Saturday, February 13, 2010

Gadgetry

The real problem with the iPad for me is I want it to run this whole Mac OS thingie that Apple seems so proud of. It doesn't. Here are some tablets - vaporware included - that possibly can.

17 comments:

Simba B said...

this whole Mac OS thingie that Apple seems so proud of.

Surely you kid. iPhone OS locks you to the App Store, which makes His Steveness and (most importantly) his shareholders superrich. They're not proud of Mac OS at all...the future is in iPhone OS. Mark my words.

Apple is now a mobile gadget company, as it is far more profitable to sell people the same thing, over and over again, dangling out things that should have been fixed in the first edition as a carrot.

Who knows if this computer business will keep up much longer.

Substance McGravitas said...

Well, when they wanna say "world's most advanced operating system" whenever they can, I'm happy to complain about gadgets that don't include it.

fish said...

If it's running Windows, it isn't an alternative.

Give it less than a year before the OS can run multiple apps simultaneously. It already can (mail, iTunes, phone), but Apple doesn't allow other things to run in background yet.

Substance McGravitas said...

If it's running Windows, it isn't an alternative.

My assumption is that you can wipe that. Simba's one of those bad people who runs the Mac OS on a non-native machine: wonder if it'd run on those?

mikey said...

Nope. Wrong. Thanks for playing.

Here's the thing. Tablets, smartbooks, MIDs etc. MUST have two characteristics. Long battery life and underpowered compute hardware compared to a typical 'computer'. So both Windows and MacOS defeat the purpose, and are therefore ill suited for this form factor.

But wait. You're RIGHT when you say iPhoneOS and Android are not useful in a more capable, broadly useful device. Oh my. Whatever shall we do.

You know, if only there was another operating system choice, one that was open source and had no requirement to support legacy versions and applications, that has much lesser hardware requirements and a much smaller footprint, one that could be quickly and easily modified by any hardware company to work optimally on their specific hardware build and still support a HUGE ecosystem of stable and useful applications. Man, that would be great. That would give us much more useful, much more powerful portable solutions that weren't dependent on the whims of Apple or Microsoft for improvements. And it would be especially cool if this OS was much cheaper than Windows or OSX.

Dood. It's 2010. There is virtually no question in the technology realm where the answer is not Linux.

Moblin. Ubuntu Netbook Remix. ChromeOS.

I will quite honestly NEVER understand people's irrational attachment to a particular operating system. Fer crissakes, USE WHAT WORKS BEST.

Substance McGravitas said...

This is an easy one to answer: the Mac OS works best for me.

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

Vancooverines!
~

mikey said...

Unless you try to use it on a platform that won't support it. If it's slow and won't work the way you want it to and won't run the applications you want. It's a different device, built to different specs. It clearly needs an OS optimized for that class of hardware. Is apple really going to re-jigger OSX as a lightweight, small-footprint OS? Maybe they can call it the square peg project...

Substance McGravitas said...

Man, I'm a mac user. I still have a couple of decade-old machines running OS X. I can tolerate those, and the clock-speeds on the new portables beat the hell out of them.

I really don't think it's a stretch. Haven't checked into the development, but the brag when the iPhone came out was that it was a whole OS X on a phone - which isn't quite true, but I take it for granted that the Unix guts are there, and the fancy-schmancy overlay is what's missing.

Substance McGravitas said...

Vancooverines!

You are referring to our dedicated window-smashers, yes?

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

You are referring to our dedicated window-smashers, yes?

Actually, I was just making noise.

But you did inspire me to look up Vancouver wolverines on teh google.

So what's all this about Smashing Windows?
~

Substance McGravitas said...

Olympic protesters smash department store windows

By ANNE M. PETERSON (AP) – 16 minutes ago

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — More than 200 masked Olympic protesters splattered red paint and smashed windows of a popular downtown department store Saturday on the first day of competition at the Vancouver Games.

Police say the group marched through the upscale shopping district, vandalizing cars and stores. Witnesses say protesters threw metal newspaper boxes into the display windows of Hudson's Bay Company, where Olympic souvenirs are sold.


The "upscale shopping district" is pretty much just "downtown" like in any city, a very few blocks from a buncha homeless shelters and the poorest neighbourhood in Canada.

They were after Olympic pins I guess.

Simba B said...

It runs reasonably well under VMware, for the purposes I want it for: developing and testing applications under OS X. Thing is, anything requiring advanced graphics hardware will not work. This is extremely annoying if you hate graphics card companies and their shenanigans, and understand how these things work, but also an entirely different rant.

And as far as iPhone OS goes, yes, it is "OS X" on a phone, in that they took Mach, ported it to ARM, and some of the other frameworks and stuff came with it. So they sort of did what mikey's saying Linux does, except that people like me don't give a shit about that because I can't play with it or tinker with it, it's completely closed.

But that aside, Mach is pretty heavy-duty—it's a microkernel with it's own system call interface. It actually isn't UNIX, if you understand "UNIX" to be a native syscall interface resembling POSIX. It emulates POSIX. Apple just kind of stretches the definition of words, as is the wont of their marketing department.

Microkernels require lots of operations called "context switches", which are expensive in terms of computing cost—this isn't really a huge deal on your average high-power desktop Mac (even going back 10 years, due to the superior design of PowerPC), but in two environments, it's a killer—the server world, where raw I/O speed is crucial, and the mobile world, where efficiency is king.

This is, incidentally, why no one takes the Xserve seriously, outside of IT departments using them to easily support Mac workstations.

Substance McGravitas said...

Thank you Simba for outbaffling me. You and mikey both have more tech expertise, nevertheless 13x9 MacBook suggests to me that more is possible.

mikey said...

Oh, it is CERTAINLY possible for apple to build a tablet with robust enough hardware to easily run OSX. The problems would be heat, short battery life and COST.

They would have a hard time finding a market at two thousand dollars retail for a machine with a ten inch screen and two hour battery life...

Substance McGravitas said...

A friend's got a Mac Air, which is $1499 so yeah...

zombie rotten mcdonald said...

oof. Imma stayin out of this one, I've been out-geeked before I even start.

I'll just pretend I'm running Windows ME on an eMachine....