Re: OsX compared to Linux and BeOS

From: Randy Howard (randyhoward_at_FOOverizonBAR.net)
Date: 04/27/05 

Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2005 21:37:36 GMT

In article <znu-52A4FE.17275627042005@individual.net>,
znu@fake.invalid says...
> In article <MPG.1cd9ae329e80738d98a4d6@news.verizon.net>,
> Randy Howard <randyhoward@FOOverizonBAR.net> wrote:
>
> > In article <znu-52F06C.15582727042005@individual.net>,
> > znu@fake.invalid says...
> > > Dual core will matter to the markets targeted by Xserves and G5 towers.
> >
> > People with a dual-processor box like a G5 tower don't need dual core
> > at all, unless you think that multithreaded apps on the G5 are so
> > slow they need 4 CPUs to get there.
>
> A lot of the tasks for which people buy G5 towers still push the
> capabilities of today's hardware quite a bit. HD video editing, for
> instance. Of course, Apple is trying to unload some of this sort of
> thing on the GPU, but fast processors are still a must. And four fast
> processors (effectively) are better than two.

True, but I doubt that the majority of people with G5 dual towers are
running high load averages currently.

> > Sure, nice to have, not that big of a deal. More important in the
> > single-socket desktop and notebook market, along with blades and
> > rack-mount low profile servers.
>
> I'm not thinking that the Mac mini's target market needs a dual-core
> processor right now.

Who said they did?

> They might be nice in high-end PowerBooks, for people who need mobile
> media workstations.

Yep.

> Well, they don't like this idea, because it's going to result in
> increasingly long upgrade cycles, which means much lower sales volume.
> But I'm not sure they'll be able to do much about it.

You forget that Microsoft is in collusion with them. :-)

> > You do realize that Windows is the primary delivery vehicle for
> > technologies to help spurn new hardware sales (read as: "slow
> > the damn thing down so people will upgrade"), right?
>
> It's pretty funny that Apple, which actually has a very direct interest
> in getting people to upgrade their hardware, actually manages to make
> the OS *faster* on the same hardware with every release. Some bean
> counter should really go yell and the engineers to cut that out <g>.

It's those damn gcc guys, working on the optimizer. Maybe Apple
should turn it off when building the platform. :-)

> It's true, Longhorn will probably drive some upgrades. But if consumers
> and business users start only upgrading for new Windows releases, and if
> Windows releases are going to come as far apart as XP and Longhorn from
> now on, that's going to be a major slowdown. We could see people only
> buying new machines every 6-8 years.

People are buying lots of machines to run Linux on right now, they're
just not buying from Dell, HP, IBM, Toshiba, etc. They're buying
them at Fry's, and that's a real problem for the traditional OEM's,
and for MS. And they're also using old Windows boxes to run Linux
on, since you can get a lot more mileage out of a back-rev PC on
Linux than you can on Windows, and that's another problem for them. 

-- 
Randy Howard (2reply remove FOOBAR)
"Making it hard to do stupid things often makes it hard
 to do smart ones too." -- Andrew Koenig

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