Microsoft 9, Apple 1: Apple Wins!

TechCrunch has an article today which points out that Microsoft will be shipping 9 – nine! – versions of Windows 8. This is amazing to me, especially when I reflect that Apple has only shipped 9 total releases of OS X (I'm not counting server versions from either company). It gets even better when you look at the cost of upgrading. While I'm fairly well-versed in Windows use and troubleshooting, I don't keep up with all the versions and their differences, so I was a somewhat surprised by the following quote from the article:

Windows 7 Starter and Basic isn’t sold directly to consumers but they can still be found online for less than $100.

So the most economical versions aren't even available to your average consumer, who won't know to go online to try to find these cheap versions, and that may be a good thing considering what's left out. Windows Home Premium – the cheapest version of Windows available from Microsoft – costs $120 and doesn't include a lot of features such as XP Mode, which would seem to be something your average XP user upgrading to Windows 7 would want. Apple on the other hand charges $30 bucks (these days anyway) and only ships one version of each release. And yes, Apple killed support for PowerPC code by discontinuing Rosetta in Lion, something that I think should have continued at least through 10.7. But I also doubt that Microsoft would have included XP Mode in Windows 7 if Vista hadn't been such a disaster.

But beyond that, how is your average consumer or small business owner supposed to figure out what version of Windows they should buy? Even if someone explains the differences between the different versions to them, they're not likely to truly understand if or how those differences are going to affect them unless they're reasonably tech savvy. Ultimately they're likely to buy the cheapest version and hope for the best.

I encountered this about a year ago when helping a client who's a small business owner get a network of several PCs up and going. It was an interesting project because the machines were all running different systems, from XP to Vista to Windows 7. Among the XP machines was one running Professional and one running Home. I don't recall the exact issue (there were lots of issues and they all kind of run together in my brain at this point but it was a pretty basic networking function) but I couldn't get the XP Home machine to do what he needed it to. All the other machines, including the one running XP Pro were handling this particular function, whatever it was, just fine.

After beating my head against a wall for a while, I finally called a friend of mine who's a PC god and asked him if he knew what was up. Sure, he said, you're running XP Home and it doesn't support that or a bunch of other networking features. As I said earlier, I don't keep up with the differences between versions, and all my experience with XP up to that point had been with the Pro version. I figured the Home version didn't support Exchange servers or something like that.

When I explained to my client, who's also a friend, that his only real option short of purchasing a new PC was to purchase XP Pro and install it on the machine (it didn't meet the requirements for Windows 7 and there was no way I was going to recommend Vista) he didn't want to accept it. He had spent a lot of money on that machine when he bought it, it ran XP, his other XP machine worked, so it should be able to work too. Like all small business owners he's on a budget and views everything from a bottom line perspective. He's also a good boss who would rather give a bonus or a raise to one of his workers than spend money on a machine he's already spent money on. I tried to explain to him, as I have many times over the years, that he wouldn't have this issue if he bought Macs but the prices freak him out no matter how often I've explained the savings on tech support. Of course, he's my friend and wasn't paying me much, so maybe he figured it was worth it.

But I see him as pretty typical. He has a mishmash of machines because he's bought them one at a time, usually when he added to his staff. At such times he went to the nearby Office Depot and bought the cheapest machine that would do what he thought he needed. The profusion of Windows versions just confused him, the salesperson couldn't explain it to him, and so he just picked a machine from a company he was familiar with that fit his budget. Yes, he could have hired me or someone else to advise him, but spending money on someone just to tell him what machine to buy isn't in his nature – that's what the store salesman is for, right? And he could have read reviews but how many would he have to read before he understood what he would and wouldn't be able to do? Again, something he's not likely to do. Eventually he decided to just buy a new Windows 7 machine and donate the old one so it all worked out, but not after a lot of useless hassle.

