{"id":1641,"date":"2007-03-24T12:28:48","date_gmt":"2007-03-24T15:28:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/bb\/viewtopic.php?p=2106"},"modified":"2010-05-08T17:53:56","modified_gmt":"2010-05-08T20:53:56","slug":"re-musings-on-apple-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/2007\/03\/24\/re-musings-on-apple-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Re: Musings on Apple"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Wow, 15 days without a post. It&#8217;s been a slow couple of weeks, news-wise, and I&#8217;ve been distracted by off-line problems; sorry about that.<\/p>\n<p>Of course the <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/apple.png\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\" \/>TV has finally shipped, there&#8217;s been tons of reports about it, and Apple&#8217;s stock price even got a good boost from that. Still, it&#8217;s a device I find it hard to comment upon, either positively or negatively. I rarely watch TV or even DVDs, our TV is an old model that has none of these new-fangled inputs or features (I think), and even if the device were available here I&#8217;m not in the target market. What does seem slightly interesting is that it apparently runs Mac OS X (not the &#8220;lite&#8221; OS X many expected), and therefore some people have already <a href=\"http:\/\/forums.somethingawful.com\/showthread.php?s=&amp;threadid=2391956\">twiddled it<\/a> to install additional video codecs.<\/p>\n<p>Other than that, I&#8217;ve just read an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.macnewsworld.com\/story\/7iMngrGz3t1YAt\/What-the-Naysayers-Are-Missing-on-Apple-TV.xhtml\">excellent piece<\/a> by former Apple manager John Martellaro, essentially arguing that Apple has first-class engineers and designers and doesn&#8217;t (at least not nowadays) do anything dumb, although it may look like it from the outside standpoint:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>What I&#8217;ve noticed is that there is hardly a single writer, including myself, who has complete insight into Apple&#8217;s reasoning and design decision for a product.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;when you get a lot of smart people together in an Apple conference room, and let them fight it out, good things happen. One person will invariably have insight and hindsight that&#8217;s lacking in the others. By the time the dust clears, and a lot of scribbling has been done on the white board, a pretty good solution will have been worked out. Gotchas will be discovered and diagnosed. Experience with the customer, intimate knowledge of Mac OS X internals, and next generation technologies coming down the road will lead to sound engineering judgment from the group.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;Just remember, no matter how experienced any one writer is, they can seldom out-think a corporation as good as Apple.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Indeed. There are many young pundits, journalists and developers out there that are way too eager to jump on the &#8220;Apple is obviously brain-dead&#8221; bandwagon &#8211; of course &#8220;young&#8221;, nowadays, describes almost everyone from my viewpoint <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/blog\/wp-includes\/images\/smilies\/icon_biggrin.gif\" border=\"0\" alt=\"icon_biggrin.gif\" \/>. In contrast, I think that, today, most questionable decisions from Apple can be blamed on limited human resources. Doing insanely great stuff takes time and needs first-class people.<\/p>\n<p>Another never-ending discussion is the Leopard shipping date. I stiil agree with Ars Technica&#8217;s Jacqui Cheng that <a href=\"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/journals\/apple.ars\/2007\/03\/22\/leopard-not-ready-for-april--barely-beta-not-final-or-gold-master\">Leopard should ship at WWDC<\/a>. However, people have been picking up a rumor that Apple is delaying Leopard by several months to (supposedly) get Macs to boot Vista. Huh? This completely illogical reasoning is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.roughlydrafted.com\/RD\/RDM.Tech.Q1.07\/5209A3EE-03DE-42CA-8A27-55DBF41C6F5D.html\">aptly skewered<\/a> by Daniel Eran at RoughlyDrafted:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Apple didn&#8217;t exactly scramble to get iTunes working on Vista, and iTunes is an important part of Apple&#8217;s business. That being the case, will Apple hold up the release of Leopard for months in order to support Vista in Boot Camp, a product that Apple makes no money in providing?<\/p>\n<p>The story is so absurd on so many levels that it&#8217;s hard to find a place to start pointing out why it&#8217;s so stupid.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It really is very strange. Apple says they will ship in spring (these local seasonal references are really obsolete in a global context, but that&#8217;s another rant). Spring in Cupertino goes until a week or so after WWDC, people tell me. Even so, people who have not seen anything of Leopard beyond some leaked screenshots wrote excitedly about a MacWorld release, then about a March release, then when their wild predictions aren&#8217;t confirmed start to moan that &#8220;Apple&#8217;s been having trouble getting Leopard out&#8221; and now, even, that &#8220;Leopard had reportedly been delayed until October&#8221;. I really hope that Apple will show more details before WWDC, but I won&#8217;t be too surprised if they don&#8217;t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Wow, 15 days without a post. It&#8217;s been a slow couple of weeks, news-wise, and I&#8217;ve been distracted by off-line problems; sorry about that. Of course the TV has finally shipped, there&#8217;s been tons of reports about it, and Apple&#8217;s stock price even got a good boost from that. Still, it&#8217;s a device I find [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3,16,19],"tags":[23],"class_list":["post-1641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apple","category-hardware","category-software","tag-mac"],"featured_image_src":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Rainer Brockerhoff","author_link":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/author\/rbrockerhoff\/"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1q3Zc-qt","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1641\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}