Tag: Apple Inc.

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Are People Too Hard on Apple? (Part 3)

Apple

Continue from yesterday’s article…

Although if you did not read Part 1 you may want to start from there.

As for the premise that Bill Gates’s Microsoft taking over Apple Computer Inc., I have this to say. I agree that Microsoft have copied the Mac OS for years in their Windows OS. With the release of Windows 98, Windows OS is feature equivalent to the Mac OS in 1998.

Since then the Mac OS has again leaped forward with Mac OS X, which the forever delay and yet to release Microsoft Windows Vista is suppose to be copying. Some even say that the forthcoming Windows Vista is Microsoft’s most complete copy of the Mac OS to date. But by the time of the suppose release date (November 2006, as of this writing), Apple will have already released their 5th major revision to the Mac OS X.

Many must agree that Microsoft has long lost any innovations, if they ever had any. Some may argue this point by pointing out “Windows Media Center”, I will say they copied TiVo. Others may bring up XBox, I will say they copied Sony’s Playstation and Nintendo. I do agree that the latest version of the XBox, XBox 360 is elegant and well thought out, but according to my information it was outsourced to a Japanese design firm. Yet some will point to “Windows Pocket PC” or “Windows CE”, I will say that they copied Palm OS and Symbian OS.

For a glimpse of what to come from Apple you can take a look at the video of Multi Touch Interface that Apple is working on
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l29zW4_W5E]
Apple’s success has been credited by its focus on design and its “Apple Way” of doing things.

Case in point, the success of the “iPod”, “iTunes” and “iTunes Music Store” in allowing Apple to dominate the online music download and MP3 player markets, is the direct results of these trio of products from Apple. Without any one of them Apple would not have been as successful as it has been. Apple’s competitors can testify to that successful formula. None of them so far had been able to duplicate what Apple has accomplished in a short 4 years time. The only one that came close was Sony, but they were not successful even with their advantage of owning a large portion of the music rights of the music industry.

Another example is the “5th generation iPod” with video capabilities. From the start, Apple purposely did not label this newest version of the iPod series the “Video iPod” or “iPod Video” like many other uninitiated have. This is because when Apple eventually decides to get into “Portable Media Player” (PMP) market, it will be with a device that was designed, the Apple Way, from the ground up for video play back. Rather than retrofitting a MP3 player (iPod) for video pay back. The market, industry analysts and critics of Apple, have mistakenly took the “5G iPod” as Apple’s example of their entry into the “up coming” PMP market.

I believe that Apple will do what they have always done so well, not necessary being the first but always the innovated.

Apple is a company that does not do anything half way. When and if they decide to participate in a market or consumer area, they will do it all the way in the spirit of, the trial and trusted “Apple Way”.

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Are People Too Hard on Apple? (Part 2)

Apple

Continue from yesterday’s article…

The ability to run Windows applications on the Macintosh is not new. There had been:

  • Microsoft’s “VirtualPC for Mac”, formerly owned by Comnetix
  • “Q”, a CoCoa port of the OpenSource project “QEMU“
  • “Darwine” project, a port of the WINE OpenSource project [Updated 2006]OpenDarwine project closed.

Apple and others have made the possibility of running Windows applications/executables much easier and much much faster on the Macintosh.

Most of these solutions have their respective merits, but none so far has been as elegant and quick as the “dual boot” solution; except “Q”. Apple’s “dual boot” solution, code name, “Boot Camp” will be included in Apple’s up coming Mac OS X upgrade (v10.5, aka “Leopard”), with this software and firmware technologies, Apple has again demonstrated the “Apple Way” of doing things.

Despite the fact that Apple made a point of not supporting the Windows environment on the Macintosh, they do make it extremely easy to create the necessary partition for installing Windows XP on the Macintel. They even included the feature of not requiring any lost of existing data after partitioning; something that has not been done before on the Macintosh. To the spirit of the “Apple Way” of doing things, Apple provided a simple and intuitive “Mac Way” to specify the sizes of the respective partitions, plus also provided an easy and intuitive way for users to get back to the Mac OS boot from within the Windows XP environment and vice versa.

