- Can anything beat iPhone? Handset makers, here's how.
- One switcher's tale: Once you go iMac, you never go back
- Back to the Mac
- Corrections to "Back to the Mac"
- Apple's BlackBerry offensive
- Apple shocks boneheaded bloggers
- Eight-core Xserve puts Apple back in the majors
- CES and Macworld Expo predictions
- Leopard: Not an OS, but a system you operate
- Apple OS X Leopard: A beautiful upgrade
June 10, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Can anything beat iPhone? Handset makers, here's how.
One of my live blog entries from the keynote at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference had a one-line body:
iPhone competitors, it's over.
It doesn't excite me to say that. I don't like seeing any one player rise to lord of the realm. At least theoretically, a cornered market isn't good for buyers. But make no mistake, Apple entered the mobile market to corner it, and at this moment it's largely unopposed. If you wonder how Apple got there so fast, consider the zeitgeist that Apple tapped: Most wireless customers are sick of their wireless carriers. After years of overbilling, lousy support, spotty coverage, being locked out of bargain rate plans available only to new customers, and worst of all, being stuck with carriers' anemic hand-picked catalogs of devices, customers wish wireless carriers would just go away.
[ Get the full scoop on Apple's mobile empire-in-the-making in his Enterprise Mac blog's deep dive essay. ]
That's what Apple did. iPhone makes wireless carriers go away. At first, carriers went through the motions of negotiating with Apple to retain ownership of subscribers. But then a funny thing happened. The most possessive of all carriers, AT&T, discovered that it doesn't really like taking care of customers (surprise!). iPhone gives AT&T the benefits of customer ownership -- rate plan lock-in and term contracts -- with none of the hassle of support, advertising, or plan competition. Word got out that AT&T likes it, and Apple quickly knocked over carriers worldwide with its simple "lean back and get paid" plan.
At least in North America, wireless carriers are completely helpless when it comes to services. They all spend fortunes trying to create mobile Internet and media services so appealing that they'll lure people away from other carriers. Apple tells carriers that for just one model of phone, they can skip trying to cobble together a bundle of carrier-unique services.
U.S. customers may dislike AT&T (hand goes up), but if you have an iPhone, you will never have to speak to them. Apple gives AT&T permission to send you a flat rate bill, with the only allowed unit charges being for text messages. The rate plan is expensive, but there is no fine print. Consider that $15 per month premium as insurance against getting screwed by your carrier. You're also paying for Apple's help desk, which is shockingly helpful.
If a handset maker came to me looking for advice on competing with iPhone, I'd offer a place to start. Break wireless carriers' blockade on handsets. Release new handsets worldwide, simultaneously, and offer them in North America free of carrier locks and subsidies. Opt out of the charade that carriers have to validate individual devices on their networks before allowing users to buy them. With high-end handsets, customers will welcome the freedom to choose the handset first and the carrier second. Carrier and device choice will be powerful competitive weapons.
Don't be so price-sensitive about your handsets. People will pay $399 or $499 for a feature-rich handset for the privilege of owning it free and clear. Buyers in that price range understand that term contract subsidies are a rip-off.
Get your developer program act together. If you can't create the tools and the community you need to build the kind of vital third-party mobile app market that Apple is constructing for iPhone, find and fund some champions in the open source realm. Get devices out to developers; even refurbs would be welcome. Most mobile developers don't have enough devices against which to validate their code.
Expose the advantages of your platform at a high level. For example, iPhone does not have the ability to run simultaneous applications or to open arbitrary TCP or UDP sockets over a wireless connection. Consider the applications that these limitations make impossible, and show that your platform makes them available.
Get aggressive about firmware updates, and unify them so that one image updates a large category of devices. The industry's habit of making customers buy new devices to get the latest functionality is wrong-headed. Here, too, handset makers should do an end-run around carriers and push updates directly to customers.
Where support is concerned, handset makers should give customers a place to meet and help each other. If one already exists, get your people involved. Assign support tickets and refer to those tickets in release notes for new firmware and tools so that customers see that they're making change happen.
The lowest-hanging fruit for iPhone competitors is savvy, self-sufficient users of high-end handsets and the developers who want to code for those users. That's not the whole roadmap, but it's a place to start. Believe me, the market is waiting.
Posted by Tom Yager on June 10, 2008 02:06 PM
May 28, 2008 | Comments: (0)
One switcher's tale: Once you go iMac, you never go back
I've been relating the story of a professional colleague who, some months ago and under semi-voluntary circumstances, made the switch from Windows to the Mac. Her twisted arm now nicely healed, she has not only switched, she has an unshakable conviction that even the fastest, newest PC would be an embarrassing hand-me-down next to a mature Mac. If I were to swap her early model MacBook for a quad-core PC desktop, she'd accept it with the graciousness one brings to the gift of a fruitcake (or one from a fruitcake), and then covertly scan eBay for a PowerPC Mac. It is not the particular machine or its performance to which she has become attached; indeed, the hardware is, to her, invisible. The Mac platform is home to her now, not out of religious devotion or some wish not to disappoint me, but because it clicks with both halves of her brain in a way that Windows cannot.
I've held forth with her on this subject, namely how creativity and logic get equal attention from Mac developers because Apple's development tools, code samples, documentation, and style guide naturally produce applications that are right brain/left brain balanced. Mac developers' first published efforts often bear an apologetic "this is my first time... don't hate me" in their accompanying README file, and yet they exhibit a degree of usability and consistency that Windows and X Window System developers can't afford to invest. When you're coding for a Mac, form and function progress hand in hand without special effort.
When I treat my colleague to theses such as this that are outside her realm of interest, her advice, borrowed from a film, is "write it, dear boy." One cannot be a friend to me and a stranger to patience.
The vessel that carried her from Windows to the Mac platform was an early Core 2 Duo MacBook, a fit little notebook that I chose for two reasons. I figured that she'd want a Mac that she could take with her when she travels. I was also mindful of keeping Apple's investment in this project to a minimum. Although it nets me the best observational research for which a writer could hope, and it is further enabling my efforts to adapt technology to the changing needs forced on users by the deterioration of their vision, it benefits Apple nothing.
We worked together to fashion MacBook into a functional desktop. It took an old Lexan-encased 20-inch Apple Cinema Display, a trio of Lego pedestals with double-sided tape to raise it to the proper height, and a small, battery-operated fluorescent lamp fixed beneath the display to gently illuminate the keyboard. This weird-looking arrangement works surprisingly well, but the MacBook can only wedge in with its lid closed, and it has to be turned to one side to make room to insert or eject a CD or DVD. This is what you or I might consider extraordinary effort to derive a barely acceptable result, but she's so much in the Mac that she's never expressed anything but delight in her use of what we've put together, be it ever so kludgy.
Even with all of this, she has to lean in to see her work at her desk because she cannot rotate or tilt her display. She cannot hope to use a notebook computer for longer than the briefest periods because to raise its display to a workable height would necessitate the use of a separate keyboard and pointing device (defeating the purpose). While its user hadn't the merest desire to replace or upgrade it, I resolved to cut the MacBook loose so that it would be free to travel as it is designed to do.
I expressed to Apple my desire to carry my research to a new level by bringing in an iMac all-in-one desktop for my subject's use. To my surprise, Apple agreed, at least for a time. The 24-inch iMac has arrived, and my colleague, who shares my lack of susceptibility to anything new for its own sake, is not keen to have it on her desk. In her experience, moving from one computer to a newer one leeches productivity while leaving her no better off than before. My long experience with PCs and UNIX servers and workstations leaves me in total agreement. My experience with replacing a Mac for a new one is something I'm not sharing with her.
I've told her that the MacBook is going back next Monday. Its shipping box sits next to my subject's desk as a reminder. I gave her an external hard drive and told her to make ready for the move by copying everything that matters to the external drive, burning the stuff she really can't afford to lose to DVD, and gathering all of the installation media and registration keys for her software. It's standard operating procedure for a PC swap, a routine that all sensible people put off for as long as possible.
Imagine how pleased she'll be when I tell her that Apple insists on having the MacBook back this Thursday rather than next Monday, and by the way, I'm leaving town and I won't be able to help her set up her new machine. Apple is making no such demand, but there is much to be learned from observing subjects' reactions to unexpected challenges.
Posted by Tom Yager on May 28, 2008 03:00 AM
April 16, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Several months ago, I determined that my years-long fondness required reexamination. I quietly took a break from the Mac to get some perspective, to check out Vista, AMD, and Longhorn (Windows Server 2008) untainted by Apple's PR and uninfluenced by other journalists and bloggers. I elected to take a break from reviews of new Mac hardware, the occasion of which always piques my interest in Apple's platform. There were times when I felt I'd chosen the worst possible time for this hiatus. I ended up passing on MacBook Air, Time Capsule, Harpertown Mac Pro, and most painful of all, the new MacBook Pro. It was difficult seeing InfoWorld pick up reviews of these from sister publications, but I take my responsibility to readers very seriously. I can't very well counsel you on technology choices if I consider the field limited to one worthwhile player, especially when that player projects the image that it competes only with the generation of systems that preceded what's presently sold.
I found enormous value in my time away from Mac. I made the kind of discoveries I used to make routinely before I took on the Mac as a specialty, and as I take up the Mac again -- which I am doing immediately -- it's clear that my appreciation for the platform is justified, and that the customary split of my effort and attention between Apple and AMD is justified.
The genuine, practical superiority of AMD's Barcelona server platform, and its Phenom desktop platforms that derived from Barcelona, came to light during the break I took from Mac. A one-socket, quad-core Spider (Phenom plus ATI CrossFire graphics) runs Vista so obscenely fast that even a die-hard Mac user's head will turn. Privately, of course.
I found it extremely intriguing that systems built on Phenom platforms can tune themselves autonomously for the maximum possible CPU and GPU speed over a surprisingly broad range, based on a whole system approach that takes cooling, power supply capacity, and your preferences for noise and maximum power consumption into account. I found that I could speed bump an AMD Phenom desktop for free by moving it closer to the floor, where the cooler air prevails. What a grand idea that in itself shows genuine customer-focused insight.
