[Joe Bloggs]

SSRC may be a solution to a problem specific to PCs. What if the Mac sound system can process 44.1kHz directly? (you do realize that SSRC is there to get around the crappy resampling that most PC soundcards insist on doing?)

Anyway, it seems quite likely to me that the goal of the founders of Apple was first and foremost to produce / promote a computing system that fitted their ideals, and *then* to spread it as far as possible--in other words, they are somewhat interested in gaining market share, but only if they get to do everything their way. Whether the current outcome is success or failure is up to them to define

 

[BDA_ABAT]

History revised:

OK Russ. So Apple never intended to be a big company. They always intended to be a small company that catered to a certain clientelle (al la BMW). Premium products for premium users.

I guess the reason Apple put all those computers in schools all across the country was to only target ONLY those that would go on to earn enough money to be able to afford their products.

I guess they went out of their way to make computers that were so easy to use that nearly anyone could use them was because they know only rich people need that kind of functionality.

I guess, "A computer for the rest of us" means only those within a certain income level.

What is that saying about those who fail to learn from history????

Bruce

 

[grinch]

Quote:

Originally posted by Joe Bloggs SSRC may be a solution to a problem specific to PCs. What if the Mac sound system can process 44.1kHz directly? (you do realize that SSRC is there to get around the crappy resampling that most PC soundcards insist on doing?)

it's also for the people who use external dacs and prefer listening to their music when it's being decoded at 24-bits and 96khz.

 

[williamgoody]

Bruce

Apple releases their products, at a pricepoint they deem appropriate for their purposes and bottom line. They have a great educational program that they utilize to get students introduced to computers, which as they get older they will determine which platform is better for them. Apple doesn't necessarily try to be everything to everyone, without being exclusionary. If anything they're trying to open peoples minds to consider another platfrom that they may find suits them better and that they may find to be a better overall platform. Where or how they got here today is really irrelevant to the hear and now. Bottom line is they put out a quality product and try to promote it as best aas they can, while staying true to what works for them. They don't necessarily need to be "everything to everyone". They do what they do and do it really well.
If more businesses followed this philosophy things might indeed be better for them.

 

[ian]

You asked what job can't be done on a Mac, and I say mine.
I'm saying: Engineering. What CAD does run on Macs? The job cannot be done because the job almost always requires one of the popular CAD programs. You can't just use a random CAD program. The mains ones I've used, such as Solidworks, Bentley Microstation, AutoCAD, all don't run on Macs. For an engineering job, Macs will not work.

 

[BDA_ABAT]

williamgoody:

Actually, I disagree with your view that what happened in the past is irrelevent to what's happening now.

I started contributing to this thread because of a comment someone made about Apple and marketing. My initial response was that Apple has had it's share of marketing fiascos that have resulted in the company doing relatively poorly. Unfortunately, they seem to be going down the same path again. By not continuing with a PDA (seemingly because Jobs doesn't like them), they are loosing customers to Wintel.

By becoming a niche computer company, they are loosing the ability to influence the market. Have processor speeds increased for Macs as they have for PCs? Why? It's not profitable enough for Motorolla (or other chip manufacturers) to continually push the boundaries for a relatively small market product.

Example: Macs really gained a stronghold with graphics houses in the mid to late 1980s. Almost all small-medium scale desktop publishing was done on Macs. Eventually, almost all large graphics shops were using Macs. That's not the case any more. Why? Because Wintel finally got around to making software and hardware that could do the job as well as a Mac for less cost.

Mac lead the way with video editing in the 1990s in a similar manner to what happened with desktop publishing. They have steadily lost ground to Wintel. Now, Wintel machines perform BETTER than Macs in video. Example: go to
this site, select Reviews, then scroll down to the story, "Mac vs PC III: Mac Slaughtered Again".

They've travelled down this road before. And the result continues to be the same.

Actually, Apple is/was in a position to do something, but I don't think they're going to be able to pull it off. OS X, release of REAL servers and server software could make a difference, especially as many Wintel companies were looking at the choice of staying with NT or Novell or deploying Active Directory (with the associated security gaffs). But I believe that it's too little, too late for Apple to become a major player.

Bruce

 

[charlesb]

Quote:

Originally posted by BDA_ABAT Instead of saying that Apple was on the brink of bankrupcy, how about saying that Apple was (is) on the brink of irrelevency? [snip] (Question: Anyone remember "the" Superbowl ad from Apple??? 'Nuff said.) Bruce

First, the "Superbowl" commercial has been voted the best commercial of all time. EVERYONE knows that commercial. (How effective it was selling Macs is a different question, but it was a -brilliantly- done commercial....directed by Ridley Scott, no less.)

