Live from Austin!

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.

On average, computers last me for about 4 years. Last week, I was still using an 800MHz iMac.

Partly this is down to my being frugal. It’s like the TV situation, where I didn’t buy the HDTV until my family visited and laughed at the 20″ TV, and seemingly made it die of shame shortly afterwards.

Partly it’s because Macs remain usable longer than PCs. A PC Magazine survey found that Macs tend to last 3.9 years on average, compared to 2.4 years for Windows PCs. (Of course, with Linux you can keep an old machine usable for even longer.)

Partly, though, it was because I wasn’t wild about any of Apple’s offerings. The Mac Pro is too big and expensive. The current iMac is unergonomic and (in my view) ugly. The Mac Mini is too limited. The MacBook Pro series used ATI graphics. I was going to wait, and maybe get a plain MacBook as a kind of stopgap, more by a process of elimination than as a matter of choice.

Then Apple revved the MacBook Pro. They ditched the ATI graphics, and put in an LED backlit display in the 15″. I was sold. So, I have a shiny new Mac.

One advantage of making computers last 4 years is you really notice the upgrade when it comes. Going from a 16MHz B&W Mac to a 180MHz PowerPC color Mac was awesome. The switch to a wide screen and dual core CPU is almost as good. I can leave GraphicConverter optimizing PNG files, and the machine stays totally usable. Mail also flies with multiple threads able to run in parallel.

I use each upgrade as a cue to go through my files and clear up. I move old stuff to CDs, make my folder structure more consistent, get rid of cruft, and so on. This time there’s a lot to throw away, because any PowerPC Mac software I was keeping around is now obsolete. One problem area is PhotoShop Elements, because Adobe still haven’t got an Intel native version. The PowerPC one will run under emulation, but I’d rather wait for Adobe to get their act together.

On the plus side, now I can go try all the cool stuff that has appeared in the last year or so, that was too CPU-intensive for my old machine. And maybe do an official Red Pill Intel release.

How to convert RealAudio streams into WAV (which you can then encode to MP3):

1. Install mplayer. It’s available for OS X and Linux.

2. Put the following definitions in your .bashrc file:

   function radownload {   if [ "$1" = "--help" ]; then     echo radownload [url or .ram file] file.ra   else     mplayer -dumpstream -dumpfile $2 $1   fi } function ra2wav {   if [ "$1" = "--help" ]; then     echo ra2wav file.ra file.wav   else     mplayer -ao pcm:file=$2 -vc dummy -vo null $1   fi } 

3. Start up a new shell and convert away:

   % radownload rtsp://www.suckysite.com/media/foo.rm audio.ra
   % ra2wav audio.ra audio.wav

Adapting the instructions for Windows is left as an exercise for the reader.

It’ll be a service for downloading your voicemail to your iPod, and not a piece of new hardware.

$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!”

It wasn’t much fun following Apple during the 90s. The transition from mono to color was painful, as it involved whole new chunks of OS and a different processor. The transition from Motorola 680×0 to PowerPC was also ugly and painful, and a lot of software simply stopped working and was never fixed. Those of us who had 680×0-based Macs quickly found them made forcibly obsolete long before they would normally have become unusable. Then came OS X, and a bunch more machines were forcibly obsoleted, more software broke, and more developers gave up.

Things have been looking pretty good in the Apple world recently, though. The technically adept have been flocking to switch to the Mac, the OS keeps getting faster and better rather than bigger and flakier, and open source and Java software now runs better on OS X than on Windows.

And now, here we go again. Except that this time, it’s going to be much worse. Whereas PowerPC processors were able to emulate 680×0 at acceptable speed, it’s going to be a lot tougher to try and emulate a 3GHz PowerPC G5 on any kind of Intel chip, even the kind shipping next year. Everyone who uses Metrowerks CodeWarrior for their Mac development (i.e. all those big old legacy Carbon applications from the 68K days) is going to be out of luck, as they’ll first have to drag their entire codebase over to Xcode, and then spend weeks (according to Jobs) fixing up the code. So one thing’s for sure–we’ll be waiting years for another release of Quark XPress this time, too.

