What axod was suggesting was that the people who need a laptop that small might be well off with what the iPhone's capable of. Certainly my iPod touch is what I use when I'm on the move, and it's capable of everything up to responding to people on Hacker News.
Capable but not pleasant. Using my netbook is like using a slightly-slower version of my desktop machine. No compromises. (I carry around my HHKB with it, so the input experience is the same.)
It kinda fits the gap for me. In terms of functionality, it's a netbook pretty much. The only difference is it's got a smaller screen, and a touchscreen instead of keyboard.
Sure, it takes a little more fiddling, but I can easily ssh to servers, and fix things from my iphone, as well as any webapp/website things I need to do.
The only difference is it's got a smaller screen, and a touchscreen instead of keyboard.
Which are huge differences. Sure, I've had an ssh client on my phone for about six years now (Sidekick II first, and now a G1), but I can't do work on my phone, even though it has a reasonable keyboard for such a small device. But, my Mini 9 is actually a pretty reasonable device for most of the work I do, up to and including development (though its obvious sweet spot is email and forums and such, which I do a lot of since support is a huge part of my business; and using the phone would be way too slow). I wouldn't consider it a replacement for the big 15" lappy or my desktop machine for serious development or graphics work or whatever, but when I am travelling light, it's exactly the right size and form-factor.
Guys, it's really, really not that difficult. Apple offers you a combination hardware/software package. They design the software to work brilliantly with the hardware they design, and they work very hard to make sure your experience is the best imaginable. That's why they pair the two together. And Apple doesn't want you using their software on hardware it wasn't designed for, because they want to make sure you get their full experience. They're designers. They win international awards for their computers. They want you to get their product, not a hybrid of half of their idea with half of somebody else's cheap refuse.
If you don't use OS X, you don't miss out on that much. It's not like you need OS X to live, and Apple's depriving you of something by asking you use their computer. If you don't want a Mac, then use Linux or Windows. If you want Apple's product, buy Apple's product, not a cheap third-rate knockoff.
In return, when you buy a high-end Mac, you get a superb, pleasurable experience. For as low as, what, six hundred dollars now?, you get a beautiful piece of hardware that does what you want it to splendidly, has the best third-party ecosystem I've ever come across, and doesn't lose you cred among any fashionistas you might know, plus it runs on Unix so you can tinker away with it however you see it. It's a very nice machine and millions of man-hours were spent making it, so perhaps it's worth your saving up a little money to purchase the full package. I and many other Mac owners can testify that we are very happy with our buy and may buy another one in the distant future.
I know the line of thought is that computers are just tools to get a job done, but that's like saying all a chair has to be is a plank of wood to get your ass on. There are planks of wood, and then there are chairs that lots of thought has gone into to make you as happy as you can be. We pay more for those chairs because while we don't need it to live, it makes our lives a little better. That's how Mac OS X's been made, and I don't think it's ridiculous to ask that we honor its maker's wishes, or at the very least, not bitch when the maker puts a little effort into ensuring you do it their way.
I have to disagree Apple wants to make the experience the best possible. For instance, I spent a couple hours trying to make Munin work on a Mac and all I could monitor from the main computer was disk space and a couple other things I don't use. The lack of up-to-date versions (they don't update stuff between major OS releases) and the lack of proper package management (ports is subminimal) drive me crazy.
And that's precisely why my Mac ended up being my "play" computer. It runs iTunes and syncs my iPod like nothing else can.
And, BTW, when I updated my iPod, one of my _cables_ (yes - a cable) stopped working because it's "not supported". What evil mind besides Apple's would consider DRM-cripple cables?
No... Macs are pleasing, but Apple doesn't aim to please it's clients above anything else. It strikes a balance between profit and an as-abusive-as-possible relationship with its customers.
It's interesting to see how many people support Pre syncing but not hackintoshing (not an observation about you, just an observation about hackers in general).
I can't figure out why hackintoshing has such a bad name in the hacking community. I would imagine that hacking, the art of using things in clever and unintended ways, would be a great fit with osx86.
Plus the osx86 guys are some of the smartest I know. The good people contribute to Darwin and the other core Apple projects and their code ends up in mainline os x. Hackintosh users are some of the most prolific driver writers and help get tons of USB drivers written that are useful to macs and osx86 machines alike.
There's something really satisfying about building a mac, the same way there's something satisfying about building a linux or a windows box. Apple's DRM just makes it more fun.
The good people contribute to Darwin and the other core Apple projects and their code ends up in mainline os x.
Could you link to some commits on Macosforge that were based on patches by people from osx86? This is the first I'm hearing of this.
Hackintosh users are some of the most prolific driver writers and help get tons of USB drivers written that are useful to macs and osx86 machines alike.
Last time I looked at osx86 (admittedly, years ago, long before Leopard was released), there weren't any custom kexts written by the community, just plists from Apple that were edited. Can you link to some custom kext's that have risen from osx86?
> Could you link to some commits on Macosforge that were based on patches by people from osx86?
There are cases that I'm aware of, but I think several Apple employees would fear retaliation if I outed them here :-)
It's too bad that the XNU development process is totally closed (even if the code is OSS), as that's where you see so much of the osx86 activity. In particular, go look at voodooxnu, xnu-dev, etc. These are all drop-in replacement kernels for mach_kernel, run by hackintoshers, that accept patches from contributors. I believe voodoo will be the default kernel for the next PureDarwin (the new OpenDarwin) release.
> Can you link to some custom kext's that have risen from osx86?
These are all drop-in replacement kernels for mach_kernel, run by hackintoshers, that accept patches from contributors
It sounds like none of these modifications are sent back to Apple. Its great that they can fork projects - that much, anyone can do. The original claim was that osx86 hackers had contributed code to Apple, that was now in Darwin and is used in shipping OS's. Thats far more interesting then any modification that's made on a fork.
And of the two kext's you linked to, they both look to be dead in development, with more then a few major bugs each. Thats more of a hinderance than a help for your argument, really.
> And of the two kext's you linked to, they both look to be dead in development, with more then a few major bugs each
I use both of those drivers daily on three different machines. I have yet to experience a single bug on my hardware. For bleeding-edge chipsets, YMMV.
As for speed of development, I generally install drivers (as opposed to userland software) once and forget about it unless there's a problem. Given that I have no problems, I'm quite satisfied.
This is going to make a lot of people very upset. But really, news like this becomes a lot easier to swallow once you simply accept that Apple is a proprietary platform that works really hard at vendor lock-in.
I am not sure how can anyone in his right mind claim this is unexpected. Apple has always been one of the more closed companies in this market. It's is the only remaining computer maker from the 70s/80s that makes its own exclusive platform. The fact it uses a somewhat open Unix is a historical accident: Steve Jobs wanted to enter the Unix workstation market with NeXT and it had to be Unix-based.
Even if every Mac user here in HN used Macs because of their Unix core, that would be very little compared to the average user. To the average Mac user, OSX is nice despite its Unix heritage.
It's a historic accident Apple currently uses NeXT's OS as the foundation of OSX. Before that, Apple failed miserably a couple times trying to make a better OS upon classic MacOS.
It's a happy accident that when Jobs returned to Apple, he brought the NeXT OS stack with him and had Apple stick a decent GUI on the front end that turned into OSX.
The accident is that they were desperate and would have bought any decent OS they could to replace the gigantic failure Copland was. NeXT had the one with the more eloquent salesman and the only person who could have given back any semblance of credibility to Apple's lineup.
Were NeXT based on VMS, Amiga, TOS, MP/M or anything like it, that would be OSXs base.
You said it jokingly, but I think this x86 world where the OS-space seems divided between a bastard child of VMS and variants of Unix is unbelievably boring.
Years ago in my undergrad I took a most excellent OS course offered by the indomitable Peter Denning. As presented, his course basically considered each part of an OS, chose the best of alternatives for core system concepts, and built the OS from there. The result was something not grossly unlike a modern nix, but still leaving enough wiggle room for the large number of variants we see today.
His comparisons between the way these concepts were instantiated in an nix and in other OSs were particularly good (and scathing).
That being said, it is a pity that there aren't still a dozen or so major OSes out there, each coming from a completely different approach, oh the days when an Amiga or a BeBox were interesting consumer choices. You can still find lots of minor OS variants around, but they are very small communities and it's really all boiled down to a very small and "boring" handful.
Additionally, most new OS approaches suffer from a distinct lack of software. And slowly but surely we find the inevitable creep of software Ports into new OSs, using bringing *nix like infrastructure in with them.
