Where is everyone?

Ripcord

Ripcord

Senior Lurker
There's been a pretty distinct slowdown on the site over the last 6 months. Is this because people are leaving/finding other (better?) places to discuss? Because the ramp-up to G5 and Panther is now over and we're in that lull where we're waiting for things to build up again? Or are people just starting to get less enthusiastic about Mac (I know I've been pretty disappointed with things lately, not much has happened since Panther, Macworld was a bust, and no surprise follow-up afterwards as predicted, though Garage Band *is* pretty cool (just a stripped-down Soundtrack, tho))?

Even a month or two ago I used to regularly see "50 viewing" in forums during peak times, now I'm lucky to see more than 10...

Where's everybody going? Is there a party going on at some other site that I don't know about?
 
.....pressing the refresh button every minute to see whether apple.com has the new pb yet....kiddin, am gettin mind tis weekend!
yay!
 
Nah! ive always got an interest in it, its great to see what we all talk about here i visit at least once a day. i dont think people are getting sick of apple either mabey they are starting to sinc in with the releases coinciding with events, eg: as an event approaches the site becomes more active i guess, people want to know whats next. Though there hasnt been much hardware innivation for a while from apple meaning other than a processor upgrade that was needed for quite some time [innevadable]. there has to be some next gen digital device comming soon. i can feel it. its like a splinter in your mind, iPod was just too succesfull for investors or the board not to jump at such an idea.

Also dont forget the media monitoring. Many apple stores and resellers probably use this site as a tool to speculate or hype up sales. Same to investors for a hint or some possible inside info to help with stocks and decisions.

Has that powerbook appeared yet? im waiting for G5 PB's my iBook is starting to get really slow:(
 
I guess you've said most of it already, Ripcord. :) Panther's been a _big_ boost for the board as has been the G5 anticipation. Right now, there's nothing much going on. Speculation over Mac OS X 10.4 is just that: Speculation. And the expected new hardware (G5s, PowerBooks...) just haven't appeared yet.

I'm sure that when Apple releases new hardware, we'll be happily discussing it here - and many of those who don't post that much right now will return and say even more. ;-)

Same for Mac OS X 10.4. It's been like that in the past few years. WWDC will be the first time anything about it is officially announced. With Panther, there were some screenshots shortly before WWDC that many thought were fake (or just 'themed'). They turned out to be real, but who knows (those in the know, of course...).

MOSR has kicked off 10.4-rumouring, but in not _that_ a good way, I think. It sounds like wild speculation.

Btw.: I notice this slow-down around the web of Mac rumours and news, mostly because when I sit at the computer and gather the stuff for macnews.net.tc, I end up with empty hands. It's a sad feeling. ;-) ...

But it's not only Apple, btw. There's also nothing going on at Adobe, Macromedia etc. Adobe CS is kinda fresh out, and so there's no beta reports of Adobe apps right now. MS Office 2004 will quite certainly create some waves when it's out. (Or when rumour-mongers get their hands on some prerelease copies, which apparently hasn't happened just yet...)
 
.. and maybe people in general are in this time of year (Jan/Feb/Mar) more involved in work, study, schools, etc than around the WWDCs, MWSFs etc? I'm doing insane hours now, and the time I cam browse freely are .. well, insane to be US hours .. (like now). A lot depends on the hour you are viewing as well .. so if I view the boards 9 am GMT it is empty also because many (most?) users are in the Americas, and it's 1-4 am US time .. ;)
 
as mac rumors is slowing down for now, the digital cameras are in for it, if you're into cameras, look @ some of the review sites, they're readying pma las vegas, an equavalent to macExpo....
i know this is offtopic, well, its better than nothing, right?
 
That's not off topic, I'm actually pretty excited for 10.3.3 to be released and I check MacOSX.com everyday, so I have no clue. I'm a regular visitor 3 to 4 times a day, but most of the time I just read and don't post.
 
well, i must admit it, i myself, i come here a few times a day too, other than macosrumors and macnn.....being a reader not poster tho....
 
Actually, I've talked to a few people who have been getting a bit annoyed with this site itself. Some people think Macosx.com is getting sterile; there's no real hot discussions here anymore. Obviously, we don't want to become Slashdot, but everyone seems to agree with each other or kindly aquiesce... knawmeen? And the site problems that occasionally pop up, while hard to help I'm sure, don't help anything.

I'm sure the lull has something to do with it, but there are also internal factors at work that aren't doing anything to attract people or keep them here. I for one like this site and check it regularly (despite the whole ignoring thing :p), but there are some names you just don't see anymore who a month or two ago were everywhere.

