g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

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Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
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Tuesday, January 10, 2006
13:20 - So here's the skinny

(top) link
Let's see if we can recap what's gone down...

First of all, iLife '06, whose major improvement appears to be iWeb, which isn't so much an HTML editor as a component-driven content manager for your .Mac web space. It's got built-in blogging/podcasting/photoblogging stuff, and while it all looks very pretty, I'm skeptical of the layout quirks evident in their blogging software, and I don't doubt that .Mac blogs will become as easily identifiable as default Blogspot templates. Which is no bad thing, I guess, but it means I'm not about to jump to it.

Meanwhile, iPhoto has boosted its speed and added stuff like calendars and greeting cards, as well as improving the printed quality of the books (good). And GarageBand has a "Podcast Recording Studio" with some interesting sound engineering features that I'll have to look into. They're trying to grab hold of this whole "podcasting" thing with a vengeance—someone else coined the name, but by gum, Apple isn't about to skip over this mindshare windfall.


There's nothing hugely new in iPod/iTunes-land, but there's this thing: a radio tuner/remote.

Just plug in your iPod Radio Remote and select "Radio" from the main iPod menu. Tuning takes place right there in the color display with your Click Wheel, just as you'd set a classic analog radio. Easily mark a favorite station for quick access later, and switch between favorite stations using either the iPod or the remote.

If you're listening to a station that supports the Radio Data System (RDS) standard, you can even see song title/artist or radio station information in the iPod display.* The iPod Radio Remote supports FM stations from 87.5 to 107.9MHz (in both the US and European standards) and 76 to 90MHz (the Japanese standard). You can switch between the different standards when traveling.

Cool. So for fifty bucks, that's one fewer perennial complaint that can be leveled by the competitors. Somehow I doubt they'll sell one of these to every iPod owner, too—which will retroactively show up all those complaints as being rather gratuitous, as I suspect them to be: if you've got all your music on your iPod, why would you care about the radio? (Notably, AM is missing from this product—so you won't be getting your favorite 24/7 news or harsh talk station on your iPod; if you can't tear yourself away from NPR to get in your car and go to work, you'll have to miss out. Or—wait! The car has a radio!)

So that's all that. Now we've got the Intel Macs: the iMac and the MacBook Pro, neither of which look any different from their predecessors. Not even an Intel Inside sticker.


Both have Intel Core, and both are being rated as several times faster than their predecessors (up to 3.2x on the iMac, up to 4x on the MacBook). Pretty wild numbers. But will people actually see these kinds of improvements? After all, there's no native software for these machines yet... is there?

Well, that's what the real big news in all this is: Apple's been steadily and stealthily rolling out Intel support into all their software, so that Tiger 10.4.4 is now a Universal Binary—and so is iLife '06 and the new iWork. Presumably, because Steve said the entire Mac line will be moved over to Intel by the end of the calendar year, we'll see all the Pro apps come out in native versions along with the revised Power Mac (or whatever they'll call it—since the PowerBook became the MacBook to indicate the dropping of the PowerPC, the Power Mac will have to become the Mac Mac. Right?) when they're slated to arrive in March. And the upshot of all Apple's efforts over the past few years to get everybody onto Apple software for their content creation and everyday computing lifestyle (moving us onto Safari from IE, and Mail from Outlook Express, and all the iLife apps from... whatever there was before them) means that we get all of our software in native formats for no more than the usual upgrade costs—and in the case of all the apps that come with OS X, free. If you've already got Tiger, and if you already do most of your stuff using the built-in Apple apps, you won't have to spend any time in Rosetta. That's pretty dang cool if you ask me.

Now, although surprising companies like Quark (!) and Microsoft have announced officially that their next releases will be Universal Binaries, Photoshop isn't on the list—and apparently its emulated performance under Rosetta is nothing very inspiring. So that explains why Apple will be able to continue selling Power Macs (slower than the iMacs by an acknowledged huge amount, and yet selling for twice as much, not including monitor) for the next few months, or until Adobe decides to commit to its own fat binary. But I don't think that'll be a long time in coming. Just from the brief look I've had at Lightroom, Adobe is going head-down straight at the Mac market in the pro content creation field; Lightroom, after all, is available for Mac first, and its interface is very Mac-centric, to the point where I wonder whether they plan to try to port its interface widgets to Windows, or leave some features out that wouldn't translate well. This kind of commitment to the Mac market I haven't seen since Photoshop went cross-platform, and I'm thinking it must represent some kind of new rivalry (perhaps born of the Aperture mess in and of itself) where Adobe plays the part of the third-party upstart taking on Microsoft's applications on the Windows platform, and Apple plays Microsoft. Adobe's learned how to use all of Apple's development tools and go-fast widgets every bit as well as Apple has, and now we see that they're actually serious about using them too, evidently seeing the Mac market as being worth winning. That's bound to be good news no matter how you look at it. It's far better than having Adobe abandon the Mac in disgust (which, arguably, would kill the platform dead).

So, about those Intel Macs. There's no FireWire 800 on them. Why? Because the Intel Core chipset doesn't support it? They certainly could have fit it in if they'd wanted to, especially on the iMac. Is it the same reason for dropping FireWire on the iPod? Not space concerns, but the judicious shaving-off of features that nobody uses? I've been hearing that FireWire 800 is essentially as widely used as the undocumented "Geek Port" on the old BeBox: it's been there for people to use, but nobody's taken the plunge aside from a few external hard drive makers. Certainly if they're going to only support one standard and not the other, they'd have to opt for FW400, because it's the one all the camcorders and DV bridges support. It's too bad that FW800 couldn't have been implemented with a backwards-compatible connector, because then we wouldn't be having this conversation.

The new iMacs are exactly the same, feature-wise, as the old ones—same screen sizes, and even the same price points. Interestingly, you can still buy the old ones at the Apple Store, for the same prices as the new ones; I guess that's in case you really need those native third-party apps and don't want to wait or upgrade. I hope people who aren't in that boat won't get fooled into buying the wrong ones. If I were an Apple sales droid, I'd be careful to make sure the customer knows the score. It's not even an upsell, as the price is the same.

Same goes for the MacBooks—same price points as the old PowerBooks, but they only come in one size (15.4"). If you want a 17" or 12", you still gotta go for a G4, at 1/4x the speed, but the same price as ever. I hope they rectify this situation soon with some appropriately-sized MacBooks to replace the entire old line.

But the new laptops' feature set is impressive. Bluetooth is standard, as is AirPort and gigabit Ethernet; there's also now an iSight, so the laptop can do all the FrontRow stuff that the iMac can, and comes with that cute little remote. It has the backlit keyboard and standard DVD burner. It has the aforementioned magnetic power connector, which I think is just the bee's knees. It has SATA drives (hopefully they're more durable than the ones in the 12" PowerBooks—every single person I know who bought one of those has had the hard drive die). It has optical audio in/out, and its dual-link DVI port can drive the 30-inch monitor. In other words, until the Power Macs get here, this is your new high-end Mac. And at $1999-$2499, it's hardly extravagant.

I'd convinced myself quite effectively that I didn't need a laptop; after I gave away my old iBook I haven't missed it. This development makes it hard to stay true to my resolution, though.

We're now officially in the Time of Confusing Product Lineups, as a quick look at the online Apple Store will attest; from now until the entire lineup is on Intel, there'll be more Mac models available than there have been since the days of the Performas with their wonky numbering schemes. But from the look of how they've managed this transition, being well practiced in the art by now, if that's the worst we have to put up with I'll consider it a resounding success.


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© Brian Tiemann