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[Tech] Apple, Inc. vs The World
16 years ago
Trigged by this.
Alright alright, I know what you're thinking, I need to shut up about Apple already... but bear with me! This isn't me bitching about them directly, just entertaining an interesting fantasy.
Imagine... if pretty much every major company turned against Apple, all at once, as an organized move. They all have their differences, but they can all agree that Apple is fucking them over.
Google: You said that we're evil, and we compete with you in a number of services (smartphone OS, netbook OS, web browser, photo gallery manager, online photo albums). With you dead, we'll eventually reign supreme on mobile OSes at the least.
Microsoft: You insult us daily, and we compete with you in a fuckton of services (smartphone OS, netbook OS, laptop/desktop OS, portable media player (and quite possibly smartphone) hardware, gaming platforms, movie delivery, home theater integration, office suite, web browser and other countless competing applications). With you dead we'll provide the industry and home standard desktop OS.
Intel: You hold a whole group of people about two years behind in CPU adoption and never offered the Core 2 Quad despite its extreme popularity. Also, you are moving away from x86 processors in favor of ARM, and you use AMD graphics parts in some of your products and Nvidia in the rest. You don't offer Intel integrated graphics of any sort. With you gone we'll sell the same number of equivalent or better parts in the PC market, and not have to put up with your bossy bullshit.
AMD: You chose Intel over us back in '05-'06, and provide an unwavering sale of millions of units on a regular basis for them, courtesy of your die-hard fans who upgrade every other quarter. Although you use some of our GPUs, you mostly use Nvidia GPUs. And you offer no enthusiast GPU solutions, and enthusiasts are important for funding our development. With you gone, we might sell more desktop CPUs (we certainly can't sell fewer than 0 to Apple customers) and we'll definitely sell more low-to-midrange graphics chips, and probably more high-end ones too.
Nvidia: You do use our GPUs, but you also sully an otherwise perfect computer lineup by using AMD graphics cards for the highest-performance offerings with no options for comparable Nvidia parts. You chose to make your own chips for the iPad, rather than using the chance of a new platform to switch all your mobile products over to our Tegra lineup. And like AMD says, you don't offer truly enthusiast solutions. Plus you like Intel, and we don't. If you die, Tegra will eventually become the undisputed platform of choice for mobile devices, and we'll sell more high-end GPUs.
IBM: Go fuck yourselves. PowerPC forever, assholes. When you're gone, we'll feel a lot better, and it's not like we were making sales to you anyway.
Everyone who sells A/V on iTunes: We don't have the freedom to dictate our prices. If you disappear, we can raise prices for premium content (things which are high-quality, like Blu-ray, or expensive to make, like certain TV shows and movies).
Adobe: You refuse to put Flash on any of your mobile devices and are pushing for HTML5 and iPhone Apps to replace video streaming and Flash games. If you died off, the artists using our creative software would just move to Windows and still buy our stuff, and Flash would have one less enemy.
And just like that, Apple would be really feeling the pain. Google sites and services would be patched to be incompatible with Apple's software only. Windows would be patched to commit suicide on Apple hardware, refuse to cooperate with iProds (my term for Apple products, typically iPods, iPhones, Apple TV, etc), and they'd stop selling Mac versions of Office. Intel, AMD, and Nvidia would all stop selling chips to them as soon as their previous agreements had been fulfilled, and IBM wouldn't take them back. Movies, TV shows, and music would be pulled from the iTunes store leaving mostly just iPhone apps, which don't have any other convenient place to be sold. And Adobe would make Flash incompatible with Safari and any other browser installations it could identify as being on Macs, as well as completely pulling all their creative software (Photoshop, Adobe, etc) from the Mac platform. In short, a next-gen Mac, if it existed at all, would be using a scaled up version of the iPad processor for both CPU and GPU work, be incompatible with every browser except their own, not work with some of the most frequented online sites and services, not be able to run Windows, Office or any Microsoft software at all, and be completely stripped of the industry-standard art applications which compel artists to seek out Macs above all else. They'd be stripped down (multitouch-enabled) pale shadows of computers running proprietary software on pussy hardware and be completely unsuitable for anyone who needs to use applications like Office/Photoshop or the Windows platform in general. Which, in a sentence, basically describes the iPad and its problems as a platform.
I'm sure it'd be a highly illegal anti-competitive move, and companies wouldn't risk it, which sucks because it shouldn't be and they totally should go for it. "You wrote your software to be incompatible with Apple's platforms." "And they designed their platforms to be incompatible with our software in the first place." "You're refusing to sell certain products to Apple." "And they're refusing to buy certain products from us." Fair's fair, Apple can make anti-competitive decisions, pick 'n choose who they'll do business with and who they simply shrug off, so other companies should be able to do the same.
And they should do it, too. As I've said many times before, letting a company like Apple who embraces one product from one manufacturer and leaves everyone else high and dry might work when you're dealing in single digit percentages of marketshare, but as those digits go up and they become more dominant, it means less competition in the long run. Sure, (for example) Nvidia might be excited about selling GeForce hardware in every Mac, but they know Apple has no loyalties to them, as evidenced by offering AMD chips for the high-end and going with their own graphics parts in mobile platforms. GeForce sales in the Mac are a sure bet now, but that might not be the case in 3 years, and if when the dust settles there's nobody else to sell your GPUs to and you aren't the preferred supplier, your multi-billion dollar corporation just got headshot'd. All the companies need to be aware that Apple has no problem bossing them around and dictating the terms on which they will or won't do business, and if you think it's bad at 5-10%, imagine what it'll be like at 50-100%.
Alright alright, I know what you're thinking, I need to shut up about Apple already... but bear with me! This isn't me bitching about them directly, just entertaining an interesting fantasy.
Imagine... if pretty much every major company turned against Apple, all at once, as an organized move. They all have their differences, but they can all agree that Apple is fucking them over.
Google: You said that we're evil, and we compete with you in a number of services (smartphone OS, netbook OS, web browser, photo gallery manager, online photo albums). With you dead, we'll eventually reign supreme on mobile OSes at the least.
Microsoft: You insult us daily, and we compete with you in a fuckton of services (smartphone OS, netbook OS, laptop/desktop OS, portable media player (and quite possibly smartphone) hardware, gaming platforms, movie delivery, home theater integration, office suite, web browser and other countless competing applications). With you dead we'll provide the industry and home standard desktop OS.
Intel: You hold a whole group of people about two years behind in CPU adoption and never offered the Core 2 Quad despite its extreme popularity. Also, you are moving away from x86 processors in favor of ARM, and you use AMD graphics parts in some of your products and Nvidia in the rest. You don't offer Intel integrated graphics of any sort. With you gone we'll sell the same number of equivalent or better parts in the PC market, and not have to put up with your bossy bullshit.
AMD: You chose Intel over us back in '05-'06, and provide an unwavering sale of millions of units on a regular basis for them, courtesy of your die-hard fans who upgrade every other quarter. Although you use some of our GPUs, you mostly use Nvidia GPUs. And you offer no enthusiast GPU solutions, and enthusiasts are important for funding our development. With you gone, we might sell more desktop CPUs (we certainly can't sell fewer than 0 to Apple customers) and we'll definitely sell more low-to-midrange graphics chips, and probably more high-end ones too.
Nvidia: You do use our GPUs, but you also sully an otherwise perfect computer lineup by using AMD graphics cards for the highest-performance offerings with no options for comparable Nvidia parts. You chose to make your own chips for the iPad, rather than using the chance of a new platform to switch all your mobile products over to our Tegra lineup. And like AMD says, you don't offer truly enthusiast solutions. Plus you like Intel, and we don't. If you die, Tegra will eventually become the undisputed platform of choice for mobile devices, and we'll sell more high-end GPUs.
IBM: Go fuck yourselves. PowerPC forever, assholes. When you're gone, we'll feel a lot better, and it's not like we were making sales to you anyway.
Everyone who sells A/V on iTunes: We don't have the freedom to dictate our prices. If you disappear, we can raise prices for premium content (things which are high-quality, like Blu-ray, or expensive to make, like certain TV shows and movies).
Adobe: You refuse to put Flash on any of your mobile devices and are pushing for HTML5 and iPhone Apps to replace video streaming and Flash games. If you died off, the artists using our creative software would just move to Windows and still buy our stuff, and Flash would have one less enemy.
And just like that, Apple would be really feeling the pain. Google sites and services would be patched to be incompatible with Apple's software only. Windows would be patched to commit suicide on Apple hardware, refuse to cooperate with iProds (my term for Apple products, typically iPods, iPhones, Apple TV, etc), and they'd stop selling Mac versions of Office. Intel, AMD, and Nvidia would all stop selling chips to them as soon as their previous agreements had been fulfilled, and IBM wouldn't take them back. Movies, TV shows, and music would be pulled from the iTunes store leaving mostly just iPhone apps, which don't have any other convenient place to be sold. And Adobe would make Flash incompatible with Safari and any other browser installations it could identify as being on Macs, as well as completely pulling all their creative software (Photoshop, Adobe, etc) from the Mac platform. In short, a next-gen Mac, if it existed at all, would be using a scaled up version of the iPad processor for both CPU and GPU work, be incompatible with every browser except their own, not work with some of the most frequented online sites and services, not be able to run Windows, Office or any Microsoft software at all, and be completely stripped of the industry-standard art applications which compel artists to seek out Macs above all else. They'd be stripped down (multitouch-enabled) pale shadows of computers running proprietary software on pussy hardware and be completely unsuitable for anyone who needs to use applications like Office/Photoshop or the Windows platform in general. Which, in a sentence, basically describes the iPad and its problems as a platform.
I'm sure it'd be a highly illegal anti-competitive move, and companies wouldn't risk it, which sucks because it shouldn't be and they totally should go for it. "You wrote your software to be incompatible with Apple's platforms." "And they designed their platforms to be incompatible with our software in the first place." "You're refusing to sell certain products to Apple." "And they're refusing to buy certain products from us." Fair's fair, Apple can make anti-competitive decisions, pick 'n choose who they'll do business with and who they simply shrug off, so other companies should be able to do the same.
And they should do it, too. As I've said many times before, letting a company like Apple who embraces one product from one manufacturer and leaves everyone else high and dry might work when you're dealing in single digit percentages of marketshare, but as those digits go up and they become more dominant, it means less competition in the long run. Sure, (for example) Nvidia might be excited about selling GeForce hardware in every Mac, but they know Apple has no loyalties to them, as evidenced by offering AMD chips for the high-end and going with their own graphics parts in mobile platforms. GeForce sales in the Mac are a sure bet now, but that might not be the case in 3 years, and if when the dust settles there's nobody else to sell your GPUs to and you aren't the preferred supplier, your multi-billion dollar corporation just got headshot'd. All the companies need to be aware that Apple has no problem bossing them around and dictating the terms on which they will or won't do business, and if you think it's bad at 5-10%, imagine what it'll be like at 50-100%.
