Asymmetrical Information

Apple's new slogan "Pay more, Get less, Be Different"

But then, I'm also a PC whacko.

From an economic perspective, I do find it interesting that many seem to venerate Apple - which has always had a model of limiting competition and realizing high per unit margins, while criticizing Microsoft - the key player in the robustly competitive and very networked PC industry.

Seems odd somehow...

I'll confess, I love the Mac's industrial design, and I think Apple's a great SOFTWARE company.

But I just sold my last Mac. They can't compete in real world tasks. My iBook 600Mhz with 256MB of RAM crawled compared to my lowly Dell P3-700 also with 256MB of RAM, and that was just at web browsing. Apple alone can't compete with the robust market that PC component vendors have created, increasing performace while continuing to drive down price.

But I love that design. It's foolish, but I'd pay a price premium if a PC manufacturer would hire Jonathon Ive and Steve Jobs to do their industrial design. I'd love the performance and flexibility of a PC with the look of a Mac.

Yes, Apple will die if its competitors on the PC side successfully imitate it.

But anyone who read Lileks yesterday will have doubts that will actually happen (or at least that it will happen enough to leave Apple beached and bleeding).

Lileks is used to editing movies with Apple's iMovie. He then tried to edit on his brother-in-law's PC.

"The movie-editing software was aimed at the consumer, much in the same way that North Korean artillery is aimed at Seoul, and it’s fairly recent. Apple’s iMovie has been out for a couple of years, so the PC boys have had ample time to study it, see what makes it work. And did they learn? No."

The whole story is at: http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/03/0103/010303.html#011303

I hate to say this, but the company has been in big trouble for a long time. It's not as bad as in the late Sculley/Amelio days, Apple's a much better run company now, but their technology is so far behind Wintel that it's what's going to do in the company eventually.

Of course, they can probably carve out a profitable niche for themselves doing what SDB says they're doing now: being the entry level alternative for home users. The other alternative is to port OS X to wintel and become a software company, which for various reasons probably won't happen until it's too late.

The minute OSX moves to Intel is the minute MS stops making Office for the Mac. I don't think they want to follow Be down the rabbit hole of being the "other" Intel OS.

Bob

Apple's insistence upon a command economy was never a decision that lent itself to longevity; when PC components decentralized to the point where users could build their own machines at a lower cost than purchasing from a PC supplier like Gateway or Dell, Apple's hourglass began to drain.

One year ago I built a second-tier (sweet spot) PC at about two-thirds the cost of a corresponding Gateway/Dell. My soft-liberal buddy decided to go Mac and easily paid two times as much as I did for a similar machine. Worse still, he observed that prices on Apple's website would change abruptly; a customer could save or lose $500 depending on their luck.

I mention my friend's political persuasion because I can't help but see a correlation between Macintosh and techie liberals. Everyone who has commented about who buys Macs and why is dead-on: it's all about (life)style. Have you ever leafed through a copy of Mac enthusiast magazines? Virulently anti-PC, fashionably left and internationalist. Almost religious in its silico-political reverence. And both proud and trusting in a rigid, centralized market.

In a West Side Story brawl between Macophiles and Linux adepts, who would win?

I would, however, agree with Roger (and Lileks) that the PC has yet to seriously approach the Mac's superiority in video production. Video production is my friend's own occupation and, particularly in his most objective moments, holds little regard for the video production ability of PCs when directly compared to Macs. Could Apple survive by sneaking into this niche?

Another interesting techno-catfight: Intel gaining a sustained upper hand on AMD. I'm very curious to see where that leads.

I was a consumer Mac user from 1984 until 2000, and a Wintel user in the office at the same time. I can't disagree with you or Steve DB, or any of the commentors. My only minor quibble is that, as a non-power user, the wintel interface was much more opaque than mac. I was able to understand functions on my Mac that are still a mystery on my wintel machines. At this point I don't care because my wintel laptops (at work and at home) are stable enough to ignore.

Macs probably justified their price difference against wintel running 3.x or even '95 but the bottom has pretty much dropped out of that market. Except in certain specific applications (like the video editing example above), wintel software is no better or worse than equivalent Mac products, and is certainly cheaper due to the broader wintel market.

I always belived that Apple was a software company that happened to build hardware. Other than the base CPU's most of their hardware stank. They really started to die when they were late in embracing the clone CPU makers. Jobs was able to spark a turnaround by racing to the bottom with the i-fruit machines but, as you pointed out, he can't generate the cash necessary to keep growing from that market, and now Apple is losing the high-end video market by falling behind in hardware.

Apple might stand a chance with an aggressive embrace of Unix/Linux as a base to run the Mac desktop (this is basically what OS X is, I understand), and joining forces with Sun(?) to push Unix/Linux to the desktop. Their only shot at survival is to try to grow Open Source Microsoft Office replacements and try to become the default Unix/Linux desktop.

I was a Mac user from 1990 to 1999. My evangelism was responsible for the sale of hundreds of Macs at places of employment and among friends. I built my own PC in mid-'99 to play with Linux (I hated Windows, but I also hated Steve Jobs). As an afterthought I also installed Win98SE just in case I needed it for something work-related in the future. Much to my embarrassment, I found that within a couple of months I'd stopped using the Mac, was just playing with Linux, and Win98SE had become my primary OS. The PC gave me freedom to upgrade cheaply (which I did several times) and even Win98SE was more stable than OS 9. I was surprised to find myself spending far *less* time maintaining Win98 than I did with OS 9. As far as the user interface being better on the Mac, I thought so at first, but after six months I got used to the PC GUI and now I find it superior. A while back I went to an Apple Store to try OS X and found I had serious issues with the one-button mouse and the GUI in general.

Last month I bought a new PC, from Dell, and didn't even look at Macs. I think there are many like me, which is why Apple sales in the high end are tanking.