Why? If it's not Apple hardware ('what they expect it to be') then they don't support it. So why spend the time to check if you're on non-Apple hardware, and then pop up a nice "Unsupported hardware" (or similar) error message? Unless, of course, you're trying to prevent non-Apple hardware, but that goes without saying.
If you only support one platform, you just need to make sure that it works on that platform. People that try to run it on another platform are on their own if it breaks something/corrupts their data/etc just because you didn't do some sanity check somewhere. Putting that sanity check in is work on top of supporting your target platform (because your target platform will already be 'sane' by definition).
[Note: I'm just arguing against axod's sanity checks surprise, not necessarily anything to do with the article]
Intentional or not Apple doesn't sell any system with an ATOM CPU. There are any number of reasons they could have made completely unrelated changes that would break them. Perhaps due to security, or the 64Bit transition, or a simple oversight. Installing OSX on CPU models Apple doesn't sell has always resulted in your CPU being declared as "unknown CPU" so that suggests Apple doesn't simply copy & paste all Intel CPU identifiers. I tend to doubt it was intentional because the Hackintosh community will find a simple work around that will add maybe 1 step to the process. Won't stop anyone who really wants to do it. Seems more likely it was a case of Apple not going out of their way to support hardware they don't sell.
OTOH, they can always return an "unknown CPU" when the CPU identifiers are something they don't like.
Is there a trick an original Intel Core Duo will do that an Atom won't? Snow Leopard can't be 64-bit only because that would make it incompatible with the first x86 Macs.
I vividly remember this because of the way the xnu kernel switches in and out of 32 bit mode, which broke Dino's Vitriol VT-x rootkit, which I needed to have working for a Black Hat talk on rootkit detection, which necessitated me tracking down an old Macbook to run my demo on.
Maybe if you remove all third party fonts it'll work again.
</sarcasm>
Jokes out of the way - they did just release a new line of incredible and ground breaking iMacs, Macbooks, etc. All along with the news of their most profitable quarterly earnings, and the general disdain for Windows 7.
I wouldn't be surprised if the mind-flow went like this for consumers:
"Wow I want one of those new macs!"
"Damn those are expensive..."
"But I don't want a windows machine..."
"I'll get a netbook, and then hackintosh it, I'll save money, get the experience I want, AND save 15% or more on my car insurance!"
Apple could have seen something like this happening on a larger scale and simply "tweaked" the OS with the latest update to prevent mass pirating.
I think the confusion from my comment resulted from a working definition of "consumer". Have you payed for an apple product? Then you're a consumer. Let's not differientiate ourselves just because we write software.
That said, that mind flow wouldn't be the TYPICAL one, it could result from people still wanting Osx on a cheaper machine and doing a google search for "mac netbook" or "osx netbook". Your typical "dumb" consumer may not know the difference, if that was the argument.
Those searches could certainly turn up pages to hachintosh netbooks.
Exactly. Even as an owner of an Atom-based Hackintosh netbook, I can't fault Apple for not maintaining support for hardware they never supported in the first place.
EDIT: Also: it seems to me that if Apple really intended to put a dent in the Hackintosh movement, they'd do something far more drastic than make things slightly inconvenient for netbook owners with a point release.
So you're replacing vendor lock-in with incompetence. I'm not quite sure which is more likely as there is extensive evidence on both sides of the coin.
If there was incompetence. They don't sell OSX to install on netbooks - in no way is that advised. If it was advised I'd bet they'd ship a lot more OSX discs than they do. But no, they ship those discs to upgrade your Apple hardware to the latest operating system that they made work with your Apple hardware.
Please explain how I mis-used the term, considering the definition is: In economics, vendor lock-in, also known as proprietary lock-in, or customer lock-in, makes a customer dependent on a vendor for products and services, unable to use another vendor without substantial switching costs.
I didn't say this incident is the result of incompetence, I am saying their developers have illustrated a lack of competence in the past. Breaking with third party fonts installed. Breaking iPhone updates that require the use of another computer to fix a broken patch. The list goes on and on.
> Please explain how I mis-used the term, considering the definition is: In economics, vendor lock-in, also known as proprietary lock-in, or customer lock-in, makes a customer dependent on a vendor for products and services, unable to use another vendor without substantial switching costs.
In what way does Apple lock you in? If you manage to switch to Apple, which is the more difficult task since you clearly have to buy their hardware and can't re-use what you already have, then switching away is as simple as installing Linux or Windows on the Apple hardware.
> I didn't say this incident is the result of incompetence, I am saying their developers have illustrated a lack of competence in the past. Breaking with third party fonts installed. Breaking iPhone updates that require the use of another computer to fix a broken patch. The list goes on and on.
If the product in question is a netbook form factor. Apple does not produce this type of product however they do no impede a customer's ability to buy one from another vendor. You can walk into BestBuy and get one in about 15 minutes. Apple doesn't have a bunch of thugs wearing two layers of brightly colored polo shirts there to stop you by taking your credit card and forcing you to buy a MacBook instead. Additionally Apple offers software for Windows to interoperate with their services: iTunes for iPods/iPhones and iTunes Store and also a MobileMe control panel. They also offer QuickTime & Safari for Windows.
If you want to use Apple's operating system then you have to buy an Apple computer. If that prevents you from buying the type of machine you want I would seriously reconsider using Apple's operating system in the first place. Other companies such as Microsoft have a business model of selling software so they don't care what hardware you buy. Apple makes it quite easy to install Windows on a Mac so they don't lock you into using OSX on their hardware. Apple is a hardware company. Your example of vendor lock-in would be more along the lines of going to an Dell Store (I know they don't exist, play along) and demanding they sell you an Apple computer instead.
The problem with this line of arguing is that Apple's entire marketing strategy is about how an Apple is better than a Windows machine. Thus, their product, contrary to what you are saying, is not hardware, it's software. Their ads say nothing about hardware manufacturers, they say everything about Windows. It's not Mac Book's are faster than Dells. It's Apple's are more secure than Windows. It's about Windows 7 vs Apple, not HP vs Apple.
Therefore, inhibiting a consumer's ability to run that product, which is OSX as much as it is a physical device, is vendor lock-in. It is vendor lockin, because they are saying, "To run our product, OSX, you must buy Mac Hardware."
I think that's a slippery slope to go down as far as what is predatory vendor lock-in and what is not. It is most definitely vendor lock-in if you had to use an iPod ($200) with a Mac because the software only works on Apple hardware ($600, can break and may need to be replaced within a year). Whereas with OSX, you purchase it with the intent to use it on your Mac that already came preloaded with an older version of OSX.
Does the software work on PC? Sort of, but it's unsupported. Should they be forced to support it? Probably not, because it may heavily impact their business model, bottom line, and stability. What if they don't want the no-name-brand manufacturer to make customers think their product (OSX) sucks?
The fact is that Microsoft locks in customers by mere quantity. OSX has prestige and quality, but it requires the customer to acknowledge they don't have a genuine choice in hardware vendors unless they want to manipulate it into working (although I do think Apple's license is dumb with regard to saying it can't be (pre)installed on a PC).
I think you are simply biased against microsoft and pro apple. What Apple is doing, if they are intentionally not working on ATOM is essentially what Microsoft would be doing if it didn't allow its software to run on apple hardware.
Vendor lockin, whether intentional, or simply because the vendor doesn't care to make their products work with others, or whatever, doesn't change the vendor lockin.
It's not that they don't care -- it's not their business model. I believe a company should have the right to control their own products as long as they are not breaking any laws.
Okay, that's fine, but it's still vendor lock-in. I don't know why it's so hard to understand. If you buy a product and use it and then you can't get out or switch or use the product with some other hardware or whatever, it's vendor lock-in. You are locked into that vendor. If you buy a Mac and put a bunch of files on it that only work on a Mac and your Mac crashes, you can't restore the backups to a windows machine or an ATOM processor machine.
Thus, you're locked in. Thus, vendor lock-in. It's pretty cut and dry really.
Apple has an HFS+ implementation for Windows included in their BootCamp package. There are various utilities for Windows that can also access HFS+ volumes in userspace including MacDrive, TransMac and HFS Explorer. Additionally Linux supports HFS+ and Apple's own HFS+ implementation is open source. (you could actually boot Darwin on any PC and access the data that way) Anyway..
