Mac worldwide market share hits 3.5 percent in Q2 2008

@Mike. I welcome the challenge and hope I can represent it well. Later tonight I will post some stuff for you to consider. I'm a TV guy first and foremost, so my technical knowledge has it's limited despite a few semesters of A-grades in CSE at penn state. It ultimately is my hope to just defend my platform to intelligent people like yourself who I think have written off Apple unjustly (hey, we all have only so much time to learn about stuff). Let's both give up broad proclamations and dismissals and we can really get somewhere. I'll post more later. One big starting point, though, is the Quartz graphics subsystem in OSX. Another is QuickTime. I'll expand on those later.

This should be interesting. Remember, mike...play by your own rules...you saying "Things like a journaling file system, native Unicode, B level object security enforced in the microkernel, multipersonalities, DFS, EFS, etc" will be considered too vague as well. --tayme

OK. Let's take them in order so I don't miss any... Quartz 2D - I honestly don't know what this offered in 2000 that wasn't already present in DirectX. I know the subpixel aliasing was already present with ClearType (and still isn't anywhere near it for font rendering - partly due to some bad typography choices) Quartz Compositing - I don't know of any technology in the compositor that's not already present in every GUI. Seriously. If you know of one, I'd like to know. I've never worked on the compositor guts and the base compositor is nothing new. Quartz Extreme (and Quartz 2D Extreme) - The offloading of tasks for the GUI to the GPU is definately an innovation and I happily give Apple credit for getting it out the door while Microsoft did the Vista Reset (Microsoft had shown but not shipped GPU compositing of the desktop but hadn't shipped it and by our discussion rules, shipping is what counts) but from what I understand, Apple still has it turned off by default because they've never gotten it working reliably. Not being snarky, that is what I understand at least as of 10.4.x and I think it's still true in 10.5.x. Core Animation framework - There are certainly some APIs here that are neat however since they didn't appear until 10.5 and equivalent APIs already existed in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), it's pretty hard to call in an OS X innovation. That they used it in the iPhone was indeed innovative but not what we're discussing (staying to the desktop OS world) QuickTime Video - Definately an innovative product in back in 1991. (A little iffy as for it being an OS innovation since it shipped as a separate application but innovative either way) OpenCL - Really hard to say since it hasn't shipped. All we really know is it's an implementation of GPU/CPU cross processor multiprogramming based on C99. We'll have to see what actually gets done. (On the parallel programming front, note that Microsoft has Task Parallel Library (TPL), Parallel Language Integrated Query(PLINQ), Robot Developer Studio and MS MPI (on HPC and CCS supercomputers). This is really language stuff and not OS stuff (on both MS and Apple's sides) so probably not relevant but interesting in either case since it's a critical next set of technologies as we move to the era of 32-core and more processors.

@mike, Thanks for the reply. I have to disagree with the narrowing of the debate to "desktop OS" given your initial claim was that "they're stagnant and offer little to nothing to the industry". I'm principally responding to that overstatement. But, I like this approach to discussion. I think we can both agree that your "little to nothing" was a bit hyperbolic to say the least. No hard feelings ;) Like I said, I can't really speak to the technical implementations of any of this stuff. All I can say is that everything I've read by people that seem to be pretty credible say that the implementation of Quartz was very ahead of it's time especially compared to GDI+ (is that right?). "Apple still has it turned off by default because they've never gotten it working reliably." What you're talking about it Quartz 2D extreme, not the GPU-acceleration of the compositor, which has worked beautifully since 2002 in Jaguar. Quartz 2D Extreme is an effort to have the GPU take over the rest of the graphics pipeline. Not only composite the drawn windows, but actually draw the interior and changes like resizing. I believe it's actually active in Leopard. Tiger and then leopard very heavily optimized the performance of Quartz. My end user experience of Vista vs OSX (pick any version since 10.2) is that OSX's engine generates a much more polished experience. Why is it that brand-new, top of the line PCs running vista demonstrate horrible tearing, artifacts and dog-slow performance with application window resizing? Even simple windows like IE resize horribly. It makes the otherwise nice looking UI feel cheap. You generally don't see any tearing in the OSX UI even on old hardware that can't support Quartz Extreme. That's been true since OS 10.0. It's also impressive that Apple is able to deliver the UI with or without the hardware, switching software-rending that's still got the solid, tear-free composting alpha-effects and all. Clearly there's some superior code under the hood with Quartz. Another contribution to the industry is WebKit. When Apple chose to build on KHTML, everyone laughed. "Why aren't they using Gecko? IDIOTS!". Now, it's becoming a widely-used engine (Android, Adobe AIR, Nokia and others). Is it the greatest thing ever? I don't know about that. But it is a contribution that's underpinning a ton of interesting work. The other thing that needs to be said is that there are a great many industries where Apple's impact is very very powerful. Media creation and distribution is the most obvious and continues to be an area of intense innovation. Hardware design is another obvious one, and since they are a computer maker, it's not fair to ignore or dismiss that. Now mobile phones/mobile internet... where according to Google the iPhone is already the number one mobile platform in terms of actual use of the browser. Apple is not the end all be all or the sole innovator... but they're a great innovator on many fronts including the OS. I take back my jabs at you and appreciate your honest debate here. Don't let the mac zealots get to you.