When I compare all this to Apple and OS X, it's clear why the Mac's market share has been rising so steadily. Lots of people claim it's because of the popularity of the iPhone and Apple's "coolness factor" but I don't believe that explains it all. With Apple you have one company and one OS version that does everything. The easily understood product line helps as well. Throw in the Apple Stores, with their well trained salespeople and Geniuses, and you've got a much better, much more understandable, and much less frustrating experience. Not having to find out sometime later that your OS is crippled in some way is just icing on the cake. All of this in my opinion is more than worth any price premium (perceived or real) on the machines themselves. After all, the first time you upgrade your OS it's going to run you a a hundred bucks or more for a non-crippled version. As the TechCrunch article says, no wonder Windows is so heavily pirated.

Applehoo!? Don't think so.

Recently Forbes ran an article putting forth reasons why Apple should buy Yahoo. They make a couple of  good points, but others are less compelling. For example, while I agree that Apple has a lot of work to do when it comes to mobile advertising I don't see the attraction of buying a company to get it's admittedly "demoralized" (Forbes' term, not mine) sales people. These guys have been getting their clocks cleaned by Google for years now. You could argue that it's not really their fault (Yahoo lost it's way, took it's eye off the ball, etc) but if they're that good they'd either be tearing it up for Yahoo or working somewhere else.

The article goes on to say "all the big mobile players in the future will need a core stable of amazing mobile apps to differentiate" and that Apple for some reason needs to own these apps, and therefore Yahoo! Finance, maps, etc. could fill these gaps. Apparently Apple won't be able to differentiate themselves from Android if they're still using Google Maps. Or maybe the implication is that Google will stop letting Apple use these services? Either way I don't see it. Google Maps is on iOS and Android but everyone seems to know which is which, and as long as Apple sells a buttload of iOS devices, Google et al will want to be on them. After all, Google created Android mostly to save it's ad revenue. Just as Microsoft keeps making Office for the Mac, Google and others will continue on iOS because it makes them money. And let's not forget all the iOS developers out there, coming up with who knows what.

Next is search engines, and why Apple needs something like Yahoo! as another back-end to Siri (in addition to Wolfram Alpha). But does Apple really need to buy Yahoo! to do this? As long as Google Search and Bing stay around, Apple will always be able to make a deal with one or the other. The iOS market is just too much to pass up. And again, Yahoo! has been getting it's clock cleaned in search by Google for a long time now.

The article starts to make more sense when it gets around to patents and payments. Yahoo! apparently has 1000 patents that could be used against Facebook, Android, and Microsoft. I don't know the details of these patents or how useful they may be, but Apple did just shell out billions for a part of Nortel's patent portfolio. As for payments, Apple is obviously going to get into mobile payments and while (as the article admits) "Yahoo! isn't a force in payments today," the CEO had stints at PayPal and Visa. And Apple has been known to buy companies for their talent.

But we're talking about an approximately $18 billion buyout here. If the CEO is that great, Apple could quite possibly lure him away for the right pay package, especially if Yahoo! continues its downward slide. And there would have to be some real humdingers in that patent portfolio to justify the price tag.

Ultimately though, Apple won't buy Yahoo! because Apple, when it buys a company, buys up-and-comers, not has beens. If you look at their acquisitions, most are companies that almost no one had ever heard of before Apple bought them. So Apple might buy a search company, or a company that makes a particular app, or a payment processor, but it will be a relatively small concern with great talent and/or a new twist on the way they go about it. And in all likelihood no one will have heard of them before.

Up-and-comers, not has beens (or maybe I should say down-and-outers, though that seems a little harsh). So, Applehoo!? Not going to happen.

Brown crayon and other Mountain Lion observations

In my younger days when I did a lot of backcountry hiking and camping I actually observed mountain lions on a few occasions, albeit from a safe distance. I generally treat beta OS releases the same way – I'm happy to let others jump in and risk their data and sanity. But a client who's a developer offered to let me spend some time with the 10.8 Mountain Lion Developer Preview on an otherwise pristine Mac. Since I wouldn't be risking my system or data, I gladly accepted. I didn't look into everything – I don't do instant messages/chats and I'm not a big iCal user, so I didn't spend much time with the new Messages app or the rebranded Calendar, for example. In any case, my first impressions, in no particular order, are as follows.