Boot Camp is just the tip of the iceberg for Apple’s virtualization strategy. Their next step is to take advantage of the virtualization technology within the Intel processors to allow Windows applications/executables to run within their respective Mac OS window in the Mac OS environment, without requiring the user to reboot each time they want to change to applications of a different operating system. For the matter of fact these applications can potentially from any operating systems (ie. Linux, BeOS, UNIX, etc.).

This sort of virtualization is what the “WINE” and “Darwine“ OpenSource projects aim to accomplish. At the moment the Darwine project requires any Windows applications wanting to run on Mac OS to be recompiled with the Darwine library. Apple’s goal will not require any recompilation.

With Boot Camp and future virtualization developments, the barrier of switching to the Macintosh platform had been lowered substantially. Macintosh is now most ideal for individuals who are forced to use the Windows platform at work, while not wanting to deal with the trouble of managing Windows on their personal computer. This is also the ideal moment for corporates to readdress the subsidization of personal computers for their employees for both business and personal uses. Eliminating the ownership of personal computers all together at the corporate level.

I can’t believe how long this article is getting. I will continue part 3 tomorrow…

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Are People Too Hard on Apple?

Apple

As many of you already know if you are a regular reader of my blog. There have been lots of buzz about the ability to run Windows XP on the new Macintel computers.

I have 2 articles here in my weblog on the subject:

Some even went as far as suggesting this is the prequel of Apple Computer abandoning the Mac OS in favor of Microsoft’s Windows OS.

And there are some who suggest this is a preview of a Microsoft take over of Apple Computer Inc., then incorporating it into one of its divisions, based on the tatics, if Microsoft cannot beat them might as well buy them. I respect that all these are individuals’ opinions and some are from well known and outspoken journalist (ie, John Dvorak) of the tech industry. Even so, I do not agree or share these authors’ sentiments.

Having used the Macintosh computer for the past 22 years and a couple more with Apple computers, I must say that it has become the computing tool of choice for me. I have always used a Macintosh, no matter which company I worked for. This was especially so when I was working in North America as a Macintosh Software Developer.

I do agree that the Macintosh had been distance dreams for many corporates who did not choose the platform from the start. These were mainly due to the cost of switching from the Windows environment. Yet there are many corporates, who made the initial decision to use the Macintosh, will tell you, the long term maintenance and support cost is much lower with the Macintosh platform compared to that of Windows platforms. This had been the case since 1984 when the first Macintosh was first introduced.

Since this article is getting long, I will continue part 2 tomorrow.

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Running Windows XP on an Intel Macintosh (aka. “Macintel”)

WinMac

You can now run Windows XP on a Macintel. The solution was found with the contest that started it all 3 months ago. It ended with two individuals calling themselves “blanka” and “narf2006” winning the final jackpot of USD13,854.00.

The full instructions can be found at the Contest site’s How To page.

[Update – 2006.03.23] there is also an excellent video steping through the instructions at UneasySilence

There is also a new instruction where one can create the Windows XP On Macintosh Boot CD on a Macintosh without using a computer that runs Windows.

In this experiment I used an Intel iMac to create the Boot CD.

If you are going to follow my foot steps, there are much details in the Fink install that may not be obvious from following the instructions. The currently tested version of Fink on the Intel Mac is 0.24.12, and the “mkisofs” package is not available in the “stable” branch of the Fink install.

At the moment I am still investigating the “mkisofs” issue. One possibility is that the “mkisofs” package is in the “unstable” branch of the Fink release. If this is the case we must modify the “/sw/etc/fink.conf” file so that “unstable/main” and “unstable/crypto” in the TREE parameter. This will get Fink to look in the “unstable” tree for package’s source.

If you do not have a Windows XP Pro SP2 install CD but just a regular Windows XP Pro install CD, then you will need to create what Microsoft calls a “Slipstream” CD.

