Live from Austin!

As expected, MacWorld was a big disappointment. The MacBook Air was supposed to be the big “wow” item, but it’s more of a big “meh”. Apple clearly set out to make something comparable to the VAIOs Sony has been selling for years–which is a great idea, as I love small laptops, but in the quest to be thinner than anyone else they introduced a few too many design compromises.No optical drive built in is no big deal; I go weeks between using my Mac’s optical drive. More of a problem is the lack of any Firewire capability, the inability to upgrade the RAM, and the fact that there’s no ethernet unless you carry around a USB ethernet adaptor. And of course, that adaptor will use your only USB port, so better carry a hub too. And cables for your hub.

[Update: It's also no smaller than the regular MacBook; just thinner. So it's not an ultraportable, and no easier to carry around.]

Now, if they had done something like Fujitsu’s P1620 and made it possible to flip the keyboard under and use the device as a tablet, that would have rocked. But as it is, it’s just another laptop, albeit a very thin one; and it’s not really suitable as a primary machine.

So what’s the target market for the MacBook Air? People who want a status symbol, or people who travel an awful lot and need the absolute lightest Mac possible. They also need to be people who can afford a second Mac as a main machine, or people with very light needs. So I really can’t see the Air selling in great quantities. If I were choosing a Mac laptop today, I wouldn’t get one, even if price wasn’t a concern.

I was more interested in what they’re doing with AppleTV. I’ve been thinking for a while that dealing with scratched and scuffed Netflix DVDs is a pain, and I’d rather just rent movies via the Internet. AppleTV is going to offer this as an option. Add in the ability to buy TV shows a la carte, and it’s starting to look pretty tempting.

Of course, there are a couple of problems. The first is that a lot of content isn’t in MPEG-4 format. The iPod would never have been a success if it hadn’t been able to play MP3s and had only worked with MPEG-4 audio; and similarly, if Apple wants the AppleTV to be a success, they need to make it able to play more formats than just MPEG-4.

The second problem is selection. Right now, the movie and TV selection via iTunes doesn’t even come close to Netflix. But give it another year or two, and I think the cable TV and satellite companies are going to be in big trouble.

The economics are simple. I watch 2-3 hours of TV a week, on half a dozen channels. To get those channels, however, I have to buy a bundle of over a hundred channels that I literally never watch. I could buy the shows via iTunes instead, cancel the DirecTV subscription, and save $30 a month. But not this year, not until all the shows I want are available…

The big question will be whether the new AppleTV software can be easily hacked to enable installation of other codecs and playback of non-MPEG-4 content. If so, I may get one. If not, I’ll wait until the content is all available in MPEG-4–which may be a long wait.

I guess I wasn’t paying attention to the Leopard previews earlier in the year, because OS X just blew my mind.

I was editing an e-mail message, and decided to idly click on Time Machine to see what it was doing. Instead of the Finder going into Time Machine mode, my e-mail went into time machine mode. I clicked the back arrow a couple of times, and there was what my e-mail inbox looked like 2 days ago, complete with since deleted messages.

It’s the same with the Address Book. You can step back through how your address book looked at different moments in the past.

My general impression of Leopard is that it’s good. Proper multi-threading in Finder and Mail makes a big difference. But this Time Machine thing is the most amazing backup tool ever. I got a big hard disk at Costco at the weekend, and backing up is now totally painless, there isn’t even an application to run. You just have to make sure a suitable disk is plugged in for long enough to copy the changes over, once a day or so.

Backing up isn’t sexy and it isn’t fun, which is why most people don’t bother to do it. Now there’s no excuse to skip backing up. Or at least, not if you’re a Mac user.

I’m an iPhone skeptic. While I appreciate good UI design considerably more than the average person, a good UI alone is not enough to make me accept a crippled and overpriced product.

At WWDC today, Steve Jobs has announced that the third party SDK for the iPhone is…make all your applications web applications, and access them from the Safari browser. Which means the user has to pay network bandwidth charges to run the application, and can’t make or receive any calls while it’s running. And of course, no service means your applications all stop working.

