'Putor Industry

[rant]

I will be SO glad when this whole 'putor Industry gets to a point of maturity! Constantly have to upgrade yuhr 'putor that works just as good as the day you bought it - only b/c the software won't suuport the new progs or equipment. Let alone the Internet hookups. Those fancy banner ads are kewl - if'n yuh got a cable connection!

Just got a card reader the other day so's my 'putor could read the little flash cards that the Fanucs take nowadays. Cute little jobbies and works swell! Now if'n my Winders '98 could just run the reader! Gotta copy the prog to a floppy and take in the house to the wifeys 'putor that has been updated and can support the card reader.

Why was the one in the house updated? NOT b/c it was broke - NO! But b/c the old 'putor wouldn't support the new version of Quickbooks a cpl yrs ago. GOOD GRIEF! You'd think she was tryin' to run a full blown package of CAM! It's just an accounting prog guys! ???

How many more yrs doo you s'pose it will be before we can actually keep a 'putor around untill it breaks?

[/rant]

Think Snow Eh!
Ox

Yep, shoulda' stayed with the Atari's, and Commodore 64's.
To heck with progress!

It depends what you need to do. I sell computers but I am still using the same one I used 5 years ago to run my accounting program in the front office. That's about all it does and I have no reason to change the program or the computer.

The industry is maturing. Computers are becoming commodity products like most other electronics. The end is near for desktop machines, at least in the general consumer market. This year the sale of laptops has exceeded the sale of desktops for the first time in North America. There are some new technologies, especially display technologies, that will reduce the price of a laptop to the point that it will not be economical to repair, just like most consumer electronics.

Within a few years a laptop will cost no more than $200 for a basic machine and that machine will be equivalent in power to a mid to high end machine today. Rotating storage is going to be gone and replaced with all solid state. The only moving parts will be the keys on the keyboard.

All your important data will be on removable media and if the machine breaks you pull out the card, buy a new 'puter and stick the card in it. Throw away the old one so some poor peasant in China can try to make a buck by grinding it up to get $2.00 worth of scrap from it.

As for me, I'm shutting down my business in the next year or so just like I planned to do when I started it 9 years ago. I saw all this coming and intended to stay in the business no more than 10 to 12 years. I finally will get to move my 6 really nice work benches and Gorilla Rack shelving units to my home shop.

My favorite quote, I can't remember where I got it, and I'm paraphrasing. It is something like this:

"When computers/software is perfect, we will all be dead."

There is hope in my mind, in the open source software "movement". Linux is maturing at a fast rate, and like Evan stated, computers are becoming commodity products, with standards being well, standardized. I for one am tired of the forced obsolescence, like the requirements for hardware upgrades, when in reality, the software could be functional on older hardware, though without some of the eye candy that is being put forth. My case in point would be Apple's OS X vs. OS 9. When OS X came out, I couldn't run it on my older Macintosh. However, some clever person wrote a patch which enabled OS X to run on the old hardware. Apple did this on purpose to sell new machines. My thoughts are a little mixed, because at the time Apple wasn't doing so hot, so I believe they needed to sell some more machines to get their revenue up, but at the same time, OS 9 was/is quickly becoming obsoleted/unsupported. I can run linux on the same hardware, but I am still very much a linux newbie, and so I don't use it regularly. I'm still stuck at the 400Mhz speed at home, and quite frankly, it still keeps me satisfied except now a lot of video has gone to Flash (Macromedia/Adobe) and I cannot view flash video. I can play mpegs just fine. My computer turns ten next year, so it is finally time for me to upgrade, but I can sympathize with Ox. A lot of it is market driven, and some of us don't want to get on the "upgrade" cycle when we know perfectly well that the hardware is technically capable, maybe just a little slow.

Computers are no different from any other product, except that they become obsolete in a different time warp. In the same way that dogs age in "dog years," computers age the same way. I've often compared computers with cars, but with a 10X multiplier in "years"

We don't like it, but there's not much we can do about it. Admit it or not, Winblows98 IS 10 years old.

I do agree, that there's too much "noise floor" with websites. Even with cable, I often come across some damn website that seems slow, and oh, yeah, let's turn up the speakers, and sure enough, there's a bunch of irritating "sound" going on.

As for laptops, they may largely replace desktops for the average user, but there's always going to be a place for them. They simply aren't robust enough for some duty. You will never find a 24 hr 911 dispatch, for example, using laptops.

