Mac Daddy

And Boy Have We Patented It

2007-01-14T15:56:00.000-08:00

My streak of getting predictions wrong continues. I got the iTV ("Apple TV") part right, even down to the shipping and pre-order dates. The rest was wrong, obviously, and of course it's particularly galling that I was proven wrong in my predictions about a cell phone, a tablet computer and a touchscreen iPod by one and the same device.

The problem here, though, is that none of the concerns I raised in my argument against the existence of an iPhone have been addressed. Those reasons why an iPhone wouldn't exist have now turned into flaws. As specific details came out, I saw more flaws. Five hours of battery life? A paltry 8GB, tops, of storage? A GSM phone that's locked in to Cingular, thereby negating the user-side benefits of GSM?

I said Apple would take stock of these reasons and decide not to produce the iPhone, at least not as such. Now I can see the iPhone failing for exactly those reasons. Of course, given my track record, I'm most likely wrong, but I remain skeptical.

Pre-MWSF 2007 Analysis & Predictions

2007-01-08T13:32:00.000-08:00

First of all, sorry I haven’t posted in forever. It’s mainly been because the Mac news has been dominated by one thing that I thought was so stupid, it didn’t deserve my attention: the “iPhone” rumors.

Now, of course, with the Macworld Expo starting tomorrow, the rumors are flying faster and thicker than poop in a monkey cage, with all major news outlets (even mainstream ones) doing everything but expressing absolute certainty that Apple will announce some form of mobile phone tomorrow. Some “analysts” have even gone so far as to predict the demise of the “iPhone”. Is it just me or is there something drastically wrong with predicting (in quite specific detail) what will happen to a product that hasn’t even been announced?

I’m here to weigh in on the myriad rumors, and possibly even make some predictions of my own. There are too many rumors, each with many variations, that I won’t be able to address them all. Some are just too asinine to even merit a mention. I’ll do the important ones, though.

I’ve always thought, and still think, despite the hundreds of news stories liberally citing “reliable/inside/well-placed sources” who think otherwise, that Apple will not make a mobile phone, or any device with mobile-phone-like capability, in the foreseeable future. “Foreseeable future” as used here includes tomorrow’s Macworld Expo. The reasons for this are manifold. I’m too lazy to give a full argument now, but my reasons include: the business model of the cell phone market is too provider-centric for Apple to dirty its hands with; Apple will not accept the locking-in and wholesale purchases of handsets by service providers (service providers buy cell phones in bulk and offer them for vastly reduced prices to consumers); Apple is not a maker of convergence devices (their philosophy for products is basically “do one thing and do it well”); the cell phone market is not emerging, it’s completely saturated – Apple can’t do anything with it; and finally, introducing a cell phone would introduce a vast new range of problems that Apple would shy away from, most notably the problem of support. Since a cell phone’s proper functioning would necessarily be dependent on another company (the service provider), Apple would find itself attempting to deal with service provider issues, and I believe Apple (Steve Jobs in particular) would not deem any service provider as providing a level of quality commensurate with that of an Apple product. Sharing responsibility for the correct functioning of a product complicates matters for both the producers and the consumers. Consider this hypothetical scenario: Apple releases a GSM phone (it takes a SIM card). A consumer’s phone has trouble reading the SIM card; whom does the consumer call, Apple or the provider? Now, name any other Apple product and try to come up with a scenario where the product malfunctions, for whatever reason, and a consumer wouldn’t be sure whom to contact for help. That’s right, you can’t.

So there it is: no device with mobile phone capability from Apple. Not at this Expo, and not in the foreseeable future. I stand by this. Should I be proven wrong, I will humbly eat my words. I am quite confident that I’ll be proven right, though.

Overshadowed by the “iPhone” rumors have been several others, some of which probably have a grain of truth to them. I’ll start with the obvious ones.

There will be further revealing of what “iTV” is and does. We should at least find out what its actual name will be (it was made quite clear when it was first revealed that “iTV” was a code name and would most definitely not be its final name). This is completely obvious; I don’t get any points for being right about this. I’ll go ahead and predict that Steve Jobs will announce that it will ship in February, but they’ll start taking orders immediately following the keynote.

iLife and iWork will receive updates. Most notably, iWork will now include a spreadsheet app. This one was reported on Think Secret, and as a general rule, anything that Think Secret reports is horse doo-doo, but this is plausible and seems like the obvious next step for iWork. It also seems like a typically Apple move to be subtly organizing an ouster of Microsoft Office from the Mac platform. I foresee that over the next several years. Remember when Internet Explorer shipped as the default browser on new Macs?

Now, as far as iLife goes, I believe there will be changes relating to ousting Microsoft Office. If you look at iWork, it will end up with three components: Pages, Keynote and “Lasso” (this is the code name Think Secret reported for the spreadsheet app). The Office counterparts of these are, of course, Word, PowerPoint and Excel. The missing component is Entourage. Apple has the email part covered, but not the personal organizer. iCal, Address Book and iSync supposedly cover that part, but they are most certainly not adequate for enterprise-level users who want a unified personal organizer like Microsoft Outlook. Entourage is the gimpy second cousin of Outlook who lives in Mac-land. I think Apple would like few things more than to be able to say, “Hey, enterprise users! Look at this! We made a pretty thing that acts like and is compatible with Outlook, but doesn’t look like animal entrails or have thousands of security holes! It’s only for Macs, by the way. Just sayin’.” Breaking into the enterprise market is the only way Apple can make non-negligible gains in market share, and they currently have nothing to offer to that market. I think that aggressively trying to change that is part of their long-term battle plan. I believe that eventually there will be an Apple-made Outlook counterpart on the Mac, in the form of a single program that might be offered separately from iWork and iLife, but in the meantime, I think iLife will be beefed up with capabilities approaching those of this hypothetical Outlook replacement. Part of this improvement involves working out the myriad issues with Sync Services, which leads me into…