On the debate narrowing, I'm just saying that Apple as a hardware vendor has been a major influencer of the industry. The iMac was a significant factor in migrating the other vendors to USB (who were resistant to [any] change). They lead the way to widescreen laptop displays with the original Titanium G4 Powerbook. The backlit keyboard was, I believe, the first of it's kind, and the magsafe connector continues to stand alone. Among the most important may be that Apple was a leader in introducing WiFi to the market with the iBook in 1999 (the first computer maker to do so). Lucent developed the tech and worked with Apple to make it cheap for a consumer laptop. Apple also lobbied the FCC in the early ninties to open spectrum to wireless data, foreseeing the future potential of wireless networking. Apple's innovation and leadership in PC hardware is indisputable. It's core to their company DNA starting with the Apple II, then the Mac and continuing from there. They don't stagnate like the PC makers have, typically ceding all innovation to Microsoft and Intel for reference designs and new ideas. Apple tries new things without anyone's prodding and takes risks on new standards. That has had a tremendous impact on the industry. We can see their impact playing out in realtime right now with the iPhone and it's ever-expanding list of clones from every phone maker. So leaving their hardware leadership off the table isn't fair to what their core business really is. Hardware+Software has always been the key. Apple's launches Wifi... they build in the OS support. Their intergrated business model allows this fast innovation. Look how easily they moved their Multi-touch work into the trackpads of the macbook pros. And since this thread is all about marketshare of COMPUTERS, it's worth nothing these things. Now... "I suspect it was done as the test to see if things could be handed off the the GPU and when they couldn't get content enabled, they kept it in even though it really doesn't offer much end user benefit. Still, it is an innovation." Glad you agree it's an innovation. It does, however, offer a real benefit though. First, it relieves the CPU of a ton of processing and decouples some of the GUI responsiveness from the CPU utilitization. Hence, the OSX GUI remains solid and snappy even what all cores are tapped at 100%. Also, the awful GUI drawing engine in XP that sends windows repeating in a smear across the screen when the CPU is pegged, or leaves artifacts all over the screen goes away. There is a reason the Aero / WPF engine was considered one the biggest "pillars" in Vista and it's basically a Microsoft implementation of what Quartz has been doing for years. It also enables new GUI approaches with useful animation and no CPU impact like Expose and spaces. The animations aren't "eye candy" but very informative guides to keep the user oriented as the windows shit. GPU accelerated compositing and rendering is the pre-requisite to advanced next generation interfaces. Flip 3d is powered by GPU compositing, though it is a classic example of copying a feature while missing it's key benefit. Flip doesn't show all the onscreen windows at once, leading to a tedious rollodex scrolling. It also stacks them in a cascade that obscures the contents. Dumb. Even so, WPF had to come first before new UI opportunities could be part of the Windows platform. This is big BIG stuff for application development and user experiences and Apple got there first. So I think this one innovation is more than enough to demonstrate that Apple isn't "stagnant and offer little to nothing to the industry". Bonjour zero-config networking is another great innovation (as was appletalk before it). I believe Macs easily networked long before it was reasonably doable on the PC (without major tech chops). You haven't addressed core image and it's broadcast-quality GPU-accelerated rendering which is on display in an app like Motion and used by many third parties. OpenCL is vaporware until it ships... but it's building on this base of expertise and there's little reason to assume it won't work. I'd also like to point out that NeXT, the precursor to OSX, was probably one of the most innovative OSes ever given what it could do at the time of it's release compared to everything else. To me, Apple now = NeXT Here is the Apple model: #1. Concept emerges in computer science. (GUI, object-oriented programming, networking, wifi, etc) #2. A company or group of companies experiment with the tech. Sometimes Apple is in at the beginning, sometimes not. Nobody appears ready to take the risk or able to ship a productized version that can have an impact. #3. Apple identifies the potential of the tech and leverages their agility and integrated business to deliver a functioning solution to market before anyone else. Computer Science is just that... science. Each "invention" stands on the shoulders of the giants that came before it. Those that discount all innovation that isn't original invention simply have concept of the nature of computer science. As such, many of the discoveries aren't as interesting in themselves unless they are implemented. WiFi is just a lab project until someone has the guts to invest in shipping and promoting it. It only matters when it ships. Sometimes Apple is a basic research innovator. More often they are an innovator in the execution. They're doing tons of real software engineering on all levels, though. That's clear. Harnessing the GPU for the OS graphics isn't a hard concept. But Apple got there first with a great execution that is now underpinning all of their devices. Quartz is the heart of the iPhone's fluid UI as well as the UI power of OSX. As for KHTML.. at this point, I think they've probably contributed more code than initially was present in the engine. It's not a macro innovation for them to take someone's engine and improve it. But they are improving it tremendously and it's having an impact on the industry. Without Apple, KHTML would not be what it is. I believe, actually that, WebKit is now the only name for it. This is a symbol of Apple's contribution to the engine. Microsoft didn't "invent" the engine in IE either. They bought mosaic and built on that codebase. So, at the end of this massive diatribe, I hope I've made my simple point. Apple is an innovator that continues to contribute to the industry. They aren't the ONLY one, obviously. But their contribution is very significant in the areas of OS software, Application software, hardware, distribution and business models. p.s: I'm going to go to a Best Buy with my camera and snap some shots and video of the awful window resizing in Vista and post them at some point for other to comment on.

