Ahead of the Curve | Tom Yager » TAG: Intel Macs

January 03, 2008 | Comments: (0)

CES and Macworld Expo predictions

TAGS: Apple, Intel Macs, Microsoft, Mobile devices, Software Development, Wireless

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

November 12, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Score: Dead MacBook Pro gremlin vanquished

TAGS: Intel Macs

Nothing gets my Irish up as quickly as when a hunk of technology takes on the characteristics of a stubborn animal, to wit, one more so than I. It's been the better part of a week struggling, with little success, against some cowardly goblin that infested the innards of the MacBook Pro in my possession, and in the course of his exploits managed to shred months of hard work.

My grief did not immobilize me. I dug through a stack of raw hard drives and found an archive that brought me back to late August. I then resolved to crack, rather, gently open the MacBook Pro's chassis to extract the hard drive to see if it was readable elsewhere. I had assembled the notebook's service manual, the requisite tools and the will for the operation, but Apple's replacement MacBook Pro had just arrived. I went to my office to restore the August backup image onto it, and the most wonderful thing happened: It locked up after the chime, precisely as the dead MacBook Pro had done, and in which state MacBook Pro the elder remained.

I call this a wonderful event, but I didn't think so at the time. I yanked the cables out of both sides of the notebook, reached underneath and ejected the battery like a spent magazine. After a minute's rest, I powered up again and found the new MacBook Pro in good health.

The wonderful part is that in a flash of understanding, I realized three things: The MacBook Pros' USB ports were the proximate cause of death, I might be able to get the dead MacBook Pro to boot from a flyweight FireWire drive, and that if it booted, it would be the last time I'd see that machine alive. While there is no defending this as a product of reason, it played out precisely as I had envisioned it. I was able see the internal drive and image most of its contents to an external FireWire drive, then transfer that to the new MacBook Pro.

Apart from reinforcing my long-standing disrespect for the USB implementation in Intel chipsets, the lesson, the yarn of which is too long to spin, left me with two simple bits of advice, one which you may take or leave, and one you're obliged to keep in mind. I recommend that you use FireWire drives. Apple developed it, they're understandably fussy about its implementation, and FireWire is not part of Intel's chipset. If you need to pull data from a damaged hard drive, don't use Disk Utility; it stops at the first error. Use the command-line utility ditto instead, which will plow through any read errors it encounters and copy everything it can, and with HFS+ metadata intact.

The dead MacBook Pro never boot again, and I don't believe it ever will. It is winging its way back to Cupertino, where it will be thoroughly refurbished and given a new life. I wish it well.

Posted by Tom Yager on November 12, 2007 04:25 PM

November 07, 2007 | Comments: (0)

The new road to recovery is worse than the old one

TAGS: Intel Macs

Now that an Intel-based Mac is a dead x86 PC, how do you bide your time until the replacement comes in?

I always do my best to turn misfortune into opportunities for enlightenment, and oh, what enlightenment the past couple of weeks has placed within my grasp. When the MacBook Pro loaned to me by Apple slipped into a coma during a full-volume image backup and subsequently died in my arms, I was forced to deal head-on with the impact of Apple's switch in suppliers and with an irrecoverable loss of data and productivity -- a hardship I've never faced in five years with Macs. I lost a full month's worth of work, research, and creative projects, along with every application that requires registration keys and online activation. I can barely conceal my glee at having so grand an opportunity as this to learn a new way.

I'll be pilloried for this comment, but this wouldn't happen to a PowerPC Mac. You see, there was no reference design for a PowerPC notebook. Apple had to do all its own cooking, and that included the creation of an independent system management controller. It took a mummy's curse to put a PowerPC Mac in a fully unrecoverable state. A Mac's firmware could boot into several recovery states, ranging from Target Disk Mode to a firmware boot prompt, even when a Mac would not boot. It was Apple's home-brewed system management controller that gave Mac folk legitimate bragging rights with regard to reliability; you had to do something truly nasty to kill a PowerPC Mac.