All closed source software is inherently vendor locked. If that's the point you're trying to make I agree. It seems we were talking about how a company chooses to sell their closed source software which is a different issue. For example, if I had all my data on an NTFS formatted drive I would need a Windows computer to read that data (ignoring for now there are other ways of doing this via third party tools -- but none of them are developed or supported by Microsoft) My choice is HP, Dell, Acer, etc but I'm still vendor locked to Microsoft. Same deal. Microsoft abstracts their vendor lock away from hardware in the PC world -- in other areas such as the Zune, Xbox 360 they also include hardware. Open source is the only way to be free from vendor lock for people who are concerned about it. For the most part there are simple work arounds in the closed source world so it's not usually a major problem. (which is why most people don't care I think)
Sad, because it was my little Mini9 OSX that really made it fun to hack on the go. It was also a nice cheap way to test on OSX for doing web dev at work, much easier to keep a little 9 inch netbook for browser testing!
Everytime a Hackintosh thread comes up I wonder why no-one ever mentions that they don't have a software license to run OS X on that hardware.
Excerpt from Snow Leopard license:
... you are granted a limited non-exclusive license to install, use and run (1) copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-branded computer at a time. You agree not to install, use or run the Apple Software on any non-Apple-branded computer, or to enable others to do so. This license does not allow the Apple Software to exist on more than one computer at a time, ...
Fuck the license terms. If people pay for the copy of the OS and are willing to accept that Apple will only offer support for OS X on Apple hardware, it's not really any of Apple's business what they run it on. For end users who don't have contractual relationships wth software publishers (eg special pricing deals, technology sharing agreements or whatever), those EULAs are basically meaningless; the moral rights of the software publisher are adequately protected by existing laws on copyright and so forth.
How many people that install osx86 actually buy a copy of OS X and then modify everything as necessary themselves? It seems like its far more common to find it online and then complain when it breaks.
I have no sympathy for such complaints, or even for expectations that Apple should support it on non-Apple hardware. I'm just saying that there is no reason for legitimate purchasers to lose any sleep about the morality of otherwise violating the EULA.
Whether or not this move is an intentional swipe at the Hackintosh trend, I'm rooting for Apple here:
(1) Just from a pure CS perspective, the Hackintoshers seem awfully smug, and I'd like to see them get knocked around by Apple for awhile. In a theoretic sense, it's far from established that Apple can't lock clones out. We have no idea what tricks they might come up with to reject non-Apple gear, and I for one really want to see what they are. When Microsoft did this to the Xbox and X360, we got some incredible systems research out of people like Bunny Huang and the MIT hackers.
(2) Just on general principles, if you don't have a monopoly and you aren't specially regulated, you clearly should be able to sell whatever combination of hardware and software you want to. Other people don't have the right to force you to sell some random configuration of your stuff. It's a really skeevy kind of Geek Exceptionalism that says "there's no GOOD reason why OS X shouldn't run on my Netbook, so you can't stop me".
1) There is no such thing as "non-Apple gear". The entire hardware platform is the same as any Intel box running Windows or Linux. They use the same CPUs, chipsets, graphics cards, memory, hard drives, form factors, etc. etc. etc. as the rest of the industry with some minor changes to the boot system and system startup entry points (nothing that hurts running Windows or Linux on the same hardware for example).
2) true.
But I think the exception to Apple's behavior is that there are large numbers of customers who would be more than happy to fork over another wad of cash for an Apple branded netbook (in addition to their existing systems) and Apple has (yet again) failed to listen to their consumer.
That's fine, Apple probably can't make the numbers work to preserve some margin figure they want to maintain. All Apple demonstrates by this is that consumer feedback is not as much a part of their development process as most people seem to think (or hope) it is.
The problem is that not only is Apple saying "we can't be bothered with this netbook thing right now" but they are saying it with a middle finger, fully extended, at their customers. They've gone and put themselves out, expended effort, to ensure their users can't operate as they want to.
So really it's "give us your money for our overpriced commodity hardware and we don't care what you think or actually want, you'll think and want what we tell you to, how dare you try and step outside of our carefully crafted ecosystem"
You seem awfully confident about (1). It's almost like you think Dell couldn't sell a piece of software that was locked to Dell gear. I'm not so sure.
Remember, the goal of "software protection" (be it DRM, platform locks, or anticheating software) isn't to make it impossible to break the system; it's to make it (a) impossible to do it cost-effectively, and (b) impossible to do it permanently.
The rest of your argument, with the "middle fingers" and whatnot, I don't care. Again: companies should be able to sell whatever they want, modulo antitrust and regs.
Take a Macintosh, open it. Inspect using the novel technique of "looking".
Not to be glib, but when Apple decided to ditch other platforms for Intel-styled chips, they bought into the entire R&D work of their principle competitors. Back in the day with the 680x0 Macs and the PowerPC Macs, even things like RAM and video-cards weren't interchangeable between the platforms (due to endian-issues and timing issues etc.). The early 3d cards were a prime example of having to buy Apple branded hardware (or co-developed in partnership) for Apple branded computers. So for example, if you wanted to upgrade your Mac with a better video card, you couldn't run over and buy the $199 Nvidia card that 90% of the market could buy. You had to buy the "Made for Macintosh" Nvidia card at the 20% markup.
What Apple bought when going Intel was expertise in a vast marketplace of hardware manufacturers and R&D departments, doing Apple's work effectively for them. So what's in an Apple branded case? Probably some x-ATX board, the standard combination of chipset chips from whoever Apple could purchase from cheapest, a perfectly stock Intel chip and perfectly stock memory. With PCI-E ports with perfectly stock video cards (or video on the mobo, like value PC builders go with). If you are careful you might notice Apple uses a different boot system that's equivalent to the traditional BIOS (and is the direction some PC systems have already gone as well).
What Apple also bought when adopting an open architecture was that unfortunately, it makes locking it down really really hard. They came to the same party as everybody else, but they don't like the music. Too bad.
If Apple wants to sell a closed architecture, then that's what they should sell. But they decided to adopt an architecture that's designed not to be locked down, then are trying to lock it down after the fact.
It just took you over 300 words to say the same thing you said one comment earlier. I think you know less about how platform technology works than you think you do, and you'd benefit from opening your mind a bit. Again: Dell could probably lock code down to Dell boxes, if they had anything worth locking down.
So, I just took the 7 minutes required to give a casual read to every comment you've posted here, and here's what I've come up with:
* I have no idea what your technical expertise is, because you're anonymous, haven't filled out your profile, and have never posted a technical comment here. You have "a lead developer" and an ex CTO that screwed your company, so I assume you (a) didn't found that company and (b) don't lead a dev team. Once you typed the letters C++.
* You really, really dislike Apple. As evidence for that, I submit the fact that you (a) have never agreed with any pro-Apple comment here, (b) said you have an irrational dislike for the platform, (c) haven't used it enough to make sense in an argument about how app focus works on OS X, and (d) tried to win an argument about how overpriced Apple hardware is by linking to what appears to be the worst-reviewed input device on NewEgg.
* Your dislike for Apple currently constitutes the majority of all your comment-words on HN.
I have no problem arguing with you on how effective software protection could or couldn't be on a standardized ISA with a tiny number of valid build configurations, or how microarchitectural profiling works, or what the parameters are for a "win" for Apple in this cat-and-mouse game are.
I fully accept that you might win that argument; I feel comfortable with my position, though, with some fair amount of practical experience to back it. But whatever.
I'm simply not going to do that until you tell me who you are and why I should take you at all seriously. Otherwise, I'm just going to remember you as someone never to talk to here.
> I have no idea what your technical expertise is...blah blah blah
Correct, correct and correct. I did a fair amount of hacking about as a computational linguist in my younger years. I haven't run into many others who have. So I'd suspect that we'd talk past each other in any technical conversation. Only one correction, I co-lead my company's dev team, usually providing front-end design work, domain expertise and providing pithy input on algorithmic analysis for some of the more problematic issues that regular coding won't teach. Like, "should I recursively crawl an unweighted digraph to find up-to n-length paths between disjoint and incomplete sets of nodes?" or "how should I deal with a sparse matrix when computing the steady state values of an Eigenvector on a graph with an uncertain morphology?" or my recent fav "given a set of a large number of search terms with a lower cardinality bound of 1 million, how can we scan a set of strings against this search set without exhaustively scanning for every search term in the string set while preserving lemmas on the search set? How can we do this phonetically? How can we do this probabilistically in a weighted n-space?"
> You really, really dislike Apple. As evidence for that, I submit the fact that you (a) have never agreed with any pro-Apple comment here, (b) said you have an irrational dislike for the platform, (c) haven't used it enough to make sense in an argument about how app focus works on OS X, and (d) tried to win an argument about how overpriced Apple hardware is by linking to what appears to be the worst-reviewed input device on NewEgg.
