Comment by nikster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nikster | Hacker News Reader

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Nice one! Ever since the port of Mac OS X to the iPhone - the iOS - I am in awe of Apple engineering. They are Gods.

I mean - imagine Vista, or Win 7 going on the phone, just with a new touch UI framework added. It simply wouldn't work, couldn't work, would be impossible, beyond the reach of the richest software company in the world.

Sometimes, good engineering does pay off, and ultimately one could say that iOS is a direct result of good engineering. Every time the iOS wins it's a win for good design, and for object oriented programming.

That said, the dark side of being so far ahead of everyone for so long is a severe case of NIH syndrome at Apple. Those times when others surprisingly better Apple, Apple takes a very long time to catch up. Dev tools are the best example with XCode 10 years behind Eclipse. MobileMe Mail is perhaps another one: MobileMe Mail is similar to Mail.app on OS X - but Gmail is way better than that, and has been pretty much from the beginning.

I'm not sure why you're getting upvoted. The NT base OS already runs on embedded platforms with equal or lesser power than that of any of the iOS platforms.

Are you trying to imply that the base OS is bloated? Or, are you trying to imply that the UI frameworks are bloated?

Apple didn't just port Mac OS X to the iOS platform, they more accurately ported the underlying Darwin OS to it, and added UIKit and other specialized frameworks.

The thing is those "other specialized frameworks" are mostly the exact same ones you get on the Mac. So the accurate description would be: "Apple ported the major parts of Mac OS X to ARM and exchanged UIKit for AppKit".

I don't know much about Windows Embedded Standard (what Microsoft officially calls its modular embeddable cut-down version of W7, also known as "MinWin") vs. Windows CE, but Microsoft for whatever reason still chose to base Windows Phone 7 on CE instead of Standard, indicating that they still don't think Standard is appropriate for mobile devices. Probably they will port it to Standard eventually, but they haven't yet.

Good point.

I think they were more concerned with preserving certain frameworks and their time-to-market given iOS & Android's market dominance.

Honestly, I don't have much confidence that Microsoft will get it right, in the long run.

I'm not a fan/foe of Microsoft, merely an observer, but I think their days of greatness are long past.

MinWin is not a "cut-down version of W7" - it was never productized, only a concept demo. Regardless though, Vista had started and W7 continued better separation of layers in NT. Maybe Vista was a percieved disaster, it was a necessary step nontheless.

Wasn't it productized as Windows Embedded Standard? (in its minimal configuration)?

I must admit I've never seen this stated anywhere official, I just assumed it based on the fact that the minimum footprint for WES is 40MB, which was the same figure quoted for MinWin.

Actually it is a cut-down version of W7. But you're still right, as "MinWin" has meant different things inside Microsoft across each release:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minwin#Releases

An interesting excerpt (iirc, Eric demoed this in a Channel 9 video):

In October 2007, Eric Traut, a developer at Microsoft, demonstrated a self-contained MinWin system, made up of about 100 files, on which a basic HTTP server was running.[10][11] Traut noted that MinWin takes up about 25 MB on disk and has a working set (memory usage) of 40 MB. It lacked a graphical user interface and is interfaced using a full-screen command line interface. Traut explained during the demo that MinWin would not be offered as a stand-alone product, but would instead be used as the basis for future operating system releases such as Windows 7.

Yes, this demo what I'm referring to - there's no confirmation anywhere that it was used anywhere yet.

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