Re:Some good, some bad (Score 1)

The transition from Motorola 680x0 to PPC is a good example of Apple innovation at its best. The transition was sometimes ugly, but overall amazingly smooth. The transition from IBM Power64 to Intel Core was perhaps less innovative, simply because they were using a state-of-the-art kernel. Nevertheless, the transition was almost completely transparent from a developer point of view. I'm amazed how quickly I made my Application into a Universal Binary.You really have to give Apple some credit here. A lot of salaried guys at Apple worked long hours for years to keep Mac OS X running well on Intel hardware when no one else was aware of it.

Yeah, well, that has two sides to it. While I admit, that all Apple has ever done to solve the problem of changing to another platform was simply astonishing, from a technical point of view. From the end-user point of view, things didn't always went that smooth. I work at a DTP-Buisness and I remeber how painful the switch to OSX was. So painful that we switched half the department to Windows-Desktops to keep reliability in production (which actually works great). And I remeber that I actually prefered OS9 over any OS at that time for working with graphical apps, even though it was a laughable OS, it was EASY and had not the administration-problems a more complicated OS like NT had. With OSX there came a lot of instability into the workflow, updates caused Photoshop to crash, and the whole font-problems. I can't understand why it can be so hard to handle fonts for a OS, Windows does this flawless. A simple font once caused my colleagues G4 to Kernelpanic, what is this? Then I know how there wasn't a native support for Photoshop 7 and we had to use it in "Classic"-Mode. Which technically may be a great achievement, but again, was a real pain-in-the-ass for our working environment. Nowadays I can see nothing OSX can do better than Windows relating to my work, even if it has Screen-PDF or system-wide colormanagment. Apple isn't supporting the userbase in the graphical industry very much, not like they did in the past. Meanwhile Microsoft hires some colormanagment-experts off Canon for developing the Vista-CMS. Right now half of my company works with Photoshop under Rosetta-environment, which runs on a MacPro as fast as on a G4 Powerbook. And that is kinda frustrating, the windows-machines run Photoshop three times as fast as the shiny, new cheesegrater. I don't blame Apple, I don't blame Adobe for not beeing faster at developing a Universal Binary version. But still, as a customer, it would have been very much more efficent and productive if we'd have entirely switched to Windows-PCs ever since OSX came out. XP has its flaws but thanks to its age and support it is a very reliable system when used in production and I can't always say this about OSX. The flaws of Windows can also be its strengths; it carries a lot of old waste and support for entirely old or unmodern protocols, hardware, specific software aso. While OSX doesn't have to support all that crap, a lot of it makes Windows extremly backward-compatible and thus reliable for buisnesses. Microsoft does great work in keeping backward-compatibility in nearly all they do, though you can argue about that this is blocking innovation, buisnesses just demand that kind of behaviour. So, yes, Apple's efforts in making switches less painful were undoubtly great. Still not all of Apple's decisions are very customer-friendly, they are very good at selling it to their customers. Like they were marketing the G5 and the PowerPC Architecture so much faster and superior to the Pentium... till they switched to Intel, when (Ah, but I know it isn't a Pentium, but a Core Duo now, sorry)suddenly Intel had the fastest CPU on the Market according to Apple. I admit that Apple is better at innovation than Microsoft. But Apple is also much better at marketing innovation where there is not much about it (the iPod shuffle - it only plays shuffle. No, you can't select the tracks, it's a feature, idiot!)