I gained a fresh appreciation for the GNU compiler collection, which has taken remarkable strides since I last took a deep dive in it. I was unaware of the level of engagement from commercial partners, including Apple, AMD, and Novell. Each is undoubtedly pursuing its own agenda, but it does so within the framework and culture of one of the most tightly controlled and liberally licensed open source projects in existence. AMD has finally embarked on the long road to compiler parity with Intel with its contribution of Family 10 (Barcelona/Phenom) architecture-specific optimizations to GNU.
Apple has been busy on the gcc front as well. Objective-C 2.0, with its desperately needed garbage collection, has been a reality in the GNU toolchain since Xcode 3 was in nondisclosure beta. In release 4.2 of gcc, auto-parallelization joins auto-vectorization to adapt projects to multiprocessing and vector acceleration without developer intervention. Unless I'm mistaken, the public beta versions of the iPhone SDK, now at Beta 3, mark Apple's first swing at Microsoft-style free public distribution of pre-release dev tools. The privilege of early access has been reserved for paid members of Apple's Developer Connection programs. That iPhone SDK carries all of the latest GUI tools, documentation, and GNU command-line compilers, including Fortran, into Apple's default distribution. Hit Apple's iPhone Dev Center and scroll to the bottom of the page for the download link. You do not need to pay the $99 fee to register as an iPhone developer to use the new tools, which compile applications for Leopard as well as iPhone.
Apple is getting ever more daring in its engagement with open source in other ways. WebKit, the fast HTML/CSS/SVG rendering and JavaScript engine used in Safari, has caught on like wildfire outside Apple, and why not? To get a commercial browser, loaded with current and emerging standards, free and open for incorporation in your software, is the stuff of fantasy, and Apple holds virtually nothing back. The WebKit project is not strictly Apple's. It enjoys broad community engagement, but it is worked as a priority by Apple's staff, even to the benefit of direct competitors. For example, the browser on Nokia's E-series phones is WebKit-based, and this is not the only example where Apple effectively put its staff and technology to work for the benefit of a competitor. The GNU toolchain's adaptability to multiple embedded platforms will see WebKit in everything from phones to toys, starting with iPhone and iPod Touch. Now that WebKit has been accepted into Google's Summer of Code, I can't wait to see what innovation comes from that gathering. I plan to ply the most influential attendees with the libations of their choice and get their take on where development is headed.
Apple pushed the source code for the publicly exposed innards of OS X Leopard, known as Darwin 9, out for public download on MacOS Forge. Every time it does that, I imagine the move preceded by arguments inside the office about the effort and risks that such a program visits on Apple's platform business. The work of preparing a project of Darwin's size for public distribution is inestimable, and Apple deserves credit for putting it on the agenda of its top OS engineers and project leaders.
I love the conservative approach that Apple is taking with iPhone, especially with regard to multiprocessing. iPhone applications need to launch and quit instantly, yet relaunch after the first execution, having cached and persisted their closing state in detail. It's a freeze/thaw model of state persistence that I'd like to see extended to applications in general. Apple's Xcode has Instruments (prior: xRay), a tool that jams electrodes into your program's and the system's running environment. It records and charts statistical data at runtime along several axes for later examination. It's the most effective means of hand-tuning code for efficiency that I've ever used, and it shows the benefits of persistence quite plainly.
Taking a break from Mac hardware gave me a chance to drink more deeply of the software that Apple maintains off its beaten path. MacPorts and Apple's validated versions of open source projects are open source treasure troves stuffed with some 5,000 free applications tuned and packaged for Intel and PowerPC Macs. Digging through these repositories is so addicting that I had to issue myself an edict to get back to work, which I shall do, newly confident in my mission and purpose. I'm a Macophile for good reason.
Posted by Tom Yager on April 16, 2008 03:00 AM
April 16, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Corrections to "Back to the Mac"
I made a couple of statements in my recent "Ahead of the Curve" blog that Apple contacted me to correct.
First, contrary to my claim that the iPhone SDK is the first time that Apple has released a public preview editions of Xcode in the past, Apple claims to have done so.
Apple tells me that it is not incorporating FORTRAN into beta 3 of its iPhone SDK, a release that includes the newest stable build of the GNU Compiler Collection toolchain. MacOSForge lists FORTRAN as a default language in its distributions of gcc after v4.0, This accounted for my confusion. Note that while gcc 4.x will build for OS X, it is only supported informally by Apple, as are all Apple open source projects.
My apologies for any inconvenience brought about by my incorrect information.
Posted by Tom Yager on April 16, 2008 01:49 AM
March 19, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Apple's market power derives not merely from its technology, but from its adeptness at reframing a familiar market to limit the field of competitors. In the most extreme example, Apple portrays its sole competitor as itself. The competitive messaging around MacBook Pro emphasized how it skunked PowerPC notebooks in performance. Later, Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro was sold as far superior to Core Duo MacBook Pro. Apple is 2X faster than Apple, so clearly, the smart money's on Apple.
At the press conference at which iPhone's Exchange Server connectivity and software development kit (SDK) were unveiled, Steve Jobs established and reinforced the premise that in eight months, iPhone redefined the entire smartphone market. Windows Mobile and Symbian Series 60 are now irrelevant, leaving only two relevant players, iPhone and BlackBerry. Given that BlackBerry is old, tacky, and unreliable, enterprises oughtn't waste time trying to prop it up. Out with the old, in with the new.
[ Enterprise handsets are a special breed. See "Supersmart phones for extreme mobility" and "iPhone: The $1,975 iPod" ]
This mirrors the swipes that Apple used to take at Microsoft. They're always delivered with the Jobsian wink and smirk, but they are far from the offhand remarks they're packaged to be. They're very carefully targeted. In BlackBerry's case, Jobs took the opportunity to reveal some little-known information about BlackBerry -- widely published, just not the kind of details that BlackBerry users care about -- and portray it as a powerful disadvantage that makes the fresh technology that iPhone brings to the market a necessity. I grant that iPhone outshines BlackBerry as a platform for graphical mobile applications, with the drawback being that writing iPhone software for your personal use will cost you $99 (BlackBerry, Nokia, and Microsoft impose no charges). I think that Apple could have made more hay by showing a text-based custom BlackBerry app next to the same application done in Technicolor and full motion on iPhone. Instead, Apple focused its battle with BlackBerry on two simple points: BlackBerry handsets are ugly, and BlackBerry's network is old fashioned, insecure, and unreliable.
I'll grant you, my BlackBerry 8820 is industrial in its styling. That was my choice. BlackBerry handsets are now in all sizes and colors, with the bonus that every model has matching messaging functionality. Consumers and fashion-conscious professionals have swarmed to Curve, BlackBerry's jazzy QWERTY handset, and more compact phone-like devices that have the same standard BlackBerry messaging capabilities. No BlackBerry's screen is as large as iPhone's, but iPhone's visible display space is cut considerably when the huge on-screen keyboard slides in. A BlackBerry squeezes more text onto its smaller screen, and both fonts and font sizes are adjustable to match your vision.
Every BlackBerry is operable with one hand, or if you use the in-handset voice dialing, no hands. Built-in GPS is there if you want it, with Google Maps and BlackBerry's own excellent mapping software showing you where you are and where you're going. Upgrade to the inexpensive and platform-defining TeleNav, and you'll find out why I can't leave home without its turn by turn directions called out by street name. My BlackBerry 8820's battery lasts forever compared to iPhone's. BlackBerry comes with a holster. BlackBerry handsets are available from all major U.S. carriers, and they're subsidized. Even AT&T will amortize the cost of your BlackBerry device in return for a two year contract commitment. With iPhone, your two year contract commitment gets you list price, and you can shop around and pick any operator you like as long as it's AT&T.
Apple's favorite way to pin the gray beard on the BlackBerry is to point out that it uses indirect delivery. All messages, regardless of their origin or destination, are routed through BlackBerry's proprietary network. Every message makes a stop at Research In Motion's network operations center in Canada (Jobs: "It's not even in this country!") before being sent to a handset or mail server. In contrast, Apple and AT&T give you a direct TCP/IP connection between an employee's iPhone and your company's Exchange Server. Jobs wonders why BlackBerry users aren't concerned about security, given that all messages are gathered on a central group of servers, a single point of failure, where unencrypted messages sit naked and vulnerable to anyone roaming around the BlackBerry NOC. Can Americans really trust those nosy Canadians with our sensitive e-mail?
It's funny that Apple, fronting for AT&T, points to the privacy risks of shuttling communications across the border. Aren't there some hearings on Capitol Hill about warrantless something or other, and pleas for legal protection of telecommunications companies that too eagerly spilled the beans on subscribers? Security begins at home, eh?
The bulk of the e-mail traffic coursing around the Internet right now is in plain text. What Apple sells as a direct connection from iPhone to Exchange Server is anything but direct. It hopscotches through router after router. When you send a message from your iPhone, the path it follows takes it through AT&T's bandwidth-limited EDGE network, through countless intermediate routers, to your Internet provider's router to Exchange Server. If a message makes it through that gauntlet before a TCP timeout, it's home free. There are literally thousands of places where it can go wrong, not least of which is within your walls. You might have heard or said "Exchange is down" a time or two in your career. No iPhone in your enterprise can talk to any other iPhone unless your Exchange Server is up.
There is a method to BlackBerry's old-fashioned way. BlackBerry's network, which is a cooperative fabric woven by wireless operators in concert with Research In Motion, is geared for guaranteed delivery, so the burden for this is shifted from you. A message from a BlackBerry, or a competing handset equipped with BlackBerry Connect (free to any manufacturer who wants it) only needs to make it to your wireless operator. Equipment placed there by RIM routes the message straight to the BlackBerry NOC without queuing up behind browsers and music downloads. If a BlackBerry message can't make it to Exchange, it hovers in the NOC until Exchange is ready to grab it. If a message bound for a handset doesn't go through because an EDGE connection can't be made for whatever reason, BlackBerry's NOC waits for a presence notification from an operator. The instant that the NOC has a clear shot at your handset, however fleeting the trees and tunnels make it, RIM makes the most of it.
