From: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>
Date: November 15, 2007 11:48:59 AM MST
To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Re: Imaging Source Abandoning FireWire?
Hi Ralph;
On 15-Nov-07, at 10:37 AM, Ralph Megna wrote:
Milton, with all due respect — and I do appreciate your frustrations as a developer with Apple — none of this is a likely scenario. Ask any stock analyst (or stockholder like me), and they will tell you that what is driving Apple’s stock price upwards these days is the growth in Mac sales. From a lousy 2% or 3% for years, the Mac’s current US retail market share is at least 6%, and may be higher. There is evidence that in laptops, Apple’s US retail market share is somewhere between 16% and 20%. These figures are reinforced by considerable casual evidence — my office is located on the edge of a major university and the number of MacBooks at the Starbucks and other gathering places has exploded in the last year or so.
Agreed they are selling more MacBooks. I'm not 100% sure they are all running OSX though. Quite a few developers I know have removed OS X and have installed Linux / Windows on them, mainly because they wanted the HW features on that Laptop or Mini that were offered but with a different OS's.
Steve Jobs has always maintained he would do whatever he can to make money and he's an opportunist by nature. Nothing wrong with that and he's doing what is best for Apple, not end users or developers. If he finds that sales of iPods / iPhone are where he gets the biggest bang and gratification, he'll expand on that and dump other things. Where is the Newton today?
As for the “fiasco that is Leopard,” I have to strongly disagree as a user. It may be causing you development fits — again, this is something I can appreciate but don’t personally know — but there is absolutely no question that this is the best OS I have ever used on a personal computer, and my experience goes back nearly 30 years. Leopard has been snappy and stable on my MacBookPro and, except for some weird behaviors from Microsoft Office 2004 (which is having to run under Rosetta), all of my work applications are behaving just fine. Its initial adoption by the market — over 2 million copies sold the first weekend — equal to the sales of Vista the first few days — clearly suggests that this will be the preferred OS for Mac for the next few years.
That's your situation which is great for you. However I've read numerous other accounts that are not as complementary and in some case down right dangerous with data loss. For example a significant percentage of people had Leopard DVD's that would fail half way through the install, leaving them with nothing bootable (the most likely situation for a successful installation now is to have it wipe your drive then re-install everything from scratch and avoid any install that over writes the existing OS in place). Others now can't use their keyboards, many USB HID devices (including the GPUSB) are now broken, FireWire is screwed up and tons of 3rd party applications that worked fine in Panther and Tiger are now broken in Leopard.
Here is a fast collection of links outlining some of the issues people are finding.
http://www.robhyndman.com/2007/11/14/ive-been-attacked-by-a-leopard/
http://theappleblog.com/2007/11/15/no-software/
http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/leopard/index.html#d15nov2007
http://www.macintouch.com/leopard/compat.html
I'll lay bets that sales of Leopard will have slowed dramatically until Apple fixes these problems, which they will eventually.
And as for iPhones and iPods, it might be useful to remember that all iPhones and a growing number of iPods are running OSX, and it will soon be clear that Apple sees these computing platforms, too. Having millions and millions of additional devices running the same core OS as a Mac will only strengthen the overall Apple/Mac ecosystem.
That only applies if they actually allow developers access to the OS and have documentation for it. So far they haven't opened it up except for writing browser plugins that only work in Safari and no one knows what the final product will be. So January will be interesting to see what they come up with - but I'm pretty pessimistic given their track record. Apple has made a tonne of changes to Leopard without telling anyone that they were doing it and many apps that were beta tested up until the final release were broken in the last GM release.
I have been begging for documentation for 5 years now, and Apple still insists that 3 lines in a header file is all that is needed for documentation. That may be true IF the guy who wrote the code your using is beside you in Cupertino, but for most developers we are totally screwed and waste a ton of time fumbling around trying to make this stuff work. And then they arbitrarily obsolete APIs they don't like and come up with something "new" to replace it, except it doesn't replace it at all and is just a dumbed down derivative that has less features.
There is little doubt that Apple is experiencing some growing pains associated with its surprising string of successes, and I am not advocating blind allegiance over reality. But it is useful to understand that Apple’s struggle to address some of these problems is as basic as getting buildings constructed in Cupertino to house the additional people needed to develop and support its products. Apple’s core commitment to ship great products remains and as best as I can tell, it is delivering.
Well Leopard is certainly not best of breed yet. Maybe it will be better in 10.5.03, but the current 0.0 / .01 release is causing lots of people and developers headaches. And there is no need for it if they actually test with 3rd party products and do some meaningful Q&A. But they shoved a late stage beta out the door and inflicted chaos on the Mac community.
And on a positive note, I have just completed the port of Astro IIDC 4 to x86 this week and will be seeding it to my Alpha testers late tomorrow, assuming my testing goes well today and tomorrow. My Alpha testers have been testing the PowerPC Astro IIDC 4 for 8 months now, so it's going to be a solid feature packed well tested release.
Talk to you later..
Milton J. Aupperle
President
ASC - Aupperle Services and Contracting
Mac Software (Drivers, Components and Application) Specialist
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