It Was The Best Of Times, It Was The Worst Of Times

Folks, I'm tanned, I'm rested, and I'm ready. (Translation: my usually butt-white Irish skin is a lovely late-summer pink, I've been lazy, and Dave Nagel was about to hand me my rear end on a shiny silver platter garnished with a lovely sprig of parsley if I didn't get him something to publish soon.) I hope everyone out there in Mac-land is doing about the same, because if this summer has been any indication, the next year or so should be a very interesting one for the professional end of the Mac market.

Now, we know Steve Jobs has been all over the consumer market like stink on a goat, and if you happen to fall into this segment, the iTimes are pretty iSweet for you right about iNow, what with the iMac, the iPod, and all 'dem cute little iApps. Alas, this article is not for you. While the times are great for Mac consumer users, it's hard to tell which way the wind is blowing these days for those of us that make up the professional segment, which leads me to oh-so-smoothly work in the title of this article:

It Was The Best Of Times

If the mid-nineties were the "poop age" of Apple software, the early zips may come to be known as the decidedly "anti-poop age" of Apple software. As I write this, I have just spent a bleary-eyed weekend with Jaguar, which, in case you've been living under a rock for the last month or so, is Apple's code-cum-marketing name for the eagerly-awaited and much-ballyhooed Mac OS X 10.2. Folks, I am more impressed than I thought I was going to be. I'm not going to go as far as saying that "this is the operating system OS X 10.0 should have been," as I've heard many utter in the last few days, but this is definitely the version that finally delivers on pretty much everything we were promised OS X would eventually be. Oh, sure, I have some minor issues with it, like an enormous system slowdown whenever I try to install a TrueType font and the police state ushered in with the new Dock with regards to third-party application switchers. But, as Fred Sanford would put it, this is the big one: Quartz Extreme, Inkwell, the return of Spring-loaded Folders, native Samba serving, yadda yadda yadda. You've probably heard all the buzzwords by now. The bar has definitely been raised, and unless you're a Director developer or Quark designer, Jaguar is definitely right for the vast majority of the creative marketplace (especially those stuck in the middle of a sea of Windows). Maybe when word gets around about what you actually get for the money folks will stop complaining about the $129 price tag, because it's definitely worth the jack. And yes, before the cynical amongst you break out the torches and pitchforks, I paid for my copy like every other schmoe out there.

And it's not just the OS that's benefitting from the software renaissance going on there in Cupertino. Apple's Napoleonic streak of creative software acquisitions has already borne fruit in the form of the first release of Apple Shake (sounds like the flavor of the month over at the DQ). Sure, Windows users can still buy Shake (for now, anyway), but it's going to cost you double what the Mac version does. Only time will tell what will become of Apple's purchase of Silicon Grail and Emagic, but if the Shake model is any indication, it won't be long before Apple could conceivably have a low-cost, turnkey software/hardware solution for any number of creative markets. Stay tuned on this one, but it's not a stretch to say that the future is very bright in the professional-grade creative production department.

Another sign that this is, indeed, the best of times for Apple was provided to me over the weekend, when I saw Gateway's iMac rip-off commercial. How cute! The little gateway machine was bouncing over an iMac and sticking out it's "tongue" at it, all while the Billy Bigvoice announcer is spewing the same FUD about no applications being available on the Mac. This is, quite frankly, something I never thought I would see: a PC maker trying direct competition with Apple. Wasn't Apple's puny 5% market share not worth going after? I thought Apple was irrelevant. Guess not. If you see these ads, after the initial bad taste in your mouth goes away, you'll likely come 'round to realizing that the direct competition route is great for Apple. I'd like to see more PC makers jump on board this train, actually.

OK, enough fun. Time to leave a big, stinky you-know-what in the punchbowl:

It Was The Worst Of Times

While the software side of the Mac equation is pretty freaking excellent, I'm really beginning to worry about where the hardware is going. Take the new towers Apple just released. At first glance, everything looks pretty good. Dual processors across the board, DDR RAM (finally), spankin' new Radeon cards, decent pricing. However, at least for me, after a couple of days I realized I was doing the toolie version of beergoggling with the new towers. Dual processors are nice and all, but combining the clock speeds of two top-of-the-line G4's just about equals the latest offerings of single CPUs from AMD and Intel. Supposedly, megahertz doesn't matter, but when you're only halfway to where other chipmakers are, with no signs of things getting any faster, then that's cause for concern. There has to be some serious catching up, and soon. I doubt Apple is going to switch over to an x86 architecture, but the 2 gHz+ processors IBM recently (and somewhat quietly) announced apparently sport some AltiVec-esque instructions, and are looking more and more like the G5 to me every day. I really hope so, because it's painfully obvious that Moto hasn't given a damn about the desktop G4 chip market for a very, very, very long time, and it's time they were put out to pasture.

Also, it wasn't even a week after the new towers' release when the first benchmarks surfaced, and they were very disappointing indeed. What's the point of putting DDR RAM in a box when it's going to add almost no performance increase? C'mon, Apple. Surely you could put a little more oomph into whatever in there is holding up traffic. Suddenly, the new G4s were looking a mite long in the tooth to me. The last several tower revisions have all had "stopgap measure" written all over them, and the trend is a little frightening.

OK, so what else is wrong? In a word, Microsoft. Like many of you, I flipped a gigantic proverbial bird at Microsoft's Mac BU when their head honcho, Kevin Browne, chose the eve of the Macworld Expo to relieve himself all over Apple's Mac OS X rollout efforts. Surely, Mr. Browne, the fact that a full copy of Office v.X will run you close to 500 bones has no bearing on your perceived woes. I took it as a challenge. We don't need no stinking Microsoft!!! Surely we all can get by without any Microsoft software on our Macs. But while the vast majority of creative users can easily leave MS behind like so much roadkill, continued development of Office and IE on Mac OS X is absolutely vital to continued Mac acceptance in all kinds of business situations. Let's face it: many creative folks would rather assume greeting duties at the local Wal Mart than be forced into switching to Windows, but sometimes it's really hard to make the case for corporate IT purchasers to agree to bring ANY Macs into the fold. A motivated Microsoft developing good (and, more importantly, compatible) software for OS X goes a long way towards making a lot of Mac folks' lives easier, regardless of whether they use MS software or not. In any event, even since Microsoft's big OS X whinefest they have announced that MSN will be coming to Mac OS X, so I have no idea what they're thinking over there for long-term Mac development. The Apple/MS catfight should be a good one (but what catfight isn't, when you get right down to it?).

So anyway, depending on how you look at things, Apple is either flying high, scraping the bottom, or doing some amazing swoops in between the two extremes. Whichever way the scales choose to even themselves out, at the very least it will be interesting to watch everything unfold.

Filed under: Opinion on August 29th, 2002

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