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[Brentai]

IE's product manager jumps onto the bandwagon with Apple, asserting that Flash is too buggy and insecohgodicantdothiswithastraightface.

For Christmas this year I'm going to give every executive in the computer industry a really big mirror.

[Ziiro]

Courier tablet and the HP Slate cancelled, iPad to reign supreme complete unchallenged for the forseeable future.

I wanted a slate, goddamnit.  

[Brentai]

HP Slate was cancelled because HP just bought Palm.

There's going to be an HP-Apple war all right, but now HP's coming in with a version of Palm OS instead of a cockfucked Windows port.  Jobs' increasing hysteria is warranted.

[Thad]

I guess its too much to ask for people to actually read the article.  Aside from the lengthy, true paragraphs about how awful and unstable Flash is, the basic idea is that there's nothing wrong with proprietary software, but proprietary formats are kind of dumb.  Which, y'know--if you're not an open source zealot--is pretty reasonable.

Except that he's, you know, advocating H.264.

Related: MS has started spreading FUD about Ogg Theora, and Jobs has allegedly written an E-Mail asserting that there's about to be a patent suit over it.

Honestly Jobs is kind of being a fucking tool here.  He has a laundry list of extremely good, hard to argue reasons for the decision, and keeps going back to the one that makes him look like the most self-unaware person on the planet.

This.

Like I said, I wholeheartedly support refusing to support Flash, because Flash sucks and somebody needs to force a new standard.

It's everything AFTER that that's fucked.

Adobe's rebuttal, on the other hand, puts into perspective why they're so understandably pissed: Apple just hamstrung Flash's interoperability, one of it's biggest selling points.  Hell, I remember Thad actually suggesting a few years ago that an aspiring game developer could switch to Mac and comfortably use Flash for cross-platform development.  That's still technically true... But it's not exactly tempting right now.

Worse than that, Jobs is actually howling that the very IDEA of cross-platform design is evil.  He gripes at length about how long it took Adobe to implement Cocoa, and says that makes it "the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X" -- which I guess is true if you don't consider Microsoft Office to be major third-party software.  And of course omits the fact that there are still FIRST-party Apple programs that haven't implemented Cocoa yet.

He's literally advocating that every piece of software be developed, from the ground up, for the single platform the binary is going to be run on.  Which is not a very good position for a guy with 10% of the desktop market to take.

It's crazy 1960's stuff.  I mean, I'll grant that a ported application is not going to work as well as it did on its native platform.  (Just look at how awful iTunes for Windows is -- ZING!)  But the idea that applications should therefore never be ported is fucking asinine.  The entire history of software development has been a movement toward apps that work the same on different platforms.  (I'm typing this in Firefox under Windows on a Mac -- I am a guy who cares about interoperability.  Hell, I wouldn't have booted to Windows at all if I could fucking play Dragon Age in Linux.)  Jobs wants to go back to the days before portable code.  Before C, for God's sake.

He wants what he's always wanted: tightly-controlled, very high-quality software that works predictably, exactly the way it's designed to, to the benefit of stability and usability but at the expense of user choice.

It's not an inherently bad goal (most users are happy to sacrifice choice in favor of stability and usability), but he's taken it to a truly ludicrous extreme.

[Royal☭]

FTC and the DoJ are thinking about maybe starting an anti-trust inquiry on Apple possibly

As far as I'm concerned, this is a pretty open and shut anti-trust violation.  Apple is trying to block other developers from developing for their product in an attempt to control the market.  The whole thing sounds almost note for note like the tune Microsoft was took to court over for the IE integration in Windows.

Of course, all of this will probably go down up until Steve Jobs just commands them to stop.

[SCD]

For what it's worth, Your feds are investigating whether an antitrust suit is possible. 

Hope to hear more from this in a month's time. 

[TA]

Apple's market share for mobile app sales, including free apps, was 99.4% in 2009.  Even in its heyday, Internet Explorer never got that high.

[Thad]

Source?  Because I'd like to have one for the next time someone tries to make the market share argument.

[TA]

Here you go.

[Kayin]

I gotta be honest, I work on macs a good deal and I never noticed them running adobe products any better than the PCs I regularly use. In fact, my PC kicks the crap out of the iMacs I've used. The reason is obvious: I'm running more powerful hardware, on average. I sorta get sick of people saying "I use macs because I'm a designer and it's better for design". Pound for technological pound, Apple makes hot products, but dollar for dollar, the price/performance ratio isn't there. I want them to just say it how it is. "I use a mac because PCs are bullshit and I want my shit to work all the time without being some tech geek" which is TOTALLY fine.  Or a lot of other reasons (like, you know, being thoughtfully designed and generally pretty damn consistent and intuitive), but implying that these products magically run better on OSX constantly annoys me. It's a question between money/power and money/convenience.

Not that I'm accusing Guild of any of this, but I hear it ALL THE DAMN TIMED AND HE REMINDED ME HOW MUCH I HATE THAT.