So far as getting compatible hardware for your old machine, you CAN find stuff on the internet, including eFray


So far as Apple, I think there low percentage speaks for itself. I was all excited to hear that they were going to a PC style platform, but now we find that both their OS and their hardware remains proprietary. If Apple REALLY wanted to do something, they'd make their OS runnable out of the box on common PC hardware, and be done with it.

"How many more yrs doo you s'pose it will be before we can actually keep a 'putor around untill it breaks" NEVER...

Think of them (computers) as something you sort of "rent."... and then after about 4 years you take it out and throw it in the trash and go "rent" another one...... I use the word rent because unlike buying something and paying for it once..... these computer things you just have to keep spending money on, kind of like renting.... it never ends..... and I hate it but I have to live with it...

If Apple REALLY wanted to do something, they'd make their OS runnable out of the box on common PC hardware, and be done with it.

Click to expand...

I have a prediction that Apple will be out of the PC market in probably 5 years. You go into their stores and it seems to be a product that's not well promoted...regretablly they have turned into a company of "fad gadgets".

To the other comment that Linux is maturing...it is...at about a wine rate. Linux main introduction is pushing 8 years and it's still a rough product.

I sense a maliase in the computer market (and it's been going on since the 2001 crash)...Dell's now rubbish and HP's a joke with an impending demise. MS's Vista seems to be a late miscalculation that might not pay off..just a bad time for the industry in general.

Wow, that was a depressing reply huh?

They simply aren't robust enough for some duty. You will never find a 24 hr 911 dispatch, for example, using laptops.

Click to expand...

Don't count on it. I sell a line called Durabook. They have water resistant sealed keyboards and the hard drive is encapsulated in gel. The case is all machined magnesium and the unit is rated for 30 drops of 30" to concrete without breaking. Yes, it is double the price of a cheap plastic unit but it is ideal for people that really need durability. I just sold one to a helicopter pilot last week.

Don't count on it. I sell a line called Durabook.

Click to expand...

Panasonic "Toughbooks" are just that. I used them in the field when I used to do GPS surveying. They did and can take a tumble down a blasted stone embankment and be fine.

I've got a growing disdain for laptops myself. I've gone back to desktops. If the small screen doesn't bother you...eventually the carpal tunnel will!

440roadrunner,

Apple in the late '90s started adopting industry standard hardware, aside from the processor. The expansion slots are PCI. For example, the memory in my hardware is a DIMM which was the same for many PCs at the time. My USB card was for a PC, but it works fine in my Mac. Same for the Firewire card. I use the same IDE hard drives. My CD rom drive came out of a PC. SCSI, while older, is OS neutral. The newest Apple hardware, with Intel, can also run windows, but it new and doesn't use the old BIOS type boot routine. Apple has seen the light, and their newest hardware isn't any more proprietary than the Windows OS is. OS X and Windows XP are both proprietary in that sense. Windows is just more ubiquitous, giving the appearance of not being proprietary. There are common standards for both, mpeg being one. Windows media is proprietary, just like Real media is. Apple has no interest in making their OS runnable on common PC hardware, because Apple is also a hardware company. Don't get me wrong, I use both Macs and PCs they both have their "gotchas" and they both play dirty.

The internet has been a boon to interoperability, as every machine has to speak a common language at the lowest denomonator.

I'm not going to get into a discussion over Mac/PC superiority, my point is, the hardware has already become standard between the two, with Apple on the cutting edge of the PC side, because they have ditched the BIOS, and are using the new Intel EFI boot routine, which the PC side will eventually adopt. Same was true of USB. It showed up first in PCs, but it didn't explode until Apple ditched the old ADB and went USB. Why are we still using PS/2 ports for keyboards and mice? Why are the ports different? (keyboard and mouse on PS/2). Why can't I plug my mouse into my keyboard which is usually closer than the box? Inertia, inertia, inertia.

Linux is the only hardware neutral OS of any significance (Unix being another that comes to mind, which linix is a clone of).

Everyone in the market tries to lock the consumer in. Apple does it with their iTunes music store (which I don't use) and Microsoft does it with their software. The hardware is becoming commodity, and I know that linux is scaring the crap out of Microsoft, which is one reason they are getting into the specialty hardware market (xbox). That is the beauty of software. Once written, the cost of production is extremely small. Everybody knows that Microsoft got rich with dirty tricks, it is why the DoJ came to the conclusion that they had been a monopoly. But the software side of things is where everyone starts to play dirty. It is like buying a car and all the screw threads are proprietary.

