Category: Vista
January 25th, 2010
Apple Macintosh: Where's the respect?
Of course, the vast mindshare of the tech market is focused almost single-mindedly on Wednesday and its supposed announcement of an Apple tablet. Still, some part of the unconscious, animal brain must have found something to like in Apple’s Monday quarterly report: Once again, its most profitable quarter, gross margins way up, and sales of products within expectations.
But for this longtime Mac-head, I was impressed by the continuing strength of Mac sales. And this in the face of the competition’s most desperate marketing campaigns.
Was it unreasonable to think that in this quarter, we would see some signs of resistance by Windows customers to the siren call of the Mac? After all, Microsoft spent many millions telling PC customers that they were cool with Windows 7 updates to the “I’m a PC” campaign. And customers surely must have recalled the rounds of previous attack ads on the cost of Macs — the “I don’t want to pay for the brand; I want to pay for the computer” series of ads.
Shouldn’t we have seen some effect following the reportedly successful release of Windows 7, the fixed Vista?
Read: Yes, based on Mac history, Windows 7.5 will suck less
But, no. It seems not. CFO Peter Oppenheimer ran down the bullet points:
• Mac sales of $3.36 million beat Apple’s previous record set in the September quarter by over 300,000.
• Quarterly Mac sales grew 33 percent over the year-over-year quarter (with IDC saying the there was overall growth in the PC market of 17 percent inthe December quarter).
• 70 percent year-over-year growth in desktop sales.
• Apple’s retail stores sold a record 689,000 Macs compared to 515,000 Macs in the year-ago quarter. Again, about half the Macs sold in the stores during the quarter were to customers who had never owned a Mac before.
October 27th, 2008
Macs that can run 64-bit Vista
Which Macs can run 64-bit Vista? It depends whether you insist on an all-Apple solution or will run a more-flexible approach using third-party virtualization technology.
A recent Apple technical note lists which Intel-based Mac models can run the 64-bit editions of Windows Vista. To little surprise it’s the 2008 flavors of Macs for professionals: the Mac Pro (Early 2008) workstation, the 17-inch MacBook Pro (Early 2008) and both Early and Late 2008 15-inch MacBook Pro notebooks.
However, it’s a different story when we look outside Boot Camp.
VMware Fusion supports 64-bit Windows Vista as well as the 64-bit edition of Microsoft Windows XP Professional (and a bunch of Linux and Unix OSes). The hardware requirements are “Intel-based Mac with a Core 2 Duo or Xeon processor,” which greatly expands the list of usable machines, including many non-professional iMacs and MacBooks as well as the MacBook Air (and even several models of the Mac mini).
Here is a place on the comparison table where VMware Fusion differentiates itself from Parallels Desktop; the latter currently only supports 32-bit OSes. Now, Parallels Server for Mac can run 32- and 64-bit OSes, however, this runs on Leopard Server and costs $1,248.75.
So, for most of us, VMware Fusion scores in the 64-bit department.
October 23rd, 2008
More ideas for where Apple should park its cash horde
In a recent column, my Apple Core colleague Jason O’Grady offers some suggestions where Apple could spend it’s $25B in cash. He pointed to some consumer content companies, such as Tivo.
Fine ideas. On the other hand, I can imagine Apple driving up its longterm value with some moves in the professional market.
At the top of the list would be Autodesk Inc. This is the major design software for engineering and manufacturing, as well as offering products for both 2D and 3D work in media and entertainment markets.
Like Apple’s approach to its customers and markets, Autodesk provides software platforms rather than technologies. While Autodesk products would be hit by a downturn in manufacturing in a worldwide recession, the company’s products are business-critical applications that will grow as the economy recovers.
May 30th, 2008
What gets Photoshop cooking?
Adobe Photoshop has been the app of choice for several generations of image editors. Tweaking its performance is a hobby for some, but what practices can really make a difference?
Adobe blogger John Nack recently posted notes from the performance tuning presentation offered at Photoshop World by Photoshop co-architect Russell Williams and Adam Jerugim, the performance testing lead. This presentation is an annual event and filled with interesting tidbits. The PDF presentation is here.
The presentation offers advice on how to go about testing your system and workflow as well as some general tips about performance improvements.
Of course, monitoring CPU performance with Activity Monitor is an important first step. It’s useful to find things that might be taking away CPU cycles from your image crunching.
For example, why do usually sensible graphics pros insist upon running memory-hogging applications, such as browsers (they are all bad) and iTunes (or QuickTime Player)? Turn them off!
But there can be hidden junk on a machine running in the background. The presentation said that Mac users were much better off on this front than Windows users:
Applies to Windows users a bit more – Macintoshes don’t seem to suffer the gradual performance decline that XP seems to. Vista isn’t supposed to either. And so many Windows machines come with junk now.
Most of us engineers do a fresh OS install on any new machine. We start from a known state and control what gets installed. At least scan Add/Remove programs on a new machine and remove anything you don’t think you’ll need.