I really really dislike Apple's pricing scheme and worse yet Apple fanboys who can inject even the most insane irrationality into any topic that even mentions fruit. For example, our current "discussion" centers around pretty basic business decisions, for which your reply is first disagreement, then agreement but without agreeing with my principle point just to be contrary, while simultaneously insulting me all because I said something to the effect of "Apple can't make the margins work". I think it's the word can't associated with Apple that got you riled up -- I dunno.
Specific responses:
a) I have said and agreed with some things Pro-Apple where I see it. Reread my posts in detail. If you want some more, Apple makes a reasonably good OS, writes reasonably good software. It's nothing particularly special, but it's at least modern and up-to-date.
b) I do irrationally dislike the platform, you'll get no argument from me.
c) I used 'em off and on since at least the late 80's. But not terribly hardcore or for any extended length of time. My pretty much unused MacBook Pro goes down in personal history as one of the worst wastes of money I've ever managed to throw away.
d) And then I linked to one of the highest rated input devices on NewEgg and it was still 50% below the cost of the comparable Apple offering. And still nobody could provide any rational statement why Apple's kb/mouse combo was worth $100 other than vague hand waving about being more "productive" or "feeling better about yourself" or some other touchy-feely nonsense. Which is a small scale exemplar of the irrationality that pervades the entire platform from top to bottom...correction, at the bottom. What Apple is doing at the top is perfectly rational from a business perspective. They've managed to finally crack the nut on two things:
1) How to sell absolutely vanilla PC hardware at high margins - something no other maker does effectively, it's the holy grail of the modern computer business.
2) How to get people to use their feelings in a consumer purchase rather than their brains. So people will shell out 20-50% above cost to buy said vanilla PC hardware because it runs that one killer app you can't get on a Windows computer, Steve Jobs' love.
>Your dislike for Apple currently constitutes the majority of all your comment-words on HN.
Good. When the entire Apple ecosystem stops being majority filled with prete...
Thanks for the writeup. I've decided not to take you seriously. You might consider jumping back to the top of this comment thread, rereading my comment, and taking my word for it.
I actually made an account due to this thread after lurking for a while. I think elblanco raised some very interesting points from a business perspective that you didn't counter.
He was kind of a jerk about it. But two salient questions remain:
1) Why doesn't Apple have a netbook offering? "Because they don't" isn't really a good answer. That space is booming and still evolving right now. Apple could come in and define it for the entire marketplace.
2) Since Apple doesn't have one, why would they go through the trouble of shutting down atom based netbooks? Wouldn't this jeopardize future uses for an atom in a lower-end device like the Mac Mini?
I don't think you answered either question in your original comment:
"Whether or not this move is an intentional swipe at the Hackintosh trend, I'm rooting for Apple here:
(1) Just from a pure CS perspective, the Hackintoshers seem awfully smug, and I'd like to see them get knocked around by Apple for awhile. In a theoretic sense, it's far from established that Apple can't lock clones out. We have no idea what tricks they might come up with to reject non-Apple gear, and I for one really want to see what they are. When Microsoft did this to the Xbox and X360, we got some incredible systems research out of people like Bunny Huang and the MIT hackers.
(2) Just on general principles, if you don't have a monopoly and you aren't specially regulated, you clearly should be able to sell whatever combination of hardware and software you want to. Other people don't have the right to force you to sell some random configuration of your stuff. It's a really skeevy kind of Geek Exceptionalism that says "there's no GOOD reason why OS X shouldn't run on my Netbook, so you can't stop me"."
So I'm not sure what word anybody is supposed to take exactly.
(1) Because introducing a product at the netbook price point would cannibalize sales that would go to the lowest-cost Macbook, and torpedo their profitability.
(2) Because allowing clones forces Apple to compete with other hardware vendors, and Apple sells a unified hardware/software product, and there is nothing in law or standard business principle that allows us to dictate to Apple how they package their products.
I don't know what your previous (1) has to do with this (1) ;) But I agree. I think elblanco agrees with you also, only he/she managed to give a reason. I've reread this thread a few times and still can't figure out why you two seem to be disagreeing over agreeing on this.
(2) Apple closed the loop on this when they killed off their clone market. Done right, hardware sales can bring in more money than pure software sales. Allow me to be contrary on one point. "and there is nothing in law or standard business principle that allows us to dictate to Apple how they package their products". Supply and demand would seem to dictate that you should supply what the consumers demand. Apple's done an effective job at controlling/predicting/creating what their consumers demand (for example, I didn't even think about a mult-touch mouse before, now I'm drooling in anticipation of getting one). But they seem to have gone a bit off-kilter here w/r to ultra-small notebooks. The 13" Macbook is huge compared to the 10" netbooks I see at Costco. If it weren't for their ridiculous battery life, I could see trading in my Macbook for a netbook since that's a hugely compelling feature for me.
First, you both are being annoying about the whole thing. From the sounds of it you are both in agreement. tptacek and you are just coming at the same solution from different directions. But it's clear that HN is full of brilliant people both in technology and business.
Second and OT. I'm interested in anything you can share regarding
"given a set of a large number of search terms with a lower cardinality bound of 1 million, how can we scan a set of strings against this search set without exhaustively scanning for every search term in the string set while preserving lemmas on the search set? How can we do this phonetically? How can we do this probabilistically in a weighted n-space?"
It sounds like this maps to a particular problem set I'm working on now. Any papers? We've looked into PLSs, numeric hash buckets, independent dispatch of search tests across large distributed systems, etc. All are either no better than a linear exhaustive search in the worst case, too network intensive, too memory intensive or too processor intensive for the applications we're interested in.
We're dealing with an issue where we have a large corpus of documents to search, and a very large number of search terms to search against this corpus. For example, say you had every comment ever posted in HN and you wanted to search them for every city/state/village/town/etc. The set of places has a cardinality that is very large, and the set of documents to search is also very large.
So to do a linear scan (naive search) of a single source document for each search term gives you some terrible O(n^2) or some such. You can try different techniques like:
1) Turn the document into a n-gram lex-trie where n is some value from 1 to some other single digit n. This effectively compresses all the word combinations down to some very fast per-character search usually a O(logn) I think (or better).
2) Tokenize the document into an overlapping n-gram hash which is basically the same as 1, but you eat up less memory if you pre-compute and keep the document hash-sets someplace else (like in a relational dB) but then you get very I/O bound on searches against the hashsets particularly in worst cases with lots of collisions. Plus this makes adding/removing documents more complicated for our purposes since we already compute various indexes and things for other purposes. Keeping half a dozen different kind of indexes really does start to eat up disk space after a while.
3) We thought about compiling the search list down into a lex-trie, doing the same with the documents, and using some kind of tree comparator algorithm to trim the searchterm lex-trie down, but that would be HUGE in memory usage, and driving it off of disk would probably turn us onto non-trie solutions like b+ trees or b* trees so we can page out the sub tree parts without too much performance hit, but at that point we may as well just be using indexed hash sets and the comparator algorithms get all funky since bx trees do all that balancing business, their morphology is mutable.
4) The best solution we've come up with so far is to set n to our maximum search term token length. Tokenize the document into an overlapping set of n-grams (New York City becomes New, New York, New York City, York, York City, City, etc.). We also have taken the search list and turned it into a big indexed hash, in one test we just shoved it all into a SQLite table (brilliant software). Each document token is simply searched against the table. If we get a result, it's good, if not, it's not a search term. It basically searches the document against the search set, inverting the problem.
So far it's hideously fast and all of our tests for the above 4 cases were single threaded. Once we multithread out the algorithm it should become even faster. Right now in our test C++ code, we run about 1/10 of a second per document (avg 1k/doc) on a search set of 30million terms. We also haven't developed our metrics for when a search list is "long enough" for this kind of thing to kick in vs. the naive search.
Sure you can index the documents down and just do a variation of the naive search, that's what we were advised to do, but it still reduces down to doing 30 million searches/document. Over a corpus of 10 million documents, that's gonna take a while even if a single term search against the index takes 1/100 of a second.
You are right, Dell used to give out restore disks that locked to Dell hardware. They'd even give an appropriate error on non-Dell hardware. I don't think anybody cared to subvert it since it as usually COTS software they just packaged up.
