Category: Apple

How refreshing.  And how typically unusual.  Rather than doing the usual, boring, upgrade – you know, the one where the new product is significantly better than the old one, Apple has reinvented the new release!  They thought differently and released a product which is significantly worse.  I’m talking, of course, about the new AppleTV.  Sure, it’s smaller.  It’s cheaper too.  But they’d need to reduce it to the size of an SD card and price it accordingly in order to justify the loss of functionality.  I like the iOS bit.  I like the efficient A4 bit too.  I could stomach a drop in capacity to 64GB if it meant having SSD rather than a hard drive – but they dropped the storage altogether, thereby making it impossible to use as a stand-alone HiFi separate.

You know what though?  I reckon that His Steveness is probably using the last generation, and I reckon he’ll keep doing so.  I reckon he’s quite aware how awful this new TV wart is – but that he’s gambling on the rock bottom price seeing it through.  Well, fingers crossed – I hope that it bombs.  And that they replace it with a device with built in storage. Until then though, I’ll be patching the hell out of my wonderful Mark 1 AppleTV.

I can smell a rat.  Humour me while I try to find it.

The iPad.  It looks very nice.  In fact, despite the mumblings of the nay-sayers, I think I’d like to have one.  I don’t even mind that it doesn’t multitask.  I wish it did, of course, but I’m a geek.  Most people don’t really care about browsing the internet, e-mailing, editing a photo and playing Super Whambot Massacre IV simultaneously; provided that they can switch from one to another quickly I suspect that most people won’t notice if those apps aren’t actually running in the background.

I’ll go further.  I think that the iPad might end up being the replacement for the Mac.  Think about it.  It doesn’t even matter that you can’t write software on it. In the very early days of the Mac you couldn’t write software either.  You needed to buy another, vastly more expensive, system (Lisa) running the Mac development kit to do that.  Substitute iPad for ‘Mac’ and Mac for ‘Lisa’ and that’s exactly what you need to do today.  The Mac won’t disappear tomorrow, or even next week, but one day it will – and the iPad is its replacement.

What I can’t abide, though, is being in thrall to Apple for all my software.  I don’t want to get everything from the app store, DRM’d to the hilt.  I don’t want to be told that I’m not allowed to run an emulator, or that I must pay a subscription for the privilege of writing software – even free software – for their system.  One day, I suspect, Apple plans for us to get all our content, software, media, the lot in this manner.  And that isn’t just unacceptable, it’s a very big rat indeed.

A dictionary has been censored by Apple prior to its acceptance on the app store. Not only have unambiguously rude words been removed; words like ‘screw’, ‘snatch’ and ‘ass’ have been purged too.  Whoever made that decision is a cock.  It’s a type of bird, you know, although the bird is apparently extinct by Apple’s request.

Personally I have no problem with rude words.  If your child can’t get them on your phone then they’ll underline them in a paper dictionary instead.  Maybe Apple are trying to protect me.  I’m grateful.  Really I am.  I shall send over my copy of Rogers Profanisaurus without delay so that they can censor that too.

I do have a problem with all the gun simulators on the app store though.  A rude word has never resulted in injury to another – but guns kill hundreds, if not thousands, of people around the world every day.  Surely that is more offensive?

To quote South Park it seems that “Horrific, deplorable violence is okay, as long as people don’t say any naughty words.”

Deep down, in the depths of my soul, I’m a luddite.  I didn’t like PowerPC when Apple first unleashed that on the world.  I was cold about the shift from NuBus.  OS X seemed to be a disaster. On all these counts, I was wrong.  Apple knew what it was doing, although I’m still not convinced by the switch to Intel.

This time though, I’m certain that an own goal has been scored.  Boot Camp, the technology that allows Mac’s to boot Windows, has to be a bad idea.

If a Windows user buys a Mac and then uses it to run Windows, why should they ever learn to use and love the Mac? If a Mac can run Windows Photoshop, why should Adobe bother to develop an Intel native version of Mac Photoshop?  Why should any developer
develop for Intel Mac? Finally, Apple is a hardware company that just happens to write an operating system.  If fewer people are using its OS, why should bother to spend all that money on continuing development?

I’ve been proved wrong in the past.  I’m not visionary enough to see the wisdom of Apple’s manoeverings.  But I wish they’d stop scaring me and right now I’ve got a sense of impending doom about this.

Apple is moving to Intel?  It’s a sad day for so many reasons.  I’ve scratched my head in bewilderment at many of Apple’s crazy moves in the past, and those crazy moves have turned out okay.  I don’t see how this one can amount to anything more than a kick in the nuts to Mac users though.

PowerPC was a great architecture, and competition with it gave Intel a reason to make their processors better.  More importantly, it prevented Windows users from installing OS X, thereby depriving Apple of its important hardware business.

Here’s to the boring ones.
The bland.
The tedious.
The vapid.
The square pegs in the square holes.
The ones who can’t see further than the ends of their noses.

They’re fond of rules.
And they worship Status Quo.
You can yawn at them, agree with them, forget them,
go along with them or be forced to accept them.
About the only thing you can’t do is have an alternative.

Because they keep things the same.
They stagnate. They hold back. They fester.
They decline. They expire.
They hold the human race back.

Maybe they have to be boring.
How else can you stare at Vin Diesel and see art
Or listen to Britney Spears and hear beautiful music?
Or gaze at another country and want to conquer it?

We make tools for these kinds of people.
While some see them at the boring ones, we see them as a ticket to a fat back hander.

Because the people who are boring enough to the think they can hold the world back, are the ones who inherit the earth.

Apple. Think uniformity.

I was browsing through an old MacUser (16 November 2001) when I came across a letter deriding the iPod as another ‘cube’.  I chortled heartily at this, but my laughter froze in my throat as I read the next letter on the page.  It described the iPod as a ‘poxy Rio clone’, ‘a wasted opportunity’ and unable to ‘outperform my minidisc player’. Unfortunately the shortsighted fool that wrote the letter was me.

I’d like to take this opportunity to eat my words. I love my ‘poxy Rio clone’.  Since I bought mine many of my friends and family have done so too, and they love theirs as well.  I was wrong, and I apologise for my rudeness to Apple. As for my minidisc player, I have no idea where that is. Scrap probably.

I might even remember this humbling lesson and buy a Mac Mini.  Maybe not.  After all, it doesn’t have enough graphics memory and it is just a poxy clone of the Cappuccino PC. Ahem.