They seem very.. I dunno the word for it at the moment..
As far as the computer market is concerned, that's really my SINGLE complaint about Apple! By making OS X legally and practically a Mac-exclusive OS, they create a highly anti-competitive element which is like a one-way door for customers, letting them enter the platform but never leave.
I mean, there are certainly Mac users who love Macs for their hardware, or their tight hardware-software integration. But these people are typically nerds and tech elitists. A lot more people enjoy them because they've got user-friendly interfaces and terms. And I've heard more than one friend say that they love Macs because of the software you can get on them. But yanno what? You could still get that user-friendly interface and powerful software if OS X were running on a non-Mac laptop.
They really need to just man up and take the Microsoft route, selling an OS and software which will work on a multitude of devices. Sure, I'd be happier if they vanished overnight and I didn't have to fucking worry about "will this program run on my OS?" but short of that, yeah, licensing their OS and software out would be ideal.
The reason I didn't include either is because nothing immediately occurs to me that Nintendo or Sony supply to Apple, some Sony movies aside. Nintendo only does software for their own platform, same for Sony. So as much as they might want Apple to die, they don't have any leverage to help with the killing.
Personally, as much as I have a distaste for Apple and it's iCulture, I'm going to be looking to them to put a check on the eventual Google Empire.
personally, I really dislike just about everything that apple does or makes. I want a desktop computer. not some iCrap with a 1.8Ghz dual core processor, I do video editing as well as some other resource incentive stuff on my PC. if a $1,000 PC can do what a $1,500 mac can't, well then screw it, I'll go with PC.
plus, apple won't make AMD computers? okay no thanks then, I'll stick with my AMD Windows machine, they can have their $2,000 dual core all in one intel box.
I can appreciate a lot of what they do hardware-wise. Embracing LED backlit screens completely? Great! I don't want to spend $1500 on a laptop with a shitty last-gen screen technology. Metal construction without cheap plastic parts? Excellent, again, my $1500 laptop shouldn't feel like it's made by Fisher Price.
Where I don't like their hardware choices are in the areas they're lacking heavily--a tablet SLATE running a desktop OS, a tablet LAPTOP (obviously running a desktop OS), and an actual desktop with the space for real graphics cards, which doesn't cost $2500 for the no-monitor version and come with completely over the top server parts.
Do I complain that hardware manufacturer X doesn't offer all of those things? No, because hardware manufacturer X uses Windows instead of trying to offer a complete, stand-alone platform.
Yeah, I think they push to have their products finally look good, I'm glad they're finally paying attention to the screens, as the older ones really weren't all that great on color. I like the fact that they use metal, it dissipates the heat pretty well and all that, but at the same time it means that they do dent if you aren't really careful and that they can get a bit warmer on your lap.
Yeah, I pretty much fully agree with you, the Slate running OS X or even a lite version of OS X would be really an awesome product, I think they could fully make a new and improved market out of something like that. As for the desktop, if they could make a product for like $1200 that gave me a quad core processor, and something decent like a cuda enabled nvidia 9600GT I'd be okay with that. they would just have it air cooled and not liquid cooled like the mac pro's and just running a Q6600 or something like that, I would have a lot more respect for them. However I'm finding for $919 on newegg from iBuyPower you can get a system with a AMD X4 at 3.4GHz and a ATI HD5770. That will do all the GPU and CPU stuff you'll ever need, the card will do gpu acceleration for video editing and image rendering just fine. but you could also do games and all that. While the mac pro is a professional workstation, would that iBuyPower really be all that far behind with how reliable stuff has gotten.
Yeah I see your point, probably would be maybe best to compare HP or Dell or something like that to Apple, but even then it seems that Apple still ends up loosing out. And with how user friendly Vista and Windows 7 are, I don't really know if OS X really has that even going for it anymore.
But for now, things are selling well, so PTHHHBBBT is the response, I guess.
I'll just be over here on Win7 watching Flash and syncing my Windows Mobile phone with Outlook. c.c
Multiple penetrationMultitasking makes me so hot.ZING
its pretty funny, every time i go to the mall here they have a small place there where they sell apple stuff, like iMacs. every time i go there i play around with them a little and EVERY TIME one question comes to mind: what the hell is the imac trying to be? is it a userfriendly PC? no, i think the OS is overly complicated and not userfriendly at all. is it trying to be a high performance PC for enthusiasts? no, they arent equipped with the best CPUs and GPUs and are mostly extremely limited.
i have to give them a little bit of credit though, they seem to run extremely stable and are very responsive.
i hate apple though... they pump out one iprod (i love that name^^) per quarter and with every product they release the costumer is getting more and more limited...
"oh, you want to use other headphones with your ipod? no way jose! we put a chip in it so that you can only use our headphones!"
or dragoneer who had a small issue with the customer support and his iphone because he used it as a USB modem with a modified user profile. they actually wanted to remove the warranty because he did that!
sure, microsoft is a bitch... but at least i can use my PC the way i want to! =/
Thing is, sure the UI might be slick and responsive, and that's great for getting to programs where you do the actual work... but once you're in those programs, the slight difference in UI performance is gonna be outweighed by the lack of good hardware. That's what puzzles me about something like Chrome OS. Yeah, it doesn't have Windows background processes running, so I guess it's gonna be faster... but ultimately you're quibbling over whether you idle at 1% CPU usage or 5%, when you fire up a high-rez flash video it's going to destroy your performance in both cases.
i think they just wanted to cancel the warranty^^ taking it although he paid for it would be stealing, not even apple would sink that low XD
but yeah, you are absolutely right! they sell outdated hardware for more than 1000 bucks! if i would build that thing myself i would pay half the price >.>
and im worried about that part of chrome OS, too... it sounds great in theory but sometimes if i load a big flash video even my new PC which i build last week with an AM3 plattform and fast DDR3 memory is a little lagging. i dont even want to know what will happen without any drivers!
or what about the new flash beta which is using nvidia GPUs to render the flash content? its still a little buggy but ultimately it will be MUCH faster once all bugs are worked out. this will not be possible on the google OS if they dont add any driver support. in the worst case it will be outdated before it even launches.... simply because it doesnt support the new technology which is improving the performance of thse applications on a system which does load drivers and background processes...
Big flash videos run like crap on everything except for limited beta software, so don't feel bad about that xD
Oh, right, you know about that it seems...
Speaking of, it's probably an interesting OS to hack onto something like a classic iPod, more graphical than *nix and would probably run just about the same, just have to build a 'kernal' bootloader for that hardware. Oh the good ol days of the classic iPod Mini... drive started failing so I replaced it with a different compact flash card and put the linux on it and made a small usb patch cable for the apple connector x3
What an interesting hack.
I'll never own a Mac, and I tend to piss off Apple distributors at the store here. Its amusing, Macs have little to nothing holding them in the market, with only an existing fan base supporting them really, that and new iPods because the batteries are irreplacable and Apple refuses to cover the batteries under a warranty.
Why do I have an iPhone? Because I live in Japan and I like having my phone use English, and not unintelligible characters.
I've seen it happen quite often, its the same reason why banks are all to happy to share each others money :P
[typical comment] : Yeah I fucking hate apple, down with corporations !
x3
Huuuuuuuuuur.
They are just the worst business model ever in terms of everything EXCEPT for profit! They're followers range from seeing Apple as a religion and at worst a CULT. I at least have the occasional feeling to stick my Ubuntu flash drive into my laptop and run that every once in a while over Windows XP!
Just, I totally agree with everything yu say Twile. Apple the company and Apple the lifestyle is just a way for smug people to think they're better than everyone else while controlling everyone else and destroying them...
I like my Mac. yeah they're dicks. But I'm a dick too on most occasions, so it all works out. <3
I dunno, it was kind of a knee-jerk reaction, since my roommate loves to bitch about Macs as well. So um..nothing personal? Hah.
But uhhh yeah. I could really go for a 40 of PBR. Ohhhh that would be good.
I'd say a Guinness or Stella, but I don't wanna spend mucho moneys on good beer when Im sick and cant enjoy it completely.
And I love PBR. when yer a poor college student, you learn very quickly what constitutes a good, cheap beer. and I mean CHEAP.
Prolly corny of me to say, but I have a hankering for fuzzdragon.
Read my reply to bcsnider, or browse through my journals to find my ultimate journal of Apple hating or whatever I called it, because you obviously aren't acquainted with my opinions.
But whatever man. It's your opinion. If you don't like Apple because of XYZ, thats fine by me, as long as ya don't try to like, break my laptop in half.
Which would be wierd.
and kind of a dick move.
In an attmept to counter your statements, You say that Apple is trying to take over the market in regards to personal electronics. My response is, why shoudn't they? If you truly want to succeed, you sometimes hafta step on peoples faces and squash them out. Yeah it's a dick move on their part when it comes to smaller companies, and it sucks for them, but thats life sometimes, as cynical as it is.
I personally don't really care if they dominate, because I'm happy with their products, even if they are expensive. It suits my purposes, which in the end is all that matters to me.
That is My opinion on the matter :D
People sometimes act like I'm crazy about this stuff. They say "Twile, why are you making such a big deal about it? Macs only have x% market share. That's nowhere near enough to threaten the PC market." They ignore that, small number of fringe users aside, the market is only using PCs because that's what they're used to, that's what they see in stores, that's what they know from work. Already there are lots of cross-platform programs and some OS X-only applications with no Windows equivalent, and as Macs get more popular you'll see more of those. I watched Macs go from total jokes to the #1 laptop in colleges, easily making up half of the computers I saw during my last semester. As more people use and grow up with them, develop software for them, give them to their parents and children, their popularity will only increase--especially if Apple attempts to make some cheaper models. At some people it'll be like the stock market crash, people will start switching because lots of other people have switched, and the even larger number of people switching will provide an even more compelling reason to change over to Macs. Snowball effect, man. And at some point, it will affect me. If a day comes when I can't realistically continue to pick my own non-Apple hardware, I promise you that heads will roll.
I seriously am not the person you should go to for a good argument for why...I dunno. Why Macs are awesome, or should be more awesome. I don't know. I'm with BCSnider; gimme some beer and weed and sex. That's what I like.