But I think the exception to Apple's behavior is that there are large numbers of customers who would be more than happy to fork over another wad of cash for an Apple branded netbook (in addition to their existing systems) and Apple has (yet again) failed to listen to their consumer.
So, companies are free to make their own products up, but only as long as there isn't another product that may be in demand, in which case, they should be forced to spend time developing said product based on a hunch of someone who isn't familiar with intimate details of Apple's business?
The problem is that not only is Apple saying "we can't be bothered with this netbook thing right now" but they are saying it with a middle finger, fully extended, at their customers. They've gone and put themselves out, expended effort, to ensure their users can't operate as they want to.
Apple is a company who's goal is to make lots of money. If they want to shun one area and focus on other areas instead — perhaps because one area isn't as profitable as another area — why shouldn't they be able to? To Apple, their users are the people who buy their hardware. If you buy a Dell netbook, download an osx86 image off of the Internet and then install it, you're not an Apple users.
So really it's "give us your money for our overpriced commodity hardware and we don't care what you think or actually want, you'll think and want what we tell you to, how dare you try and step outside of our carefully crafted ecosystem"
So its a business. Whats wrong with that? If you disagree with their policies, dont use their products. Pirating it and using it isn't "sticking it to the man" somehow.
>If you buy a Dell netbook, download an osx86 image off of the Internet and then install it, you're not an Apple users.
Precisely. There aren't many non-apple users (classifying them as people who already own an Apple system, but want the improved portability the netbook formfactor affords) who are interesting in taking the time or energy to hackintosh their netbook. These people are saying, as loud as they can "Apple! We love your platform, make some hardware like a netbook and we will buy it! For goodness sakes, look at all the trouble we're going through to simulate it!"
Apple doesn't even have to R&D the netbook formfactor. They don't have to work with chip vendors to come up with lowpower chips and chipsets, or downgraded low power GPUs. They literally have to do nothing except get Jonny Ive to cook up a unibody case and put OSX on them. Charge $400 instead of $350 and they have and Apple netbook.
But Apple can't find the margins in the product line and the equation means that they have no offering for this huge hole in their lineup.
I'm trying as hard as I can to figure out what your point is. Apple isn't selling this stuff because they've decided not to. No matter how big you think this "hole" is and what your "equation" says, they get to pick what their product line is, not you.
So in your world, Apple has a big decision dartboard in the board room, and Steve goes there everyday and asks "should we sell a netbook?". The darts so far have landed on "No" or "Play Golf".
"Apple decided not to sell them." is not a reason, it's an effect of a long line of decision making. The first part of your statement is missing. "Netbooks _____, so Apple decided not to sell them". Fill in the blank with something that makes business sense and you'll probably be not too far off the mark. You have offered absolutely 0 to the analysis of why Apple is not in this space.
My point, since you have failed to deduce it, is that I think Apple couldn't make their margin goals on that product line (netbooks). They sell for between $300-400. Apple's absolutely bottom of the barrel offering is $500 with no peripherals whatsoever. Margins on netbooks are pitiful, probably close to break even. Apple wants to sell commodity hardware at 20% markup, they can't do that in the netbook space. Common, this is Business and Products 101.
I can see no other rational business reason not to get into that space. There may be one, but I don't see it. You are certainly not offering a compelling analysis.
It introduces a product gap that their analysis should have spotted but they were willing to chance. The effect of that product gap is that something filled the hole via consumer demand and that was either:
a) People bought vanilla netbooks and "suffered" with XP.
b) People bought netbooks and turned them into hackintoshes.
Either way, Apple didn't realize revenue from these purchases. Smart business would have tried to capitalize on this form factor, which is why every major manufacturer other than Apple has some kind of netbook offering. My claim is that this is an oversight on the part of Apple. Sure they wouldn't have realized revenue from these sales, but they would have kept their consumers "in the fold" since netbooks are usually a second purchase.
Apple's response so far has not been to fill the hole in the product line with a product (even an overpriced one), but by crippling their software.
It's a scorched earth policy, if they can't have the consumer's money, nobody can.
But Apple can't find the margins in the product line and the equation means that they have no offering for this huge hole in their lineup.
It won't have a good profit margin. Why should Apple waste time on it? They have many other products that are selling incredibly well (with much higher profit margins). It seems like Apple wants to work on those products instead.
Also, its not very good form to insult someone in a debate. It doesn't help further your point, and indicates that you don't have any additional items to add that will help further the discussion. And good discussion is what a lot of people come to HN for, not simply the news.
Seriously, considering that my longer, and more thoughtful reply was rather trollishly shot-down as stupid and overly long, with no counter analysis provided by the complainant, I think I restrained myself rather well.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadIt's great to spend money on something that you enjoy!
More money to spend on my family.
(Fortunately, Linux doesn't have this problem. It supports Atom out of the box.)
ok,ok there's a gap for a 9-10" macbook. They should make one.
Which are huge differences. Sure, I've had an ssh client on my phone for about six years now (Sidekick II first, and now a G1), but I can't do work on my phone, even though it has a reasonable keyboard for such a small device. But, my Mini 9 is actually a pretty reasonable device for most of the work I do, up to and including development (though its obvious sweet spot is email and forums and such, which I do a lot of since support is a huge part of my business; and using the phone would be way too slow). I wouldn't consider it a replacement for the big 15" lappy or my desktop machine for serious development or graphics work or whatever, but when I am travelling light, it's exactly the right size and form-factor.
Guys, it's really, really not that difficult. Apple offers you a combination hardware/software package. They design the software to work brilliantly with the hardware they design, and they work very hard to make sure your experience is the best imaginable. That's why they pair the two together. And Apple doesn't want you using their software on hardware it wasn't designed for, because they want to make sure you get their full experience. They're designers. They win international awards for their computers. They want you to get their product, not a hybrid of half of their idea with half of somebody else's cheap refuse.
If you don't use OS X, you don't miss out on that much. It's not like you need OS X to live, and Apple's depriving you of something by asking you use their computer. If you don't want a Mac, then use Linux or Windows. If you want Apple's product, buy Apple's product, not a cheap third-rate knockoff.
In return, when you buy a high-end Mac, you get a superb, pleasurable experience. For as low as, what, six hundred dollars now?, you get a beautiful piece of hardware that does what you want it to splendidly, has the best third-party ecosystem I've ever come across, and doesn't lose you cred among any fashionistas you might know, plus it runs on Unix so you can tinker away with it however you see it. It's a very nice machine and millions of man-hours were spent making it, so perhaps it's worth your saving up a little money to purchase the full package. I and many other Mac owners can testify that we are very happy with our buy and may buy another one in the distant future.
I know the line of thought is that computers are just tools to get a job done, but that's like saying all a chair has to be is a plank of wood to get your ass on. There are planks of wood, and then there are chairs that lots of thought has gone into to make you as happy as you can be. We pay more for those chairs because while we don't need it to live, it makes our lives a little better. That's how Mac OS X's been made, and I don't think it's ridiculous to ask that we honor its maker's wishes, or at the very least, not bitch when the maker puts a little effort into ensuring you do it their way.
And that's precisely why my Mac ended up being my "play" computer. It runs iTunes and syncs my iPod like nothing else can.
And, BTW, when I updated my iPod, one of my _cables_ (yes - a cable) stopped working because it's "not supported". What evil mind besides Apple's would consider DRM-cripple cables?
No... Macs are pleasing, but Apple doesn't aim to please it's clients above anything else. It strikes a balance between profit and an as-abusive-as-possible relationship with its customers.
I can't figure out why hackintoshing has such a bad name in the hacking community. I would imagine that hacking, the art of using things in clever and unintended ways, would be a great fit with osx86.
Plus the osx86 guys are some of the smartest I know. The good people contribute to Darwin and the other core Apple projects and their code ends up in mainline os x. Hackintosh users are some of the most prolific driver writers and help get tons of USB drivers written that are useful to macs and osx86 machines alike.
There's something really satisfying about building a mac, the same way there's something satisfying about building a linux or a windows box. Apple's DRM just makes it more fun.
I really don't understand the hate.
Could you link to some commits on Macosforge that were based on patches by people from osx86? This is the first I'm hearing of this.
Hackintosh users are some of the most prolific driver writers and help get tons of USB drivers written that are useful to macs and osx86 machines alike.
Last time I looked at osx86 (admittedly, years ago, long before Leopard was released), there weren't any custom kexts written by the community, just plists from Apple that were edited. Can you link to some custom kext's that have risen from osx86?