@john Or, once again, the point of this discussion is to back up your statement: They've delivered mountains of real innovation in OSX. That's why discussing innovations in NeXTStep or System 6 or power cord design really aren't relevant. I'd say that there were interesting innovations in NeXTStep. They were trying to be the "innovative small competitor" to unseat Apple. They failed, but they tried. I'd say there were interesting innovations in System 6. Apple was still trying to compete back then. And I do think the magnetic power cord is innovative. (although I wish they'd have insisted that their designers stick to one rather than letting the Mac Book Air team do their own) and I applaud Apple's successful push for USB and even their unsuccessful push for IEEE1394. But, again, those do not have anything to do with: They've delivered mountains of real innovation in OSX.

My knowledge of OS underpinnings is thin as I'm a director not a coder. I think that you're trivializing Quartz and it's contribution to OS progress, and that's unfair since it was one of the single most important changes Microsoft made in Vista. If you judge the GUI subsystem's importance by how Microsoft treats it, then Quartz and Avalon/Aero/WPF are very big deals and one could argue that OSX played a major roll in orienting Microsoft around this priority. So yeah, on the graphics front, OSX has mountains of innovation. You still haven't commented on Core Image accelerated rendering. Maybe it's because you don't really know what it does. But it's amazing and is in use in the real world from Apple and third parties.. unlike WPF which still seems to have pretty limited developer support (though I hope/assume that will improve with time). I'm sorry if this doesn't satisfy you. I believe that it more than qualifies as a rebuttal to your initial statement. "I don't say they're circling the bowl. I say they're stagnant and offer little to nothing to the industry. Perhaps that's saying that they should be circling the bowl but it isn't saying that they are." I think we can agree that Apple/NeXT have a pretty long history of industry-influencing innovation on all fronts. If they aren't delivering the kinds of innovations you care about, that's fine. I also think it's not reasonable to say that Microsoft can be fine without competition. IE stagnation prior to the emergence of Firefox is proof to the contrary. This has been a great discussion so far. Thanks Mike. I think we'd enjoy a geek-out over coffee to really dig deeper. Have a great rest of the weekend.

