Arguably, the App Store is a gamble. If you win the gamble, you get popular and the store reinforces your popularity and you skyrocket in earnings. On your own, it's harder to get that pop.

Ah, our last was a G5. I stopped paying attention.


Pretty much.

The next iteration of the Mac Pro is what I'm wondering about. There were rumors that it would be rack mount friendly, which could make up for some of the lost possibilities by discontinuing the xServe. Though it's somewhat telling that Apple's own datacenter in North Carolina doesn't run on Mac hardware, so who knows. They may just have decided the dedicated rack mount server market wasn't for them, with OS X Server never really gaining much of a foothold over it's decade+ lifecycle.


This was believed to be a GPLv3 issue. Apple could either stick with Samba 3.0 (GPLv2), and never gain the newer protocol introduced in Vista/Server 2008, or dump Samba and go with a solution more compatible with the licensing OS X carries. From what I understand, they chose to write their own replacement, not sure if it was based off some different SMB implementation or if they started from scratch.


I won't deny that their success with iOS hasn't changed their focus quite a bit. And I would say it's probably the right thing for them to do, considering that in 2011, they sold more iOS devices then total Macs since the introduction in 1984.

With that said, I don't personally see Apple in the near term abandoning the pro markets that they currently have a stake in. In my eyes, 10.8 shows that Apple is going to remain committed to producing a desktop class OS for a while longer. They did slip up a bit when they rolled out Final Cut X, and pulled the previous version initially. Recent updates have been adding features lost in the changeover, specifically targeted at the pro market.

I can see why it would be harder to trust them now if you are into the high end video production field. Apple is going to have to do something to make up for that over time, and my feeling is that it was partially due to other projects being rushed to meet what Steve wanted to see before his passing. It's somewhat telling that Job's last performance on stage was to introduce iCloud, something that will be the cornerstone of their consumer efforts for a long time to come.

It is probably a mistake for me to lump the "Pro" market with the business/enterprise market. I could see them keeping some stock in "Pro" realms that I know very little about -- like small group collab/production, but for business I think they are toast.

A fair point on your part re: the Samba GPL decision, but they could have worked the problem to a different conclusion, I think, if they desired.

The notion that they might try a comeback in the server space with a more flexible Mac Pro I think is wishful thinking though maybe they could offer a non-interoperable workgroup solution (and you might say they already do if the current "Mac Pro Server" config suits your SOHO needs.)

In the end, though, their server products were overpriced relative to Linux running on less sexy commodity hardware and there were lots of other aggravations -- like perl and other packages were generally out of date. Add to those the abandonment of platforms like WebObjects (something I am having to address recently).

I remember sending an email to an Apple rep asking if they couldn't make an iMac that had an adjustable-height display. I'm not sure but I thought I heard a chuckle.

None of this is particularly new or shocking. As Apple morphed Appletalk into Bonjour -- protocols that map to their workgroup philosophy -- we were always busy running around turning it off on any new printers that might arrive

Anyhow, sleek, cool-looking stuff, but an increasingly dubious value proposition outside of the individual iSphere.

Perhaps, but it would have been hard if Apple already had their planned security lockdowns in mind for OS X back then. The GPLv3 isn't really compatible with signing based systems, due to the inability to replace the shipped binary. I'm not sure if Apple had any input on the conversion to GPLv3, but they did have a person on staff with commit access to Samba. From reading some of the discussions from the Samba folks, they seemed to realize GPLv3 would inherently be incompatible with OS X. Not sure why, but they had assumed Apple would be happy just sticking to maintenance releases of 3.0.

Dan earlier mentioned ZFS, which ended up also dying due to licensing concerns. Oracle just wouldn't come to an agreement Apple was willing to live with on something as critical as the filesystem for their OS. And sadly there is precedent here, with the situation between Veritas and Microsoft coming to a bad end relating to Dynamic Disk technology in Windows 2000.


They do sell a VESA mounting kit for the iMacs, for what it's worth. Not sure when they started though.

WebObjects was a surprise to me, considering how heavily Apple used it. Not really sure about the backstory there, nor am I sure what they replaced it with for their somewhat recent store revamp.

IMHO, the biggest value is the gigantic number of users they "bring" to the developer. That is hugely valuable to small operations, I think.

You may be right that a smallish operation can keep their costs below 10% for transactions, possibly, but they'd spend a fortune to get the kind of access that the app store gives them via traditional marketing methods.

Presence in the app store is not a replacement for traditional marketing. The App Store can get crowded and while someone may find your app because they'll use the search feature, they're not necessarily any more inclined to be looking for your specific app than they would be if you weren't in the app store (and only had your own site).

The huge benefit is you're only competing for eyeballs with other apps for that platform and not a million web sites with terms that may match on searches - when someone is searching directly within the App Store.