There are some facts stated by Steve Jobs that were flat wrong. He said that to use BlackBerry, an enterprise needs to have Exchange Server and BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES). An enterprise can use BES with either Exchange or Notes. There are numerous providers that sell well-managed, off-site hosting of BES/Exchange. Unlike your iPhone, your BlackBerry can get true push e-mail from OS X Server. Configure the Postfix mail server to copy all inbound messages destined for a given user to that user's BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) e-mail address. Every BlackBerry user gets one, and an e-mail message delivered to a BIS address hits the handset immediately, with no polling delay. Not that I have anything against Microsoft, but I'm not going trade my gorgeous eight-core Xserve for a Windows Server 2003 box just so I can get push e-mail on an iPhone.
Read winks and elbow jabs in here as you choose. I'm not ragging on iPhone. I'm looking forward to iPhone becoming the alternative to BlackBerry that Jobs envisions. But even from the lips of Steve Jobs, saying doesn't make it so.
Posted by Tom Yager on March 19, 2008 03:00 AM
January 16, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Apple shocks boneheaded bloggers
A new ultra-slim MacBook, a Wi-Fi router with automatic backup, location-aware navigation on iPhone, and iTunes without a computer put the score at Apple 1, rumormongers 0
At this time of year, bloggers come out of the woodwork with claims that they have the inside scoop on Apple's product strategy, specifically, the products that Steve Jobs will unveil in his keynote at Macworld Expo. Prior to this year's show, the pinheads really outdid themselves. A bogus "leaked keynote" was distributed, and the number of losers who bought it, vetted it, passed it along, and gave it play in supposedly legitimate outlets broke records. At least when I take a stab at predicting Macworld Expo, you know that it's based on nothing but my speculation and desires. Sometimes I don't score well -- I pretty much pooched my Macworld Expo keynote predictions this year -- but at least I turn in my own homework and I fess up to what I got wrong. Not only that, but I give you a microscopic look at the flaws in my reasoning.
I predicted that Apple would introduce a new notebook. I was betting on a MacBook Pro with a Penryn CPU. I voiced my hope that Apple would play Penryn's power efficiency for longer battery life. I got more than I dared wish for: A new 12-inch PowerBook, but with a 13.3-inch screen and a case that's three-quarters of an inch tall.
For those who don't need to travel with heavy desktop replacement-grade notebooks, the 12-inch PowerBook was certainly the most portable and practical Mac of all, standard fare among Apple employees. What 12-inch PowerBook had going for it, besides being small and light, was its 1.33GHz PowerPC CPU. Nobody complained about its performance. If you want a notebook that's small, light, and cool, and you want it to fly coast to coast on a charge, slow is good. You don't cut video or compile the Darwin kernel on an ultra-slim notebook.
MacBook Air's Core 2 Duo CPU has a positively PowerPC-ish standard clock speed of 1.6GHz. I consider that to be a major victory of sense over specs. Apple also did its first modern notebook without a built-in optical drive. Apple's USB-powered external SuperDrive DVD burner is $99. The simpler cooling and the space freed by removing the DVD drive was used to backlight MacBook Air's full-sized keyboard, and to squish the case down to a height of about three-quarters of an inch.
This unit also features a multitouch trackpad that supports iPhone-like gestures like pinch and spread to zoom. But the story here, which I'll need hands-on to confirm, is power. Minus the DVD, the fluorescent backlight (it's now LED), and the desktop-speed CPU, MacBook Air has a claimed battery life of five hours. It has a 45-watt charger, so MacBook Air's name may refer to its airplane-friendly power supply.
I felt sure that Apple would roll out its 3G iPhone. It did not. Instead, Apple took to making dramatic improvements to iPhone's software. Google's location-based adaptation to Maps, which uses cell towers and public Wi-Fi rather than GPS to triangulate position, has made its iPhone debut. iPhone and iPod Touch users can finally create their own icons on the device's home screen, and users can create Web clips, snippets of online content that update automatically when the site changes. The latter two features presage the emergence of JavaScript widgets like those offered on OS X.
I can think of several reasons for Steve to keep 3G iPhone backstage. iPhone is marketed worldwide. I expect that Europe will be the growth market for iPhone, and Europe is GSM, the standard that iPhone uses now. Redesigning iPhone for 3G would be expensive, considering that buyers outside the United States wouldn't use the feature at all. Developers in the States would also be tempted to create sites and applications that take the 3G bandwidth for granted, filling iPhone's pretty screen with detailed graphics that take GSM/EDGE subscribers forever to download.
And lastly, there's AT&T. Its slower EDGE data networks sagged under the initial load of hundreds of thousands of browser-happy iPhone users with their unmetered data plans. Unmetered 3G service may not make financial sense.
I've found the Time Machine automatic backup feature in OS X Leopard to be too cumbersome for users without external hard drives, but I figured that it would be a "fixed in next release" issue. I wasn't alone in pointing out that AirPort Extreme, a base station that supports directly attached USB hard drives, would be perfect for centralized backup of Time Machine-equipped Macs, but AirPort Extreme's software doesn't support it. The only solution to date has been Time Machine Server on Xserve, somewhat costly for small and departmental networks. Apple struck an ideal middle ground with Time Capsule, an 802.11n base station that supports up to 1TB of internal disk storage. Time Capsule publishes itself to the network as a Time Machine server. At $299 for a 500GB model, the price isn't bad. I don't know whether Time Capsule allows the use of USB-attached hard drives to add to its network backup capacity.
Lastly, Apple has entered the movie rental business, which was expected, but it added a twist: If you have iPhone, iPod Touch, or Apple TV, a PC or Mac running iTunes is optional. You can buy and download iTunes content directly from your mobile or set-top device.
If you're looking for the IT relevance here, take note of Apple's model, which challenges presently popular practices. Apple is using rich, native software to cut out the middleware and to give mobile, desktop, and home users, working over networks of unpredictable bandwidth, a similarly satisfying experience. Direct connections between users and applications can be done safely, reliably, and efficiently, and trackable protected data can be persisted on the client. For all the clamor over AJAX applications that go useless the instant you're offline, the connect-authenticate-transfer-disconnect model may seem old fashioned, but it works everywhere.
I got a lot more from the Macworld Expo keynote than I bargained for.
Unlike some others, I enjoy being surprised.
Posted by Tom Yager on January 16, 2008 03:00 AM
January 09, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Eight-core Xserve puts Apple back in the majors
Apple's new Xserve is lean, mean, and green, like a Mac should be. What took Apple so long?
Apple rarely lets any product sit still for long, so when something in Apple's lineup goes untouched for a while, it prompts speculation about Apple's commitment to it. Consider Xserve. I do, and sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who does. Apple's Xserve went Intel with the rest of the Mac line, but instead of keeping pace with x86 rack server competitors and keeping up with Intel's latest silicon like its Mac client kin, Xserve hung back. It's been a two socket, four-core server in an eight-core world. Ever since the Intel transition, Apple's been quiet on the marketing front for Xserve, too. It looked like Apple might have relegated its server to the back burner, but that didn't jibe with the proud noise that Apple has made over OS X Server Leopard, its first true UNIX server OS. A shiny new OS on server hardware that had lost pace with the market? Perhaps Apple was quietly thinking what I've been quietly advising curious buyers to do: Use Mac Pro as a server instead. An eight-core Mac Pro makes a nice home for OS X Leopard Server.
I never worried that Apple would let Xserve languish. It is a product that, if no one else bought it, Apple would produce for itself. I see Xserve as being engineered to track the requirements of the datacenters serving iTunes, .Mac, the Apple online store, Apple Developer Connection, and the rest of Apple's vast, worldwide portfolio of Internet properties. Squeezing as many cores and DIMM sockets as possible into one rack unit isn't a priority when you're scaling out for fine-grained load balancing and minimal response time to requests from users. The extent to which Xserve's Lights-Out Management (LOM) is exposed in server admin tools -- power up, power down, and reboot -- is as much as one would need in an enterprise operation where it's easier to swap out a sick system than to diagnose it.
That Xserve Xeon was designed by Apple, for Apple, is merely partially informed speculation, but it gives me a quick answer to the "Is Apple serious about the enterprise?" question that I can never shake, as if I'm Apple's appointed server apologist. "Yes," I answer. "Its own."
Even if Apple's secret internal data center requirements haven't evolved, market requirements and public perception have. Apple doesn't just want to be a passenger on the big green bus. Apple wants to drive it, and Xserve's lagging performance per watt forced Apple to reply to the green question by asserting the greenness of all Macs. Xserve, you see, is not a Mac, and is therefore exempt. Not to me, and now, not to Apple.
Apple has delivered the first substantially new Xserve since its last PowerPC G5 server. I haven't touched Xserve yet -- I'm getting my hands on it shortly after Macworld Expo -- but on paper, Xserve puts Apple back in the lead relative to two-socket, x86 rack servers in its price class. I've written in detail about Xserve's specifications in my Enterprise Mac blog. With the new Xserve, latency and bandwidth, which have always been great owing to OS X and the advantages of a controlled platform, are finally balanced with compute performance. Xserve uses Intel's Harpertown, the two-socket Xeon edition of Intel's Penryn 45 nanometer quad-core Core 2 platform. Harpertown's got 12 megabytes of shared Level 2 cache per socket, a 1600MHz front-side bus, PCI-Express 2.0, 800MHz DDR2 memory, and is, in all regards, a thoroughly modern server. This, plus the availability of an add-in hardware RAID controller with battery-protected cache (which I have tested and found to be astonishing), makes Harpertown Xserve a peer among the best 1U rack servers.
