tao51nyc's Profile

Not from my perspective. In those early days, Apple computers were largely do-it-yourself-here's-the-manual. From the perspective of a desktop support guy in the late 90's, the Worst Apple Ever was the Powerbook 5300. It was constantly breaking down, and being sent back for warranty work. Total Lemon. I laughed out loud when Jeff Goldblum used one to defeat the aliens in Independence Day. No way that would happen!

In hindsight, was Raskin more the visionary in the case of the Mac? Rather than making it a high-end Porsche, truly make it a "computer for the rest of us" starting out of the gate at a VERY competitive price point? This could have slowed down Microsoft's growth significantly, as Windows would have had nothing of value to offer, other than price. Price parity at the very outset would have killed it.

"Why is it, for example, that Radiohead is offering DRM free, name your own price MP3s and Apple is not?" Because Radiohead has better control over their own content than Apple does over theirs - in fact, Apple doesn't "own" ANY of the music/videos it sells at ITMS. Apple has narrow, limiting contractual agreements with content producers. Perhaps Apple would LOVE to sell mp3's without DRM...but their clients, the labels, will not allow that at this time.

Problem is, we're beginning a new upgrade cycle at the office. We've already planned for about half the staff to have top-of-line MacMini's. If the Mini's are discontinued, then the low-end iMac would be next on the list, which would add about $500 to the purchase price per unit. Unfortunately, IT already invested in new 17-20" flatpanels for everybody, as Mini's were the decided way to go. I guess we really need to buy NOW...lol

I tried the drag/drop technique between the accounts, and so far it seems to work; of course I had to re-enter the passwords for each mailbox to satisfy Keychain's demands. (Now the thing is whether or not that will "stick" - it didn't when I upgraded the laptop at home to MacBook Pro.) Thanks for everyone's input. tao

The way the Changewave data is presented is unclear. iPhone is not a "cell phone" as people generally perceive and use them - it is a SmartPhone, a much smaller niche of the overall cellular market, the turf of Blackberry and Treo. People with VerizonWireless accounts, and the "new every 2" option, for example, can get a new phone from them free or darn cheap every 22 months. But if you want a SmartPhone you still pay the premium. The vast majority of cell users have "regular" phones as opposed to SmartPhones. If you did a survey of SmartPhone users alone, the results may be very different. This reminds me of when the MacMini first came out. Consumer Reports tried to compare it with a cheap Dell system, feature for feature, dollar for dollar. Of course this was a BS comparison, as Apple was not trying to intrude on Dell's profitless, low-end market - they were making a play for Switchers, and your living room entertainment center. Similarly, you can't pitch the iPhone to mass-market folks using low-to-medium-end Samsungs.

Actually, from my experience, the rumors aren't completely "baseless". I've been a VPC user since v4. I kept up with it to v6, the last version Connectix made, using both Win98 and XP builds, on a 1.5ghz G4 PowerBook. v6 integrated with XP extremely well, and I was really pleased with the performance. After Microsoft bought the property, I tried a v7 upgrade on the office machine - a dual 2.0 ghz G5 tower. Unsurprisingly, it didn't run as well as v6 on the home laptop. As always, when the Borg assimilate something, they take what isn't broken and "fix" it, in order to put their stamp of ownership on it. They usually fail miserably, as in this case. When I finally traded in the G4 for a MacBook Pro last month, I decided to make the move to Parallels. I'll never look back. The performance of Parallels astounded me, far surpassing the v6 Connectix build I relied on for years. As I only use Windows when forced to, concepts of "brand loyalty" are meaningless. Microsoft, by it's inaction in this realm, is sending a clear signal that they really don't care about the consumer desktop - they wanted to get their hands on some virtualization technology they could apply in the server farm - something they couldn't do themselves. It's not in their long term economic interests to enable their OS to run effectively on alternate platforms. With the success of Parallels, they can now claim VPC is irrelevant and let it die. I never forgave Connectix for selling out to Microsoft, as they made great products that would subsequently be ruined by their new owners.