I use the Notes feature in Mail quite a bit, so I was interested in the new separate Notes app. I had thought that it was replacing the feature in Mail, but that's not the case – Notes is still in Mail, crappy font and all. The two don't integrate in any way that I could determine.

The Notes interface, like iCal (or Calendar in 10.8), uses the visual analogy of a real-world notepad, complete with the torn-off sheet remnants at the top of the page. Is the torn sheet look really so compelling that we need it here as well? The default font ("Noteworthy") is much better than that used by the Notes feature in Mail, but is still a handwritten-style font. To the left of the Note window is a sidebar which lists your notes. The name of the selected note is circled in what looks like brown crayon. Not sure what that's about, but it's taking this analog analogy too far. I'm aware that I'm using a computer to take notes. Is this level of visual connection to paper-and-pen (or crayon) necessary?

I also noticed a couple of oddities in using Notes. First, apparently you can't change the name of your note short of changing the first line of the note itself. Maybe it's just me, but I think I should be able to change the name of the note (leaving the first line of the note unchanged) by clicking on the note name once it's been selected, as you can with file names in the Finder and playlist names in iTunes. Granted, the same issue exists in the Notes feature in Mail, but you would think a full blown application would offer something this basic. In addition, I had read that you could "pin" a note to your desktop, somewhat like Stickies (which is also still around in 10.8 for some reason). You can do this, it's just not readily apparent, or at least it wasn't to me. I tried dragging it to the desktop, as you can do with tabs in Safari, but that didn't work. There was no visual cue for how to do this and no menu item – indeed, if I hadn't read about it, I wouldn't have realized it was possible. What you do of course is double click on the note name, something I figured out eventually but should have been more obvious.

Completely by accident, I discovered something else in Notes that I hadn't known about – if you type command - period a scrollable list of word suggestions pops up. This apparently already exists in TextEdit but I hadn't been aware of it. It works in TextEdit and Notes, but not in Mail or Reminders for some reason.

Safari has some changes to the interface that I truly don't like. First, I hate the combined address/search field. That may just be me being set in my ways, but I like keeping the two separate. Since Safari doesn't know when I begin typing whether I'm entering a URL or a search query, the autocomplete function is less specific and therefore less useful. I would be okay with it if I could switch back to the way it was before, but there's no apparent way to do that. Also, combining the fields seems to have killed off the Snapback feature, something I use all the time. Again, I didn't see a way to bring it back. Second, tabs now take up the entire width of the Safari window and the results are just ugly. If you have only two or three tabs open, each tab is ridiculously wide. It does let you see more of a long page name, but when you have three tabs with page names like Apple, Google, and YouTube the names appear in the middle of the tabs with large amounts of blank space to either side. It just looks bad. Finally, I don't like the new Reader button, which rather than being a subtle grey icon at the end of the address field is now a large, bright blue monstrosity that I find distracting.

I've said a lot of negative stuff here, and at least some if it is just my own curmudgeonliness. But there are some good things. First, the release feels very solid – I didn't have any crashes and everything seemed to work well. Also, there's a definite feeling of a speed increase. Safari, the App Store, and iTunes all seem to launch and load much more quickly than in Lion. Of course, this is running off of a hard drive that has nothing else on it, and in the case of iTunes it didn't have a library of media to load. But even so, I think the OS is snappier than Lion. Loading internet content (in Safari, the App Store, and iTunes) was definitely faster on the same connection than a similar machine running 10.7.2.

There is also a minor change to Dashboard. When you click on the plus sign at the bottom left, the available widgets now appear in full screen grid, similar to LaunchPad, rather than in a horizontally scrollable bar at the bottom of the screen. I think this is an improvement, but I don't really care that much because I don't use Dashboard.

Overall, I'm happy with the responsiveness and speed of 10.8. But much of the look and feel in the included apps as well as some of the functionality leave me disappointed. I keep reminding myself that this is just a preview and a lot can change between now and late summer when the final version ships. Here's hoping someone at Apple agrees with me on at least some of this and changes are made.