Simply having an eight-core, Harpertown rack server isn't sufficient to differentiate Apple from the rest of the x86 server space. For those of us with high standards for the use of the term "server," Harpertown Xserve finally makes the grade. Like its Big Four counterparts Sun, HP, and IBM, Apple has custom-designed hardware -- one look inside will convince you that Xserve is no cookie-cutter take on Intel's reference design -- that supports a limited range of unique devices. That control gave Apple the freedom to custom-design an OS optimized for only the peripherals it sells. It works out of the box, and you can't knock it over. These are the advantages that keep HP-UX, AIX, and the enterprise releases of Solaris in high demand even though Linux and Windows have covered the earth. Now that Apple has a server worthy of its fresh yet mature UNIX server OS, questions about Apple's stance on the enterprise can be considered answered. Indeed, with Apple's meticulous pairing of software and server, it may be reasonable to ask whether any of the sellers of cookie-cutter rack boxes, running cookie-cutter OSes, can be taken seriously.
Posted by Tom Yager on January 9, 2008 11:31 AM
January 03, 2008 | Comments: (0)
CES and Macworld Expo predictions
Two trendsetting trade shows hit back to back, starting next week. Here's a preview.
Being far softer of belly and of brain for the time off, I'm glad to be returning to working and working out. Just in time, too, because I have just enough time to amp up for that one-two punch of trendsetting trade shows, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and Macworld Expo. During my vacation, I have taken advantage of half-hour breaks between naps to stock my quiver with relevance-seeking, pitch-piercing projectiles. I go to trade shows with a mission based on my view of what matters, which oft times yet entirely by chance fails to overlap with what everyone else considers important.
Consider my take on Macworld Expo. I think that the headliner there, although Mac heads will be loath to acknowledge it, will be Microsoft. It's been four years since Office for Mac, the one piece of software that every professional Mac owner must have, has felt its creator's touch. The new features in Office 2008 for Mac are almost incidental. Office 2008 is Universal, meaning that it runs natively on Intel and PowerPC Macs. Microsoft came by that honestly, using Xcode and Objective-C, accumulating expertise along the way that has made the developer staff blogs of Microsoft's Mac Business Unit one of the very few I check out regularly.
That's not to say that I have no questions about Office 2008. For instance, why will Entourage in the standard edition of Office 2008 stand out as the only mail client that doesn't connect to Exchange Server? I'm also curious about Office 2008's integration with the OS X dictionary that's shared by all Mac apps. I can see both sides of this: Microsoft's Office dictionaries and proofing tools are available in many languages and are geared for auto-correction, while Mac users like having one consistent master dictionary and thesaurus that operates system-wide.
Lest you think that I'm writing about Officeworld Expo, Macs built on Intel's Penryn 45-nanometer Core 2 CPUs will roll out at Macworld. I'm selfishly hoping that a Penryn MacBook Pro will be first out of the gate. The Santa Rosa model is more than fast enough. I'd like longer battery life and a break from the heat. Macworld Expo's heavy emphasis on an IT track fills me with new hope for an eight-core Xserve. That could bring a consolidation angle to OS X Server virtualization. I have a wish here, too: I'd like to see the entire OS X presentation layer rendered optional for OS X Server, with a flip of a switch in the Server Admin tool or a command-line operation. This would vastly shrink the resource footprint of a virtualized Mac server.
The iPhone will be a star attraction as well. The 3G iPhone will make its bow, and perhaps we'll see a hint of the iPhone/iPod Touch software development kit (SDK) that Apple plans to deliver in February. My personal wish is a screen alignment process, like the one that Microsoft handhelds use. This addresses the parallax problem that makes iPhone typing so error-prone. If Apple or AT&T decides to put a premium on 3G iPhone or the iPhone service plan, the raspberry you'll hear during the Macworld Expo Webcast will be mine.
Why would a publication of InfoWorld's orientation dispatch someone to CES? Don't let the word "consumer" fool you; CES isn't a city-sized Circuit City. It's chipmakers and manufacturers selling to manufacturers and importers, importers selling to distributors, and America making a rare appearance as a global peer player on its own stage. It's a chance to see technology and strategy in the making, as well as products that are already well entrenched in Asia and Europe but haven't yet caught the slow boat to the States.
I always see breakthroughs on multiple fronts at CES, and it's not a show I try to predict. I do expect to see the theme of consolidation play at CES as it does in IT, but with the spin of simplicity that IT doesn't usually take the time to make a priority. For example, when IT thinks of it, unified communication is a complicated server-side solution. What electronics vendors want is to sell that idea to consumers in a retail box. Why? Because that's what consumers demand. If there is a consistent lesson to take away from CES, it is that simplicity always deserves priority.
Posted by Tom Yager on January 3, 2008 03:00 AM
October 31, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Leopard: Not an OS, but a system you operate
Apple tasks Mac users to rise to the next level
On Saturday night, after I received my OS X Leopard client and server discs, I checked into a local hotel to work on my review of OS X Leopard, intending to blog along the way. I ran into the most delightful sort of roadblock: I couldn't stop using Leopard long enough to blog about it. I made a run back to my lab to load up on discs of other Mac software, and to round up the license keys that I've scattered about, and came back to a room that looks like the aftermath of a besotted rock star's stay. Leopard excites me, but I don't go loopy over eye candy, or anything that bears the Apple logo. If Leopard had been a point release beyond Tiger (OS X 10.4), I'd have been satisfied, but not smitten enough to move into a hotel.
This is worth it. For the first time since I met OS X back in 2002, Apple is challenging Mac users to raise their productivity to a new level. Strictly speaking, you can keep using Leopard the way you used Tiger, and Panther before that, and every book you buy on Tiger will still apply to Leopard; it all still works. But Leopard rewards those who are willing to take a chance on doing more with the gear and skills they already possess.
I don't mean this in a trivial sense. Even on Tiger, there is significant labor involved in sequentially loading documents to find the right one, sizing and hiding and moving your windows, and groping around in System Preferences (the Mac's Control Panel) to find where Apple decided to put settings that are scattered across various icons. Locating a mountable share on a system on your LAN is a tricky exercise, and sharing files is harder under Tiger than it is on Windows XP. In a corporate or family environment, it's difficult to limit users' access to sensitive or inappropriate information, or to restrict usage to particular hours of the day.
Leopard wipes out all of the problems I described in the preceding paragraph. A spotlight search for a document may turn out a hundred matches of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, RTF, and PDF documents. Previously, you'd have to open each document in its associated application to see its contents. In Leopard, a feature called Quick Look gives you an instant pop-up of the document's contents, which you can expand to the full screen and navigate through, without having the application that created it installed on your Mac.
To banish the hassles associated with managing windows, Leopard introduces Spaces, which creates multiple virtual desktops, empty until you fill them with applications. Some Linux users are familiar with virtual desktops, but no one has seen the likes of Spaces. You can navigate spaces by holding down the Control key and pressing the left and right arrows, or a function key can present a grid of desktops that allow you to drag apps from one space to another. If a movie or Flash content is playing in one of the spaces, it will continue to play in the grid view. And you can easily bind applications so that they will always open in a particular space, creating room for development spaces, a mail and appointments space, and a space that you don't need the boss to see. When you use Command+Tab to run the choice list of running applications, if that app is running in another space Leopard will automatically switch spaces to bring your selected application into view.
Locating network shares and sharing data from your system to the network used to be a laborious exercise. Now it's easy: The Sharing tab in System Preferences takes care of sharing your files, and the Places section of the Finder sidebar lists visible Mac and Windows machines with available shareable files. Likewise, firewall settings have been moved from the Sharing preferences to Security, and their character has changed as well, with a focus on letting specific applications through the firewall instead of opening numbered TCP and UDP ports.
Lastly, setting up a Mac so that it can't be used in ways you don't want it to be used is usually a matter of setting policies from a server. The name may be unfortunate when it is used in a business setting, but Leopard's Parental Controls provide user-level local policies with regard to Web sites, IM and e-mail targets, and limits on time of day and weekend usage. Restricted users can petition an appointed guardian (or gatekeeper) for permission to mail or IM a user, or to access a Web site that is not on the approved list. All activity for users under Parental Controls is logged. Draconian? Maybe, but software and edge appliances that serve this very purpose fetch a high price.
There is something new around every corner, like the fact that the program I'm using right now, Leopard's included TextEdit, saves Word 2007, Open Document, and HTML files. TextEdit has adjustable kerning, hyphenation, spelling, and grammar checking, and the ability to look up words in the Oxford dictionary and thesaurus, Apple's dictionary of Mac terms, and Wikipedia. That these features are available in every text box in every Mac application is something that makes Mac users say "but of course," and makes non-Mac users wonder how Apple could do it.
Posted by Tom Yager on October 31, 2007 03:00 AM
October 17, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Apple OS X Leopard: A beautiful upgrade
Finally, a PC Unix that everyone can love. OS X Leopard is a triumph of customer-focused engineering
Apple's announcement of the impending delivery of OS X Leopard (release 10.5 of Mac and Xserve operating systems) marks the public debut of an engineering achievement that dwarfs iPhone, iPod, Windows, and Linux. No other PC server vendor, with the notable exception of Sun Microsystems, invests so much time and manpower in its system software.
In 10 days -- 10 excruciating days -- I and hundreds of Mac developers and VIP users can finally speak out about that which we have sworn to hold secret. Leopard is magnificent code architected from the user in, rather than from core technology out.
Windows and Linux are designed from the core out, which is to say that they are all about layered kernels, system calls, and APIs, with each layer's purpose being to abstract the layers below it. The layers grow thicker; when a layer gets unmanageably thick, a pretty new abstraction layer is created so that people don't have to deal with the ugly one. Programmers end up having endless entry points with identical purpose and having heated debates about which ones are best. But each way of doing the same thing involves varying dependencies, deprecations, and peculiarities.
