I had just been lurking these forums for a while, and this thread has several times made me want to smack down ninez, and I've let it go. But the absolute arrogance of this Apple fanboy has drawn me out.
usability
{
[quote = "ninez"]Apple sucks for usability??? ...[quotes trimmed to get within limit] i would actually have to say the opposite,[/quote]
It's not just his opinion. Apple sucks for usability under any real measure, and in fact they are designed specifically opposing usability concepts. Lets take it apart why don't we?
The Global Menu: Originally Apple implemented the global menu because they thought their users were too stupid to use a two button mouse by default so it allowed them to have a context menu. Now the other thing is that the original Mac OS (pre-OSX) couldn't really multitask, which meant that the Global menu didn't cause the problem it does today. Which is to say: A Global Menu makes it more difficult to use controls between applications. Say I've got two applications side by side, and I've given focus to one but I want to go over and do something with the other. I've got to go over, give focus to the application then I've got to scroll all the way up to the top panel and then I get to do it. Whereas with such menus inside the application I just scroll over the application and click on what I need right then and there. No extra steps, no needless complication. Which means that tool bars inside an application make for much better usability.
On that note, OS X emulates the behavior of Pre-OSX and does not close the program when you close the window, instead you either have to use the key combo or you have to go up to the global menu and tell it to close from there. This is another strike against usability because then the average user is going to close the window thinking that the program is closed not realizing that it is still open and sucking up valuable memory.
Close, Minimize and Maximize Buttons: There is a very good reason that by default on most OSes/Distros these buttons are on the right side of the window. The very simple reason for this is that most people are in fact Right Handed. Left of course works better for people who are Left Handed, but they are a smaller subset of the population than those people who are right handed. And before anyone asks, the Kicker or Start Menu is on the left because menus cascade out to the right, and as english and most other languages read from left to right, it is more natural to cascade from left to right. By putting the standard three control buttons on the left Apple increases the usability for a small subset of the population while putting the rest in a worse situation.
The Dock Bar: Some people like dock bars other people hate them and think they're terrible for usabillity. I'm part of the latter group. The Real problem comes that the Dockbar in actual practice acts as a replacement for a kicker or start menu, rather than an actual dockbar for favorite applications. This means that the icons must shrink in order to accomidate more icons being put on it, Also it exemplifies the accordian behavior which from a usability standpoint is a terrible thing to do because it makes it more difficult to judge how far you actually need to move the cursor.
Also Key Combos, At first glance to most users it would appear that Apple does not infact have key combos, from both the standpoint of Linux users and Windows users. While they do in fact have key combos they are not the standardized ones that everybody but them uses, instead they require you to use the meta-key, which most users will not even recognize as neither Linux nor Windows makes that much use of Meta, they do some but it's not much. Apple is once again breaking cross platform standards and doing their own thing once again removing usability.
Also their compositing for multitasking from what I saw is also rather inferior to the KDE versions of the same effects. From a Windows perspective that would be one thing in its favor, but who ever said Aero actually did anything useful? From a KDE/Linux perspective on the other hand it is not.
}
Security
{
[quote = "ninez"]Many of these types of users, are not necessarily super-tech-savvy or extremely computer literate - but even if they are tech-savvy, they still prefer a platform that works as expected, and that doesn't introduce problems (like viruses, amlware,etc) [/quote]
Apple Security is a joke at best; to quote and add my own addition on to what the pwn2own guy said:
OS X is like an unlocked farmhouse on a country road, Windows is like a building with bars on the windows in a bad part of town, And linux is like a paranoid man in a reinforced concrete bunker, surrounded by barbed wire, land mines, and automated turrets, and he's sitting on a nuke.
