OSDev.org

Well, Apple...

Apple had (and still has) a real talent of selling bread as gold. Yes, they had some really good inventions. But they sell an image which is not real. Colourful computers? Yeah, we buy it! MP3 players (iPods)? Yeah, we buy it! Better than Windows? Yeah! Etc. People were sleeping in front of Apple stores to be the first to get an iPhone.

The hardware and the GUI looked more elegant, that is true. And they concentrate more on the core of the productive (Art) process. And they have more powerful video/movie editor than others. That all admitted, but that still this doesn't justify the big success of Apple. It's the image that people buy.

To some extent Windows and Linux have their image and their irrational fans. But not as much as Apple. It would be clever of an OS developer if he/she builds up an image around his OS, too.

Greetings
Peter

Apple: the word you're looking for is "hype". People are sheep, they tend to think if something is more expensive then it must be better. And Jobs was a marketing genius (I mean it, he really was).

Windows: it never really needed conventional marketing, because they always used guerilla-marketing instead: pre-installed on almost every PC and laptop (locked-in via "Secure" Boot), an average user (who doesn't have money for Mac or does not know how to install an OS) simply has no other choice. MS also bribed governments and did other questionable things to force schools to only teach Windows, therefore most people doesn't know anything else. You don't choose when you simply don't know you have a choice.

Linux: it always had pretty good PR and catch phrases (like "Linux is like a wigwam: no windows, no gates, just an apache inside", do you remember that? Or that "Melinda surely knows why is it called Microsoft"?), but never had enough money to make big marketing campaigns, and certainly not enough money to make contracts with manufacturers to pre-install Linux on OEM machines on a grand scale. With the notable exception of Android (which is so much re-branded that most users have absolutely no clue that they are actually using Linux).

Cheers,
bzt

Wat is your take on recent M1 release, 1st inhouse CPU Arm powered? It itself does not account much against AMD, Intel but concern is future implications.

@bzt: What you said is 100% true! That is exactly how they stock up. Windows is terrible, yet is forced upon us. I so badly want to install Ubuntu or Debian on my laptop, but I can't boot to it for some reason! Oh well, I guess I could use Windows for something.

Apple's image - to me, anyway - was cemented when they switched out the screws (on the iPhone, I think) for ones you were unlikely to have a screw driver for. If the company wants to treat me, an adult human being, like a toddler, then they are welcome to it, but I won't do business with them. I have heard that artist swear by their stuff, but not being one myself, I have no reason to even investigate the claim. I have always found music and video editing software for whatever OS was currently running on the machine holding the raw data. That reminds me, I wanted to finish cutting the OST of CaveStory to go on my phone.

bzt wrote:MS also bribed governments

Why the past tense? The process is still ongoing.

ggodw000 wrote:Wat is your take on recent M1 release, 1st inhouse CPU Arm powered?

Yet one more ARM powered device. In the grand scheme of things, it is unlikely to tip any scales.

nexos wrote:Windows is terrible, yet is forced upon us. I so badly want to install Ubuntu or Debian on my laptop, but I can't boot to it for some reason! Oh well, I guess I could use Windows for something.

My previous laptop (the current one had Linux pre-installed) had secure boot forced on as long as no supervisor password was set. No, I don't know what the connection is supposed to be, but setting a supervisor password meant I could turn secure boot off, and then I could load whatever OS I desired. Maybe that will help.

ggodw000 wrote:Wat is your take on recent M1 release, 1st inhouse CPU Arm powered? It itself does not account much against AMD, Intel but concern is future implications.

I haven't heard about M1 before you mentioned it. I looked it up and the web pages about it are so full of buzzwords, it's a pity. I don't know what the implications are, but getting away from x86 seems a good thing to me.

nexos wrote:I so badly want to install Ubuntu or Debian on my laptop, but I can't boot to it for some reason

Does your Linux DVD boot but the installed Linux on HD doesn't? Or don't Linux DVDs boot at all?

Greetings
Peter

Personally I see M1 as a proper game changer. The Consumer space needed a huge nudge to push it out of the intel rut it has become stuck in.
Apple releasing ARM machines will be the catalyst to other companies pushing more interesting custom architectures, better designed for specific market spaces.