Leopard, of which we’ll see not much more than a “little update” on how it’s going. There will probably be a concrete release date announced. If we’re lucky, we might even see some more Microsoft bashing, now that Vista is released. We’ll probably see some of the more minor new features of Leopard that weren’t announced at WWDC – nothing groundbreaking, though. Grand, sweeping changes like a complete system-wide overhaul of the OS X GUI will definitely not be shown, if those rumors are even true. It’ll be just enough to titillate the fanboys and assure normal people that progress is being made on Leopard’s development and it’s not too far from release.

iPod+iTunes will get a little bit of Steve time, probably right at the beginning. It’ll be a good way for him to get the audience into it: using misleading graphs, he’ll brag about how iPod sales skyrocketed for the holiday season and trumpet the iPod’s ridiculous market share. There will probably also be some new content for the iTunes Store. But I think that tomorrow will not be the iPod’s day, it will be the Mac’s day. As Jobs himself once said, “It is Macworld Expo, after all.”

Let’s dispense with the ridiculous right off the bat. There will be no tablet Mac. There will be no PDA (remember the Newton? Holy moly, that sucked). There is no market for a tablet Mac (don’t let the slavering hordes of fanboys deceive you into thinking there is – mercifully, the slavering hordes are a minority among Mac users). Even if there were, a tablet Mac would risk taking a bite out of the MacBook’s market share. There would be too many engineering issues to overcome. I’m not saying Apple isn’t capable of it (they certainly have some of the best hardware engineers in the industry on their payroll); I’m saying that there are just too many inevitable compromises in the building of a tablet computer that Apple would not want to make. Nothing can make Apple compromise the quality of a product. Period. Remember their most powerful weapon: their brand, and hand in hand with that goes their reputation. If they made a tablet Mac, which would almost certainly have some weakness that would annoy people, that would be brand suicide – and likely suicide for the entire company. No tablet Mac.

I am not ruling out a very small/lightweight laptop, but I have no idea how they would spec it so that it wouldn’t compete with the MacBook and so that it would still have an Apple-like level of quality. These rumors of an ultra-portable Mac could turn out to be the “MacBook mini” I mused about some time ago. If I turn out to be right, ten million points to me.

An eight-core Mac Pro is not entirely out of the question, but I expect they’d continue to offer the four-core version if they did this. Maybe they’d replace the 3GHz (currently top of the line) Mac Pro with an eight-core 2.66GHz, with only a slight price increase.

Now I come to the crux of the matter. Nothing I’ve mentioned so far as possible or likely has been particularly exciting. However, since New Year’s Day, Apple has displayed an enigmatic, grandiose, slightly ominous message on its home page. There appears to be a brightly glowing thing behind a silhouetted Apple logo, with the message, “The first 30 years were just the beginning. Welcome to 2007.”

This means that either something incredibly revolutionary is going to happen at Macworld, or something’s being incredibly (and disastrously) overhyped. I believe the second explanation is more likely. I think even an Apple phone is not revolutionary enough to merit that kind of hype. Woo, a cell phone. If this message is to avoid being ridiculous hype, one of the following things has to be revealed: (a) a completely new device, tapping into a completely new market; (b) a jaw-dropping new feature of Leopard; (c) a radical, sweeping change to the entire Mac line; or (d) changes to just about everything Apple makes, all consistent with some grand new theme or direction in Apple’s philosophy. If nothing like any of these happens, I’ll regard that message on Apple’s site as just so much hot air. I need not remind the reader of how bad it’ll be for Apple if that turns out to be the case.

We shall find out tomorrow. As before, I’ll follow this up with a post-keynote analysis.

iPod shuffle ad

2006-11-24T11:01:00.000-08:00

Ad for the new iPod shuffle that's kind of cool. What hits me first, however, is the fact that in this ad it seems to be possible to change one's gender and skin color simply by adding or removing a layer of clothing. This is quite disturbing to me. I should sue.

Pwned, revisited

2006-10-25T19:02:00.000-07:00

Oh snap.

From the end of the article:

The myth that Apple computers are more expensive than PCs needs to end. They have proven that they are committed to selling well-equipped computers at reasonable prices. Now people just need to take the time to compare the systems and realize that with a Mac they are getting a better computer at a better price with a better operating system, and if they don't like Mac OS X they are still better off to spend hundreds of dollars less and buy a copy of Windows for their Mac. Is there really a reason to stay on PCs anymore?

Unfortunately, yeah. Some people are content with using shitty computers. And, like I've ranted before, Apple ignores the sub-$1000 laptop market.

But isn't it galling that people still pay for high-end POS Dells and then whine about how Macs are more expensive? The machine I'm writing this on (2.66 Mac Pro + X1900) is, as shown previously, over $1000 cheaper than a comparable Dell and it runs OS X. (Yes, I am aware of the OSx86 project, but I'd rather have it just work.) Seriously.

Oh, by the way, while in Chicago I discovered from a Chicago-native C4 attendee why the L runs so slowly out to the airport: the trackage is, shall we say, elderly and past its prime, so the trains have to operate at reduced speed in order to be safe. I'm just going to sit here and consider myself lucky to be alive.

L is for Lame

2006-10-20T16:46:00.000-07:00

I’m in Chicago for C4 now. Posts concerning the actual content of C4 will follow, but I have to get this one posted.