Problem #1: If there is only a single user account that account has root-like powers. I was actually rather shocked to learn this but it explained something I had heard about once before, about a friend being able to lock a file down from command line so that the root shouldn't even be able to do anything with it, and yet was able to access it from the GUI. This of course breaks the Unix user security design. Particularly as I expect that most users are going to just make one account and possibly have it just log them in without them doing anything,
Problem #2: Safari opens files automatically by default. Having things like Auto-Open with the browser or Auto-Run/Auto-Mount of anything the user doesn't specify by default is asinine behavior that leaves one very open to things that will be just so happy to take advantage of them. Be they spyware hidden on that flashdrive you picked up out in the parking lot, to a file downloaded from a bad website like this MacDefender,
Problem #3: Firewall is not set up by default. Yes I know this allows for better interoperability between devices but it opens up a big gaping hole to any and all who know how to take advantage of it.
Problem #4: Jobs and his followers are deluded about their protection against viruses and other malware, this means that not only is the full proprietary model going to slow things down to crawling but in their pride they will attempt to ignore it until they cannot any longer.
Another potential hole is that to my knowledge they do not have an equivalent to AppArmor or SELinux and so things can attack along those vectors.
}
[quote = "ninez"]
MS is a gamer's platform or for office work. [...] Windows uses 2x the resources to run, than MacOSX Snowy does.
[/quote]
If Windows uses 2x the resources to run, and OS X is so much faster would you care to explain two things to me #1 the phoronix benchmarks on OSX vs Windows vs Linux and #2 the fact that Microsoft Office 2008 has lag on the ribbon interface. And no you cannot blame it on Microsoft. The simple fact is that Microsoft sees Apple as another partner to sell software too, and I don't know if it's still the case but for quite some time Microsoft held a 50% share of Apple. Microsoft is largely benevolent towards Apple, it is Apple that has been trying to attack Microsoft. In fact in terms of OS, Microsoft was it's own niche with no one else competing for that specific area until Linux came down towards desktops and Microsoft was going up towards servers. They in fact would be very much so inclined to optimize it specifically for Apple.
[quote = "deanjo"]
The cases are also extremely well built, far better then most PC's out there.
[/quote]
I don't know about you, but I think Silverstone makes some really nice desktop cases, but more on point.. Aluminum is a terrible thing to use in construction of a case, because it turns it into a giant heatsink, But problem: you've got a heatsink, but no active way to cool off this thing having all this heat dumped into it , There is a reason you mount a cpu fan on the heatsink in most configurations, and that applies very much so here. Also aluminum is a notably weak metal which means that fatigue will get to it eventually.
And if what has been noted here several times is true, the fact that they're using aluminum is causing the lids to melt to the body when they're left on, so another reason it's less than reasonable case quality.
I mean unless we were counting aesthetics which then that's a meaningless ranking because its relative and I actually like the look of Thinkpads myself.
[quote = "ninez"]
"-Shitty price"
yup, they are pricy. i wont disagree there, but the software and hardware is often better integrated. (as is the case with firewire). there latest offering thunderbolt/light-peak is awesome. often Apple bundles new technologies in their hardware which i think partially drives up costs (as they develop a lot of this stuff too).
[/quote]
Thunderbolt is the proprietary firewire replacement designed by Intel and ordered by Apple, and excluding the market that Firewire already had it will never go anywhere. Most peripherals don't even use the full capacity of USB version 1 let alone version 2 or 3, and it's a standardized interface that everybody is already using anyway. HDMI seems to currently be the VGA(also known as DVI) and DVI-D replacement and not displayport, and so that doesn't help there either. All this is really is Apple saying "We don't like other people's standards, nope not one bit, and so we're going to go and try to make our own.. again"
[quote = "ninez"]
However, Apple software is very reasonably priced, and similar software for windows, especially what Microsoft packages with it, usually sucks crap.
[/quote]
I would have to disagree about pricing, Apple software usually is higher priced from what I've seen (excluding of course Windows and Office) and maintains that higher price for longer (just like Linux software). I will agree however that what is packaged at base is rather blah, and that the KDE SC being an actual SC is far superior.