At the very least, can we get rid of the brown crayon?

What's in a name?

The big news today is the meetings Apple had with a few journalists and bloggers (or has Apple decided that bloggers, or at least John Gruber, now qualify as journalists?) where they introduced them to Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, which in theory will ship this summer. The even bigger news, to me at least, is that Apple will be updating the Mac OS on a yearly schedule so that it parallels the iOS releases. Despite all the talk of the merging of features between iOS and the Mac OS, I don't think anybody saw this coming. I'm still trying to get around to getting a Magic Trackpad so that I can get with the program when it comes to gestures. I mostly use my pre-MagicMouse MacPro, and my aging MacBook Pro's trackpad doesn't support three- or four-finger gestures. In light of the new announcement, I think I'll just wait for 10.8 and learn it all then as I'm sure there'll be new and changed gestures in the new OS.

But I've been wondering for a while where Apple was going to go with their big cat OS names after Lion. After all, the Lion is the king of the jungle so where do you go from there without it seeming like a step down? Naming the new system Mountain Lion is a bit of a dodge, just as naming 10.6 Snow Leopard was. But if Apple is switching to a once-a-year release schedule, they have the additional problem of what to number the OS after the 10.9 (Sea Lion? White Lion, or maybe just Kimba?) release. Back in the days when we were waiting for Leopard, Apple went past the normal dot-nine numbering convention by releasing 10.4.10 and even 10.4.11, so I guess they could call the presumed 2014 release OS X 10.10, but it seems kind of unwieldy from a marketing perspective. OS XI also lacks the flair of OS X. God forbid that they start naming them after the year that they're released (OS X '13 anyone?)

They do have other options. They could drop the numbering altogether (for marketing purposes anyway – I imagine some kind of numbering system would remain for technical purposes) and just go with OS X and a name (Mountain Lion or whatever). If they go this route they would still have to solve the naming situation, perhaps switching to wild animals in general (OS X Cobra? OS X Grizzly? I also came up with OS X Badger, but that would seem to have been more appropriate in the beginning of OS X when Apple seemed kind of backed into a corner.).

But the most likely scenario, to me at least, is that they tie the names of OS X and iOS together to emphasize the connection between the two and the parallel development schedule. iOS to this point has named it's major releases with simple numbers, iOS 4, iOS 5, etc. Considering that no one but us old Mac codgers remember System 6 or System 7, there's no worry with using the name OS X 6. No one's going to confuse that with the operating system from their old Mac SE. The concurrent numbering system will make it easy for users to connect the two – if they're using iOS 6 on their iPad they should use OS X 6 on their Mac to stay up to date. It's simple and it could help drive OS X sales as well as sales of Macs. It also allows Apple to retain it's investment in the branding of OS X. Eventually of course they'll reach iOS/OS X 10, but by that time most people will have forgotten, or will be able to ignore, that the X originally represented the number ten.

Of course, I'm not a genius marketer, so there's undoubtedly other, and quite possibly better, options. Apple does have genius marketers, and they could come up with something brilliant that leaves my ramblings looking as pedestrian as they probably are. So it's conceivable, even likely, that we will have a new naming/numbering convention that bears no relation to anything I've said here, and this whole post can go into the great bitbucket in the sky.

But personally, I'm holding out for Kimba.

Computer Literacy in the Age of the iPad

Back in the early 1980s when personal computers were still a relative rarity in most homes and numerous platforms (Apple II, IBM PC, TRS-80, Commodore, Amiga, Atari, etc.) proliferated, people talked a lot about "computer literacy." Kids needed to achieve this skill in school if they were to succeed in life and adults were advised to get with it or be left behind. The problem was that no one was sure exactly what computer literacy meant. About the only thing that seemed obvious was that you needed to know how to type. I was in high school at the time, and the number of males taking typing classes increased dramatically. In those days, secretaries typed up whatever their (usually male) bosses needed and almost all secretaries were women. Indeed, there were many executives who proudly stated that they didn't know how to type and didn't need to since they had someone to do that for them. My family was a little different in that my mother insisted that all her kids, regardless of gender, learn to type. She wasn't looking forward to a day when everyone had a computer on their desk (indeed she was generally baffled and even a bit scared of computers), she was looking back to her college days when people (mostly males) who couldn't type had to hire people to type up their papers.

