the brook

It’s finally official, I guess Apple’s reality distortion field is wearing off for me. This was the first Macworld that I slept through since 2004, and no regrets.

The most interesting thing to me was that they got a pretty awesome movie rental service out. Includes all movies, at a pretty good price and reasonable rules for viewing. If there was an iTunes store in Singapore, I’d actually become a subscriber for this (I’m not sure if one can access the US store from here). Rentals are almost as cheap as stores, and you have the added advantage of not having to bother about going to a store to get and return media. The upgraded Apple TV makes a lot of sense, and actually it’ll be a pretty awesome device to have - given that you can access Youtube, Flickr photos, video podcasts as well as traditional iTunes content without needing a computer.

Minor updates to the iPhone. Steve Jobs is undoubtedly the greatest presenter in the world - he got applauded for allowing iPhone users to send SMSes to multiple people at once - a feature thats been around on phones for half a decade now. Enough said.

Which brings me to what was in the air at this Macworld - the Macbook Air. It’s certainly not what many people, including me were asking for (as long ago as last Macworld) - a Pro machine thats portable yet powerful - in essence a replacement of the 12″ Powerbook that I still use.

Thin is good, but Apple compromised way too much on thin. Let me put down my premise here - I understand Apple as a brand commands a premium, and with good reason. However, if I’m paying them US$1799 for a computer, I had better get a decent computer. One that I can, say, make my only computer if necessary and it should do whatever I’d need. Is that asking too much?

Lets start with the lousy disk options. Guess what, the consumer looking at the MacBook Air has a “choice”. Option A, choose the slowest drive in the world (80 GB, 4200 RPM). Firstly, 80 gigs? My three year old Powerbook 12″ has a 60 gig drive (5400 RPM), and I had an option to make it 100 gigs at the time. This is ridiculous, especially as Apple clearly has a 160 gig drive on their iPod Classic as well, which is NOT an option on the MacBook Air - I guess it was a slice too thick. But hey, if we go from 0.76″ to 0.8″ we’ll no longer get a thinner laptop than Sony, will we? Secondly, speed. This drive was advertised as “the drive on millions of iPods”, ergo, fast enough to play music - but you know, I might actually want to run like, real software on it. I dread the thought of anyone trying to load up a large Lightroom (or worse, Aperture) photo library onto this machine. Thank God we have a choice.

Option B is to choose the most expensive drive in the world - the 64 GB solid state drive. This is supposed to be really fast - but only costs a thousand dollars. A thousand dollars that could fetch you a whole new Apple Macbook at student price. Not to mention its even smaller than the actual magnetic storage, and lets not forget that OS X eats up close to 10 gigs of space for a full install. Yay for consumer choice.

Optical drive extra - but as Jobs said, we don’t need to watch movies on DVD (we have movie rentals!), we don’t need to burn CDs (we have iPods!) and we certainly don’t need space for backup (why wouldn’t anyone spend US$300 extra on a glorified router plus hard drive that is the Apple Time Capsule?). And we have the option of sharing a drive wirelessly from another computer to experience the joy of installing Microsoft Office 2008 over wifi, as if the process weren’t already slow enough. Fact is, there are people who live outside Cupertino-land. They’ll actually need a DVD drive, and be forced to pay US$99 (though I would hope other brand-drives which are cheaper would work as well).

No ethernet. Which will be missed when you want to configure your brand new router for the initial wifi config. But well, they do sell an adapter for US$29, and though we’re leaking change, we’ll bite the bullet except…

The MacBook Air has a single USB port. The ONE. Like Neo, in The Matrix (sorry, but I couldn’t resist). Why one? What is one supposed to do if forced to use the Ethernet adapter? Buy a hub, of course! So now we have to have an optical drive, a hub, an ethernet adapter - is it just me or is the Air getting a bit more viscous than it looked? Given that most people like to work with a mouse attached, that means the average person will have to move around with a hub all the time, if they so much as want to be able to work with a USB drive sometimes. Would it have been that bad if the Air was a tenth of an inch thicker but had three USB ports?

And no decent video card option, either. All of this ranting though, is only for someone who wants to buy this thing as a primary or only computer - clearly not Apple’s target market. Apple seems to be targeting this at people who already own a primary machine (maybe even two) and the Macbook Air is just for travel, or to be cool. Unfortunately, I’m not one of them.

I can pretty much bet that revisions to the Macbook Air line will be way better than what we have now. SSD will get cheaper and bigger, small hard disks will become faster, and who knows they might find a way to put in a real video card in there. And maybe when wireless USB comes along the whole Air thing will make more sense; as it stands currently, the Air is an experimental concept. All the more reason to wait this one out.