[quote ="ninez"]
"-Slower than Gallium3D drivers"
in my own experiences - gallium3d drivers really really suck, and can't even run many 3d apps very well, if at all. the driver is also incomplete. [...] gallium3d is nothing special, or even useful, really. Gallium3d is a last resort.... my old dell inspirion with ATI 1300 used to be able to run compiz back in the day, not having to use Gallium3d, but after about 2.6.33 (KMS) it was broken - now that machine uses Gallium3d - compiz performance is pathetic! so is any and all 3d acceleration.
[/quote]
Well that explains it you're using Nvidia, and it sounds like you haven't checked the current state of Radeon. My main beef with radeon is that the power management is still not doing scaling by default, at least under Fedora 15. Which means the card is running full out all the time, but otherwise I find it to have decent performance and in some areas has more features than the ATI blob.
[quote = "ninez"]
as for the rest. you finger Apple as the only manufacturer with these types of issues, meanwhile it happens with Dell, HP, and every other manufacturer. period
[/quote]
Ah yes Dell and HP the other two bottom of the Barrel OEMs that also went with Foxconn. And more on point unless you go to a custom builder or make it yourself, Anything you get from ANY OEM is going to be an unbalanced PoS. More often than not a high end CPU and 8GB (of the slower end of DDR3 or they'll go with DDR2) of ram gets paired with integrated graphics. As a custom builder myself all OEMs tend to anger me in this regard. It also means that I'm only ever likely to deal in Lenovo Thinkpads in terms of laptops, but only when AMD Fusion parts become the mainline there.
[quote = "ninez"]
As for "dropping laptops" - people who do that are dumb. I would never do that, regardless if a device as been stress tested, or not. that's moronic. - that's like wearing a helmet, and assuming it's okay to repeatedly smash your head off a wall, and then expecting to not kill any brain-cells or have a headache after doing that for a few hours...lol another exampler would be - you buy a pyrex cookware (like a pan), you are well aware - that is smash resistent... but what... does that now mean you should throw it around and drop it over and over....?!?!?
[/quote]
Wow that's arrogant. People don't do this stuff on purpose, it's almost always accidental. The other 5% of the time they're showing off a thinkpad.
[quote = "ninez"]
They get fabbed by Foxxcon in China for bottom price. Hardware? Acer could deliver the same specs for $700, so it's also not the components like CPU and GPU. The flatpanel is realy, seriously to start crying about. Jesus. And they have been sued for it and lost.
...Sure, acer can deliver it for cheaper - but ya know what - acer is never a company i would buy from. I've had more problems from Sales-reps that own Acer products than ANY other PC-manufacturer, period. (and that is consistent over the last 4-5yrs).
[/quote]
That kind of happens whenever you buy OEM.
[quote = "ninez"]
Apple's goal is not to be in every office or to be a distributed system - i don't know where you get that idea - that is plain stupid. there focus tends to be multimedia/design, and providing an interface that is intuitive and easy to use.
[/quote]
Actually no that's not their focus, their focus is on providing computers tailored towards rich stupid people. As shown all the way back with the original Macintosh.
[quote = "ninez"]
About that nVidia GPU problem again (yes I read it); they should have gone through testing.
Of course, you are right - Nvidia should be testing any and all GPU's before selling them to other companies like Apple, who plan to integrate nvidia's hardware into thier systems...
[/quote]
That responsibility lies not only upon the chip vendor but the OEM themselves. It clearly shows Apple's QA that they did not even check for any problems but assumed a good build and thus did not find it themselves but let the consumer find it out for them. Particularly given we're talking Load-Testing not even anything off the wall but load testing, which is one of the easiest things to test.
[quote = "ninez"]
it isn't uncommon, nor is it inconsistent. I have probably 10-15 applications that have similar themes...i like it.
[/quote]
Isn't that kind of a double standard? That it's okay if it's inconsistent as long as there's other programs doing it too?
[quote = "ninez"]
Apple is a great company with great service and support - I don't know a single dis-satisified Apple customer, nor has anything ever been difficult to get sorted out.
vincent seems like an Apple-hater, very mis-informed and a total Windows fanboy.
