Apple As Quality Center

Due to the lack of an OpenSourceQualityProcess, open source software has become EnslavementWare. Stuff crashes, you can never figure out what release to use, and you spend many weekends trying to get basic functionality like sound servers and usb drivers configured.

With MacOsx, your life is different. You can assume that the basic stuff all works. All the open source stuff is available to you, but you don't have to rely on it. Apple makes fine hardware, and their integration of hardware and software enables appliance orientation that's unparalleled with any other OS. But the real appeal of the platform is AppleAsQualityCenter. They take the best elements of what's available for free, hammer the crap out of them, hammer the crap out of their combination with other tools, and only then sell them.

If Redhat or Mandrake could understand this, they might remain viable. If Microsoft could understand it, they might not be evil. As it is, the tide is turning...

I don't think it's that Mandrake and Redhat don't understand the importance of "user experience" it's just that they don't have it as easy as Apple. Mandrake and Redhat are designed to run on commodity hardware, Apple on the other hand can test on all their hardware platforms easily and can afford to pay for the specs to any hardware they develop drivers for. Redhat and Mandrake have to wait for the Linux GUI to catch up with OSX. GNOME (and probably KDE) have moved Linux forward a long way. If you have tried Redhat 6 and Redhat 9 you will know what I mean.

I would rather Mandrake, Redhat and GNOME continued to develop and standardise the Linux configuration system (into GNOME so that its all available on the X-Windows platform and is all available Free to any OS rather than caring about the proprietary stuff that Apple makes. In the shorter term OSX is much better but in the longer term I want a free and open-source GUI that can be fitted on any UNIX/OS.

Bugs/features I submit to OSS projects like GNOME and Mozilla generally get fixed or at least discussed. This is not normally true of proprietary software. I would rather use a project that had no unit tests but was functionally tested by millions of users on a daily basis than some project that had 100% unit tests but practically no real users. Note here I have switched from the OSX vs. Linux rant to an OSS vs. XP rant. Different projects and methodologies all have their advantages and disadvantages.

-- MatthewCooke?

The rant above is a false dilemma misunderstanding the point. The issue isn't so much Apple vs OSS. The issue is more that Apple plus OSS is better than OSS alone, probably in part because Apple not only adds to OSS products it uses but also removes or replaces things that are inconsistent, flaky, unnecessary etc. The issue is not Apple vs X-Windows. AppleAsQualityCenter is the realisation that actually, using X-Windows gets in your way considerably less when you use Apples version on OS X. -- DavidCake?

Latest testament to Crapple's dedication to quality: iPhone 4. Heh, heh, heh.

CategoryRant