From Apple's 2003 Q4 postings, it would seem that PowerMacs and PowerBooks had significant increases in sales, with a decline in iMacs and iBooks. Revenues continue to increase, but a large portion of that includes non-CPU sales (iPods, software, ect). Take a look to find your favorite, or least favorite, part. The party line is here.

Darr, I think I'd rather play the horses than the stock market. If supposedly good news is followed (at this moment) by an 8.8% dip in Apple's stock then I truly just don't get it.

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As the Mac market share continues to decline, what we know is that Apple as a company has been successful in helping itself by diversifying its product line with iTunes and the iPod. Since there's no significant switching from Windows to Macs three years into the OS X era, the bump in sales of G5 and Powerbook Macs is accounted for by existing X-users being willing to buy the newer Apple boxes they need to run that bloated slug of an OS. Apple thus has every incentive to keep the hardware requirements of X high in order to wring as many sales as possible from its remaining customer base.

Markle

I'm right with you there, brother Markle. The more I go through this nonsense trying to add more hard drives, configure them, watch what OS X does to them, the more I'm sure as shit that it all boils down to disk usage. The file system.

That whole business of extents, inodes, indirection and so forth. All, and I mean all my problems with OS X are probably a result of me throwing more metadata at the OS than it can handle, and throwing it faster than the file system can handle it.

I'm sure the brothers remember me talking about the Mac having lost that sense of "touch"... that feeling that it can't keep up with us. Well, it can't. Not if you use your computer mac-finder-style. As in spatially. As in constantly reorganzing modifying and spatially orienting your files. And the bigger your directories are, the more they change, the more you move them, the more you will fuck everything up and break/confuse the operating system.

Without 64-bit G5s, we're screwed. 32-bit systems will never ever handle the kind of crap this bloated OS needs in order to keep track of you... unless you nursemaid it and never move or modify more than a few files at a time. Play your iTunes, don't rock the boat, keep your files lean and trim. So ironic. The system is so bloated with kazillions of its own files that WE have to give it less to deal with. Instead of having an operating system so lean and trim that WE can use it to manage kazillions of OUR files.

Pro users? Forgettaboutit. If you insist on using Panther, it makes no sense NOT to get a G5. That is if you want even a fighting chance. You'll be spinning your wheels. I'm convinced no pre 64-bit hardware can handle the disk usage problem. And I think even with 64-bit, OS X will still get confused by the workflows of serious pros. We may get closer to legacy performance, but we had to double our computing power to do it. And for what, AQUA? Unix? Puh-leez.

On the bright side, it's obvious to me that Apple knows exactly that this is the problem. All their strategic moves point to it. Serial ATA, More RAM, 64-bit... it's just going to remain to be seen if the file system can handle Mac Faithful workflows... instead of merely digikid, home user, and banger workflows.

All I know is, right now, right after "INTERFACE" as my primary beef with OS X, comes disk usage and file system. It's totally unreliable. Totally inadequate. Something about Legacy Mac file systems had this shit right. Doing it like unix does it is obviously very wrong. There is no excuse for the OS to lose track of where our shit is, what we're doing, where we are, etc.

We need that. We need an OS that can keep up with us. Not one that forces us to do less, and do it more carefully.

I'll know for sure after Panther if things are on the improve, but everything I'm seeing says without the 64-bit doubling, OS X will be even more useless than it is now. Unless people stop working the way they're used to (intuitively, mac style) and are VERY conscious of not confusing the file structure. If you move slowly and deliberately and wait for the OS to catch up with you, you may survive.

But I fear that the legacy is still going to be the better designer's platform. I'll work to make that less true, but unless some serious work goes into this operating system, not just giving the crap more breathing room, we're going to have to crap settle for poor performance. Because apparently this file system is not very forgiving of the way real human beings, and real power users work.

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I'm sure the brothers remember me talking about the Mac having lost that sense of "touch"...