When the above are completed we can go back to the OnMac instructions and create the Windows XP On Macintosh Boot CD.

My first attempt to create the Boot CD failed. When attempting to use the created CD to begin the Windows XP installation, the system claims that the CD is not a valid El-Torito formated disk. II plan to try again, and when I have more information, I will announce it here. Please stay tune.

Note: Please remember that downloading the instructions and associate files is legal, but the jury is still out as to whether modifying the Windows XP install CD is legal, so be careful of the Microsoft police.

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Reactions to Steve Jobs’ Keynote at MacWorld 2006

Apple

Earlier today Steve Jobs of Apple Computers made his keynote for the official opening of MacWorld Expo 2006.

He started the keynote with some amazing retail figures. Some of the best financial figures in Apple’s history, which shocked all anaylsts, as a result shot Apple’s stock price 8% during the keynote.

Steve then went on to talk about the new versions of iLife and iWork. The latter does not have much improvements other than new themes for both Pages and Keynote.

A real different story with iLife, many improvements had been introduced to its component of the suite.

iPhoto now enables full screen photo editing and increased its capability of handling up to 250,000 photos in one Photo Library. The speed of scrolling through the photos within a Photo Library has dramatically improved. This is particularly important if you actually have 250,000 photos in your Photo Library.

You can read all about the new features of the other components: iMovie HD, iDVD, GarageBand in the iLife suite at Apple’s web site, but a new component of note is iWeb.

iWeb is a layman’s tool for creating web content from your iLife contents and have these published to .Mac for others to access. The most significant thing about this application is that, iWeb supports exporting of these web content pages in standard web formats (HTML, CSS, RSS, etc.) for publishing to your own web hosting provider.

I have yet to try iWeb but I will. For readers who may like to try an alternative that had been in the market for a while is RapidWeaver by Realmac

The most signicficant announcement from Steve Jobs [Apple] of this keynote are the new Macintosh computers based on the new Intel Core Duo processor.

Apple angered many when Steve Jobs announced the new iMac in his keynote. That’s because Apple had only just updated the iMac 8 months ago. There nothing really changed or added features with the new iMac, accept a brand new Intel Core Duo processor. According to Apple, the new iMac is two times (2x) faster than its predecessor.

The “One More Thing” at this year’s keynote was the announce of a new notebook, strangely called “MacBook Pro”. I share others’ opinions of not liking the label of the new Macintosh Intel based notebook. Although, I can understand why Apple is trying to promote the brand “Mac” or “Macintosh” with this new line.

For the layman purchasers out there, they may mistaken the new line of Macintosh as just any other “Wintel computer” (aka. “PC”). I had always hated people using the term “PC” or “Personal Computer” to refer to computers with Intel processes that runs Microsoft Windows.

I think Apple is worry that by introducing this new line of Intel based Macintosh (or “Macintel”) the average consumers would lump Apple into the likes of Acer, DELL, Lenovo and HP and anyone else who makes a computer based on Intel processors.

One thing I really not happy about with the new MacBook Pro are its included SuperDrive. Apple had just recently transformed all their computers to come built in with a 8x SuperDrive that is cable of producing DVD-DL and DVD+DL. I believe this is definite backwards decision of Apple. Although, the reason for this change could be the result of the new MacBook Pro being developed by a different team of engineers and sourced separately from the rest of the PowerPC based Macintosh. I just hope that Apple rectify this soon in the form of an upgrade option.

One other thing that really would have drove the sales of the new Intel based Macintosh, is the much talked about ability of the new Macintosh to “dual boot” meaning that users are able to choose to start (“Boot”) the Macintosh computer in Windows or some other OS or Mac OS X.

This had initially been concluded as not possible. At least with Microsoft Windows XP. This is because the new Intel based Macintosh uses a technology called EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface). For Microsoft the first Windows OS to support the EFI technology is the upcoming Windows Vista.

People who knows me well would ask, why I care, if the new Intel Macintosh are dual bootable. Well, if the new Intel Macintosh are dual bootable, then all those consumers who are “on the fence”, can’t decide whether to try a Macintosh or not would have nothing to loose from trying the new Intel based Macintosh.