I’m staying in a Motel 6 near (heh – read about the rather liberal use of the term “near” later) O’Hare. The easiest (heh) way to access this motel is from an L station nearby. One good thing is that the L that stops here goes to O’Hare in one direction and downtown, to the conference center, in the other.

So, when I got into O’Hare this afternoon, I proceeded to ride The Ghetto Train for one stop, then I got off and hoofed it to the motel. Firstly, I was given a bit of shit for being under the age of 21, and was met with considerable suspicion that I would engage in rowdy underage boozy debauchery, most likely involving multiple rowdy underage boozy people. When, in fact, I am the only C4 attendee to be staying in Motel 6, and for God’s sake I’m here for a fucking developer conference. Jesus, how much further from rowdy underage boozy debauchery can you get?

After checking in and dropping off some of my stuff in my room (which, because the motel is pretty full, is a handicapped room, meaning that there is no border of any kind between the floor of the shower and the floor of the bathroom at large), I began the long trek back to the L station (the trek is a mile and a half, which takes me about 20 minutes to walk if I set a brisk pace). When I got back, I found that I had to buy another ticket to get back on. This meant I had paid $2 to get from O’Hare to the next station, and I would have to pay another $2 to get from there all the rest of the way to downtown. That displeased and confused me somewhat, as did the fact that all three ticket vending machines were acting somewhat spastically and I had to make multiple attempts to buy the stupid ticket. One of the machines actually ate one of my dollars, thereby depleting me of singles, thereby dashing my hopes of possibly catching a bus from the motel to the station tomorrow morning.

The L trains themselves are, as implied before, ghetto in the sense that they are as bare-bones as trains can get while still qualifying as trains under a reasonable definition of “train”. The ride gets incredibly sketchy sometimes, for example when on an elevated segment with no barrier between the train and a 30-foot drop, with the train traveling at 50 miles an hour and lurching around like an overcaffeinated snake, then pulling into a station where the platform is obviously just a bunch of planks on top of some rather haphazard-looking scaffolding high above the street. On that part of the ride, I noticed in one area of Chicagoland an odd trend towards rooftop decks. The houses there were all old-style, with oddly-contoured roofs, but many people had built little wooden decks on one part, perched up there rather precariously. In any case I wouldn’t think those decks would be terribly inviting to relax on, since a 24-hour L line passes barely ten feet away. It makes huge amounts of noise and dust (noise pollution was apparently not a concern in the 14th century or whenever the fucking thing was built). In addition, as I noticed on the ride back after dark, the contacts with the third rail are constantly sparking and acting like little strobe lights alongside the train. I’m pretty sure they’re not supposed to spark so much; no other third-rail-driven train I’ve seen does that.

The L is supposedly a fast commuter rail system, but in the segment between O’Hare and the downtown Loop, it’s decidedly not (except on the elevated, barrierless segment mentioned earlier). Most of the time, we poked along at the same pace as the rush hour traffic alongside, occasionally stopping and listening to a recorded announcement (which I heard at least ten times) saying that “we are standing momentarily awaiting signal clearance; we expect to be moving shortly.” Signal clearance? What the shit? It’s just a plain simple line that doesn’t intersect anything, ever, not even other L lines. Trains just go back and forth and back and forth.

If you ask me, any train system could benefit from a little infusion of Japaneseness. This one certainly could.

Fuck Microsoft

2006-10-16T16:12:00.000-07:00

Because Office isn't Universal yet, I'm using NeoOffice on my Mac Pro. Let me tell you, NeoOffice sucks shit. It's written in Java and hence it's, shall we say, aesthetically challenged, as well as slow, un-Mac-like, and a resource hog (not that it really matters on this machine).

Why do I use NeoOffice, you ask? Office should run under Rosetta. Well, it does, but I use NeoOffice because among the few virtues it has is stability, which Office on Intel under Rosetta does not have. I've had Word crash on me repeatedly (and reproducibly) when I'm trying to save a document. So saving frequently doesn't even do any good. My options are Pages (which sucks), TextEdit (which sucks) and NeoOffice, which sucks but at least comes closer to imitating Word successfully than Pages and TextEdit.

Say what you want about Microsoft — Office for Mac is a good piece of software. I've long thought that it's better than its Windows counterpart in many ways, most especially UI design. Apparently Microsoft's Mac Business Unit has some talented Mac GUI designers working for it. So it bothers me that I have to use a shitty alternative after using a pretty solid Mac-native application for so long.

However, on Intel, Office seems to be crippled (Excel's worked fine for me, but I definitely notice the performance hit of Rosetta). And Microsoft isn't going to release a patch — they're just going to work on the next release of Office, which will be Universal. This is the approach taken by another major Mac software maker who shall remain nameless except to say that their name is an anagram of "abode", and I think it sucks. "Abode", and its flagship product whose name is an anagram of "Shh! Poo pot!" is the only reason that the Power Mac G5 is still for sale directly from Apple. I've been forced to use NeoOffice by the lack of a Universal Word.

Seriously, what the hell else does the Mac BU do? Messenger (OMG CUSTOM SMILEYS!)? They've axed IE and Virtual PC, so what do they do with all their time? Find new and innovative ways to hide their iPods from management? MacSoft managed to port UT2004 to Universal (and release a free patch) pretty quickly, and I'm sure that was a bigger task than it would be to port Office.

Essentially: fuck Microsoft and their laziness. The next release of Office better be the most fucking amazing product EVER to be worth the delay.

Woulda been nice

2006-10-15T10:48:00.000-07:00

Check this out.