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Touch is everything, brother thalo. It's like a car. It makes absolutely no difference if the list of features on the window sticker is long and impressive. If you drive that car and it doesn't handle well then it's all for naught. Same thing with musical instruments. Same thing with kitchen appliances and utensils. Same thing, probably, with toilet paper. Feel is everything because a good "feel" means that things are making sense, there's not a lot of wasted motion, not a lot of fighting the machine or tool. A good feel means having a sense of control, precision, predictability and that the machine or tool is smartly equipped and can deal with novel situations. It sort of means that when the going gets tough you know who you can depend on, who your real friends are. An example…

Somehow one of my Zip disks got pooched. I'm not sure how but, strangely, one of my two Windows machines is able to read it. When I stick it in the other one the bloody machine restarts itself (no kidding…can't quite figure that one out). I stick it in OS X and it looks at me with that dull, blank, blinking-of-the-eyes stare that Homer Simpson's countenance retreats into when someone is trying to explain something to him that is beyond 3rd grade level. No disk shows up on the Desktop. No message about anything being wrong and there's no way to easily eject the disk.

But I stick the corrupted Zip disk in OS 9 and it recognizes that something is wrong and asks me if I'd like to format it or eject it. Ahh…I'm home. (Still, a next generation OS would tell me that the disk was corrupted and save what information it could, format the disk, and then restore the good information. If Windows could read it then it was, in theory, capable of being read so OS 9 kind of bails on this to some extent as well. It only offers me an all or nothing choice but at least the damn OS responded and didn't try to con me with "Disk? What disk? Are you sure you put a disk in? I don't see no disk.")

Often with Windows, and usually with OS X, it feels like there's something between me and what I want to do. It's almost like there's an interpreter, like I'm listening to what would otherwise be a very easy-to-follow conversation except that it's taking place in the U.N. General Assembly and you have to wait until the message is translated and piped into your earpiece. It's lag. It's bowling. "Bowling?" you say. Yeah...you ever catch yourself trying to give OS X some body English in hopes that it will do what you want it to do?

Feel, or touch, is good. OS X is like a sociopath. No feelings.

LOL brother Brad. YES! Bowling. You wouldn't believe, or maybe you would, some of the body english I've evolved in my three years of vein popping, neck throbbing, teeth grinding hell.

First of all is the head forward towards the screen when I tell the interface to do something and it does nothing. I can't control it, My head inlines forward as if to go: "WELL?" This is usually followed by the ubiquitous EYE ROLL.

Instead of finger drumming when I get the beachball, I whiz the optical mouse back and forth. I lift it up and shine the red light on things. Jiggle my foot impatiently.

When the beachball becomes PERMANENT, as it has now that I have 3 hard drives, and there's no way out, because the command-option-escape routine doesn't work, and I know I'll have to power off... I crack my forehead down onto my desk. Close my eyes. Roll my forehead like a seesaw left and right and sigh.

I've told you I grip the handle of the G4 like a monkey out of habit, because I love the feel. I do that when I'm looking at some design... just thinking. Now I have to resist the urge to lift the machine and fling it against the wall.

OS X has never behaved worse for me, or slower, since I put in 2 new Serial ATA hard drives. But you know what? It's never behaved BETTER in the legacy! All that new storage, the new video card, where I feel it is when I boot into OS 9.

I'm going to give Panther a chance, what's the countdown say, a week? (is it just me, or are a lot of Apple's marketing ploys clock/calendar/time related? I'll never forget the "months are hours" thing. Well, at least days are still days here.)... but if I'm still getting perma beachballs after that, because this bloated OS can't figure out how to access or spin up or find files on a drive, well, then it's either buy a G5 or stay in 9 to work, and use X, like now, just for messing around with.

It's funny you should mention removables. Part of this whole disk access theory was revealed to me through DVD-RAMs. I've got an Apple installed factory DVD-RAM in this machine, and OS X has never done right by it. A sure way to crash the finder is put in a data CD that's fairly full. Lots of items. I'll scroll down a list of filenames, get to a certain point and POW...finder bails. I can repeat it over and over. All disks work fine in 9. OS X always chokes. SOMETIMES a restart will let me access the disk more fully, but the finder will crap out if use or view the disk multiple times, or frequently. In other words, if I browse several directories, go to a hard drive, come back to the CD and browse it again, BAM, dead. Disk useless. And then it won't eject. "Disk busy" yeah right, busy confusing the operating system.