On Thu, 14 Nov 2002, Martin Joseph wrote:
> Actually that isn't true. You presume that the OS exists in vacuum
> which it does not. Many of Windows problems have manifest because of
> the huge array of hardware vendors they need to support. (ie Compaq
> want to use the cheapest possible video chip X, while sony wants DVD
> playback from vendor Y).
I did mention this in the post i.e. NT/2000 crashing is mostly due to
either bad drivers or bad hardware. Translation: third parties.
There are plenty of third party manufcaturers for Mac's for peripherals,
but not as many as there are for WinTel, hence, less buggy hardware and
drivers.
For example Sun is in the same position, and to some degree so is
Compaq. Sun makes their own hardware, and drivers for the same, so if
they're buggy, you've got one vendor to go to. Since the market is
smaller, the third parties are smaller, and so are the defective
products. Nevertheless, Sun did manage to get put bad hardware out there
i.e. the Ultra II 450MHz CPU's had cache failures. Rumor has it this was
because they got them manufactured from a third party, etc.
Compaq for the longest time had to have everything to their own specs and
back then a lot of off the shelf hardware just would not work right, you'd
have to get it through them. The joke in our NOC was that Compaq would
object if you used a non-Compaq power cord or ethernet cable. In my
experience, they've been getting better over time.
But back to Apple, they too produced lemons (7200 and flaming powerbook as
previously mentioned.) On the Wintel side, it gets worse when you have
cheap knockoffs. If you read slashdot and theregister.co.uk for instance
you'll notice that some manufacturers made cheap capacitors and several
motherboard manufacturers had to deal with exploding caps, so that's why
PC's have a worst time of it. Then there was Fujitsu's fun hard drives
that die, and so on. Some of these may wind up in Sun or Apple hardware
as well as PC's.
Are we going to blame Mac OS or Apple for Fujitsu's fuckups? But again,
it's lame hardware and drivers that mostly causes OS panics, far less
actual bugs. It's far more likely for a software designer to have bugs in
applications than up in the kernel or driver layers, because kernel bugs
are more catastrophic, so they get caught earlier.
Cheap hardware manufacturers care less about driver quality,"oh well it
crashed, call microsoft, it's not us." Microsoft says, nope it's their
drivers, not our OS. Hence the driver signing that's now normal of MSFT
stuff... Doesn't mean the drivers won't be buggy, just a bit better
tested.... and so on...
> Apple makes the whole widget which means from a software point of view
> it is MUCH easier to quality control the OS and software, since it runs
> on so many fewer hardware configurations.
Ditto, but...
> Of course like most things in life this is both Apple's greatest
> strength and there greatest weakness. It does allow for a higher
> quality user experience, but the hardware has to have fruit on the
> front.
And in theory NT is the greatest OS since sliced bread. But in truth, OS<
X had no memory protection, cheap cooperative multitasking (which
interestlingly enouhg MSFT copied outright for Win 3.x!) Any MacOS
application can crash the entire OS. With X this is no longer true.
Win Win9x this is still true. With NT/2K/XP, not true. Well you can
still exhaust all resources in the OS, but that's cheating. :)
> > And should by some stroke of luck Apple be in a position to grab 99% of
> > the market, you'll find that peripherals on Macs will also have lame
> > buggy
> > drivers that cause crashes. Linux, Solaris, and *BSD have the same
> > issues. Bugs in anything that lives in kernel mode will crash the
> > machine, no way around that. Get over it.
>
> This is also wrong, see the above.
I stand by my statement. If Apple does grab the market (not a snowball's
chance in hell for that to happen) you'd see the same issues as
Wintel. They'll have to rely on third parties for components, and you'd
have lots of cards, software, and other peripherals coming from non-Apple
sources. Some of them very cheap. If Apple doesn't write the drivers,
some of these will be ok hardware with buggy drivers.
Besides this, have you actually opened up a Mac and taken a look at the
chips and other components? Not all of them say (C) Apple on them. Sure,
the motherboard does, as do the ROMs, but who made that hard drive? Might
be Apple branded, but apple doesn't have a hard drive plant; who made the
video chip? nVidia? ATI? Who made the keyboard? Who made the power
supply? Who made the capacitors in the power supply?
There's plenty of room for things to slip by QA, even for stuff with the
fruit on the cover. Ditto for Sun, Compaq and everyone else out there.
Want to add a USB/Firewire combo card to your Mac? Guess what, you have
to get it from a third party. Will it work? Probably. If it
doesn't? hmmm.... I guess that's life, get over it. :)
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