The Mac App Store is a welcome addition to my computing experience; for one thing, it allows me to purchase the two iLife apps I care about (iPhoto and iMovie) at half the cost of the full suite. Yesterday, I finally had time to take advantage of that—I bought both apps, at $14.99 apiece.
iMovie was perfectly straightforward. Locate it in the App Store, click Buy, enter some credentials, boom. iPhoto, on the other hand…
Yesterday morning, I got a disturbing report from my wife: “I just tried to wake up the computer by hitting the space bar, and it went ‘bzzzzrrrt’ and didn’t turn on.”
Crap.
That sounded bad, and when I went to check out the iMac, it smelled bad, too, like a popped capacitor. I tried all the appropriate troubleshooting stuff, and nothing worked—the iMac was dead as a doornail.
You may have heard, Apple is cancelling the Xserve. There is much apparent consternation about this decision, though according to Steve-o, they just weren’t selling that many of them, so it makes sense to drop that line of machine. And you’re not just totally out of luck to run OS X Server, since a Mac Pro is quite a machine, and Apple even offers the Mac mini in a server configuration, sans optical drive. As a matter of fact, there’s an entire business dedicated to Mac mini colocation for your cloud computing needs.
It seems to be the way of things that I put up a few thoughts whenever a major Apple keynote rolls around, so I might as well keep it going.
Kinds of feels like the good old days are back.
Remember when there were no big software companies? Well, other than Microsoft? I’m talking about the wild west of PC days, in the ‘80s, when you bought (or, frequently, copied from a friend) little applications developed by nobody you had ever heard of, which did only one thing, but it was exactly the one thing you expected that application to do. Whenever there was some new innovation in computing, like say the mouse, (I’m talking about PCs here, bear with me) you couldn’t count on your main system, MS DOS, to support it, or deliver an update to you in a timely fashion. You had to find the driver, and put it in AUTOEXEC.BAT or CONFIG.SYS1 yourself.
John Gruber (daringfireball.net) has a nice little article up, What’s Next For Nokia, in which he describes, through public and private sources, the hardware-oriented design and development process at the handset maker. Read it and come back; the nut is that Nokia feels the ticket to winning customers is catchy hardware design, and the software running on it is merely a tiny component.
Contrast this to Apple, who regards the software as the primary driver in the design of everything they produce. Much is made of their minimal hardware designs, true, but the deceptive thing is why it is minimal: the hardware itself gets the hell out of the way of the software and what you are trying to do. The iMac, iPhone and iPad are epitomes of this.
So, Apple had their fall iPod event yesterday. Crazy.
There was a giant argument raging on Macbreak Weekly on the future of the Mac OS. Alex Lindsay thinks Apple, within 5 – 10 years, will license or open source the OS, pretty much abandoning the desktop in favor of its mobile iOS platform. Andy Ihnatko vehemently disagrees, thinking there’s lots of life left in the desktop; he is merely curious about what Mac OS XI is going to look like. I think they’re both kind of wrong.
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Here’s an interesting thought: for the most part, the way of American life hasn’t really changed for a century. Well, okay, make that 60 years. Take away computers and the Internet, and the most defining pieces of technology in our lives are, going backwards in time, the television, the automobile, and electricity in the home. Everything else is unchanged. My life is essentially the same as it would have been in the ’50s, sans computer.
Today Apple is set to announce iPhone OS 4.0, and probably go into some details about what is going to be in it. Most are speculating about multitasking and some new springboard, but I have to think it’s going to be more than that. There must be something really interesting Apple is going to do with it, or why do it?