Mostly, it's just Steve Ballmer rambling semi-incoherently, but there's this one nugget of goodness at the bottom:

How much money will you lose per Zune?
None. Apple put the hammer down there, dropped the price down to $249. If they had been $299, it would have been nicer. They have the advantage of scale. So we're at $249, too. We don't make a lot of money, not to start out.

Translation: God dammit, Apple owns us. It would have been really cool if they made the iPod $50 more expensive. Yeah, that would be awesome.

Thing is, Apple can probably afford to drop the price of the iPod even lower. iPod sales are so massive that Apple gets ridiculous deals on parts, since they buy in such large quantity. I've made the argument before that Apple should lower prices on Macs, let their profit margins take a hit, and gain a bit of market share. Once that's done, they can gradually inch their prices back up to regain their old profit margins but with more market share.

However, there's no reason for them to do this with the iPod. The iPod's market share is already huge, and it doesn't look like the Zune will be able to take much of a bite out of it. The Zune's a crap nugget. If Apple really wanted to drive it into the ground, they could lower iPod prices. It's a fallback plan, in case the Zune actually does turn out to be a threat. I highly doubt that'll happen, though.

Post-game

2006-09-12T20:21:00.000-07:00

Holy shit, I was wrong about the set-top box! It's code-named iTV and is an Apple set-top box. I can't be arsed to find out more about it right now, but I was definitely dead wrong about that. That's the only stupid rumor I couldn't be bothered to bust yesterday, coincidentally (I didn't bother to bust it because I thought the idea was so ludicrous it didn't need busting) - oh well.

I was also wrong about the Merom chips in the MacBook Pro, it seems. There's still time in the Expo; maybe it hasn't been announced yet because today was iPod+iTunes day. It might come up later.

I'm not terribly impressed with iTunes 7. The interface, good God it's a fright. None of the controls are native OS X controls, they're all weird random new things that are not consistent with each other. The Cover Flow view is cool, or rather it probably would be if any of my songs had cover art associated with them.

I'm not terribly impressed with the new iPods. Woo they have more HD space. They have bigger HDs than some laptops. Sarcastic wooooo.

I'm not terribly impressed with the new iPod shuffle. Woo it's half the size of the old one. It doesn't have a USB plug anymore, so you can't use it as a USB key. That's crap.

I'm not terribly impressed with the new iPod nano. Woo it's in pretty colors. Woo they have more capacity for the same price points; now they're the same price per gigabyte as every other flash-based MP3 player. Very sarcastic wooo.

Maybe I'm just jaded, I dunno. But on the whole I was underwhelmed by today's announcements.

That time again

2006-09-11T20:57:00.000-07:00

It's that time again: the night before an Apple "special event", where Apple is going to announce a new product. The Mac rumor sites are in overdrive, engaging in a session of mass pants-wetting in anticipation of a session of mass pants-creaming tomorrow.

I, personally, couldn't care less. All the announcements I care about (Leopard, Mac Pro, ... uh, that's pretty much it, really) are over with. I don't give a crap about new iPods, movies in the iTunes Music Store, new MacBook Pros or whatever the hell. Apple will make more money, rather unenthusiastic yay.

Incidentally, the three rumors I just mentioned are the only three of the bazillion rumors I've seen that I actually think contain a grain of truth. Now I'd like to take a moment to look at all the rumors I can find online and tell you why each one of them is a load of crap.

iPhone, For Real This Time, Seriously Guys. OK, remember the Motorola ROKR? When was the last time you heard anything about that? That was the actual product behind the iPhone rumors last time, and it turned out to be a complete bust. Hopefully Apple has learned their lesson. I believe phones and music players aren't ready for fusion yet, as proven by the utter failure of the ROKR to make a splash. The ROKR has practically disappeared from Apple's website — I found it only through a search of the site, and it is in fact accessible through a small, plain, obscure link on the iPod+iTunes page (labeled "iTunes Mobile"). I'm dismissing this one as already tried and failed.

Some iPod with the screen covering an entire side. Number one: what's the point? Watching a movie on a current iPod screen isn't much worse than watching a movie on a screen with just twice the surface area. It's still watching a movie on a little doohickey in your hand. Number two: it would offend Apple's sense of aesthetics. They'd be asking you to deliberately smear finger grease on your iPod's screen. Number three: engineering. I know Apple is the master of cramming unbelievable amounts of electronic gizmoery (I made this word up; I hope it catches on) into really small cases, but c'mon. They're not going to increase the size of an iPod case just to make the screen take up the entire side. Number four: this rumor comes up every single time new iPods are expected, and it's never true. Nothing's different now; why should it come true this time around? I'm dismissing this one as that old load of crapola that just won't die.

The Rebirth of the Cube; a.k.a. Mid-Range Tower. The Cube was a dud. I don't think anyone can deny that. It's the biggest slip-up Apple has made since Steve Jobs took over, and thankfully they managed to mitigate the damage it did. It was such a heavy rain on Apple's parade (they had been skyrocketing until then) that I think they've learned their lesson and the Cube is forever dead. This is a less obvious thing than one might think. Look here:

The company said there is a small chance it will reintroduce an upgraded model of the unique computer in the future, but that there are no plans to do so at this time.

