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.
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?
I am, generally, a liberal. The relevance of this will become pertinent in a moment.
Microsoft, as you know unless insert-your-living-under-rock-cliché-here, has opened a couple of brick and mortar stores. This is laughable for several reasons, most of which are plainly obvious even to Windows enthusiasts, but I’ll repeat them here for the sake of completeness.
The gang on MacBreak Weekly, to which I was listening on my commute this morning, touched on the recent spate of trojans accompanying illicit copies of iWork and Photoshop CS4. They rightly commented that this is really only a problem for idiots who supply their admin password to install shady downloads. But they (I am using “they” because I don’t recall which member of the panel actually said it—they all seemed to agree) also suggested that it is still a matter of time before the Mac community’s security complacency bites it in the rear. Meaning, the time will come when teh evil haxxorz target Mac OS X full-bore and Mac users start to suffer the same unwitting security problems that have plagued Windows users for decades.
This is the point where I think they are wrong, for two reasons.
No, I’m not at the conference yet; that will be Thursday. But I do pay rapt attention to the liveblogs. Primarily, I like to follow arstechnica’s keynote blogs during the event, then take a look at some of the others for color commentary and different images.
I’m surprised there was no new Mac mini−and yet I’m not. I can see where getting hardware out the door by a given date is harder than software. Hence, they hyped iLife and iWork ‘09 during the keynote, and will save a new mini for their own special event, possibly in conjunction with revamped iMacs. No skin off my back… I just got my in-laws to switch to a mini a few months ago, so it’s just as well that the new ones come out a little later on. (I’m a firm believer in making technology purchases when you need to make them, with no regrets for what comes later, but others don’t necessarily take that view.)
I am excited about the new iLife ‘09 stuff. And jealous, because I probably won’t be able to justify upgrading for a little while. iMovie’s improvements are neat−and I really like iMovie ‘08. The simpler interface that generally “does the right thing” works better for me. I don’t necessarily have time to do all the little tweaks that an expanded, detailed timeline allows. It would be nice to have the option, though, and I love the travel montage theme stuff.
17″ MacBook Pro, kind of a given.
iTunes announcements: yay and meh at the same time. Yay that everything is going to be DRM free, but meh that we knew it would all go this way eventually, and for me personally, I don’t care that much. The notion that the DRM on iTunes music was putting any kind of stranglehold on your music library is ridiculous; it’s trivial to remove it. And I’d rather just keep it in iTunes and on my iPod(s) anyway, because that’s the best way for me to use it. I go to pains (HandBrake, for example) to get media into my iPod; I’m not terribly concerned that it go the other direction.
Tony Bennet: outstanding choice for final keynote musical guest. Very, very classy. The best is yet to come, indeed.
So, barring any new announcements during the week, it looks any time in the Apple booth for me will be spent taking a look at iLife. Mainly, though, I’ll be there to chat up anybody that will listen about Telegraph.
Overall, I think this was a great announcement. Like many, I am a little dismayed that the new MacBook does not include a FireWire port, but otherwise I am impressed. Glass screens don’t bother me in the least, and I haven’t used the button on a trackpad in a long time—I am apparently one of those rare people who doesn’t disable the trackpad-tap feature on his notebook; in fact, I rely on it, and miss I it on other machines whose owners have turned it off.
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