He probably isn't, but this guy is...

Ah yes... the old mob mentality at work. I know *I* always rely on others to make my decisions regarding my vehicle, home, clothing, and computing platform purchases. After all, being "cool", buying into marketing hype, and having the "respect" of those around me brings me lots of money.

Oh wait...

Until I can make a killing off what others think of me and the ownership of material possessions, I'll never understand what the point is...

Douchebags confuse cockiness with expertise

There. Fixed that for you :)

I am a PC. :)

You are a sucker for marketing...

My computer runs just fine... with OS X on it...

Just a note here: cooperative multitaking may cause a system to become unresponsive, but it won't cause a system to crash. In both the case of cooperative multitasking and the lack of memory protection, the stability issues were caused by applications rather than the operating system (in virtually every case). As such, it was quite possible to choose applications that did not affect the responsiveness or stability of the system as a whole. Granted, that was virtually impossible to do for web browsers in the case of the classic Mac OS.

It was usually 68k apps running on PPC machines that would cause the more catastrophic crashes, as they were more likely to corrupt the system heap. The classic OS's main stability issues were with extensions, which were mostly fixable with Cassidy-Greene's Conflict Catcher. Reordering the extension loading usually fixes any issues.

I've found that with any PPC-native program, if it becomes unstable and causes the machine to stop responding, force-quitting would usually bring it back from the dead without causing the entire machine to go down. I still tend to reboot after such an event, to clean up memory. But the crashes are few and far- between with PPC- native apps.

8.6 compatibility is very good... so far. I'm testing the browser on my Cube, a Bondi iMac (running 8.6) and a Performa 6400 (ditto). It's definitely faster than Mozilla, Netscape, and WamCom, and fairly stable. Only certain sites make it crash, such as Alltop (if you hover over a link), and it has some rendering and scrolling bugs (such as on Blogspot). But on the whole, it's much more stable than the older browsers. And Slashdot no longer crashes either :)

I jumped on as a tester fairly early in the project; discussion started on the OS 9 list sponsored by Low End Mac about a modernized browser for the classic OS; as I still use my OS 9- running Cube daily, and got tired of WamCom crashing on me.

"Sure, it may be a good product but how many people would be willing to buy the equivalent product that has little or no image / cool factor attached to it?"

If people are suckers enough to buy into the marketing of a product ("it's a reflection of my lifestyle"), that's THEIR problem.

Not everyone buys a product based on their commercials. Some of us are actually long-time users of something. But never underestimate the stupidity of the general public when it comes to marketing, and the inherent laziness when it comes to investigating a product before purchasing.

(*ahem* Mountain removal, and the blind eye the US media turns to it...)

Jim Hightower would be proud :)

Exactly.

Let's not forget that due to those high margins, they have almost 30 billion bucks in the bank with NO debt.

Apple just does NOT care about market share. They make money with what they do. Why should they change for a few thousand hobbyists?

Apple have found a niche for themselves as a combined OS + Hardware vendor where they control the entire environment. They will never make an expandable, cheapo minitower, they aren't the cheapest, and they will never dominate the industry AND THEY DON'T CARE! For one simple reason: enough people like what they produce to generate a very healthy, very profitable business. That, at the end of the day is all they want and they're succeeding at it.

For now anyway.

Never going to happen. Period. Apple would never sell any product that would either enter them into the race to the bottom market that Dell, HP, et. al., compete in, or lower the high profit margins that they currently enjoy. It's just not going to happen because 1-2 thousand hobbyists are clammering for it.

You should be an analyst. Your predictions are just as accurate as theirs are in forecasting Apple's future.

Steve Squyres of the Mars Rover mission won't be in on this one, but about ten years ago on BBC's The Planets series, he discussed designing a lander/sub mission to Europa. The lander would melt through the ice, turn into a sub, and start exploring the ocean beneath.

While I'm optimistic that this will happen someday, I'm sad that I won't see it in my lifetime.

Yeah I'll give you guys that. Apple's software for Windows SUCKS, and always has. The same problems don't occur in Mac OS X. Why they write shitware versions of their Mac apps and spread forceware to Windows machines is fucking stupid. No excuse, Apple, and I'm what the juvenile labelers of the world would probably call a "fanboy."