O RLY, the wild rumor monkeys might say. YA RLY, they say to each other. NO WAI, say I. Apple's desktop product line has taken shape nicely, and there's no room in it for such a thing, at least not from Apple's perspective. This is complicated, so let me elaborate. Suppose, hypothetically, the Cube were reborn tomorrow. What would its specs be? I think the closest approximation is an iMac without a display. It would probably have the Core 2 Duo, at least, and retail somewhere in the $1000-$1500 range. And what would this little six-sided wonder do? Why, take a bite out of the iMac's sales, of course! They can't solve this no matter what they do. Spec it lower, and it'll encroach on the Mac mini. Spec it higher, and it'll encroach on the Mac Pro. Overcomplicating the product line by introducing a machine that, no matter what, will compete with another Apple product is, I believe, something Apple will avoid at all costs. Were it to entirely replace the iMac, then it might be a good idea (depending greatly, of course, on its price — there's loads more to say on this subject but I'm too tired right now), but that's something Apple will never do either. The iMac is their flagship, and its distinctive look and all-in-one ease of use (harking back to the original Mac 128k and its ilk) are such a powerful brand that it would be toweringly idiotic to throw it away with some upstart new product whose ancestor was a bomb. I'm dismissing "Cube 2.0" as another already tried and failed.

Some Awesome Video Streaming Thingy. What possible use could this be of? You can't stream high-quality video over wireless. Not high enough quality to satisfy Apple marketers. And what would be the point? You'd stream video from...what? An iPod? A Mac? Any old video device? To...what? An iPod? No...unless you introduce wireless iPods too, and that's too close to the iPhone to be true. A Mac? Uhh...why not just play the stupid video on the Mac? Any old video device? How? Most TVs/tuners/whatever don't have wireless. This just seems like trying to match-make two cool but grossly incompatible (for now) technologies — not entirely unlike the iPhone. I'm dismissing this one as Apple's not that stupid.

Apple Set-Top Box, Whatever The Hell That Is. Not even going to bother.

To summarize, I expect to see some sort of revision to the iPod line (I have no idea what; most likely the nano will be replaced by the nano^2 or something, as well as size increases without price increases, across the line), movies in the iTMS (this is practically a given, what with the leaks from studio execs), and updates to the MacBook Pro and possibly the MacBook ("we promise they won't randomly shut down anymore, or, like, catch fire"). I think it's quite likely we'll see Merom chips in the MacBook Pro, but it's not as likely in the MacBook.

I don't think there will be anything significant beyond that (a new Aperture, maybe, but who cares). After the Expo, I'll revisit my predictions and see how I did.

MacBook mini?

2006-09-09T09:05:00.000-07:00

Being on a college campus, I'm noticing quite often how Apple is completely neglecting the sub-$1000 laptop market. There are lots of students in that market. Students also tend to be repeat customers. So why is Apple neglecting them?

This thought comes hand-in-hand with this other thought that I had when considering the unified theme Apple's Mac nomenclature is taking on. There is a gap that coincides perfectly with this neglected market. Observe.

	Low-end (~ mini)	Mid-range	High-end (~ Pro)
Desktop (Mac ~)	Mac mini	iMac	Mac Pro
Laptop (MacBook ~)	???	MacBook	MacBook Pro

There's definitely a "MacBook mini" missing there in the lower-left corner.

Odds are against Apple filling that gap, though. I believe the MacBook is their only concession to the existence of that market. It's selling like hotcakes, too, so Apple isn't going to introduce another product that's going to complicate their product line and steal sales from the MacBook.

It's funny to think about, though. What would a MacBook mini look like?

Zealotry

2006-09-01T09:56:00.000-07:00

I am not a Mac fanatic, nor a zealot, nor a cultist. I'm offended when anyone calls me that. People think that the fact that I get angry when they call me that is an indication that's it's actually true and I'm just in denial. No, I get angry because I'm being slighted. I now take care to differentiate myself from fanatical, zealous Mac cultists.

Today there was a story on MacDailyNews (MDN), a site that seems to be frequented by some of the most insane fanatics I've ever encountered, about how a tech blogger, Paul Thurrott, had made a post about how the latest build of Vista was a really good build, that it had solved a lot of problems, that it was just working faster and better and more reliably.

Note that there's sort of a history between MDN and Thurrott. MDN hates Thurrott because he almost always fawningly praises Microsoft and subtly (and sometimes not-so-subtly) disparages Apple. Not always, though - he posted at length in favor of the Mac mini, and admitted to being a closeted Mac user. He's almost always critical of Vista and its delays, features that have been dropped, and the general crappiness of pre-release builds. (One thing he doesn't do is accuse Vista of copying from Mac OS X - an omission which the MDN fanatics find great fault with.) Anyway, it's a regular occurrence - Thurrott writes something praising Microsoft or Windows, MDN links to it, MDN fanatics get very riled up and post hundreds of comments on MDN saying what a jackass Thurrott is. They also probably flood Thurrott's inbox with irate emails telling him what a jackass he is.

With his post on the raised quality of the latest build of Vista, the usual procedure started and the MDN fanatics posted lots of derogatory comments. Here's a sampler:

"Oh yes, it's a magical turnaround. Riiight. From "trainwreck" and "driven into the ground" to POOF! "it just works" (that's Apple's line, by the way, you tech-schizo troll.) Okay, who didn't see this one coming from a few trillion miles away?" (MacDailyNews Take - a little editorial they put at the bottom of their post)

"Can I kill him. I see his stupid picture on his site, I want to wind up and smash his face. Is that wrong?"

"Hey! No Kool Aid!!

Get the Longhorn bullsh!t outta yer ears! That's laughter you're hearin'! The laughter of millions of Mac Zealots who're thinking the very same thing that was in the first post in this topic!! We're thinkin':

So the fcuk what?! Vista will be virtually obsolete before it hits the shelves!! Everyone knows that it'll be nothin' more than SP 3 with bits of corn in it!!"