There are cases that I'm aware of, but I think several Apple employees would fear retaliation if I outed them here :-)
It's too bad that the XNU development process is totally closed (even if the code is OSS), as that's where you see so much of the osx86 activity. In particular, go look at voodooxnu, xnu-dev, etc. These are all drop-in replacement kernels for mach_kernel, run by hackintoshers, that accept patches from contributors. I believe voodoo will be the default kernel for the next PureDarwin (the new OpenDarwin) release.
> Can you link to some custom kext's that have risen from osx86?
http://code.google.com/p/voodoohda/ http://code.google.com/p/voodoo-power/
It sounds like none of these modifications are sent back to Apple. Its great that they can fork projects - that much, anyone can do. The original claim was that osx86 hackers had contributed code to Apple, that was now in Darwin and is used in shipping OS's. Thats far more interesting then any modification that's made on a fork.
And of the two kext's you linked to, they both look to be dead in development, with more then a few major bugs each. Thats more of a hinderance than a help for your argument, really.
I use both of those drivers daily on three different machines. I have yet to experience a single bug on my hardware. For bleeding-edge chipsets, YMMV.
As for speed of development, I generally install drivers (as opposed to userland software) once and forget about it unless there's a problem. Given that I have no problems, I'm quite satisfied.
It is difficult to switch to Apple hardware, but switching away is as easy as installing Windows on a Mac.
No it isn't. It's no different than getting a new computer, and then putting Windows on it. I think you meant OSX, not 'Apple hardware.'
I don't think macs would be anywhere near as popular as they are today if this wasn't the case. I would not be using one now if it wasn't 'unixy'.
And mind you they once did A/UX...
Were NeXT based on VMS, Amiga, TOS, MP/M or anything like it, that would be OSXs base.
His comparisons between the way these concepts were instantiated in an nix and in other OSs were particularly good (and scathing).
That being said, it is a pity that there aren't still a dozen or so major OSes out there, each coming from a completely different approach, oh the days when an Amiga or a BeBox were interesting consumer choices. You can still find lots of minor OS variants around, but they are very small communities and it's really all boiled down to a very small and "boring" handful.
Additionally, most new OS approaches suffer from a distinct lack of software. And slowly but surely we find the inevitable creep of software Ports into new OSs, using bringing *nix like infrastructure in with them.
Do you also bemoan linksys for releasing firmware updates that only work with linksys products and not others?
If you only support one platform, you just need to make sure that it works on that platform. People that try to run it on another platform are on their own if it breaks something/corrupts their data/etc just because you didn't do some sanity check somewhere. Putting that sanity check in is work on top of supporting your target platform (because your target platform will already be 'sane' by definition).
[Note: I'm just arguing against axod's sanity checks surprise, not necessarily anything to do with the article]
Is there a trick an original Intel Core Duo will do that an Atom won't? Snow Leopard can't be 64-bit only because that would make it incompatible with the first x86 Macs.
Jokes out of the way - they did just release a new line of incredible and ground breaking iMacs, Macbooks, etc. All along with the news of their most profitable quarterly earnings, and the general disdain for Windows 7.
I wouldn't be surprised if the mind-flow went like this for consumers:
"Wow I want one of those new macs!" "Damn those are expensive..." "But I don't want a windows machine..." "I'll get a netbook, and then hackintosh it, I'll save money, get the experience I want, AND save 15% or more on my car insurance!"
Apple could have seen something like this happening on a larger scale and simply "tweaked" the OS with the latest update to prevent mass pirating.
That said, that mind flow wouldn't be the TYPICAL one, it could result from people still wanting Osx on a cheaper machine and doing a google search for "mac netbook" or "osx netbook". Your typical "dumb" consumer may not know the difference, if that was the argument.
Those searches could certainly turn up pages to hachintosh netbooks.
EDIT: Also: it seems to me that if Apple really intended to put a dent in the Hackintosh movement, they'd do something far more drastic than make things slightly inconvenient for netbook owners with a point release.
I didn't say this incident is the result of incompetence, I am saying their developers have illustrated a lack of competence in the past. Breaking with third party fonts installed. Breaking iPhone updates that require the use of another computer to fix a broken patch. The list goes on and on.
Bringing up things which frankly have absolutely nothing to do with what we're currently talking about doesn't aid your argument.
In what way does Apple lock you in? If you manage to switch to Apple, which is the more difficult task since you clearly have to buy their hardware and can't re-use what you already have, then switching away is as simple as installing Linux or Windows on the Apple hardware.
> I didn't say this incident is the result of incompetence, I am saying their developers have illustrated a lack of competence in the past. Breaking with third party fonts installed. Breaking iPhone updates that require the use of another computer to fix a broken patch. The list goes on and on.
No, you didn't say that, you are saying that now.
If the product in question is a netbook form factor. Apple does not produce this type of product however they do no impede a customer's ability to buy one from another vendor. You can walk into BestBuy and get one in about 15 minutes. Apple doesn't have a bunch of thugs wearing two layers of brightly colored polo shirts there to stop you by taking your credit card and forcing you to buy a MacBook instead. Additionally Apple offers software for Windows to interoperate with their services: iTunes for iPods/iPhones and iTunes Store and also a MobileMe control panel. They also offer QuickTime & Safari for Windows.
If you want to use Apple's operating system then you have to buy an Apple computer. If that prevents you from buying the type of machine you want I would seriously reconsider using Apple's operating system in the first place. Other companies such as Microsoft have a business model of selling software so they don't care what hardware you buy. Apple makes it quite easy to install Windows on a Mac so they don't lock you into using OSX on their hardware. Apple is a hardware company. Your example of vendor lock-in would be more along the lines of going to an Dell Store (I know they don't exist, play along) and demanding they sell you an Apple computer instead.
Therefore, inhibiting a consumer's ability to run that product, which is OSX as much as it is a physical device, is vendor lock-in. It is vendor lockin, because they are saying, "To run our product, OSX, you must buy Mac Hardware."
And before you argue that OSX is not a product, they do in fact sell OSX: http://store.apple.com/us/search?find=osx
"requires a Mac with an Intel processor."
Does the software work on PC? Sort of, but it's unsupported. Should they be forced to support it? Probably not, because it may heavily impact their business model, bottom line, and stability. What if they don't want the no-name-brand manufacturer to make customers think their product (OSX) sucks?
The fact is that Microsoft locks in customers by mere quantity. OSX has prestige and quality, but it requires the customer to acknowledge they don't have a genuine choice in hardware vendors unless they want to manipulate it into working (although I do think Apple's license is dumb with regard to saying it can't be (pre)installed on a PC).
Vendor lockin, whether intentional, or simply because the vendor doesn't care to make their products work with others, or whatever, doesn't change the vendor lockin.
Thus, you're locked in. Thus, vendor lock-in. It's pretty cut and dry really.
Apple has an HFS+ implementation for Windows included in their BootCamp package. There are various utilities for Windows that can also access HFS+ volumes in userspace including MacDrive, TransMac and HFS Explorer. Additionally Linux supports HFS+ and Apple's own HFS+ implementation is open source. (you could actually boot Darwin on any PC and access the data that way) Anyway..
All closed source software is inherently vendor locked. If that's the point you're trying to make I agree. It seems we were talking about how a company chooses to sell their closed source software which is a different issue. For example, if I had all my data on an NTFS formatted drive I would need a Windows computer to read that data (ignoring for now there are other ways of doing this via third party tools -- but none of them are developed or supported by Microsoft) My choice is HP, Dell, Acer, etc but I'm still vendor locked to Microsoft. Same deal. Microsoft abstracts their vendor lock away from hardware in the PC world -- in other areas such as the Zune, Xbox 360 they also include hardware. Open source is the only way to be free from vendor lock for people who are concerned about it. For the most part there are simple work arounds in the closed source world so it's not usually a major problem. (which is why most people don't care I think)
Nothing wrong with it, but it is what it is.
Excerpt from Snow Leopard license: ... you are granted a limited non-exclusive license to install, use and run (1) copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-branded computer at a time. You agree not to install, use or run the Apple Software on any non-Apple-branded computer, or to enable others to do so. This license does not allow the Apple Software to exist on more than one computer at a time, ...
(1) Just from a pure CS perspective, the Hackintoshers seem awfully smug, and I'd like to see them get knocked around by Apple for awhile. In a theoretic sense, it's far from established that Apple can't lock clones out. We have no idea what tricks they might come up with to reject non-Apple gear, and I for one really want to see what they are. When Microsoft did this to the Xbox and X360, we got some incredible systems research out of people like Bunny Huang and the MIT hackers.
