[ohyes]

"Or is this some sort of false dichotomy to begin with?"

Yes.

When you are starting out, you need that first critical mass of people to get your service going. Those are the nerds looking for the next 'cool' thing.

Once you have a service going, you can ditch the nerds, they are a small segment of the population. Instead pander to the lowest common denominator. I don't see how Apple is making money off (1).

I'm a nerd and I haven't owned an Apple product recently (disclosure: I had a B&W G3 in the late 90s; it was sick, I mean, firewire and usb, man).

The iPod was not the first mp3 player. (In fact, it had worse specs and a higher price than its contemporaries back in the day...)

And with their computers, I mean, realistically, they are making money off of overpriced hardware running warmed-over BSD. Sure, its got a fancy skin, but the in terms of the substantive stuff, it is BSD.

Where they really make money is incredibly amazingly great marketing and an increasingly loyal user population. You could say that the loyal group of users is due to 'superior' something or other (tech ux, etc.).

This might be true, but i can't imagine them actually winning market capital with those. Where they really win are with the commercials that I can't friggin' get out of my head.

So sure, false dichotomy, and no one ever made money off of (1), (1) is kind of the price you pay to jumpstart your market.

[mst]

From the point of view of the majority of their users it's high end (but not these days overpriced) hardware that happens to have a reliable underpinning to a fantastic UI.

Sure, it's got some BSD underneath, but in terms of the substantive stuff, it's the fantastic UI the users care about.

Of course as an fvwm2 user for half a decare plus, I hate Aqua, but at least I'm aware there's a point there to be missed.

[pyre]

  > overpriced hardware running warmed-over BSD. Sure,
  > its got a fancy skin, but the in terms of the substantive
  > stuff, it is BSD.

If you want to get technical, it's based off of NeXT and NeXT is based off of BSD.

[jacobolus]

> but the in terms of the substantive stuff, it is BSD. Where they really make money is incredibly amazingly great marketing

This is just insulting flamebait.

[ohyes]

How so?

I'm baffled by how this is flame baiting.

They have amazing marketing! They have great stores! It looks great!

On a technical level, I don't see how the OS and hardware are better than, for example, BSD or Linux on Intel hardware (same hardware)!

I honestly want to know what exactly is better from a geek perspective.

If you can tell me, I'll go out and buy one. I've looked at them and I haven't seen anything.

[jacobolus]

It’s flamebait because your implication is that anyone who uses it or likes it is only doing so because it is well marketed/trendy. That is insulting, for obvious reasons, to anyone who uses it because they believe it is legitimately superior.

Frankly though, your argument is just wrong, on the merits. Most BSD distributions have nothing like the set of tools and APIs that Apple ships with OS X: they don’t have interface tools rivaling interface builder (at least that I’ve seen), they don’t have the APIs for sound and images, they don’t have the APIs for speech synthesis and speech recognition, they don’t have the APIs for integration with a built-in address book, they don’t have APIs for rich typographical support, or printing, or so easily connecting interfaces with a database backend, or doing 3d transformations to portions of an interface, etc. etc. etc.

Your basic claim is that there is no value added in all of the stuff described here, http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/navigation/#section=R... and that anyone who believes otherwise is just some kind of pawn of Apple’s marketing machine.

I mean, heck, it takes a 1000 page book just to describe the low-level parts of OS X: http://osxbook.com/book/toc/toc.html

The further implication is that things like well-supported hardware that comes in predictable configurations, very good technical support for developers who run into difficulty, a large ecosystem of high quality applications and discriminating users, etc. etc. are all unimportant compared to your personal opinion of whether something is sufficiently technically innovative.

To be honest there’s really not that much in any computer system, in terms of groundbreaking ideas, that wasn’t in Doug Englebart’s “mother of all demos”, or in the Smalltalk machines at PARC. So one could argue I guess that everything done since the 70s is uninteresting and derivative. But there’s a world of difference between the ideas and a solid production implementation.