James, the EirePreneur, is maintaining a map of Free (or cheap) WiFi hotspots in Ireland. Log into GMail and then you can add extras. I’ve added a few in the North, mostly centred around McDonalds (which explains why I look like I’ve been Supersized).
Add some more in? What about your own?
Every year we wait for the new and sparkly stuff from Apple and we often get it. The move to Intel. The iPhone. the 17″ and 12″ Powerbooks wayback when. This year is no different. We have a new subnotebook, software updates and a glimpse into Apple’s plans for everyone.
Some correspondants on Damien’s blog don’t think it’s up to much (and this is before touching the device). One commenter wrote “Certainly it’s some kind of breakthrough, but then shit-flavoured ice cream would be, too.” I think that’s more than a bit harsh but then it explains why Apple always dips straight after MacWorld even if the product announcements have been insanely great. A lot of people were expecting Apple to go after the eee PC market and produce a subnote that was cheap. People, seriously. Subnotebooks are not cheap. If you don’t mind running a machine with a 7″ screen, that is light but bulky, only has a 2 hour battery and has barely enough storage for the OS plus any media files, then by all means run, don’t walk, and buy a eee PC. It’s ugly (and yes, I have one here).
The MacBook Air is aimed at people who would buy the Sony TZ series of subnotebooks. No-one would ever accuse Sony of being a cheap brand so I wonder why people expect Apple to suddenly, after years of being a premium brand, flood the market with £200 laptops. The Air would have to be beautiful, it would have to show something new and exciting and it would have to beat the best, not beat the cheapest. It’s thinner than the TZ and cheaper than the TZ.
My beefs with the MacBook air are simple. It’s only got one USB port. Though I seldom have more than one thing plugged into my MacBook Pro, there are times I have two. I might be charging my iPhone while playing Battlefield. And no, wireless mice are not good for the First Person Shooters. This happens infrequently enough that I’m not concerned about it. I’m also not worried about the lack of an ethernet port because, frankly, it’s been months since I plugged my laptop into ethernet and that was when I was at a client site. I usually carry a Airport Express with me if I’m unsure of wireless at the next location. I’m also not that concerned with the lack of RAM upgrades and the inability to remove the battery. 2 GB of RAM is a goodly amount for the target market for this device. I am curious that they didn’t bring out some sort of dock, I guess you plug in your USB hub, your power and your video out and just work on. It’s a sleek machine, underpowered for what I want (mostly in the graphics card department) but tempting. I don’t consider the multi-touch trackpad to be a big deal - if it’s not a touch laptop screen I don’t see the point. That said - touchscreens tend not to be thin if they are of any size.
In all, the MacBook Air is not for me. I’m not THAT much of a road warrior (heck, my laptop is 17″ and seldom leaves the house). It would serve a lot of people I know, probably more than they realise especially when they consider exactly how often do they plug anything into their laptop!
Lack of ethernet? Yes. I really wanted to drop over a grand on a laptop and then run wires all over my house, chaining me to certain parts of the room.
Scores 8/10 in my opinion. I’d have liked a 11″ machine.
We knew this was coming and it’s just like it said on the tin. Maps will now find your location pretty effectively using cell tower triangulation. You can move icons about. You can add bookmarks to the home screen for the bazillions of web apps out there. Texting to multiple persons doesn’t inspire me in the implementation but that’s a UI thing. Song lyrics? If I had any. iTunes rentals? If they were available in the UK I might care but I have Sky and more movies than I can watch anyway. And for iPod touch owners, $20 for the update isn’t a big deal. Sure, it’d be nice if you didn’t have to buy it but then 5 apps for $20 means apps are being targetted at around $4 each. Is Apple laying down expectations for pricing for iPhone apps bought through iTunes later this quarter?