Be careful about what you install. In theory, an uninstall cleans things up – but it doesn’t usually work that way on Windows. Mac users are in good shape here. On Windows, scan through Add/Remove Programs (Vista: Programs…) once a month or so to see what things you really didn’t use or need and remove them.
The engineers suggested that Mac users look occasionally at /System/Library/Startup to make sure nothing unwanted has been added.
April 22nd, 2008
Crazy sales video rocks out: 'Gotta get me some' Windows Vista
Microsoft can’t seem to catch a break, whether from Apple’s latest ads targeting switchers, or in a crazy music video celebrating Vista SP1 that was done by Redmond’s channel group.
Jupiter Research Analyst Michael Gartenburg pointed to this video on YouTube called Windows Vista SP1 Celebration. It’s obviously aimed at some kind of channel pitch. But it’s truly pathetic and horrible — an upbeat Bruce Springstein-ish homage about the improved value of Windows Vista now that SP1 is released.
Here are the lyrics I transcribed from the “Rockin’ Our Sales” video by Bruce ServicePack and the Vista Street Band from the album, Our Ecosystem Rocks! by Microsoft Quota Records:
Last year, when Vista was new
You sold the Optimized Desktop value
That’s a pitch that never fails
And you saw lots of sales!
But some enterprises said
“Wait and see, we don’t wanna adopt early”
Well, that’s over ’cause of SP1
And our ecosystem
(Chorus) If they have been waiting
No more hesitating
When they see the improvements in security
The desktop and mobility
And productivity
They’ll say, “Vista, gotta get me some”
March 26th, 2008
UI guidelines: one reason the Mac shines, Windows sucks
Is there a method behind the madness of the Windows experience and the elegance of the Macintosh? One reason can be seen with just one look at the human interface principles found on Apple’s and Microsoft’s developer sites.
This exploration was sparked by a blog post on O’Reilly’s Digital Media by FJ de Kermadec, a Paris-based designer and author. He wrote about several differences between Windows Vista and Mac OS X and the user expectations for each platform.
According to Kermadec, said some new users are either afraid of computers or bored by them. They don’t care about the metaphors of the user interface or the niceties of icons, menus and widgets.
Here, Vista’s start menu is brilliant: it shoves 99% of what you may want to do in one single menu, allowing users to immediately “get into” their tasks. Calling it “Start” in the old days was a very good move in that it clearly told users to “start here.”
From that menu, Vista will open a sort of window-meets-web-page, filled with buttons and icons, that clearly tells the user, in plain English, what to do. There is even a little colorful shield icon next to some links to suggest some kind of big security system is protecting the computer. When clicked, these links cause a playful cursor to appear and a big reaction – screen dimming. A strange, awkwardly worded dialog will pop up but that does not matter: there is a big button in there to proceed, which the user can now click, safe in the knowledge the computer is doing some thinking for them. Then, the appropriate window will load, with buttons bigger and brighter than the last one.
Yayy! The average user feels like a real computer user now: look at how the big machine reacts to his every whim.
March 17th, 2008
Did Microsoft beat Apple to dual-sided touch technology?
A recently disclosed Apple patent describes a number of devices using a two-sided touch panel and to no surprise, the speculation online begins. With a patent that describes “embodiments” of a technology, the dreams can go anywhere, it appears.
However, in some of these embodiments, Microsoft appears to have been there first!
Unwired View posted the Dual-sided Track Pad patent document and an accompanying piece with imaginative description of iPhones and MacBook tablets using the technology (with illustrations, even).
Here’s a bit from the patent’s technology summary:
The capacitive array element may be a dual-sided panel that is capable of sensing touch from either side and sending signals indicative of the touches to a host device (e.g. a desktop computer, a laptop computer, a digital music player or a mobile telephone unit). The capacitive array element may be able to sense multiple simultaneous touches and distinguish on which side the touches occur. A connected processor unit, either in the device or in the host system, may be adapted to interpret the signals as a cursor or view movement with six degrees of freedom.
In some embodiments, the track pad device includes a display element and the capacitive array element is translucent. The display element and the array element may be configured with respect to each other, possibly including a configuration where the array lies over the display screen so that the display screen is viewable through the array element, in effect forming a touch screen. The device may have a touch screen mode of use activated by the device’s being configured with the array element over the display screen, which allows a one-to-one correspondence between the array element and the display screen. The device may interpret and respond to the signals from the the array element in a configurable way.
As long as it’s configurable! Whew, I was worried there. This patent is tough reading. (And am I the only one who’s worried about patents that call expressions of a technology, “embodiments?”)
The Unwired View article takes the patent device and imagines a number of “expressions” of its own, including a iPod nano-sized iPhone with a clamshell input pad, a Mac tablet notebook with a virtualized keyboard, and a standard notebook with a clear trackpad that makes a porthole (more of a port-square, really), letting users see a section of the screen when the lid is closed.
