Subject: Re: Ease Of Use and Hardware Support (WAS: Linux Laptops)
From: Timothy A. Seufert (tas@mindspring.com)
Date: Sat Mar 09 2002 - 19:24:52 MST
Folks, if you ain't interested in increasingly trivial details, just
hit whatever key your mail program uses for delete right now...
At 2:31 AM -0600 3/9/02, Robert Brandtjen wrote:
>On Friday 08 March 2002 09:10 pm, Timothy A. Seufert wrote:
>> s an aside, it would behoove you to find a place where Apple
>> actually says "fully supported" or similar. You probably won't have
>> much luck. (One of the reasons the class action lawsuit is probably
>> doomed.)
>
>thats your opinion tim - and yes, it was right on their website - if they
>have removed - no big surprise - they are being sued.
My MacOS X retail box, made long before the lawsuit was filed, is
basically the same as the website. They give a list of systems MacOS
X can run on and how much RAM and HD space it will need. That makes
the claim roughly "seller guarantees the software will run on this
config" while saying nothing about how many features are supported.
For better or for worse, it's the standard industry practice. A
common example is 3D games -- as a general rule you must disable a
lot of features to get a game to run acceptably on the "minimum
required system", even though the screenshots on the box are
typically made using the latest and greatest hardware with all the
game's fancy rendering features enabled. Phrasing it the way they do
keeps them legally clean.
That's really what I was getting at; "requirements" or "minimum
requirements" is such a common technique for avoiding liability that
Apple's legal department is unlikely to ever allow phrasing like
"fully supported" to be associated with any software product, purely
on general principles. I don't know if it did happen -- but it seems
unlikely. Lucky break for the class action if it did.
>All Apple G3's were supported, its not fud, the problems are there, the
>lawsuit is real, the suit could have been made for the PCI macs under
>California Law. why? they were sold to the mac user base as "fully supported
>for Apples next generation OS - OSX/Rhapsody"- that point was made in early
>1997 - when they weren't supported under the original OSX - were they old ?
>hardly, the 9600 was still being produced and sold, the 7600/7300 went out of
>production 1997 - it was a move to push hardware, since there was no other
>compelling reason (read speed boost) to do so.
>
>now I haven't checked lately, but as of OSX 10.01, uname -a came back with a
>Rhapsody 1.3 - OSX 1.2 is Rhapsody 1.2. The reason for the name change was to
>screw people out of their Apple updates.
It always seemed quite clear that "Rhapsody" was a public codename
never intended to be the final shipping name, in much the same vein
as "Copland" and "Gershwin" before it (which were supposed to be
MacOS 8.0 and 9.0 respectively, though neither ever saw the light of
day).
Anyways I'm afraid you misremembered. I was curious, so I let 10.0.0
(build 4k78) install on a spare hard drive while I went out to get
lunch:
[localhost:~] tas% uname -a
Darwin localhost 1.3 Darwin Kernel Version 1.3: Thu Mar 1 06:56:40
PST 2001; root:xnu/xnu-123.5.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh
powerpc
>Linux doesn't drop support for older hardware - MS doesn't drop support for
>older hardware
Not true. The Linux time constant is very long, and it tends to
happen by attrition, but it does happen. There are lots of drivers
that I would not want to touch with a 10 foot pole because they
haven't been properly maintained for years. Sometimes they won't
even compile. If a driver is really crusty it can even be dropped
from the kernel, but that's just a formal recognition of an
accomplished fact.
As for MS -- of course they drop support for old hardware. XP's
minimum hardware requirements are pretty high. And it's quite
interesting to note that XP's drivers for Rage II/II+/Pro support
none of the chip's features beyond basic 2D acceleration -- same as
MacOS X. So far as I can tell, neither ATI nor Microsoft plans to
write better drivers in the future.
Even Linux support for Rage Pro has faltered -- you can only get 3D
with the Utah-GLX drivers, which currently require XFree86 3.x.
XFree86 4.x currently has no 3D accel support for Rage Pro. Probably
3D for RagePro will make it into XF4 eventually (I've read that some
people are trying to revive Utah-GLX by porting some of its drivers
to XF4), but right now you're screwed if you want 3D and a current
XF86 server at the same time.
Sucks to own a Rage Pro, I guess.
> - Apple does, but then Apple needs to drive hardware sales to
>make ends meet - or as Jobs said in his Time Magazine interview in 1996,
>"milk the Mac user base"
The exact quote is:
"If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it's
worth -- and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over.
Done. Microsoft won a long time ago."
I think it's pretty clear that he changed his mind on the first part,
since Apple doesn't have anything to replace the Macintosh as its
bread-and-butter revenue maker even remotely in sight.
>In legal terms - this sets a pattern - legal suits look for patterns of
>behavior in suits like this - saying Apple was "gracious" enough to do so is
>nonsense, the machines were fully supported with out hacks on the beta
>release - the fact that support was later removed was in fact nothing more
>then mean spiritedness.
You can't have it both ways. If Apple had a policy to absolutely
force users to upgrade hardware to run OS X, they could have removed
the relevant drivers from Darwin as well as the compiled release and
thus made it MUCH harder for the community to run OS X on unsupported
HW.
>BY the way, had you read the entire legal filing, you would know it also
>affects the early G3 laptops - which were, under the adds at the time (legal
>dispute doesn't concern itself with present marketing, it's what was in place
>at the time the hardware was sold) was also a fully supported piece of
>equipment for OSX 10.
Sigh. I was already well aware that the lawsuit covered G3 laptops,
since a large number of them use Rage II or Pro. In fact even very
recent stuff like the original toilet seat iBook used it. Beats me
why you're trying to slam me for supposedly not knowing this.
>Now - that lawsuit exists - contrary to your earlier assertion that there
>were no problems listed
I made no such assertion.
>nor any support to my alleged FUD - there are
>hundreds of posts at the forums on Macobserver, xlr8yourmac, etc.
FUD is an acronym for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. You spread FUD
about (FUDded for short) the recent 10.1.3 update; you claimed that
it deliberately degraded support for beige G3s by making QuickTime
useless on them. You provided no evidence. I mentioned that the
only 10.1.3 QuickTime problem I'd seen reference to was the info
window problem which affects everybody, not just beige G3s. And
though I only mentioned Macintouch, I also checked the xlr8yourmac
forums before naysaying you on this one.
You FUDded MacOS X as a whole by claiming that Apple deliberately
tries to prevent ATI and NVidia retail video cards from working. You
clearly had no idea what you were talking about since there aren't
any Mac NVidia cards aside from Apple's OEM ones. Nor have you
supplied any information substantiating the claim about ATI cards.
You even went so far as to speculate that Apple would soon finish off
the Beige G3 and begin targeting the Blue&White. Very much an
example of FUD.
>I hope he wins his lawsuit - just like the owners of pre PCI macs who were
>sold a life time support warranty ( I was one of them) and were later told to
>take a hike by Jobs - Jobs lost that class action suit.
>
>I think asserting these things didn't happen is FUD.
Aside from the fact that I made no such assertion, if I had it would
not have been FUD, by definition.
-- Tim Seufert
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