25 years of Macintosh - the Apple Computer report card

@Ivan Headache (again)

Fair enough.

I can't really comment on apple's products life span as I don't have much experience of them. I do find, in general, that life span is frequently dictated by lazy software developers rather than hardware death (xbox + rrod excluded perhaps). Software for windows platforms tend to be developed with easy ram upgrades considered more favourable than efficient code. Maybe with Macs there's more of an attitude to make it work on the kit that came out of the box.

As far as i'm aware my old Amiga 1200 still works. Not sure id try to get it to run any software from the last 10 years or so :)

Personally i'm neither pro or anti apple, I use some of their products, I don't use others. I do enjoy baiting the apple evangalists in my company though, just because I find their smug attitude irritating (the 'i'm a PC' ads really didn't help - had I been considering a mac at the time that alone would have been off putting simply for being so childish).

Regarding the missing apple key, surely there should be some sort of inquiry. Is there no governing body we can turn to to prevent such ludicrous changes?

@Elrond Hubbard.....Wow!

Surely your post must qualify for flame of the week. It's really well constructed and based on astute observation and reasoned argument.

FYI. Top Gear isn't on 'till Sunday. I'm going to watch QI now - it's all about being mendacious.

bloat

"Software for windows platforms tend to be developed with easy ram upgrades considered more favourable than efficient code. Maybe with Macs there's more of an attitude to make it work on the kit that came out of the box"

I don't think it's a case of Apple trying harder to make software work on old hardware. They are primarily a hardware company. If anything making people upgrade more often would be good for their business.

Like OS X, Linux runs on old hardware. I think that's because it's well programmed.

Microsoft has always written bloated software. For example, compare the number of system calls made to serve up one static html on IIS:

http://www.devside.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/iis_425px.jpg

and the same thing done by Apache:

http://www.devside.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/apache_425px.jpg

Also consider that many applications run faster under Wine than they do in Windows, and that Samba has historically given better performance serving files than native Windows.

Åpple uses Carbon and Cocoa to build OS X . How many platforms and languages does Microsoft use? The more complicated you make things the more likely there are to be failures, and the more "workarounds" that have to be added to address faults.

One other big factor, I think, is Microsoft's staff retention. MS keeps their staff employed even when they are rubbish programmers or have barely any work to do. I've heard first hand from developers sent to coding conferences who log in at the conference, go shopping all day, then log out at the end.

This is an enlightening read:

http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html

Really?

"Apple isn't doing as well as their marketing would have you believe"

Well, far from me defending a company, any company, let alone Apple. All I have ever bought from them is my first gen 4GB iPod nano (I like it), which I plan to retire when (if) I get a Touch. But I dislike Apples dictatorial style and all that.

That said, the article did not present marketing. Or at least not just. As far as I could see, the article presented some charts with not too shabby numbers on them. I wish I had a company doing that badly. Or are you implying those numbers are fake (marketing)? Call the SEC or whatever, then?

@AC "That old trope again.."

Well, but they do not listen with their senses+reasoning, they listen with their emotions... There's serious research about this, "the taste of brand", you know. And they have no clue what you are talking about anyway. Your reasoning is thus wasted on those you're trying to reach, really.