A solid enough upgrade I guess - I don’t get lost very often though. 6/10
This makes the Apple TV into an interactive device rather than just something to view media with. It becomes a realistic option for people who have broadband and don’t want to pay for cable or satellite TV or on-demand services. Of course, you can’t buy movies on iTunes in the UK and neither can we rent them via Apple TV. So if you’re in the UK, this is a useless update and another example of how if you’re in the UK, Apple doesn’t really care. Just keep buying their stuff. This is pretty much a 1/10
The Airport Extreme with built-in hard drive is the only thing that really impressed her-indoors. Everyone should be backing up and with having to plug in disks, it can be a pain having to do so. This removes that pain. This I would place as the most impressive release in the show.
What does this tell me? Apple wants people to have more than one Mac. That seems obvious but Time Capsule is designed to back up multiple Macs. The MacBook Air is not designed as a standalone machine but rather as a portable machine which provides you with a companion to your powerful desktop at home. Leopard options like “Back to my Mac” show that being able to access one Mac from another Mac is an important part of their strategy. They’ve convinced a lot of people to buy one Mac so far and when you’ve managed that, getting them to buy another Mac is a no-brainer.
Time Capsule gets a rather spiffy 10/10 from me. Would have been 11 if it had AirTunes too.
We’re now counting down to the release of the iPhone SDK.
Mark Pilgrim moved his parents to Linux because their Mac experience was souring.:
I had originally chosen Kontact/Kmail for their email needs, but I ran into some strange bug where Kmail refused to send messages. Basic functionality, right? You’d think someone would, you know, notice. I realize email standards are wide and complicated, but still. An email program that can’t send email is pretty fucking useless.
my father threw me for a loop and asked how he could realign the print heads and check the ink levels. I have owned printers for many decades and I have never done this, but apparently it’s a regular occurrence for him, and the Mac printer driver let him do it. So OK, I poke around Google, and lo and behold, there’s a package for that. But it doesn’t work. Oh wait, I need to install gimp-print too (God knows why). Now it aligns the print heads, but it gives an error message while checking ink levels. But it works from the command line. But only as root. Weird. Unresolved. Grr.
Sounds like they’re off to a great start!
Cool, I didn’t know you could just grab entire articles from the IntarWeb and publish them wholesale without even giving an attribution link!
That’s what Rixstep has done?
Scott Anguish, one of the nicest guys on the Intarweb is more than a little upset because Rixstep has repeatedly refused to remove his content which has been ripped of wholesale. What’s worse…
My copyright has been violated by his reproduction. Yes, the DMCA would allow me to get it taken down, and I am exploring that route. But given his track record, I see no way to stop him from doing this. He’s published incorrect and horrible stuff about me, Aaron Hillegass, and others, before.
It is imperative (and the reason I temporarily pulled things down) that long-time readers of Stepwise know RIX stole this.. I do not approve of his doing so. His use does not fall under fair-use, or commentary. He’s simple theft.
I’ve worked 13+ years on supporting developers by maintaining Stepwise (which truly is a labor of love) and I don’t want this theft and misrepresentation to damage that effort.
Rixstep gets traffic by stealing content, misrepresenting the opinions of the authors and doing the whole “keeping it real” thing in the face of millions of new Apple converts.
I must say it’s an interesting marketing step, calling Apple’s customers idiot fanboys while trying to flog them a replacement file manager. It really motivates me to buy it.
Scott Anguish is a pillar of the NeXTStep community. Anything that offends him and, in his own words “makes him sick” should motivate everyone interested in the Mac and especially Cocoa.
Intuit recently issued an update for QuickBooks which, due to some fuckedupness deletes the entire desktop folder. That’s pretty serious shit right there.
RixStep, the whiner of the week, was caught by this bug but blames Apple. I’m not sure how “unsafe” code written by Intuit really qualifies as being Apple’s fault considering that the Intuit developers must, at some point, have tested their code on a Mac OS X system. Sure - there are bound to be bugs in Mac OS X - every system has them - but this is what testing is for. We can all justify the release of unsafe code but deleting the entire desktop folder? Not acceptable. I’ve seen this kind of problem before, in the olden days when Bungie was an independent company they released Myth 2 which had the possibility of wiping out large amounts of your Windows install. Eep. Bungie released a fix pronto and said sorry.