PeterX wrote:Does your Linux DVD boot but the installed Linux on HD doesn't? Or don't Linux DVDs boot at all?

I managed to install Debian, but GRUB doesn't appear in the boot order in BIOS settings. I know it doesn't have secure boot, but for some reason, the BIOS doesn't recognize Debian (not the installer, this happens after installation).

bloodline wrote:Apple releasing ARM machines will be the catalyst to other companies pushing more interesting custom architectures, better designed for specific market spaces.

I personally think in several years, everyone will turn to RISC-V. They are already making a 128 bit ISA. When the industry transitions to 128 bit, as they eventually will, x86 and ARM will be scrambling around to update their ISAs and RISC-V will have its chance to pounce on the industry, as they will already have developed it.

nexos wrote:I managed to install Debian, but GRUB doesn't appear in the boot order in BIOS settings. I know it doesn't have secure boot, but for some reason, the BIOS doesn't recognize Debian (not the installer, this happens after installation).

That's too bad! If it isn't Secure Boot's fault, I don't know a remedy here.
Maybe it's installed in CSM mode and boots from HD in UEFI mode (or vice versa)?

nexos wrote:I personally think in several years, everyone will turn to RISC-V. They are already making a 128 bit ISA. When the industry transitions to 128 bit, as they eventually will, x86 and ARM will be scrambling around to update their ISAs and RISC-V will have its chance to pounce on the industry, as they will already have developed it.

I'm not so sure about that. But I definitively would like to see the CISC-, Legacy-driven x86 CPUs go away. The x86 codeset seems like a dirty hack to me. Some aspects are probably good, like multi-core, DMA and SIMD, but you don't have to use x86-codeset to implement these features on a CPU.

Greetings
Peter

Oh, come on, that kind of talk is old. x86 has been condemned more often than a restaurant in a poor city district, and it is still around. First i432 was supposed to replace it, then PowerPC, then MIPS, then Itanium, now ARM. I highly doubt it is going to happen, technological inertia being what it is.

I think a CPU that only supports 16GB of RAM is a backward step. Fine for iPad toys, but not for a serious computer.

iansjack wrote:I think a CPU that only supports 16GB of RAM is a backward step. Fine for iPad toys, but not for a serious computer.

My first computer had 16KB of RAM -- it's impressive that we can now look down on a CPU that "only" supports roughly a million times that amount.

To stay on topic regarding Apple...it's not just their image, it's also the "Apple way" of vertically integrated hardware. I have friends who have completely bought into this and love how their laptops, phones, music players, and watches all just work together. I'm not willing to pay the premium price for that, but I can understand its appeal to people who are.

Long boring story alert:

I first started using MacOS (really NeXTStep) in around 2004. At the time I was the keyboard player in a moderately successful electronic rock band, and for our early tours supporting the first album we had used a couple of workstation keyboards, and a large rack of 19” hardware samplers/fx/signal processors/synths (and a curious rack Amiga600 conversion, which I still have) for everything,

After our second album it was clear we needed to increase the stage kit quite considerably, as the new songs needed a totally different line setup, and it was really like have two separate bands on stage at the same time. Also our tours were getting longer and bigger, traveling to more places. Equipment would get broken, go missing, or just start misbehaving. So I made the decision in 2003,to rationalise the whole stage setup which had become kludged together and generally evolving for around 3 or 4 years.

So I went out and bought the best HP Laptop (one of the few laptops with a FireWire port at the time) I could get the management to sign off, a couple of cheap midi controller keyboards, and a MOTU 828 if I recall correctly. I spent three weeks recreating the whole live set using various bit of software (and a lot of midi loop backs), as a programmer I also wrote a few bits of software to do some specific tasks.

Amazingly the whole stage setup could easily be recreated in software, was more controllable and the patches/signal paths for each song could be loaded in seconds! Rehearsals went well and the logistics for the next tour were massively improved, reduced tour staff/etc... We looked like we might actually make some money on this tour

But within a week into the tour, it was clear I had made a massive mistake. The laptop would randomly crash, reboot, or lock up during a gig... rebooting was hit and miss, sometimes it would work fine after a reboot, boot times were strangely random. A few times on powerup the machine would refuse to initialise the audio interface, and I would have to route all the audio via the noisy built in sound card... an engineering nightmare (with seemingly random latency). Often the audio would dropout, or worse would glitch, and all the sequences and timed effects would be out of time with the band... We had to pare down our set to ensure we could perform most of the songs as acoustic numbers, as backup if the tech let us down. It was miserable, everyone blamed me for the problems. I noticed that all the other bands were using PowerBooks on stage... So when our next gig was at a London venue I went to the Apple store, and with my own money bought a 12” PowerBook G4, and an Edirol FA101 audio interface. Then spent the weekend (day and night, I didn’t sleep for three days) rebuilding our touring set using the Macintosh.

