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Peeve Farm
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  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.


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Monday, March 4, 2002
13:45 - Beef Makes the Crust (and software makes the difference)
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-000016167mar04.story?coll=la%2Dheadlines%2Dtech

(top) link
Jim Heid of the LA Times casts a critical eye on whether a Wintel/XP machine or a Mac is the better deal, factoring in each platform's natural advantages and its disadvantageous blunders.

The iMac includes AppleWorks for word processing and business tasks. There's also Apple's suite of "digital hub" programs: iTunes for playing music and burning CDs, iPhoto for managing digital pictures, iMovie for editing video and, on the $1799 iMac I tested, iDVD for designing and burning DVDs. These programs share a similar, straightforward design.

The Gateway 500SE comes with the titanic Microsoft Word as well as Works, Microsoft's Swiss Army Knife program; Money 2002, a personal finance program; Encarta, an encyclopedia; Streets and Trips, a digital road atlas; and Picture It Photo, an image-editing program with more features than Apple's iPhoto.

The Gateway's digital hub includes Microsoft's Windows Media Player and Windows Movie Maker and the MusicMatch Jukebox MP3 program. These programs lack the features and elegance of Apple's i-ware. Windows Media Player can't play MP3 tracks, Windows Movie Maker can't record finished videos to tape, and MusicMatch Jukebox has a brain-addling user interface.

The Gateway has the edge for productivity, business and image-editing tasks, while the iMac wins for music, movie editing and DVD creation.

Pretty fair comparison, especially considering how even-handed the rest of the article is, and how rife with "If Operating Systems Were..."-esque metaphor, such as his claim that "If Windows XP feels like ABC, Mac OS X feels like HBO", when it comes to how commercial the operating experience is and how subtly that commercialism is presented. (Is that accurate, though, that WMP can't play MP3 files at all?)

As for the claim that iPhoto is more limited than competing products, well, yeah, it is. I think there's indeed some truth to the rumors that Apple deliberately kept its image-editing feature palette small, so as to avoid a confrontation with Adobe over the potential buyerhood of Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. But iPhoto is, after all, only a 1.0 version, and the rumors are already flying about an imminent point update which will add an "E-mail" sharing option as well as a few more image manipulation tools. After all, Adobe doesn't get on Gateway's case for bundling Picture It Photo. So I fully expect that iPhoto 2, if not an earlier update, will be something to be reckoned with. And for now, as we've already covered, iPhoto's strengths aren't in image manipulation; they're in management, organization, presentation, and the simplicity of ordering prints and books-- areas in which most pundits have found that it shines.

It's the software that makes the difference, I guess is the moral. If that's true (and my experience last night with iMovie seems to bear it out), Apple's hitting its marks pretty well.

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© Brian Tiemann