Gaming, movies, TV shows, music, phone calls, GPS, eReaders and desktop/mobile computing... am I missing anything here? About all that Apple needs to be your one-stop shop is to sell TVs, speakers (they already kinda did with the iPod Hi-Fi) and the other "dumb" home theater equipment which just outputs what your iProds are feeding them. Oh, and digital cameras. Apple doesn't seem to care too much for the basic I/O unless there's more exciting stuff to be done, like geotagging photos and uploading them to Twitter, or speakers that connect to an iPod.
iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Macs. Aside from the same manufacturer, the thing they most notably all have in common is that they're woefully incompatible with other products--iPod wouldn't embrace non-Apple DRM schemes from other stores, iTunes is patched to only work with iPods and the content (music excepted, and only just in the past few years) won't work on non-Apple hardware, iPhone is he same as the iPod but also adds in more iPhone-only software, iPad is the same as the iPod and iPhone, Apple TV only plays the formats that Apple likes, and Macs run an OS which is not permitted to run anywhere else. What does this mean? You buy some apps for your iPhone, some games for your Touch, a thousand songs on iTunes over the years, a few dozen high-def movies through iTunes, iWork for the iPad, Office and Photoshop for the Mac... and then you decide, maybe you want to give the Zune thing a try, or Windows 7, or use your PS3 for streaming movies, or upgrade your TV to a 1080p system and then replace your Apple TV with a Blu-ray player. But guess what? You've spent 2 grand on software, games, music and movies which BY DESIGN will ONLY work on Apple's stuff. So what do you do? You certainly don't dump all your expensive purchases and spend time and money to rebuy everything for your new Apple-less computing environment.
Oh, but you say, how can I fault Apple for only supporting certain file types and hardware? That's like getting upset with a Chinese restaurant because they won't make me tacos. No. Fuck that. Apple sold DRM-protected music while Amazon and Zune had millions of DRM-free MP3s for sale, and they didn't get on board with PlaysForSure when Microsoft attempted to make a unified standard that all portable devices, media playing programs and music stores could use to allow for competitive sales of DRM-protected music. And they could've themselves made a standard open to implementations from other manufacturers, but instead went the anti-competitive route of proprietary shit. Other companies favor DVD and Blu-ray for movie distribution which lets you move between an Xbox, PS3, Panasonic DVD player and laptop, all from different manufacturers, while Apple's purchases lock you down to them and force you to keep around your Apple TV unless you want to rebuy your movies. Apple intends for OS X to not run on other hardware, so they'll be the kings of computer hardware--why else do you think they won't license it out like Microsoft does?
Every fucking thing they do is carefully designed to be streamlined and elegant and just work on their systems due to tight implementation on proprietary systems, which has the delicious side-effect of making consumers emotionally and financially tied into the Apple ecosystem. For people who don't know any better and don't care, do you think they'll realistically ever break free from Apple products once they've got their money sunk into content that only runs on them?
That's why we're hostile. Every dollar you toss Apple when you buy something is a dollar directly fighting the free and open technology market. Every dollar is another link in the chain which is going to ensnare us all with Apple's bullshit practice of proprietary systems.
But Apple IS at fault for stupid issues such as not being able to sell certain apps or do certain in-app upgrades.
The App Store has ruined mobile gaming because of the low prices. Customers EXPECT it to be $.99 or free (seriously, even $1.99 is too much to some people). These devs can't really leave because if they went to say Sony for their PSP Minis (small games made by devs to compete with the App Store), then they'd be criticized for releasing high-priced games.
The devs are seriously not making ANY money off of their creations on the App Store. Every time they release a really good app (or game) that's $2 - $5, then people argue that it's too expensive and refuse to buy it.
One dev said "fuck it" and boosted the price of his app from a measly $2 up to $35 for one day just to show people that $2 isn't' really anything to bitch about when it comes to a mobile game.
There's a pretty good article floating around stating that, if things continue the way they are, that mobile gaming will pretty much die off because of consumers wanting really good games for literally pennies.
So far, I haven't seen anyone just leave though.
...Speaking of mobile games, there's a mobile Rock Band on iPod/iPhone. I tried it today and I STILL don't get the fucking appeal of Rock Band/Guitar Hero.
Then again, I don't like GH cause it's Activision. :3
It's a fantasy and a totally unrealistic one, mostly because those companies you mentioned aren't that stupid. Microsoft especially, who, despite their sniping, NEEDS Apple. Apple makes them healthier and safer.
And hell, it's not just Apple who has it out for Flash. One of the few things I agree with Apple about is that Flash NEEDS to die and be replaced with something like HTML5.
FA's interface is a little primitive at times.
Of course, it does allow awesome games like Toss the Turtle. But one good game does not redeem a standard from a lifetime of obnoxiousness. But supposedly a lot of other companies are looking for Flash alternatives, like Silverlight and other stuff.
If Silverlight did take off in a major way, you can bet that companies would be making Silverlight ads instead. It's basically just a mildly different take on Flash, and I'm sure it would be used for the same annoying stuff. Plus, I really don't see Apple embracing Silverlight if they won't even let Adobe, their trusted and loving friend, put an industry standard that everybody wants onto their platform.
It is okay, I suppose, for making silly animations to post on the internet--until I realize that people were doing that just fine in 1997 with .avi and .mpeg files; furthermore, the damn things would actually play worth a damn on processors whose clocks were measured in mere hundreds of megahertz.
Ads? Do we really need flash ads? I am not going to elaborate on that at all.
Games? Why, it's a good thing Flash exists, or people would have to spend a huge amount of money on a specialized development environment just to make a quick, shitty game with a programming language about as pretty as bloody whiskey vomit. Oh, wait.
YouTube? They use Flash because it discourages the average Joe from downloading videos.
Space isn't the main concern with Flash. If space were a concern, webpages with Flash would take too long to load (Oh, wait. They take so damn long to load that the GIF banners from back when I saw the internet through a dial-up connection look simply quaint.). No, the concerns are that:
Flash is fucking slow unless you are one of those people who can afford a new computer every four years;
Flash is frequently a security risk;
Flash, by its very design, invites web developers to do terrible, terrible things and generally makes the internet an uglier, less usable place;
Flash is a highly proprietary standard and Adobe forbids third parties from making their own players, lest someone make one that doesn't fucking blow goats;
Flash is disastrously buggy on non-Windows platforms (consider Flash on Mac OS X or Linux);
Flash is even buggy on Windows, for that matter.
I'm sure there were more, but I forgot.
The apologists always say "But you can do good things with it!" A good artist can make something look nice in even a bad medium. However, Flash isn't designed for the good things. It's designed for the obnoxious shit: Bad web design and advertisements. People aren't abusing it when they put it so such uses--that's what it's meant for.
Flash is, in short, a fucking disaster. It does NOTHING that couldn't be done more reliably with something else. It is popular because the kind of half-assed hacks who usually get hired as web developers love all-in-one tools that do everything wrong (see also: PHP, Javascript). They also love reinventing the UI wheel in new and increasingly gruesome ways. Flash did not get popular because anything was *good* about it. It got popular because it's easy for lazy people to use, and because computers are just fast enough that the aforementioned lazy people can get away with it.
That should read "the Visual Basic of graphic design".
As Adobe rightly points out, you can't just throw a video file up on a webpage and expect it to work for everyone. It would be totally awesome if every device and browser out there worked elegantly with every A/V file type, but that's just not the case. Codec support, anyone? What's Apple's alternative? Install a Quicktime plugin, which for content streaming purposes just equates to neutered Flash. I'm not happy with the situation either--I'd love the hell out if it if I could stream an MKV file embedded in the page, watch H.264/XviD/VC-1 video and switch between language tracks, toggle soft subs, or count on every phone having native FLAC support... but that's not the case right now. Flash, at the least, provides some common platform for delivery. If you have Flash, you can watch anything on YouTube, because they make sure all their content can be streamed and displayed that way. The same can't be said for Apple.com. And it's not like some groups aren't TRYING to standardize codec/container support into HTML specs either. Finally, when Flash gets its next big update to support hardware acceleration for video playback, it should no longer require a beast of a system to do 720p or even SD video. It's a limitation which is being worked on.
Do we need ads? Sadly, yes. Any site you don't directly pay for is kept afloat by donations or, more commonly, ads. And while Flash ads may be more abusive to your CPU (again, until they update it properly... hardware acceleration for animation is supposed to be coming down the tubes too) and possibly your speakers than a GIF, it's also almost definitely kinder to your network connection--in Flash you can animate things that would eat space like crazy in a GIF with just bytes of code ordering a scale, rotation, fade, whatever. Animated GIFs are, for the most part, a tragic relic of years past, aimed at the same problem Flash sought to do away with--animated content. While I'm not a fan of ads any more than the next guy, and hate the ones that dance and sing, I'd prefer to block the ads on a site and let other people occasionally click them to keep the site afloat than have to pay for everything >_>
Really, I don't know what you're proposing to replace Flash for games. Is it hard to code? Maybe, I haven't worked in Flash too much. Does it run like shit when you try to run it full-screened at native resolution? Most decidedly (although again, they're working on that). Does it work? Yes. And that's the important thing. What exactly are you proposing as a solution for people's desire to perform rich interactions in the browser? I've worked in Javascript before, and it's a bitch to do something as simple as reordering a list of items. Hell, even Google uses their own software to say "I want to do this, generate Javascript to make it happen"--that's what they used for Google Maps and Wave. What's your clean, elegant, reliable, no-plugin-needed high-performance solution for embedded games and other such applications?
* Flash is slow if used poorly or at very high resolutions. That's being worked on. Until then your alternative is?
* Flash is a security risk if the people who made it are not trustworthy. If that's the case, then why are you on those websites, and why don't you block Flash from running except on sites you trust?
* Flash also invites web developers to do awesome, awesome things and generally make the internet a more fun and engaging place. Case in point, Cerberus' latest animation. YouTube. Professional websites which utilize music, video, and animation to create a highly stylized browsing experience on their sites, such as webpages for upcoming movies. Although Flash might offer the potential for rather nasty abuses, it also puts powerful tools in the hands of creative people--it empowers them to do more than flat HTML.
* It'd be cool if Flash wasn't proprietary or we didn't need Flash, but again, given the choice between Flash or a 1990s-era Internet, I choose to have Flash.
* Flash almost always works for major applications and major sites, end of story. I prefer a .999 or even .1 success rate to a 0.0 success rate.
Which brings me back to my overall and original point. What are you proposing should be used to do everything Flash does? If you don't like Javascript and you don't like PHP and you don't like Flash, what the fuck tools do you expect people to work with to make websites more interactive than your old-school web-form-for-every-setting-and-text-input shit from the '90s? It's easy to tear something down, but completely different to actually pose constructive criticism. That's something I always try to do when I bemoan companies and products, but it's something that is most decidedly lacking in your analysis of Flash.
In any case, this is neither here nor there. I don't really think it's Apple's place to decide what is and isn't allowed on the Internet, which is what they're effectively trying to do by keeping Flash off their products. If they try to do that, they'll suffer the consequences. And while it won't be anything as extreme as what I spelled out here, I don't see Adobe being as fond of Apple after this.
