DISQUS

This is more that a little strange. Rich Mogull's complaint is that Apple isn't secure because it doesn't act like Microsoft. Maybe Apple doesn't need a formal security system, because Apple designed Mac OSX right the first time, so they don't have to fiddle with it.

It is Microsoft Windows, after all, which has the 200 thousand virus and malware in the wild and Mac OSX has none and never has. Now, Snow leopard's security is getting even stronger and Rich discounts it.

Where is the proof of the pudding? Where in Mac OSX is the malware, worms, adware, spyware and virus which infest Wintel? I don't get any. Perhaps Apple is doing something right by not following the recommendations of people like Rich.

Lou Wheeler

The iPhone is an iPod which acts like a telephone, so why wouldn't it be sold wherever iPods are sold? Walmart has been selling iPods for years, but it isn't selling Macintosh Computers there, yet. Why? Because the Apple Macintosh isn't a commodity computer. Apple still needs the Apple Stores to sell people on the Mac's benefits.

The point was that Apple needed to pretend the iPhone was a SMARTPhone to get a fair entry into the Telephone market since it was all locked up. Times have changed, Apple has won. The iPhone is recognized as a COMPUTERPhone. Apple no longer needs to make any artificial market constraints.

Trees are a crop just like corn. They just take 25 years to mature. They are neither pure nor holy; they pollute like all living creatures. 60% of Tennessee's fog is from the hydrocarbons put in the air from the Pine forests. And since the Pine needles contain an organic acid which kills the underbrush, Pine forests cause acid lakes down stream.

That is why the trout in the 10 thousand lakes region of Michigan and Wisconsin started to die in the 1950s. It wasn't pollution from Detroit or Chicago, because they are downwind. Their acid rain falls on upper New York State. The only reason there were fish in those lakes, at all, was because both states were stripped of trees in the 1880s. The trees came back starting in the 1930s, so the lakes had to die.

The problem here seems to be one of expectations; Robert Scoble expected a flawless upgrading experience and he didn't get it. He doesn't know why he had problem and assumed that the difficulty was with Apple. He then constructed a paranoid fantasy that Apple was out to get him. LOL.

A common cause of the "blue screen of death" in Leopard is a haxie-- A old version of Unsanity's Application Enhancer. Unsanity broke the rule that you are not supposed to mess with the System folder. When Apple makes major changes to its operating system, as it did in leopard by introducing 64 bit Cocoa Intel API's, then the internals that the haxie relied on changed and problems occurred.

Any major upgrade holds the possibility of creating problems although Leopard's are rather minor. The more a person is a power user, as Robert Scoble apparently thinks he is, then the more likely that he has added something which will produce odd results.

Change is often disruptive, but often change is for the good. It helps no one to place false expectations on people and companies. Even if Apple is entirely sincere it can make mistakes that will have to be corrected. It helps no one for Robert Scoble to blame Apple when he does not know the cause of his problem.

The Mac does "just work" when compared with Microsoft Windows. But, Apple has it's own way of thinking and problem solving learned on Windows systems rarely applies to the Mac. The Mac operating system is not perfect and only a fool would think it was.

Any article which would cite a Microsoft shill like Robert Scoble is biased. Apple has a defensive stance, because Microsoft would take advantage of any weakness. Apple learned long ago that it does not pay to defend itself from Microsoft FUD. The honest people will appreciate Apple's products. Anyone who buys into Microsoft's propaganda is not a good market for Apple products. Apple would rather win through excellent products and services than through dishonest marketing. Even when that dishonesty is filtered through Microsoft bootlicker's like Scoble.

It's time to let the iPhone price drop go, Chuck. Apple didn't intentionally try to embarrass you people who overpaid.

It was just a business decision; nothing personal. They saw that the IPhone was going to be a success, so they could spread the R&D fixed costs over a wider group. They probably negotiated with their suppliers, so their variable costs were down. They could see that if they dropped the price by a third then their sales rate would double, which it did. That means that the December buying season, which doesn't start until after Thanksgiving, will likely be between three and four million iPhones sold. How could they pass that up?

Hanging onto resentments is childish. Steve Jobs apologized and gave you a gift that he wasn't require to give. What else would you expect of him? Crawl on his knees? Not likely? Let it go.

The author apparently does not know Apple's history otherwise he would not make these errors.

1. Apple learned from Microsoft not to be transparent. The Microsoft engineers used to joke that Apple in Cupertino was R&D south. The way that programming works is that it takes twenty percent of your time to write eighty percent of the code for a product. And fifty percent to write and debug ninety percent. Then 100% to polish and refine it for sale. Microsoft would hear that Apple was working on an idea. It would produce a knock-off just to be first in half the time of Apple. It would be awful and buggy, so no one would use it. But, Microsoft got to spike Apple's guns.