Rixstep, however, points the finger at Apple and not at Intuit. Oddly.
His reasons:
Steve Jobs came back to Cupertino triumphant. Not only did he get to finally run his own company but he came with the world’s most fantastic system in his suitcase. A system the Grade A Idiots already ensconced in Cupertino have done their best to destroy.
Did anyone else miss the NeXT takeover of Apple in 1997?
The greybeards at Apple responsible for the bugs that he complains about are actually NeXT greybeards. It’s nothing to do with KoolAid. It’s nothing to do with Apple’s head honchos and their file system APIs. It’s absolutely 100% to do with the “world’s most fantastic system”. Where do people get this kind of hyperbole? That a CEO waltzes in with an entire management team and a new operatiing system in return for $400 million. And it’s still the fault of the OLD guys at Apple when there’s a bug and a problem? Catch a grip. Apple is NeXT. The same fusty old NeXTies who built the world’s most fantastic system are the same fusty old buggers making Mac OS X. Blaming it on a nebulous “Apple” is just fairy tales designed to help you sleep at night. You seriously think there are areas of Mac OS X that Jobs doesn’t make his presence felt at? Do yu think for a second that once this bug affected Mac users that there wasn’t a high level meeting to find someone to go and explain how it was Intuit’s fault? At risk of certain death from their Steve Vader leader?
The solution is, of course, is that if you don’t like it go back to using OpenStep.
Unless of course it wasn’t actually the world’s most fantastic system….to be honest, the post reads like the inane ranting of a stalker.
The Rixstep blog spends most of it’s time complaining about Mac OS X. But mostly it’s a damn good read. It would be nice to see a post about why, if Mac OS X is so broken, Rixstep’s writers continue to use it.
Rxstep takes issue with lackingareas of Mac OS X. The lack of an Advanced button and the lack of supported GUI theming.
OS X has no advanced button. There’s no way for professionals - for developers and admins - to get beyond the confines of the tilded user home area and see what’s really going on in the file system or the network using tools available from Apple.
Professionals assigned OS X have no recourse except to take to the command line - and this with a company renowned (infamous) for how it’s eschewed the command line all these years.
The problem here is the definition of “Advanced”. Are we talking about the mythical pwer user? Mac Professionals? Mac OS X SysAdmins? Seasoned UNIX Hackers? Fusty old NeXTStep types? How do you even begin to cater for all of these groups?
You do what Apple did. You create an interface that is simple, subtle and shallow for the 80% of users and for the remaining 20% you expose the command line and create kick ass developer tools. My frustration with Windows is that the GUI tools are simply stupid with windows that cannot be resized in table view dialogs and theres no obvious way to expose that information in the command line (like I’m going to relearn DOS in 2007!) My frustration with Linux is that it’s engineered piecemeal and feels disconnected - one minute I’m safe in GUI-land and the next minute I’m in advanced GUI designed by the developer who didn’t think to ask anyone if it looked like ass.
It’s obvious OS X users want the opportunity to customise the look and feel of their systems; not being permitted to do so ‘legally’ means they will resort to ‘illegal’ approaches. And history shows they’ll use these illegal approaches if that’s all that’s available.
It’s obvious to me, as someone who meets a lot of Mac users and Mac OS X installs, that theming is a 20% solution. The tools are there for people who want them. And the providers of these tools provide the warranty (i.e. nothing).
It’s frustrating enough trying to explain to someone who’s 70% blind how to do this or click that when the dock can be moved to three sides of the screen. If they could move the top menu as well it would be an absolute nightmare.
It’s not that I disagree with the sentiment. I just think there’s bigger fish to fry than “Advanced” buttons and themes. They need to work on the bugs, they need to fix security holes. Maybe theming will become important in 2037?
Apple is trying to be all things to all people. Whereas Linux GUI interfaces attempt to cater to small subsections of the population with the unhelpful suggestion that you can change the Window Manager to suit. That’s not a solution for anyone other than the 0.2% of the population which can be bothered. Similarly the Windows interface is designed for Windows users and the absolute horlicks they made with the almost simultaneous release of Office 2007 and Vista and the completely different UI paradigms for both. Ribbons? What’s that you say?