Yeah, a small OS designed by a fucking typesetting company. Do you buy automatic transmissions from Nokia? I wouldn't. They'd probably re-enact every common dumb mistake on the subject which, incidentally, is what people pretty much always do when they build something that acts like an OS where one doesn't need to exist. Performance problem? Probably. Reliability problem? Definitely.
What am I proposing should be used to do everything Flash does? Nothing. Nothing, because the same thing doesn't *have* to cover all of that. Rather than doing one thing well, it does several things poorly, and the only reason people put up with it is because of a perceived need for the same shitty tool to address all those points at once. I'd rather have a good fork, a good knife, and a good spoon than a flimsy plastic utensil that tries to be all three at once. How about do video with something that does video worth a shit, make games in something that does games worth a shit, and make ordinary banner ads that don't resize themselves and pop on top of everything you're doing to inform you that you are the ten-thousandth person to be pestered about winning a free iPod, instead of doing ALL of these things in something that sucks at ALL of them? If the web requires that, it's because the web has become a technological tumor.
What do I recommend for video? Pretty much anything else (except MKV, which is also shit, but that's another story). Give pretty much anything else the same industry-standard status, and it will work for at east as many people. As for the aforementioned Cerberus animation: The guy's a good artist, and the drawing-pictures end of Flash is actually good and easy to use; unfortunately, that's the only part of it that isn't crap (and it also costs as much money as I make in a month). If Flash were merely a piece of studio software that, say, let people easily render cartoons in .avi or something, I'd probably like it--and it would be both equally enabling to people who do good things with it and less of a monstrosity whose design is dictated by people who only want to abuse it.
It's easy to make animations in it, sure. Does that, by any means, imply that the format is actually good for *playing* them?
I didn't say Actionscript is hard--just that it's a hideous piece of shit comparable to Visual Basic in both general badness and magical appeal to people whose coding suggests they probably shouldn't be doing that.
What else for making games? Oh, I don't know...how about one of the dozen or so other environments people use to design games? Perhaps even Java*--which is faster, more stable, works for more people than Flash, is generally better for embedded anything than Flash, has extensive graphics libraries, and, unlike Flash, was designed by people who know what the hell they are doing. I have seen and played web-based games via Java applets; unlike Flash, they don't slow down and drop frames until I shrink them down to a sixth the width of my screen. If you don't like that, there are also game design resources for other portable, multi-platform environments, such as Python. I'm not too familiar with the subject of game development, so I'm probably forgetting several other options.
Also, in case you didn't notice, Flash *doesn't* work for everybody. If it comes close, it's because it's been adopted as an industry standard--and a proprietary industry standard, need I remind you, is a terrible, terrible thing to have in any industry. Let me repeat that.
A proprietary industry standard is a terrible, terrible thing to have in any industry.
Want video? Kill Flash. Fuck it. Use Ogg Vorbis or something. It's free, and it's supported on every platform with enough market share to complain. That's just one example; for many other things, AVI and MPEG work just dandy, and have since before since either of us was in high school. The only thing Flash has that Ogg Vorbis doesn't is the sworn allegience of tens of thousands of web developers who think it is the only correct way. That doesn't make a thing good--just harder to escape from. Heard of that HTML 5 thing that's coming down the pipes, by chance, on acount of widespread disapproval of Adobe owning an industry standard? Yeah. You mention Javascript, and I suppose I should use it to point something out. That exists primarily because things like CSS weren't around back when Netscape was getting popular, and the vast majority of what's done with it does not need it. The web is full of kludges that have outlived their usefulness, if they were even needed to begin with.
Adopt something that isn't shit, and something which is an open standard. That's what people do in industries where things actually have to work. "Works 95% of the time" is unacceptable in most fields of engineering. Why should this one be any different?
By the way, in closing: Even if there weren't alternatives for every single damn thing Flash does--which there are--that would not excuse the fact that it is shit, and that it has made the web an even bigger mess than it was before. Shit being made an industry standard does not make it stop being shit. Even if there is nothing better--and in this case, there are several something betters--that is not grounds for preserving status quo. The first step to getting rid of or replacing something that is shitty is to admit that it is shitty. Instead, you seem to want to defend it, and act like its erroneously perceived necessity grants it immunity to accusations of shittiness. Well, guess what, it's shit--and if anything else acted like that, you'd probably call it shit, and I'd love to see the look on your face if somebody told you you had to pay for it. Accept the fact that it's shit, look around a little, and you'll find that it doesn't have to be shit. That, or remain yoked with shit. I guess it's up to you.
As for Apple (and I apologize for the prior tangent, since I think you meant the thread to be about Apple): It ain't their place, no, to decide what people should see on the internet. However, Apple's take on it is more that, because Flash is shit, they refuse to support it. Apple's whole gig is to sell customers a solid, vertically-integrated package that works correctly out of the box and doesn't just eat shit every week for no apparent reason--which counts out Flash on OS X. Besides, what are they to do when Adobe doesn't want people writing third-party Flash players?
*That's Java, not Javascript. Completely unrelated. Fuck those Netscape assholes for coming up with the name "Javascript".
I am completely opposed to the idea of rendering an animation and encoding it for subsequent decoding when it's not needed. You'll always end up with bigger files that look worse and have a fixed resolution. I hate unnecessary compression and rastarization with a burning passion. Does that mean that we should try to render Pixar films on our computers in real time? Of course not, completely unfeasible. Does it mean that we should try to render simple 2D animations on our computers in real time? Absolutely.
I'm not an idiot. I don't need to to try and tell me that there's a difference between Java or Javascript. I don't need you to tell me that not everything is perfect. Surprise! I write lots of journals about stuff that I think is bad and how it could be improved. And... you suggest the continued use of .avi and hate MKV? I don't even know why I'm typing stuff to you anymore. That's like a criminal offense in my book. I'm done here. Come back when you can be polite, stay on topic and avoid putting words in my mouth.
Given that .mkv files are almost invariably more computationally expensive, I don't see the beef.
The Xbox in the living room can't play them, yet it can handle .avi. Housemate's old Celeron machine couldn't play .mkv for shit either, yet it could handle .avi. Two or three laptops the anime club on campus uses have run into the very same problem when, all the sudden, they found out that the next episode in the show they were planning on watching is in .mkv instead of .avi. Oh, and .avi worked fine on a 166MHz Windows 95 machine. Try that with .mkv, I dare you. This seems to happen whenever I talk to people who stick up for .mkv: They act like everybody who tells them that it plays slower than the same thing as a .avi file of the same resolution and quality is simply lying, and that what they've observed never happened. But I wasn't here to argue with you about .mkv, unsurprised as I am by how mad you got when I said something bad about it. By the way, in case you weren't looking, I suggested other video formats too. ..avi came to mind because, unlike Flash, computers clocked under 1GHz seem to be able to handle it without dropping frames. No amount of steam out of your ears is going to make that stop being true. What's all this shit about encoding? Flash fucking chokes where other video formats people used to use instead do it less. Is that simple, empirical fact somehow subordinate to your speculation about what you think should work better in theory?
But if you're concerned about video quality, then why stick up for Flash of all things? Being able to play it smoothly is pretty well at odds with high-quality rendering in Flash.
Oh, and if you don't want me thinking you're sticking up for things being shitty, then you probably shouldn't leap to post a rebuttal when somebody calls Flash a slow, bloated piece of shit.
*That's drawn a lot of less than flattering interest from security researchers of late.
MKV properly supports H.264 and pretty much any other codecs imaginable, AVI does not. MKV supports lots of streams including multiple soft subtitle tracks and multiple audio channels. Because yanno, I might want to have a copy of a movie with subtitles that aren't always burned into the image, or have the option to do a foreign language or director's commentary or another sound mix (original mono vs remixed 7.1 for old Disney releases). What else do you want in a video format?
I won't claim to be an expert on the performance overhead of MKV, and indeed the only thing I've read on it has been "A Matroska containing EXACTLY THE SAME as an AVI will be smaller and faster than it. KEEP THIS IN MIND - Matroska is SMALLER and FASTER. It's BETTER for older computers. (Certainly, the difference - especially in speed - is practically irrelevant. But it is there. So next time someone says mkv is slower, you can flame them.)" from http://kickassanime.org/wiki/index.php?title=MKV . And in my experience that's been completely true. Maybe the reason the MKV files didn't play nicely for the anime club is because the files used MKV to incorporate H.264 video or soft subs, which would really throw off the comparison. If all they wanted was one XviD video stream and one MP3 audio stream, there's no reason to use AVI, and in general subtitling groups won't unless they need to. Frankly, common sense and KAA's wiki suggest that the actual container has little impact on performance when the contents are exactly the same.
Frankly I find it amusing that you bitch me out about how you'd rather have a good set of tools than a single crappy tool, and then try to argue against the value I place on using Flash or something like it to store animations. Conventional video files aren't the ultimate solution for every problem, and when that problem is scripted 2D animation with high visual quality and small file size, video codecs just don't measure up to something like Flash. Things like old-school MPEG and DivX codecs weren't designed to have super high quality and super small files for high-contrast animation, they were made to provide acceptable video quality for realistic video with the performance constraints of '90s-era computers. Modern codecs do a better job at reducing color bleeding, banding, and visible compression artifacts in things such as 2D animation, but even they can't hold a candle to the native resolution output of the mastering program. Which is exactly what Flash gives you when you use it for animations.
Why am I even arguing codecs with you? This is all kinds of stupid.
So you don't like that one. Okay, use a different one. I haven't seen a peep out of you about any of the other formats I mentioned. (Oh, I also forgot to mention SVG animation. Silly me.)
A corrrection: What I should have said was Ogg Theora. That's the one under consideration for HTML 5 for streaming video purposes. Granted, compared to a typical Flash-based streaming video site, whatever they pick doesn't have to try too hard to beat it on speed and video quality. Artifacts? Shit, who'll notice with how things look already?
As for all this stuff about scripted animation: So why is Flash being used so much for displaying heavily compressed streaming video? And what's this about using Flash for high quality? I'd think high quality would imply it looks good full-screen. Unless you can spend a lot of money, full-screen Flash is choppy and broken, and may have to be reduced to a lower quality setting. By and large, Flash is not used for high-quality, high-resolution animation. I think I've seen that maybe twice ever, with no chance in hell of getting it to animate correctly. I really don't see what you'd be missing by using a simpler, more efficient format for displaying that, when a badly compressed YouTube video no larger than six hundred pixels across won't even play reliably--even if it looks worse than it did when I saw the same animation as an mpeg file years ago, when it played smoother on a computer with half the horsepower of one that chokes on Flash today.
So it doesn't make ads better, it doesn't make streaming video better, and most of the benefits it might purport to gain in the course of taking a cheese grater to my processor never come to bear because anything I find to watch with it is either low-quality or too taxing to play smoothly. What good is that?
