The Mac Professional's Resource
— Tom Ierna
Things are in flux, right now, a real sea-change in the entire computer industry, from top to bottom, has been in play since the middle of 2006.
- At the top, general purpose servers are giving way to appliances. Storage appliances, firewalls, DNS appliances, mail appliances, loghost appliances, web proxies, load balancers – when someone starts selling turnkey RDBMS and webhost appliances, it’s all-fucking-over for the big iron and the megabuck software applications that run on it.
- At the bottom, Netbooks rule. Linux owns this space in the long haul. For the moment, Microsoft ships on more of them, but this will no longer be true as the price keeps going down. You can get a Dragon processor powered netbook for $200. Pegatron (a spin-off of ASUS) is planning on Freescale-based netbooks in the $150 range, that get 8hrs of battery life, and run cool to the touch. In a return to the Amiga days, they will have specialty chips that offload stuff like HD video from the processor made possible by a special, paid-for Ubuntu distro. Microsoft will have to sell its OS for a few bucks to compete, at which point the Obama DOJ sharpens its anti-trust knives. No can has loss-leader under consent decree. Not yours. ( And speaking of the Amiga, did anyone else see the eee Keyboard? Dude. ASUS out-Appled Apple with this little unit. A full pc, with wireless HDMI out, in a keyboard that looks a lot like Apple’s aluminum one, and, oh yeah, the touchpad is a secondary color LCD display the size of a numeric keypad.)
- In the middle, Apple sold ten million Macs last year. A lot of that was driven by frustration with Vista, and my PC-weenie brother has declared Windows 7 to be the next coming of Windows2000 (without having actually been able to download it yet), but still – momentum is hard to shift. Every one of the hard-core IT nerds I work with owns a Mac at home, now… they’re all nervous and evasive around me when discussing this, because they’re afraid I’ll hit them over the head with “I told you so” smugness. (I’ve grown past that, and am now Nostalgia Guy, waxing poetic about my old Mac Portable, the Powerbook G3, Cyberdog, Burning Monkey Solitaire and how awesome window tabs were on the old MacOS. This might be an equally valid excuse in not discussing your Mac around me, come to think of it.) Steve Ballmer sneers that away with a claim that there were 300 million PCs sold… but he’s wrong. Intel, AMD and Via sold 300 million x86 chips. Nowhere near all of that was used in a Windows PC. In terms of Safari, around 9% of all web traffic is generated by this one, Mac-specific app. Considering the popularity of Firefox, Camino and Opera, it’s a safe bet Apple’s market share is closer to the 15% mark than further… and this is in the middle of a recession!
- In the pocket. Apple’s iPhone changed everything – Blackberry and WinMo are flailing madly, and failing badly, in the face of the New School. Even so, assuming that Apple had a mortal lock forever was a mistake. Google’s Android is generating warm-fuzzy love despite being saddled with a crappy phone… and better, much better, hardware is on the way. And now Palm comes out swinging, hell-bent on doing to the iPhone what it did to the Newton. Palm has been a sleepwalking zombie for the past seven years, and now, the sleeper has woken! Palm’s back, and back in a big, bad way… app store and all. (Despite the unfortunate name, which already has slash-fiction afficionados snickering mercilessly) Oh, and this is Palm, so expect full disclosure of its API and hardware to any and all interested developers, in stark contrast to the Apple Way.
— SoupIsGood_Food
One final iCard…
— Matthew Sparby
The big buzz on the Internet these days is the imminent release of iPhone 2.0. I am not sure if I would go that far. If you are familiar with Mac OS versioning Lexicon, we would call it iPhone 1.0 version 2.0. But we haven’t blogged for a while, so we can’t complain about the naming conventions passing us by.
Tech bloggers all over the place point to iPhone shortages, which started when Carpone warehouse said they were out of stock of the 16GB model, but the chatter really started hitting the fan when the US Apple Store reported they were no longer in stock. Diminished stock of hardware has always been a way that the Mac rumor industry has keyed in on product updates. The conventional wisdom said that iPhone 2 would be out in June, approximately a year after the initial release of the phone. But if the company is out of stock now, somebody would have to do a lot of explaining to rationalize why Apple might go a month without selling an iPhone.
Back in January, some pundits speculated that Apple might be stuffing warehouses with excess iPhone stock to boost its sales numbers. If only that were true, Apple wouldn’t be out of stock now! We laughed at the shoddy analysis then and this being the Internet, we couldn’t resist another opportunity to call out the analysts once again.
— Joe Fahs
No, literally, made on a Mac; many of the sequences are done with elements of the OS.
Appearances are made by Microsoft Office, Time Machine, Final Cut, the Finder, Quicktime, VLC, Photoshop, Fast User Switching, and a slew of other apps.
Brilliant!
— Tom Ierna