juanxer's Profile

Well, let's put it this way: you are a multinational corporation IT department, you invest in NeXTStep, you see the company failing even if their products are quite great, you see Jobs selling it to Apple, you receive notice of Apple going to redevelop NeXTStep into Rhapsody, which will limit NeXTStep from four platforms to just two (Mac and Windows). A Few years later they just kill the Windows version and force you to go through a Java bridge if you want to keep your NeXTStep apps in anything other than a Mac. Let's say you are an HPC client: are you receiving any news from Apple about the future of the xServe products? Are they going to keep a PPC line for a little longer? Is there going to be xServe line at all in the future? What about future support? Wouldn't you be rather nervous? Apple, some years ago, decided to rob their VARs their Education accounts. The result was a terrible erosion of their presence in that market. Add to that their usual attitude of not keeping product lines alive and forcing disruptive changes where progressive ones would better apply, plus their usual premium pricing. (SONY doesn't offer Apple's DRM-dependent products) And I'll hold that Basic is quite OK :P

My hope is that Mac x86 towers will be far more expandable than current ones. There are some "killer workstation" trends right now, such as GPU cards working in parallel, internal hardware RAID, quad CPU motherboards and so, that PC boxes seem to be able to hold without that much effort comparing to G5 boxes. I wonder if Apple would make a stab at doing an SFF-sized box, sort of a MacMini Pro: an as fast as possible box with expansion capabilities similar to Shuttle's ones. Most pro users would do great with such a thing.

"Industrial Strength" is rather too generous for a system that puts its device drivers in Kernel space and crashes along misbehaving ones (I've had to suffer some). "No legacy" and 21th Century is going too far for old creaky Unix (is Unix the most adequate OS for a home computer user? Is the all too common FSCK recommendation a reasonable one for maintaining a home computer). Look, OS X can be the best personal computer OS out there right now, but that can't hide some truths: that it is becoming incredibly crufty, that its GUI is a mess, and that it is ridiculously un-snappy at basic things like simple text editing. Tiger is so full of holes and Spotlight so limited and limiting that I'd laugh if not for the fact that I have to work with it every day. And the Finder is an utter disaster. WinXP is terribly uneven, and I rather keep using a Mac, but there are a lot of ideas in it that makes me wish Apple started their photocopiers real now (a decent Help facility, for a start). Truth be told, Apple started photocopying them and others a long time ago. System-wide audio plug-in architecture? OS-level Web render engine API? Web browser-style Finder navigation? Copy-Paste Finder items (but no Cut-Paste, rats!)? App switch key-combo? Contextual menus? Konfabulator widgets' look and feel (the real crux of that debate)? Watson channels in Sherlock? Not to deny Apple's great merit in defining the key principles of current PC GUIs, but frankly, guys, the age of innocence is way past gone. (By the way, Vista's skin is a provisional one. They look like they are playing with concepts until release time, and there are some very interesting ones, such as stack icons' "thickness" expressing content quantity, or non-graphic files thumbnailing)

Well, there is the type who knows what he is doing and has no problems at all.

What Apple ought to do is take a real hard look at the state of OS X' GUI and begin doing intensive repair work. Right now it is a mess, from concept to implementation. And oh there are so many little things done wrong is like being devoured by a miriad little pirañas. And I hope they start being less condescendent: in this day and age of internet search how come we don't have a documented way of doing simple boolean searchs (and-or-not)and must rely on some gracious developer to give us notice of some esoteric symbols to be able to do that? Not only it is not that difficult for an user to understand booleans: it simply wouldn't affect those that do not to have those capabilities. One would wish that Apple would provide an "Advanced User" option for most preferences and settings, giving us more control if we feel up to it, instead of seeing us all as, well, one button mouse guys (I know, I know, and I agree, but you know what I mean :) ) If they really want to advance the Finder, they just need to pursue the web browser metaphor to the logical end: tabbed Finder windows, bookmarks, history. Plus file Cut'n'Paste. That would help a lot. What I am afraid of is things like searchs that don't wait for me to end typing my query and start giving me results with just a character or two in the search field, which is ridiculous most of times. That is the kind of misguided eyecandy that Apple commits to so often nowadays. We'll see how many of those Leopard brings to the table.