I started out with an old Mac SE and moved up through an LC, Centris 610, and finally to a beige G3 Powermac Desktop. I loved my Macs and would love to own a Mac, now. Unfortunately, the price disadvantage has increased while the other advantages have decreased.

Back in the day, my Mac just worked. Software installation consisted of dragging the files off the disk or CD. I could move my installation to another computer by dragging the folder over a network. Of course, now Macs install crap in the System folder so you can't do that anymore.

Hardware just plugged in and worked. Now, PCs do this a lot better than they used to. I had SCSI drives and a Laser Printer with my older Macs before PCs had those. Now Macs don't use SCSI and everyone uses Inkjets (except Mac no longer even sells printers or supports the ones they did sell).

I still like MacOS and would love to have MacOS X (I like Unix, so MacOS GUI running over Unix that I could access through a CLI would be the best of both worlds), but I have a budget and for the money, I can get a much better PC. In fact, for the cost of a low-end iMac, I have a PC with a CD Writer, DVD drive, twice the memory and hard drive and at least twice the CPU speed. And Windows XP can be wrestled into a shape that I can work with even if I don't like it as much.

I also can now run software I want to run without having to resort to Virtual PC. There are a few games I miss, but I can play others and better ones on my PC. Even Quicktime is available for Windows. And Eudora, which started out as a Mac email program, has a Windows version.

I'm sad to see Apple in the situation it's in because I would like to be able to buy a close to price-competitive Mac but I can't. So I didn't.

Bolie IV

For all those of you who love the Mac for aesthetic reasons, let me ask you this: how could you stand that horrible ubiquitous Chicago font? I'm a graphic designer. For years Macs were the sensible option for what I do. And yet I hated them irrationally because of that terrible, terrible font. There have to be others like me out there--people who might even now be loyal Mac defenders, if Apple hadn't taken 15 years to come up with a display font as inoffensive as Microsoft Sans Serif.

"The Mac is a great piece of equipment, with an ease of use made possible only by integrated manufacture of parts and software."

This is something of a myth, and like most myths, there is a grain of truth to it. It's a statement that was true, oh, say, six years ago. However, it's not true now. One of the only ways that Apple has been able to keep their system costs within shouting distance of the commodity PC manufacturers has been their whole-scale embrace and exploitation of the same commodity components that PC manufacturers use. IDE drives and controllers, PCI buses, USB, AGP video and so on. The only proprietary connector that Apple has used since the introduction of the original iMac -- more than four years ago -- is the original Airport card slot (which is simply a modified PCard connection).

The legendary ease-of-use exemplified in OS X has very little to do with hardware/software integration and everything to do with intelligent OS architecture. Win9x was an ugly collection of hacks and kludges slapped on top of MS-DOS. Windows NT/2000/XP is somewhat better, particularly as it's a truly modern architecture, but it's still ugly. What's the purpose of having something as fugly as the Registry? Why on earth would you design an operating system that requires you to reinstall your applications if you have to reinstall the OS? Does this have to do with integration of hardware and software, or does it have to do with poor OS design?

There are two ways to measure the power of a computer. One is to sit there with a stopwatch and time how long it takes the computer to do something (useful, true, particularly if you're doing something really computationally heavy, like modeling the Earth's atmosphere). The other is to measure how much work you can get done on it.

A gearhead friend of mine recently took both paths, buying a dual 1.4 GHz PIII W2k/Red Hat system and an iBook at the same time. His thoughts?

there's just such a huge contrast between the ibook and the pc. i'm still tweaking things on the pc after having it for about three weeks, and the ibook just works, like every mac i've ever had.

As a follow-up, I should point out that in my experience, Mac publications are generally full of articles about how to do things. PC publications are full of articles about how to fix things.

Important difference there.

I disagree, Frank -- I think that the reason "it just works" is that there's a very limited basket of components, and the software team is able to extensively test the possible configurations and make sure that the OS helps them to work. Microsoft couldn't do this even if it wanted to -- it doesn't control the hardware, and the abundance of different components would make it impossible to test even every likely configuration. The hardware folks, on the other hand, can't tweak the OS and lack the intimate knowlege of the designers. I think Apple has come far since the days of "Apple Everything", but their control over the hardware and the software is a major component of their success. It's also the major constraint on affordable manufacturing, and I think this fracas with Motorola may destroy them. But reports of Apple's demise have been many times much exaggerated, so I won't count Jobs out yet.

Lileks is such a piece of work when it comes to Macs. He's ragged on PC's for its "counter-intuitive" use of ctrl-alt-delete. And considers Mac's font smoothing a major plus (whoohoo!).

Aside from movie editing, where he does have a serious point, he doesn't have a real arguement. While that is an important feature, and will be more so in the future, it readlly doesn't matter to a lot of people. It sounds like he is constantly taping Gnat (constantly), so its a major app for him. Thats cool. But I dont even own a camcorder, so it means dick to me.

I'm not an expert on these things, but it seems to me that one of the big things about Macs are the cool names. Take Firewire, for instance. Cool name. Firewire. Its like 10 times slower than USB2. But who can get excited about something called USB2. Its a totally boring name.

I think that encapsulates the difference between Macs and PCs.

I take issue with the "liberals buy Macs" comment. I'm not liberal!

I used to be a Solaris admin, but now I'm an IT director running the LAN/WAN, NT systems, UNIX systems, etc. for a major financial services firm. I'm proficient (actually I'm great) on all these operating systems.

At the end of the day, I retire to my PowerMac at home. Yes, it's computationally slower than a cheaper Wintel system but for me it is more powerful. However, I define "powerful" to mean more than just "clock rate."