Thurrotts' just lookin' for hits, smokin' crack and givin' his master blowjobs... as usual. If Mr. Softies favorite shill didn't come up with something favorable he was gonna be left whorin' without a pimp...
and you know how dangerous that is."

"Paul Thurrott is the typical Microsoft Windows Butt Monkey Lemming Fan Dork™ who follows Microsoft's cult of blind ignorance while drinking their rotten Kool-Aid. Anything he writes carries no weight at all."

""But the recent release of a surprisingly good Vista pre-Release Candidate 1 (pre-RC1) build"

Maybe he's talking about the CD media, as in "the quality of the disk itself was surprisingly good." Mitsui or Fuji CDs?

You know he's on the payroll, so he has to find something good to say, even if it's against his better judgement."

I could go on, but I don't want to. I mean, the fourth one ("Microsoft's cult of blind ignorance") is so unintentionally ironic it makes my head spin. But reading all that crap made me need to write a reply. Here's what I wrote, and posted as a comment:

Wow, you guys disgust me.

You people are exactly the people who are responsible for the widely-held belief that Mac users are crazy cultists/zealots who won't hear a word against the Mac platform, no matter how deserved it might be. It's unbelievable.

Is it completely inconceivable that Microsoft has pulled off a good build of Vista? You've been saying for months, on this very site, that Vista is getting bogged down and Microsoft needs to shake things up in the Vista division. For all you know, that's what they've done, and the new management has busted some heads and kicked some asses and gotten Vista into a decent state. Why not? Don't say "Microsoft is a bloated, useless, incompetent company". Companies have been known to turn things around completely - just look at the state of a certain computer company ten years ago versus now. They made their turnaround in the space of two years. Who's to say Microsoft hasn't done the same?

It's even better that some of you are writing off this news because it was conveyed by Paul Thurrott. Here's something shocking, so if you're of a sensitive nature, stop reading: Paul Thurrott is not always wrong. He does have access to inside information. I'll admit he's a Microsoft apologist, but perhaps - please bear with me here, I know this is a radical idea - there's a grain of truth in what he said.

Remember when the Mac mini first came out? Paul Thurrott said he liked it, and I recall tons of posts saying "OMG KISS OF DEATH". Are you really so mindless as to think that absolutely *anything* that Thurrott says is wrong, just because he's Paul Thurrott? Even if he's saying something in praise of Apple and the Mac?

You people, and I include the MDN staff in this statement, make me ashamed to call myself a Mac user. I am one - I have been since 1990, and I've never owned a non-Apple-made computer. I try to convince people buying computers to buy Macs. I get excited over Macworld Expos and WWDC. But with idiocy of this magnitude coming from Mac users, I end up having to defend not the Mac platform, but *myself* - people accuse me of being one of you, which I take as an insult.

I know that I'm trying to dam a river with a twig here, but I just have to make my feelings known. If one zealot sees reason because of this, then I'll feel like I've succeeded.

Half an hour after I posted that, someone posted below me: "Keep trying to kick that football, Charlie Brown." That's pretty much how it is.

My point is: please don't call me a fanatic, zealot, cultist or anything like that. I'm not.

WTF?

2006-08-29T11:44:00.000-07:00

They dropped the price of my Mac Pro! I just got this email:

To Our Valued Apple Customer:

Apple is pleased to announce a price drop for the Mac Pro you recently
ordered. We have automatically adjusted your order to reflect the new price.

For up-to-date information on your order, please visit our Order Status
website at http://www.apple.com/orderstatus. Once your order is shipped, you
can also obtain tracking information on this site.

Thank you for your interest in Apple products.

Sincerely,
Apple Store Customer Support

I suspect this has something to do with the shipping delays of the Radeon X1900 XT (I looked at the configure page on the Apple Store's site and that is indeed the component that's cheaper). It's only $90, but I'm still happy about it.

iPod stuff

2006-08-24T11:17:00.000-07:00

Pwned. Another iPod killer bites the dust. Then again, it's made by Dell; what can you expect other than shitty quality?

Apple totally shafted Creative with their $100 million settlement of Creative's patent infringement lawsuits. In fact, Apple shafting Creative has been sort of an ongoing theme in the digital music player market. Creative's players arguably give better value for money in terms of feature lists and price (not necessarily in terms of ease of use), but no matter what they do, they can't make a dent in Apple's near-monopoly. The situation is only going to get worse for Creative with September's Apple Expo, I believe. The iPod line is due for a makeover, and the date of the Expo corresponds nicely with the end date of Apple's heavily-promoted "buy a Mac and get a free iPod nano" offer to college students. If they can cut prices on the iPods across the line, Creative will be even more screwed. The latest numbers put Apple in first place with 75.6% market share, and Creative in third place (behind SanDisk) with 4.3%. Tell me that's not kinda sad.

Note to Creative: this is how Apple has felt for years in the personal computer market. They make products that are clearly superior and price-competitive, but their market share is still small. Granted, this appears to actually be increasing measurably, as opposed to Creative's market share. Still, people who empathize with Creative's plight in the music player market should be able to empathize with Apple's plight in the personal computer market.

On a non-iPod note, Apple has recalled batteries that it shipped with iBook G4s, 12-inch and 15-inch PowerBook G4s. It would have been hilarious if Dell were the only company to be affected by Sony's shitty batteries (damn Sony) but apparently Apple's not going to escape it. A brief few days of Schadenfreude are over. Oh well.

How low can you go?

2006-08-22T09:26:00.000-07:00

OK, check this out.