Apple has certainly made huge mistakes, the two most glaring are (1) failure to license the MacOS as Bill Gates begged them to circa 1986, (2) failure to release a version of MacOS for Intel chips. They have developed this at Apple at least twice, but never released it. There are strong rumors of a thing called "Marklar" inside Apple, which is OSX on Intel. This almost certainly exists, because Nextstep runs fine on Intel and much of the basis for OSX is from Nextstep.

However, Apple is anything but irrelevant. The whole industry copies nearly everything that Apple pioneers. Recently: The Imac, the digital hub concept, firewire, the titanium powerbooks. Much of the look of WinXP is poor copy of OSX.

I think Apple will live long and prosper. Combined a brilliant GUI with BSD Unix underneath is a holy grail that has eluded the entire industry for over a decade. My 7 year old daughter secretly uses BSD unix!

Love Apple or hate 'em (and I have done both), you better HOPE that Apple prospers, because no one else in that moribund industry is doing a thing worth paying attention to.

 

[Russ Arcuri]

Quote:

Originally posted by morphsci Mathematica is for mathematical functions but not necessarily statistical. In any case the windows version is much ahead of the MAC version. (I already checked the functionality).

BZZZT. Nope. the Mac version has feature parity with the Windows version, and always has. Wolfram Research has fully supported the Mac platform from the beginning. I saw Steven Wolfram demonstrate a pre-release version of Mathematica 2.0 at RIT when I was in college, and he used a Mac for the demo because the Mac version was the most stable beta at that time. Quote:

The problem is that for packages available on both systems the MAC release lag the Windows releases (sometimes by more than 2 years (SAS) and you simply cannot afford that lag if you are trying to stay up-to-date.

Because obviously all software ceases to function correctly once the new version comes out. Besides, this is only true for some packages, not all. If the software you prefer to use for your work doesn't exist on the Mac, that's fine -- but don't make a statement (like you did originally) that an entire category of software simply doesn't exist on the Mac and expect to get away with it. My list isn't even close to complete, anyway.

 

[Russ Arcuri]

Bruce, I'm not "revising history." I'm disagreeing with your version of it, and the conclusions you draw. EVERY company "intends" to be a big company. Apple would love nothing more than to grow to double, triple, ten times its current size. But that doesn't mean they're a failure if they simply continue what they have been doing -- filling a lucrative niche.

What you fail to recognize is that just because they haven't captured 50% of desktops does not make them a failure. And even if that's how you define failure, it certainly can't be blamed on "marketing."

As I already explained several times, there are far better reasons than "poor marketing" why Apple hasn't overtaken Microsoft for share of desktops. The primary reason is that most people buy the cheapest hardware they can, no matter what the benefits of the competitor's products are.

Some people don't work this way, which is why Apple still sells so many computers. Your dissatisfaction with their marketing and business decisions is irrelevant anyway. They will continue to do whatever it is that's made them such a strong company.

 

[morphsci]

Quote:

Originally posted by Russ Arcuri BZZZT. Nope. the Mac version has feature parity with the Windows version, and always has. Wolfram Research has fully supported the Mac platform from the beginning. I saw Steven Wolfram demonstrate a pre-release version of Mathematica 2.0 at RIT when I was in college, and he used a Mac for the demo because the Mac version was the most stable beta at that time.

Nope. Sorry. You musn't have been in college for a while. Anyway, as I said it is not really a significant statistical tool (unlike S Plus) and is really more suited for analytical models. It takes too much programming effort to use Mathematica for statistical anlyses. That effort is better used elsewhere so other packages are utilized.

Quote:

Because obviously all software ceases to function correctly once the new version comes out. Besides, this is only true for some packages, not all. If the software you prefer to use for your work doesn't exist on the Mac, that's fine -- but don't make a statement (like you did originally) that an entire category of software simply doesn't exist on the Mac and expect to get away with it. My list isn't even close to complete, anyway.

Not at all. However, the new software does now allow us to do things we could not do before. For, example, perform mixed model analysis correctly. It is not the software I prefer, it is the software that is necessary for me to do my work. Which was my original point. Ever try to calculate Best Linear Unbiased Predictors on a MAC? Let me know how it works out for you.