Apple’s approach is not going to please everyone but that’s why they ship the extra tools. It’s why the BSD subsystem is no longer optional. Previous to Mac OS X 10.0 shipping there was debate about whether Apple would ship the system with Terminal.app or whetherit would be a developer-only option. Apple is walking the fine line betwene providing a UI that my mum can use and providing a UI for the Alpha Geeks.
Reuters has this little snippet about SAP planning to release an iPhone client despite analysts falling over themselves to tell us the iPhone isn’t business-friendly:
On Monday, SAP broke with precedent by saying it would introduce a version of its upcoming customer relationship management software for the iPhone before launching versions for mobile devices from RIM and Palm Inc (PALM.O).
The reason? SAP’s own salespeople were clamoring for it, saying the iPhone was easier to use, according to Bob Stutz, SAP senior vice president in charge of developing customer relationship management software.
“This isn’t necessarily iPhone deployment by way of the IT department, but it’s by people who really want to use this device and IT is responding in a really positive way,” said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst with market research firm Jupiter Research.
This is exactly the way that the market should work. The customers want something, they build a case and the IT department responds in a positive way. In the most simple of business cases, “easier to use”, that’s exactly the sort of response an IT department should respond with.
I’m not a fan of Blackberry devices. In a previous life I was forced to help people use them when attached to the O2 network and I can say that simply because their IMAP implementation in the device sucked the big one it was not a pleasure to use for email. It was functional, it was something the customer tolerated, but under no circumstances did it take away the pain. (And frankly the number of keyboard shortcuts we needed to look up made it more reminiscent of using Wordstar or DOS than a modern handheld device).
February brings us the iPhone SDK and SAP is one of the first of many companies which will be queuing up to get their applications onto iPhone. Others we’ll see will be Skype, VNC, a Terminal, an AIM client, an MSN client - maybe even a Yahoo client (as long as they all maintain Store-And-Forward IM messages).
Sure, analysts tell us that an Exchange client is essential but that’s for Microsoft to produce and we have to ask them why they wouldn’t create Outlook for iPhone and why everyone expects Apple to create it? Same reason they don’t produce Outlook for Macintosh - because the Mac would continue to replace Windows in business but at a frighteningly quicker rate. I’ve said before there is no option out there for Groupware which realistically compares to Exchange. SAP is creating a client for their corporate applications and not expecting Apple to build it. So, come on Microsoft, where’s the client for iPhone?
(Why does Microsoft get that benefit of the doubt? Cisco creates clients for their servers/routers. SAP does for their applications. Apple does for their servers. Why does Microsoft get away with this crap?)
What application would you like to see on your iPhone?
We’ve got two strong legs on our chair today,’ he told USA Today. ‘We have the Mac business, which is a $10 billion business, and music–our iPod and iTunes business–which is $10 billion. We hope the iPhone is the third leg on our chair, and maybe one day, Apple TV will be the fourth leg.’
Steve Jobs has a plan.
Apple haven’t been pushing the Mac as hard as they have this last 18 months. They now want everyone to have a Mac at work and at home in the spare room. Nearly 6 months ago they introduced iPhone and later the iPod touch, both which run ‘OSX’ a cut-down version of Mac OS X. They’ll likely be transitioning more and more to the ‘touch’ operating system for use in their iPods. in effect, they want everyone to have a Mac in their pocket. Apple TV, though as woefully underdeveloped as the iPhone, could be the Mac in the living room.
While people were very quick to hack open the Apple TV devices and install extra codecs and cavernous hard drives, there wasn’t the same hue and cry about an SDK - yet in truth this is what we really need to see. The Apple TV, however, represents a much more long term play than the iPhone or iPod. These pocket devices will get you to use their file formats, their networks - H.264, m4v, iTunes which will all play very nicely on the Apple TV.
