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Bill Gates assaults man for using an iPod.

Razor says...

>> ^Sagemind:
Zoon..., Zune..., Zoone... A what?
Why bother with anything other than an iPod?


Check out the Zune HD. You might change your mind. OLED, Tegra, better sound. Needs more apps though.

^CaveBear

And I suppose Windows is better than a Mac - Yea, right


It all depends on who you are and what you do. As a gamer, programmer, photographer and overall advanced user, Windows beats the shit out of OSX... for me. As a system builder (that is, I put together my own customer computers) I would never consider buying something pre-built, Mac or otherwise.

Blind allegiance to any brand is plain idiotic. I know my wants and needs and design a system around it. Many years of computing experience have helped me find the hardware and software that suits what I do. Customer built PCs using Windows.

Not a Mac. Not OSX. Not a chance.

Zune HD Promotional Video

Razor says...

Looking forward to seeing this in action. Kinda curious what to expect in terms of game titles, too. Sounds like porting XBLA titles to this thing should be fairly easy for developers. Tegra FTW =)

New Augmented Reality Zombie Game - ARghhhh

Comodore 64 app for the iPhone

Razor says...

@ dag:

Mac vs PC commercials are a great example of FUD tactics. This has been argued on other forums ad naseum and I will avoid repeating what has already been heavily debated. FUD on any scale is bad; I really could care less how Apple's compares to Microsoft or Sun or any other company. But combine FUD with the Apple RDF and it only serves to make consumers more stupid and companies richer for hurting the market =P

Moving on... As for the iPhone SDK and API, I'm only in partial agreement with you. I'm not sure if you are are low-level (assembly) programmer, dag, but to call the API for the iPhone unprecedented and robust is not accurate and really depends on what you code. It is, in fact, very limited from a more general viewpoint. This is in part due to the EULA and TOS (don't forget, Apple tells you what you are allowed to release for the iPhone) but also because of what access the APIs provide to the hardware.

That access, in fact, is none. The SDK and API are heavily abstracted from the hardware. This incurs a serious performance penalty that prevents certain applications from being practical. John Carmack, lead programmer of id Software made commentary regarding this while developing a version of Doom 3 for the iPhone:

“If you look at it in raw hardware horsepower, the iPhone should be better in performance than the Nintendo DS and the PlayStation Portable,” Carmack said. “But the truth is, you can’t exploit it all because of software inefficiencies.”

More can be found here: http://games.venturebeat.com/2009/06/10/next-generation-iphone-game-doom-resurrection-debuting-next-week/

Those software inefficiencies he is referring to are a result of the API design, and is not an example of being supportive of all external developers. Don't get me wrong. The current API works well for a large amount of apps, as proved by the number present on the App Store. But really, how many of these apps really push the technological envelope? Alot of the apps on the stores are the technological equivalents of a basic .NET project: easy and fast to code (good) but not efficient (bad). This effectively kills one area of development: high end games. Kind of funny when you think about it. Apple is yet again limiting game development on another one of their platforms, although for very different reasons. I'm convinced (at risk of butchering something Steve Jobs might say) high-end gaming is not compatible with Apple's DNA.

I do understand Apple's reasoning behind this level of abstraction: control. This isn't necessarily malevolent control. An advantage of abstraction is that it can prevent nasty things from happening... your risk of crashes is reduced for example. But you will always lose performance due to overhead. There is simply no way around that.

Overall the iPhone's API philosophy was probably the right way to go in the very beginning. It's now been two years, though, and Apple needs to rethink their strategy when it comes to low-level access if they expect AAA developers to do anything remotely close what Tegra-based hardware can do when it hits the market. The iPhone will appear quite flimsy by comparison and only an API change will fix it.

Sorry for the long post, but game and assembly programming are passions of mine and I feel people are incredibly misinformed as to the true nature of the iPhone SDK and API. Good for some, but not for all.

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