I don't like any of the old video containers. We created new ones for a reason; new capabilities and new needs. AVI and MPEG just don't cut it. They were fine when the very notion of color video was novel on a computer, but that's neither today nor last year.
I don't know much about SVG animation but have no problems with it.
It may be under consideration for HTML 5 but that doesn't mean things are all downhill for it. More than 2 years ago a number of companies were making a fuss over it for a variety of reasons. How exactly Theora measures up to codecs like H.264 in compression and performance, I couldn't exactly say... but everything I'm reading on the subject indicates that Theora is at best on par with H.264 when it comes to compression.
Don't cloud the issues here. I'm saying that Flash results in better-looking, lower-bandwidth video than DivX/XviD/WMV/H.264/VC-1/MPEG# when we're talking about scripted animations, which shouldn't be surprising--you can't beat the visual quality that you'll get from something being rendered locally. At best you can match it with lossless compression... which would be a complete bitch for video. All I'm saying is that standard video files aren't a completely superior solution to Flash for ANIMATION.
Streaming video is a different issue completely. However, just because a video is delivered through Flash doesn't necessarily mean it's crap quality. Flash can deliver H.264 video--for example, YouTube streaming to an iProd--which is at least as good as Theora. Try to be more objective with this stuff, just because you came across some shitty-quality YouTube videos doesn't mean that the delivery method is inherently flawwed when it comes to quality.
Flash is used for displaying heavily compressed streaming video (with crappy or good results) because it's a common plugin that sites like YouTube can count on. Without present support for things like HTML 5, and with worries of people downloading the content of the videos (which would make pirating videos a lot more common, eliminating royalty payments that would be provided for through related advertisements), Flash provides a platform for delivery inside the browser which most people already have.
High quality can imply a number of things. If by looking good full-screened you mean that still frames are free of visible compression artifacts then yes, Flash videos can be pretty high-quality (although they don't have to be). That's what I'd consider to be the common metric for visual quality, the amount of noise added in and details lost. Fluid playback is an important issue as well, but somewhat of a different one at the same time. Playback performance with Flash video can suffer at high resolutions, but again, this is something that Adobe knows about, and which has been fixed in the newer Beta versions of Flash. Even an ION-powered system is capable of doing smooth 1080p H.264 video playback. Actually, amusingly, that's the reason Apple cited as not supporting Theora while being proponents of HTML 5; no chips exist for devices like portable media players and smartphones which will accelerate Theora playback, while H.264 is more widely embraced in such devices.
So amusingly enough, if you look at H.264 vs Theora on old systems, lower-rez Theora is probably all you'll play fluidly, but when you move to modern portable devices, it's H.264 which has the advantage. Modern computers will probably handle Theora better if they don't have GPU acceleration for H.264, but if they do, the situation is probably reversed again. Really, it's all about having proper hardware support.
Flash is nothing more or less than a stopgap. The "old" Web was relatively static and primitive. A lot of proprietary shit went down in the '90s, Flash was one of those things. Right now it's bridging the gap between a text-and-image-based Web, and an interactive, audio-and-video-and-animation laden one. Scripted animation and embedded media in neutral ("web friendly") formats are just coming to fruition (as you keep pointing out, HTML 5). Until those are more developed and more supported, for better or worse, Flash will be used by most of the major sites and browsers to provide a hackish and sometimes buggy common platform for things which don't have support in HTML 4.
Adobe hasn't done shit right in years, just look at all the people with Photoshop having issues with Windows 7 and so they bitch that 7 is a piece of steaming shit just because of Adobe's horrible program.
No matter what browser I use, I've had it crash just...randomly. Firefox, IE, Chrome... if I have tabs up for about 1 minute with more than 3 windows from YouTube, it'll crash. The whole browser, not just a tab (for Chrome). The whole thing.
I can understand where you're coming from against Apple, but I can also understand where Apple-fans (and fanboys) are coming from against Adobe.
By the way, I'm using the RTM of 7 and Flash is still being a piece of shit. XD
Apple isn't going to dominate the desktop and laptop market. They just don't price themselves that way for mainstream appeal.
Software monopoly beats hardware monopoly. No monopoly is best, when it's practical.
Yeah, it's inconvenient that you can't just run any binary on any architecture, but it's not such a great inconvenience that the benefits of variety should be forsaken. A heterogeneous population is good for evolution of any kind, and that's good for everybody. The first AMD Athlons were designed with the help of jettisoned former DEC employees, and were basically Alpha EV6 chips modified to speak x86, and symmetric multiprocessing sure as hell didn't start on x86. Good chip technology comes from a lot of different angles.
And you're right about mobile architectures: One size can't fit all. This alone pretty much rules out the ultimate feasibility of hardware monoculture--except within a given market, where the aforementioned convenience is a powerful commercial force.
There doesn't "need" to be a standardized "single instruction set", and there shouldn't be.
Many good designs have died not because they were inferior designs, but because of politics. Was Alpha inferior to x86 or to Itanium? No, it was usually the fastest chip out there every time a new one got released, and Hewlett-Packard sold Alphaserver systems for years after the architecture was supposed to have died simply because Itanium, its intended replacement, took years to catch up with a moribund architecture; x86 wasn't even on the map. Similarly, SGI MIPS and HPPA were killed off because SGI and HP thought they'd save a few bucks by cutting chip development out of their budgets. (SGI subsequently swirled down the crapper and got bought by Rackable; HP had somewhat better luck.)
A lot of people really wish x86 were the only thing out there, because of how convenient it'd be if everything ran on everything. I've heard this from a lot of people, I really have. Well, where did its technology come from? x86 started its existence as little more than a glorified traffic light controller. Currently, it exhibits a great many of the brightest ideas in processor design.
Very few of which Intel or AMD actually invented. Their contributions were not in processor design, but in the devising of new manufacturing techniques--which, granted, are a vital and underplayed accomplishment.
x86 didn't introduce integrated memory cotnrollers (VAX), it didn't introduce load-store methodology despite using it internally today (every RISC chip ever), it didn't introduce the concept of using microcode to tailor a specific chip's system of opcodes to the instruction set the computer sees (old as the hills, but probably IBM), it didn't have good branch prediction for a long time (DEC Alpha), it didn't introduce register renaming (System/360), it didn't introduce on-chip cache, and there are other ideas it's never even touched on, such as virtual register windows (SPARC*). Just this one architecture--the bog-standard thing everybody has to use--required ideas that came from several other architectures. Did this design not benefit from the competition between different architectures and the various ideas they produced?
Intel and AMD now both manufacture what are essentially RISC chips wrapped in translation layers solely for the sake of compatibility (so that they don't end up like the Intel i960 or the AMD 29000). Would this have happened by now if everybody had just standardized on the same architecture--say, the System/360 line? Indeed, most of the architectures that have appeared in the past few decades arose because somebody didn't like the limitations of the architectures that were available. No doubt, it'll happen again.
*Over which, by the way, nobody's been sued for making their own because, unlike x86, it actually is an open standard. There is nothing stopping you or anybody from downloading the Verilog code for the eight-core OpenSPARC T2, putting it on an FPGA, and using it to design a new processor. See who knocks on your door if you try to make your own x86 chip without talking to the right people. I hear lots about open-source software, but what about open-source hardware? That's pretty rare still.
Still, from an end-user perspective, I'll take compatibility and portability over the vague potential of competing standards giving better hardware. Unless x86 is threatened by something else, I can't see them changing their approach in response to something else.
Of course, I'd prefer for there to be competition AND compatibility. When I can get both of those without compromise, let me know and I'll be the first to sign up. Until then, I'm going to bemoan smartphones and other sub-netbook devices not running real OSes with real software.
http://www.windowsfordevices.com/c/.....q-EasyPC-E790/
ARM is a curious character in the game. It's produced in very high volume by several manufacturers--that is, Intel may not enjoy their usual advantage of economy of scale--and traditionally optimized for power efficiency, which could make it a potent threat to Atom. If Microsoft ports some mainstream Windows to ARM, Intel might be in trouble, depending on how popular netbooks get in coming years.
x86 might also run into problems if somebody besides Intel or AMD is first to come up with something cheap to make that's much faster than the current state of the art in semiconductor manufacturing--for example, the 100GHz graphene transistor IBM scientists demonstrated very recently:
http://www.eetindia.co.in/ART_88005.....T_436b10bd.HTM
I won't guarantee anything interesting will happen to the processor racket on account of it, of course, but it's early yet.
In conclusion. Apple sucks for multiple reasons
Amy's phone is about the size of her thumb and she gets bumped into and swallows it
Fucking awesome. Apple just doesn't get it.
even the Microsoft/ general PC bashing that they call commercials sadly works (in the same way that religion works) take a blind group of easily swayed people and stuff your opinions in their faces till they fold and march with you.
I guess then your "trendy" you don't have to justify why you do some asinine things XD
Apple generally does not make original products. The iPod came out in the second half of 2001--the digital audio player was first made in 1979 and patented in the late '80s, the first mass-produced MP3 player was in 1997, the first (4.8 GB) hard-drive-based MP3 player came out in 1999... two years before the iPod. All they did was use a smaller (physical size, not capacity) hard drive and change up the controls. The iPod got photo capability in what, 2004, and video in late 2005? I had an MP3 player in 2004 that did photos (actually had a Compact Flash camera card reader built into it) and movies (DivX, XviD, WMV, MPEG, etc) on a color screen back in '04. The same company that did my '04 MP3 player, Archos, also made a large touch screen-based model with Wifi well before the Touch. Seriously, what did they do that was original? The most notable thing they've done in the past 5 years was to move largely from hard drives to flash memory, which is ironically what the first portable media players used... albeit a paltry 32 MB of it. iPhone? Smartphone with a touch screen and software you can download, the same shit other people were enjoying several years prior outside of the Apple realm. Apple TV? It's what is known as a media extender, and it wasn't the first. Even new fancy things like multitouch and tilt sensors are nothing new, they've been around for longer than I have.
Again, if you didn't realize from reading this journal, the point is not to bitch Apple out for making crappy products or whatever. The point was that they're being very bossy, publicly insulting companies like Google, stabbing Adobe in the back even though it's Adobe's own software that makes the Mac the supposed standard for artists, and so on. They're giving companies a lot of shit. Ironically, Apple is applauded for being a very picky customer and only picking certain things to use in their systems, and when I try to be picky about what they end up with, people bitch me out. What gives?