I think Apple also realizes this fact, and that is why Apple’s current official opinion about Mac users installing other OS onto their Intel based Macintosh is that, “we will not prevent users from installing foreign OS”.

It has been an exciting start for Apple, with many more news and new products to come before December. Time will tell how all these will turn.

One disappointment I have with Steve Jobs’ keynote is that the rumored Apple Media Center Computer did not materialize. The rumors was that they would be a Mac Mini PVR with a revised Apple FrontRow as the main interface. There is still 11 more months in the year, we may still see this rumored product. I personally hope so.

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Too Hard on iPod® with Video

So many people are being too hard on Apple’s recent release (Oct. 12). Particular with their announcement of the Apple iPod® with video.

First of all note that they [Apple] did not label it the “iPod Video”. This is an important and subtle fact. In no way Apple or Steve Jobs thinks that people will want to watch high resolution videos on their 2.5 inch LCD screen of the new iPod®.

This new version (5th generation) iPod® is foremost a MP3 player with video capability.

In my opinion, the current version of the iPod® is a transport medium of video and it is a tip of the iceberg for what Apple will do for this area of digital media.

As in the original launch of iPod® there were very few features as compare to other MP3 players in the market at the time. Although due to its ease of use and design along with the introduction of iTunes Music Store (iTMS), which is how Apple took the MP3 market from the its well established competitors (Creative, iRiver, Sony, Rio, etc., the latter even went closed its doors).

Again Apple is doing the same thing here with videos. They are introducing a device that can do basically the same thing as everything else in the market. With only 2000 music videos and a handful of TV shows, it is not particular different from the 10s of thousands of songs available in the iTMS when it was first launch.

Yesterday iRiver just announced; to be released next month [November], a new device called “iRiver U10”, which has a smaller screen than Apple’s new iPod 2.2 inches compares to 2.5 inches. Most importantly the two devices have similar functionality, but the iRiver is much smaller in capacity compared to the new iPod (iRiver’s 1GB or 2GB compared to Apple’s 30GB or 60GB).

Another thing people are hard on Apple with, are the video codecs that the new iPod supports. Officially the new iPod supports the H.264 (aka MPEG-4 AVC) and MPEG-4 codecs.

People need to remember that Apple, unlike many others (namely Microsoft), supports industry standards. Both the H.264 and MPEG-4 are ITU-T and ISO/IEC respective approved standards.

I understand that many of the “torrent” videos available are encoded with the DivX codec, but that is not the standard for videos. Although it uses codec from MPEG-2.

They other misnomer is that the .AVI format is better than .MOV (QuickTime) or .MPG (MPEG). All three of these are “video/audio containers”. Neither of them are conclusively better than any other, except both QuickTime and MPEG are industry standards.

So what Apple has done and introduced to the world is only the “tip of the iceberg” of what to come. I do not know for a fact, but you can follow my trail of thought by reading my previous weblog article (“Next iPod“) on the subject.

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Should I Say I…

hmm… I am glad.

Back on July 23rd this year I wrote in my blog:

… about short videos. Like music videos, TV sitcoms, TV commercials, Movie Trailers, audio skits of any kind which are 15 minutes or less. In these case the entertainment value out weights the quality of video or audio quality of the handheld device on which these videos would be played on….

I wonder if the rest of my post will come true in the near future.

I guess time will tell.

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Concerns Unfounded for Apple iPod Not Supporting Firewire

Firewire

Ever since last night’s (morning in San Jose) Apple announcement. There had been post all over the Internet complaining that Apple dropping the support for Firewire (aka i-Link, aka IEEE-1394) on their iPod®.

Firewire is an industry standard that is approved by the IEEE (hence the IEEE label). It was developed primary by Apple back in the 1990s, but this is not an Apple exclusive technology.

As long as video is still important in consumer electronic and film industry, Firewire and its variants will still be around, and will be supported by Apple and its devices (ie. Macintosh, iPod®, etc.)