Everyone plugs into OS X through the frameworks, and below that lies a stable, thin, simple, and well-documented system stack. It is not the frameworks' job to abstract lower levels of software. From a developer's point of view, the frameworks are OS X. When developers write to Apple's frameworks, they inherit cross-application integration and operational and interface consistency with no effort. For example, E-Mail, the Address Book, and QuickTime are smart, autonomous objects available to all Mac apps regardless of language and requiring no optional software. You look in the docs to find the object you need, you shoot a message at it (you can always count on framework objects being present and behaving as documented), and receive a response that you can use directly without marshaling. The whole system is about message passing among objects.
The system's hardware configuration and management are exposed as objects. If you want to know the battery's charge level or get a list of wireless networks within range, OS X has common frameworks to do it. Sometimes hacks are necessary, and when they are, they take the tidy form of superclasses of existing objects or new objects inserted into a chain of message responders. The whole thing is easy to grok, and the tools and docs are free.
Leopard is beautiful, not merely in appearance but in design, all the way down to its certified Unix core. My own core is Unix certified, and now that Apple has reworked OS X to jump the many hurdles required to bear the Unix trademark, I feel like I've returned from a lengthy self-imposed exile. Finally, there's a PC Unix that everyone can love.
I offer these raves as one who is intimately familiar with all popular microcomputer operating systems. Each OS, including prior versions of OS X, have left me wanting and looking ahead to future releases. I irritate the hell out of Apple's PR and product managers by interrupting their scripted briefings and meetings with questions that force them to say, "We're looking at that for the next release."
For example, when Apple showed the Spotlight integrated search facility at Tiger's (OS X 10.4) launch, I stole the glint from the eyes of Apple's beaming executives and asked, "What about searching across the network?" They said that they were looking at that for the next release, and they silently wondered why I showed up at a christening asking when that kid would get a job.
I remember standing in a room full of proud engineers, each of them three feet smarter than I am, telling them that a rack server without lights-out management, hardware RAID, and redundant power supplies can't accumulate enterprise cred. It seemed to Apple that OS X flat never fails to boot, which was a prerequisite for diagnosing and managing a hobbled Xserve. Apple has filled in all of those gaps, and it is constantly at that job.
I know it's difficult for people who don't use Macs to understand why an operating system gets us so worked up. The coming debut of Leopard may make you mindful of Vista, an OS that no one begged to get before it shipped and that very few rushed out to get after it shipped. Vista's penetration is largely incidental, a result of being preinstalled on new PCs. That is not how Leopard will score its wins. Apple's customers rush to upgrade, and not because some sticker on a box of software says "designed for Leopard."
Leopard is a legitimately big deal. It's underhyped compared to iPhone, and yet unlike iPhone, Leopard is a genuine triumph of customer-focused engineering. It's a pleasure and a relief to see that Apple remembers how to deliver open, affordable, standards-based products. There probably won't be lines around the block at Apple retail stores for people who can't wait to get their hands on Leopard. If they had been using Leopard as long as developers have, Apple wouldn't be able to stamp Leopard DVDs fast enough. Word will get out.
Posted by Tom Yager on October 17, 2007 03:00 AM
October 10, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Where OS X doesn't fit, you have an impressive alternative
It is no small source of consternation to those of us who have grown attached to OS X that systems that would run it best -- primarily, those with processors created by AMD -- will never do so unless Intel fails to deliver on some promise made to Steve Jobs.
It's doubly difficult for me because I'm a devotee of both OS X client and server operating systems. It's triply difficult because Leopard is system software to get hot and bothered about, and I have a solid three weeks until October ends and Leopard ships. There's an Xserve here with Leopard's name on it and a Mac Pro pining for it, and they're about as patient as I am. Yes, they speak to me. If you own a Mac, you understand.
Even with the wild wonders that Leopard will bring, and has brought in secret to those with the foresight to buy Apple Developer Connection Premiere memberships, there are things that OS X won't and may never do. I've already mentioned the biggie. There is a dual-socket Quad-Core Opteron at my feet, literally at my feet, running SPECcpu 2006, and it would be a happy box indeed if OS X Tiger Server was making a scorching day for Barcelona. I have an Intel Clovertown Xeon server that thinks, given Intel's cozy relationship with Apple, it is entitled to run OS X. It's not to be. Alas, and bummer.
As an aside, when I broach this subject, I always draw comments from readers who tell me that dude, if I want to run OS X on an AMD machine, it can be done. To all who would offer this helpful advice, I tell you with the greatest disdain I can muster to stuff it. You're all making Apple wonder whether its open source program, which is exploited to pirate OS X's way onto non-Mac systems, is worth the trouble. I have the same advice for my colleagues in the media who treat every advance scored by OS X scofflaws as legitimate news.
Back to the subject at hand: to wit, what a law-abiding individual is to do when deprived of OS X. As a developer and system administrator, I need to be able to run multiple instances of OS X, different versions if need be, or simply for purposes of isolation and consolidation. I can do this with Windows, Linux, Unix, OS/2, and DOS. But despite how technically simple OS X's design would make and has made virtualization (PowerPC OS X's MacOS Classic environment relied on virtualization), Apple won't let OS X run as a virtual guest, not even on a Mac.
So what's an OS X nut to do when he can't tap the Mac's active and welcoming community, sumptuous documentation, gratis dev tools, out-of-the-box richness, and massive library of free and affordable software wherever he needs it? I recently found the answer: Run Solaris.
A chorus of groans is now rising from my readership. For some reason, Solaris, particularly Solaris on x86 and 64-bit x86 systems, suffers from a reputation problem. That used to make sense when Solaris x86 was the performance- and compatibility-challenged stepchild of SPARC Solaris, but Sun has long had its x86 Unix in lockstep with its SPARC operating system. While Solaris has none of the no-brainer usability and manageability of OS X client and server OSes, I'm finding Solaris to be an increasingly comfortable workmate with enough similarities to OS X to deserve some attention.
For starters, Solaris is legitimate Unix and legitimate open source. OpenSolaris is Solaris to a far greater degree than Darwin can be equated with OS X. Even though it is open source, OpenSolaris plugs into the same free, automatic software update system that commercial Solaris customers enjoy. Solaris' GNOME-based GUI is a good thing since Solaris is a System V Unix, something that takes OS X users a while to get used to. And StarOffice 8, which is now standard with all versions of Solaris, has strong Office document compatibility and a user interface that Office users find familiar.
Like OS X, Solaris has free developer tools, and impressive ones at that. Its compiler, debugger, and IDE suite, Sun Studio 12, incorporates leading-edge standards and processor feature compatibility. Solaris also includes innovations that Apple found worthy of borrowing for Leopard, specifically DTrace, the real-time performance profiling facility, and ZFS, which exceeds the loftiest dreams of administrators who want a fast, simple, and bulletproof dynamic file system. The extent to which Leopard will implement ZFS is unknown, but if you meet ZFS on Solaris, you quickly understand why Apple is so impressed.
The Solaris user, admin, and developer communities are boundless and positively stuffed with everything you ever wanted to know. When you go to Google looking for OS X system-level enlightenment that's not in Apple's documentation, you'll often get shunted off to blogs and half-helpful, albeit well-meaning, user-written texts. Google is a reliable index to Solaris documentation. Even the fuzziest search yields definitive results, and most of those point either to Sun or a major university, both of which reliably hit the nail on the head.
As for virtualization, it's baked into Solaris, and its specialty is self-virtualization using a facility called Containers. Like other unique Solaris system facilities, Containers requires some reading, but Sun has done a remarkable job at producing two-to-four-page PDFs that walk you through setup of complex and unfamiliar facilities.
I'm just feeling my way around Solaris after an absence of several years, and so far, I really like what Sun's done with the place since my last visit. Solaris is rough hewn compared to OS X, and the catalog of things that Solaris won't do for OS X users is at least as long as its strengths, with simplicity and usability topping the list. But Solaris is free in all relevant definitions of the word (I recommend Solaris 10 Express Developer if you want to see all that Solaris can be), and its interoperability with OS X is seamless. After all, Solaris and OS X are both Unix, and if that's not enough, know that PowerBook, MacBook, and MacBook Pro are practically de facto choices among Sun's engineers. There's clearly some clue in the halls in Menlo Park. As I get more acquainted with that, I'll clue you in.
Posted by Tom Yager on October 10, 2007 03:00 AM
September 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Eight months since the switch to Mac, and it's no turning back
Commenters on my Enterprise Mac blog have been begging for an update to my column "Mac sense and nonsense," in which I chronicled the early experiences of a friend who agreed to switch from Windows -- her OS for her entire computer-using life -- to the Mac. Updates on her progress are among those things I keep meaning to do, but 2007 has been a year of one top priority after another, all strung together. Now, in a cab to LaGuardia Airport, I'm blissfully unable to browse, and that gives me a chance to reflect on some of what I've observed as my friend makes the migration.
My friend loves OS X; she's sold. Wild horses driven by a grinning Steve Ballmer carrying $100,000 couldn't drag her back into Windows. That hundred large might have convinced her under Tiger (OS X 10.4), but I've shared with her many of the published details of Leopard (10.5), due in October.
She knows that I'm an Apple Developer Connection Premiere member and that I have Leopard, and she thinks I'm a jerk for not letting her use it. She's spied on me from a polite distance as I've driven Leopard around, and a couple of features stood out for her. One is the cleaner and more consistent look and feel that makes it easier to tell where windows start and end. Deeper shadows around foreground windows make them stand out starkly, leaving no doubt as to keyboard focus. Another feature that caught her eye, so to speak, is the much clearer, more natural speech synthesis.
So far, I've deprived her of the services of the Xserve in my lab. She's stuck with the Mac's mail client to sift through the prodigious amount of spam that floods her inbox, and it's not keeping up with spammers' tricks. I also had her jacked into an HTTP proxy cache on Xserve. A serious user needs a server. Yes, I know; I'm a jerk. It's killing me to keep reminding her about October.