Obviously if things continue at their current rate, the Mac may be so far behind in chip performance that it can't catch up. That day hasn't arrived yet nor will it for years. (I'm typing this on my nice Wintel rig at work running Win2k.)

cr

I don't even think that the "just works" applies too much anymore, at least when you get beyond the box itself. The bloom was off the rose for me when I could only get my USB printer to print one page from my iMac before requiring a reboot. Literally, print a page. Reboot. Print a page. Reboot.

Since the "one whose name cannot be spoken" printer manufacturer sold a whole lot more PC printers than Mac printers, they didn't spend too much time looking at the drivers to try to fix my bug.

Then there was the ever so user-friendly act of pulling the power cord out of the back of the machine when it locked up hard.

"It just works." except when it doesn't.

Bob

You're all missing a key piece of criteria here.

Power using defecting because of the speed/cost gap seems to be the basis of the conclusion. However, it is reasonable to assume that power users use speed/cost as only one of many criteria by which they decide to purchase a new machine.

There is one very important criteria which I haven't seen considered in the post or in any of the comments: the platform strategy and switch costs. If you are a power user doing hardcore audio, video or publishing on your mac, you've already invested several thousand dollars into high-end audio, video or publishing applications for your mac. Switch to windows? You have to buy them all again. So, add those thousands to the cost of the PC and suddenly the mac looks a lot more favorable in the price comparison.

There are other switch costs, like the cost of re-learning the user interface, which is of debatable significance. And there's also the risk that, once you've switched everything over at whatever cost, things won't work quite right. I think this is a significant risk because of -- wait for it -- asymmetric information. Like buying a used car, you can't know if it will work until you've already bought in and used it for a while. With a lot of income on the line, I think the risk is a significant one. (Whether this risk is perceived by a significant amount of consumers at the time they make their purchasing decisions, I can't claim to know. But it seems reasonable.)

Switch costs and network effects: crushing efficiency in software markets since different platforms emerged.

Taktile, that's somewhat true, but versioning makes the argument untrue over the long run. When you're buying your new computer, it's probably not that big a consideration, since you're probably looking to upgrade a major package once a year or so.

The comment about tech-liberals was more tongue-in-cheek than anything else, but nevertheless based on a strikingly suggestive casual observation over several years. Perhaps Apple simply markets itself as counterculture, thereby attracting a certain demographic more than others? I am a fan of what Macintosh apparently did for tower fashion, though. Beige boxes are probably the modern equivalent of Henry Ford's rumored obsession for a black paint job.

Aw, Frankie, you're too harsh! Matters of stability with major OS releases are like automobile testimonials: some swear by the same model others despise. Windows 98 Second Edition, one of the most maligned operating systems ever, is a wonderfully stable and driver-cosmopolitan platform; I indulge in audio engineering as a paying hobby and Windows 2000 failed to connect with drivers and hardware. XP, irrespective of its "here, lemme do that for you!" antics, is at best a gamble. If weren't for 98's growing antiquity - recognizing no more than 512MB of RAM or the inability to multithread - I'd stick with it indefinitely.

Here's a question: do Macs allow motorheading, like overclocking and other assorted tweaks? I don't try it on my PCs but I certainly reserve the right! :-)

Lilek's article had two major holes in it, IMHO:

1) Notice how it's THE PC video editing software as compared with iMovie for the Mac? He fails to mention that there are dozens of options for PC video editing, where with Mac, you're pretty much stuck with iMovie (DISCLAIMER: there may be iMovie alternatives out there - I'm not a Mac user, but everytime I hear someone talk about Mac video editing, they mention iMovie). Now, I'm not saying that I'd rather use a PC to edit video than a Mac (best tool for the job, blah, blah, blah), but I find it deliciously ironic that the big, bad monopoly that's "stifling innovation" has, by its ubiquitious presence in the marketplace, encouraged more alternatives in just about every software category. Bottom line: if Lilek's brother-in-law's software is really that crappy, then someone out there will fill that vacuum with a better product before you can say "Switch."

2) Lileks talks about the component-based architecture on a PC like it's a bad thing. With Apple, "the future is already installed." Sure - if your future involves graphic design & video editing. Trouble is, if you just want a glorified web browser you've got to buy a video editing-ready machine anyway. With the PC, you decide what you'll be using it for & customize from there. If you decide to dabble in something that your machine isn't configured in, well then yeah - it's going to be a little harder to do (you may need to go buy some hardware, download some drivers, etc.). But the rest of the time (MOST of the time), you get to used an optimized machine.

Uhhh, stupid question, but what's a six-sigma event?

An event that is six standard deviations from the mean -- or very, very improbable. It's the title of a popular quality management program, that being the probability of defects the Six Sigma manager is supposed to achieve.

Odds of a six-sigma event are roughly one in 300,000, assuming the statistics of the process are Gaussian.

From the top:

1) The fracus with Motorola is a major problem. Incidentally, it's my opinion that the P4 wouldn't be running at 3 GHz today if it hadn't been for AMD's Athelon -- the power of competition -- but that's another issue.

2) Firewire = 400 Mbps. USB2 = 480 Mbps. 10 times slower? FireWire2 (aka FireWire 800) = 800 Mbps.

3) Yeah, you can overclock a mac. Google "overclocking mac". Not so many people do it, though.

4) My beef isn't with stability so much (I rarely had problems with the W2K Server box I had when I was working) as with architecture.

5) Well, the reason why everyone talks about iMovie is because 1) it works well and 2) it's free. There are lots of other video editing programs availble for the mac (off the top of my head, there's Premiere, Avid Express DV, Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Express).

Toxic: Firewire and USB2 are approximately comparable in speed. Firewire is about 35 times faster than USB1.

Firewire was blazingly fast, and worked, years ago. But it didn't become broadly used mainly because Apple tried to charge an unrealistically high royalty. USB doesn't have a royalty.

