Forums | MacLife

There I agree, Pariah. EULA, patent, & copyright laws need some serious reforms.

That said there needs to be a single, preferably fair & balanced, standard for those laws and they should be applied and enforced universally.

Bat wrote:

Let me just throw out some food for thought before retiring again from this... suppose MS were to get into the computer (hardware/ 'whole widget') biz. Further, they went with Czach's 1-2-3 bullet point approach; e.g. you can has Winders at retail, but at $1,000 a pop- otherwise you need an MS-labeled machine. Impracticalities and brickbats aside (as well as throwing the current computer/IT world into chaos), why would[n't] this be just as legal as Apple and OSX? I'm sure MS would have lawsuits out the wazoo within a day... but it seems as 'commonsensical' that MS should have equal rights with Apple. It's their OS; they 'invented' it.

The absolute free market spirit inside of me would have absolutely no problem with that scenario.  I have a feeling that the DOJ would have an issue though, because the federal government will have an issue with MS abusing their monopoly power in operating systems.  One standard that they would inevitably use on the "tying" of the OS to specific hardware is whether the device maker is abusing monopoly status at the expense of the consumer with the tying.  With MS, it would be pretty obvious that the tying is doing just that.  With Apple, to use the same legal approach, a company like Psystar would have to make the case that Apple has a monopoly with respect to OS X, rather than the general operating system market.  That seems like quite a stretch to me, and akin to claiming that every company has a monopoly at selling their own product.

Bat wrote:

Czachorski wrote:

...akin to claiming that every company has a monopoly at selling their own product.

Not every company should have a monopoly on the selling ('the sale & distribution') of their own products? Chevy should be able to sell Fords &/or their revolutionary radio?!

Perhaps Psystar has a right to sell/resell OSX then too, by that reasoning. I think you just used your own logic against yourself.

Perhaps common sense/reasonable man standards would save MS in such a case, if that is indeed the trend. Linux and OSX have both increased marketshare since the DOJ case 8-10 years ago, OSX on the consumer side, *nix in the server space IIRC. MS hasn't the marketshare for monoply it had 8-10 years ago, tho they're still dominant.

And you can easily make the case that Apple and its profit margins are hurting the public with their OSX 'monopoly.' OSX, Windows, Linux... there are alternatives, even if impractical for many. Linux isn't just for DIYers anymore.

And with Apple's fantastic last quarter results, perhaps it's MS that's endangered.

If MS no longer is considered as having a monopoly on the OS market, then I fail to see how anyone is going to have any legal success claiming that Apple does.  Like I said, that only way to make that claim with Apple is to say that they have a monopoly within the OS X operating system, and that this is different than the overall OS market.  That seems like a thin argument to me.

Bat wrote:

You're being very selective in your choice of items to address, Czach. You didn't address the Halo IP issue, and here you didn't address asserting that it was 'a stretch' that 'every company has a monopoly at selling their own product,' after previously asserting that Apple, and companies in general, did, as they 'invented' them.

Your own case seems to be thinning with each post.

I've been saying the same thing consistently for 11 pages, and you are spinning it up pretty hard.  Read it more carefully.  Again.

I think it will be pretty hard to show that Apple has a monopoly in just the OS X market, as opposed to the general OS market.  To prove such a thing would be just a ridiculous as claiming that every company has a monopoly at selling their own product, which they do not.

"The NVIDIA Quadro family of professional graphics cards are very, very expensive. But many people know that Quadro and GeForce graphics cards are virtually identical in hardware. Obviously, you cannot just use Quadro drivers with your GeForce graphics cards. However, there is an easy way to soft-mod an NVIDIA GeForce desktop graphics card into an NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics card. Tech ARP shows us just how to do it. 'It all revolves around the driver support for professional 3D applications like 3ds Max or Maya. Quadro drivers allow the Quadro to be used to accelerate the rendering operations of such professional 3D applications while GeForce drivers do not. This is the basis for the premium prices NVIDIA (and ATI) charge for their professional-grade graphics cards.'"