It turns out that despite dreams of going portable, my subject of study is a desktop person. It takes very little decrease in vision to make a 14-inch notebook display difficult to see. Knocking the display resolution down to 800x600 makes most text large enough to see, but it turns fuzzy and fatigues your eyes quickly, and window dressing sucks up most of the display. Leopard's support for resolution-independent user interfaces holds promise here. (I'd be happy if Web designers quit assuming that 1,024x768 is the minimum display size at which to test their site, and they stopped using hard-coded, absolute font sizes instead of relative ones that let users grow and shrink fonts. What does your site do with its layout when you shrink the browser window to fit on a 640x480 display? It's not difficult.)
We discovered an unexpected hitch in adapting MacBook to tethered use on a desk: External Mac keyboards uniformly stink. I pulled in three candidates, plus two Apple keyboards, and they are all just awful next to what I consider to be the gold standard: the keyboard on the present MacBook Pro. I see well, and even my eyes get tired after hours of looking at small, thinly drawn italic gray keycap legends on an off-white background.
The second-best keyboard at my disposal is the MacBook's, which has black keys and nice white legends. The desk arrangement, though laughable to look at, works: We have the MacBook, lid open, tucked under and behind an LCD monitor (the monitor is mounted on an articulating arm) so that the MacBook keyboard is the desktop keyboard. Yes, the state of keyboards is just that sad. The notebook display, the bottom third of which remains visible, has even found a use as a spare room for the clock, Address Book, and other stationary items. She's gotten so used to the two-headed arrangement that I think she'd miss it.
I didn't think that Parallels Desktop would aid me in convincing my friend to abandon Windows entirely, but this security blanket has worn through. Parallels Desktop went flaky on both of us simultaneously. Despite repeated reinstalls, it crashes on me, and during one crash, it rendered my MacBook Pro's Vista partition unusable. Small loss, you might think, but with my job, I can't pretend that Vista doesn't exist. Its rightful home is in a window on the Mac desktop. Parallels keeps kicking it out.
For my friend, Parallels Desktop's ills are less dramatic than my crash logs that e-mail themselves to Parallels, but more troublesome. I have never been able to keep her USB printer working from Windows, and recently, Desktop scribbled over several weeks' worth of her bookkeeping records. The Windows application hasn't a clue that anything's amiss, and every time she opens the app, it makes things worse. I've done all the physical and logical diagnostics you'd think of. There's nothing for it but to put Windows to sleep for good and resort to the last backup.
I've told her about Time Machine, the Leopard feature that does automatic backups of modified files. I've also told her that Time Machine won't help her with Windows, virtualized or otherwise. She no longer has a fondness for Windows, and I have learned that if I wish to acquaint myself with the great beyond, all I need to do is mention October one more time.
Posted by Tom Yager on September 26, 2007 03:00 AM
August 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)
The unholy Apple/AT&T alliance has been undone, but iPhone is still a waste of money
If your biggest gripe with Apple's flagship media player is that it refuses to make voice or data calls on anything but AT&T's wireless network, you're officially free. But the price of freedom, in this case, is either a very steady hand and soldering iron, or a willingness to send money to Australia in exchange for a "Turbo SIM," delivery date unknown. Of the two methods, I prefer the third: Buy a real phone. Following an exhaustive comparison of alternatives, I have overwhelming backing for my early conclusion that iPhone is vastly outmatched by several devices in its price class.
If you simply must buy and unlock an iPhone, use George Hotz's (forum nickname "geohot") 10-step hack, the one that requires soldering. If you need help with the soldering, go to a ham radio fest or sit in on a robotics club meeting. If you want to tackle it yourself, practice with throwaway surface-mount electronics, scraping conformal coating from circuit traces and soldering wire to them before you crack the case on an iPhone. George's method is the easiest possible hack to a surface-mount board. While George recycled his wire from a motor, I suggest you buy new magnet wire from Radio Shack. The thinnest wire in the three-spool pack is the 30-gauge Kynar insulated wire you need. Scrape or burn the insulation off the ends.
Posted by Tom Yager on August 26, 2007 06:51 PM
August 22, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Closed iPhone opens road for Linux phones
With iPhone a closed platform, Linux gets an wide-open road for phones and other smart devices
Linux developers have been dying for a phone of their own ever since Sharp killed the Zaurus Linux-based PDA. Apple's decision to close iPhone to 3rd-party applications gave the green light to Linux phones and mobile devices. LinuxWorld Expo 2007 basked in Apple's unwitting generosity, with one booth after another featuring fledgling mobile Linux projects prospecting for funding, direction, and developers. The whole exhibit floor had the feel of a mining town that was just getting its footing.
Linux on mobile devices is nothing new; success would be. It would take a phone handset maker the size of Motorola to make mobile Linux a hit, and as it happens, Motorola has staked a claim. Motorola's been fiddling with Linux for some time, promising to open the Linux-based phone OS that it uses on a couple of shipping models, but, like many other exhibitors in the mobile Linux realm, Motorola can't decide where to draw the line between protected intellectual property and The Public Good. As a result, in Motorola's booth as at its developer site, Motorola teases a couple of Linux phones in its current line-up, but it won't commit to open-sourcing the phones' OS. That's the very dilemma that Apple faced with iPhone, and Apple came down in favor of closed-ness. Motorola had to show up at its LinuxWorld Expo booth with Eclipse-based software development tools, ably demonstrated by a booth tech who seemed fed up with a whole week of being asked, "have you opened your phones’ Linux yet?" He seemed so pleased at having a chance to demo Motorola’s Eclipse toolset that I felt compelled to stay through his demo, despite a tug in the direction of Palm's booth, where an extraordinarily capable, albeit far beefier heir apparent to the sorely missed Zaurus was on display. And Palm's Linux gadget makes phone calls.
Of the big players in handsets, Palm is definitely where the mobile Linux action is. Its Foleo "mobile companion" is everything you could want in a sub-sub-notebook clamshell: An efficient Intel Xscale 32-bit ARM CPU, five hours of battery life, a 1024 x 600 display, support for an external display, storage expansion through SD and Compact Flash memory cards as well as USB, Palm, and Windows Mobile sync, Wi-Fi, and an Ubuntu Linux development environment. You can hack Foleo and flash your code directly to the Foleo's non-volatile memory. You do so at your own risk but also, likely, to your delight.
Foleo isn't a phone, although it will connect to the Internet through a Palm or Windows Mobile phone if you have one, and Foleo doesn't play media files. But representatives in Palm's LinuxWorld Expo booth were quick to respond to questions about Foleo's limitations with "we’re actively looking for developers." Foleo pushes enough standards buttons, including DirectFB graphics, to draw developers easily.
Palm promises an introductory price of $499 and delivery "this summer," but Palm booth reps told me that the thing is finished. In a booth far less flashy, an outfit called Openmoko was showing developer previews of a gorgeous, fully open-source $300 Linux phone called Neo that's already sold out. The device has tons of gawk appeal for its UI's visual similarities to iPhone (it looks nothing like you'd expect phone Linux to look), but publicity on Neo hit before iPhone made its debut. The company that makes Neo is in transition, as it were, in the process of being spun off from its parent. But OpenMoko is real, with matching .org and .com URLs and everything, and I'm curious about where the project will end up.
I'm curious about the whole mobile Linux field in general. We've been here before with memorably limited success, but iPhone's near perfection, despite its tease/denial game with open source developers, may have been just the shot in the arm that will put Linux on a successful phone. As I said about iPhone, bragging about running an open OS on your device, when source code for said device is not published, is noise. Motorola is on the brink of going truly open or emulating iPhone's business model. Perhaps it's waiting to see how Apple fares. Palm, OpenMoko and some others are pushing ahead. Mobile Linux is not a gold mine yet, but whatever gold there is to be had is completely untapped.
Posted by Tom Yager on August 22, 2007 03:00 AM
August 08, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Notes from 'The Fringe': New Apple iCandy dazzles
Good-bye Office 2004, hello iWork '08. And welcome new iMacs and .Mac boost -- all well worth skipping LinuxWorld Expo for, writes Tom Yager.
During an unprecedented Q&A session following Apple's Town Hall meeting Aug. 7, no less than Steve Jobs gave me a new nickname: "The Fringe." He was referring to journalists who solidly panned the iPhone in the first round of high-profile reviews. To my knowledge, membership in that fringe is limited to one.
I wear that moniker proudly, remembering the not-too-distant days when Apple, too, was dismissed as a fringe player and when Jobs himself was written off by the financial media for investing in some crazy idea, considered by pundits inside the sparsely populated fringe as the enemy of profit and market share -- namely, innovation. Apart from habitually being at odds with conventional wisdom, I share one other trait with Jobs: Far more often than not, when everybody else writes me off as an idiot, I turn out to be right. It's just a matter of patience. It's OK with me that by the time the rest of the world catches up to my way of thinking, they've forgotten who told the truth in the first place.
My editors have my permission to call me "Fringely."
But enough about me. The big news from Apple's Town Hall is the three models of completely redone iMacs. Think Cinema Display but with a flush, glossy glass display area where the inset matte viewport whisks users away from mind-numbing PC mediocrity. The iMac's reworking in aluminum and gloss-finished glass is as much about pulling commercial buyers into iMac as it is about imbuing desktop Macs with iPhone-inspired style. Jobs repeated the standard iMac line about getting rid of PC cords and cables with iMac's all-in-one design, but he's also after the market that uses notebooks as desktops.
Now, why do that when Apple's MacBook Pro leads in "portable workstation" notebooks? Because Apple wants to get ahead of any potential saturation in the Mac market by moving to a "two Macs for every user" policy. Jobs also alluded to the fact that the least-expensive 20-inch iMac is now more cost-effective than a MacBook Pro, and like MacBook Pro, iMac is now expandable to 4GB of RAM. Jobs had an unusual repeating theme in his presentation that got its first mention in the drumming out of the 17-inch iMac for the product line: "We're obsoleting our own products." If you can't fight a market perception, own it, use it.