Like QuickTime, DVD-R and CD-R, Firewire was made popular by Apple (and to a certain extent Sony). The fact that the original iPods have Firewire does not mean that the USB versions are any less superior.

Removing the support for Firewire is a business decision. Being one of the inventor of Firewire, it is to Apple’s advantage to include Firewire in everything (royalties). But I am sure to maintain the same price point and add new features, I think Apple had made the right decision to drop it from the current line of iPod®

Consumer should equate this decision to Apple’s decision to remove the AC Adapter in every iPod® shipped. Similarly, I don’t think Apple believes that AC Adapter is any less superior to charging via USB or Firewire ports or after market AC Adapters.

Don’t be mislead by these individuals who believe there is a feature lost or the unfounded conclusion, that the decision is based on the fact that there are more Wintel users of iPod®.

We are not talking about a large quantities of data being transfered; even with the new 5G iPods. Unless may be you’re using your iPod® as an external drive. Even for the latter, USB 2.0 is arguable faster than Firewire 400. Each technology has its own flaws, and the jury is still out on which is better. You can be assure that both technologies are still being advanced as we speak.

The most important thing people need to remember, most USB compatible devices; including the Apple iPod® are backward compatible to USB 1.1. So again there is no worry here. Do NOT believe the notion that one will have to upgrade their computers (Mac® or Wintel) to connect their iPod®’s.

People please read Apple’s web page for the products.

Mac system requirements

  • Macintosh computer with USB port (USB 2.0 recommended)
  • Mac OS X v10.3.9 or later

Windows system requirements

  • PC with USB port or card (USB 2.0 recommended)
  • Windows 2000 with Service Pack 4 or later, or Windows XP Home or Professional with Service Pack 2 or later

The Internet is a powerful medium and we should all be responsible for spreading the wrong rumors.

Also some people had complained that their iPod® are not always recognized on their Windows machine when using the USB connection. You should be complaining to Microsoft about their OS rather than Apple of their iPod.

[Update 13:54]
I have found another article by “Gareth Potter” on the subject.

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Apple’s “One More Thing…” Announcement

OneMoreThing

At this very moment (October 12, 2005, 10:00am PDT) in California Theater, San Jose, California, USA, Apple is making their “One more thing…” announcement to the members of the press.

In the past week everyone had been speculating what Apple will announce at this event. These included:

  1. video iPod
  2. radio feature on a 5th generation iPod®
  3. new revamped PowerBook
  4. even a “tablet Macintosh”

So what Apple will actually announce will have to wait until Apple finish its event.

Stay tune…

[Update: 01:35] – from MacRumors on Site

  • New thinner iMac® with built-in iSight
    • FrontRowRemote


  • New Apple application called “PhotoBooth”
  • New Apple media software called “Front Row” with an infrared remote. Having only 6 buttons to control all the video functions compared to the various versions of Microsoft Media Center’s 40+ buttons remotes
    • FrontRowRemote
  • New 5th generation iPod® Video 30GB/60GB with 2.5in TFT display displaying 320×240 pixels and realtime decoding of MPEG4 and H.264 video. Both the “5G iPod® Video 30GB/60GB” are 31% thinner than the current “iPod® Color Display 20GB” priced at USD299 and USD399 respectively
  • New iTunes® 6

So it looks like Apple is definitely getting into Digital Media Center in a way, and began to sell Music Videos on iTunes® Music Store (iTMS).

[Update: 01:59] – from iLounge on Site

  • Alleged photos of the new “5G iPod® Video 30GB”

[Update: 02:00] – from MacRumors on Site

  • TV shows will be available for purchase at USD1.99 each episode. So far ABC, Disney and Pixar are on board to sell their content. Making “Desperate Housewives”, “Lost” and more available
  • All videos purchased from iTMS will have Digital Rights Management (DRM) software built in.

[Update: 02:01] – from Apple
Here are the details of today’s announcement in the form of an Apple press releases: