01.01.09
Opportunities Open Up for GNU/Linux as Apple Suffers
BEING IN THE MIDST OF A HOLIDAY, not much has happened since the "Hard(er) Times at Apple" post, but in order to keep readers up to date, worth maintaining track of are these technical issues which brick Apple Macs. This is pretty serious.
As PC Mag reported last week, Apple OS X 10.5.6 can break some MacBook Pros leaving some users (like me) with a dead backlit black screen after the Apple logo appears.
Apple’s enormous marketing budget (about $300M per year) will probably send this one “oopsie” under the shade
It is saddening to see OS News turning a mere rumour into the headline “Jobs’ Health Rapidly Declining, Inevitable News Spring 2009.” A more accurate report is probably this one.
Apple’s stock fell abruptly on Tuesday, but later recovered some ground, after an online report said CEO Steve Jobs bowed out of next week’s Macworld Expo keynote address because of declining health.
In a report it labeled “rumor,” the gadget blog Gizmodo quoted an unnamed source as saying Apple “is choosing to remove the hype factor strategically” by holding the keynote without Jobs, whose “health is rapidly declining.” Gizmodo said the source had been correct in the past, though only about Apple products and not about Jobs. Apple did not comment for the Gizmodo post and did not immediately respond to IDG News Service requests for comment.
It is worth remembering that Apple is not invincible. It spends outrageous amounts of money on shaping perceptions, so it’s too easy to be deceived. Apple is not exactly a friend of Free software, to say the very least. Its people also fail to acknowledge their ‘debt’ to ideas which come from the software community but are never mass marketed. █
“Hey, Steve, just because you broke into Xerox’s store before I did and took the TV doesn’t mean I can’t go in later and steal the stereo.”
–Bill Gates, Microsoft
“Our friends up north [Microsoft] spend over five billion dollars on research and development and all they seem to do is copy Google and Apple.”
–Steve Jobs, Apple
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Diamond Wakizashi said,
January 1, 2009 at 4:26 pm
Is that a picture of Ballmer?
twitter said,
January 1, 2009 at 4:28 pm
I got to see a Vista brick last week. The victim had problems with SP1 that blocked updates. Dell sent him to M$ for support. After two or three weeks of back and forth by email, the solution was to remove SP1. The operation failed, leaving him with a machine that tries to fix itself on boot and freezes with a single line of blinking white text on a black screen, “!! 0xsome_hex_number !! obtuse error message”. While I’ve read about things like this and seen plenty of it on youtube, it’s another thing to see it in person. The victim still had faith in M$ to make things work in a reasonable time frame, but I sense a GNU/Linux conversion is on the way.
Roy Schestowitz said,
January 1, 2009 at 4:27 pm
He can’t eat Apple. IBM probably can.
David Gerard said,
January 2, 2009 at 10:45 am
Realistically, not leaving a successor is a failure on the part of any CEO, prime minister, etc. Steve = Apple = Steve is a bad thing, and Steve is quite aware of this. I expect he has his qualms as to how well he’s encultured good taste at Apple, but he realises it’s the only way to go because anyone including him could die any moment (the “hit by a bus” problem in successor management).
The Mad Hatter said,
January 3, 2009 at 4:36 am
Actually I think that Apple will do well, even if Steve Jobs is sick, as long as they look at what Microsoft is doing, and then do the opposite.
Yuhong Bao said,
May 5, 2009 at 1:11 am
“Apple’s enormous marketing budget (about $300M per year) will probably send this one “oopsie” under the shade”
Yep, OS vendors are not perfect and do makes mistakes, and you are right that things like this do tend to be swept under the rug.
Here is another example:
http://www.osnews.com/story/15587