Nothing to see here…move along.

I love that you “first version of OS X and used OS 9 until 10.1 was released” that completely proves my point. BTW, I don’t look at stock prices to decide if my software does what I need in the way that I like it done.

@Scott,
Windows 2000 didn’t have built-in CD burning, but XP did and it came out in 2001 as well. So OS X and XP are contemporaries. XP had CD-burning, could watch DVDs, had a built-in search (not as good as Vista’s or Spotlight though). There is simply no way you can compare OS X 10.0 to Windows XP favorably, and I don’t even think pre-SP1/SP2 XP was any good at all.

@Rich,
Can you really say it’s meaningless that Apple sold a 4GB iPhone one year ago for two-and-a-half times morethan an 8GB iPhone 3G costs now? Or that only two months after the iPhone 1.0 came out that they started selling the 8GB version for $100 less than the 4G had cost?

I will agree with you that bleeding edge tech can be a painful experience. It just bothers me how Apple and many of its followers act like launch products are perfect with Apple. Arguably their products may be below average for their industries though. My Treo worked great when I bought it, and the price didn’t drop like crazy right after I got it. Apple rarely gets the flack like Microsoft, Motorola, or many other companies do. Can you imagine how bad the outcry would be on Microsoft or even Google if Hotmail or Gmail (which are both free) had the issues MobileMe has?

A company can try its best and still not get things right. Often, new ideas are flawed where the technology and implementation are inadequate. But if you want prducts to improve, and who doesn’t, the public must expect that some of the new features are boneheaded.

You need not single out Apple INC, though. This is true of any technological devise. Just look at the long series of failures that Microsoft has produced. At least, Apple, eventually, gets thing right, so that the product goes on to be a success. This is not true of many other companies.

The fourth makes an important distinction. Apple needed developer support to get OSX off the ground, but it needed to show a stable, public build of OSX to do it. Developers were leaving the Mac in droves at the time. This was the best approach. Apple widely said that even X.1 probably wasn’t ready for most users.

Your second to last point is more of a quality control issue than a beta testing one.

The ONLY one that has any merit whatsoever is MobileMe. It was clearly launched without enough testing on Apple’s part. It’s a big blunder, to be sure. Was it blatant public beta testing? Nah. Semantics, maybe. No excuse for it, definitely.

Truth be told, living on the bleeding edge is always somewhat of a dangerous game. There are ALWAYS issues with new products. It’s not just Apple.

you take this completely out of context. you have to remmeber that in order for Apple to regain some kind of relevance in the OS arena, they had to make a bold decision to revamp their OS offering. without making this move, OS 9 would have sunk into obscurity. besides, most people were able to run their OS 9-native applications without a large number of issues. or they could choose to continue to run OS 9 and not upgrade to OS X at that time.

if i remember correctly, i think Adaptec/Roxio or whatever they were at the time followed on shortly with a native version of CD burning software. and at the time, did windows 2000 have built-in CD burning? i don’t think so. did windows 2000 have built-in search? no. no OS had this at the time. and it wasn’t until apple included Spotlight in future versions that MS actually took this feature seriously.

listing this “missing features” going back in time is akin to faulting a 1970’s era auto for not having anti-lock breaking systems. its an anachonism since both these features (anti-lock breaks and built-in search) weren’t invented at the time.

Most long time Mac users remember that the first Macs that shipped with OS X 10.0 included OS 9. I personally passed on the first version of OS X and used OS 9 until 10.1 was released… which has since rocked the entire PC market—check vendor stock values. And those new Macs with OS 9 upgraded to 10.1.

Your point is well taken: when you buy a “new” Apple product you typically get their worst version on first release.

“firewire only, no iTunes for Windows, no service to replace old batteries, mechanical scroll wheel”

because the original product was for the mac, where firewire is common ( and much faster) and the mechanical scrollwheel was fine. It was a 1.0 release not a beta.

iPods went to Windows later due to demand. The iPod was not a beta on launch.

“launch version had almost zero software, ran very slowly, no DVD playback, no CD burning, no Windows/Samba file-sharing, no built-in search”

You are on stronger ground here ( except for the zero software nonsense, that is chicken and egg) but any 1.0 release has to be a compromise. Features have to get dropped to make deadlines. So it goes.

A silly game overall. Try it with windows 1.0. Or 3.5 for that matter.