The core problem is that the x86 is a lot less like the PowerPC than the PowerPC is like the 680×0. For starters, the x86 stores all its numbers half backwards and half forwards–the least significant bytes are stored first, but within a byte the most significant bits are stored first. (That kind of ugliness is fairly typical of Intel designs, which are legendarily unpleasant to program for at low level.) Any program that does bit or byte manipulation is likely to break. The PowerPC also has a lot more registers than the x86, which means that emulation is tough.

Ultimately, though, the fact that the x86 is a hideously ugly design doesn’t matter too much, because hardly anyone touches machine code these days.

Still, will Apple be able to pull off this kind of screwing around with their developer and user communities again? I don’t know. The more interesting question is why they are willing to risk it. With Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft all using PowerPC cores in their next-generation console systems, it really seems like a strange time to switch to Intel CPUs. Plus, if you want an x86 with PC-crushing performance and price, why not choose AMD rather than Intel?

One possible reason is that Apple is strongest in laptops, and IBM has singularly failed to deliver a G5 that can be stuck inside a laptop. AMD isn’t all that in laptops either, which would explain why Intel. But then again, there’s no reason why laptops can’t continue to use the G4, save for the perception that the G4 is “obsolete”, a perception which Apple itself has to take the blame for. Jobs says that there are no plans for improvements to PowerPC for the next few years. I don’t know whether that’s true or not; we’ll see.

Then there’s the intriguing possibility that Apple would like users to be able to run WINE. On the one hand, people could then switch to a Mac and still run their Windows software on it, for free. On the other hand, who would bother to develop Mac software if everyone could run Windows software? One possible answer might be to bring back Yellow Box for x86, which allowed Cocoa (NeXTStep) software to run on Windows. Still, even without WINE, software developers might just say “Hey, you want to run our software on your Mac? Just dual-boot into Windows!” (Jobs has already said that they’re not going to do anything to stop people running Windows on the Mac.)

So WINE on the Mac and Intel CPUs in the Mac could either be a colossal disaster that will kill the platform, or the best thing to ever happen to the Mac. I’m not going to pretend I know which is the case. I do know one thing, though: I’m sure as hell not going to buy a new Mac now, and I had been hoping to upgrade some time during the next year. No, I’m going to sit quiet and see what happens. I’ll want to see all my core applications available in native x86 versions, and an x86 based Mac that blows the doors off the G5, before I spend more money on Apple hardware. And as with the last round of turmoil (the switch to OS X), if it all goes disastrously wrong I’ll just switch to Linux everywhere.

Since I know people find my web pages while searching for information about Nikon scanners and Mac OS X, I’d like to offer the following endorsement:

The Ratoc FR1SX Ultra-SCSI to Firewire adaptor works perfectly with Mac OS X 10.3, and doesn’t need any drivers.

Plug the unit in to the back of your SCSI-based Nikon film scanner, and you suddenly have a Firewire-based Nikon film scanner. This can then be used with Ed Hamrick’s excellent VueScan software to fulfil all your scanning needs.

No adaptor drivers, no Nikon drivers, no Nikon software of any kind—so this solution should work fine with 10.4 / Tiger and other forthcoming OS X versions too.

Unlike USB options, the Firewire interface seems to result in scanning being just as fast and reliable as it was with SCSI.

RedPill 1.4.2 is out. Adds Tiger compatibility. I haven’t upgraded to Tiger myself yet, so let me know if you find any problems…

I was quite amused by the guy who wrote saying he was trying to get the source code to work under Tiger, and confessed that he didn’t know any C and could I help him? Right, yeah, I’ll do that.

Also, yes, I know Tiger doesn’t include StuffIt. I didn’t pack it using StuffIt, I packed it as a bzipped disk image with welcome dialog, but the guys at info-mac apparently have a policy that all such things must be unpacked and repacked with StuffIt.

Source code is at info-mac too.