But beyond typing, what did computer literacy mean? Was it learning to program, and if so, in what language? Was it knowing how a computer operated? Knowing how to fix or troubleshoot it? Or maybe it was learning to use the predominant software of the day (WordStar, Visicalc, etc.) or learning the various operating systems? There didn't seem to be a cohesive strategy for imparting or even defining this nebulous skill.

While there were those who predicted it, it wasn't at all clear at the time that things would settle down to the point where there were essentially two choices, DOS/Windows and the Mac. I grew up in a county that was among the richest in the country and had one of the highest rated public school systems in the U.S. Despite this, there was one computer class available, taught by a math teacher who had taken some computer classes in college. In addition, there were only five computers in the classroom, two NECs that ran their own proprietary OS and three dumb terminals connected over phone lines to an HP mainframe at a remote location. With 30 or so kids in the class, computer time was quite limited.

As I recall, we spent a fair amount of time just learning how to log in and operate the two different systems. This was around 1982, before the Mac, mouse, and GUIs, so we had to learn the various commands for each. We didn't learn any software packages, probably because we were using two incompatible systems. We did learn, in a very general way that really didn't help us much, about CPUs and memory and the like. Finally, we were taught to do some rudimentary programming, mostly in BASIC but also a little FORTRAN.

For those like me who were little proto-geeks this was fine – we were into it, digging into the manuals to learn more and eventually knowing more about the systems and programming than our teacher, who after all was a math teacher and still had her regular classes to teach. But for most of the class, it was ultimately kind of useless. Most of the kids weren't looking to make computers their careers; they were in the class because their parents or a guidance counselor had told them they had to be "computer literate" if they wanted to succeed in this brave new world. I can't think of anything from that class that would end up helping any of those kids.

In just a few years, all that stuff we learned didn't really matter except to those of us who went off to become Computer Science majors in college. Graphical user interfaces and the mouse made memorizing the arcane commands of older systems unnecessary. Off the shelf software replaced any need for programming skills. Once you grokked pointing, clicking, and dragging, you could generally figure out how to use a program enough to suit your needs. Understanding the inner workings of a computer became unnecessary for most – as long as it did what you needed it to who cared how it did it? And if there was a problem requiring repair or troubleshooting, you called in a geek.

I was thinking about all this recently while watching a friend's four year old daughter use an iPad. And I mean use it, creating artwork and music and even sending messages to her friends. According to my friend, no one showed her how to use it, she just picked it up and went to it. And there are numerous stories of octogenarians who've never used a computer picking up a iPad and beginning to use it almost immediately. They didn't spend time learning to use it, they just used it. The same holds true for my friend's daughter.

So it's no surprise that no one talks about computer literacy anymore. Much of the energy put into creating it, at least in my experience, was channeled into curriculums and activities that weren't relevant to the lives of most of the people involved. Not that the people who created these programs weren't sincere, and I'm not trying to put them down. But I do find it interesting that the one thing they were right about was something we didn't learn in our computer class: you still need to know how to type.

Does the MacPro have more of a future than the iMac?

There's been a lot of speculation for some time now that the MacPro's days are numbered. The thinking seems to be that an ever smaller number of users need the power and expansion capabilities that the MacPro provides. The speed of the iMac, MacBook Pros, and even the Airs, is sufficient for the overwhelming majority of people, most of whom aren't the type to open up a machine (even one as easy as a MacPro) to install a new graphics card and don't need 64 – or even 16 – GB of RAM. As far back as a couple of years ago various reviewers started putting forth the idea that most people who had traditionally used MacPros and the earlier PowerMac towers could now switch to an iMac with little or no consequence.

