@Uncharted

You're right the iMac was Apple's savings grace. The clone market via Apple was poorly managed and didn't give them what might have been if better agreements, marketing and direction were in place -- that's what I'm saying.


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OS X as it stands is not slow (in the mainstream sense not the Amiga sense). Why are you mentioning versions of the software that are no longer available? that's like me saying that Windows has terrible USB support because of Windows 98.

I'd say OS9 is more akin to Windows98 whereas OSX in it's current state is like Windows XP sp2. OSx.1 being WinXP, OSx.2 being WinXP sp1.

See 98 - XP was a major core change of the desktop as the Apple was prior to their use of the Unix Mach kernel. I see OSX.1, .2,.3 to be more akin to service packs in the Microsoft world.


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I never said that. but it's hypocritcal to use that as a point against one party when the other has also done it.

Sounds fair. Your point read that you excused Apple because others before, Microsoft, had done it.



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The main income of Apple is hardware, it always has been. iTunes store is not thier biggest money maker, in fact it's barely made them anything nor is it the biggest draw for the iPod.

You are right the iPod and the iTunes have barely made anything but their 'audio service' made the majority of Apple's profits. Last year was $1billion in revenue for iPods with an estimated profit of 150 - 200 million. Last year was $200 million in revnue for iTunes w/ 80-90% of iPod owners buying songs from Apple's store, along with profits of 10-30 million. (Range of profits depend upon which analysist you trust. ) 2004 Apple's revenue was $8 billion and overall profits were shy of $280 million. So you're right the main income, revenue, is hardware - Mac. However, the biggest money maker is 'audio services' which I coin as iPod + iPod OS + windows & mac software + iTunes, as hardware + software together is a service. 'Audio services' is 60-80% of profits but only 12% of sales.

2005 -- estimates are 200-300% increase of iTunes and 25-75% increase of iPods. Apple desktops in order to remain competitively priced will probably end up as a loss-leader in 2005.



Quote:

Quote: Over the past 5+ years it appears the majority of Macs are sold to pre-existing Mac owners. Sounds familiar? W/o iTunes Mac may well have entered the hobbiest realm of the AmigaOne... I somehow doubt it.

2004 PC Desktop sales increased 13.5+% Mac sales increased 5%. It's been a constant that Apple has lost marketshare every year. It's just not me but various analysists have said that the 'audio services' have shone a light on Apple, added the majority of their profits, and probably helped to sell Macs. Various analysists see the iPod/iTunes as the current item saving Apple. With 60%+ of profit generation I see why they'd think that.

Also note I did say 'may well have' not 'would'...

@MetalJoe

I must agree to cell, I had a few macs and played with G5's. My latest was a Mac G4-1200MHz, Radeon 8500 64MB, 120GB 7200RPM disk and OSX 10.3. OSX is a ok, but it just feels slugish even compared to my Duron PC !!! And that was with a clean install. And forget about games on a Mac, they run much slower on the Mac. Take a look at benchmarks.

But offcourse speed isn't everything for a computer user, MacosX has other advantages.

@terminator
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you can even turn the old machine into an external Firewire HD case.

Great. But I just sold my iMac 2 hours ago. My iBook is now half payed by my iMac DV.

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@bennymee

I must agree to cell, I had a few macs and played with G5's. My latest was a Mac G4-1200MHz, Radeon 8500 64MB, 120GB 7200RPM disk and OSX 10.3. OSX is a ok, but it just feels slugish even compared to my Duron PC !!! And that was with a clean install. And forget about games on a Mac, they run much slower on the Mac. Take a look at benchmarks.

I own, use and abuse various Macs as well as a PC. My iMac G4 (1 GHz) is more responsive than my PC (Athlon 1.1 GHz). Of course Mac OS X actually does some fancy things with Quartz, which can be CPU intensive unless you have either a G4/G5 and/or supported GFX card to take the heavy load. Windows XP's UI should be more responsive, but it even chokes here and there as you can see when a window does the lego dance when rendering.

As for games, here is an interesting article about the state of 3D gaming for the Mac versus the PC...

http://www.barefeats.com/doom3.html

_________________

@MetalJoe

>begin Rant

I've had enough of WInXP now, it just drives me nuts, system slows down for no apparent reason? Security centre conflicts with Norton, all those stupid messages, "you're wireless network is now connected" for the tenth time (yes, I know!), "there is a power surge on your USB hub" (and?), the list of goes on...