2. Apple has always been a control freak; it wants to control the user experience. The thing about the iPhone was that the software was not finished enough to be a hand held computer the way the hackers wanted. The second point was that the iPhone is a Leopard OSX 10.5 devise and had to wait for the Leopard release. Also, Apple had its programmers refining Leopard . So, they had no time to fix the iPhone's problem until now.

Neither of these are likely to change.

This is just a three day wonder, Matthew; no one is going to care if some hackers got hosed for acting stupid. It wasn't as though you weren't warned. So what if they turned their iphones into iPod Touches?

This won't affect iPhone sales, at all, over the Christmas quarter. I expect to see three to four million iPhones sold to common, ordinary people who would never dream of hacking their phones.

I'm just amused at the hysteria. And at the double standard. The hackers can violate Apple's rights with impunity, but Apple can't void their warranties, write over their apps or brick their phones. Not so.

This is just a disagreement over marketing. The Music and Media Giants and Apple have a different marketing plan from Apple. The Giants want to wring every dime out of its customers; that is why they have long favored a strong DRM and variable pricing. Apple's vision is to move to a unit pricing and no DRM.

The question that you miss asking here is ,"What do the Music and Media customers want?" The customers have long rejected the Music and Media Giants plans. We will find out soon who wins.

NBC's move to Amazon will succeed or not. We'll see how flexible the customers want to be.

Innovation and invent mean almost the same thing-- new. It's just that we use invent to apply to new devices while innovation can also mean new methods and customs. What Apple does is create devices and systems that are difficult to imagine coming from any other company.




It's easy to dismiss an innovation. All you have to say is that someone else thought of it first while ignoring the effort necessary to make an idea practical. The desktop on Xerox's Star looked nothing like or worked like the Macintosh. The Xerox "mouse" looked like a trackball. The Mac's desktop was much better and more practical than the Star's. And the Mac cost $2,500 while the Star was $15,000.





Besides, Xerox got its idea for the Star from Bart Engelhard's seminal work in the fifties and sixties. Apple only got a one day show and tell for its million dollars in stock. It got no hardware designs or software. Apple had to go and innovate its own way of doing things and Apple's way was often better. The point is that it is damned hard to get things right so that they are useful in ways that no one else dreamed of. The Macintosh did that. Apple continues to do that.





The iPhone will do that, too. Why? Because it's nothing like the other smart phones. It's a computer more powerful than most from five to ten years ago. It has a shortened version of Mac OSX 10.5 in it. There is little that the iPhones won't be able to do, eventually. Mostly, the iPhone will expose how rotten the current Smartphones are. And it will do it in a way that seems intuitive. People will ask, "This seems so easy. Why didn't phones work like this before?" A lot of hard work and thinking are necessary to make things appear easy.





Great design, good looks, near perfect execution, ease of use and fine craftsmanship are nothing new, but they are damned rare.





Bravo, Apple, you did it again.





If it were easy to do what Apple did, then why weren't the Smartphones designed like this, years ago?

As a long time Macintosh user (22 years and counting), I wish Vista well. Why? Because it puts to rest another bit of Microsoft FUD. Ever since MS-Dos, Microsoft and its pet columnists would play the same game. They would spend years of effort advertising that whatever benefits the Macintosh had were worthless-- right up to the time that Microsoft put out its own version of the same thing.

This isn't to say that Apple hasn't screwed up at times: the whole Pink, Taligent era was embarrassing. But, Apple has a winner with Mac OSX. Meanwhile, Microsoft and its sycophants were discounting Mac OSX as eye-candy.

Areo Vista has eye-candy of its own now, so Microsoft can drop that bit of FUD. You will also notice that to use Areo Vista, you need a machine that is at least two to three times as powerful as to run Windows XP. This means that only upper end PC's sold in the last two years qualify. But, the junky PC's older than that have probably been thrown away. What this means is that, all this time, Apple computers needed to be twice as powerful to run Mac OSX. Eye-candy uses up computing cycles. We Mac users don't mind that; the Areo Vista users won't either. Eye-candy is nice.

I don't mean to disparage the PC's; many people are happy enough with them. I wish them well. All I'm saying is that, every time Microsoft catches up to Apple, some disinformation vanishes.

Now, if we could only get PC users to recognize that Apple doesn't make low end, throw away, junky PC's and starts comparing them to mid range computers from Dell or HP. If they did compare correctly, then the PC users would know that Apple Mac's are comparable in price or lower. And why shouldn't they cost the same? All these computers are built in the same Chinese factories that build Dells or HP's. They use most of the same components. So, the hardware question, among mid range computers, becomes irrelevant.

Those of you who build their own computers from parts, and bragging about their savings, are ignoring the time it takes you to research, build, get them working and maintain them. How much is your time worth? Most Macintosh users have pay grades above $20 an hour, so it's not worth it to us to build one. It would cost us above two thousand dollars in time to get even near the quality of a Mac. And the Mac's cost less than that.