evilcat's Profile

Probably. They need to do to the iPhone what Apple did to the Walkman, and work on something even better.

Chris Howard: 'Adobe has an online image editing app called Photoshop Express. ' Fair enough, good point. But how about editing that wedding video and burning it to DVD? 'Many organizations run thin-client technology on Citrix or Windows Terminal services. ' Have you used these? I used Citrix at a large company and it was painful. Unbelievably slow. At times, almost unusable. Also, they are still running full versions of Windows, just they're running from a central server, like using Parallels, but one server is shunting out 300 VM's at once. And those VM's are using desktop software. Until you can get Powerpoint, Visio, Project, those custom-built Access applications that always run so badly, and everything else running under Chrome OS, there's no competition. Citrix et al are about giving more control to the IT department, not about handing it over to a third party like Google.

No threat. Just another windowing system on Linux, there to compete with KDE, Gnome and XFCE, plus all the other versions out there. That means they're just going to take another slice out of the small slice currently owned by Red Hat, Canonical et al.

The puck! Ha ha ha :) And how about the so-called 'Mighty Mouse?' The clit on mine dried up within 2 months and became unusable. I actually use a Microsoft cordless mouse with my Mac (heresy, I know). It's the old 'innovate then evolve' argument, isn't it? The last Mac innovation was the original iMac, which is now evolving. The iPod was an innovation and now it's evolving. Let's see... iMac in '98, iPod in 2001, iPhone in 2007... which means now the iPhone is merely evolving, the next big innovation may arrive between 2010 and 2013. Now that would be something to get excited about.

What I have noticed since I started buying Macs (for myself and work) in 2004 is a gradual separation of their products, so that less of them overlap with one another, and they are more clearly defined as 'pro' or consumer.' Generally, the only time you see a price overlap is with the top-end of one model and the bottom end of the next, and this exists either to have you pay a ridiculous amount of money, or up-sell you to the next line. Just like when your car insurance firm tells you it'll be £3,000 to insure your car -- they don't want to insure you but if you're willing to pay, well... In the same way, who would spend almost a grand on a Mac Mini? They want you to get the lower end iMac for the same / slightly less and they're hoping you'll add a couple of small upgrades and make a few hundred more out of you. I also get the impression that they design from the top end down. It would be feasible to have a quad core iMac but that won't happen... until the base Mac Pro is based on a six-core Xeon. Apple have firmly held beliefs about 'pro' and 'consumer.' All laptops are glossy, unless you are a photographer, but they have no intention of letting someone who carries three grand of camera around with them get away with a 15" MacBook Pro. You're a pro? Prepare to pay like a pro then. A few years back I worked at an agency with five graphic designers. Two were running early Power Mac G5's with dual 1.8's in them. Those machines were 18 months old and still running fine. The other three were running old G4 Power Macs, 500 - 800MHz. Everyone ran CRT monitors. Those machines were just too slow. We bought two Dell 20" monitors (back when they had the same panels as the Apple Cinema Displays) for 1/4 the Apple price and they went to the G5s. The three G4 PMs were replaced with 20" Intel iMacs. Each one ran at about 2GHz, and between the 20" panels (IPS back then, I believe), had 2Gb RAM (double what the G4's had) and the designers loved them. That's no option now, though. Glossy screens? No good for colour accuracy. With one design choice, Apple have said 'No. You shall not use our consumer Macs for professional work. How dare you get by on £1,000 of kit? Our Mac Pros are £1,900 and this is what you must pay.' Throw in the choice of nasty, cheap TFT panels and there's no choice. Mac Pro or nothing. The point I am making with this rather long-winded post is that Apple already have a 15" laptop. It's a MacBook Pro. And we Apple users are dumb enough to do as they tell us... like bvdecicco said above, they needed a 15" and so they bought a MB Pro. Why would Apple make a 15" MacBook and lose that extra few hundred dollars?

jocknerd >> Since I want the OS to simply stay out of my way and let me run my apps without being annoyed by it, Windows 7 starts to look quite attractive. Then take the case that Photoshop CS4 is true 64-bit on the PC, but on the Mac it's not. Even Adobe don't give a flying fudge about OS X. They're having to write CS5 from the ground up since they just Carbonized the OS 9 version 5 years ago and charged us $1,000's for it! Let's face it, us Mac owner get gouged. That's all there is to it.

I wish that people would stop fixating on the iPhone/AT&T;combination. Look how many partners Apple has for the iPhone across the world. It is O2 in the UK. They are nothing to do with AT&T;. In each market, there is a different provider. They'll have to do the same with Apple TV. I moved to the US from the UK late last year and I'm stunned to find that your choice of TV is from your cable provider (and you don't get to choose which one) or satellite (if the building you're in will let you have a dish). In our apartment, that gives me a choice of one TV provider. Since cable, satellite and digital use different technology, Apple would either have to bundle three converters with the Apple TV or make you pay extra for the one you need. I have no idea what that would mean for the decoding/processing software. That's just for the US with NTSC. Then they have to deal with PAL broadcasts in the Europe and Japan, and SECAM in France. Frankly, the DFVR route is a dud. If they would let the AppleTV use an existing TV tuner/recording solution (such as the EyeTV), that would be better. The solution seems then to be the Hulu/NetFlix route. But guess what? They want to provide that content through iTunes. They wouldn't even let the South Park boys provide video clips to the iPhone though the app store because they want you to buy into the iTunes ecosystem. And that will never change. Someone internal at Apple said the AppleTV is a hobby. I think you're right, Hadley, anbd it could be so much more... But expect it to stay an Apple hobby.