If you’re a computer science geek, check out John Siracusa’s review of Leopard at Arstechnica.

Its a wonderfully written review which digs deep into the internals of Leopard as an OS, and some really interesting issues right from human interface guidelines to kernel scheduling are discussed. I wish the tech press wrote more often like this instead of churning out simply whatever is sensationalist and superficial.

From The Economist:

The danger in developing a gadget that tries to be a phone, internet appliance and iPod all in one is that it can fail to accomplish each as well as it might… simply making a phone call is more cumbersome than it should be, requiring up to half a dozen different steps.

I use my phone for maybe minutes a day, and I’d really like to keep it that way. No matter how gorgeous the screen may be, does anyone really want to spent more than half an hour a day staring at a 3.5 inch screen? 95% of the calls I make from my phone require two clicks (speed-dials). By now, I can type an SMS without even looking at my phone (I have a 3 year old Nokia 7250i by the way). No matter how innovative or great looking a phone is, I feel it’s important to get the basics right.

If you really think about it - the iPhone is sort of an “attention hungry” device. Because it has no keys a user must use the touchscreen to operate it. Here’s a test - can I write an SMS with just one hand? Can I at least make a call? How about change the volume of the currently playing song? I suspect the answer is “probably not”. An innovative new interface doesn’t mean the old ones aren’t useful. What do you think of someone who uses the mouse to go to Edit->Copy and Edit->Paste instead of pressing Ctrl/Cmd + C and Ctrl/Cmd + V?

For a convergence device which is supposed to do “everything” and run OS X, I really hope Apple does provide a real programming interface for the iPhone other than web apps. I cannot understand their point of view that third-party apps are a security concern (after all, Windows mobile phones have been around without serious security issues for years, is Apple saying OS X is more insecure?). Not only are they preventing serious users (who want things like SSH) from buying the iPhone, they’re also pretty much trying to cut out a large part of the mobile-phone software industry, which is no good thing given that it’s a market that Apple has just entered.

It is quite probable though, that second generations (and smaller version) iPhones are already in the design stage and hopefully they’ll address some of the issues around the first-gen iPhone. I would certainly love to see an iPhone with full-fleged Safari running on hardware that has some basic keys as well as the touchscreen interface.

Mike Elgan has written a wonderful piece in MacWorld analyzing the appearance of Safari for Windows. From the article:

The insular Apple universe is a relatively gentle place, an Athenian utopia where Apple’s occasional missteps are forgiven, all partake of the many blessings of citizenship, and everyone feels like they’re part of an Apple-created golden age of lofty ideas and superior design.

But the Windows world isn’t like that. It’s a cold, unforgiving place where nothing is sacred, users turn like rabid wolves on any company that makes even the smallest error, and no prisoners are taken. Especially the Windows browser market.

This is no Athens. This is Sparta.

For the first time since removing “Computer” from their name, Apple Inc. has shown us they mean business, finally releasing MacBook Pros that make my mouth water. How sad is it that I can’t even think of affording one!

Santa-Rosa support has been offered by almost all other manufacturers for a while now, so it was about time that Apple announced it too. But increasing the baseline memory across all models to 2 GB is real sweet.

Even though there’s still no sign of a “real” portable Mac, the 15″ MacBook Pro now is thinner than the Macbook (only an inch thick) and at 2.45 kgs, only 0.14 kgs heavier than the Macbook. Does anyone still want just a Macbook? And it’s only a quarter of a kilo heavier than the 12-inch Powerbook G4 that I’m typing this on!

The upgrade to Nvidia 8600M cards will mean the MBP is now virtually as good a gaming machine as any gaming desktop. Especially since you can actually use Bootcamp to run Windows on this thing. And it probably becomes easier to dualboot it with Linux. Apple is one of the first to introduce LED-backlit screens, I’ll wait for the reviews to evaluate that. There’s a insane 1920×1200 optional screen for the 17″ model which should be good for people who edit photos and have expensive houses to mortgage.

This weekend, by which time the new models should be in Singapore, I will do what I usually do - head down to the Apple store and ogle at them. Now I know why wise people say you shouldn’t desire things too much. It’d sure make life a lot easier right now.

About the only thing I can complain about - besides not having a 13″ MBP model (which would probably compel me to go rob a bank somewhere) - is the lack of an option to upgrade the 15″ screen from 1440×900 to 1680×1050.

Go ogle!

If you own a Mac, you have got to try this out: a software called Nocturne by the same people who made QuickSilver. The software does a very simple thing - inverts your entire screen, giving the appearance of night vision. Looks great. Not only that, it is actually effective when using the computer in a dark room or at night! Not very good for surfing the web, though, since all photos are inverted as well.