Google presence is still going to be important and so too will other sites reviewing and/or pointing to your product.

Paying 10% to process payments is low if you're looking at Kagi or eSellerate. It's bat-shit high if you're looking at a proper merchant account or PayPal (payments standard or even Payments Pro - where a customer would not know at all you were using PayPal for processing).

I suspect Apple must be paying well under 2%.

ZFS, yes too bad.

Happily, we have it running on OpenIndiana. Did I ever think I'd see the day? Back to the Solaris Future!

Seems like zfs is available as an add on: http://tenscomplement.com/

...though not quite launched yet...

Yeah, I'd be willing to pay for a commercial ZFS port if it really worked, and particularly if it was bootable. And extra especially if I could run some sort of migration tool that would translate my current HFS+ hard drives into ZFS and do it in place. (Or, at least, restore to my new ZFS partition from my Time Machine backup without too much pain.)

This OS is about to be released within a few weeks - maybe even next week.

I haven't tried it in a few months now but will be giving it a go again with the GM release on Monday. Fingers crossed it doesn't pooch too much.

I'm already running Safari 6 and it's the reason I'm adding to this thread. Does anyone know how to disable the full-width tabs and return back to the old tab look?

Full length tabs are a usability horror - it makes it very hard to tell a window has any tabs at all, or how many for that matter.

I also hate the unified URL/search bar because it breaks too much functionality, but I can probably live with that one for now. Maybe someone can help me figure out how to display search history in some manner other than changing focus to the address bar, deleting clearing it out and then moving down using a cursor key. It works, but it's ugly and then I don't know how to get the original URL back without reloading the page.

I also have a problem paying $20 for Mountain Lion considering how bug and problem ridden Lion is. If Anything I'd like to be paid a couple of grand when I update for the troubles Lion has caused.

Today is the day. For Mac users looking to upgrade, or who have done so already, I'd recommend glancing at this list:

http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/features.html

There are tons of little fixups and tweaks compared to Lion, some easy to miss. Still working my way through the John Siracusa epic review (http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/os-x-10-8/).

I've been running the GM on my machines pretty much since it came out, and I've not been hit by any regressions from Lion. With the release today also comes the iWork update for iCloud. This weekend I'll spend some time moving my old iDisk documents into iCloud and decide if this is what I want. If it doesn't work out, I'll look into an iDisk replacement.

Gatekeeper so far hasn't been a problem, and I plan on keeping it in it's default setting of "Mac App Store and identified developers". When you do an upgrade install, any existing unsigned app is still allowed to run. Any new unsigned apps will be blocked via double click, but can be allowed by simply context clicking and choosing open. Once you open it once, the system stops blocking it.

Not really sure on the tabs thing Bruno, perhaps a hidden preference will be revealed now that the OS is officially out. For history, there is always the History - Show all History menu item. The unified bar hasn't bothered me yet, since it seems to still do the right thing and visit internal servers when I type their names. Chrome in the same situation enjoyed tossing me to a google search, and usually required a manual http:// to get it to go to internal servers.

I updated this morning. Ran into two snags so far. The version of Parallels 7 I had on my Mac Mini was slightly out of date. After the 10.8 upgrade, OS X made a new folder on my hard drive called "Incompatible Applications" and moved Parallels there. I just installed the latest version of Parallels 7 and moved the whole Incompatible folder to the trash. Not a big deal. This wasn't a problem on my Macbook since that instance of Parallels was already at the latest version before 10.8.

10.8 also broke compatibility with the last freeware version of Automatic. I'm now running the trial of the paid version. If I stick with it, my Mountain Lion upgrade costs will have doubled.

Also, purchasing Lion Server doesn't seem to automatically get you Mountain Lion Server. So that interface/app doesn't work now. Steve wants another $20 from me, but I don't think he's going to get it.

I'm going to move my main machine over to 10.8 tomorrow and install Lion onto a development (external) drive. I have a long list of Lion bugs that I haven't yet reported to Apple, so I'll verify them all against ML to see if any have been fixed.

Yesterday I reported the fact that Safari 5.1.7 and Safari 6 in Lion could not be used to obtain certificates from Apple's developer site for signing apps. I had to use Firefox. Ugh.

I put up a new beta of my own software last night that contains signed binaries and a signed installer to avoid any hiccups in ML. Had to move to a new package type using a new packaging until as well because I can only seem to sign flat packages with the installer cert. Oh yeah, installers need a different cert than apps, and uses a different mechanism (command line tool) to sign.

I am bit worried about the security option that allows only App Store app installs. I wish they hadn't included that one. Hopefully they'll never make it default. The security settings seem to only affect the ability to install apps, not run them from what I can tell. I can run unsigned apps off an external drive when running 10.8 even with the App Store setting set.