I was pretty depressed by now, I was fervent anti Apple at the time, the Macintosh was clearly underpowered and massively overpriced... But that little G4 worked. It never had one crash, never glitched, never had any driver issues. I still have it now, with MacOS 10.4 Tiger still installed... I fired it up about a year ago and it was still ready to go after over a decade, I even ran through a couple of songs (the screen is really dim now, the backlight must be going). It was clear Apple’s audio architecture is light years ahead of Microsoft’s attempt.

I was still a Windows guy, but gradually that little PowerBook, eventually replaced with an Intel MacBook, became used for more and more of my daily tasks (I know, very naughty to use a mission critical device for non critical tasks, but I had purchased the machine with my own money so I didn’t care), and by 2006 (I think) I had stopped using my Windows machines almost completely.

I learned (and still like) Obj-C, and while I might not like some of Apple’s business practices, I really like and heavily rely on MacOS (really NeXTStep), and I like the look of their laptops (I have a lot of MacBooks now!). I have a Microsoft Surface too, with Win10 on it... but it’s just a pain to use and mostly I just use it to run web based educational software for my young daughter.

My desktop is a monster Xeon Hackintosh (it was a dual boot Hackintosh/Linux), but now I run Linux in VirtualBox in the Hackintosh. I also have a load of RapsberyPis.

So there is my story... Microsoft dropped the ball in the mid 2000s, and I needed a machine which “just worked”. Apple deliver on their promises, and for me that is worth the money.

Here is my summary of operating systems...
I hate Apple, I dislike Windows, I halfway like Linux, and I love Minix and NetBSD and Hurd and Haiku. I want to use NetBSD as my main OS, the only issue is that it doesn't have a web browser. I love Minix, but that has literally no drivers. And I like Managarm too.
Now here is why

The reason I hate Apple Macs is because I feel like I'm working in a closed box. Everything feels like it is in a sandbox. Its UI is alright, but it has no power whatsoever. You must go through the App Store for most apps. There is a lot of drag n' drop, which was supposed to be make it easy, but instead seems to be difficult. As for drivers, they are hidden away, no control over anything with drivers. The only power in the system is the terminal, which no one knows about. I find Objective-C and Swift to be very confusing Mac is perfect for some people, just not for me .

I used to love Windows. And it is alright. But then I began seeing problems. My laptop would crash every now and then. I had installed so many apps, and had accidentally created such a complex compatibility net that uninstalling one thing would create bug problems. Overall, I think Windows is so big that Microsoft has to ship out updates ASAP because they have so many people waiting for them that they skip the finer details. I still use Windows, I have W10 on my laptop and XP on one desktop I have, plus SBS 11 on a PowerEdge T320 I have, but I don't like it as much anymore.

As for Linux, it is better. I wouldn't do anything other then Ubuntu as it is the only distro I've tried with proper drivers. However, Linux has USB problems. I've only seen it crash once, and it was a USB problem. Linux is very powerful, while the UI is still easy. My main problem with Linux is how bloated it is. The kernel is bloated, GNU sure is more then bloated, and the driver set is bloated. But it is better then Mac and Windows.

As for NetBSD, I really like. It seems to be lightweight. It works on most CPUs out there. It has a GUI, with no browser unfortunatly . I haven't used it all that much, but looks to be very promising, and I have though about contributing to it. Minix is great, but isn't developed any more and doesn't have ACPI or USB support. Hurd is good too, but is GNU (so it is bloated), and very buggy and doesn't have USB. Haiku seems promising, but I have barely tried it.
Overall, I wish NetBSD and Minix had a full UI and more drivers. But for know, Linux is the best option for me .

Firefox is available for NetBSD.