Night vision screenshot (click to enlarge):

(I had to take a snap since taking a screenshot only shows the original colours, I think Nocturne is only inverting the final display rather than the underlying buffer from which the screenshot is taken)

Normal screen (for reference):

By the way, Mac OS X has a built in standard way of doing this - hit Ctrl+Option+Cmd+8. But Nocturne allows a number of options that make the effect more pleasing, like turning the screen monochrome, disabling shadows and applying color corrections.

Enjoy!

Thanks to Magical, now I don’t have to open iCal or go to the dashboard to get a decent calendar. Found this via AppleMatters.

Two years ago, I decided I was tired of Windows. I was already running Linux full time at lab, part-time at home, and nearly full-time on my trusty old Thinkpad T23. And so I did something that, back then, was quite unheard of - I started thinking about switching to a Mac.

I knew not a single person who was using a Mac, I’d never seen a Mac being used except as a 14-year old (one of my friends had a Macintosh running System 7.3). But I had heard all about it, mainly on slashdot, and was impressed with what people had to say. I spent a couple of months researching on what served for software on the Mac, attended a few seminars and workshops on the Mac; and finally wrote the following on my blog:

no, i don’t think i’m ready to buy an apple just yet. though its cool (and i was really excited at seeing all the new stuff), my work and play are going on pretty smoothly on linux and windows respectively. apple is for when i have 3K with no better use for it than to play on a new platform with.

– Me, January 18th, 2005

Less than a month later, it was all over but the squealing.

For two years plus a day or three, it’s been a great journey. Mostly, I’ve loved my Powerbook, on rare occasions hated it, occasionally compromised and yes - I did eventually make a dual-boot system with Linux on it. For a year and a half, it was my primary computer without doubt, and I did virtually everything except game on it. For the last six months, it’s been more of a useful toy - for photography, some writing and Powerpoint. But it’s something I can survive on completely if I have to.

The positives are many. The best - solid build quality. My laptop feels as good as new on my lap - keyboard response, screen brightness, speaker quality, everything - nothing feels the least bit aged. My battery was recalled and replaced sometime last year but even after 1.5 years, there was no noticeable decrease in charge retention capacity.

Next - Mac OS X. As solid, stable and good-looking an OS as one can hope to see. I’m running on a PowerPC G4 processor. The G4 architecture first debuted in 1999 - more than seven years ago - and my applications never skip a beat (well, maybe Firefox does once in a while but thats Firefox). Unless I run code benchmarks on this thing, it’s hard to tell how old a CPU my laptop is using. And of course there’s all the eye candy - which I was initially enamoured by, but don’t care for anymore. I hardly use Expose, my Dashboard is permanently turned off. But for those who like looks, OS X is as pretty as anything out there - though I haven’t seen Vista up close yet.

Finally - things just work. The best hardware/software integration I have ever seen on any platform. Wireless just works, external monitor support is nothing short of amazing, and I’ve never had to go hunting for a driver. This will probably be the one thing that will keep me stuck on the Mac platform when I upgrade my laptop.

There are a few negatives too. The biggest one is lack of hardware options. In the laptop space right now, Apple doesn’t have a laptop that I’m completely happy with. The Macbook Pros are too big - but the Macbooks have that glossy reflective screen that I can’t stand and are limited to Intel onboard graphics. In the desktop space, you either get a highly performance limited Mac Mini, or an iMac. If you already have a good monitor and are looking for a Mac tower - you have no option but to go for the ridiculously expensive Mac Pro systems.

For people who love to tweak their OS to the extreme, the Mac will feel stifling. It’s just not as hackable as Linux, and in some ways even less so than Windows. You do get a lot of customizability both out of the box and due to the BSD base - but there are limits to this.

Frankly, if Linux would become top-notch in terms of laptop hardware support (external monitors, hibernate support and so on), and get a few more applications (Photoshop, presentation, voice/video chatting apps), I would switch back to a Thinkpad. While OS X is fun, Linux is what makes me feel at home. Until then though, the Mac is a more than able replacement.

From the latest Joy of Tech, this guy is totally me!

It’s just been announced minutes ago. Apple is no longer Apple Computer, Inc. but Apple, Inc.

I had a bad feeling about this. When a whole MacWorld goes by and you see no mention of a Mac, things looked that way. In fact I was composing a post in my head with the title “Wasn’t it Apple COMPUTER”?

I’m just wondering… will there be the usual “One more thing…”? If so, I hope my wish is granted!