[/quote]
<sarcasm>And you're definitely not a Microsoft-Hater and total Apple Fanboy</sarcasm>, congratulations. Obviously the frowny face in the OP meant nothing.
and Apple (and specifically Steve Jobs) is a terrible company that is really only good at one thing: Deception
There are things surrounding Jobs that I cannot for the life of me understand, from the cult of Apple to how Jobs stayed off the streets with NeXTSTEP. I mean take a look at that history, not only did he somehow convince Canon to sell him Magneto-Optical drives for below manufacturing cost (No one does that), but the way NeXTSTEP stayed afloat was that companies were pouring money into it. Eventually NeXTSTEP took over Apple and Jobs performed a corporate coup and no one said a word. I can name not one other person whose been able to do what Jobs has done and gotten away with it.
In more recent history we also had the whole SEC debacle as well.
[quote = "ninez"]
but hey i shouldn't be surprised, coming from the guy (vincent) who also just told me, that Windows is expensive because NT was designed from the ground up to be the best distributed operating system...lol. I guess he doesn't realize that NT in it's original specification didn't even have TCP/IP - it was added after the fact... lol.
[/quote]
Being designed to be, and being are two completely different things I hope you realize. Windows is of course designed by Microsoft to be the Best OS ever, it doesn't mean they are, it just means they're designed towards that goal. Almost nobody designs something with the intention of it being second-rate (Apple GUI design has to be one exception otherwise I cannot explain how literally everything breaks Usability standards).
[quote = "ninez"]
of course they had to throw in that famous steve Jobs interview (which i totally agree with, microsoft doesn't come up with anything original, they are all about aquisitions, straight up buying technology, and obviously they have very little style over at MS)..
[/quote]
Funny I could say the same thing about a certain fruity company but the opposite about a company with a flag as it's logo.
All of Apple's "Innovations" that I'm aware of are one of four things: Theft, Buy-Outs, They Paid someone else to do it for them, or they're taking credit for someone else's work without paying them.
Examples:
Theft:
The Xerox interface, what happened was that Apple went over to Xerox saw the shiny GUI, Jobs used his technology-anti-christ powers to make them sell copies of their OS to him, he brought it back to Apple and had his entire development crew Reverse Engineer it. Later Apple licensed the gui to Microsoft and then proceeded to sue them over it, prompting Xerox to sue Apple over the software it stole.
Buy Outs:
The Mag-Cord was actually developed by someone else, their ARM team was originally independent, CUPS was not originally Apples, etc... etc...
Paying someone else to do it for them:
Thunderbolt is a good modern example.
Taking Credit for other's Innovations:
The GUI, Tablets, anything Microsoft does, anything Linux does, anything anybody does..
Oh but there is something they had first... Viruses, they were absolutely wracked by them, this was pre OS X mind you, however.. They were in fact the first.
Now onto Microsoft that actually does innovate and generally works to improve real usability.
Microsoft took the old 80's paradigm and created a shift, a change for the better, by adding something that some people will try to downplay but was just as important an advancement as tabs are in browsers today. That is to say they invented the concept of a start menu and task bar.
While not being the first to design them, they have been the first to do wide scale adoption of tabbed toolbars also known as ribbons. Once you shed your old way of thinking about menus you can see that tabs as always improve usability, and that it's actually an easier interface to use than the old Office 97 style interface.
Microsoft actually started pushing tablets a long time ago, The problem has always been however that the devices simply weren't powerful enough, Just as most personal computers weren't really properly powerful enough for a GUI OS when Apple was pushing it's Lisa and so it was just a toy for management types who couldn't be bothered to learn the command line.