The article on FastCompany describes a lot of situations where they think Apple’s hand has been forced but I think that’s a very naive position. Apple’s early adopter iPhone “credit” of $100 was obviously planned but held back on. Likewise, the SDK was planned but all things take time and it probably wasn’t the hollers of a few self-centred geeks to make the difference. It describes how other manufacturers have a touch screen phone, which is true, but for the most part they’re disasters. It describes a world where it was hard (or illegal) to get music onto MP3 players before the iPod (despite the existence of CD rippers for half a decade) and it puts a lot of faith in subscription music - something which, despite being readily available, not many people seem to want (to be honest, does the analyst think that Apple couldn’t implement subscriptions?). The final straw really has to be the contention that the iPhone is the “remote control” for your Apple TV.
I think the lack of enthusiasm comes from cautiousness and I’m not going to suggest that said analyst has invested heavily in Microsoft, Creative, TiVo, Real or any of the other players in this market who have a lot to lose if Apple maintains it’s lead. Note I said lead. We’re not talking about a monopoly (like, for instance, the desktop operating system monopoly held by Microsoft). Yes, it’s probably correct that Apple is likely overvalued at over $180 per share but the same is certainly true of Google as well. Earnings and assets don’t need to add up to share price as the latter is more an indication of how people perceive the value to be. If you’re able to sell Apple at $190 it’s because someone values it at that price which means it’s that valuable. It’s a supply and demand market aside from the considerations of assets. How could anyone but the market put a value on the turnaround Apple has made in the last decade? In May of 2008 we’re going to be celebrating the tenth year of iMac. iPod has been out since October of 2001 and yet half a decade later Apple commands the lions share of the online music business. How could any analyst make these sorts of realistic guesses? Would he look at the Apple TV and declare it a flop or would he take into account the reception the iPod received in 2001 as an indicator?
What the analyst misses is the win-win situations. It’s true that Apple makes a lot of money from AT&T and presumably O2 with iPhone subscriptions but it’s important to realise that Apple also makes money from each and every iPhone sale. Similarly, the Apple TV may not be resounding success right now but at the same time it’s not a loss per unit (like XBox) or selling at a loss-making discount to get Amazon sales ranking (like the recent run on the Zune).
So, Mac, iPod/iTunes, iPhone, AppleTV - the four legs of Apple’s strategy. Are we sure there are only four legs on this chair? You’d like to wager on that?
As reported in Computerworld:
In a brief submitted to federal court, state antitrust regulators dismissed companies such as Google and Mozilla Corp. and technologies such as AJAX and software as a service as piddling players that pose no threat to Microsoft’s monopoly in the operating system and browser markets.
…
“In spite of the advantages of arguably superior products and missteps by Microsoft, Apple has been unable to raise its share of the worldwide installed base of PCs, hovering near 3%,”
…
“Competition in the market for Intel-based PC operating systems has not been restored by the five-year term of the Final Judgment,” he concluded.
Not quite but it’s amazing that Microsoft and the DoJ are both appealing against the decision to review the monopoly ruling and see if the restorative measures decided by the DoJ were sufficient. Evidently they were not, as the US states agree.
Does anyone think there has realistically been a change in the market? Is it still not dominated by one player?
The article The REAL Reason the Linux Community Didn’t Come Up With the iPhone starts off with an interesting premise.
Lately, there seems to an explosion of interest in Open Source.
Sure. As much as there has been an explosion in interest in the last decade.
The article is really a rebuttal of a piece about how Open Source rarely innovates. The argument wobbles between support for “wisdom of crowds” to holding up Android and OpenMoko as sterling examples of how the Linux crowd could have come up with the iPhone.
I think, sadly, the author missed the point.
Open Source rarely innovates. I say rarely because the few Open Source projects that have shown some real innovation are usually the itch of one or two smart guys.
I’ve always considered laziness to be a very important quality in someone. The desire to get things done with the minimum amount of work is central to my own work ethic. I want results and I will work for them but I have a hard time starting any piece of work where I cannot see the value in it. (Sending emailed reports is one area that is pointless when there are web tools which generate them. Go click a bloody button)
Some of the best IT guys I know are excessively lazy. They’ll work solidly for 3 days to create a script that will shave five minutes off their work day or remove some piece of work that is boring or otherwise undesirable.