And I fed up of being an XP technical guru to friends and family (apart from my Dad who never asks for help - but then he's got a blueberry iMac )

WinXP is anj improvement over previous encartations in my view, but still ultimately pants.

Never liked Mac OS until OS X came along, unfortunately until the Mac mini there wasn't a iMac I fancied really, but now I'm converted. The Mac Mini is so small and well built, the keyboard, mouse, computer, OS, even packing ouse quality which I love, ahh that cold aluminium casing, love it to bits

Bye bye XP

>end Rant

@thread

The last version that I used was 10.2 (jaguar) on a mac G4 tower with 512MB ram. Based on web surfing, running java programs, and general responsiveness, it felt way slower than a Pentium-3 933mhz pc with the same amount of memory running windows or Linux. Face it folks -- aqua sucks!

@thread

its really odd that you guys are say that OSX is slow coz i have a very different experience.

My 1ghz powerbook (1024 RAM) isnt slow at all! maybe its coz ive a load of ram in there, but saying that ive never needed all that RAM except when video editing.
OSX is as fast as hell and beats the crap out of x86 systems of twice the mhz running XP.

and its not like all i do is web browse. you name it, I run it. the whole Adobe CS, Macromedia Studio MX, video editting software. everything. and Im on an out of date version of the OS!

OSX is so much better than XP anyday IMO and the new release is gonna just blow XP away.

even if OSX was slower than XP id still use it coz its a pleasure to use and the most stable system ive ever worked with.

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@BrianK
Quote:

2004 PC Desktop sales increased 13.5+% Mac sales increased 5%. It's been a constant that Apple has lost marketshare every year. It's just not me but various analysists have said that the 'audio services' have shone a light on Apple, added the majority of their profits, and probably helped to sell Macs. Various analysists see the iPod/iTunes as the current item saving Apple. With 60%+ of profit generation I see why they'd think that.

Apple's sales are doing well right now, when sales are typically sluggish. The analysts are predicting something like 35% over the Christmas sales period.

If it continues like this for the rest of the year, that would be another million machines.

Forbes.com is saying that the iPod has helped move machines too.

Remember, Apple's ability to sell machines is directly related to their ability to manufacture and deliver them to customers. Something MS doesn't have to constrain their sales of windows.

@terminator

Great article. One of my points was again made in Forbes.
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"Given incremental opportunities from the iPod brand, we believe Apple's risk-reward [ratio] remains attractive

iPod is leading the charge of the PC to Mac conversion. They site iPod users change at a ~25% rate whereas the non-iPod rate is about 10% conversion.

It seems the iPod is leading the charge, is a high margin product, and is a two-fold win for Apple helping to generate profits and generate Mac devotees.

Unfortunately, the article compares HP to Apple instead of the whole Windows industry. They noted 3% of their survey is going to buy HP. However, it doesn't measure who's going Dell or IBM or EMachines or...


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Remember, Apple's ability to sell machines is directly related to their ability to manufacture and deliver them to customers. Something MS doesn't have to constrain their sales of windows.

This is one of the noted advantages in the clone marketplace. MS doesn't have to stock hardware, software takes much less shelf space. MS doesn't front money for hardware, Apple has to. Apple needs to accurately predict it's sales. Apple has had a history of misprojections. G4 Cube is one example of demand higher then supply. Early 2001 was a notable timeframe when Apple had an oversupply of equipment and end up taking some losses. I believe there was some early iPod missed projections as they were hard to come by and vendors ran out of stock.


It truly would be amazing to see Apple pick marketshare back up in 2005 as the Forbes article projects. They've been unable to do it in the past and it appears their music service - iPod + iTunes is going to be the key.

@cell

Quote:

The last version that I used was 10.2 (jaguar) on a mac G4 tower with 512MB ram. Based on web surfing, running java programs, and general responsiveness, it felt way slower than a Pentium-3 933mhz pc with the same amount of memory running windows or Linux. Face it folks -- aqua sucks!

Ahh, there's your problem. As stated many times in other threads, OSX Panther is about 2-5 faster than Jaguar. It made my Powermac 333 Mhz usable and is my main desktop now, where it was just a curiosity with Jaguar. I couldn't do real work with it under Jaguar, but no problems with Panther.

Also there's a thing you should try: Run 10-20 programs simultaneously under XP and do the same under OSX. Guess which one is the most responsive, when a single program decides to lock up. Window movement and resizing in XP is fast, but that's also because window management sits in kernel space. That's also why XP hangs the entire GUI when one program takes up 100% CPU time.