That being said
V!ncent:
While this is an excellent UI for tablets I do not tend to think that it'll be that big a hit among home users for their Desktops and Notebooks. Also from a demonstration it appears that that may be their Start menu, in which case they've very well shot themselves in the foot for desktop use. However Plasma Active may very well be quite capable of taking this on and defeating it. Either way It looks to me as if Android and iOS will be marginalized very soon here.
usability
{
[quote = "ninez"]Apple sucks for usability??? ...[quotes trimmed to get within limit] i would actually have to say the opposite,[/quote]
It's not just his opinion. Apple sucks for usability under any real measure, and in fact they are designed specifically opposing usability concepts. Lets take it apart why don't we?
The Global Menu: Originally Apple implemented the global menu because they thought their users were too stupid to use a two button mouse by default so it allowed them to have a context menu. Now the other thing is that the original Mac OS (pre-OSX) couldn't really multitask, which meant that the Global menu didn't cause the problem it does today. Which is to say: A Global Menu makes it more difficult to use controls between applications. Say I've got two applications side by side, and I've given focus to one but I want to go over and do something with the other. I've got to go over, give focus to the application then I've got to scroll all the way up to the top panel and then I get to do it. Whereas with such menus inside the application I just scroll over the application and click on what I need right then and there. No extra steps, no needless complication. Which means that tool bars inside an application make for much better usability.
On that note, OS X emulates the behavior of Pre-OSX and does not close the program when you close the window, instead you either have to use the key combo or you have to go up to the global menu and tell it to close from there. This is another strike against usability because then the average user is going to close the window thinking that the program is closed not realizing that it is still open and sucking up valuable memory.
Close, Minimize and Maximize Buttons: There is a very good reason that by default on most OSes/Distros these buttons are on the right side of the window. The very simple reason for this is that most people are in fact Right Handed. Left of course works better for people who are Left Handed, but they are a smaller subset of the population than those people who are right handed. And before anyone asks, the Kicker or Start Menu is on the left because menus cascade out to the right, and as english and most other languages read from left to right, it is more natural to cascade from left to right. By putting the standard three control buttons on the left Apple increases the usability for a small subset of the population while putting the rest in a worse situation.
The Dock Bar: Some people like dock bars other people hate them and think they're terrible for usabillity. I'm part of the latter group. The Real problem comes that the Dockbar in actual practice acts as a replacement for a kicker or start menu, rather than an actual dockbar for favorite applications. This means that the icons must shrink in order to accomidate more icons being put on it, Also it exemplifies the accordian behavior which from a usability standpoint is a terrible thing to do because it makes it more difficult to judge how far you actually need to move the cursor.
Also Key Combos, At first glance to most users it would appear that Apple does not infact have key combos, from both the standpoint of Linux users and Windows users. While they do in fact have key combos they are not the standardized ones that everybody but them uses, instead they require you to use the meta-key, which most users will not even recognize as neither Linux nor Windows makes that much use of Meta, they do some but it's not much. Apple is once again breaking cross platform standards and doing their own thing once again removing usability.
Also their compositing for multitasking from what I saw is also rather inferior to the KDE versions of the same effects. From a Windows perspective that would be one thing in its favor, but who ever said Aero actually did anything useful? From a KDE/Linux perspective on the other hand it is not.
}
Security
{
[quote = "ninez"]Many of these types of users, are not necessarily super-tech-savvy or extremely computer literate - but even if they are tech-savvy, they still prefer a platform that works as expected, and that doesn't introduce problems (like viruses, amlware,etc) [/quote]
Apple Security is a joke at best; to quote and add my own addition on to what the pwn2own guy said:
OS X is like an unlocked farmhouse on a country road, Windows is like a building with bars on the windows in a bad part of town, And linux is like a paranoid man in a reinforced concrete bunker, surrounded by barbed wire, land mines, and automated turrets, and he's sitting on a nuke.