(2) Just on general principles, if you don't have a monopoly and you aren't specially regulated, you clearly should be able to sell whatever combination of hardware and software you want to. Other people don't have the right to force you to sell some random configuration of your stuff. It's a really skeevy kind of Geek Exceptionalism that says "there's no GOOD reason why OS X shouldn't run on my Netbook, so you can't stop me".
2) true.
But I think the exception to Apple's behavior is that there are large numbers of customers who would be more than happy to fork over another wad of cash for an Apple branded netbook (in addition to their existing systems) and Apple has (yet again) failed to listen to their consumer.
That's fine, Apple probably can't make the numbers work to preserve some margin figure they want to maintain. All Apple demonstrates by this is that consumer feedback is not as much a part of their development process as most people seem to think (or hope) it is.
The problem is that not only is Apple saying "we can't be bothered with this netbook thing right now" but they are saying it with a middle finger, fully extended, at their customers. They've gone and put themselves out, expended effort, to ensure their users can't operate as they want to.
So really it's "give us your money for our overpriced commodity hardware and we don't care what you think or actually want, you'll think and want what we tell you to, how dare you try and step outside of our carefully crafted ecosystem"
Remember, the goal of "software protection" (be it DRM, platform locks, or anticheating software) isn't to make it impossible to break the system; it's to make it (a) impossible to do it cost-effectively, and (b) impossible to do it permanently.
The rest of your argument, with the "middle fingers" and whatnot, I don't care. Again: companies should be able to sell whatever they want, modulo antitrust and regs.
Take a Macintosh, open it. Inspect using the novel technique of "looking".
Not to be glib, but when Apple decided to ditch other platforms for Intel-styled chips, they bought into the entire R&D work of their principle competitors. Back in the day with the 680x0 Macs and the PowerPC Macs, even things like RAM and video-cards weren't interchangeable between the platforms (due to endian-issues and timing issues etc.). The early 3d cards were a prime example of having to buy Apple branded hardware (or co-developed in partnership) for Apple branded computers. So for example, if you wanted to upgrade your Mac with a better video card, you couldn't run over and buy the $199 Nvidia card that 90% of the market could buy. You had to buy the "Made for Macintosh" Nvidia card at the 20% markup.
What Apple bought when going Intel was expertise in a vast marketplace of hardware manufacturers and R&D departments, doing Apple's work effectively for them. So what's in an Apple branded case? Probably some x-ATX board, the standard combination of chipset chips from whoever Apple could purchase from cheapest, a perfectly stock Intel chip and perfectly stock memory. With PCI-E ports with perfectly stock video cards (or video on the mobo, like value PC builders go with). If you are careful you might notice Apple uses a different boot system that's equivalent to the traditional BIOS (and is the direction some PC systems have already gone as well).
What Apple also bought when adopting an open architecture was that unfortunately, it makes locking it down really really hard. They came to the same party as everybody else, but they don't like the music. Too bad.
If Apple wants to sell a closed architecture, then that's what they should sell. But they decided to adopt an architecture that's designed not to be locked down, then are trying to lock it down after the fact.
So tptacek, enlighten us, what's the principle hardware differences between a run-of-the-mill desktop Mac and a run-of-the-mill desktop dell?
Protip: if you use the acronym "DRM" in your response you loose because you obviously don't understand what "DRM" means.
* I have no idea what your technical expertise is, because you're anonymous, haven't filled out your profile, and have never posted a technical comment here. You have "a lead developer" and an ex CTO that screwed your company, so I assume you (a) didn't found that company and (b) don't lead a dev team. Once you typed the letters C++.
* You really, really dislike Apple. As evidence for that, I submit the fact that you (a) have never agreed with any pro-Apple comment here, (b) said you have an irrational dislike for the platform, (c) haven't used it enough to make sense in an argument about how app focus works on OS X, and (d) tried to win an argument about how overpriced Apple hardware is by linking to what appears to be the worst-reviewed input device on NewEgg.
* Your dislike for Apple currently constitutes the majority of all your comment-words on HN.
I have no problem arguing with you on how effective software protection could or couldn't be on a standardized ISA with a tiny number of valid build configurations, or how microarchitectural profiling works, or what the parameters are for a "win" for Apple in this cat-and-mouse game are.
I fully accept that you might win that argument; I feel comfortable with my position, though, with some fair amount of practical experience to back it. But whatever.
I'm simply not going to do that until you tell me who you are and why I should take you at all seriously. Otherwise, I'm just going to remember you as someone never to talk to here.
Correct, correct and correct. I did a fair amount of hacking about as a computational linguist in my younger years. I haven't run into many others who have. So I'd suspect that we'd talk past each other in any technical conversation. Only one correction, I co-lead my company's dev team, usually providing front-end design work, domain expertise and providing pithy input on algorithmic analysis for some of the more problematic issues that regular coding won't teach. Like, "should I recursively crawl an unweighted digraph to find up-to n-length paths between disjoint and incomplete sets of nodes?" or "how should I deal with a sparse matrix when computing the steady state values of an Eigenvector on a graph with an uncertain morphology?" or my recent fav "given a set of a large number of search terms with a lower cardinality bound of 1 million, how can we scan a set of strings against this search set without exhaustively scanning for every search term in the string set while preserving lemmas on the search set? How can we do this phonetically? How can we do this probabilistically in a weighted n-space?"
> You really, really dislike Apple. As evidence for that, I submit the fact that you (a) have never agreed with any pro-Apple comment here, (b) said you have an irrational dislike for the platform, (c) haven't used it enough to make sense in an argument about how app focus works on OS X, and (d) tried to win an argument about how overpriced Apple hardware is by linking to what appears to be the worst-reviewed input device on NewEgg.
I really really dislike Apple's pricing scheme and worse yet Apple fanboys who can inject even the most insane irrationality into any topic that even mentions fruit. For example, our current "discussion" centers around pretty basic business decisions, for which your reply is first disagreement, then agreement but without agreeing with my principle point just to be contrary, while simultaneously insulting me all because I said something to the effect of "Apple can't make the margins work". I think it's the word can't associated with Apple that got you riled up -- I dunno.
Specific responses: a) I have said and agreed with some things Pro-Apple where I see it. Reread my posts in detail. If you want some more, Apple makes a reasonably good OS, writes reasonably good software. It's nothing particularly special, but it's at least modern and up-to-date.
b) I do irrationally dislike the platform, you'll get no argument from me.
c) I used 'em off and on since at least the late 80's. But not terribly hardcore or for any extended length of time. My pretty much unused MacBook Pro goes down in personal history as one of the worst wastes of money I've ever managed to throw away.
d) And then I linked to one of the highest rated input devices on NewEgg and it was still 50% below the cost of the comparable Apple offering. And still nobody could provide any rational statement why Apple's kb/mouse combo was worth $100 other than vague hand waving about being more "productive" or "feeling better about yourself" or some other touchy-feely nonsense. Which is a small scale exemplar of the irrationality that pervades the entire platform from top to bottom...correction, at the bottom. What Apple is doing at the top is perfectly rational from a business perspective. They've managed to finally crack the nut on two things: 1) How to sell absolutely vanilla PC hardware at high margins - something no other maker does effectively, it's the holy grail of the modern computer business. 2) How to get people to use their feelings in a consumer purchase rather than their brains. So people will shell out 20-50% above cost to buy said vanilla PC hardware because it runs that one killer app you can't get on a Windows computer, Steve Jobs' love.
>Your dislike for Apple currently constitutes the majority of all your comment-words on HN.
Good. When the entire Apple ecosystem stops being majority filled with prete...
He was kind of a jerk about it. But two salient questions remain:
1) Why doesn't Apple have a netbook offering? "Because they don't" isn't really a good answer. That space is booming and still evolving right now. Apple could come in and define it for the entire marketplace. 2) Since Apple doesn't have one, why would they go through the trouble of shutting down atom based netbooks? Wouldn't this jeopardize future uses for an atom in a lower-end device like the Mac Mini?
I don't think you answered either question in your original comment: "Whether or not this move is an intentional swipe at the Hackintosh trend, I'm rooting for Apple here:
(1) Just from a pure CS perspective, the Hackintoshers seem awfully smug, and I'd like to see them get knocked around by Apple for awhile. In a theoretic sense, it's far from established that Apple can't lock clones out. We have no idea what tricks they might come up with to reject non-Apple gear, and I for one really want to see what they are. When Microsoft did this to the Xbox and X360, we got some incredible systems research out of people like Bunny Huang and the MIT hackers.