Guess also which one you can locate a specific window in a specific program in 2 seconds.

Guess also which one you can run for months without rebooting.

Guess also which one I don't need to clean from spyware and viruses every 3-4 days.

Try searching for a file under XP and under OSX Panther.

Try creating PDFs from any program under XP.

Try playing DVDs in a freshly installed XP.

Try creating a guest account with access to specific programs, and no file management in 1 minute in XP.

Try removing the standard installed webbrowser (Internet Explorer) under XP because you don't like it.

Try removing Visual Studio or MS Office from your harddrive by dragging its application drawer to the trash or delete it.

Try moving C:\Program Files or C:\Windows to a different harddrive under XP and see if XP complains about it.

It all adds up. It's just a few of the reasons why people like OSX. Very little hassle, struggling and fiddling. There's a little more than sluggish window movement to it...

I mentioned how you can repurpose an old Mac running OSX. and here is how you do it:

spotted on a Mac weblog:

"Got an old useless FireWire-enabled Mac? Run this:

sudo nvram boot-command=target-mode

Now you have a drive enclosure. Congratulations. A twin reset of the
PRAM will return it to normal."


Not sure if it will work with more than one drive installed, unless you blended them into a RAID array. IIRC, when I moved the stuff off the G4 onto the G5, I didn't see the 80G HD that was in there, just the 60G boot drive.

But there are a lot of neat and evil things you can do at the command prompt...

@HMK

Even 10.2 was pretty good with responsiveness, but 10.3 is a huge improvement as you say.

There does seem to be a lot of personal opinion involved, however. I've run XP at work on hardware that supposedly has two or three times more horsepower than my Mac - it's better than previous incarnations of Windows, but still poor considering and definitely not as responsive as OS X. I stress out the Powerbook quite a bit because I'm used to doing the same on the Amiga, and it copes very well - thanks in part to that BSD UNIX core. 867 MHz G4, 256 MB RAM. OS X changed my opinions on Macs quite a bit, and they're the closest I've come to something Amiga-like in feel and performance since BeOS.

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@ikir

Quote:

I love MacOSX

My thoughts too! Amiga OS4 & Mac OSX are both brilliant

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@Uncharted

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Well you seem to know better than Apple's CEO and VPs. Apple is a Hardware company. The main income of Apple is hardware, it always has been. iTunes store is not thier biggest money maker, in fact it's barely made them anything nor is it the biggest draw for the iPod. Yes it is a benefit, but the iPod was doing very well long before the store came along.

Here's an interesting read - http://www.business2.com/b2/web/articles/0,17863,1037197,00.html?cnn=yes

2006 iPod and iTunes is projected to bring in as much revenue as the Mac. This completely makes sense as the profit margin is higher on the iPod then the Mac why wouldn't a business switch to this services model?

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iTunes generated almost $200 million in sales last year, and Apple, without breaking out numbers, said the store recently turned a profit. ... Wolf calculates that iTunes could bring in annual revenue of $2 billion within the next few years,,,

As I said it wasn't just me making things up. Music Services, iPod+iTunes, seems to be the direction of Apple.

The later halfs there are some directions where the iPod is likely to go such as the VideoPod and iHome... I listed those 2 because I personally think they are directions which make some sense. VideoPod, vPod, would be a good idea, they already have Quicktime can they make a format for a portable player? iHome, a place that centralizes all media in the house -- great idea my only worry would be that Microsoft vs Sony are going there in the next console race, could Apple win there w/o gaming?

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by HMK on 18-Mar-2005 4:04:52 @Koz Quote: I've even gone so far as to tell myself to wait till the next OSX upgrade comes out and then go for it. Well, you probably won't need to wait that long. Persistent rumors say that MacOSX Tiger will be presented on April 1st (the 29th anniversary of the founding of Apple Inc.) and go on sale on april 15th. But after that, the development cycle of MacOSX will get longer, so we probably won't see another major upgrade for another two years. I think after Tiger gets out, it's a really good time to buy macs. It also helps signalling, that we're really tired of Windows PCs and we need another mainstream…

Rumor has it that MacOSX Tiger is set for release on April 1st and should hit the market by mid-April with standard models including only 512 MB of RAM. This could be a good time to invest in Apple products as upgrades will become less frequent post-Tiger, potentially making now an ideal moment before prices rise again due to increased demand for enhanced specs like more memory modules after each major OS release.