Guerilla Comedy Teaser
Have yourself a look at this video of yesterday’s Apple Store opening at the Toronto Eaton Centre; at the end of it you may recognize the guy in the orange shirt.
Full story tomorrow!
Tagged: Apple RSS Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
-
Andrew
-
Andrew
I’ve Been MacSurfer’d!
It seems that my last post about the beginning of the end for the Mac OS struck a definite chord with Apple fanatics. But I’ll let you in on a little secret: I had some help in getting word out…
The Slashdot effect, also known as being Slashdotted or Dugg, refers simply to a smaller website like mine being linked to by a much bigger one. The huge surge in hits can put a strain on the servers hosting the smaller site, and in some cases can actually bring it down!
Thankfully that didn’t happen here, but after posting my Mac doomsday scenario yesterday I decided on a whim to cut and paste a link with text into an email and send it to the weekday editor at MacSurfer, a popular portal for Mac-related news. And lo and behold a half-hour later I was listed and the comments started flooding in.
Along with the feedback there’s also been a healthy does of comment spam. My personal favourite so far has been from Frank McDermott, whose entire comment was this:
“Have you seen Chicken Little?”
-
Andrew
Mac OS: The Beginning of the End
I’ve got a real bad feeling about this…
A couple of weeks ago the Mac community was all abuzz over news that Apple CEO Steve Jobs had unloaded almost half of his stock in the company. While the consensus eventually came to be that he did it only for tax purposes, this morning the other shoe dropped—a public beta of Boot Camp, an official software product from Apple that will let owners of Intel-powered Macs dual-boot into either OS X or (gasp) Windows!
In the short term this is great news; Apple’s stock price will surely surge, and Macs will likely make that big dent into the enterprise market that everyone’s been talking about for so long.
But further down the road I see dark clouds gathering. With Adobe and Microsoft still holding out on Intel-compatible versions of their critical Macintosh software, they now have every reason to shrug off development and say: “What’s the point? Macs are gonna run Windows anyway…”
In time, I see the library of Macintosh software steadily shrinking while the Windows partitions on our Macs get bigger and bigger. Eventually, maybe five years from now or whenever Jobs finally retires to run Disney full-time, the Linux-based, crash and virus-proof operating system that we’ve grown to know and love will be reduced to a single Windows app—something like iLife with Apple Mail and maybe Safari thrown in for good measure.
Mark my words: This is the beginning of the end for the Mac OS…
-
Tim
I’m afraid you’re right on the money. It amazes me at how many Mac fans are celebrating today.
-
Frank McDermott
Have you seen Chicken Little ?
-
Andrew Currie
And somebody’s already got a slide show up on Flickr showing the installation process:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/speedye/sets/72057594099504282/
-
Robert B
There may be some drop outs in the software vendors; but the profits are still there in the smaller Mac market that Microsoft and Adobe won’t want to jeopardize. You’re obviously a PC user and perfer Microsoft’s OS. This makes a clear evaluation more difficult. Remember there have been scores of Apple deaths and purchase rumors for the past decades. It ain’t going to happen anytime soon.
What you may find is Apple reviving software they developed but never released. That is a programming package for dual platform development. Who knows; but we live in intersting times.
-
scott anderson
You could be right. But, it just doesn’t ring true to me. I also didn’t”get” the iPod when it was introduced, so maybe my radar isn’t all that sharp.
I think Apple’s in it for the long-haul. I like to think of this as a trojan horse, more so than the opening sentence in a last chapter. No one using the Mac side will use Windows and think, “Wow, what a great experience.” Plenty of people – enterprise included – will likely buy them, and discover the grass is greener on this side.
More units sold = more market share. More relevance. More traction. More converts.
Also, Jobs could have retired to paint goldfish or run Pixar or knit doilies a long time ago. This appears to be where his heart is – I’ll “trust in Jobs” for now – it’s been ages since he let me down.