So basically, the iPhone is a closed platform, a very pretty but underpowered cellphone. It’s not a smartphone. It lacks even the capabilities of many low-end handsets offered by GSM networks, but it’s going to be sold at a premium price.

Let’s see how it compares with my current 2-year-old phone, for example:

To me, that’s a hell of a tough sell.

You may point out that my tiny phone’s screen isn’t great for browsing the web, but that’s just tradeoff I made because I like a phone that’s truly pocketable. If you prefer a big screen, you can get a Blackberry or Treo for $150 or less. Right now, Cingular has refurb 8525 devices for $99.

I prefer the hybrid solution: pair a small phone with my Nokia N800, and browse the web at triple the resolution of the iPhone. You can get an N800 plus a small Bluetooth phone and you’ve still saved $200 over buying an iPhone.

In addition, most of today’s phones take SD cards for memory expansion. I can dump movies onto a 4GB SD card and stick it in the Nokia. If I need more space, I’ve got a couple of extra 1GB cards floating around. What happens when you use up all the memory in your iPhone? You’re stuck, there’s no expansion option.

If the iPhone was $99, or even $199 at the most, I might be interested. At $599, it ought to sell like the similarly-priced PlayStation 3. It’s the most overpriced Apple product since the Mac Cube. (Which I loved the design of, but didn’t buy because it was overpriced.) It’s the most overhyped since the first Newton.

Oh, I’m sure Apple will sell some. I mean, the Motorola RAZR sucked, but plenty of people had to have it because it looked so cool. But then, the RAZR wasn’t $600…

Today’s the big day. The iTunes Music Store has started actually selling DRM-free music. I decided to vote with my wallet and go find and buy something. I’m hoping that in a few weeks we’ll see a press release stating that EMI’s music sales tripled, or something like that, and the other labels will get that clue they’ve been missing.

Unfortunately, it seems as if everyone else has had the same idea, and Apple’s Internet connections anre buckling under the strain. In a way that’s a good thing, but it’s a bit frustrating.

I’ll keep this brief, as you’re a busy man.

You recently wrote that you would drop DRM from the iTunes music store “in a heartbeat” if you could.

Well, as you’ll see if you check the iTunes purchase logs, I bought quite a few tunes from the iTunes music store. You’ll notice that I stopped as soon as you fixed the flaw that allowed Hymn to remove the DRM. Since then I’ve bought music from places like bleep.com that sell DRM-free music. I still use the iTunes music store, but only as an easy way to preview tracks that I then buy elsewhere.

Clearly, there are plenty of music labels (such as most indie labels) that are willing to license their music DRM-free. Clearly there are people like me who won’t buy music if it has DRM they can’t remove. So, here’s a proposal:

Allow record companies and artists who elect to do so, to sell their music DRM-free on the iTunes music store. Indicate the DRM status with a small icon in the download views in iTunes, like you indicate explicit lyrics. I’ve put together a quick mock-up. As you can see, the padlock icon is very discreet and unobjectionable. I don’t think it would cause user confusion; the people who don’t care about DRM will probably never notice it.

Once you’ve offered DRM-free music on the iTunes store, you just sit back and watch. If I’m right, the non-DRM music sales will surge. Then you’ll have some real ammo with which to approach the major labels. Because frankly, they don’t listen to consumers like me. I know, because this year I wrote to EMI listing a bunch of CDs I didn’t buy because they had DRM warnings on the packaging. I didn’t even get a reply.

Yours sincerely,

mathew

I was kinda enthusiastic about the iPhone…then I found out from Macintouch that it’s a closed, locked down unit.

Forget about installing software to use it as an e-book reader, or reading Word documents or PDFs. You’re not going to be using it to give business presentations. Forget about downloading music via the WiFi connection. Forget about writing your own neat applications and running them. There’s no Xcode iPhone developer kit, and Apple apparently has no plans to produce one for public use.

So basically, it’s a phone that does exactly the same stuff my current phone does, but with a much prettier interface. I’m sure Apple will sell a boatload of them to the same people who bought the Motorola RAZR because it looked cool. But to me, it’s not that interesting unless it’s open.