Things to note: question 2, I love how "Confusion" is an option. It's definitely the correct answer. Question 5, "Aqua" is an option! What the hell! (Note to uninformed readers: Aqua is the name of Mac OS X's GUI). Question 6, aren't all of those pretty much the same thing? Gadgets are mini-applications that are meant to be frequently used tools. Question 7, holy crap. The entire marketing department needs to be fired if they're responsible for slogans like that. "Enabled Virtual Workforce" is a business scenario? Umm...right. Oh, and last but not least: "The minimum RAM requirements for a Windows Vista machine is" (emphasis added).

And these people have a near-monopoly on the consumer and business OS market!

Oh hell with it

2006-08-21T10:27:00.000-07:00

I realized I have another, very compelling reason to get a Mac Pro. I'm now about 65% done with a Cocoa development project that I started a couple weeks ago and have been working my ass off on since. I'll have to release it as a Universal Binary, which means I should really test it on an Intel Mac. And it would be good to have my own Intel Mac to test it on.

I realize this means I could get a Mac mini or something, since it's not really a processing-intensive app, but to me the Pro is the only Macintel worth getting.

I further realize that this doesn't seem like a very compelling reason. However, this app uses cryptography, which is greatly affected by endian issues. Intel processors are little-endian and PPC processors are big-endian. It's going to be a royal pain to test, even with computers of both architectures. (With this reason to buy a Mac Pro comes a companion reason to keep my PowerBook: it's good to have a PPC machine sometimes).

So I've made my decision: I will wait until Apple Expo Paris, this September, in case the Mac Pro line is updated (it probably won't be, a month after its initial release). No matter what, the second the expo ends, I'll order a Mac Pro. I'll get the standard configuration, plus the ATI Radeon X1900 XT and an AirPort Extreme card. I'll get extra RAM and a monitor from third-party manufacturers. The whole ball of wax should set me back a little over $3000.

There. I feel much better now that I've finally decided on it. Now I will spend four weeks jittering with anticipation (the Expo is September 12-16) and after that, spend 3-4 weeks (unless they speed up getting Radeons) going berserk and frothing at the mouth with impatience.

Mac Pro first impressions

2006-08-19T17:58:00.000-07:00

I went to the Apple store in South Hills Village today to try out a Mac Pro (I had other reasons for going all the way down there; I'm fully aware that there's an Apple store much closer to where I live). I talked to one of the store employees, who was very nice. He showed me something that he said made him realize the awesome awesomeness of the Mac Pro: go into the Applications folder, select everything in it (this includes stuff like Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Shake, Motion, Logic Pro, Photoshop CS2, Aperture, iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, and on and on and on — basically, lots and lots of apps that all take a lot of time to start up), and hit Command-O. The silly machine had them all loaded in about ten seconds.

Then I asked him if any of the machines in the store had Boot Camp. One did (not a Mac Pro), and the guy showed it to me. The sight of Windows XP running natively on a Mac gave me one of those moments where two opposing forces brush against each other. It was fast, though. Once I got over the incongruity it was very cool. If (oh hell, WHEN) I get a Mac Pro, I shall definitely be putting Windows on it, blasphemous and unholy though that may seem.

After that he left me alone and I went back to the Mac Pro. I downloaded Xbench onto it and watched the Quartz and OpenGL benchmarks. Having a machine be that fast sort of takes the fun out of watching those benchmarks; the Quartz tests each took less than a second, so I couldn't even see the pretty patterns. The OpenGL test reached 228 fps. And that's with the GeForce 7300GT, not the Radeon X1900 XT that I'll be getting.

I also did some poking around with Terminal and discovered that the Java VM and compiler are indeed universal (able to run natively on both PPC and Intel processors), as I had hoped. Same for the Perl and Python interpreters; all good news. I had been wondering about that for a while. The quickest way to find out something like this, by the way, is to go into Terminal and enter file /usr/bin/perl, replacing the path to Perl with the path to whatever executable you want to inspect.

Then I downloaded the Universal demo of Nanosaur 2 and played it a bit. Now, this was on a 30-inch Cinema Display, and the game supports the native resolution of the 30-inch Cinema Display. Quite simply, you have not gamed properly until you have gamed on a Mac Pro attached to a 30-inch Cinema Display running at its native resolution. It was stunning even with the somewhat mediocre graphics card. I definitely won't be getting the Cinema Display but it's definitely at the top of my list of things to buy when I have $2000 to spare.

The Mac Pro didn't have Xcode on it, so I couldn't test the apparently superfast compilation (and I forgot to check if gcc was universal; I'm almost sure it must be). That'll be what seals the deal for me — I need to see Xcode compile something and I need to download Eclipse onto a Mac Pro (not an easy task considering it's a 100MB download) and start it. I don't really give a shit how fast it can start Final Cut Pro or anything; I need it to compile fast. And run games at insane frame rates. But I already know it'll do that. I'll go back to an Apple store once school starts and poke around some more.

Yes, the Mac Pro seems to be as awesome as I had expected, although I feel like I didn't push it to its full potential. I think they might frown on me straining the thing's four processor cores on the display model, so I can't really do that unless I buy it. I will. Eventually. Maybe.

AAAAARGGGGHHHHH

Leopard

2006-08-18T15:33:00.000-07:00

From the blog of some developer who ignored Apple's "DONT BLOG CONFIDENTAL STUPH LOL" warnings. With my commentary.

There are shitloads more Leopard screenshots here. The new Safari looks good — it has a Firefox-esque search function (FINALLY). It also uses a version of WebCore that can USE THE SUPER POST EDITOR IN BLOGGER. FINALLY.

512x512 icons?! Jesus, who needs THAT many pixels in an ICON?