-
Alex
Now I begin to understand why Avie Tevanian left last week.
This move is risky, and I fear you’re right about the prediction: unless they license the OS to other manufacturers some years from now, MAC OS will cease to exist. -
Jeff
If Steve knew he were doing this, he’d have predicted the stock surge as well – would he have sold back then, or now?
The man’s not an idiot.
The true concerns about XP/OSX on the same machine is the security one. Unless XP is prevented from writing to the OSX partitions, a whole bunch of infection vectors just got added to the OSX world, effectively nuking any previous reputation for security.
-
Chris
Except that Steve Jobs hates Bill Gates and is doing this to capitalize on the Vista debacle. Relax, the mac is the OS, so there is no way in hell that Apple is dropping OSX. You are like any conspiracy theorist. Take two seemingly innocuous points and link them and stir… and VOILA! Conspiracy!!
-
RWD
I think the software vendors will continue to release Mac software as a defensive move if nothing else, especially if Apple’s hardware market share is growing as a result of this move, as seems likely. Say you’re Adobe. Apple already has various apps that nibble at the edges of Photoshop’s space. No doubt they could produce a competent photo editor pretty quickly if Adobe vacated the Mac market. Add a spreadsheet to iWork (which is already rumored), and that’s a competitor to MS Office for all but the most sophisticated users. If MS Office for Mac is out there, it will probably still capture the power users—if it’s not, iWork will evolve to meet their needs, and people running Apple hardware will have less of a need for MS Office.
As a Mac user, my loyalty is to the platform, not the software vendor. Lots of software customers probably feel the same way. If someone drops Mac support, I’ll find an alternative. All someone like Adobe or MS is going to do by dropping Mac support is lose me as a customer and give rise to competitive products.
That’s not to say I won’t use the occasional Windows app under Boot Camp (or, hopefully, virtualization solutions like Virtual PC if they go native), just like I use various open source Unix software apps now. But faced with two pieces of software, one of which runs crisply in OS X and one which doesn’t, I’m going to use the former.
-
Peter J. Pedersen
“Linux-based” ?
How long have you been a Macolyte? not long, I wager.
As for Mac OS X being “diminished, and move unto the West”, I doubt that double-booting will have anything near that effect. At most, a sizable number of people will be attracted to the coolness of the hardware (as you point out) and buy it to run XP (and later Vista) on. More money for the Fruit War Chest…
Unfortunately, I believe “Leopard” (or “Cheetah” – whatever the follow-up will be termed) will introduce not only dual-booting but also some kind of virtual environment that permits running Win apps in windows in Mac OS X. I guess it will be based on Intel’s coming hardware-implementation, rather than any of the software solutions extant; if so, it will probably be in a later update of Leopard, or in the successor.
I write “Unfortunately” because I find it hard to foresee the consequences of such a move: is it Good since it opens up for running lots of games on Apple’s advanced hardware, or is it Bad because it will make many software developers cut away the costs of Mac-native versions and go for the (sorry) “Big Apple” – meaning Microsoft – instead? Now, Apple earns most of its money on hardware, so as long as it has a market for that, the company as such will survive. But…
I have a bad feeling about that – but then again, I had a bad feeling about the release of the iPod…
Are the times a-changing?
Peter J. Pedersen
-
-
Andrew
Mac vs. Windows… And Maybe Linux Too!
(Read this Wikipedia entry or load up this very long FARK.com page if you are confused by the above…)
Just like last December I’ve had to get a new hard drive for my PowerBook, and its battery—which currently holds about a 7-minute charge—is probably due for a replacement as well. Anybody who knows me has had to endure my Macintosh zealotry on at least one occasion, yet if you peruse the Mac-related posts on this humble site you’ll see that I’ve had more than my share of issues with the platform.
In my decade of Mac experience the software has gotten better and better, but the hardware has gotten steadily worse.
Consider my recent history with Mac computers:
- October, 1999 – iMac DVSE: FireWire not working out of the box.