Keep in mind, I'm not trying to point fingers, I'm just trying to shed another light on the situation and what is probably going on around here.
 
im new to this whole mac forum thing, having switched recently and not sure which sites were best to be a part of. Yes i remember two months ago or so id see 78 active users on at around 9 (us central time, illinois) I like posting here, i get good responses and have already spoted the people who post regularly. I had a good thread about longhorn a while ago, but its died down. Right before macworld there were a lot of discussions, i think everyones just kinda pissed we havent seen any anniversary stuff yet, but jobs did say in the keynote that "great apple products will be realeased during this year. Im expecting this place to be a whole lot more active once the summer starts approaching (late may, early april) and i think its gonna be a great summer for new apple stuff , G5 stuff anyway, i heard a rumor about powerpc 976 "G6" processors being used in macs in 3 to 5 months.....can anyone say dual 3 ghz? powerbook g5.......and maybe we'll finally see that g5 cube thats been rumored for quite a while now? other stuff- nintendo and xbox's new consoles will be powered by g5 variants, and theres some speculation the ps3 will use multiple g5's too instead of that microprocessor, hopefully well be seeing upgraded g5 models, maybe more competitive prices with the g5, and then the dual 3 ghz powerpc 976 which i doubt will be dubbed the g6 (too early for that) apple will probably just keep calling it the g5.......we seem to be getting more friendly to windows users, first with the ipod, then itunes and the music store, now we can videoconfernce with them, and hp and apples ipod deal, hopefully more windows users will start converting, and apple will start trying to grab pc users attention more. what i would really like to see from apple or should i say chiat/day......an ad SHOWCASING panther, what its all about, show all the awesome features, how much better it is, and then at the end say, only on a mac.......something like that i mean even the ipod ads arent that spectacular, they dont say too much about the product...... anyone know steve jobs email or how to contact the apple team? seriously, all they need is some better advertising and well see a difference from the curret 5% market share! anyways, hope to see some more life around here! :)

Jon
 
It's the nature of the Internet. People are going to come and go. And I think the fact that many posters here are quite young adds to the transitory nature here.
 
Hi Ripcord,

Well, if its any consolation, I got my 12" Powerbook in early January (just made the iLife upgrade window whoo hoo!). I am an old WinTel hand, and the PB was my first Apple since I sold my tricked out Apple 2+ back in 1983. Being an Mac newb, I had a bunch of questions that I asked here and at macosxhints.com, and some very bright folks generated quick answers for all of my questions (thanks everyone!). Every problem (and there wern't many) solved in less than 24 hours.

My biggest revelation, however, had a direct impact on the number of posts I make. The freekin PowerBook simply works. Once I got some Mac things worked out in my head, got the preferences set, the thing purrs right along while I churn out stuff on the road. No BSODs, no flakey drivers, no missing or corrupt .DLLs or bad uninstalls. It simply keeps on churning away despite the fact that I have fiddled with the settings and preferences a huge amount.

I use a homebrewed XP box at home. It took a long time to get all the drivers and whatnot setup (it was a new type of motherboard and video card), but I will hand it to MS...XP is fairly stable (for windows, that is) once you get thing set. But there was an enormous amount of fiddling with the thing to get it that way, with the resultant 100's of message board postings, not to mention 100's of MB of new driver downloads, BIOS updates and Windows critical updates. Now to be fair, I brought this on myself my building my own boxes, but sheesh....

To give you one example...the ASUS MB I have has provisions for SATA hard drives. Cool, I thought, put the HDs on the SATA and leave my optical drives as masters on their respective IDE chains to improve performance. I grab a pair of IDE-SATA adapters for my IDE HDs... hooked it all upand promptly corrupted Windows XP. Turns out XP doesn't like when you switch drives around like that. Had to re-install WinXP, but first I had to find a SATA driver to download to a floppy, so that when I reinstall XP, it can use the SATA during the install process, since XP has no native SATA support. Fine, got that straight, re-installed XP (without losing any data, if you can believe it), called MS on the phone to re-activate XP (arghh).

Few days went by, and lo and behold I am starting to see disk corruption (Windows needs to check your disks...and so on). No data loss, but disconcerting to say the least. Well, search the web for some ASUS specific sights and start to bump into people with the same issue (and literally 1000s of messages on the same topic). To make a long story short (shorter, anyway), it turns out the ASUS BIOS had a bug in the SATA BIOS, and it took them a couple of months to admit it, then find it, then fix it. I didn't need the SATA or RAID (the only way to set up a RAID was via the SATA), so I slapped my HDs back on the IDE (and had to re-install XP again...and had to call MS to reactivate it...again), but the people who really needed it were really torqued.

The moral of the story is that I think that kind of message traffic I can do without for a long time...

Meanwhile, the nice, little Powerbook goes on doing its thing without so much as a wimper. I get to watch movies on the road, too. Bonus. Funny thing tho...They sold me on the 12" PB cause it was the smallest thing out there, Mac or PC. But now that I am sort of converetd....that 1.25Ghz 15" sure is cooool and not tooo much bigger, heh heh.

Very best to you,
Richard

12" AL Powerbook, 1Ghz, 768MB, Superdrive and Airport Extreme.

HomeBrew XP Box with ASUS A7N8X-Dlx, 512Mb, GeForce4 128Mb Vid, Lite-on DVD and CD.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top