Problem #1: If there is only a single user account that account has root-like powers. I was actually rather shocked to learn this but it explained something I had heard about once before, about a friend being able to lock a file down from command line so that the root shouldn't even be able to do anything with it, and yet was able to access it from the GUI. This of course breaks the Unix user security design. Particularly as I expect that most users are going to just make one account and possibly have it just log them in without them doing anything,
Problem #2: Safari opens files automatically by default. Having things like Auto-Open with the browser or Auto-Run/Auto-Mount of anything the user doesn't specify by default is asinine behavior that leaves one very open to things that will be just so happy to take advantage of them. Be they spyware hidden on that flashdrive you picked up out in the parking lot, to a file downloaded from a bad website like this MacDefender,
Problem #3: Firewall is not set up by default. Yes I know this allows for better interoperability between devices but it opens up a big gaping hole to any and all who know how to take advantage of it.
Problem #4: Jobs and his followers are deluded about their protection against viruses and other malware, this means that not only is the full proprietary model going to slow things down to crawling but in their pride they will attempt to ignore it until they cannot any longer.
Another potential hole is that to my knowledge they do not have an equivalent to AppArmor or SELinux and so things can attack along those vectors.
}
[quote = "ninez"]
MS is a gamer's platform or for office work. [...] Windows uses 2x the resources to run, than MacOSX Snowy does.
[/quote]
If Windows uses 2x the resources to run, and OS X is so much faster would you care to explain two things to me #1 the phoronix benchmarks on OSX vs Windows vs Linux and #2 the fact that Microsoft Office 2008 has lag on the ribbon interface. And no you cannot blame it on Microsoft. The simple fact is that Microsoft sees Apple as another partner to sell software too, and I don't know if it's still the case but for quite some time Microsoft held a 50% share of Apple. Microsoft is largely benevolent towards Apple, it is Apple that has been trying to attack Microsoft. In fact in terms of OS, Microsoft was it's own niche with no one else competing for that specific area until Linux came down towards desktops and Microsoft was going up towards servers. They in fact would be very much so inclined to optimize it specifically for Apple.
[quote = "deanjo"]
The cases are also extremely well built, far better then most PC's out there.
[/quote]
I don't know about you, but I think Silverstone makes some really nice desktop cases, but more on point.. Aluminum is a terrible thing to use in construction of a case, because it turns it into a giant heatsink, But problem: you've got a heatsink, but no active way to cool off this thing having all this heat dumped into it , There is a reason you mount a cpu fan on the heatsink in most configurations, and that applies very much so here. Also aluminum is a notably weak metal which means that fatigue will get to it eventually.
And if what has been noted here several times is true, the fact that they're using aluminum is causing the lids to melt to the body when they're left on, so another reason it's less than reasonable case quality.
I mean unless we were counting aesthetics which then that's a meaningless ranking because its relative and I actually like the look of Thinkpads myself.
[quote = "ninez"]
"-Shitty price"
yup, they are pricy. i wont disagree there, but the software and hardware is often better integrated. (as is the case with firewire). there latest offering thunderbolt/light-peak is awesome. often Apple bundles new technologies in their hardware which i think partially drives up costs (as they develop a lot of this stuff too).
[/quote]
Thunderbolt is the proprietary firewire replacement designed by Intel and ordered by Apple, and excluding the market that Firewire already had it will never go anywhere. Most peripherals don't even use the full capacity of USB version 1 let alone version 2 or 3, and it's a standardized interface that everybody is already using anyway. HDMI seems to currently be the VGA(also known as DVI) and DVI-D replacement and not displayport, and so that doesn't help there either. All this is really is Apple saying "We don't like other people's standards, nope not one bit, and so we're going to go and try to make our own.. again"
[quote = "ninez"]
However, Apple software is very reasonably priced, and similar software for windows, especially what Microsoft packages with it, usually sucks crap.
[/quote]
I would have to disagree about pricing, Apple software usually is higher priced from what I've seen (excluding of course Windows and Office) and maintains that higher price for longer (just like Linux software). I will agree however that what is packaged at base is rather blah, and that the KDE SC being an actual SC is far superior.