It just made me so fucking sick when during a Keynote presentation Jobs was like "I've got the number for NBC on my iPhone here, with 'Give peace a chance' as the ringtone. They'll call" or something to that effect. The context being that NBC or whoever had recently decided to pull Heroes and other shows from iTunes, because they wanted to raise the price for the show. On the one hand a consumer might say "Yay, Apple is forcing prices down which is good!" but on the other hand, 1) if the companies refuse to comply it's robbing customers of the option of Heroes on their portable devices, 2) if the company bends to Apple's will and they end up making less money than they needed to, they'll probably trim their budget accordingly for the next season which will result in a shittier programming lineup, and 3) it shows that they're so confident in their utter supremacy on the digital distribution market that not only do they get to dictate all pricing and terms, even after talks have broken off with the studio, said studio will come crawling back to them for the chance to sell their goods to Apple devices again--and if that's not a fucking monopoly indicator, I don't know what is.
For sustainability, I always look to the PowerPC issue of the early '00s. I bet Mac users are really fuckin' glad that PCs didn't die out during the '80s and '90s like they'd hoped for, Intel would not have been there to offer Apple a good alternative to sticking with the poorly-scaling PowerPC chips.
It just confuses the fuck out of me when Apple fans hiss and boo at Microsoft for using their influence to do anything, and are giving standing fucking ovations to Jobs when he announces that Apple has managed to work a great pricing deal for this, an exclusive content deal for that, and so on. Microsoft buys up a company to integrate their offerings into Windows, people get up in arms. Apple buys up a company specializing in multitouch input and shortly after they introduce that feature in their products, and not only are people applauding their amazing talent and vision, they're going off about how original Apple is (see the comment above yours). It's a fucking double standard, and it drives me insane.
I'm still wondering why Apple is so popular with all its limitations. Is it because the closed system is much simpler for people to understand, that they are not overwhelmed with all the knowledge necessary to use a PC to its full potential? Whatever it is, it works, its just not for me. I want to be able to do EVERYTHING on my PC.
They're popular because most people can't afford stuff into the range where Apple hardware fails to meet your needs. People don't care about the long-term implications of their purchases, they just want something elegant and trendy that will simply work.
In any case, I'm just saying that PC gamers aren't going to be a big influence on things.
You need to be fair and objective about these things. Criticizing the phone's price is one thing, trying to take certain absurdly inflated prices and using them to form conjecture about what they would sell for in totally different situations is another. They wouldn't sell it at that price because not enough people would buy it at that price, and they don't HAVE to sell it at that price. Given the choice of selling at an absurd profit to tens of millions of people and selling it at an OBSCENE profit to hundreds of thousands of people, they'll choose the former.
Proof -
http://www.buy.com/prod/apple-iphon.....211493259.html
Also, while not available in the US, the Apple Store itself sells unlocked iPhones in certain other countries, like Hong Kong, for the equivalent of about $800US for the 32Gb 3Gs. (6288 HKD = 809.18 USD) http://store.apple.com/hk/browse/ho...../family/iphone
Believe me, I wouldn't make this up, lol.
All I do know for a fact is that the iPhone itself cost far less than $1100, $900, $800 or $500 to make. These devices aren't cheap, but we're still looking at prices at or under $200 much of the time. Compare to the Nexus One, which sells for $530 and is more than a match for the iPhone in terms of hardware--as well as newer and produced in smaller volumes. If we lived in a world where phones were bought like laptops, and you could pick and choose your service provider on a monthly basis with no penalties, you'd see a whole lot of smartphones available with no contract for $400-600, and I'm sure the iPhone would be among them.
Not trying to say they're always high priced, I bought my iPhone 3G, refurbished, through AT&T as an upgrade for $50, and the only way I'd be happier is if it could display Flash, and I definitely agree that, especially with the iPad (OMFG they should fire the guy who came up with that name) starting at $500, there is no way they could justify a price higher than that for the iPhone. As stupid and gullible as so much of America seems to have become, even the stereotypical Valley Girl has to know that adding a phone doesn't cost THAT much.
/sarcasm
If that were to ever happen... I think the apocalypse would be imminent...
And I absolutely LOVED their cons for netbooks when they were comparing the two...
1) THEY ARE SLOW... - MULTITASKING :D That's why they might be slow... that and its NOT made for performance.
2) PC SOFTWARE - That single term defines an almost infinite plethora of operating systems, applications, etc that it would put "app world" or what ever they call it, to shame...
Apple is a joke that is only there to sucker the stupid, uneducated and rich into their horrible hardware/software locked scheme...
Oh and I loved how you mention the "die-hard fans who upgrade every other quarter." I happen to know one such individual... his fucking parents are buying him an iPad... and he upgrades his iPhone ever year to the latest... can you say lame rich yuppie?
"I'm sure it'd be a highly illegal anti-competitive move, and companies wouldn't risk it, which sucks because it shouldn't be and they totally should go for it."
It's a fantasy and a totally unrealistic one, mostly because those companies you mentioned aren't that stupid. Microsoft especially, who, despite their sniping, NEEDS Apple. Apple makes them healthier and safer.
And hell, it's not just Apple who has it out for Flash. One of the few things I agree with Apple about is that Flash NEEDS to die and be replaced with something like HTML5.
I know it's a fantasy. I still think it'd be amusing, though, if Adobe said "Okay, you guys are being huge dicks to us and won't support our software? Then we won't support your software. No more Mac Photoshop versions." followed by a wave of support from other companies who Apple has pissed off through their bullying and alliances.
Yes, that's why Microsoft needs Apple. Not only to fend off government interference, but competition forces them to build their products better.
Gotta say, I'm not a huge fan of Apple these days, but I'm far less of a fan of Adobe. If it came down to Adobe vs Apple, I'd swallow my pride and root for Apple.
"And Microsoft still has to deal with government interference; Apple's existence has never changed their status as a monopoly."
I think Microsoft would never have faced a monopoly trial in the US if Sun, Oracle, and... well, it was mostly Sun and Oracle.. hadn't lobbied so hard for it.
but you won't see that happening to apple/safari :B
also more giant dragon cock plox :V
Because Apple's market share is so small.
Really, it's intentional that the rules are different for companies with truly dominant market share. Those rules are meant to ensure that they companies remain atop because their products are actually better, not because they use monopoly power to provide unreasonable barriers for other parties.
No, it doesn't work perfectly, but this is one of the few cases where I think it's better to do this than to do nothing at all.
I mean, I understand enforcing certain rules differently because of the size of the company and their degree of control over a market. If Nvidia doesn't release their GPUs in a timely manner because they're having manufacturing difficulties, that's one thing. If Disney doesn't release The Lion King on Blu-ray because they want to have a stable income through staggered re-releases of movies we already own, that's fucked up. Both Microsoft and Apple have the same goal here: dominating the browser market. Just because Apple hasn't hit x% market share doesn't mean they won't. And at what point do you say "No, you have one extra user, so you're now too big to include Safari"?
Sure the OS is stable, but the actual processors are outdated compared to their PC competitors, the UI is overly simplistic and the only company that really makes Mac software is Apple... and maybe Blizzard, and Adobe.
Everything else is Windows in terms of commercial software. Photoshop is photoshop no matter what you're running it on.
Doesn't get viruses because nobody makes them for macs, because the Windows marketshare is 2-3 times the size of the Mac.
He tried to tell me that Macs can run windows games through an emulator, to which I rebutted "At lower framerates, lower resolution with limited DirectX effects on similar hardware? No thanks"
I think the only competition Windows really has in terms of OS usability is Linux.
I came across another interesting tidbit of information; apparently IBM rewrote OS/2 for PowerPC partly because of animosity towards Microsoft. Anyone who thinks that companies don't do anything because they're pissed at other companies needs to consider that c.c
They could plaaaausibly make a pen with a tip that would be detected by capacitive screens, and using Bluetooth to communicate the pressure level, but it would require internal batteries for the Bluetooth which would make it bulkier, heavier, more expensive, and limited in its longevity. And without the Bluetooth mode, it'd just be a stylus. In any case I don't think that would help the iPad platform as things are now, it would make art use a bit better perhaps, but unless you can dock it with your computer and use it as a fake Cintiq, I wouldn't think there's much you could do with it. Dunno about you, but I wouldn't want to be manipulating 5000x5000, 10-layer Photoshop files on an iPad.
Sent from my iPod touch btw hehe
Kind of like those new 3G phone battles. Even though I hate Verizon for making some cheap jabs at their competitors, at least they make some sense. "I'm going to download myself using both OUR company and VERIZON! Oh look at that! In a commercial made by our company, our company downloaded a pretend file faster than Verizon!" It's like, obviously that doesn't prove anything. Secondly, Version was only a head slower. I'd put up with an internet that's only 5% slower if it has better coverage. Friggen idiots!
I've built PCs, I've owned windows computers in the past three years. I'm neutral when it comes to which is better than the other.
Just thought I'd share why I like the platform, and the hardware.
Now, I will say Apple has some funny ideas about selling computers. For instance, my two year old 13" Macbook has a higher speed processor than the entry level 13" macbook pro currently being sold. Mine was also slightly cheaper at the time, two years ago. I completely agree that Apple manhandles users when it comes to pricing.
To reiterate - I'm not saying Apple computers are inherently better - I'm just saying they're not bad for everyone.
I suppose we drink from different cups of tea on this idea though. :P
But okay, let me struggle to talk about hardware, if it's important.
Dual 2.2 ghz processor is still speedy for many things. Netbooks run smooth and typically have 1.6 ghz of cpu power. Heck I watched one of my good friends play Crysis on an ASUS netbook (granted, it was slow frame-rates and nasty graphics, but they still played it!). Processor's are getting so fast nowadays that only a few programs actually need all that speed. I think Apple's been decently reasonable about its processor speeds - but that's purely opinion. In fact, besides the Crysis statement, this entire paragraph is purely opinion.
I'm sure all your grievances with MACs are viable, and I haven't done the obvious quantity of research you've gone through. But it's all about customer satisfaction when you get down to it.
No, you don't have to say anything about hardware, unless you... say you said something about the hardware D:
And to reiterate, I don't care about whether they're good or bad for stuff. It is a complete non-issue. To me, it's the difference between a benevolent dictator and an asshole dictator--I don't really want either.
Why do you keep capitalizing Mac? It's not an acronym. You're not the first person I've seen do this.
in reference to spelling, it's honestly aesthetics. Plus, I seem to remember when I was quite young seeing an apple computer at a store with MAC spelled in capitalized letters. There's no real good reason beyond that.
Yet, even among companies in conflict, there is some degree of cooperation. To start a big tussle can disturb an industry as a whole, and is probably bad for everybody. Frequently, several manufacturers may partner with the same distributors or buy equipment from the same people. They may even do business with each other, or with each other's customers: For example, the Sun workstation sitting in front of me has a Hewlett-Packard inspection sticker on its case, and nearby are several UltraSPARC-II processor boards of a model which, in some cases, has been known to bear SRAM ICs from IBM. A little further away, an older Sun machine has an Intel ethernet controller. (Intel was, after all, one of the original players in the ethernet game, along with Digital and Xerox.)