(2) Just on general principles, if you don't have a monopoly and you aren't specially regulated, you clearly should be able to sell whatever combination of hardware and software you want to. Other people don't have the right to force you to sell some random configuration of your stuff. It's a really skeevy kind of Geek Exceptionalism that says "there's no GOOD reason why OS X shouldn't run on my Netbook, so you can't stop me"."
So I'm not sure what word anybody is supposed to take exactly.
(2) Because allowing clones forces Apple to compete with other hardware vendors, and Apple sells a unified hardware/software product, and there is nothing in law or standard business principle that allows us to dictate to Apple how they package their products.
(2) Apple closed the loop on this when they killed off their clone market. Done right, hardware sales can bring in more money than pure software sales. Allow me to be contrary on one point. "and there is nothing in law or standard business principle that allows us to dictate to Apple how they package their products". Supply and demand would seem to dictate that you should supply what the consumers demand. Apple's done an effective job at controlling/predicting/creating what their consumers demand (for example, I didn't even think about a mult-touch mouse before, now I'm drooling in anticipation of getting one). But they seem to have gone a bit off-kilter here w/r to ultra-small notebooks. The 13" Macbook is huge compared to the 10" netbooks I see at Costco. If it weren't for their ridiculous battery life, I could see trading in my Macbook for a netbook since that's a hugely compelling feature for me.
Second and OT. I'm interested in anything you can share regarding "given a set of a large number of search terms with a lower cardinality bound of 1 million, how can we scan a set of strings against this search set without exhaustively scanning for every search term in the string set while preserving lemmas on the search set? How can we do this phonetically? How can we do this probabilistically in a weighted n-space?"
It sounds like this maps to a particular problem set I'm working on now. Any papers? We've looked into PLSs, numeric hash buckets, independent dispatch of search tests across large distributed systems, etc. All are either no better than a linear exhaustive search in the worst case, too network intensive, too memory intensive or too processor intensive for the applications we're interested in.
So to do a linear scan (naive search) of a single source document for each search term gives you some terrible O(n^2) or some such. You can try different techniques like:
1) Turn the document into a n-gram lex-trie where n is some value from 1 to some other single digit n. This effectively compresses all the word combinations down to some very fast per-character search usually a O(logn) I think (or better).
2) Tokenize the document into an overlapping n-gram hash which is basically the same as 1, but you eat up less memory if you pre-compute and keep the document hash-sets someplace else (like in a relational dB) but then you get very I/O bound on searches against the hashsets particularly in worst cases with lots of collisions. Plus this makes adding/removing documents more complicated for our purposes since we already compute various indexes and things for other purposes. Keeping half a dozen different kind of indexes really does start to eat up disk space after a while.
3) We thought about compiling the search list down into a lex-trie, doing the same with the documents, and using some kind of tree comparator algorithm to trim the searchterm lex-trie down, but that would be HUGE in memory usage, and driving it off of disk would probably turn us onto non-trie solutions like b+ trees or b* trees so we can page out the sub tree parts without too much performance hit, but at that point we may as well just be using indexed hash sets and the comparator algorithms get all funky since bx trees do all that balancing business, their morphology is mutable.
4) The best solution we've come up with so far is to set n to our maximum search term token length. Tokenize the document into an overlapping set of n-grams (New York City becomes New, New York, New York City, York, York City, City, etc.). We also have taken the search list and turned it into a big indexed hash, in one test we just shoved it all into a SQLite table (brilliant software). Each document token is simply searched against the table. If we get a result, it's good, if not, it's not a search term. It basically searches the document against the search set, inverting the problem.
So far it's hideously fast and all of our tests for the above 4 cases were single threaded. Once we multithread out the algorithm it should become even faster. Right now in our test C++ code, we run about 1/10 of a second per document (avg 1k/doc) on a search set of 30million terms. We also haven't developed our metrics for when a search list is "long enough" for this kind of thing to kick in vs. the naive search.
Sure you can index the documents down and just do a variation of the naive search, that's what we were advised to do, but it still reduces down to doing 30 million searches/document. Over a corpus of 10 million documents, that's gonna take a while even if a single term search against the index takes 1/100 of a second.
I'm actually curious about this as well. I would have gone the fail route and said "some form of DRM in the EFI".
So, companies are free to make their own products up, but only as long as there isn't another product that may be in demand, in which case, they should be forced to spend time developing said product based on a hunch of someone who isn't familiar with intimate details of Apple's business?
The problem is that not only is Apple saying "we can't be bothered with this netbook thing right now" but they are saying it with a middle finger, fully extended, at their customers. They've gone and put themselves out, expended effort, to ensure their users can't operate as they want to.
Apple is a company who's goal is to make lots of money. If they want to shun one area and focus on other areas instead — perhaps because one area isn't as profitable as another area — why shouldn't they be able to? To Apple, their users are the people who buy their hardware. If you buy a Dell netbook, download an osx86 image off of the Internet and then install it, you're not an Apple users.
So really it's "give us your money for our overpriced commodity hardware and we don't care what you think or actually want, you'll think and want what we tell you to, how dare you try and step outside of our carefully crafted ecosystem"
So its a business. Whats wrong with that? If you disagree with their policies, dont use their products. Pirating it and using it isn't "sticking it to the man" somehow.
Precisely. There aren't many non-apple users (classifying them as people who already own an Apple system, but want the improved portability the netbook formfactor affords) who are interesting in taking the time or energy to hackintosh their netbook. These people are saying, as loud as they can "Apple! We love your platform, make some hardware like a netbook and we will buy it! For goodness sakes, look at all the trouble we're going through to simulate it!"
Apple doesn't even have to R&D the netbook formfactor. They don't have to work with chip vendors to come up with lowpower chips and chipsets, or downgraded low power GPUs. They literally have to do nothing except get Jonny Ive to cook up a unibody case and put OSX on them. Charge $400 instead of $350 and they have and Apple netbook.
But Apple can't find the margins in the product line and the equation means that they have no offering for this huge hole in their lineup.
http://www.s2999.com/images/dartboard_decision_maker.jpg
"Apple decided not to sell them." is not a reason, it's an effect of a long line of decision making. The first part of your statement is missing. "Netbooks _____, so Apple decided not to sell them". Fill in the blank with something that makes business sense and you'll probably be not too far off the mark. You have offered absolutely 0 to the analysis of why Apple is not in this space.
My point, since you have failed to deduce it, is that I think Apple couldn't make their margin goals on that product line (netbooks). They sell for between $300-400. Apple's absolutely bottom of the barrel offering is $500 with no peripherals whatsoever. Margins on netbooks are pitiful, probably close to break even. Apple wants to sell commodity hardware at 20% markup, they can't do that in the netbook space. Common, this is Business and Products 101.
I can see no other rational business reason not to get into that space. There may be one, but I don't see it. You are certainly not offering a compelling analysis.
It introduces a product gap that their analysis should have spotted but they were willing to chance. The effect of that product gap is that something filled the hole via consumer demand and that was either: a) People bought vanilla netbooks and "suffered" with XP. b) People bought netbooks and turned them into hackintoshes.
Either way, Apple didn't realize revenue from these purchases. Smart business would have tried to capitalize on this form factor, which is why every major manufacturer other than Apple has some kind of netbook offering. My claim is that this is an oversight on the part of Apple. Sure they wouldn't have realized revenue from these sales, but they would have kept their consumers "in the fold" since netbooks are usually a second purchase.
Apple's response so far has not been to fill the hole in the product line with a product (even an overpriced one), but by crippling their software.
It's a scorched earth policy, if they can't have the consumer's money, nobody can.
So in what way is not offering a netbook a method to maximize profit? Again you fail at offering absolutely anything of value.
But Apple can't find the margins in the product line and the equation means that they have no offering for this huge hole in their lineup.
It won't have a good profit margin. Why should Apple waste time on it? They have many other products that are selling incredibly well (with much higher profit margins). It seems like Apple wants to work on those products instead.
Also, its not very good form to insult someone in a debate. It doesn't help further your point, and indicates that you don't have any additional items to add that will help further the discussion. And good discussion is what a lot of people come to HN for, not simply the news.
Seriously, considering that my longer, and more thoughtful reply was rather trollishly shot-down as stupid and overly long, with no counter analysis provided by the complainant, I think I restrained myself rather well.
I don't think that satisfied tptacek. Which was how this went quickly down flamewar and troll territory.
Is the tablet definitely ARM-based?