The developers behind most of the Open Source apps out there are similarly lazy. They work hard until the functionality is good enough and focus on areas like stability and when they have achieved their goal, the momentum decreases. Areas of development, like user interface, often are left alone because these guys are hardcore techies. Editing text files is easy. Why should there be a nice GUI? They’ve created apps like vi or emacs to simplify an aspect of their life - it’s not meant to be taken as a life philosophy.
Read the comments. Count how many Linux-philes deride the Mac because of eye-candy without realising that eye-candy in many cases is responsible for the usability of functionality.
What the author misses is that while Linux and Mac OS X share a distant ancestry in that they’re both based on crufty old UNIX designs from 20 years ago, Mac OS X has innovated in ways that are not reliant on the underpinnings of the operating system. Through frameworks they’ve made some great functionality available to developers who want to concentrate on the business logic. Their frameworks inspire people to create new and fabulous.
This is why Android, despite being touted as an answer to iPhone, looks like ass. Might also be important to note that while it is now Open Source, it wasn’t OS during development and there remain a lot of questions about how it will be presented. It’s not shipping for another year on any handsets (if indeed it gains traction) so it’s ultimately vapourware.
Similarly, the innovation apparent in OpenMoko seems to be routed in the rounded edges and the fact it comes in two colours. There’s certainly zero innovation in the current design and based on the fact it can’t make calls or send SMS messages currently (in the GUI) it’s going to be a long while. A developer picking up OpenMoko will be saddled with hardware that barely works. His time and energy is going to be based entirely on working with others to overcome the current shortcomings and get the device to the state it needs to be to compete with the most run of the mill mobile phones. Trotting it out as an example of how the Open Source innovated is very poor show. You can Photoshop/GIMP all the screenshots you want. It currently doesn’t do any of that. (if I draw a picture of a manned rocketship on the surface of Mars, is it the same as actually building it? No, didn’t think so).
The virtue of the iPhone is not in the fact it has a phone or an internet communications device but that people actually find it easier to use. They think it looks lovely, they want to paw it and stroke it. You don’t think “looks” or “eye candy” are important?
Why has the white/orange model of OpenMoko sold out?
The whole article is so inconsistent that it actually makes me cross, gives me irritation.
However, the corporate for profit model is simply NOT how Open Source works or wants to work. In fact, innovation is not usually a profitable undertaking. Consumers fear change. What they love is incremental improvements and businesses like releasing new versions of the same thing - it helps drive sales. The only ones who are free to innovate are those with nothing to lose - like the Open Source world, for example.
Innovation is not usually a profitable undertaking?
If Innovation is, as the author describes, the very lifeblood of Open Source, then where the hell is the innovation in Open Source? The author is quick to correlate “borrowed” or bought technology with Open Source.
It’s one thing to point at Mac OS X and claim the GUI was invented at PARC and Engelbart invented the mouse - but the innovation present in the original system in the first Macintosh was so far ahead of what Xerox were offering and what Microsoft would eventually deliver that it beggared belief. The reason - a couple of really really REALLY smart guys at Apple who had a vision. The PARC design couldn’t overlap windows but the Mac developers didn’t know that. So their version had overlapping windows. What the author misses is that Apple paid Xerox for access to their lab. There was no Open Source involved, these were both companies investing in innovative research.
I’m not a critic of Open Source; quite the opposite. Open Source is incredibly important in establishing the fundamentals of a system. The guys in Infurious are very motivated to feed back patches into the frameworks they are using in order to build apps. We use Linux, we use BSD, we use MySQL, we use Apache, we use gcc - Open Source is at our core.
I am a critic of revisionism however. Trying to paint IBM as a proponent of Open Source 50 years ago is silly, as is claiming that Xerox PARC was the result of open source philosophy.
It’s a silly article.