In contrast, the only way that an x86 PC, Apple's or anyone else's, can match the PowerPC Mac's resiliency is if it has a dedicated Baseboard Management Controller, which only higher-end PC servers, including Apple's Xserve, have. Otherwise, the only thing a PC does in firmware is initialize buses and catalog devices. Then it hands control to the CPU, which pulls a boot block from storage or the LAN. Intel's Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) is tidier than the old PC BIOS, but it steps out of the boot process at the same point that a PC BIOS does. A PC that can't boot is dead. A PowerPC Mac that wouldn't boot was a diagnostic challenge. It's ironic that the old PC BIOS will give me a series of beep codes indicating a component failure that I'm competent to address. Lacking even that, there is no point in calling AppleCare. A PC in this MacBook Pro's condition is not diagnosed. It is gutted and refurbished. AppleCare does offer, or at least it offered me, a shot at recovering the data on the dead MacBook Pro's drive. I'm going to attempt that myself. Apple doesn't need to see the projects I'm working under nondisclosure.

My backup schedule -- full volume images monthly, with incremental backups whenever I plug into the LAN -- was based on my experience with Macs. I neglected to implement the more aggressive PC-level regimen except with regard to that most critical asset: e-mail. I didn't lose any messages, and perhaps one day I'll tell you why.

As for recovering from this disaster, I passed through the standard stages, including denial, rage, acceptance, and coping. When I got to the coping part, that's when I decided to make this an opportunity. A replacement MacBook Pro is on its way (thank you, Apple), so I'm not about to reconstruct my digital existence on a Windows client. Why not try a new alternative that breaks my dependence on clients? The New Way is Web apps and adaptive wireless connectivity. Adopt the New Way, and anywhere you carry a device with a browser and a two-bar signal from a cell tower, you're good to go. At least, that's the idea.

I settled on Gmail, which seemed perfect. Its 5GB limit is ample, it is well designed for a Web app, and it has several modes of taking over for a dead client or server. I pointed it at my private domain's mail server (already switched to Windows when the Xserve I use was being upgraded to Leopard), set it to slurp all the mail backed up in my queues, and watched expectantly as the message count rose.

I had more than 9,000 messages queued on my server from slightly more than a week without an online client, but when Gmail started pulling mail from my server, it stopped at 200. Repeated clicks of "check mail now" did nothing. I learned then that Gmail pulls mail in bundles of 200 messages at a time with indeterminate delays between polls. It did eventually catch up, and I was able to connect my chosen portable client, an HTC X7501 Windows Mobile device, to Gmail. However, Gmail won't reliably pull in the hundreds of messages I get each day. At one check, I discovered that it hadn't polled my mail server at all for two days. Neither Gmail's nor my mail server's logs showed error messages. My genuine never-fail client, a BlackBerry 8200, did not miss a message, but it's set to forward only mail from InfoWorld and a short whitelist of senders. Gmail let a lot of mail slip through the cracks.

I am amazed, however, at the accuracy of Gmail's spam filter. Nothing I've run on either Xserve or Windows Server comes close. As impressive as that is, two-day delays between mail server polls puts Gmail out of the running for individual professional use. The MacBook Pro is sitting at the FedEx depot right now, so I won't bother playing Web mail roulette with .Mac and Yahoo.

I had greater success with the HTC X7501, with a 5-inch, 640-by-480 touch-sensitive (finger and stylus) display, an 8GB microDrive, and a snap-on keyboard, as a stand-in for a portable client. It's the most powerful mobile device on the market. (See "Supersmart phones for extreme mobility" for my review of the X7501 and six other enterprise-worthy devices.) A T-Mobile BlackBerry subscription, with added hotspot access, kept me connected almost anywhere I've been. But there's a rub: The X7501, like everything below notebook class, is only wireless. A stay at a hotel left me connectionless except in the lobby. In-room Internet was wired only, and while T-Mobile's EDGE signal punched through the wall, I'm not set up to rely on it for anything more than e-mail, IM, and quick checks of news. EDGE is only a trifle better than off-line.

Perhaps I'd have spent less downtime if I had configured a Windows client as a Mac replacement, but I hoped that going browser-based and lightweight mobile would better position me to just swap in the replacement MacBook Pro. But apart from wanting the opportunity to sample alternatives to Windows, I confess that I couldn't force myself to set up Windows. I now know that my recoverability expectations for Macs should not exceed those that I associate with PCs. But I also learned that modern attempts at platform and connectivity independence don't cut it, even temporarily. And where Mac client disaster recovery is concerned, I'm back to my PC dictum: There is no substitute for a good set of screwdrivers.

Posted by Tom Yager on November 7, 2007 03:00 AM