Last edited by reece_james (2008-05-10 8:17 am)

reece_james wrote:

"The NVIDIA Quadro family of professional graphics cards are very, very expensive. But many people know that Quadro and GeForce graphics cards are virtually identical in hardware. Obviously, you cannot just use Quadro drivers with your GeForce graphics cards. However, there is an easy way to soft-mod an NVIDIA GeForce desktop graphics card into an NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics card. Tech ARP shows us just how to do it. 'It all revolves around the driver support for professional 3D applications like 3ds Max or Maya. Quadro drivers allow the Quadro to be used to accelerate the rendering operations of such professional 3D applications while GeForce drivers do not. This is the basis for the premium prices NVIDIA (and ATI) charge for their professional-grade graphics cards.'"

Excellent point.  So, since it's legal to use the Quadro drivers with a GeForce card, it should --by comparison-- be legal to use OS X on unsupported hardware.  Excellent point, indeed.  I like your analogy.

Apple down clocks the graphics chips in iMacs and cuts the shared ram in Minis from the original 128 to 64.

avkills wrote:

Czachorski wrote:

I think it will be pretty hard to show that Apple has a monopoly in just the OS X market

Huh?  Apple does have a monopoly in the OS X market.

It will be very difficult to make the case that what they have is a monopoly, when they are only at 8% of the OS market.

MS has failed.  Vista has been perma-cracked.  OS X is arguably perma-cracked as well (I say "arguably," since we know PC EFI is not yet 100% complete).

And I don't want to get into this again, but I've run Vista on a 6-yo 2.5GHz P4 with plenty of RAM and a vid card who's market value is around $30.  It runs perfectly fine, with Aero and all that.  And that system is at least three times better than the min spec in every category.  In daily usage, the system doesn't feel that much different from modern hardware.  It's quite a bit different from any version of OS X on something like a 400MHz G3 -- yet many here used to find that acceptable.

reece_james wrote:

Mr. T wrote:

Excellent point.  So, since it's legal to use the Quadro drivers with a GeForce card, it should --by comparison-- be legal to use OS X on unsupported hardware.  Excellent point, indeed.  I like your analogy.

I've thrown it in for comparison.

In this case I think that NVIDIA is crippling software, much like Vista's hardware limits. Unlike the OS X example, NVIDIA is doing in how with their own hardware and software bundles. This is definitely an issue, but one that shows that they can and have gotten away with it. It's a much more serious case than Apple's restricting their software to Macs.

Apple at least doesn't cripple the software they produce for their hardware, if anything it's optimised.

I'm unaware of Vista Home Basic being unable to run on high-spec machines. The opposite is true, higher versions need [real] DX9 graphics to run the Aero desktop. It's anologous to OSX needing higher-spec graphics to run its higher graphic functions. Of course Vista overall needs newer systems to run well than XP; newer software almost always has higher sys reqs. XP neeeded more/newer than 2k and so on.

The Quadro example is better in that there's little or no difference in the hardware excepting perhaps more stringent qualification. That's definitely true of the drivers, which need OEM app cert for each app (the package needs to do things not normally needed in consumer apps, like the line antialiasing needed for CAD/ CAM work etc). With a Quadro in a workstation, you're paying for support.. also it's an open secret the margins are very high there, and NV cleans up with every Quadro sold. There's another company I've heard of that sells hardware 'over the odds' at high margin... what's their name again?

Bat wrote:

Czachorski wrote:

avkills wrote:

Huh?  Apple does have a monopoly in the OS X market.

It will be very difficult to make the case that what they have is a monopoly, when they are only at 8% of the OS market.

No one said they have a monopoly in the overall OS market. They do have an OSX monopoly- every copy of OSX sold comes from Apple. What's complicated about that?

And BMW holds 100% of the BMW market.  Are they a monopoly?  No.  And I will tell you why.

To make the case against a monopoly, you will need to show how their monopoly control is hurting consumers.  It is going to be hard to claim that Apple's so-called-monopoly over OS X is hurting consumers, when a $399 PC can be had from Wal*Mart or any other of dozens of stores. 

If you are going to make that case against Apple, then make it against BMW too.  They don't provide a $10,000 car, and they control 100% of the BMW market, so they must be a monopoly and forced to sell a car in my price range, then?  Give me a break, please.

Last edited by Czachorski (2008-05-10 2:08 pm)

My point is yes Apple has 100% of it's own brands (which is not an uncommon practice) but since they aren't the only brand of OS based on the Unix technology standards they can't be a true monopoly. If you can not see how that is relevant than I personally couldn't explain it any better to you.

A good distinction but most in here won't maintain it no matter what their POV.

Too bad they can be so with the European corporations (The RIAAs for instance).