That bothered me, too, when I was trying to make Chrome work for me. Enough that I came up with a reasonable workaround.

When I try to access an internal domain I've never been to, I just type the domain name in the omnibox. It does a Google search and it must also poll for a site there, as it give me a bar that asks if I meant to go to "http://whatever". After choosing yes, every subsequent access of "whatever" takes me to the internal domain.

Has that not been your experience?

It's been ages since I used Chrome regularly (there are other things about it that made it frustrating for me to use), but I had enough different places to go internally that that wouldn't have helped enough quickly enough.

Personally, I don't want autosearch to happen anyway. If I typo something, I'd rather it tell me that than waste time trying to tell me what I meant, and I have keyword search engines set up for when I do want to search.

Can I upgrade straight from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion, or do I have to pay the upgrade tax twice?

You can go right from 10.6.8 to 10.8, and you only pay once at the $19 rate. License is valid for any personal Mac you own, and this includes installation into a VM running on a Mac. There is no DRM or serial key, so it's just an honor system.

Just like in earlier previews and betas, Airplay Mirroring is only available to recent (2011+) machines. Now that's a fucking rip-off. It's the main reason I bought an Apple TV. I can still mirror to it from an iPad, but seriously, mirroring from the Mac was the most important.

Indeed.

Airplay Mirroring requires pretty hefty realtime H.264 encoding on the device sending video. For the desktops, this means a processor with Intel's Quick Sync tech.

The iDevices that can do Airplay mirroring also have similar hardware encoders. It's more prevalent on the mobile side due to HD video capture being a common feature.

That's a fair answer that I can't dispute. But I'm very suspicious of Apple's motives since excluding Siri and turn-by-turn navigation from the iPhone 4 for no technical reason. Especially when they still sell the iPhone 4 and 3GS.

I could buy an iPhone 4 tomorrow for $99 on-contract. Then, I'm married to it for two more years when it doesn't even support the features of today. I just find that incredibly scummy and I doubt Apple store employees are very upfront about it with potential customers.

Umm, I'm next to positive that the NVIDIA and ATI/AMD chips on many (other) Mac machines can easily outperform what Intel has in those CPUs. But I know that NVIDIA is woefully behind on current generation hardware let alone able to provide any kind of support for older gen stuff like what's in my 2009 MBP.

Apple went 100% NVIDIA this year, completely shutting out AMD from every single SKU, and it's one of the reasons they're over a year behind with many of their platform announcements. Lots of NV screw ups and inability to meet quality and quantity standards.

The funny thing about that link Tom, I used to have to explain technical stuff to the two ATI people Anand mentions all the time.

Grabbed this link from Gruber's blog: http://tidbits.com/article/13147

Some small changes/items in 10.8 which are not necessarily obvious. Glad to see "Save As" brought back, even though it requires an additional keystroke modifier. IMO, the whole versioning and auto-save thing is ill-conceived, poorly designed and poorly implemented.

Also glad to see auto-locking of files is gone.

My impression was that while siri runs on iPhone 4, it doesn't have a mic that's tuned for isolating your voice at arms length. Even with the fancy mic hardware I still find it infuriating to use for anything other than setting a reminder.

Siri was working fine on the iPhone 4 when it was available in the App Store prior to Apple's acquisition.

One can also argue that Apple needs server horsepower to run Siri and why take on additional expenditure without also taking on a new revenue stream? That's the theory I put my faith in. At the same time it's one way to differentiate the newer product from the old.

Actually, no.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-s...3-2100-tested/9

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sandy-...33-5.html

Quick Sync is damn impressive. I know, it's easy to doubt Intel as they have fumbled quite a bit in the past. But their tech is outperforming desktop class GPUs by a decent bit for H.264 encoding on both speed, and for NVidia way ahead in quality. I'd imagine the NVidia 320M (the common GPU/chipset in 2010 Macs) lacked both the performance and power efficiency Apple was looking for. And the 9400M common in 2009 definitely wouldn't make the cut.

9600M on the better notebooks. Maybe the NV chips of that time were crap after all.

Apple is moving heavily on using the GPU for general-purpose computing. OpenCL was slow to catch on, but they're concentrating heavily on similar technologies right now - along with Adobe and a few others. The main push right now seems to be for concurrent processing, so you'll benefit from everything your CPU has to offer at the same time.

Oh, does anyone know if 10.8 has airplay video support in for example QuickTime Player? In such a case the sending device only has to wirelessly transmit the H.264 video without transcoding, like with iPhone and iPad models that don't support the mirror feature.

Or support for images would be nice too, allowing one to run a slideshow. I don't actually often need full mirroring. The iPhone/iPad can do this, but getting photo content from a computer onto those devices is next to impossible in the first place.