Garmin going Mac compatible

ebbo

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Gleaned from http://www.garmin.com/pressroom/corporate/011006.html

MACWORLD EXPO, SAN FRANCISCO/January 10, 2006/PR Newswire — Garmin International Inc., a unit of Garmin Ltd. (Nasdaq: GRMN), today announced that it will immediately begin to make its line of GPS and mobile electronics devices compatible with Mac OS X version 10.4 "Tiger." This makes Garmin the first major GPS designer and manufacturer to announce direct support for Mac OS X.

“We are very excited to be supporting the many tech-savvy Garmin users who are also Mac devotees,” said Min Kao, Garmin Ltd.’s chairman and CEO. “Mac users have been encouraging us to make our GPS units Mac compatible, and we’ve listened. We hope this brings the many benefits of GPS to current Mac users and invites future Apple customers to the Garmin fold.”
Good news for Mac users :clap
 
I've just bought one instead of an Apple :doh

Still, I reckon that this announcement just covers the new Intel machines, not the G4/G5, although I could be wrong, but the timing points to that.

Now, I wonder when the 2nd revision of Intel-chipped iBooks will come one the scene :D
 
samwise said:
Still, I reckon that this announcement just covers the new Intel machines, not the G4/G5, although I could be wrong, but the timing points to that.
I reckon you're wrong :P
 
samwise said:
Still, I reckon that this announcement just covers the new Intel machines, not the G4/G5, although I could be wrong, but the timing points to that.

But the press release doesn't

MACWORLD EXPO, SAN FRANCISCO/January 10, 2006/PR Newswire — Garmin International Inc., a unit of Garmin Ltd. (Nasdaq: GRMN), today announced that it will immediately begin to make its line of GPS and mobile electronics devices compatible with Mac OS X version 10.4 "Tiger

OSX 10.4 is on all new Mac's - not just the intel ones. And I recon it will be a 'universal' version.
 
Universal Binaries. Something that has been available to Apple since they bought the NeXT/Openstep company a long time ago. It's very easy to build code with 2 passes of the compiler/linker that can run on either platform. I remember doing all this in the early nineties, when NeXT got out of the hardware business.

Linux is a different matter, it's still not a consumer product, like garmin devices. Though I installed it trouble free on a pc this morning there's a bit too much freedom to install this and that and cause support issues for garmin. I suppose a mapsource installer that made sure the appropriate pre-reqs were in place could simplify it, the market wouldn't be very big.
 
Good news. when Garmin release Mapsource for Macs I'll buy one. I've always wanted a Mac but since I've had Garmin GPS's (two years now) this has put me off taking the plunge.
 
ianf said:
Linux is a different matter, it's still not a consumer product, like garmin devices. Though I installed it trouble free on a pc this morning there's a bit too much freedom to install this and that and cause support issues for garmin. I suppose a mapsource installer that made sure the appropriate pre-reqs were in place could simplify it, the market wouldn't be very big.

Sorry for the slight hi-jack.
Linux is a consumer product - unfortunately it's still quite limited to consume.. :(
There's loads of proprieatary software running on Unix (incl Linux) so there's no technical reason for neglecting Unix/Linux. And what comes to the market; it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation; people don't run it because there's "no software" for it (which is quite wrong acutally) and software houses don't do any software for Linux because there's nobody using it. I think that Linux will hit critical mass quite soon... Providing that companies that build proprietary software would at least prepare for a multi-platform release (Win/Mac/Lin)...
The main reason why I run a windows machine at home is simply my gadgets. :rolleyes:

Anyhoo - I'll crawl back under my rock now :)
 
It's all about marketplace demands IMHO.

Garmin have been able to ignore the Mac market because their bean counters would have determined there isn't enough of the market share to make it happen.

Since the i-Revolution the goalposts have moved, and Gamin now realise that Apple are right back in there as a platform in the all important home user market.

Speaking as someone who has been involved in the software development world over the last five years, nothing has happended from a technology point of view to have stopped Garmin (or the rest of the world come to that) from deploying their products on the Mac platform before now.

