Red Hat Diaries/002d

Subtotals

So far we've got really cool hardware, the kind that's dependable and won't fall apart and leave you on a funky phone line that won't work.

And we've got a fairly well protected system - evil hackers haven't really got around to the Mac yet, it's too narrow a market share.

And we've got simplicity in the UI, the kind that Apple is famous for.

On the other hand we've got a really out-of-whack application system that has to change, and we've got the equivalent of a fancy golf cart running atop a Rolls Royce engine.

But what really matters is the graphics. That's all that's ever mattered with NeXTSTEP. That's what's always made people's eyeballs pop. And today they're doing things that even the original NeXTSTEP couldn't do.

They still have floating point screen coordinates, but now they've got vector graphics too. Check the visuals with iTunes and ask yourself if Billg could ever do that. Or go into your System Preferences and start playing around with the size of your icons and ask yourself the same question again. Or set your Dock to magnify (something you might not otherwise want to do) and repeat the question again. The graphics are awesome, and they've always been awesome on Macs.

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