I'm an exceedingly happy guy because Apple addressed a too-long-neglected peripheral: the Mac desktop keyboard, which has, in recent years, inflicted everything from digital discomfort to nausea. Hooray, it's dead, replaced by a thin, aluminum number that's reminiscent of MacBook Pro. That keyboard has wavered in quality as well, but I find that in the latest Santa Rosa MacBook Pro, Apple has come back to its senses. A user's rating of his experience is only as good as the poorest human interface device. Yes, the new keyboard will help drive Mac sales, and it's available in Bluetooth and wired.
As an aside, I'm typing this in Apple's parking lot, unaided by Apple's press packet, so you'll find details in my Enterprise Mac blog after I get back to my hotel.
Other notable new goodies from Town Hall included iLife '08, iWork '08, and .Mac, Apple's personal media creation suite, business productivity suite, and online service, respectively. In iLife '08, the standout component for business and professional users will be iMovie. Apple has moved the video editing process from the storyboard straight to the content bin. In other words, the window of thumbnails representing the clips, titles, and graphics that you used in your video is where you actually put your video together. Apple goosed the performance considerably, so you can finally "scrub" through video clips at higher than regular playback speed. Previously, you had to go to Final Cut Express or Studio to get that, and it changes the entire production workflow. As I predicted, Apple has overhauled .Mac to make it the burgeoning center of Apple's online universe. It raised the puny 1GB storage limit to 10GB. Click on "send to Web Gallery" in iPhoto or iMovie and .Mac will build you a very Web 2.0-y gallery, complete with multiple downloadable resolutions of images and videos. The integration, as well as the .Mac Web Gallery's overall design, is fabulous.
Bye-bye Office 2004 for Mac, hello iWork '08. Maybe. It's too early for me to judge--Jobs' demo was a little hasty, and I don't have the software yet--but Apple blended at least three things into iWork that make a big difference for Office users. Pages has taken on a new word processor mode to complement its powerful page layout mode. It also handles Word-compatible change tracking, and Apple has finally done a spreadsheet called Numbers.
I have to drive out to Sun to see its new 64-thread SPARC CPU, so I need to wrap this up fast with one killer feature and one prediction that might have gotten past those dreary mainstream types. Keynote, iWork's presentation program, has a bunch of new effects and templates, as you'd expect, but it does something that, if it works, is pretty incredible: Instant Alpha. This makes the background of a scanned or imported graphic (I don't think it works on video) transparent, making nonrectangular graphical elements much easier to create. I wonder if Keynote will allow you to save that alpha-mapped graphic as a 32-bit PNG image to use on a Web site.
The sweet part of Apple's raising of .Mac's standard storage from 1GB to 10GB will come in or shortly after October, when Leopard brings Time Machine automated backup to Mac clients everywhere. Since .Mac is so closely married to the Mac, it stands to reason that those who aren't using those $100-per-year gigs for video and photos will want to put them to use for online backup.
Freeing oneself from the bonds of conformity inspires all kinds of visions for what might be done with the technology around us. As long as you come by a dissenting position honesty and defensibly, I recommend speaking your mind. If you get a nickname, own it. Use it.
Posted by Tom Yager on August 8, 2007 03:00 AM
August 01, 2007 | Comments: (0)
OS X Leopard is now certified Unix, but is it safe?
Open Group Unix 03 certification puts the upcoming OS X Leopard on a par with AIX and HP-UX. Is there any truth to the fearmongering about security?
I learned last week that OS X Leopard has passed the Open Group's certification suite for Unix 03, qualifying it to use the Unix trademark. Kudos to Kevin Van Vechten and the rest of the OS X engineering crew for pulling this off. It's no easy feat. Leopard's Unix certification, along with substantial advances in its administrative interface -- including Remote Desktop, Mac client administration, standard services such as calendaring, Xsan, interoperability, and security -- puts OS X in league with the three big iron Unixes, namely, AIX, Solaris, and HP-UX. OS X's most notable missing puzzle pieces are its lack of support for virtualization and partitioning. An eight-way Xserve (not yet shipping), even one that's primarily targeted at small businesses, should be able to be sliced into pieces for consolidation, isolation, and recoverability. But one step at a time.
The Open Group has issued Apple a lovely certificate of compliance. I suggest that all Leopard users print it on fine-quality, high-rag paper, frame it, and hang it in their server rooms and Mac-blessed cubicles as a reminder to Linux weenies that there are pretenders, and then there is the real thing. And guess what? I am genuinely unconcerned about those who see such statements as blasphemous or as baiting the Linux community. Those who frequent Enterprise Mac or Ahead of the Curve know that I'm a certified Unix snob, a Mac client and server user, and proud to be both.
"Wait a minute," I hear some of you saying, "aren't those three certified commercial Unixes proprietary? Why would anybody want OS X to fly that flag?" Well, don't forget that Solaris is legitimately open source, and it runs on hardware (including Macs under hardware-accelerated virtualization) that doesn't bear Sun's badge, so there is a precedent for open, nonproprietary, genuine Unix. From my perspective, the primary value of Leopard's Unix certification is that it gives commercial server ISVs a heaping helping of confidence that their native code will port easily to OS X on Mac. Satisfying Unix 03 requirements indicates that "recompile and run" is now a reality, not only for Leopard Server but for Leopard client as well, given that both are based on exactly the same kernel, dev tools, libraries, commands, and utilities, most of which Apple laudably publishes as open source.
Open source has not been very good to Apple of late. Open system software is the best way to future-proof commercial computers for customers, full stop, but Apple's open sourcing of its true Unix imposes potential drag on OS X's credibility in organizations that equate the Unix trademark with secure systems. The informed know that OS X is no more vulnerable to black hat exploits than other OSes, closed and open alike. Yet parties from IBM to Windows and Linux anti-virus vendor Panda Security, along with some Linux users, routinely foster negative public opinion about OS X. Anyone can prod bloggers worldwide just by putting "OS X" and "security" in the same sound bite. Nobody calls them on it. I will: Vendors, if you slam OS X security, put your money where your mouth is by refusing business from accounts that have deployed Macs. After all, an enterprise is only as secure as the least secure system on the network. You wouldn't want to open your servers to exploits by helping prospective customers integrate your equipment with Macs. Just walk away from the table and leave the money to vendors such as Sun, which doesn't bad-mouth OS X.
Apart from public perception, there is a contingent at Apple that is mightily honked that Darwin renders OS X ultimately crackable, leading to successful independent efforts to open Apple's locked-down platforms--Mac, Xserve, Apple TV, and iPhone--to third-party software. OS X has been cracked to run on non-Apple PCs, albeit with gaps in functionality related to video and Wi-Fi. Apple TV is fully cracked, resulting in the ability to replace the device's cut-down edition of OS X with the full OS distributed with Mac systems and sold as a shrink-wrapped upgrade. And recently, iPhone was opened to custom native applications by developers who modified the GNU toolchain for the popular ARM microcontroller to produce OS X-compatible Mach-O executables. The iPhone effort is far from complete, but like OS X and Apple TV, iPhone cracks rely on Darwin's open sources and binary compatibility with OS X.
Apple could easily close that gap by ditching the Darwin project or tweaking it to make it binary-incompatible with Leopard. HP-UX and AIX are closed source, and that hasn't hurt IBM's or HP's sales. In fact, I recently had a day of discussions with IBM about its new POWER6 CPU during which a panel of IBM tech executives disclosed an overall lack of customer interest in Linux among its enterprise customers, despite the fact that IBM is extremely active in Linux development. For customers, platform selection is a matter of trust.
If Apple were to close OS X by withdrawing or limiting Darwin, would that bolster customers' faith in Leopard's security and scalability? Much as I'd hate to see OS X closed, and I hate the hell out of that idea, I have to admit that closing OS X's source code, combined with Apple's Unix certification, might help push OS X into organizations that associate Unix with stability and scalability.
Exploits and cracks of the various OS Xs routinely make the news, eclipsing even Windows. For example, I've read that iPhone is especially vulnerable to exploits because clicking on a phone number on a Web site dials it, and because all of its executables run as root (the unrestricted user account in Unix and Unix-alikes). But stories crafted to spread fear among the mobile masses neglect to mention that most smartphones make no distinction between privileged and unprivileged code except to alert the user that an application is trying to place a voice or data call. Mobile platforms place limitations on code that might compromise security by means of digital signatures that make executables traceable to the individual or company that produced them.
Code signing is also a feature of Leopard -- and the developers who cracked Apple TV and iPhone found evidence of a signing mechanism in those devices' OSes. Requiring digital signatures on privileged executables would afford OS X adequate protection while allowing it to remain an open OS. Such signatures can be cracked, but Apple can play dodgeball with crackers by building new keys into firmware updates. The crew that cracked iPhone also uncovered a sandbox, or jail, that allows native, nonprivileged third-party code to run in a locked-down mode that blocks access to system directories and makes root access difficult enough that most developers and prospective customers wouldn't bother trying to break it.
I know that I've been all over the place in my treatment of this subject, but I'll circle back around to my main point: Apple deserves to benefit from Unix's image as a stable and secure platform. OS X is mature, open, beautifully and thoroughly documented, and uniquely delivered to customers in a turnkey, deployable state. Real Unix never looked so good or delivered such a smooth ride.
Posted by Tom Yager on August 1, 2007 03:00 AM
July 11, 2007 | Comments: (0)
iPhone spurs mobile development renaissance
I wish I could have peppered my iPhone review with phrases such as "at present," "initially," or "for the time being." But Apple doesn't work that way. If I could be confident that Apple would address the major shortcomings that I saw in iPhone, such as the absence of programmability and the lack of access to even a sandboxed portion of the device's file system, I'd have given the device a thumbs-up for its platform potential alone.