The fact that you need to sign a 2 year contract with Cingular makes it even less attractive. Cingular’s SMS is flaky to the point of near uselessness, and their Internet connectivity is expensive compared to any other carrier. I’m sure their iPhone contract will require a monthly reaming that will make my current unpleasant cellphone bill look like a bargain.

If you like the idea of what the iPhone could have been, though, there are a couple of upcoming alternatives worth considering.

OpenMoko is a Linux-based phone with an iPhone-like touch interface. It’ll be about half the price of the iPhone, and not locked to Cingular. It’s also going to be open to developers.

The Greenphone is a more traditional phone design (i.e. one with buttons). Again, it runs Linux and is open to third party developers.

Also, since it seems it isn’t common knowledge: Apple didn’t invent the multitouch technology as Steve Jobs claimed. It was actually developed by a company called Fingerworks. Said company mysteriously shut down, and the owners refused to say who had purchased their operation, citing confidentiality agreements. However, one of the founders of the company was subsequently confirmed to be working for Apple.

When Apple launched Mac OS X, they made a big thing about its typographical capabilities. To show off the new type rendering engine, they licensed and bundled…

More than $1,000 of the best fonts available today, including Baskerville, Herman Zapf’s Zapfino, Futura, and Optima; as well as the highest-quality Japanese fonts available, in the largest character set ever on a personal computer.

It’s interesting to contrast this with Microsoft’s approach. Back when they launched Windows, they needed some fonts too. Since every laser printer on the planet (and most non-laser printers) had Helvetica and Times in, it would have been really useful if Windows had had Helvetica too. Macintoshes at the time shipped with Times and Helvetica, and it enabled them to display on screen a reasonable facsimile of what you would get on printout.

Of course, doing what Apple had done and actually licensing the fonts wasn’t an option. Bill Gates didn’t get to be as rich as he is today by paying people for the use of their intellectual property. Instead, Microsoft got a couple of knock-off fonts made by Monotype that were close enough—Times New Roman and Arial. In the case of Arial, the emulation was painstaking, right down to using the exact same character and stroke widths for every symbol.

Much the same happened with Microsoft Office. Microsoft saw a font they rather liked—Hermann Zapf’s Palatino—so they called in Monotype to make a quick copy. The result was named Book Antiqua, and bundled with Office.

Unlike Helvetica, however, Palatino was a wholly original design by a living designer. Hermann Zapf got rather angry, and Microsoft agreed to license Palatino retrospectively.

With Microsoft, history has a way of repeating itself. The forthcoming (some day) Windows Vista has a font called Segoe, used for all user interface elements. Microsoft recently filed for a visual trademark on Segoe, to try and ensure that nobody else would be able to use the font in their logotypes or software. Because, you know, everyone wants the caché of looking like Windows.

Unfortunately, some spoilsports at Linotype noticed that Segoe (as shipped in the Vista betas) was almost identical to the font Frutiger Next, designed in 1997 by Adrian Frutiger for use on signage in Munich. Microsoft had tweaked the tail on the ‘Q’, added a baseline to the ‘1′, left everything else identical, and then filed for a trademark as if the font was their own original design.

The European Union denied the application. Microsoft attempted to appeal, arguing that Linotype hadn’t actually sold Frutiger Next. Unfortunately, Frutiger is a very popular font, and the evidence of its Next variant’s existence prior to 2005 was overwhelming. Denied! Microsoft must pay all the lawyers’ fees for Heidelburger Druckmaschinen AG, aka Linotype.

Frutiger is very similar to Adobe Myriad, designed by Robert Slimbach and Carol Twombly. Consensus seems to be that Myriad is original enough to not be considered a rip off, however. Myriad is used by Apple for their corporate publications (replacing Apple Garamond), and is also used by my team at IBM. It’s worth noting that Apple license the font from its owners, and I use a legal licensed copy too.

So…will Microsoft license Frutiger or Myriad? Or will they tweak Segoe some more?

$99 for a leather iPod case? And he wasn’t laughed off the stage?

