I've been wanting to write this for quite some time but I could never quite find the time to write it. All the Mac fanatics are always saying that Apple charges less for OS X than Microsoft does for Windows (MSRP, any version, including upgrade versions, excluding Home). While it is true that even the cheapest upgrade version of Windows XP Home is $99.00 USD and that it is cheaper than even the base version of OS X, I have found that even the most staunch Windows advocate won't often recommend anything but Windows XP Professional for serious users because of how badly they think XP Home is crippled for these users. Windows XP Professional just offers more, especially in the fine-grain security settings area. The price to upgrade to Windows XP Professional is $199.00 even if you are just upgrading from XP Home. So if you are getting a PC with XP Home preinstalled, I highly suggest you take the offered option to upgrade to XP Pro. Most OEMs offer it as a choice on their CPU customization page and it is only about $70 more that way. But the entire point of this article is not to compare Mac OS X to Windows XP or Apple to Microsoft. I am only trying to show the total cost of Mac OS X to a normal consumer.
+$129.00, Mac OS X: Well, of course you actually have to purchase Mac OS X. This is pretty much a given.
+$49.00, iLife '04: If you purchase Mac OS X right now, you are given what amounts to a buggy and very slow demo of iMovie and iPhoto. The speed of iPhoto 2.0 especially is just inexcusable. Apple should be ashamed for charging a fee to upgrade to a version that partially addresses such a horribly glaring error and huge issue for many users. iMovie is no different. In fact, the very first "bullet point" of each of these software product's home page is "25,000 Photos. Zero Waiting." for iPhoto and "More Responsive" for iMovie. The entire product page for iPhoto tries to hammer in the idea how much faster iPhoto 4.0(?) is than iPhoto 2.0 and even mentions it in the title image (shown below). And you must pay for that increase in speed. I understand that earlier versions of software can be slow. Heck, FontCard 1.0.x was extremely slow but that doesn't mean we charged an upgrade fee for people to get the version that was much, much faster.
Now, I know there is a rebate for iLife '04 if you purchase it together with Mac OS X version 10.3 "Panther" Version 10.3.0 but that means exactly Dingus Squatford Jr. You must first pay out the initial funds to purchase them both together, you must have purchased them from a store located within the 50 states or the District of Columbia, and you must mutilate your purchases to prove you bought them both. Those who are Canadian or live in another country need not apply. You must also wait up to two months for the rebate check to arrive. And of course the rebate check doesn't quite cover the entirety of the sales tax, unless you live in a place that has a sales tax of around 2% or less. I really wish that if you purchased Mac OS X at least at the Apple Store (retail or online), Apple would automatically give you iLife '04 for free. That'd be at least somewhat fair. As it stands now it seems that Apple (like all other retailers) are banking on the fact that many users will purchase a product based on a rebate but will be far too lazy to redeem them. That could also be the reason Apple offers it only to those in the US; Americans are a lazy bunch.
With Tiger approaching, who knows what Apple will do. Will they continue to ship iPhoto 2.0 and iMovie 3.0 with it? Unlikely. Will they upgrade the included versions to Version 4.0 of each application and charge for iLife '05 when it is released? Very possible, considering the Add More Life to Your Mac promotion ends on the day before the keynote at MWSF. Or will Apple just drop iPhoto and iMovie completely from OS X, charge for what was once included with OS X for free, and offer absolutely no way to manage photos or create home videos on OS X, despite the fact that Microsoft gives these features away for free with Photo Story 3 and Windows Movie Maker 2.1? Very possible, as well, considering Apple's history and the fact that neither iPhoto nor iMovie is mentioned anywhere on Apple's Tiger page at all. Of course, the obvious explanation for this lack of mention is that Apple could be working on new versions of these software products and doesn't wish to announce their feature set—or even existence—at this time. I have no idea if this is actually true or not.
The noble and fair thing for Apple to do is to release iPhoto 4.0 and iMovie 4.0 as free downloads. It isn't like iLife '04 isn't compelling despite those two products. GarageBand and iDVD are enough of a reason to purchase iLife '04 for many. They were the reason why I purchased it, even though I don't actually use either product. I'm not complaining that iDVD should be a free download as well due to its unbelievably huge file size. It has never been included for free with OS X so there is no precedent here. However, considering that the rumor sites (if you believe their obvious lies and rather vague attempts at growing their readership) are saying that Tiger is being distributed on DVD, including iDVD with it may not be outside of the realm of possibility, crazy as that realm may be.