Like Ox said, why does his accounting software require an upgrade? I can understand if you are doing digital video, but simple number crunching?

And as far as hardware going to crap, why is it that my machine from 1997, which I leave running all the time still works with the original hard drive(which is getting mighty cramped)? I haven't replaced any of the solid state parts, and the hard drive still keeps chugging, but I believe it is about to fail, sometimes it won't wake from sleep.

Sun has gone to intel on the low end. SGI is history, IBM sold out to Lenovo(PCs) and Hitachi(hard drives). HP gave up and went with Intel, Compaq ditched Alpha and went with Intel, then merged with HP. All those guys are using Intel/AMD processors, which are clones of each other.

Dell, HP, Lenovo, Gateway are all just clones of each other, with Intel writing the standards with Microsoft's influence. AMD copies Intel. Apple has joined with Intel on the standards front. Linux runs on everything, but it isn't as easy to use as Windows or OS X.

Apple.....
"their newest hardware isn't any more proprietary than the Windows OS is."


"Apple has seen the light, and their newest hardware isn't any more proprietary than the Windows OS is."


Well, that's just not true, at least for the point I was trying to make, which IS that the Apple OS will NOT RUN on commonly available PC hardware. It has to have the Apple proprietary imprint, whatever that amounts to.

Likewise, unless things have changed, I was not aware that Windows OS would run on Apple hardware, without some sort of special emulation. In other words, I don't believe you can take a clean hard drive, and load winhozed onto Apple hardware---if you can this has been a really recent change.

440,
I've been a Mac eletist since '84, been forced to operate Wintel hand-crankers in the past and somehow survived.
As a result, I follow MacIntosh closely, never heard any promise of "going to a PC style platform." Apple stayed with Motorola/IBM too long, they never did catch up to Intel.

Adapting to the latest Intel Dual Core central processor didn't dictate a need to change the Mac OS to accomodate the latest iteration of cobbled upgrades to MS DOS. Hooeee, watch the other side jump on that one, they're almost semi sure most of that baggage has been jetisoned, based on the fact that backward compatability has been killed off.

I'm always amused when a hand-cranker devotee' attempts to equate the sales of MacIntosh to all the dozens of disparate PC manufacturers combined. Huh? If I finally become the only buyer of Mac's, (HIGHLY unlikely), if Apple will make that one unit, I'll buy it.

440, you didn't finish the sentence, "If Apple really wanted to do something, they'd make their OS runnable out of the box on common PC hardware, and be done with it", AND BECOME JUST ANOTHER SOFTWARE PROVIDER. That's if the could dumb down the OS enough to work, but wait, hasn't that been done?
I'm not picking on you 440, just using you as my straight man , havin' fun pickin' on all the PC hand crankers that as a united mob, have been wagging their finger and predicting "the demise of Apple tomorrow" for over twenty years.

During that period, I've discovered that the majority of them have no familiarity with the Mac OS, but I did notice that as soon as Bill Gates had thrown enough money into the shyster pot to swing a judges vote to him on his backward, (some calls it reverse), engineering of one of the points of superiority of the Mac, unleashing the inferior copy that he named "Windows", all the hand crankers jumped right in with never a look back. ALPHA-NUMERIC PROMPT indeed!

By the way, I think Bill is OK, started using his grand spreadsheet, "XL" in '85, a full 4 years before the hand-crankers matured in sophistication to the degree that Bill could port over our, 'til then exclusive spreadsheet to the catch-up crowd, in 1989.

OK, now someone scream shrilly, "yea but we got's lots more applications." True, kinda' like winnowing wheat, the chaff pile grows faster. Yeah, here and there a kernal of wheat will be lost to the chaff and vice versa.

Someone else rises with, "hey, I got boffum an'......." yeah, yeah, I've got a neighbor down the street with a Lexus and a Yugo. He feels obligated to defend his choice of the Yugo too.

I think that our trade deficit with China proves that given the choice, the majority, the average unsophisticated buyer will opt for the inferior, cheaper clone. Historical note; Apple invented the PC, (Personal Computer).

Could someone help me with a foreign concept? What are viruses, trojan horses, worms, uh, uh..... no Mac user could hope to keep up with that litany of unfathomal maladys. If I wanted to spend money on virus protection, how would I use it?

Think George Lucas would trade all his Mac's for any other computer and tell his elve's at Industrial Light and Magic, "make it work"?
Ask the music studios..... Top line graphics artists....

C'mon, didn't think we'd ever respond to the unfounded jabs? Anyway, if y'all enjoyed the above, I got lot's more for ya. Bob
The foregoing provided courtesy of a MacIntosh computer.