Once USB2 showed up, Apple massively cut the royalty on Firewire, but it was too late and I think Firewire is going to sink into obscurity. They've released Firewire2, which is twice as fast, but it won't help.

I was going to comment on the firewire/USB comment's by toxic, but see that that's already been taken care of. :-)

Steven Den Beste;
> Once USB2 showed up, Apple massively cut the royalty on Firewire, but it was too late and I think Firewire is going to sink into obscurity. They've released Firewire2, which is twice as fast, but it won't help.

Well most digital camcoders have an IEEE 1394 port, so I don't see firewire going away anytime soon. It has hardware support from the device that matters in this area. Now, firewire hard drives? I don't think these will ever be popular at the regular consumer level.

Plus, a lot of the current PCs being sold for digital editing, do have IEEE1394 ports, most seem to have 2 (and 6 USB ones).

Re:Versioning

Most high-end specialist applications charge a greatly discounted price for version upgrades than buying the whole package outright. Look at this example: the upgrade price of photoshop 7 is $150, 25% of the full price which is $600. I've never seen a discount for upgrading across platforms.

Look at the behavior of Quark users for a good example of platform switch costs. Quark XPress is still the leading page layout software, yet it hasn't had a significant upgrade in years. It isn't compatible with the latest platforms -- it only runs on *old* versions of MacOS. Adobe's InDesign was designed specifically to imitate (and kill) Quark, runs on OS X, opens Quark files, and is often considered better in many respects. Yet people refuse to switch.

It seems to follow that they must perceive some cost to switching, or else they would have done so by now.

TO: Jane Galt
RE: Computer Futures

Or any other product's future, is based on it's ability to compete.

If Apple won't develop faster computers and market them accordingly, then Apple will suffer.

If Windows continues to try to monopolize it's software and control everyone else's software that runs on their system, they'll suffer to...

...especially with Linex lurking in the wings.

When Linex comes up to OS X capabilities and if Apple can't produce a fast enough machine, I may finally buy an Intel box. But it will not run Windows.

Chuck(le)

Brian;

> Lilek's article had two major holes in it, IMHO

Well, two major holes if it's meant to be read as, "Apple computers are the end all of desktops!"

I don't know if that was his intention, maybe it was.

However, his example is valid. If you are one of the many people who own a digital camcoder and want to edit your home videos, it seems to me that you'll have better luck with Apple than with equivalent solutions for around the same price.

Same goes with consoles. We all know a PC can outperform an XBOX and a PS2. But console gaming is a bigger market than PC gaming. There are many reasons for that, but some are similiar to the current argument. If gaming is your main concern, and you don't want to buy that overpriced Alienware machine, maybe you are better off with the $200 XBOX/PS2.

If digital editing is a goal of yours, then Apple can be a reasonable consideration.

If you're like my mom and just use the computer to read emails, that cheap eMachines desktop is a great deal (she didn't take my advice and got a more expensive Compaq, which is about the same low quality parts).

BTW, I have never owned a Mac. I'm a software developer so I need a real machine :-). But trying to do digital editing in such machine, has been a pain in the you know where.

As someone who uses both the Mac and PC platforms professionally--and uses both for the high-end graphics and video functions--I have to agree with pretty much everything Steven Den Beste and Jane have said, with the exception of Steven's assertion that FireWire is going away soon. Not likely. The video industry, and by that I mean the broadcast video industry, has embraced FireWire as a means of digitizing video from tape for editing, and for layback to tape for mastering. USB2 has done nothing to change that--FireWire was already here, we were already familiar with it and liked it. FireWire2 may make a difference, but I kind of doubt it at least in the short term. There are just too many camcorders and tape decks and editing systems that already incorporate FireWire in their schemes.

As for the platforms, I'm pretty much agnostic--I'll use what's fastest and what works best. Currently I literally have a PC on my left and a Mac on my right that share a single large 16x9 monitor, and imho the PC is, today, the better machine. It's faster, less annoyed by little snags and bugs in software, and it actually has a freakin' button on the chassis that ejects cd's. The Mac I have came with a non-standard keyboard, which lacked the requisite cd ejector button, and being a Mac it lacks such a button on the box. I had to go on the web, download and install a specialized driver, then map a Function key to be the cd ejector. What a pain. Maybe the future is installed in there somewhere, but the present can be dysfunctional if you can't even open up the cd tray.

On a sort of related note, here's an interesting article by Cringely on the topic;

Free Flight
Why Apple is Pulling Away From Microsoft and Can't Afford Not to Do It

"Bottom line: if Lilek's brother-in-law's software is really that crappy, then someone out there will fill that vacuum with a better product before you can say "Switch."

I don't doubt it. Perhaps they already have. Point is, I've had a product that did the job for the last two years; it came with the machine and works perfectly. IMovie has been around long enough for Windows programmers to understand what makes it useful; there's no excuse for writing a program that's just a flaming piece of crap.

I actually felt as if the programmers hated the users, deeply & intently. "Screw you, with your stupid camcorders and bottomless gobbets of maternity ward footage, Christmas plays, graduation ceremonies, beach vacations and ski trips! You pampered rich bastards with your toys, your mewling children, your underlit shaky-cam shots - you don't deserve good software! Here - have 150 transition effects. Use 'em all in one movie! Star wipes - don't forget to use the star wipes as often as possible. Classy. Yeah, Spielberg is always calling us up and asking how he can put more star wipes in his movies. Now go away and leave us alone. Don't call the helpline. We're all playing Unreal Tournament and hoovering porn off a Russian server. Sod off."

Lileks;

LOL.

Do you remember what product it was?

I have a sort of similar experience with a NLE Windows product that has been rated as the best one in it's class (as in not as expensive as Premier).

As an example, I've had a problem where after video capture, the audio is out of synch with the video. This is kind of a fundamental thing that should work. I have 0 dropped frames, and nothing running in the background.