John, Actually, if I understand it correctly, Core Image is a response to technologies already in Windows with the various DirectX systems including the Emmy winning Direct3D and later Media Foundation. I think we can agree that NeXT did some innovation. However, that was many years ago. The point is that Apple has not innovated much with OS X and has been stagnant in OS development. That they bought a company that did innovative ideas when their attempts to create a modern OS failed is commendable. That they did so little since is sad.

I'm unaware of any facilities in DirectX that compare to Core Image. We're not talking about gaming here. We're talking about very high-precision 32bit float image processing in real time being provided for free to devs. This stuff is sick. Apple's Motion delivers realtime motion graphics capabilties that are unlike anything I've seen on any other system. (All that said, I still think After Effects is a better, richer tool) This is what powers Final Cut Studio to deliver extremely impressive realtiem performance on standard hardware without custom ASIC accelerators. That's niche, but it's result is a system that can power great content creation with dramatically lower rendering times even in apps like iLife's suite. I'm unaware of any Windows applications like Motion and not sure that Windows (even Vista) has anything that can compete with Core Image. I believe developers on Windows are rolling their own solutions. Again, this is the underpinnings of the minority report UI future. To me, that's more important that the execution at some lower level. How people interact with the device can provide bigger gains in productivity than low-level optimization of kernel performance, etc. The iPhone is the perfect example of this. The fluid UI is a direct result of Quartz. If you want to say "well, that's not a desktop" I have to say that your being very antiquated. Computing is computing and the range of devices on which you do the work has implications across the board.

As for iPhone, that's again a different discussion we can have by stealing another of Paul's comment boards... But this discussion was about your statement that they've delivered "mountains of real innovation" in OSX when I said that Apple wasn't being an innovative competitor to Windows as would be expected of the small competitor. So far, that mountain has been a few rendering APIs.

I'm talking about Motion because it uses Core Image and other developers have built their applications on the same OS-level APIs. DV Garage makes a shake-like compositor called Conduit that works in realtime in HD resolution based on Core Image. Magic Bullet plugins are Core Image accelerated for speeds many times faster than CPU rendering. This isn't about comparing apps. Avid and Adobe have rolled their own proprietary solutions, and they can afford to since they're big. But Core Image in OSX is powering even tiny projects like the raft of image and video indie software from Pixelmator to live VideoDH apps like VIDVOX. iChat uses core image to generate its realtime effects and multi-chat 3D environment. So this is a very scalable OS tech. There is a tremendous amount of innovative third party software that is building directly on top of Core Image/Video and QuickTime in OSX to do realtime processing in ways that simply wouldn't be possible in Windows to my knowledge (unless you are Avid or Adobe and can design your own GPU-based engine from scratch). So, the mountain of innovation is the GUI and the technologies that power it. Since the GUI is the most important part of the system for end users, I don't think you can dismiss it as you are. Remember, Microsoft has been talking about this kind of tech since "chromeFX" in the never-shipped and later abandoned "Cairo" project. Apple/NeXT got there first and better and is still further ahead. I don't believe there's anything like Core Image in Windows right now. Maybe I'm wrong... but I can't find any applications that claim to use it for what I'm talking about. So I was in staples getting some stuff printed. I played with every Vista machine in the store. Every one of them exhibited horribly slow application resizing performance and tearing. Even the admittedly slick HP touchsmart. There is clearly some serious problems in WPF compared to Quartz on the performance and quality front.