.... Though the sad part is, what makes people shut up the most is when I show them that it's a tablet laptop that runs photoshop and I can draw on the screen. It makes me sad that tablet laptops are just not the type of devices Apple makes. :(

[Mongrel]

Hahahahaha better for design AAahahahahahahaha.

Trust me, any artist worth their salt can tell you that hoary old sawbones was complete bullshit even fifteen, maybe twenty years ago. it's just the kind of mythological stuff that Apple revels in perpetuating "This is the computer for ARTISTS, not accountants!"* Yeah. [joke about Mac-vs-PC commercials]

The crux is pretty much that photoshop and other such industry standard programs (not just Adobe) have consistently run as well or better on PCs, the lions share of these programs having been designed for PCs first.

*_{It probably doesn't help that artists are generally the kind of idiot who'll swallow that line and propagate it like some high school kid who truly believes that this parsley is in fact the best weed he's ever smoked.}

  It's not the hardware. It's the software. And the very best software is not an Apple product.

[SCD]

It should also be of note that The Safari browser through the iPhone was the first thing to get hacked in this years Pwn 2 Own contest.  Smug and stupid are not mutually exclusive, it would appear.

[Thad]

Final Cut's still better than Premier AFAIK, iMovie and iPhoto are better than their comes-with-Windows-under-the-Accessories-menu equivalents, and it's not like Garageband is the greatest thing ever but it's better than pretty much anything you'll see bundled with a new PC.

It IS pretty stupid, given how many very-damn-useful pack-ins Macs have, that there's no fucking simple Paint program.

Especially given that Apple fucking invented that shit.



EDIT: Also, despite Steve's one-button-mouse fetish, Apple's produced some pretty great mice with obvious Photoshop interface implications, like 360-degree scroll and multitouch gestures.

[Kayin]

Final Cut is a pretty good example, though I believe theres a good deal of competitors as well that aren't premiere. I can't speak on video editing much though -- not my field. Anyways, I'm not saying Mac's are bad or anything. They also definitely come with a better set of packaged programs by leaps and bounds... But if you're a designer (and like, a real designer, not a "I blog and make websites for my dog" designer), includes don't count for much. Nice for the casual folks, for sure. Really for me, most of it seems to be that designers and artists are VERY NOT COMPUTER PEOPLE and I can't blame them for that. I'm not much of a car person and, given the funds, would buy one that wouldn't break compared to the one with the highest cost/performance ratio. I got no problem with whatever anyone uses to make something. When it's printed out, or put on the web, I can't tell the damn difference. I just hate how some artists are about it, which is in a way totally removed from reality. In fact, when I ask "Why are macs better for graphic design", they can't really give any reasons. This has nothing to do with the product (Which is a great product, but not for me), just, as seemingly always with Apple products, it's just the people who use them. When it's professionals and not hipsters though, I get bugged a bit more.

[Büge]

There are a few mac labs around campus at my school. I'm as baffled as you, Kayin.

[Thad]

I got no problem with whatever anyone uses to make something.

Which of course brings us back around to what's horribly wrong with Apple imposing limits on languages and devkits.

[Thad]

Actually, to add:

In fact, when I ask "Why are macs better for graphic design", they can't really give any reasons.

Snow Leopard actually has some really cool shit going on at the backend, between Grand Central routing processes to different processors and OpenCL offloading them to the GPU.  Not sure how much of that Adobe has implemented yet (my understanding is OpenCL requires a hell of a lot of very specific code but Grand Central is largely handled by the OS), but the potential is obvious.

And also something I wouldn't expect most users to know anything about.

[Kayin]

Hah, it's also funny that I know more about that stuff that they do, or the old argument that they were better due to the RISC processors or whatever (not sure how true that was, but it was a reason someone could try and use!). Though like I said, pound for technological pound, Apple machines more than pull their weight with a lighter and more reliable operating system. But for the price of any non-Mini Mac, you can put together some sort of God Machine with PC hardware.

[TA]

You keep saying Apple machines are hold up "pound for technological pound".  What exactly do you mean by this?  Last I checked, the physical hardware requirements even for things as Mac-friendly as Blizzard games were significantly higher on Macs than on PCs.

[Thad]

But for the price of any non-Mini Mac, you can put together some sort of God Machine with PC hardware.

And the Mini is probably the LEAST value for what you pay.  They've priced it right out of its niche.  I quite liked having one as a media center, but there's a reason I built a PC for my new one.  For less than I'd have paid for a Mini, I got a dual Pentium with 4GB RAM and 2 terabyte hard drives.  Which I can upgrade if I need to.  OTOH, as a media center it doesn't have as seamless an interface as FrontRow with the Apple Remote.  (And Windows is actually far behind Mac and Linux in terms of Wii remote support.  GlovePie's neat and all, but it's basically a hack, and the MS Bluetooth stack is pretty spotty.)

That said, you start talking student discounts and what-have-you and they start to get competitive.