One of the developers recommended to me to;

1) Turn off the taskbar clock in windows (!!!)
2) Make sure you kill all background programs (whenever possible) in the background.
3) Defrag the drive (ok, that one is kind of acceptable).
4) TURN OFF USB DRIVERS!!!!!!!!!
5) Reinstall the OS (the standard responce in the PC world).

What I don't get is why the PC users feel so threatened by a computer that has less than 10% market share that they have to pontificate about how it is going to be dead any day now.

And why they have been saying it for many years and it still hasn't happened.

Why do you care? And why should Mac users care what you think?

I haven't downloaded it yet, but I've been told that Microsoft's Windows Movie Maker 2 (a free download) kicks the pants off of iMovie for feature set and usability. Is there anybody who has used both who can verify?

as for the switching costs... they are also counteracted by the fact that designers and publishers get paid based on how fast things render (ie you can do more jobs in the same amount of time/not have to babysit rendering jobs over night)

with the speed increases that are dramatically outpacing the macs (cpu 3+x as fast, faster memory, faster bus...) video editing and graphics design happens faster. Now it may be more painful to use, and you may have to buy a bunch of new software, but productivity improvements are huge... especially when you generally need to gross up salary by 2x to get true cost to company (to capture profit, rent, heat, electricity, support staff...)

so a low paid graphic designer getting 50k/a has an actual hourly rate of $50... say that you get a total productivity improvement of 25%.. you're saving 25k/a... so you more than make back the investment in the first year, including hardware, software and retraining hits....

> they are also counteracted by the fact that designers and publishers get paid based on how fast things render (ie you can do more jobs in the same amount of time/not have to babysit rendering jobs over night)

That's why movie studios use cheap but fast Linux render farms, for brute force rendering speed, you don't want OSes and hardware that are going to slow you down.

But for editing a timeline and drawing designs on a computer, I think the rendering cost is a lot more difficult to calculate as you make it sound.

> with the speed increases that are dramatically outpacing the macs (cpu 3+x as fast, faster memory, faster bus...) video editing and graphics design happens faster. Now it may be more painful to use, and you may have to buy a bunch of new software, but productivity improvements are huge... especially when you generally need to gross up salary by 2x to get true cost to company (to capture profit, rent, heat, electricity, support staff...)

If you see making of videos of ILM films, you'll notice a lot of Unix machines for 3D graphics (are they still using SGIs, not sure) and a lot of Macs all over the place for NLE. NLE is so interactive, that the biggest bottleneck is not the rendering, but the actual human organizing scenes. When you are ready to render, you go off and send it to a real machine, not a laptop or desktop where creative people do their work.

I also draw a lot in my computer (again a PC w Win2K) with a graphic tablet, and I can assure you most of the time is not spent applying photoshop filter effects, but in actulally drawing. Speed increases on the filter effects are not the bottleneck in my system.

TO: All
RE: Ya Just Gotta Laugh!

I LOVE IT!!!! All the discussion. All the contested points. All the enthusiasm.

We're all 'alive' with and 'passionate' over our respective 'positions'. And nobody is getting shot, blown-up or otherwise murdered.

THIS is what makes America great. And I think it particularly interesting that we are doing it in a venue that is the technological side of what makes US great to boot.

Keep up the good work, kiddies. As long as we continue like this only acts of God [or that other guy] can stop US.

Play On!!!!

Chuck(le)

Different users will have different needs.

But in Apple's position, it can't afford to lose any more of its user base. It may be true that a lot of Apple's existing userbase doesn't actually care about processor speed, and indeed may well be willing to buy new machines from Apple which are slower, because they're perceived to excel in other ways. (And that's all Apple is actually interested in; it doesn't get significant revenue from installed base. Most of its money comes from new sales.)

But there will be many for which speed actually is the most important factor, and it's becoming increasingly likely that they'll defect. Apple can't afford that, because erodes their network effect.

Steven's analysis is interesting, but missing some context - how does Apple's product mix compare with the PC industry over the same time period (and don't just pick Dell, look at HPQ, Gateway et al too).

Katherine, complaining about Chicago is the equivalent of moaning about Windows 3.1 - OS 7.5 let you choose your own system font, and OS X includes a great range of classically beautiful typefaces.

Jane, your point about the (3rd party) hardware folks not having intimate knowledge of the software is no longer the case, as the kernel and lower levels of the OS that the HW folks interact most closely with are Open Source now.

What does the Mac do for you that you want to do yourself?

I have no idea if any of the 40 posts prior to mine have mentioned this, but Mac ownership isn't about speed or good value, its about sex. Do a search on google sometime for "Mac" and "Fetish."
It's quite disturbing frankly.

I'm not talking about the Mac folks -- I agree they integrate quite well with their vendors. I was talking about the PC people, who don't even try.

>>complaining about Chicago is the equivalent of moaning about Windows 3.1

Kevin, yes, Chicago is thankfully years behind us. And the current default display font is beautiful. But by the time OS 7.5 came out, I was firmly entrenched in the PC camp. All I'm saying is that there was a disconnect between "we're there for you, designers!" and the ugliest display font imaginable. I felt like they didn't understand me or care about my likes and dislikes. It's a purely visceral reaction, along the same lines as Lileks' above. Call it petty if you like; it's still the primary reason Apple lost me. As it happens, I later married a man whose only objection to the Mac was Chicago. Either there are more of us out there, or eccentric font snobs attract each other.

taktile, my guess as to the reason for failure-to-upgrade with Quark XPress is that the users are avoiding OS X, not that they're avoiding the upgrade expense.

And the $450 delta between Photoshop 7's upgrade and new costs is only part of what you'd save by buying equivalent PC hardware instead of Apple. Your argument just doesn't wash... unless you're already a Mac believer, in which case you're probably going "La la la -- I can't hear you!".