- January, 2001 – Power Mac G4: Unable to sleep out of the box.
- May, 2001 – iBook: Built-in speakers busted out of the box.
- December, 2003 – Powerbook: Dead pixels out of the box.
- April, 2004 – Power Mac G5: Logic board not working out of the box.
Not a great track record if you ask me…
And yet, my few shares of Apple stock are still skyrocketing while folks everywhere are touting the touting the superiority of the Mac platform.
My dream come true would be a release of Mac OS X that I could run on any machine I want. Sadly, even though Apple is switching to the Intel chip-set, we’ll likely not see a generic OS release until Steve Jobs finally decides to retire on a big bed of money from faithful fan-boys like myself.
I’m waiting to see what gets announced at the MacWorld keynote in January. If it’s not a generic release of OS X for Intel or at least an iBook that can run Windows, I’m buying me a notebook with XP Pro. Give me some time with it, and I’ll be able to say with at least some certainty which platform, if any, is ultimately better, and for what. Oh, and if I have enough hard drive space left over I may even install Linux on a separate partition, just for kicks!
-
Ed Miller
AC:
I’ve bought 3 new Macs since 1999 (a G4, G4 Powerbook, and a G5),and I haven’t had any serious technical problems like you’ve encountered. My first Mac was a 2nd hand 8600, and I did have some hardware problems with it that were fixable.
I had problems with my G5 after an Apple firmware upgrade caused my Mac to stop recognizing my RAM, and eventually I found a solution by checking out the various forums and tech alert sites. I watch the Apple forums as well as a few others (MacAddict, DVX Users) for a few weeks prior to running patches now, just to avoid any problems until either a workaround or a followup patch appears (I haven’t upgraded to 10.4 yet, for instance, because the Final Cut community still prefers 10.3.9). I held off upgrading Final Cut to the current versions until some of the early glitches were resolved with patches. Still, once everything’s okay and installed, it runs without crashing or constant tweaking to make it work, like I’ve experienced with Wintel machines.
On the other hand, if I were to compare Wintel performance for video versus what it was like in 1999 when I bought my firt Mac, I’d probably lean towards Wintel just becuase they’ve caught up in terms of processing speed and capability. If I weren’t doing video and just needed word processing, spreadsheets, music player, DVD player, and games, I’d say a Wintel machine is definitely the way to go just because you have a huge range of software available compared to the Mac.Ed
-
Andrew Currie
Hi Ed,
Maybe I’m one of those “bleeding edge” types, but I’m curious to see the type of real-world performance (and hopefully realibility) that I can get from one of those sub-$1000 notebooks.
… And even more curious to try out the latest darling of the Linux set:
-
Andrew
iPod Anti-Consumerism
Thanks to faithful reader and commenter Ed Miller for hipping me to video activist Ben Simpson’s Smash My iPod site. The premise is simple, young Ben solicits donations which he puts towards everyone’s favourite Apple product, then proceeds to stomp on it in-store and videotape the results.
Now despite being an unabashed Apple fanboy and all, I’m heartened by the fact that our younger generations aren’t necessarily buying into that whole gadget fetish scene, especially around this time of year. Other sites in the “SmashMy” portal include SmashMyXbox and SmashMyPS3.
Kudos, Ben Simpson!
-
Chris
I’m not sure if I agree with this idea. I checked the page, but only a little, and from what I can see he takes money and breaks a perfectly good piece of electronics. Now sure it makes a statement but I’m sure the money could go to something better in this world. Even the I-Pod could go to better use, I’m sure there are plenty of kids in this world that would love one but won’t get one because there families can’t afford them.
Make the statement but maybe find a better way to do it.
-
Jens Hembach is discussing. 
Jens Hembach 11:05 PM on May 7, 2006 Permalink |
Nice video – you’re welcome! Am definitely looking forward to seeing the full ‘Guerilla Comedy’!