That said, I should add that IBM probably isn't hurting much from Apple's departures. IBM tends to focus their concern on high-margin stuff like big iron and support services; selling low-end chips to Apple was high-volume, low-margin business--the kind IBM tends to sell off, like how they sold their PC business to Lenovo.
In a way, though, Apple's done much the same. They probably don't have a majority, or even a plurality, in any market, but their slice of the profits is always bigger than you'd expect from their footprint. Above $1000 per unit computer, for example, Apple's slice of the pie doesn't seem so small anymore. Ruthless, certainly, but they're pretty skilled at doing business. (I guess Steve Jobs learned a thing or two since he ran NeXT into the ground. Anybody remember NeXT? ...Anybody?)
What I was trying to say is that Apple is doing things that would piss me off, if I were any of the companies named above. I listed off those things, and then imagined how awesome it'd be if the companies turned on Apple and left them high and dry to wither and die. I wasn't (this time) complaining about margins or their choices for device A over device B or anything else like that.
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/...../#cid:10022997
for an argument.
It isn't one.
So...what you're describing is collusion which is definitely illegal. (It's why LCD makers and memory manufacturers have all gotten in trouble recently.)
Typically, it's in the form of price-fixing which is collusion against the consumer, but it's just as anti-competitive when it's organized collusion against a rival in the industry.
It strikes me as incredibly silly that Apple can do things which several independent companies cannot because Apple is but a single company. They coordinate efforts between teams that handle desktop software, mobile software, desktop OS, mobile OS, computer hardware, mobile hardware, and content distribution prices/contracts/exclusives. You know, things for which a single company usually handles just one or two. With a singular vision and company directive they closely orchestrate their efforts across a wide variety of products and services, and they do it to dominate the marketplace and snuff out competitors.
Ultimately the difference is all in little technicalities. Why is it that Apple should be able to say "We're not going to let this software run on our platform" while AMD and Intel can't say "We're not going to let this software (OS X) run on our platform"? Because they're two separate companies conspiring to harm another? Because they're acting as a singular company which would be a horizontal monopoly? Apple already has a vertical monopoly and assumes the roles of several companies who in the past have managed to get away with whatever they want because they're small enough to not get the attention of the legal system.
I mean, let's be honest here. Microsoft was in all sorts of trouble because they had the audacity to include a web browser in their OS. It was seen as anti-competitive. I shouldn't even have to list off the dozens of such actions Apple does with their computers and mobile devices which are the exact same thing. At one point I heard rumors about Microsoft being broken up into smaller companies, although it doesn't look like that ever happened. If that ever did need to happen to a company, though, it's Apple--unfortunately for them, the speed, ease, elegance and stability of their entire platform is built off of that tight integration.
And what do you mean "Apple has no loyalties?" I don't see any AMD (garbage) in Apple's lineup- can't say the same for their top 4 competitors. Yes they left PowerPC, but do you even remember why they left PowerPC? They were pretty clear on that.
Speaking of loyalty to hardware partners, let's talk about Google's shafting of Motorola, or Microsoft Zune-ing their PlaysForSure partners.
But do you know what really cracks me up? You allege Apple's going to force everyone into a proprietary world, yet it was Apple who opened the first music store in an open (licensed) standard (AAC) AND eliminate DRM (all while MS was paying compulsory royalties to the big 4 record labels I might add) , it's Apple who put the development muscle behind WebKit (aka Google Chrome and Chromium OS), and it's Apple who contributed to the H.264 standard for HTML 5.
So you're arguing we should all put up with such wonderful crappy standards as AMD processors, Adobe Flash, the Zune, Android, VIIV, Windows Media Player, and Internet Explorer just because they didn't meet Apple's standards?
And if you think Apple's tight integration of hardware + software isn't justified, might want to take a gander at Microsoft's new mobile strategy.
Bonus points for actually somehow implying that Apple refusing to support arbitrary price hikes on media content was a bad thing.
You clearly didn't do a good job at reading my journal. I never said that they should "come together and crank out some glitchy bricks that will kill Apple products" or anything even slightly close to that. Where, where I ask you, did I mention anything about them coming together to create new products and items? Oh, that's right. Nowhere. Good job trying to put words in my mouth and then prove how stupid they are. I said very clearly that they should agree not to cooperate with Apple because Apple is a company which screws them over in some way, a company which they would all benefit from the demise of. It's not just because they're trying to kill Flash--which, by the way, I don't care about your opinions for. Tell me, if Apple refuses to let Flash be ported to their hardware, then why shouldn't hardware manufacturers refuse to let Mac OS be run on their hardware? How is that any different?
You're getting stuff mixed up. I said that Apple has no loyalties to Nvidia, because they don't. They're willing to use AMD graphics chips when they prefer the performance and heat output. Don't see any AMD "garbage"? Check out the iMac tech specs. See that "ATI Radeon 4xxx" bit under graphics and video? Who do you think makes the ATI Radeon cards? AMD. Oops.
Of course I remember why Apple left the PowerPC. They weren't happy with the performance-per-watt of the PowerPC chips relative to the Intel ones that would be coming out. Specifically, PowerPC chips couldn't be pushed as fast as they'd like without taking a lot more power, which would be crap for their laptops--which even in 2005 constituted half of their computer sales. I don't see how that has anything to do with anything, though.
I don't know what you're talking about between Google and Motorola. And PlaysForSure? It existed for one reason, to be an industry standard DRM to allow products to work between a variety of programs, stores, and devices from different companies. If everyone used it then there wouldn't be a problem, but Apple kept their proprietary, anti-competitive DRM solution and their players took over so much of the marketplace that really, PlaysForSure wasn't going to make a meaningful impact. Microsoft then launched their own device, again as a counter to Apple, with a store that sold as many DRM free songs as they could. By that time, all the major music stores were trying to go DRM free, and things like PlaysForSure really should've died out. So my take on that story of Microsoft's betrayal, it was actually a case where Apple's proprietary bullshit lock-in and market dominance caused an attempt at making an emerging standard to fail, and Microsoft abandoned it when DRM itself proved to be on the way out.
Gah, I just... you think I have a warped perspective on things? Apple established its own proprietary music DRM in late 2001 and for more than 5 years they were content to keep it that way. Not until February 2007, years after their proprietary DRM helped them effectively monopolize the portable media player industry, did they start talking about how evil DRM is. Why not in 2005? Why not in 2003? Why not in 2001 when they launched? Was it because they didn't yet have the muscle to twist the big music labels into offering DRM-free solutions, or because there was more money to be made by using their DRM to help take over the hardware/software side of the music industry? Your call is as good as mine. I'm always the skeptic.
Sure, Apple pushed WebKit. What's your point?
And yeah, they want H.264 to be an HTML 5 standard. Of course they want that, it's the standard they use for their video playback, it's what all their devices have hardware acceleration for. They also didn't want Theora for the HTML 5 standard because their devices don't have hardware acceleration for it. And unlike H.264 there aren't licensing fees for Theora--make no mistake, Theora would be more open and friendly, Apple just shot it down because it wasn't their preferred codec for their hardware/software ecosystem.
Yeah. I do allege that they're forcing people into a proprietary world. Eliminating DRM for the music they sell is the ONLY thing they do to fight it, everything else is DRM'd out the ass. You buy a Mac with OS X, and then you get some software for it. Some time passes, and you want a new computer. This time though, they don't make a Mac that fits your needs. So you get or build a PC, right? Only oops, you're not legally allowed to put OS X on it, even in the cases where it is technically possible. If you want to not waste the money you spent on your copy of OS X and software that won't run anywhere else, you're locked into Apple's hardware. Or say you purchase a TV show or movies through iTunes, which makes sense at the time because you've got an iPod, or AppleTV. Then along comes the Zune HD with its very gorgeous AMOLED screen, and you want one of those. Only oops, the video content you bought from Apple won't work on the Zune HD, because it uses Apple's DRM. Apple's DRM which they won't let anyone else make compatible hardware or software for. Say you get iPhone apps, and later decide you want to use another device. Crap, you're stuck using iPhones if you don't want to throw away the money you spent on those apps, because iPhone OS only works on their hardware. They've intentionally made it so that when you buy content, be it media from iTunes or software for your Mac, it just puts you further in their pocket.
"Crappy products" like those are clearly not crappy in every respect, or they wouldn't be used. They cause competition amongst other companies, which is ultimately what drives computers to advance as they have? AMD processors? They bested Intel and gave further motivation to make the Core processor line which is so precious to Apple. Flash? It provided a standard platform for the past 10+ years which has allowed for rich interactive content on the web, such as animation, games, and video. While its relevance may be on the way out with browsers increasingly natively supporting embedded audio/video and embedded Java, it's not even fully the case today and certainly wasn't back when Flash took off. I could go on and on, but... I really don't see the point. These products, good or not, serve a purpose, increase competition, and have the right to exist and/or be sold.
What about their new mobile strategy? They say, "Here's our OS. Anyone can make and sell software for it. Anyone can make and sell hardware for it, as long as it meets these minimum requirements (which is different from other OSes how?)." What's so evil about that? I don't like their mobile strategy because I'd prefer to have a unified OS between hardware and software, but when you consider the three major mobile OS players--Microsoft, Apple and Google--only Microsoft and Google actually make OSes which aren't tied to their own hardware platform.
It's not Apple's place to dictate prices. It just isn't. The only reason they were able to get away with it is because iTunes was (and to some degree still is) the major digital distributor of legally downloadable TV shows and movies. I mean, what would happen if Apple demanded prices for TV shows to be dropped to 1 cent apiece, and studios had to comply? With next to no money from selling things in that method, the money available for making new content will be likewise cut, and the solution will be really really shitty TV shows and movies with tiny budgets. Sure, that takes it to a crazy extreme, but my point remains: at some value, limiting prices is going to mean limited production value because the money just isn't coming in from sales. We have to hope that Apple doesn't push things down to the point where content budgets start getting cut.
Actually, if Ryuuie is to be believed, their sort of pricing may already be influencing production value for stuff. He claims that the low costs for games and apps on the iTunes store (which is expected, not enforced, I will admit) are causing some game developers to be less sold on the high-profile, expensive games--why? Because they can't sell enough at the expected $1-5 price tags to pay for the cost. As before I can only hope that this is exaggerated and that production value really won't drop because of pricing conventions on Apple's platforms.
1) Why didn't Apple sell DRM-free tracks earlier? Good question - why didn't anyone else? It took until 2007 for the content providers accept DRM-free tracks. Mind you they wouldn't even license tracks to Microsoft without a device tariff. Microsoft.