Regarding Lileks' complaints: they reflect the tiny percentage of would-be home-video editors. If and when there are enough of them to support the software development, good programs will emerge for Windows; but at the moment, the whole cost of such development is being borne by the Mac community... the part that's not being eaten by Apple, that is. But that fact alone shows how cheap it must be to develop the necessary software, doesn't it -- and leaves only the tiny market as the cause.

TO: Matt Johnson
RE: Fetish Anyone?

"Mac ownership isn't about speed or good value, its about sex. Do a search on google sometime for "Mac" and "Fetish."" -- Matt Johnson

I didn't know that man and machine could get that close.

Personally, I prefer getting 'in touch' with my 'feminine side'.

Regards,

Chuck(le)

Oh I almost forgot -- one of the interesting facets of the mac vs pc debate is the issue of market definition (for purposes of determining anti-trust violations). In the case against Microsoft, Microsoft wanted the market to be huge, so they wanted to include Apple and Sun (arguing that Windows NT was just as high end as MacOS and Solaris). Yet, in terms of price, an Apple or a Sun workstation is not a market substitute for a PC. One could argue that Pepsi is a substitute for Coke, but I'm wondering if Jane Galt readers would argue that Apples are substitutes for PCs (in terms of an anti-trust market definition).

Katherine - Just a FYI.

Chicago was around so long as a historical artifact. Remember, the early Macs were cute little all-in-one with tiny monochrome screens that didn't support a full range of grays. Chicago was then as it is now one of the uglier fonts on the Mac (which supported a wide range of fonts from the beginning), but by a long shot it was the most clearly and easily readable.

Even by the late 1980s, Chicago was an anachronism -- displays had improved so that a pleasing font could be readable too -- but the Mac is a product built on brand loyalty, and by then Chicago was firmly entrenched in the brand. When the default system font did eventually change from Chicago to Charcoal (1997, I think?) there was much carping and gnashing of teeth among the faithful.

As to the larger discussion, while I agree with Steven Den Beste's basic analysis, I'm not particularly worried. He overestimates the cost and unlikelihood of an eventual switch to Intel or AMD64. Because it's easier for the company and its customers, Apple will stay with PPC as long as it can, and is hoping IBM's part will save the line. But at the same time Apple is very conspicuously preparing for its own potential switch:

1) OS X has always been portable, and an Intel port is actively maintained.

2) Apple is consolidating its software base dramatically. With the notable exceptions of MS IE and MS Office, all the applications the typical consumer is likely to use are developed by (and are therefore promptly portable by) Apple. Apple is replacing its MS dependencies rapidly (as Cringley has noted), with IE and half of Office already replaced (Safari, Keynote, and Mail). For professional users, Apple owns the video space (Final Cut Pro), and if it persuades Adobe (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign) to ship "fat" versions of its apps (PPC and Intel combined - the OS supports this) for a while, that would be enough.

3) The cost of PPC emulation is being diminished. "Quartz Extreme" offloads much of the graphically intensive work of the OS X hyper-GUI to cards, rather than relying on the potentially orphaned PPC Altivec vector processor. Most apps don't use this stuff at all, and of those that do, only Apple and Adobe matter enough to make a difference. The rest of the PPC instruction set is eminently emulable, and though it'll be slower than native Intel/AMD, at some point it becomes a net improvement over PPC if the performance gap continues to widen.

4) Nearly all third party hardware is already processor agnostic.

5) The team at Apple/NeXT is the world's most experienced at managing major processor/OS transitions and they have handled them remarkably smoothely. They've managed Mac Moto68K - MotoPPC, NeXT Moto68K - Intel/Sparc/etc, and most recently traditional MacOS to OS X. All of these transitions could have been catastrophes, but none of them were, and some were nearly seamless (e.g. 68K to PPC).

6) Other than potentially (but in the end probably not) losing Microsoft as a developer, Apple's business model need change not a whit. They'd still add peculiar proprietary bits to any Intel/AMD Mac to retain the control and price premium they get from "making the whole widget".

Steve Jobs et al, while they may be arrongant, are not stupid. They understand the problems SDB points out and Jane seconds, and are preparing for a potential switch. (SJ has even said so; when asked at a analysts meeting about a potential switch, he noted that after the OS X transition was complete, Apple would explore options and "we like options".) I'm sure they hope they won't have to do this - if IBM were to really deliver, it'd be nice. But I'd wager that at this point Apple's plans are already sufficiently developed that Intel/AMD Macs could be at you local mall within six months of Steve Jobs' go-ahead.

A lot of interesting comments, but I have to tell you that as an avid computer user of both Windows and Mac platforms in the graphics and printing industry for over 10 years, it has become obvious to me that your preference will gravitate towards what you are trying to do.

Chuck is right about the Mac making up for its slower speed. The speed at which the processor operates in no way can compensate for the inability to do what you want, take postcript printing from your PC publishing program vs. your Mac for example. The Windows boxes are notorious for font problems (btw, I don't like Chicago font either, but I prefer it to Courier), postscript errors and the clunky printing interface.

Agusto, I don't know if you ever tried to use InDesign, but I can tell you that if you want to design something that looks great on screen but won't separate properly (try a semi-transparent spot color over text - ug!)then InDesign is your app. I like InDesign for some things though (but stil hate OSX), and hope that the next version will fix a lot of problems, until then if you actually want your ad to be printable in a magazine, you will stick to QuarkXpress.

Bob, I was interested by your comments about PC vs Macintosh user magazines because I wonder if you know that they both are designed and printed on Macs?

I suppose that all this is to say that the Mac is by (very) far the preferred platform for high end graphics and printing, and so long as there are printed advertisments, there will be Macs.

