The Mac Observer gets all breathless in a short article that speculates (inaccurately) about the future of Windows Vista:
When Windows Vista ships at the end of 2006, it may not run on the cut-rate PCs sold by Dell, Gateway and other companies. Gene Steinberg, in his latest column at The Mac Night Owl, notes that Vista’s current requirements call for a non-integrated graphics card with 64MB video RAM and support for DirectX 9, which rules out many of those cheap US$400 and $500 systems, as well as Windows laptops released before this year.
Why would anyone go to a Mac site for PC news? The number of errors in this one short item are impressive. For starters, Windows Vista will indeed run on systems with underpowered graphics subsystems. They just won’t use the full-fledged Aero Glass 3D interface. (Read the full preliminary hardware guidelines here.)
I just did a quick online shopping exercise and found a compatible graphics card upgrade available today for as little as $32.99. If I’d looked a little harder, I probably could have found it for half that price. A year from now, when Windows Vista is ready to ship, those parts will probably be standard on low-end PCs.
And finally, leading motherboard makers are already making integrated graphics chips that meet the specifications to run Windows Vista. By next year at this time, low-end machines using the most recent motherboard designs should be fully ready for the new Windows.
That concludes today’s edition of FUD-busters.
Ed Bott 
MacObserver took some stuff out of context but if you had read the linked article you would have read the exact same thing you wrote when you ‘FUD-busted.’ So please FUD-bust the Steinberg article.
crickets
Hmm, almost as bad as saying that once Mac transitions to Intel chips, soon no software will be made to run on the older Macs.
Now where have I seen that baloney posted…?!
Since we’re into the classical literature quotes: Macs are more fudded against than fudding.
I agree! There is absolutely no reason for a Mac site to report on Vista. The truth is OS X is already so far ahead of MSFT there is no use. It is a waste of time. Mac users should be looking to the future of OS X, because there is no real future for Vista. Maybe another innovative OS from MSFT will surface in the next decade, but I am not sure Vista is it. The simple truth that MSFT cannot integrate search technology into its OS after 5 years says loads about its ability to execute. I hope we all agree that if OS X was available on any PC hardware, MSFT would be on its way out. Shame on you Apple for continuing to greedily limit OS X to your hardware only.
The Mac Observer isn’t really a respected Mac website. They steal all their news from elsewhere and pass it off as their own. No one really respects them as a news source so I’m sure they’re trying to stir the pot and get people to pay attention to them.
I think the real concern for Joe User is that his nicely equiped machine of today that he just spent $700 to $1000 for won’t run Vista tomorrow. I’m concerned about it as well, because I help family and friends with their machines. They want the latest stuff but none of them can afford a new beefy machine everytime a new version of Windows comes out, nor can they change out a video card or hard drive.
And please be honest. From what I’ve seen the requirements to run Vista nicely you will need a beefy machine, and not some baseline model from Dell for $500. Even by next year’s standards.
If you think that’s FUD, you haven’t read the stuff PC magazines and web sites have written about Macs for the last ten years. The MacObserver article is flawless reporting by comparison.
I am currently running the beta on a 1st gen Tablet PC Pentium III 1.33 with 512 of ram and an integrated video (obviously). It actually runs measurably faster in some regards. I do not get all the eye candy but it runs everything very well and has been surprisingly stable for a technical beta. The main issue most testers are having is getting drivers for certain pieces of hardware. I honstely expected it to be near unusable but I have been using it as my main machine, backing up all data ever few days. I have written and compiled a few small applications which seem to run well also.
I hope that helps wasatchwizard.
Robert,
If you want to come up with an example of something written on THIS SITE about the Mac that’s been inaccurate, feel free. But the argument that some unnamed PC magazine or Web site sometime in the last decade wrote something inaccurate about the Macintosh platform is completely irrelevant to this discussion. And if you do find any such examples, go post them on your own blog.
I agree that getting Vista news from a Mac site is bogus, but the MS site you point to as providing “full preliminary hardware guidelines” is just crap.
What exactly does “modern CPU” mean? How do I know whether or not a video card will support “Windows Vista Display Driver Model”?
Reading the preliminary guidelines in the link, I don’t see any hardware specs. The page is just a link to another page, which gives very general guidelines. “A modern CPU” doesn’t tell me anything. About the only informative thing on that page is that it’ll need 512 mb of ram.
“Modern CPU” is basically code for a Pentium 4
shipped in the past two years, and it’s in contrast with an “older CPU.” If those definitions seem fuzzy, it’s because that’s the nature of the game. There isn’t a bright line you can draw. A three-year old PC may run WV just fine if it was purchased with a high-end CPU. A two-year-old bargain PC may not have enough CPU power or graphic muscle to support the full UI experience.
As for “Windows Vista Display Driver Model,” you can Google that phrase and get a lot of information, including a Wikipedia article and a list of compatible drivers from ATI and Nvidia.
I agree that the paper in question doesn’t offer much in the way of concrete information. We are just at the Beta 1 release, however. Please note that it says, clearly, “Check back here periodically for updates.” It is normal for prelimiunary documentation to go through this evolutionary process.
Should we also point out that offloading some of the Desktop eye-candy to the GPU was another idea pioneered by Apple and now, “inovated” by Microsoft?
Of course Apple had the same issue of compatibility with older machines (which they mostly handled well). We’ll see if MS can also do that. Until the product is out though, everything we say is speculation and opionion. I don’t see anything wrong with speculation and opionion that the new Windows might not work so well on CURRENT hardware. MS has a track record in this areaa and it isn’t good. I think the Microsoft customer base is developing a better “institutional memory” than they used to have. You should adjust your marketing message accordingly.
Since the product is in Beta 1 and one would expect performance improvements in the final product, not everything is speculation. BTW, it runs very well on my P3-933 w/512 MB RAM. No pretty glass effects, since I don’t have a DX9 card, but not everyone needs that.
Nothing that you identified is an error!! Mis-leading, maybe, but not inaccurate.
pwb,
No errors?
Headline: “Windows Vista Could Eliminate Low-End PCs” That’s silly. As I pointed out, there are already integrated graphics chips that meet the specs for Windows Vista. In fact, it will run on even the cheapest PC sold at Dell or Gateway today. The low-end PCs of a year from now will be designed for Windows Vista.
Lead sentence: “When Windows Vista ships at the end of 2006, it may not run on the cut-rate PCs…” Nonsense. Windows Vista will run on just about any PC sold in the last three years. The only thing it will lack on some low-end PCs is a set of 3D visual effects in the Aero Glass user interface. The functionality will be exactly the same, it just won’t be as pretty. And to upgrade to a compatible graphics card will cost $10-20.
That’s two.
I just deleted two posts that were pure trollery.
You both know who you are. You wanna be an asshole, do it on your own Web site. Don’t do it here.
The “Mac Night Owl” site doesn’t ackowledge that the concept of “low end pc” is a moving target. Today’s low end PC is yesterday’s uber-machine. When Vista is released, many of the low end PCs of next year will support it. OK, so many of todays low end PCs won’t, but so what, they are low end machines and upgrade paths aren’t always smooth and untroubled on the low end – that’s why they are low end!!! And as Ed says, many machines with integrated graphics will support Vista.
you might as well complain that your old classic mac can’t run OS-X.
Are you saying that Vista will provide the same exact interface elements on any machine, regardless of the video-card?
What will you gain with a good video-card on Vista, pure eye-candy?
Really, I want to know…
Correct. The better video card gets you support for 3D graphics, animation and visual special effects. If you have lower-end graphics, you get the Aero Express interface, which has the same interface without the fancy stuff. See this article.