[quote ="ninez"]
"-Slower than Gallium3D drivers"
in my own experiences - gallium3d drivers really really suck, and can't even run many 3d apps very well, if at all. the driver is also incomplete. [...] gallium3d is nothing special, or even useful, really. Gallium3d is a last resort.... my old dell inspirion with ATI 1300 used to be able to run compiz back in the day, not having to use Gallium3d, but after about 2.6.33 (KMS) it was broken - now that machine uses Gallium3d - compiz performance is pathetic! so is any and all 3d acceleration.
[/quote]
Well that explains it you're using Nvidia, and it sounds like you haven't checked the current state of Radeon. My main beef with radeon is that the power management is still not doing scaling by default, at least under Fedora 15. Which means the card is running full out all the time, but otherwise I find it to have decent performance and in some areas has more features than the ATI blob.
[quote = "ninez"]
as for the rest. you finger Apple as the only manufacturer with these types of issues, meanwhile it happens with Dell, HP, and every other manufacturer. period
[/quote]
Ah yes Dell and HP the other two bottom of the Barrel OEMs that also went with Foxconn. And more on point unless you go to a custom builder or make it yourself, Anything you get from ANY OEM is going to be an unbalanced PoS. More often than not a high end CPU and 8GB (of the slower end of DDR3 or they'll go with DDR2) of ram gets paired with integrated graphics. As a custom builder myself all OEMs tend to anger me in this regard. It also means that I'm only ever likely to deal in Lenovo Thinkpads in terms of laptops, but only when AMD Fusion parts become the mainline there.
[quote = "ninez"]
As for "dropping laptops" - people who do that are dumb. I would never do that, regardless if a device as been stress tested, or not. that's moronic. - that's like wearing a helmet, and assuming it's okay to repeatedly smash your head off a wall, and then expecting to not kill any brain-cells or have a headache after doing that for a few hours...lol another exampler would be - you buy a pyrex cookware (like a pan), you are well aware - that is smash resistent... but what... does that now mean you should throw it around and drop it over and over....?!?!?
[/quote]
Wow that's arrogant. People don't do this stuff on purpose, it's almost always accidental. The other 5% of the time they're showing off a thinkpad.
[quote = "ninez"]
They get fabbed by Foxxcon in China for bottom price. Hardware? Acer could deliver the same specs for $700, so it's also not the components like CPU and GPU. The flatpanel is realy, seriously to start crying about. Jesus. And they have been sued for it and lost.
...Sure, acer can deliver it for cheaper - but ya know what - acer is never a company i would buy from. I've had more problems from Sales-reps that own Acer products than ANY other PC-manufacturer, period. (and that is consistent over the last 4-5yrs).
[/quote]
That kind of happens whenever you buy OEM.
[quote = "ninez"]
Apple's goal is not to be in every office or to be a distributed system - i don't know where you get that idea - that is plain stupid. there focus tends to be multimedia/design, and providing an interface that is intuitive and easy to use.
[/quote]
Actually no that's not their focus, their focus is on providing computers tailored towards rich stupid people. As shown all the way back with the original Macintosh.
[quote = "ninez"]
About that nVidia GPU problem again (yes I read it); they should have gone through testing.
Of course, you are right - Nvidia should be testing any and all GPU's before selling them to other companies like Apple, who plan to integrate nvidia's hardware into thier systems...
[/quote]
That responsibility lies not only upon the chip vendor but the OEM themselves. It clearly shows Apple's QA that they did not even check for any problems but assumed a good build and thus did not find it themselves but let the consumer find it out for them. Particularly given we're talking Load-Testing not even anything off the wall but load testing, which is one of the easiest things to test.
[quote = "ninez"]
it isn't uncommon, nor is it inconsistent. I have probably 10-15 applications that have similar themes...i like it.
[/quote]
Isn't that kind of a double standard? That it's okay if it's inconsistent as long as there's other programs doing it too?
[quote = "ninez"]
Apple is a great company with great service and support - I don't know a single dis-satisified Apple customer, nor has anything ever been difficult to get sorted out.
vincent seems like an Apple-hater, very mis-informed and a total Windows fanboy.