The OS is a platform for apps. My references to apps are all in the context of how they are using OS technology to innovate, and without which they could not do the things they do. Remember "Developers, Developers, Developers"? That's what the OS is there to do. Abstract the hardware, provide a unified experience to the user and provide a unified platform for developers to expand the capability of the computer with new software. If Vista lacks APIs that can do what Core Image can do, than the Vista platform will lack the kinds of Apps being made of OSX. Saying, "well, they have Avid and Adobe" doesn't cut it. The Mac has those too. But the real innovation is coming from the new entrants and they're leveraging Apple's APIs and free dev tools. If OS-level APIs that enable great applications doesn't constitute a mountain of innovation, I don't know what else does. I'll throw another OS tech your way: Sync Services. Given, they only work over the network with .Mac/MobileMe, but Sync Services has been providing much of the end user functionality being promised in Live Mesh for years starting with OS 10.2 and iSync. Mac OSX also has a services feature which exposes functionality to any application in a plug-in like way which I don't think exists in Windows. Than there's Applescript, Automator and the amazing level of scriptability in the OS, which I've read isn't remotely close to matched by Windows. How about Leopard's Helps search system which literally points you to the menu item you search for. That may be one of the biggest innovations in app feature discoverability in years, and it first appeared as the System Preferences search in Tiger. Microsoft may have demo'd instant search first at PDC in 2003.. but Apple shipped it in the OS first with Tiger. How about system-wide, in-line spelling and grammar checking? That's a damn handy feature to have across every place you can type. Core Audio I know less about but I believe is a more powerful, low-latency engine for audio processing, and Apple's plugin architecture for it has meant devs can target one audio plugin that spans all Core Audio applications. How about built-in screen reading voice-over accessibility features. I know this used to be a very expensive add-on for windows from third parties. Built-in to OSX. Anything OSX can do that Windows can't is motivation for Microsoft to add the feature. by all means correct me if my increasingly obsolete windows expertise is missing areas where Windows has built-in solutions to what I've described. Like I said, I'll install Vista on my Macbook Pro, and shoot some video, then post it. It really uglies up the interaction experience.

John, Cool. Let's look at these. Sync Services - Microsoft put IntelliMirror in the OS with Windows 2000. This allows for syncing of folders between multiple machines automatically whenever they're on the network. For example, when I dock my laptop at work, my Documents folder is automatically synced with a copy stored on the network so it matches with my desktop and both are synced with a copy stored on a network share. If I make changes to a document on any machine it's changed on all. If my laptop drive crashes and I replace it, a new copy of all my documents is replicated over to the new drive. I will give Apple credit for making this a commercial service over the Internet. That's a valuable innovation. (btw: Mesh does a LOT more as a platform but since it hasn't shipped yet, that's a topic for another time) Exposing services - Can you give more detail (or a feature name) I'm not sure what you're referring to. Sounds cool, though. AppleScript - All of Microsoft's object frameworks (COM, COM+, .NET, etc) which are the basis for both the OS and the apps are scriptable and Microsoft has provided automation and scripting systems for all of these for many, many years from the ActiveScripting initiative back in the1990s to the latest PowerShell scripts. I believe Apple provides easier UI scripting but I'm not sure. Apple's new help system definitely has some innovations. I don't know much about CoreAudio either but I do know that the Audio subsystem was totally rewritten in Vista. This may well be a case where Apple innovation triggered Microsoft to improve a feature based on competitor's innovation but I don't know enough to do the comparison. On the system wide search, sorry, but Microsoft wins this one. While it became a part of the OS later than in OS X, Microsoft shipped it as a free download add-on earlier than Apple did. (The team had it ready and didn't want to wait for the OS release) You're out of date on screen reading. Microsoft put it in the OS a long, long time ago and, in fact, won awards for innovation in accessability technology. Apple does have nicer voices, though.

John, DirectX Emmy - actually, this is for exactly the type of technology that you're refering to for Apple. It's used in gaming but is also used in video. Sync Services - again, the IntelliSync APIs allow for more than just folder sync. That's just the feature that's bundled. Other apps use the sync APIs for other sync items. The "bolt-on" sync that shipped was essentially the same "feature wise" as what's out now. The current version, in fact, is another add-on that updates the one shipped with the OS. It was fully featured. Services: That sounds exactly like the extensible context menu handler that's been in Windows for about a decade. If I right-click on this text, I've got links to built in function and to external programs and to external sites. Old news unless there's something that I'm missing about the feature you're discussing. Scorecard: OS X has few innovations in the OS arena. What little they have offered has been a few low-level features that are specific to niche industries. The only items that could be said to have driven innovation are improvements to audio driver architecture and improvements in display of help text. Hardly the stuff of the "innovative small competitor" that drives the "stodgy big company" to innovate.