I'm seeing a general trend, in Apple software interfaces, away from drawers and towards those stupid little buttons like Tiger has in Mail.app. I like that drawers are going away (I always hated them) but I don't like those stupid little buttons.

The new Interface Builder looks pretty sweet, but there's also the risk that it has suffered from overcomplexification. Ah well, we'll see when it comes out.

Time Machine

2006-08-16T09:11:00.000-07:00

Time Machine was one of the big new features of Leopard that Apple made a big deal of in the WWDC Stevenote. Criticism that it was copied from Windows System Restore aside, I have other problems with it. I don't like the idea.

I realize that during the Stevenote they didn't demo all the features and abilities of Time Machine, but it still seems to me that they could have at least mentioned a way to make Time Machine stop keeping track of a file or folder, if there were one. There's got to be. I mean, what if you delete a file and actually mean it? As in, you are definitely sure you don't need this file anymore and you never will again, so just delete the damn thing and all backups of it. If Time Machine can't do that, it's sorely lacking.

But really, I prefer a backup scheme where you specify what you want backed up, not one that assumes you want everything backed up. The overall idea seems cool — system-level automatic incremental backups — but it seems like this scheme puts people who don't have a second hard drive, whether internal or external, at quite a disadvantage. I mean, there's not much point in backing up your drive to the same drive, even on a different partition of it. That provides zero protection against hardware failure. It seems like it's making a rather bold assumption about the hardware users have; the majority of home users, towards whom the advertising for Time Machine seems to be geared, don't have two hard drives.

I hope there's a way to disable Time Machine entirely; it seems like a drain on resources (both time and space) that Mac users shouldn't be unconditionally saddled with.

LOL FIRST POST LOL

2006-08-15T19:46:00.000-07:00

In the interest of making this blog into a mature forum of discussion about Apple and the Mac, I shall reproduce and respond to a well-thought-out comment made on my main blog in response to my price comparison of the Apple Mac Pro and the Dell Precision 690. Here's the comment:

I'm not a fan of Apples, or Dells, but I think that this comparison is very good. It is, however, important to note that when looking at Dell, it's prices are the best value when buying less-powerful computers. When buying a top of the line computer, it is usually much better to buy from a different vendor (or build a system from scratch). I don't think that most people know this. Most people see good bargains with cheap computers, so they assume that the better performing computers that can be purchased through Dell would good deals as well. I think that Dell expects people to believe this, and as such, they mark up the prices of better computers, and consumers don't know the difference. With this in mind, I think that Dell and Apple should have different target audiences. Apple has been known for having more expensive computers (as you said, the cheapest one available through Apple is almost 6x the price of the cheapest one through Dell), but it also focuses on performance. If Apple were also to start selling extremely low-end computers, with subpar components like Dell does, would this harm the respect that tech-savvy people have for Apple? I think it would. In my opinion Apple should do what it does best - making quality computers. Meanwhile, I think Dell should do what it does best, sell cheap, first time-user entry level computers. As for me, I don't plan on buying either brand of computer in the forseeable future.

You're most likely right about Dell jacking up prices on their high-end computers to take advantage of their reputation as a maker of bargain computers. There's little other explanation for the result of my price comparison. This is why I hope Apple makes a big deal out of how the Mac Pro is cheaper than supposedly cheap competitors. The danger with that is that Dell will slash prices on their high-end computers and make Apple look like idiots...and Dell can totally afford to do that. Another danger is that similar comparison exercises with other Apple models (MacBook Pros spring to mind) will produce results not nearly as favorable to Apple, and the media, along with the unsavvy masses, will wave dismissively and say, "Oh, Apple still sucks."

The thing about Apple, though, is that solely targeting the high-end professional-user market pricewise goes against what their philosophy seems to be nowadays. Look at their TV ads — the virtues of the Mac that they list are things like seamless networking and peripheral usage, great "life" applications (iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, etc.), lack of viruses and malware, ability to do lots of things out of the box, and so on. These same things are the primary selling points of consumer-level computers like the iMac and MacBook. All of that advertising is targeted at Joe Average, someone who just wants a computer that can surf the web and read email and maybe make the occasional home movie. Yet if they want to compete in that market, they have to lower prices. Make no mistake, they are getting a fat profit margin on the iMac (probably less so on the Mac mini); I think they could afford to reduce its price, at least temporarily, if they saw the promise of gaining market share as a result.

Really, the promise of gaining market share is actually right here, thanks to the Intel transition. Macintels' ability to run Windows is actually turning out to be a selling point, as casual users are less afraid to make the jump to new hardware, knowing that they can still use their familiar OS. Maybe this will result in a large community of people who never run Mac OS X on their Apple hardware, but who cares? Certainly not Apple. They make their big profits off hardware.

What I'm trying to say is that Apple needs to stop viewing a product with slim profit margins as a money drain, and instead view it as an investment. If they can get reasonably cheap but still high-quality computers out to the masses, even just a little bit of the masses, then they open the way for their more profitable products. I think their profits can stand to take a hit in the name of broadening the user base — a user base that will then become loyal customers. Apple specializes in loyal customers, as we all know.

In summary, the momentum for a leap in market share is there, but if Apple doesn't do something about the prices, that opportunity will die on the vine and I promise not to mix metaphors like that again. We're witnessing an unprecedented confluence of Apple-favorable events: the Intel transition, the Mac Pro, Leopard, the continual delaying and paring-down of Vista, and the iPod Halo Effect from long ago. I refuse to believe that nobody at Apple sees things the same way, and I can only hope that someone who does has enough clout to take action. If Apple is at the top of their game, they're already secretly planning some massive strategic move that will take advantage of all their momentum.