A twofer about Apple Computers and neither of them good.
Item One from Apple Insider:
Apple fails to patent iPod interface
A near three-year-long attempt by Apple Computer to patent the menu-based software interface of its popular iPod digital music player has ultimately proved unsuccessful, AppleInsider has discovered.
The company's patent application, which lists Apple vice president Jeff Robbin and Apple chief executive Steve Jobs as two of its primary inventors, received a final rejection last month from the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Standing in Apple's way appears to be a prior filing by inventor John Platt, who submitted a patent application for a similar software design for a portable device in May of 2002 -- just five months before Robbin submitted his claims on behalf of Apple.
Platt's application describes his invention as a system or method that "generates playlists for a library collection of media items via selecting a plurality of seed items, at least one which is an undesirable seed item." The process by which the iPod's software displays its own menu-based interface is very similar to the process Platt's filing goes on to describe.
Second is this from WIRED:
Mac Hacks Allow OS X on PCs
Imagine if your next Mac cost you only $300, and ran faster than any G4 or G5 you've ever used.
That future may already be unfolding: Hackers have found a way to bypass a chip designed to prevent the Mac OS from running on non-Apple PCs, which are often cheaper than Macs.
And more:
OSx86 is designed to run on Apple Computer's next generation of hardware, which some call "MacIntels" and others "MacTels" because the machines will run on Intel microprocessors rather than the PowerPC processor used in current Macs. The hacked version of OSx86 is based on pirated software, which came from copies of the operating system sent to participants in the Apple Developer Connection. The ADC participants also received MacIntel computers for testing and development.
Now the hacked version of OSx86 is running on Dell laptops and other PCs with Intel and AMD microprocessors.
"Mileage varies depending on what kind of hardware you're using, but it (OSx86) is working on several PCs," said "Mashugly," a college student majoring in communications who manages the OSx86 Project, a community of developers interested in the new operating system.
No one knows exactly why OSx86 appears to be running faster on the PCs than the Mac OS does on today's Macs.
"To be honest, we're not sure," said a hacker nicknamed "cmoski," who said he works for a large software company. "Some in the Pentium camp want to say, 'Because a Pentium is faster, of course,' some want to say (Intel chip architectures are better than Apple's) and some in the PowerPC camp just want to say that it isn't full OS X (running on the beta systems)."
The hacked OSx86 bypasses a chip, the Trusted Platform Module, or TPM, that is intended to prevent the system from running on ordinary PCs.
"We have even gone so far as to remove the TPM kernel extension called AppleTPMACPI.kext entirely," said cmoski.
Ouch on that one -- Apple has held onto the proprietary hardware business for waaay too long.
This is one of the reasons that they have about 7% of the market share right now where MSFT and Linux have the other 93%. Even when they had a lock on the hardware, they were incredibly slow to adapt. Function Keys on the MAC appeared five years after they did on the PC, the PC had the ability to write to CD-ROM disks first, first on studio-quality audio as well. Two button mice? How about a few weeks ago for the MAC and ten years ago for the PC.
They need to take stock of themselves and come to the realization that they always have been and always will be a software company. Ditch the hardware side of things and stick with writing killer code and making awesome consumer fetish electronics. Their original choice of the Motorola 68000 was inspired -- that was an awesome CPU but when Motorola moved into the academic RISC camp, they took several hundred steps backwards by drinking that kool-aid. (RISC stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computing and is based on the premise that instead of using a CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computer) that takes several clock cycles to do a built-in hardware multiply function, a RISC chip could perform the same operations with repeated additions and column shifting. Since the RISC chip didn't have to be as complex as the CISC chip, it could be made to run a lot faster. They had their heyday for a few years but as overall chip speeds improved, the benefits became moot and Apple is the last vendor that still uses RISC. Even Motorola got out of the business, selling their line to IBM who still makes the G4 and G5 -- Apple accounts for about 60% of their business.
In a quiet announcement, IBM said that the G5 was the end of the line so they are getting out of it too.
Looks like Steve finally woke up and smelled the cappuchino...
Or the pavement...