It's a no-brainer of a decision on the part of Garmin, to not have done so would see their market share diminish.

A decision on Linux deployment will come down to the same factors again, and for that reason will be some way off I'd imagine.
 
TheJoker said:
Sorry for the slight hi-jack.
Linux is a consumer product - unfortunately it's still quite limited to consume.. :(
There's loads of proprieatary software running on Unix (incl Linux) so there's no technical reason for neglecting Unix/Linux. And what comes to the market; it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation; people don't run it because there's "no software" for it (which is quite wrong acutally) and software houses don't do any software for Linux because there's nobody using it. I think that Linux will hit critical mass quite soon... Providing that companies that build proprietary software would at least prepare for a multi-platform release (Win/Mac/Lin)...
The main reason why I run a windows machine at home is simply my gadgets. :rolleyes:

Anyhoo - I'll crawl back under my rock now :)

Linux is fine, for professional use.

I would have nightmares about installing it for example on a pc for my parents to use. That's the current Acid-Test in my book of what a consumer grade operating system needs to be able to cope with.

Windows is just about acceptable but still causes enough posts in here to make you wonder.

:thumb
 
ianf said:
Linux is fine, for professional use.

I would have nightmares about installing it for example on a pc for my parents to use. That's the current Acid-Test in my book of what a consumer grade operating system needs to be able to cope with.

Windows is just about acceptable but still causes enough posts in here to make you wonder.

:thumb

No Mum, you can't just put the DVD in the tray and watch your film, now listen carefully, first you have to mount the DVD drive..... :eek: :eek: :eek:

:D
 
You wait 'til you need to set up network teams and raid 1 disks.

Actually it's way better than the shonky old unix/hp-ux stuff I've managed to stay well clear of for the last 10 years.

I quite like the Fedora 4 I've put on a pc so I can get my head around the basics for supporting RHEnterprise. The RHNetwork stuff puked on some unresolvable dependancy bollox when i tried to make it patch itself, proving it is not quite there yet.

I like my mac more though, it just downloaded 60+mb of new releases, installed them quietly and updated all my ipods to the latest software without making me remotely nervous.

I TRUST Apple to test the upgrades, on very limted hw base.
I KNOW MS test upgrade stuff on a reasonably wide hw base.
I FEEL RH had a quick go at it, blogged a few bugs, and went off to argue about them in the pub, or sandal shop.

:D
 
judge said:
No Mum, you can't just put the DVD in the tray and watch your film, now listen carefully, first you have to mount the DVD drive..... :eek: :eek: :eek:

:D

:rolleyes:
device-popup.png
 
ianf said:
You wait 'til you need to set up network teams and raid 1 disks.

Why would a normal home user do that? :mmmm Sounds a bit like comparing apples and pears here (and I don't mean Macintoshes and PHP's Pear repository).
 
TheJoker said:

If my Mum saw that she'd think her weird cousin and her crystals had arrived at the door. :D

I've had to work in and around Unix and Linux for the last 10 years and even on occasion had to set up workstations in all flavours of Unix and Solaris, including meeting the exacting demands of geekdom where they specify certain kernels or KDE's, in that time I recognise that the likes of Red Hat/FreeBSD et al have come on greatly but it wasn;t that long ago my irony labelled quip would have been close to reality.

As an exponent of Linux I'm sure you yourself wouldn't want the masses to convert over from 'Doze, anymore than the Mac users do, as it will ruin the 'quality' you currently enjoy because sure as eggs are eggs, the virus and trojan writers will follow and piss in your pool too.
 
Bit of a misquote there I feel. My sentence was a quick comeback to Judges point about mounting filesystems to get a DVD up, not implying that a desktop would need these. I promise not to digress to enterprise installations in future to keep it all desktoppy.

Anyway I bunged in some old CD and it quite happily told me it was a mixed audio/data one and what did I want to do with it. - which is how it should be.

The RH Certifications still insist you know all the underlying unix bollox so that's what I'll be reading for the next few weeks.
 


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