| Sunday, June 22, 2003 |
23:15 - Tomorrow
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First let's get all the caveats out of the way. I'm sure that tomorrow, The Steve's keynote at WWDC, which will be broadcast to the Apple Stores to be shown live on the big-screen theaters, will not disclose anything particularly interesting, despite all rumors to the contrary. Oh, sure, maybe it will go over some planned features for 10.3/Panther; maybe he'll even give out some beta CDs to attendees. But no miraculous new hardware. Or if he does mention hardware, it'll only be to acknowledge existence of the PPC 970, which until now has only had the most sidelong of confirmations from IBM that it "could" be used in Macs, despite the fact that its Altivec-alike unit is pound-for-pound the spitting image of the one in Motorola's G4s, and not a word from Apple itself. But because IBM last year had said that even the most optimistic estimates put quantity 970 shipments in late summer or fall of 2003, and we're only in June now, surely there won't be any actual machines announced tomorrow. I'm sure it'll turn out that the leaked spec graphic from Thursday night was just a practical joke by some swing-shift web-goon whose job was immediately put up for auction, even on a weekend, in swift and terrible retribution from on high for this blowing of any surprise Steve might have had up his sleeve, getting everybody's expectations all pumped up for nothing. I'm sure it means there won't be any such animals unveiled tomorrow. The Boxes O' Mystery in the Apple Stores will surely turn out to be advertising materials, boxes of carefully-guarded-under-pain-of-death leaflets and flyers and cardboard mock-ups to stand around the retail floors and wow the visitors with their Ive-ian visual goodness, even though they have no actual physical substance and can't be bought or anything. Absolute secrecy, we all know, is required for the pallets full of the tools of whatever Apple's newest misguided ad campaign will turn out to be tomorrow. Or maybe they will be 970-based Power Macs, but there will only be like ten of them per store-- an experimental pilot run, hot off the fab from IBM, squeezed out in acceptance trials even under woefully inadequate yield numbers just so that Apple could have something-- anything-- to sell this week. I'm sure they'll cost like $6000 each, commanding a terrific price premium, being a super-exclusive limited edition whose purchase will be up for lottery among the clamoring throngs in the Apple Stores and at WWDC, where the attendees have all spent at least $1500 each just to be there, and so what's another $6000 between friends? The rest of us mortals will have to gaze from afar, and morosely click open the Apple Store online, there to find the very spec graphic that was at the center of this brouhaha Thursday night, but attached to Power Mac G5 models with astronomical prices and mocking "Shipping September '03" tags on them. Or maybe they will actually be shipping in quantity, through some amazing miracle, but they'll suck-- they'll be bottlenecked by some idiocy of motherboard design, where sure, the chips will run at 2GHz, and the CPU bus will run at half that, but the PCI bridge will be fatally flawed or the ATA controller will be some cheap-ass off-the-shelf thing that keeps defaulting to PIO mode 2, or the OS will heavily depend on double-length integer math, which Altivec doesn't support natively, so performance will suck, even if they manage to get the 64-bit "Sméagol" build of 10.2 out tomorrow as well. These über-honking dual-G5s at 2GHz will probably resemble a 700MHz Pentium III at best. Oh, and they'll probably come with last year's ATI and NVidia cards, or have outdated drivers, or all the game companies will simultaneously announce the cessation of all game development for the Mac platform tomorrow, rendering the new machines useless for any and all purposes under the Sun.
Now that that's all out of the way:
I will be at the Valley Fair Apple Store tomorrow morning between 9:00 and 10:00, in eager anticipation of the keynote being broadcast to the video screen inside. I will also be carrying my AmEx, which to this date has been used for almost nothing except buying Macs (the one exception to which CapLion knows about); house or no house, I've still got plenty of justification for spending whatever money these new things are going to cost. I've still got plenty of space left in the ol' home equity. Plus I need one. Yeah, that's right. My current machine was brand-spanking-new in January of 2000. That's over three years old, an age that Wintel PCs in this day and age are lucky to see intact. Yet who can blame Macs for seeming slow, when someone is always around to come up and say, "Damn, Macs are slow! Why, I played with one the other day, and it was slow as hell!" And I'd ask, "What model was it?" Thinking, Bondi Blue iMac? Barbie-purse iBook? Blue & White G3? And he'd answer, "Oh, that beige one downstairs." Meaning a Performa 6400 from 1996. Well, hell yeah it'll be slow! But look, it's still perfectly serviceable, right? Still indispensable to its department? Nobody ever throws a Mac away-- they keep it around until it's hobbling around on a cane, as much for sentimental reasons as for the fact that they've come to depend on it being there and working the same way every day, year after year. Small wonder people always have the impression that Macs are slow-- the average Mac that the non-Mac person gets to play with is like five years old. And chugging along strong.
My G4/450 is in need of a new keyboard, and its power supply fan has been replaced once in defiance of the warranty stipulations, but other than that it's running and jumping like an adolescent puppy. Should I succumb to the siren call of a new machine with twice as many CPUs each running three to five times faster than corresponding G4s clock-for-clock, and then again five times faster by clock frequency than my current machine, plus 64-bit benefits and PCI-X and Serial ATA and no CPU bus bottleneck and DDR RAM, I still won't be able to bring myself to just hurl my 450 onto the dung-heap. I'll have to take it to work and set it up in the lab as a server, or in the corner of my desk as a test workhorse, or put it in the closet to stream MP3s over AirPort-- something to keep it happy while it lives out its days, something to help it feel useful as it ages. The digital equivalent of a rocking chair and a pocketknife and a nice big pile of whittlin' wood.
If it forgets who I am and tells me to get off its damn lawn, I'll do so right away. It's earned the right.
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