Why Apple Delayed Leopard for the iPhone 453
Ernest DeFarge writes "Apple recently announced that they've pulled several key programmers from the OS X 10.5 "Leopard" and assigned them to the iPhone in order to get it done on time. In doing so, they delayed Leopard for 4 months. Does that mean that the iPhone is more important to Apple than Mac OS? Or is it just capitalizing on the current state of Apple's fanbase?"
Re:Captive market (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Captivated market (Score:2, Informative)
Not explicitly, but
"Given the Apple emphasis on support for open standards (such as a standards-compliant web browser and email client) and the UNIX base of Mac OS X, I'd say Apple users are relatively much less locked in than Windows users."
The fact that OS X is based on Unix would be relevent to lock-in only if OS X apps could run on Unix. Thus my comment.
System Restore isn't equivalent to Time Machine (Score:3, Informative)
Time Machine [apple.com]
Leopard Technology Series for Developers [apple.com]
Time Machine [wikipedia.org]
Although System Restore on Windows is a useful concept on Windows, it's not designed as a backup system for user data.
Windows System Recover [wikipedia.org]
What is restored and what isn't? [kellys-korner-xp.com]
System Restore FAQ: What files are monitored by System Restore? [microsoft.com]
Finally, System Restore solves a problem that to a large degree doesn't exist on Mac OS X (which has less of a tendency to randomly degrade into an un-usable or non-startable state due to regular activity like software installation and removal) and even if a system is rendered non-bootable, the Mac OS X installer allows easy restore of the system without losing user data.
Re:Who is being held captive? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:They've BEEN doing that! (Score:2, Informative)
You aren't following the same logic, you are comparing Apples to oranges. 2000, XP and Vista are marketing names. 2000 was Windows NT 5.0, XP was Windows NT 5.1. Windows service packs are point releases.
Sorry, I'd say it's more than Apple's point releases.
Sure, there might be more changes in a service pack than one of Apple's point releases, but Apple has a lot more of them. And each 10.x release has *far* more features than moving from Win95 to Win98 or 2000 to XP.
Re:They've BEEN doing that! (Score:4, Informative)
Well, Jobs and his cronies found out that they really liked the big X, and quite frankly XI isn't that appealing, so they decided to name subsequent major versions as 10.2, 10.3, etc. Some day that will wear off, but meanwhile marketing-wise it's working. Minor (point) versions, the equivalent of a less-juicy but more-frequent Windows Service Pack, are named 10.x.y.
The best way to get your mind untangled is to look at Darwin [wikipedia.org], the underlying OS. It started with a major screw-up with the version numbers, but then Apple recognized that:
1) Darwin/Mac OS X is more a descendant of NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP than of MacOS.
2) Puma (10.1) was more like a huge service pack for Cheetah (10.0). That's not true for the subsequent cats.
Thus, they revised the numbering so that Darwin would fit in the NeXTSTEP lineage. The Darwin versions and the corresponding Mac OS X versions can be found here [wikipedia.org]. Now you see that Jaguar, Panther and Tiger are all major versions.
(For another famous mash-up of version numbers, look at SunOS vs Solaris [wikipedia.org] and the jump of Solaris 2.6 to Solaris 7 [wikipedia.org].)
So, assuming that we can make a similar argument for Windows NT 5.1 (aka "XP"), since the year 2000 Microsoft has released:
Windows 2000 and 2000 Server (NT 5.0)
(Windows ME doesn't count, since it was not an NT).
Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 (NT 5.1 & 5.2)
Windows Vista (NT 6.0) (Longhorn Server may be released this year, or more likely next).
And Apple has released:
Cheetah + Server (I'm not counting Puma, which was anyway a free upgrade) (Darwin (screwedup-number)-5.x)
Jaguar + Server (Darwin 6.x)
Panther + Server (Darwin 7.x)
Tiger + Server (Darwin 8.x)
Leopard (+ Server) on October. (Darwin 9.x)
If you want to count all the service packs, MS made around 12 major+minor releases, Apple almost 40. But that's not very significant, since Microsoft packs more into each service pack than Apple does, and that's OK. Only major releases matter.
Re:Captive market (Score:3, Informative)
Magnetic power cord: this should have been standard on all laptops a decade ago (my understanding is that that things like many cooking appliances have this). Preferably a unified connector, but that would be too much to hope for. So, a point for that.
Webcam: like you said, many laptops have it. It was fun for about a day with Photo Booth, but I haven't really used it since. Maybe if more people had one I would, but my upload bandwidth tends to be too low for video chats plenty of time, and in any case, I'm perfectly content with audio or just text.
Widescreen: well, it's 1440x900 (not 960), but it is nice. The backlight bleed is abysmal on it though, and mine seems to have dust under the screen now. How it happened escapes me, but I don't seem to remember it being there before AppleCare dealt with it. And by some laptop standards, that's fairly low-res. I know I've heard of 17" screens at 1920x1200 (same as my 24" Dell screen, and Apple's own 23"), and I could swear some 15" screens are there too. It being just right for 2x upscaling of DVDs is nice, though.
x1600: for what I (and most people) do, it just shortens battery life and adds more heat. As if it wasn't hot enough already. Macs aren't exactly famed for their game selection, and I've yet to find any real evidence of any other apps I use benefiting from a standalone GPU. I could be wrong, but subjective testing hasn't shown me any improvement over the GMA950 in MacBooks and my thinkpad.
SMS on hard drive: pretty common now. I know the thinkpad I'm typing on right now has one.
So, yeah, about my thinkpad. It's running OSx86. It's a bit quirky, but it keeps me away from Windows, so I'm happy enough. I've lost audio, WiFi, and the battery indicator, but it otherwise works surprisingly well. It runs Aperture fine, as well as Parallels for those rare occasions, iTunes (just for syncing my iPod, since I've got no sound), and Disco has no problems with its funny smoke thing.
And, you know what? By and large, I prefer it to the MBP. It gets better battery life. It runs MUCH cooler (I've got it on bare skin right now and it's barely warm; I'd actually be concerned about my skin melting if I were doing this with my MBP). When the fan comes on, less frequently, it's typically quieter. It has a right mouse button, which works a lot more consistently than the two-finger tap on the trackpad. It has home/end/delete/pgup/pgdn keys on the keyboard, that don't require a function key to use (and Fn+PgUp illuminates an LED for night typing, though it's not as cool as the backlit keyboard). But, I'd say the most important thing is the physical enclosure: it's more durable (it won't dent), and doesn't have a SQUARE edge where your wrists rest!
So, let's talk price. It looks like this thing, a Thinkpad T60 with 1GB RAM, DVD/CDRW, and a 60GB hard drive retails for about $1100. Same as an entry-level MacBook, which comes with a borderline-useless 512MB of RAM. From using my brother's MacBook for a short while, the battery life is comparable and the MB has a nicer screen, but the vanilla MBs also have that stupid sharp wrist rest, no keyboard illumination of any form, and requires an extra adapter to use an external display (the T60, and most other laptops out there, have a standard VGA port not requiring you to spend more money). While I seem to remember the heat being considerably more bearable, the MacBook was still quite a bit hotter than this thinkpad. For the record, both my Thinkpad and my MBP use a Core Duo 1.86GHz chip, and the MB has a 2.0GHz C2D.
I'll give you the two-finger scrolling. It doesn't work with OSx86, at least. But in Windows, I can set up hot zones on the touchpad that serve the same purpose, plus hot corner tapping to launch apps or use as back/forward. Doesn't compare to Quicksilver by a longshot, but I'd love to see the hot corners for page or tab navigation.
Apple hard