[/quote]
<sarcasm>And you're definitely not a Microsoft-Hater and total Apple Fanboy</sarcasm>, congratulations. Obviously the frowny face in the OP meant nothing.
and Apple (and specifically Steve Jobs) is a terrible company that is really only good at one thing: Deception
There are things surrounding Jobs that I cannot for the life of me understand, from the cult of Apple to how Jobs stayed off the streets with NeXTSTEP. I mean take a look at that history, not only did he somehow convince Canon to sell him Magneto-Optical drives for below manufacturing cost (No one does that), but the way NeXTSTEP stayed afloat was that companies were pouring money into it. Eventually NeXTSTEP took over Apple and Jobs performed a corporate coup and no one said a word. I can name not one other person whose been able to do what Jobs has done and gotten away with it.
In more recent history we also had the whole SEC debacle as well.
[quote = "ninez"]
but hey i shouldn't be surprised, coming from the guy (vincent) who also just told me, that Windows is expensive because NT was designed from the ground up to be the best distributed operating system...lol. I guess he doesn't realize that NT in it's original specification didn't even have TCP/IP - it was added after the fact... lol.
[/quote]
Being designed to be, and being are two completely different things I hope you realize. Windows is of course designed by Microsoft to be the Best OS ever, it doesn't mean they are, it just means they're designed towards that goal. Almost nobody designs something with the intention of it being second-rate (Apple GUI design has to be one exception otherwise I cannot explain how literally everything breaks Usability standards).
[quote = "ninez"]
of course they had to throw in that famous steve Jobs interview (which i totally agree with, microsoft doesn't come up with anything original, they are all about aquisitions, straight up buying technology, and obviously they have very little style over at MS)..
[/quote]
Funny I could say the same thing about a certain fruity company but the opposite about a company with a flag as it's logo.
All of Apple's "Innovations" that I'm aware of are one of four things: Theft, Buy-Outs, They Paid someone else to do it for them, or they're taking credit for someone else's work without paying them.
Examples:
Theft:
The Xerox interface, what happened was that Apple went over to Xerox saw the shiny GUI, Jobs used his technology-anti-christ powers to make them sell copies of their OS to him, he brought it back to Apple and had his entire development crew Reverse Engineer it. Later Apple licensed the gui to Microsoft and then proceeded to sue them over it, prompting Xerox to sue Apple over the software it stole.
Buy Outs:
The Mag-Cord was actually developed by someone else, their ARM team was originally independent, CUPS was not originally Apples, etc... etc...
Paying someone else to do it for them:
Thunderbolt is a good modern example.
Taking Credit for other's Innovations:
The GUI, Tablets, anything Microsoft does, anything Linux does, anything anybody does..
Oh but there is something they had first... Viruses, they were absolutely wracked by them, this was pre OS X mind you, however.. They were in fact the first.
Now onto Microsoft that actually does innovate and generally works to improve real usability.
Microsoft took the old 80's paradigm and created a shift, a change for the better, by adding something that some people will try to downplay but was just as important an advancement as tabs are in browsers today. That is to say they invented the concept of a start menu and task bar.
While not being the first to design them, they have been the first to do wide scale adoption of tabbed toolbars also known as ribbons. Once you shed your old way of thinking about menus you can see that tabs as always improve usability, and that it's actually an easier interface to use than the old Office 97 style interface.
Microsoft actually started pushing tablets a long time ago, The problem has always been however that the devices simply weren't powerful enough, Just as most personal computers weren't really properly powerful enough for a GUI OS when Apple was pushing it's Lisa and so it was just a toy for management types who couldn't be bothered to learn the command line.
That being said
V!ncent:
While this is an excellent UI for tablets I do not tend to think that it'll be that big a hit among home users for their Desktops and Notebooks. Also from a demonstration it appears that that may be their Start menu, in which case they've very well shot themselves in the foot for desktop use. However Plasma Active may very well be quite capable of taking this on and defeating it. Either way It looks to me as if Android and iOS will be marginalized very soon here.
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