New Apple announcements
Steve Jobs made some more announcements this week, including a high def 30 inch flat screen monitor, and yet another upgrade to OS X. It doesn’t bother me to upgrade an operating system frequently. I am, after all, a Linux nut. But if it costs the users another $100 per upgrade, I’ll be annoyed for them. It’s not due out until 2005 and won’t break pre-existing apps, so it’s not too bad.
Unlike its smaller siblings, the new screen will work only with Power Macs equipped with a new $600 GeForce video card from nVidia that features dual DVI outputs — one for each half of the 2,560 by 1,600, 4.1 million-pixel screen.
Well, it’ll be nice for upscale graphics companies, at least.
29. June 2004 at 13:34
well, i think when tiger rolls along, that’ll put people up to $300-$400 to have stayed on the OS X treadmill, which actually makes it a more expensive propostiion than a full copy of windows XP. but i guess if you have a mac, money is no object. :)
btw, i took your advice and gave firefox a whirl and after beeing bitterly idsappointed with every mozilla-based browser i have tried up until now, this one finally is worth keeping as a day-to-day browser. still a lot of rough edges left to it (and frankly, stuff that i think IE does better), but i’m keeping it for now.
29. June 2004 at 13:54
I don’t mind dropping a hundred bucks to upgrade once a year or so, provided the upgrades continue to be more than just bug-patching. Each iteration of OS X has been so significantly different from the one before that it’s more than just a little change. It’s practically a new, improved system each time out.
Oh, and mark me down as a Mac user that’s definitely not made of money. But, I’m also not computer-geek enough to build my own machgine or run something like Linux on it, so the Mac is the best value for my dollar, much to many a friend’s dismay.
29. June 2004 at 22:50
I love my Mac. But I am the teeniest bit annoyed by the upgrading that costs $100. I skipped the most recent (Panther? Jaguar? Confused by all the cats, here), since it came out a scant two months after I had purchased the previous upgrade. I’ll still get it, but wish it was a teeny bit less expensive.
30. June 2004 at 08:52
Kurt – Great, glad to hear you gave Firefox another chance. The plug-ins can be very annoying in Linux, but I’ve found the Windows system to work like a charm. But, most of all, I think I’d use Firefox over IE just for the bookmark management and tabbed browsing. That’s pretty much enough for me.
The Mac people that scare me are the fanatics, who line up to buy whatever new toy Mac comes out with next. They already have an iPod, for example, but they had to get two new iPod Jr.s in different colors because they’re so pretty. UGH
Stephen – we’re all dismayed by you; it’s OK. But I understand what you mean about the $100 for real value. That’s the main reason I upgraded my Linux system this spring — just because the new distribution had so many major changes to it.
Bronte — You’re probably the smartest out of all of us. Your computer doesn’t run your life. You run your computer. At least you got past the major upgrade (was it OS X original?) that broke several programs from earlier versions of the OS…
30. June 2004 at 13:29
bookmark management in firefox to me is nightmarish. well, ok. if you manage them out of a html editor or something like it, i suppose it would be easier, but overall, i prefer IE’s more straightforward file’n'folder method.
i was a bit put out by tabs early on, mainly because the functionality of them seemed so very nerfed. then i found the tabbrowser extensions and boy howdy, that shure makes a mssive difference. now i can have the 1 window browser i wanted. that alone is worth it’s weight in gold. but when you throw in tab groups and such — oh, yeah. me like. :)
i’ve found that if the extensions aren’t linked directly from mozilla.org, the chance of them totally hosing your user profile goes right through the roof. but if you stick to the mozilla.org stuff, you usually don’t have to worry (oh, and when someone says that the current version is a developmental build that could really screw things up — believe them. >:)
but there is plent y of nifty little software out there that helps you back up your profile, clean out your cache at certain points in time, etc — really nice stuff. i did a small writeup of my first day with FF over in my blog and noted that while FF is kinda rough around the edges, it just has almost unlimited potential to get sooooo much better.
1. July 2004 at 16:10
I wouldn’t hate the Mac so much if I didn’t have to develop cross platform applications that work on not only PC, but Macs all the way back to OS 8.5 which is totally different from OSX making it a pain.