The argument has gotten stronger with the advent of the high-speed Thunderbolt port. Standard on all new Macs except the MacPro (which it should get in it's next refresh, though that refresh is an admittedly  long time in coming), the new port potentially offers much of the flexibility of a tower. In theory, soon a host of Thunderbolt devices will hit the market, including adapters for USB, Firewire, eSATA, etc. Additionally there will be pure Thunderbolt devices, which won't be restricted by the speeds of those other interfaces. The speed of the Thunderbolt interface, even in its first incarnation, is fast enough to handle the needs of even most pro users for the foreseeable future.

I've been using pro-level Macs for a long time now, dating back to a Quadra 650 in the early 90s, and progressing through a Power Mac 7500 (on which I twice upgraded the processor), and a PowerMac G4 (one processor upgrade). So the idea of the MacPro going away was a little disconcerting. I currently use an eight-core 2008 MacPro. When I bought it to replace my aging PowerMac G4, I knew I was buying more machine than I really needed. I was no longer doing any high-end video work, and Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and MS Office ran quite well on the iMacs of the day (with a decent RAM upgrade). But I knew that USB 3 was coming, and I already had a couple of hard drive enclosures that included both USB 2 and eSATA connections, so I wanted the ability to add these ports using a PCIe card. In addition, while I'm not a huge gamer, I am a moderate one, and I knew that the stock 256 MB Radeon card that came with the machine would eventually need to be upgraded. So I figured that rather than get an iMac and have to replace it a couple of years later I'd get a monster of a machine that would last a few years longer. This has worked out pretty well and the machine is still more than sufficient for my needs, but....

If I were buying a new desktop machine today, it would be an iMac. A higher-end model, to be sure, but an iMac nonetheless. A quad-core i7 with a Thunderbolt port is plenty powerful and solves the upgradeability problem. Since Thunderbolt in based on PCIe and is compatible with the Mini Display Port, even upgrading the video shouldn't be difficult. Someone will undoubtedly come out with a box with two Thunderbolt ports that houses the latest card from AMD or Nvidia. And it's likely that someone will also just skip the extra box altogether and put the video card in the monitor itself. Maybe there's a technological reason why this won't work, but I haven't heard of it.

Notice that I said that if I were buying a  new desktop, I would buy an iMac. But I probably wouldn't buy a desktop. All the advantages of Thunderbolt are available to a MacBook Pro, as well. So I could come back from a meeting with a client, put my MacBook on my desk, plug in a Thunderbolt cable, and be ready to go. Of course, people have been doing this for years with docking stations and the like, but they tend to be expensive and surprisingly inconvenient for something that's supposed to provide convenience. But one cable that provides access to a wide range of ports and an external monitor? It doesn't get much easier than that. The ability to upgrade to higher-end graphics when needed is just icing on the cake. And you'd have your choice of monitors, from Apple or anyone else. You'd have all the advantages of a desktop with the portability of a laptop, and little to no inconvenience moving between the two.

All this makes me think that the iMac, at least in it's current All-In-One configuration, is the model that might be disappearing. Most of Apple's Mac sales are already laptops, which when you think about it, are also All-In-One machines. Why buy two machines when one machine and a couple of peripherals will give you the best of both worlds? It's possible that Apple will release the "headless" iMac that so many were speculating on a few years ago, but it doesn't seem likely. The Mac Mini is a different story and may stick around as an entry-level offering.

And the MacPro? No one knows but Apple, but it seems to me that there's still enough people doing high-end work who buy the latest and greatest because they actually need all that power. I suspect that Apple makes a pretty decent profit off of them, and with Arthur Levinson of Genentech chairing the board at Apple these days, the MacPro is probably safe for the time being. Of course, Apple could work out some kind of OS licensing deal to a high-end PC manufacturer to supply these pros, but I don't think it's likely.

All of this comes with one caveat: if Thunderbolt doesn't take off the way it's expected to, or the peripherals remain expensive (e.g. Apple's $49 cable), then this is all moot. It's really Thunderbolt that allows all this to happen.

Of course, I may be off my rocker. What do you think? Comments welcome, but please keep it civil.