That iPod Hi-Fi looks like it was stolen from the set of Space: 1999, doesn’t it? Come to think of it, a G5 would fit the decor of John Koenig’s desk perfectly. Perhaps the Apple iPhone will look like a commlock?

Then there’s the Intel Mac Mini. We all knew that was coming. However, while the MacBook Pro comes with a Mobility Radeon X1600, the Mini comes with a craptastic Intel GMA950 integrated graphics chip. The old Mini had a slothful Radeon 9200, but at least it had dedicated RAM, whereas the Intel shares its video RAM with the main CPU.

In addition, the CPU speed has dropped from the MacBook’s 1.83GHz dual cores, to 1.5GHz single core. If that wasn’t bad enough, the entry level price has quietly risen by 20%–the $500 PC is now a $600 PC, $800 if you want dual cores or a DVD burner. Price up comparable Dell machines, and that price looks pretty hard to defend.

There are a couple of problems leading to the high price and hardware nobbling. The first is that Intel are charging over $250 for a Core Duo processor, whereas a G4 was well under $200. The second issue is that Apple have to be careful not to make their new cheap Intel boxes embarassingly faster than the PowerPC systems they’re still selling. The Intel iMac was almost as fast as the top end quad G5 workstation, so making sure the Mini wouldn’t be too fast was probably a requirement. Hopefully by the end of the year the G5 will be history and we can have an improved Intel Mini.

“I would shut down Apple and give the shareholders their money back.”

—Michael Dell, October 1997.

“If Apple decides to open the Mac OS to others, we would be happy to offer it to our customers.”

—Michael Dell, June 2005.

I’ve been watching reaction to the Apple announcement. On the one side, there are a lot of long-time Mac fans who have been expressing a kind of unfocused pessimism. Something about the move makes them really unhappy at a subconscious level, but they seem unable to express exactly what.

Then on the other hand, there are lots of people saying “Hey, it’s just a computer, it’ll still run OS X and be pretty and be a Mac even if it has a Pentium 4 inside.” I think that’s not quite true, in a fairly subtle way. To understand why, though, you need to understand the Mac religion.

Apple have been forced to make the move because the desktop CPU marketplace, while still competitive, is only competitive around a single instruction set–the one that has gradually evolved from the original 8086. The x86 instruction set dominates the desktop, in CPUs from VIA, Intel, Transmeta, AMD and others. It’s even somewhat strong in the embedded space. Compiler technology for x86 advances far faster than for any other instruction set.

So let’s be clear: x86 is completely dominant. And it blows. That’s what makes the move so hard for many Mac-heads to accept. The Mac has always been about doing what’s technically right, not what’s most popular.

For instance, I vastly prefer the clean simplicity of the 6502 to the ugliness of the Z80, having written code for both. The 680×0 was a joy to write for compared to the 8086 thru 80486.

Moving up out of the realm of processors, SCSI was clearly superior to IDE. USB was obviously the right thing, even if serial ports and ADB were far more popular and USB peripherals were initially almost impossible to find. Firewire is better in every way than USB 2.0 HiSpeed.

In the software layer, the way the Mac filesystem works is a pain in the ass to write for, but the way the system behaves to the end user as a result is clearly the right way. (Programs don’t break when you move them, files launch to the application you last edited them with, and so on.)

In short, the Mac has always been about picking the best technology and doing what’s right. But now suddenly there’s going to be an x86 CPU in the middle of it all–kludge after kludge piled on top of the original 8086 design. And recall, IBM chose that because it sucked, they didn’t want to choose something that might threaten their real computer systems. Worse, the Mac isn’t even going to be using leading-edge AMD 64 bit x86 CPU, it’s going to be a 32 bit Intel processor.

Basically, the Mac community is being served a shit sandwich. It may still be the finest ciabatta bread, the freshest pickles and lettuce–but there’s going to be a huge turd in the middle, and some of us are having a hard time preparing to swallow it, even though we know it may be necessary–because as the saying goes, “Eat shit! Fifty billion flies can’t be wrong!”