February 29th, 2008
Wintel Vista conspiracy screws customers: Another win for Apple
The latest PC market scandal - that Microsoft, Intel and some PC makers knew that the “Vista Capable” logo certification program was a lie and that some chipsets for popular machines couldn’t support the new Aero interface stuff - must be music in the executive suites down in Cupertino. The story provides more evidence to PC users that there’s a good reason to join the switcher movement to the Mac.
This amazing story continues to unfold. Microsoft officials gave the green light to Vista certification for an older Intel chipset with integrated graphics that wouldn’t support Aero. According to reports, back in 2006, Intel decided that it might not be able to ramp up production for its 945 chipset (or ramp up its marketing program for the new chipset), the one that could run Vista, so it asked Redmond to grandfather in the older chipset. And it seems that lots of important people knew about this.
Beyond all the complaints online, the internal details have come to the light because of a lawsuit. Recently, the court released more than 150 pages of redacted memos from the companies. You can just click a random page or two and come up with something interesting (The pages in the PDF are images rather than text and that makes searching difficult.)
For example, the November 2005 list of “context” from Brad Goldberg, then general manger with Microsoft’s Windows Client Product group (page 153). He said that customers didn’t want “detailed documentation” on the capabilities of their machine to handle the important new features in Vista such as Aero Glass, Windows Defender and Flip3D.
Of course, these would be the very features that they would hype for the upgrade.
February 5th, 2008
Horrors! Linus Torvalds calls HFS+ 'utter crap'
In an interview at Melbourne’s linux.conf.au conference, Linus Torvalds called the standard file system of Mac OS X “complete and utter crap.” Mac fans are only slightly outraged, pointing out that HFS+ isn’t really “complete and utter crap,” rather, it’s just slightly crap-ish.
In the Sidney Morning Herald online, Nick Miller reported his Q&A interview with the originator of Linux. He asked Torvalds about the hype surrounding the releases of Windows Vista and Mac OS X Leopard.
According to Torvalds, “An o/s should never have been something that people (in general) really care about: it should be completely invisible and nobody should give a flying f*** about it except the technical people.”
It’s stupid - when you make a big deal about something like Vista or Leopard a lot of it is about things I don’t consider to be the operating system. It’s about the visual shell around it.
The fact Microsoft tied the two together so much actually caused them problems, not just the legal problems. If you manage a thousand clients, or a hundred thousand clients which is not at all unheard of, you sure as hell don’t want to point and click at them. In many ways Microsoft has had to fix the design mistakes they made when they thought the graphical approach should be a very intimate part of (Windows).
To Microsoft and Apple the o/s is important as a way to control the whole environment, from a marketing and money-making standpoint, to force people to upgrade their applications, and your hardware.
When asked to choose between Leopard and Vista, Torvalds came down on the side of Leopard. Still, he said Windows was easier in some ways to program.
February 5th, 2008
Will Microsoft support Windows on Macs?
A rumor posted Tuesday on a Microsoft enthusiast site suggests that Redmond will support Windows running on Intel-based Macs in BootCamp.
According to poster Sumeeth Evans, “… Papa Microsoft has had a change of heart and is is extending a helping hand to those Mac users who still have a soft spot for Windows.”
While you may have to keep a few grains of salt nearby for this one, it appears as though internal emails are going out to Microsoft support techs informing them that the company is going to changing it’s stance on issuing support for copies of Windows that are installed on Apple computers using the Bootcamp software available with OS X.
Microsoft press handlers worked all day long to bring me a response on this rumor, but by the end of the day, it seems that the person with the necessary information couldn’t be brought to the phone (or to his/her keyboard).
Now, I would guess that this support — if it happens — would fall under Microsoft’s usual Windows support organization and not with the Mac Business Unit. Its all about Windows. Still, in many companies whenever the word “Macintosh” is brought up, all questions go to the “Mac guys.”
At the same time, this rumor makes a lot of sense, after all, when running under Boot Camp, the Mac isn’t really a Mac anymore. The Mac becomes another Intel PC. And the solution does require customers to purchase a legit copy of Windows; Boot Camp currently supports Windows XP and Vista.
In addition, Microsoft could determine which Apple machines it would support and which version of Windows and the Mac OS it would support. For example, it could limit support to Vista instead of Windows XP, or support Leopard and not Tiger.
Of course, this is exactly what Mac users don’t want. My guess is that Mac users would want support for Windows XP rather than Vista (like most Windows users) and on both Leopard and Tiger.
If the support is for Windows XP, then Mac users will have to hurry up and buy a copy. There’s only 145 days left before Microsoft ends the OEM and shrinkwrap licenses for Windows XP. Infoworld has a Save XP petition drive going. The blog there says that almost 76,000 persons have signed up.
On the other hand, I have a question about Evans’ calling Microsoft “Papa.” Is the company a daddy or a mommy? Or something much, much different?
David Morgenstern has covered the Mac market and other technology segments for 20 years. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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