If you know of software that can do mixed model linear and generalized analyses correctly on the MAC, please let me know. Out of the packages you listed only MatLab and Mathematica are capable of it, and both require a lot of programming to do that. None of the available packages except SAS versions later than 7.0 allow you to perform Mixed Model analyses with the correct inference space or allow you to model the covariance matrix.

I never said you couldn't do elementary statistical analysis on the MAC. What I said is you couldn't do real statistical analysis. I stick by that statement.

Again it is not a choice or a preference. Powerful statistical analysis tools with cutting edge algorithms (SAS v. 8.1+) and statistical modelling software (S Plus v.6.0) are not available on the MAC.

More importantly this has been the case for at least the last ten years. I trully wanted to switch to a MAC because of their hardware innovation. But alas the software I needed (not preferred) was not available.

I have not even mentioned very specialized software I use for performing relative warp analysis or Mantel matrix correlations.

I'm sorry Russ, you may be very good at maintaining computer systems and looking up things on the internet, but you are definitely not a statistical professional or we would never be having this discussion. The MAC is not, and has never been a platform for a statistician.

 

[Russ Arcuri]

Quote:

Originally posted by morphsci Nope. Sorry. You musn't have been in college for a while.

It makes no difference how long it's been since I was in college. Mathematica 4.2 (AND all previous versions) has feature parity on both systems -- the math engine is identical. You couldn't have "compared" them and found a difference, because there is none. Quote:

The MAC is not, and has never been a platform for a statistician.

And when did you give up genetics and become a statistician?

Never mind... that's not the point. If the specific tool you prefer for statistical analysis is not available on the Mac, there is really no point in discussing it further, is there? But SPSS is a very advanced statistical package as well -- my wife used it in college and grad school for advanced statistical analysis; it's not intended for "beginners." If you don't like it, that's your business. But I find it hard to believe that NOTHING on the Mac platform can do what you want to do. By your own admission, Mathematica could be used. There must be others.

And still, in the end, nobody is saying that ANYBODY is required to use a Mac. Use whatever makes you happy. But the oft-repeated argument "there's no a, b, or c-type software for the Mac" is simply not true in 99% of cases.

 

[Joe Bloggs]

Quote:

Originally posted by Russ Arcuri It makes no difference how long it's been since I was in college. Mathematica 4.2 (AND all previous versions) has feature parity on both systems -- the math engine is identical. You couldn't have "compared" them and found a difference, because there is none. And when did you give up genetics and become a statistician?

Does that help if Mac is up to say v4.2 while wintel is up to v6.4?

 

[williamgoody]

Fair enough Bruce, but still, a couple of points:

Quote:

By not continuing with a PDA (seemingly because Jobs doesn't like them), they are loosing customers to Wintel.

I disagree with this. If Apple loses people to Wintel it's likely more to be about platform preference than the fact Apple doesn't have it's own PDA. Most, if not all PDA's (using the Palm OS anyway) out there now are compatible with Macs. It could be more of a case that people want Apple PDA's because they fine dissatisfaction with the current Wintel PDA's out there today.

Quote:

Now, Wintel machines perform BETTER than Macs in video.

I believe Macs across their relevant product line are very much more consistant in video related apps than Wintel machines across theirs. I don't believe the percentage of Wintel machines that do this "better" is as high as that of Macs. What does that say about the relevance and innovation of Apple that windows had to improve their product to "catch up" or "compete" with Apple?

Speaking of which, anyone see Bill's watch unveiling at the CES?

 

[aeberbach]

Biggest problem with the Mac platform right now - slow, with no improvement in sight. Nobody believes that a 1GHz G4 is faster than a P4 at 3GHz do they?

It used to be the browser, but that may now be fixed. However it will take hardware gains to make me look at buying another one. I'll live with the fact that there are no embedded development tools (real ones, not GNU) and that only a small subset of games is ported to Mac.

 

[Russ Arcuri]

Quote:

Originally posted by Joe Bloggs Does that help if Mac is up to say v4.2 while wintel is up to v6.4?

I realize you're just being facetious here... but no, the current version of Mathematica on Windows and Mac are BOTH at 4.2. Wolfram Research uses the same math engine on all platforms; the code is simply recompiled for the appropriate platforms with minor, if any, modifications for the vagaries of the chip in use. The Mathematica notebooks (the interface to the math engine) is what varies from platform to platform, since the interface elements in Windows differ from the Mac. But you can open a Mac notebook on a Windows box and vice-versa because the engines on the two platforms are identical. Any problem, equation, or program sitting in a notebook can be processed on any platform. It's one of the features of Mathematica that stands out.