The OS-X operating system is BSD UNIX (Berkeley Standard Distribution). It runs just fine on just about any box you want it to. A box is a box. It doesn't mandate what operating system you use on it.

Robert Campbell,

Again, you've just affirmed that ALL Mac users are warped and have a chip on their shoulder. Apple lost...move on (It's funny how when asking Mac users why Mac's are so great, "graphic artists" almost always immediately is mentioned...)

Apple abandoning the PowerPC is key to my thinking that they will eventually exit the PC market (they no longer have to share development costs with Motorola)

440roadrunner,
Things have changed. Windows XP will run natively on the latest Intel Apple Macintosh. You need a boot program, which Apple provides called boot camp. This is because there is no BIOS for Windows XP to use. It isn't special emulation, you still have to buy a copy of XP from Microsoft. But it will run natively on Intel Apple hardware.

Read about it here

Now, as far as OS X running on commodity PC hardware, here is a quote from the link:

Will any x86-based PC run Mac OS X?

No.

Apple, via the Mac OS X license agreement, US law, and non-support of the product, will not allow Mac OS X to run on x86 hardware, at least in the near term. No doubt someone will hack it to run on various non-Apple x86 configurations (and there are websites dedicated to tracking just that), but this will be limited to a relatively small group of people due to the legal prohibitions and non-support, and such use will impact Apple minimally.

In the future, after the Intel transition is complete, it is possible that Apple could consider allowing Mac OS X to run on specific non-Apple hardware. But this is not likely to occur for the foreseeable future; if you want to run Mac OS X, you must still purchase an Apple computer:

Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers' hardware. "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac," he said. [11.1]

BusinessWeek has some further discussion and speculation on this topic in Should Apple Open Up?

Click to expand...

Now, Intel (read commodity PC hardware) is also changing, but the inertia is slooow. When the PC side starts using the Intel EFI, instead of BIOS, then the hardware will start to look less and less different. Like I said earlier, Mac and PC hardware share the same graphics bus, memory bus, drive hardware (serial ATA and old fashioned IDE), etc. Now there are other issues like the "Trusted Platform Module" chip scheme which could be used to limit what OS runs on a particular hardware set. This is being pushed (the "Trusted Platform Module") by the industry to prevent, among other things, copyright infringement (read: piracy).

A bit about that here.

Now, as far as taking a clean hard drive and loading Windows XP, no. Because XP needs a BIOS to load. So, technically, yes, you can't get rid of OS X completely to run Windows, but I believe that the next release of Windows (Vista?) will support the Intel EFI and would load on Apple hardware without anything else on the hard drive.

Now, the guys at Apple ain't dumb, and they saw the writing on the wall, if they continued to use the proprietary hardware, the machine's cost would continue to go up. Now they are acting as Intel's skunk works, because Intel has a road map to the future, and the future ditches BIOS and all the other legacy crap from the DOS days. The Intel mac's hardware is going to be similar to pc and vice versa. Neither Microsoft nor Apple are going to want anyone to get their OS for free.

It used to be impossible to buy a Dell without windows. You could build your own PC from parts, but for a long time there has been a "Microsoft tax" on all PC made, even if you didn't want Windows. With linux, that is changing, you can get a Dell without Windows.

I sell LINUX laptops. It takes about $100 off the price.

appliedproto,
I'm not ignoring you, I'm just waiting until there's enough of you to make it fair.

Bob

Robert Campbell,

Give me a break about Mac. Mac is all about marketing gimmicks and fad. If you need to get real work done get a PC if you're in the graphics industry use a mac, otherwise no one will hire you. Also if OSX is so good why does apple allow you to load XP?

I don't run software protection on my PC and have never had a virus. Does that mean there are no viruses. NO. So are you saying that Apple is immune to viruses?? wrong there is no software that is Immune. http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9075-2045460,00.html

mostly it comes down to the user. PC is cheaper so you have more novice users. PC is more practical so more users... there are just more users of PC...Does that mean Apple are better...does that mean PC's are better...neither...we could have the same debate about gay sex vs straight sex. So its all pointless.

How many Cad/cam software are avaiilable on MAC? Not enough too make me switch.

OK applied, you got Hansdie, only two lame jabs? C'mon guys, I'm disappointed.

Nobody cares about OS-X that's why! We are all using our computers while you are staring at it waiting for it to do something. Do you use your computer to make money? or just as a conversation piece.