Instead, I had to evaluate iPhone as it is: for the technology, policies, and message that Apple and AT&T are selling today. With that in mind, I judged it to be no match for BlackBerry, Treo, Windows Mobile, and Symbian devices, all of which do what business needs; are programmable and expandable; can be purchased from multiple wireless operators (at discounts); come with data- and voice-only plans; and have replaceable batteries, as well as very nice media players.
I'm glad that iPhone is waking so many people up to the potential of professional mobile devices. I urge people who are looking at iPhone to spend an equal amount of time ogling alternatives, because once you get past $200, it's easy to find handsets with displays and media players that rival iPhone's and deliver the kinds of serious features that benefit professional users. Take your newfound mobile enthusiasm shopping.
If you're jazzed about creating iPhone-friendly Web apps, spread the love -- there are lots of mobile handset users equipped with full browsers capable of running interactive sites. Make your apps mobile-friendly. It doesn't take much effort. Non-iPhones can support "iPhone apps" with little or no modification. As long as sites avoid using the nonstandard Canvas tag, apps written for iPhone usually just work on other devices. I encourage iPhone Web app/site developers to test their sites and applications on at least one non-iPhone mobile device. The native iPhone look and feel, with the exception of gestures and the on-screen keyboard, is being reproduced in CSS and vanilla JavaScript by the people who attended the successful iPhoneDevCamp in early July. Check in on the iPhoneWebDev Google Groups site to join in the discussion.
What you'll find at iPhoneWebDev doesn't turn a random smartphone into an iPhone clone; that's not the point of cross-platform mobile DHTML development, or at least it shouldn't be. But the iPhone look and feel promises to bring some good taste and common sense to sites that target mobile browsers, and with luck, it will spur Web developers to finally recognize that 1,024 by 768 is not a global standard. That's lazy design and lazy coding. Make your site mobile-friendly, if you haven't already. If it takes iPhone to motivate you to make that happen, then go buy some and pass them out to your development team.
Don't forget that practically everything except iPhone gives developers the ability to store, upload, and download data using its internal file system and to save Web pages for offline viewing. Right now, iPhone only allows you to persist files and documents as attachments to e-mail, but I recommend adding a "mail this to me" option for Web sites and documents that you format for mobile use.
If you're bored with your smartphone, PDA, or "superphone," that's your fault. The iPhone craze should get a lot of mobile professionals exploring their devices and the accompanying massive libraries of downloadable third-party software. Don't forget to include MIDP (mobile information device profile) Java apps when you go looking for software for your phone, because they tend to run just about anywhere.
iPhone's great, but if you paid more than about $200 for a mobile device, chances are high that your handset can do what iPhone does or can be taught to do it with the help of some third-party apps. And it can do a whole lot more.
Posted by Tom Yager on July 11, 2007 03:00 AM
July 06, 2007 | Comments: (0)
iPhone unbrick (activate w/o AT&T service) hack works; single-step tool for Mac
Update: This page has a one-step downloadable tool for Mac users, and it includes the keys that make the directions in the following link easier for PC users to follow. The whole business in the PC technique about decompiling the .net assembly is to dig out encryption keys embedded in that code. The author of the original crack, Jon Johansen of DeCSS (the DVD copy protect crack) fame, didn't want to make it too easy.
You can now buy an iPhone and "unbrick" it (meaning, get past the globe and the activation nag) using a hack that's not a simple process, and a PC is required, but it is laid out step by step.
It comes down to this. You patch itunes.exe, set Apple's authorization host to 127.0.0.1, and run a mini-server that acts like Apple's activation server.
There are many reports of success and lots of confusion. Once you're unbricked, apparently you stay that way until the next major release. In other words, every time Apple issues a patch, it's very likely that it will undo prior cracks. iPhone may become a brick again if it's activated improperly.
Ideally, Apple would let the unbricking crack stick. It gives users the freedom to use iPhone as an iPod/PDA/WLAN browser without paying $60+/month to AT&T, and Apple maintains deniability because the crack wasn't its idea.
In the ideal ideal, Apple will just ship iPhone unbricked, which would have been the right thing all along. Paying $499 or $599 for a perfect media player, and then having to pay $36, plus committing to $60 x 24 months before you can play a song, is ludicrous.
Posted by Tom Yager on July 6, 2007 08:05 AM
July 03, 2007 | Comments: (0)
iPhone: Correction/addition to SIM removal instructions
In iPhone: Setting the record straight..., I said that the iPhone SIM should be removed by inserting a hooked paper clip into the hole at the top of the device and pulling. Commenters chimed in to say that the SIM is removed by pressing a paper clip into the hole.
This works. There is a push-to-eject mechanism under the SIM tray, but the pressure required to engage it is considerable and the plastic tray is pretty weak. If you're going to eject the card this way, I recommend using a heavy paper clip bent at a right angle for a solid grip, or use a very thin-shafted screwdriver or a plastic "tweaker." Hold iPhone in your hand, not between your knees. If iPhone tips over while you're mashing down to eject the SIM, you'll destroy the tray.
Posted by Tom Yager on July 3, 2007 04:02 PM
June 25, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Question: How will you switch carriers for iPhone?
All iPhone units sold in the U.S. will be locked to AT&T's GSM/GPRS/EDGE mobile network. If you're already an AT&T subscriber, iPhone is a painless transition. If you're on a month-to-month contract with another operator, or you had a term contract which has now expired, you're sitting pretty for iPhone.
But if you're already under contract with a competing operator (e.g. T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon), it might cost you as much as $300 to bail out of the one or two-year agreement that scored you a cheap price on your existing handset.
If you're in that latter category--under active contract to an AT&T competitor--but planning to buy an iPhone, how will you do it?
a) Pay the one-time fee to sever your existing contract immediately (what will it cost you?)
b) Buy iPhone and make payments on your existing phone service until its contract expires (give your phone to a relative, friend, keep it as a spare?)
c) Try to complain, threaten or loophole your way into a courtesy cancellation ("I'm being deported"; "I have petitioned ICANN for a .sucks top level domain just for you"; "My service was always horrible, but it became absolutely intolerable on June 29th"; "Return to sender: Addressee deceased"; other?)
d) Something I haven't thought of
Please weigh in via comments, and don't be shy with details.
My money's on b), but don't let that sway your vote.
Posted by Tom Yager on June 25, 2007 04:59 PM
April 18, 2007 | Comments: (0)
The method behind Apple's madness
Putting Leopard on the back burner keeps iPhone hot
Apple's decision to push the release of Leopard (OS X 10.5) from June to October is provoking responses ranging from "so what? There are no indispensable new features in Leopard" to "see, I told you that Apple signaled a second-classing of the Mac when it dropped 'computer' from its name!" It's not as simple an issue as that. Apple wouldn't have done this if it didn't have to. Leopard and iPhone needed to ship in June. Strategy had them driving sales for each other, mating iPhone to Leopard the way Apple TV is married to the iTunes Store. Apple was faced with the ugly reality of having neither product go out on time unless it called all hands on deck, the way it did to get Intel Macs out eight months early. I think it was an easy choice. iPhone is a non-product with an installed base of zero, while the Mac and OS X Tiger are out there in ever-growing numbers.
Elite Mac users, especially developers, are clamoring for Leopard, but I'd challenge most prospective Mac buyers who are now in the PC mainstream to name one Leopard feature, or Vista feature for that matter, that they can't live without. Leopard remains the star attraction at WWDC. Commercial developers will be torqued off at having their go-to-market strategies scuttled yet again by the master to whom they've pledged their loyalty. Bummer, but OSes are a bitch to write, and the QA cycle never ends.
In a lot of ways, Leopard will be Apple's first grownup OS, UNIX certified, 64-bit through and through and ready to stare down x64 editions of Vista and Longhorn Server, not to mention other UNIXes from IBM, Sun and HP. Even Intel and Microsoft will have a hard time matching the power of Apple's Xcode 3.0 tools, which will still be free, and the tools and June's feature complete Leopard beta will placate the angry mob. As long as developers can ride the escalator down from the OS X State of the Union session to get their priceless, top secret black cardboard-encased DVDs every year, Apple's still cool with coders.
There is one thing that Apple could do that would get WWDC attendees hugging, howling and high-fiving as they would at the release of Leopard: Rolling out an iPhone SDK (software development kit) at the conference. iPhone runs OS X, presumably a grossly cut-down version of it, but it's entirely possible that developers could write to the overlap between the Mac and iPhone platforms to create client apps and background services that run identically on the desk and on the go. I admit that that's wishful thinking;; there is less flash memory in an iPhone than there is in my BlackBerry, and my BlackBerry isn't even built to sync with iTunes. Apple has also established a track record for keeping non-Mac development goodies to itself. Despite the fact that Apple is selling games for iPod, and users have found hooks in Apple TV for games as well, Apple offers no SDK for either device.
iPhone has been a non-product since Steve Jobs' shallow demo in January '07. Write-ups of the CTIA Wireless conference, where all mobile device makers strut their stuff--literally; there was a fashion show this year--reported that the conference was all about iPhone even though Apple didn't show. Maybe those reporters went to a different show, because iPhone wasn't front of mind for anyone I talked with. While superphones from the likes of Nokia, Samsung, HTC, and Motorola overlapped with iPhone's feature set, that's where the similarities end. Windows Mobile 6, BlackBerry Java and Symbian 9.x, the latter extended by Nokia for its Series 60, 80 and 90 devices, are all highly welcoming of custom software. Service and handset vendors showed live streaming television, embedded six megapixel cameras and wide screens galore. Nokia's even got Python and a fat subset of UNIX APIs (application programming interfaces) called Open C running on its phones. If Apple had let iPhone chill in order to let engineers work overtime on Leopard, there's a good chance that iPhone might have been frozen out of the mobile market. I hope Apple comes through with the dev tools and documentation that would absolutely put iPhone over the top.
Posted by Tom Yager on April 18, 2007 03:00 AM
September 10, 2005 | Comments: (0)