My experience has been that many crossplatform applications have very reasonable upgrade/switch policies, it isn't necessarily laid out clearly on their site because it doesn't come up often. Sometimes if you just ask nicely they do it for free. There have always been a few that ship multiple platforms in the same box. The CDs are are a drop in the bucket compared the cost of a big printed manual, and even that pales compared to the price on really high-end apps.

Lately a much bigger crossplatform issue is Apple buying up companies and discontinuing the Windows version. You know, the way Microsoft is alway accused of doing but rarely found in real life.

One of the most important issues in the FireWire/USB discussion that gets ignored is that speed, much more so than in the CPU, is not the operative issue for the applications where FireWire rules. USB was intended to be a lowest cost host driven bus for simplifying connections on both the hardware and software levels. Things such as any device in any port, cost, effectively unlimited number of devices, cost, unified driver model, cost, etc. were all driving forces. (Did I mention cost?) At this Intel, Compaq, and Microsoft succeeded. (Apple didn't enter USB until well after the spec was done.)

FireWire has a different set of priorities, including deterministic behavior in apps where that can be critical. It is consequently more expensive, not unlike the difference between Ethernet and Token Ring. Token Ring has largely dropped from sight for mainstream networking but is still depended on where its determinism matters.

So FireWire isn't going away. It has merely been made more specialized as USB2 eliminates the speed difference for casual use. Many new DV cams are now including USB2 ports in an attempt to reach out to a wider audience. At the same time FireWire, thanks to the reduction royalty obstacle, is becoming more common on PC motherboards. It says a lot that Intel is now selling a board with FireWire included.

There has long been a myth that Intel was trying to kill FireWire with USB2, an especially popular idea with the Mac crowd, who took it as an offense. They would repeated send links to tech site for articles in Maczines published years before the spec was even final purporting to show how it would never work right. This was just silliness and paranoia. Intel has only ever objected to FireWire on the basis of cost. They had sessions at IDF that promoted the use of FireWire, and that is a venue where nothing gets in that Intel doesn't like. They merely saw it as something for high-end mobos or PCI cards until such time as the cost was not a problem, not unlike their attitude towards SCSI.

Intel doesn't collect royalties from USB yet Apple notably left it out of the latest chipsets. Apple still collects royalties on FireWire, although much less on 1394b, due to the chip vendors like TI they pissed off actively working to avoid using their patents. So as it stands Apple would rather collect a little bit of royalties rather than imporve their overall platform. As often as he feels the need to spite his face it's a wonder Steve Jobs has any nose left at all.

Steve Waldman,

1) The only portion of OS X that is portable and maintained on x86 is Darwin. This far from a shippable OS X and Apple actively denies that any full port exists. (Of course, they'd have to deny it if it were true to avoid the Osborne Effect.) What remains in this case is a pretty non-trivial code base. Until such time as Apple 'fesses up or undeniable evidence is presented I'll have to accept their statement that PPC remains their future.

2) I agree that Safari is a good idea in that browser, IMHO, are non-offensive as bundleware. The base functionality is too important for an OS not to have. Keynote, OTOH, I think is a terible idea. (Note the software itself, which may be terrific.) Apple has recently been very actively competing with its ISV base, threatening to reduce the Mac to an Apple monoculture. This cannot be good.

3)The big/little-endian issue is far from alleviated by Quartz. It affect virtually all code. The move from 68K to PPC was much simpler because the two architectures were compatible in that respect. Every attempt at simulating a non-AltiVec G4 on an x86 ran glacially. The performance penalty was much to severe to expect users of recent Macs to endure, unless the performance gap grows to a much worse multiplier. The necessary secret sauce might be to have an actual G4 on a PCI card to run legacy code. The cost in hardware might be well compensated by avoiding an expensive yet unsatisfactory emulation project. If they don't do I guarantee a third party like Orange will step in. Those professional Mac users lusting after better performance cost is often less an issue than usefulness. If their first x86 Mac is a bit pricey it won't be an issue if all their legacy apps run at full speed until such as everything has be ported. (Long ago there were very expensive DSP boards for accelerating PhotoShop filters. I had clients who didn't even blink at $2500, saying it pay for itself in a month if it performed as advertised.)

4) For USB & FireWire devices this true but you'd be shocked by how many PCI cards are implemented to full spec and fail in non-PC environments and vice versa. One of the dirty little secrets of the industry.

5)Almost none of those people are still with the company. (Although I've often said Palm could learn a lot from the 68Kto PPC move. One of their reasons for buying BE.)THe NeXT port isn't really comparable because big chunks were left behind or were never finished before they gave up. THe primary driver for those ports were the dev environment, not the whole OS. This is another reason why I think a legacy hardware board would be better to get the job done quickly. Not to mention throwing Motorola a bone for their years of suffering.

6) Apple's business model desparately needs to change or switching to x86 will just be a band-aid in the face of behavior that insures a niche market position. It doesn't have to be that way. They just have to surrender some power. Currently Jobs and Co. enjoy an very high level of control of their little kingdom but only by keeping it small. By opening up more and allowing more outside influence they can regain big chunks of market share and be much stronger as a platform. Even benign monarch and dictators often resist granting more individual liberties because the will to power is too great. One lesson that is so often missed is that much of the strength Microsoft has attained came by not controlling every little detail. Anybody who wants to is free to create their own vision of what a PC should be. Microsoft will try to make a case for Windows running on that PC but that is all they can do. In the Mac world if Apple didn't think of it it never comes to market.

Gary, there has always been a portion of the majority that will pick on a minority for no goos reason other than they can. The minority doesn't make things any better when a significant portion of that minority adopts a snotty attitude, whether it exists already or is in reaction to the persecution.

