Name: Anonymous 2014-06-22 21:06
I've been following Apple for a long while (at least 10 years or so). You might tell me that's stupid, but keep in mind that it's one of the biggest computer companies. I am trying to figure out what it's all about.
I really liked the old-school stuff before OS X, but over the past few years I've been developing a distrust of Apple.
The first thing I realized is that one of the key elements of Apple is the planned obsolescence. People are eager to deny this but it is truer than ever before. The Apple operating system releases have generally be designed to have an extremely short life span. Recent software will only run on quite recent versions of OS X. There is nothing anywhere near the state of affairs in the Windows world where the newest software will run on Windows XP even though it was released over 12 years ago. Try to find a recent browser (or recent *anything*, for that amtter) for the OS X release that came out the same year as XP; the most recent one you will find will probably be at least 4 or 5 years old.
The second thing I realized is that ever since Jobs came back they increasingly moved towards open-source, off-the-shelf components for their products rather than bother to develop their own software. The easiest example of this is how they switched to a BSD-based kernel and core for the OS X operating system, while OS 9 had essentially been developed internally. Another less-well-known example is how, circa 2000, they ditched their proprietary 3D graphics API, known as QuickDraw 3D, in favour of the open-source OpenGL. So, in summary, since about 2000 they have been keeping up the whole high prices shtick but they have been using increasingly large amounts of open-source software for all their products. You pay to get stuff that is increasingly based on public domain, freely-available, DRM-and-bullshit-free work.
Most people don't seem to worry about the big picture, the long term. That's why things like DRM and proprietary software happen. GNU ftw.
I really liked the old-school stuff before OS X, but over the past few years I've been developing a distrust of Apple.
The first thing I realized is that one of the key elements of Apple is the planned obsolescence. People are eager to deny this but it is truer than ever before. The Apple operating system releases have generally be designed to have an extremely short life span. Recent software will only run on quite recent versions of OS X. There is nothing anywhere near the state of affairs in the Windows world where the newest software will run on Windows XP even though it was released over 12 years ago. Try to find a recent browser (or recent *anything*, for that amtter) for the OS X release that came out the same year as XP; the most recent one you will find will probably be at least 4 or 5 years old.
The second thing I realized is that ever since Jobs came back they increasingly moved towards open-source, off-the-shelf components for their products rather than bother to develop their own software. The easiest example of this is how they switched to a BSD-based kernel and core for the OS X operating system, while OS 9 had essentially been developed internally. Another less-well-known example is how, circa 2000, they ditched their proprietary 3D graphics API, known as QuickDraw 3D, in favour of the open-source OpenGL. So, in summary, since about 2000 they have been keeping up the whole high prices shtick but they have been using increasingly large amounts of open-source software for all their products. You pay to get stuff that is increasingly based on public domain, freely-available, DRM-and-bullshit-free work.
Most people don't seem to worry about the big picture, the long term. That's why things like DRM and proprietary software happen. GNU ftw.