+$29.99, QuickTime Pro: Now this just takes the cake of ridicularity. Every single feature it offers is a part of the QuickTime API already and is enabled in said API even if the user doesn't pay thirty bucks for a serial number. The only places these features are disabled are in the QuickTime Player and the QuickTime Plugin. Apple offers sample code on how a developer can make an application that uses all of the disabled features without any of them requiring QT Pro. Some of the features Apple lists as "enabled" with QT Pro are just insane. The worst part is that the QuickTime Player/QT Plugin shows a huge banner ad almost every time you open it to upgrade to QT Pro. Some of the insane "features enabled" are: play movies in fullscreen, save movies from websites, get trailers, export movies, and the list goes on. Playing movies full screen is one function call! Note that this is not normal Apple developer documentation; all docs should include sample code that shows the function being used along with links to sample code that uses the function calls but they do not. Apple should take a page from Microsoft's MSDN on this one. Anywho, many people only want QT Pro for fullscreen and for them Apple is charging $30 for this ONE function call. Saving movies from websites also has left me rather angry as well. All this is doing is taking the file from the cache (it has already been downloaded to your computer), renaming it, and placing it in a different folder on the hard drive. If the destination folder is on a different hard drive (volume), it has to do a copy as well. One of the items Apple has listed as a feature of QT Pro, "Use AppleScript -- a Mac-exclusive technology -- to automate your production workflow," makes no sense at all, as QuickTime Player is still AppleScriptable even if the user hasn't purchased QT Pro. And you can still write an AppleScript to enable many of the disabled functions such as fullscreen playback.
If I start thinking like a greedy bastard, I can understand why Apple charges for the Windows version of QT Pro because Apple still has to pay for patent licensing on the formats they support and need to recoup much of the loss all while getting no money from Windows users any other way. Then again, Apple should have already paid for either an infinite use (one time fee) patent licenses which many companies offer so Apple would have long since paid any patent licensing fees and written them off. Most companies that don't offer one time fees do have caps on the maximum amount that one company can be charged per year for patent licensing. For example, MPEG LA has a maximum annual cap of $1 million per encoder and $1 million per encoder (and an enterprise cap of $3 million) for MPEG-4. This means as soon as Apple distributes 4,050,000 copies of QuickTime, they have reached their annual cap. Extremely easy to do since every day more than 300,000 people download QuickTime. I imagine Apple can get a special deal on many of their licenses due to the massive amount of volume they do with all these formats. It'd be stupid from a business stand-point to not get a special deal. However, none of this accounts for the Apple mantra of being a hardware company first and a software company second.
While some sites say that the version of QuickTime included in Tiger will sport many new features, few things are being said about the player itself. Will Apple do the ethically correct thing and enable renaming from cache and the calling of that one function without paying $30 for QT Pro or will they be even worse and not only lock out the player and plugin but also the API for those people that don't have QT Pro? Imagine being a developer that leverages features "enabled" by QT Pro only to have to tell users with this new version of QuickTime will require them to pay Apple $30 to continue to use your application. Will Apple finally include GIF export since the patent Unisys held is now expired and Apple won't have to pay the license fees for it? Only time will tell. As it stands now it takes more effort and engineering time to disable the features that QT Pro "enables" than it does to just leave them enabled in the first place. And for the love of all things holy in this world and the next I still cannot fathom what cracked out manager/marketer at Apple decided that people should have to pay $30 just to enable full screen video and renaming a file from cache. It just makes no sense. Exporting I can understand, but not this... not on any platform.
+$99.95, .Mac (dot Mac): This one may not make much sense as to why I am including it at first but bear with me. I am including it because it is a requirement to use a lot of the advertised features of OS X and the full features of the software (such as iPhoto and iMovie) that comes with OS X and because as soon as you install OS X and open iChat or Mail.app you receive dialog boxes and alerts that basically make you think you have to buy a .Mac membership. The first error on Apple's part is the fact they renamed the Internet preference pane to .Mac after they had removed the ability to do anything else like set the default browser, email client, and ftp client. Right now it basically has no information for users that are not .Mac members. It just asks for a username and password or asks the user to Sign Up. No other information is given about it. Not even so much as a help button. It does however seem to make the users questioning what it is, wondering why they don't have it and then some will get the gnawing urge to join even though they have no idea what it does. At least it isn't blatant and shameless advertising like the QuickTime Pro banner.
Two of iPhoto's prominent features require .Mac to function. The .Mac Slides operation and the HomePage operation. iMovie requires .Mac for the Share via HomePage option (although it allows you to save for web irregardless of whether you have .Mac or not). The Finder requires .Mac for the iDisk menu item in the Go menu (duh). iSync requires .Mac for the .mac [sic] synchronizing (duh again). And finally, Backup requires .Mac... well, to get Backup you have to have a .Mac account for some odd reason. It is a great application and rather lame that Apple doesn't include any method of backing up with OS X short of making a disk image which isn't exactly the fastest or most efficient way to make a backup especially if you wish to do it (the backup) daily. Here's the catch: technically there is no reason why .Mac is required for any of these operations. Yup, not a single one I can find. Sure, these applications might query the Apple servers to determine your account access and other attributes about your account. And yes, iPhoto would get the latest HomePage templates from Apple's server, but otherwise it all appears to be straight up WebDAV.