2) This is a sad reality (I'm not happy with it but it's a refresher from the Mp3 days) but it doesn't make business sense to push free formats. The reason Apple is pushing openly licensed (as opposed to flat-out free) standards is likely accountability and liability. If someone determines that H.264 violates a patent (also less likely to happen), there is a licensing body to deal with it. If someone decides Ogg Theora violates a patent (Think about the bullshit SCO pulled on Linux- SCO lost but all of a sudden major companies had their ass on the line because of some jackass) , Apple's ass is on the line. Google agrees with Apple on this too.
3) DRM on the video content isn't Apple's decision, it's mandated by content providers. And the videos you buy on the Zune HD won't run on anyone else's PMP as well.
4) In an ideal theoretical world we'd have scaling canvas app development with resolution independence and cross-platform compatibility. (Well, there IS Webkit...) We don't live in that world, so a developer has to write for every single possible hardware configuration. The very obvious advantage of having tight integration of hardware and software is better quality applications. If you doubt that, compare the application quality on the iPhone with that on Android (Tweetie to Twitdroid, etc.) The current crop of phones running Android are great example as to how more hardware variations aren't necessarily better as well.
This is also why you need to have a very clear definition and boundary of a platform. If Apple acts as though Flash is a viable part of the iPad platform, developers will have less incentive to convert, and the penalties (battery life, awful performance) make the platform seem more anemic. Making matters worse, it's something beyond Apple's control, and Adobe's track record is horrible.
5) Apple is a retailer. Every successful retailer uses leverage to dictate prices (Walmart, Amazon, etc.) And as an aside, Apple's app store policies and setup aren't perfect, but (and I'm saying this as a Palm developer), there has been virtually no significant monetization in any other mobile platform. I don't know why that is but nobody else is even close yet.
6) Apple isn't going to take over the world - They aren't. They don't sell to enterprise, they don't sell to cheapskates, and they don't sell to tinkerers or gamers. Apple has a pretty clear mantra, but just because they didn't coat it with a bunch of "open" bullshit doesn't make them evil.
2) Just because Apple doesn't want to use Theora doesn't mean they have to shoot it down.
3) Damn shame that Apple didn't sign on with the PlaysForSure stuff, if they had then everyone would be using it and it wouldn't really be an issue for video. Or let other companies use FairPlay. Nope, proprietary DRM for everyone. At least Microsoft tried to bridge multiple companies.
4) I'm familiar with the benefits for having tight integration across all the aspects of a platform. I simply don't think it's worth the cost in the competition you lose. Phones have just recently (as in the past 5 or so years) become complicated enough to run applications that people might actually pay money for, instead of just doing simple calls and text messaging. Ideally, people would only invest money in a platform which is open to the community, so its progress can't be controlled by a single company AND people can benefit from keeping their old applications (monetary investments) as they move from one device to another--which implies that a platform should be defined by software alone, and the hardware specifications it's capable of running on. Consumers should be free to move from one device to the next, regardless of the company who makes it, provided that it meets some basic requirements. That's really all there is to it.
And I still don't see why Apple can't offer customers the CHOICE of using Flash. Cool that you can get a YouTube app (although it begs the question, if that's the better way to experience YouTube, why is that not how the normal YouTube site works?), but there are all sorts of games and other video streaming sites people would like to be able to enjoy, and they can't. Sure, Flash can eat batteries and performance now, but as all the mobile phone makers except Apple have figured out, that won't be nearly as much of an issue with 10.1 which is why they're all working on support for that.
5) Other retailers don't dictate the prices like Apple does. They just don't. Have you ever seen a line of TVs which were all different and all priced at $999.99? What about 20 different kinds of meat which were all $2.99/lb? Movies which were all $19.99? There's always variation in price, because there's variation in costs. I mean, we're not looking at Walmart saying "We won't stock that TV. It cost $4999 and nobody who shops here will be able to afford that." (and if they did say that, no big deal--somebody else will sell it). It's Apple saying "We want a consistent 1.99 per TV episode. It's easier for advertising and just feels nicer that way. We know that we account for almost all digital video sales in this manner, if you don't like the price we can wait for you to come around." Seriously, if that's not exploiting their position as a monopoly market leader in digital download video sales for the nigh-monopoly portable media player line, I don't know what is.
6) I'd be less paranoid about Apple if I hadn't observed three major things in the past decade: The iPod, which utterly destroyed the competitive portable media player market and completely took over; the iPhone, which many people seemed to view as the first smartphone ever, and which sells millions upon millions upon millions of units, and the Mac, which was a joke and a fringe product when I entered High School and by the time I left college, easily half the screens around me had glowing apples on them. I've seen people from all walks of life with iPods and iPhones, be they joggers/college friends/relatives/strangers (for iPods) or Target shoppers/theme park goers/corporate big wigs/college students (iPhones). Yeah, the iPhone service plan is a bit rich for the blood of many teens, but it seems almost any college student or person earning more than minimum wage can afford and wants an iPhone. And iPods? If you manage to beat their lowest entry point price, it's only by a few bucks. I'll admit that they don't yet sell to cheapskates unless you consider the iPod line, but there's no reason they couldn't--if they just shaved a little off the cost of the Mini (which used to be what, $500?) and the classic Macbook, those would quickly fall in line with normal computer prices. They don't sell to tinkerers, but tinkerers aren't a very large or influential group (let's face it, half the time they're trying to figure out how to turn a 100 MHz Pentium into a usable machine). And gamers? Tell the Mac gamers that they don't cater to gamers. I'll be the first to point out that their gaming solutions are bullshit of course, but if you check the Civ V forms, you'll see Mac gamers arguing that they should get a concurrent release of Civ V for OS X because "90% of all computer sales above $1000 are Macs". There's really no reason that Apple can't expand into these other areas as they see fit, roping users and their software purchase money into the OS X ecosystem.
No, they are just fuckin' evil. I mean, Microsoft--MICROSOFT, THE HARBINGER OF DOOM AND ANTICOMPETITIVENESS--lets you toss Windows on anything you want. They let people freely move between computers from any manufacturer--even Apple. They just don't care, because they shouldn't, because they're selling an operating system. Apple restricts users technically or legally from doing the same, and when people try to circumvent that, they get struck down in court. Apple's business model is, in a way, a black hole. It starts with enough good reasons to bring in a user, the good reasons acting like gravity. Once the user is in the ecosystem, at the event horizon, they find it effectively impossible to leave. Sure, they could get a PC, but having a swappable battery or a tablet screen isn't a make-or-break thing as much as their $500 worth of software suites, smaller applications, and Mac games are. As soon as they're in there, the gravitational pull of the platform becomes stronger on everyone outside. There's an extra Mac user, which means that the next person considering the switch might know an extra person to help, the next software developer considering making cross-platform or Mac-only software has a slightly larger incentive to do so, Apple has more revenue for R&D and advertising. As long as customers don't move away from the Mac platform--and why would they? There are so many good reasons to say when you've made the switch, and so few to leave--more than they're brought in, the Mac platform will grow in size (there's a 10-fold increase in Mac sales over the past 9 years, by the way). As long as that happens faster than the overall market grows in size, the relative size of the Mac platform will grow. And like the black hole, the bigger it grows, the more gravity it will get.
At some point, Apple will have gobbled up all but the most hardened anti-Mac consumers who purchase things in the mid-range to premium market segments. Maybe they have to make a mini Mac Pro targeted at "blazing fast game performance" which can act like an HTPC to grab the gamer segment of the market. Then, the only systems in regular use by regular people will be certain work computers which need Enterprise software, and the low end consumers who can afford $300 for a computer but not $700 without a keyboard. The Enterprise thing is easy to deal with, they already sell rack-mountable servers and a server version of OS X, they just need to get more software hammered out and wait for companies to switch over. And affordable computers? That just means they have to sacrifice some of their pride for making premium equipment. But they don't mind doing that anyway, as long as they can claim a streamlined experience. I mean, look at the iPod--originally they just sold the "Classic". Over time they added the Mini, which was a touch smaller, and then the Shuffle, which was comparatively cheap as shit and utterly featureless. Considering the iPod was a replacement for dinky little flash-based players from the 1990s and CD players which only held 700 MB of content (I had a nice one that played MP3s off of CD-RWs), the Shuffle was a total step backwards from the approach of offering a ton of storage with a screen and slick navigation system. They whored themselves out, giving up their sense of pride at offering more heavy-duty products for users with greater media needs, so they could capitalize on the less wealthy crowd. Which doesn't normally surprise me for a company, I'm just saying that there, up until the recent Shuffle iteration, they abandoned the principles of the iPod so they could fill more of the market.
In some views, the iPad is similar--even at the highest price point it's cheaper than their laptops, and it's billed as being able to do many of the sorts of things you'd want to on a computer--word processing, email, web browsing, social networking, grabbing photos from your camera, playing music, watching videos and movies, and more. Obviously it's not a full-fledged computer in the traditional sense, but Apple's making a firm statement here--they don't think that the full-fledged computer experience is that important for some sizable segment of the market. With the portability of a laptop (lighter, but sheer size will require a laptop-type carrying bag), increased battery lifespan, and the most commonly used computer programs having some sort of representation on the device--even with an OS X-like dock--it's hard for me NOT to see this as Apple's attempt at offering a sub-$900 laptop. I mean, in their Keynote they said that there's a space between the full laptop and the full mobile experiences, and that the PC netbook wasn't the solution... having a need to be different, having a flair for design and thinking that multitouch is all the rage, is it all that surprising that Apple would try to make a very different solution which still is aimed at casual computer users?
Ultimately, I wouldn't give them any more or less shit than other companies if they just did like other companies and either made an OS which is hardware-independent ala Microsoft, Google, and all those Linux folks, or gave up the OS idea completely and just made computer hardware which was OS-independent ala Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus, Fujitsu, IBM, etc. Trying to compete in the open market is one thing, trying to re-invent the market with yourself as the sole leader of hardware, software and content is a totally different beast altogether. The first is admirable and competitive, the second is the most disgustingly anticompetitive thing ever.
I agree with you, and it pisses me off that they can get away with it just because they're not a giant like MSFT. I tried a sip of the kool-aid, but realized it wasn't to my tastes. I got an iPod Touch and started buying all these apps and suddenly wondered what the hell I'm doing. There were only a few decent games on there and even then the playing experience was inferior to other gaming consoles like the DS. Plus I hate how closed in you feel in the iTunes ecosystem. It's like the gates surrounding a town not letting anyone in or out. Plus the battery is already getting shot after a half year... Not a company I would want to be locked in with...
But please... Enough already... It makes me shake my head to think of how close I became an iZombie...
Anyways... I'm just an unhappy Mac user venting, because the college insists on giving them to all art students. They're using the closed system to simply try to get ahead which is wrong.