May 20, 2002

Quartz Extreme Requirements

Okay, you assholes, one last time, try to get this one simple fact through your thick Steve-washed braincases: MAC OS X JAGUAR DOES not REQUIRE 32 MEGS OF VIDEO MEMORY TO USE QUARTZ EXTREME.

Every time there's new Apple hardware released, or some new rumor or tidbit regarding Jaguar, aka Mac OS 10.2, there always seems to be at least one idiot who posts something uninformed yet totally rude and arrogant like "ah, new hardware, outdated before it's even released." This makes my blood boil.

So what is it that you people think exactly? That upon installing Jaguar on a Power Mac G3 it'll reboot into text mode blinking "PLEASE UPGRADE VIDEO HARDWARE: INSUFFICIENT RAM TO DISPLAY MAC OS X?" Come on people, please. We know Apple's playing the "planned obsolescence" game now but that's a bit fucking ridiculous.

If there's not 16 megs of RAM, regular Quartz will run. If there's 16 megs of RAM, Quartz Extreme will run. And if there's more than 16 megs of RAM, it'll run really nice. GET THIS THROUGH YOUR FUCKING SKULLS. Mac OS 10.2 will run on any system that Mac OS 10.1 will run on. Jesus fucking Christ, I run 10.1 on my stock Power Mac 8600/300 with no video card!!! You people really need to wake up.

To said idiots, morons, and imbeciles (which the Mac world seems full of nowadays, thanks to the Apple's fruit campaign bringing over loads of PC lusers), I'd like to shout a resounding FUCK YOU and link you to Apple's Mac OS 10.2 spec page so that, on the off chance that you can read, you'll see that Quartz Extreme doesn't require 32 megs of RAM, it just prefers it over 16 megs of RAM (which is the actual base requirement).

I hope this little rant helped get the message across about Jaguar's actual graphics requirements. I need to go lay down before I have some sort of blowout. I can feel my heart pounding in my head at 180 beats a minute.

May 8, 2002

Say Hello to iHub

I've got to hand it to Apple. They've improved iPhoto without falling backward. I just wonder where this is all going, what with all of the iApps and simplification of the operating system.

One really has to wonder if, in the future, Apple's digital hub idea is going to end up making a Mac a super-appliance while sacrificing the traditional empowerment one has oer their system. This has always been a complaint of PC and UNIX people, that Mac keeps the user well away from tweaking the system, and it looks to be coming true.

Imagine a Mac that you boot up into one giant panel — think Mac OS 9's Panel/At Ease interface. On this panel one would have options to browse the web, edit a movie, play music, burn a CD, chat, alter photos, etc. All good things, to be sure, and all things we can do now. But imagine this being it! The Mac would not allow installation of programs, or moving or deleting files. It would be a de facto all-in-one box, a dumbed-down PC that only allowe the user to work on projects and not really interact with the file system in any meaningful way.

Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce to you the iHub. A connectivity and productivity kiosk that foregoes the overly-complex features of a regular PC. All the software you'll ever need comes pre-installed, updates to applications happen in the background without need for user intervention, and file management ends at the open/save dialog box. A built-in resource use analyzer alerts the user when they might want to clean up the hard drive (a single button does so, invoking a wizard that walks asks the user what to clean up), add more RAM (time to add memory! Please take your iHub to a local Apple-certified dealer), or a myriad of other tasks which most users ignore under the current user-driven OS interfaces of today.

I'd think long and hard about Apple's directions toward the digital hub. iChat, iMovie, iTunes, iPhoto, Mail.app: might all be the value-added end of a Mac now, but eventually they will be the only thing running on the Mac besides the OS.

Say goodbye to Mac OS and say hello to iHub.