WebDAV is an internet standard for "Distributed Authoring" via extensions to HTTP. In other words, it basically allows you to treat a location on an HTTP server as a writable volume (that is the general implementation I have seen) assuming the server supports it. And all the Apple applications appear to just use that for uploading and downloading files to your .Mac space. No surprise considering how much Apple advertises how OS X is based on open source and standards. However, what is flabbergastingly mind boggling is that with all this open support OS X has Apple won't permit you to choose a different WebDAV server for iPhoto, iSync, iMovie, and Backup to work with. Those that use the .Mac service know how often it can be down and how unbelievably slow it can be to work with. Switching WebDAV servers would allow people to work with what could be a much faster (and much more secure) server. iCal already permits you to choose an arbitrary WebDAV server to publish your calendars to. It'd be super nice if Apple would permit the power users that know what WebDAV does and how to set up WebDAV on OS X should have the option of choosing what WebDAV server is their user's "home". The client and server versions of OS X come with Apache's httpd and the WebDAV module. The optimal thing for Apple to do here is to remake the Internet preference pane, put the .Mac functionality back into it and remove the .Mac preference pane, and finally add a new tab or other interface for entering your username, password, and WebDAV URL if you know what that is.
=$307.94: In order to get rid of all the ads OS X presents you with, to use all the advertised features of OS X, and finally to upgrade to the fast versions of the "demos" Apple includes with OS X you must spend over three hundred dollars. Three hundred dollars... Ugh. Talk about nickeling and diming someone to death. In all fairness I should mention that we have been accused of that in the past. I mean in order to get a system as show in the below screenshot, you must purchase Xounds, ShapeShifter, and FontCard. But we do offer discounts if multiple products are purchased together and all orders get a coupon for future orders. Yes, I know that was shameless self-promotion. Sorry about that.
I do believe that I've outlined all my problems with the current pricing structure of Apple's core OS X and things Apple can to do fix and/or address the complaints I have against it in the future. All I have is hope for the future and regardless of warnings, it doesn't scare me any more. If any one is curious this was originally going to be entitled "Now I'm Sober and Nevermore Will the Raven Come to Bother Me" but I didn't think a weird title was appropriate for a post of this length about technology.
If you've created a ShapeShifter theme, a system icon replacement set, or a Mighty Mouse cursor set, we'd like to invite you to submit your goodies for a compilation CD we're putting together to distribute at Mac World San Francisco. And if you're going to MWSF, we hope you'll cruise on by our booth and say hello! Meeting the Unsane ones is always very, very cool!
Criteria for submissions: You need to be the original author, or have distiribution permission from the original author. The file should be in guiKit format if it's a theme. If it's an icon set, it should replace at least all of the icons in a user's home directory, and it can be in guiKit or icontainer format. If it's a cursor set, it should be in mightyMouse format.
Please email submissions, or a download link for submissions, to brian at the name of this company, followed by a dot com. "You have my permission to distribute such-and-such theme" is fine.
Also, please remember - if you've created a new theme or system-level icon set, please submit it for inclusion on the ShapeShifter download tab! More info on the submission process is here.
See ya in San Fran, and for the Merikkuns in the crowd, have a Happy Thanksgiving!
To continue my own post about running MT-Blacklist:
- Comment spams blocked: 2735
- Comment spams moderated: 238
- Duplicates blocked: 1
- Blacklist - Strings: 3213
- Blacklist - URLPatterns: 50
- Blacklist - Regexes: 31
The comment spam amount is ridiculous, isn't it? =)
I've been relying on the pair's installed SpamAssassin for a long while, yet it become totally untolerable in the way how many spam emails pass through its filters.
Yesterday, after reading inluminent's entry about SpamSieve, I suddenly remembered about it's existance and decided to give it a try.
I downloaded it, installed it and trained it with a bit of the spam messages found in my email box.
Today, I am sold out:
Filtered Mail
29 Good Messages
148 Spam Messages (84%)
176 Spam Messages Per Day
SpamSieve Accuracy
0 False Positives
0 False Negatives
100.0% Correct
Corpus
177 Good Messages
347 Spam Messages (66%)
28631 Total Words
Rules
642 Blocklist Rules
131 Whitelist Rules
Showing Statistics Since
11/1/04 15:17
This is a no-brainer for me -- bought it today. Thanks, Michael! This adds one more person to a list of people I want to buy a bottle of their favorite drink when we meet next time. ;)