What I annoys me is tha Lileks often abandons rationality that he usually has in great supply because of this persecution mentality. Without fail when he launches into his latest 'PC killed my dog' rant it centers on blaming things that are not at fault instead of what is, like an incompetent IT department at his employer's offices.

A look at the shelves in local stores (Los Angeles County) reveals that the iBundle has had a chilling effect on third party products competing for the same genre in the lower price points. So you better like iMovie, because there isn't much else without getting into a significant expense. Yes, there can be a few programs pointed to here and there online like Audion as competition for iTunes be aconspicious absence from retail says a lot. For casual users the choices are narrowed considerably. This is a benfit for Apple in the short run but not a good thing in the long term.

He never states what the PC video app is so the reader has no means to say either, "Oh yeah, I don't how they stay in business," or "It worked fine for me, you've got your brain too locked into Apple's One Way, Jim." I've seen the same application love and hated by users solely based on how they were accustomed to doing the task. It didn't offer any real judgement of whether the apps was very good or very bad on its own merits to a novice. (Lileks does offer enough to suggest the app is unstable but little enough is known about other elements that could be important.)

This is the problem with freedom of choice as offered on the PC. It includes the freedom to make bad choices. (If Apple gained a lot of market share the opportunity for bad choices would increase but I believe the net effect would be positive.) If I haven't any basis for making an informed decision about a product I try to gather a collection of reviews. This is terribly easy given Web access. Multiple reviews are important because unless you know the reviewer well his praise or criticism may derive from a mindset in direct disagreement with yours.

It's hard to image any product category where this does not apply. Modern mass retails sales doesn't accomodate hiring knowledgable staff and all too often nobody in the store is at liberty to say something negative about anything they carry, even when there are numerous choices.

Saying the program was written by people who hated their customers (Jerry Pournelle was a frequent user of that line in his columns) raises a question of who the customers were. While acknowledging its power I've always detested the Unix command line because it was so unforgiving to those those make a commitment to mastering it. This doesn't stop it from having tens of millions of passsionate adherents.

Bob,

I suspect Apple has a strategy for making MS Office less critical to their viability. I believe it's overstated as is. Apple is known to have licensed the Star Office code. It would make perfect sense for them to take the same approach as Safari, starting from a exisiting code base to build a mondo deluxe version for its platform. Perhaps it won't display very complex Word documents perfectly but I don't think that will affect all that many users and Microsoft itself is making that less of an issue. They see the value of what can be done with an XML format as more valuable to future growth than keeping their document format closed.

If this office app suite worked out well it might even be worth making it cross platform like the old Claris days when Apple sold apps without an attached platform.

Michael Ubaldi,

Intel has always had a massive upper hand over AMD. This again brings up the issue of performance not being the end all of value.

AMD is best describe as a successful manufacturer of flash memory parts with a money lossing sideline in x86 CPUs. Painful as that may be for AMD fans it is how Wall Street sees it. THe best year AMD has had in the past decade was but a small fraction of Intel's revenue. for most of those years AMD lost money while Intel had a handsome profit.

Part of the problem is that AMD falls short in providing complete validated solutions required to gain support from the important markets. For instance, HPaq sells AMD-based consumer systems but none in their business lines. Dell simply doesn't sell AMD at all. (That may change with the x86-64 line but nothing definite yet.) AMD has been reluctant to commit resources to chipsets, relying overmuch on third parties who don't have the confidence of big IT buyers.

Even in the consumer sector a major portion of Intel systems have an Intel chipset and/or motherboard. As a result Intel collects much more revenue per system sold. This matter quite a lot even if the stuff beside the CPU has little or no profit as cashflow matters to the beancounters.

The upcoming Hammer 64-bit processors don't offer all that much hope. For consumers they're unlikely to offer more than parity on performance. It'll be some years before memory densities and prices make the ability to easily address more than 4 GB of RAM becomes a selling point in the consumer or low -end server markets. In the mid to high end server markets there's already plenty of 64-bit choices. Making Hammer a big seller there will require a lot of good will efforts from people AMD cannot control.

For what it's worth I've become very attached to WinXP. The initial growing pains of driver updates, as with any new release that serious new stuff under the hood, are long since over. The only Win98 left in my assortment of systems is a Toshiba K6-II 333 mhz laptop and a Toshiba Libretto microscopic P90 system. They still come in handy on occasion. There is, however, a lot of goodies in XP that have yet to be well exploited in default configurations, largely due to the number of inadequate systems that still flood the market. When XP came out HPaq were still pushing system with 810 chipsets, meaning mediocre onboard video and no AGP slot. This meant a lot of stuff has to wait before Microsoft makes it a default. Some stuff has happened that raises the bar but I'm impatient. Some of the goodies can be seen at Stardock Systems, where they've gone whole hog for what can be done with a modern PC & video card.

Eric,
Excellent comment about Apple actively competing against their ISVs. They're in danger of putting their developer community in jeopardy.

Now in some cases it's justified. Their developer community is in jeopardy. People are being forced to migrate off the Mac as the relative market share continues to decline. In areas where there aren't strong Mac programs, Apple is more than justified in developing their own solution to make sure one exists. But ask the Watson folks how it feels to have a popular, successful Mac program and have Apple then come along and take all the best features and give it away for free.

At my previous employer, I was tasked with finding a shop to migrate a relatively small (25K LOC) program from the PC to the Mac. Interviewed 3 shops. Then there were internal delays and the project was shelved for a quarter. When I got the green light, 2 of the three shops weren't doing Mac port work anymore. The reason? The Mac was going to OSX and the relatively sparse amount of work available didn't justify the expense of learning OSX.

This is informative for two reasons. The first is that developers are sensitive to the fact that the Mac market share is dwindling. If Apple asks anything too complicated, like rewriting code for a processor change for example, they are likely to abandon the Mac for greener XPastures. Also, if they think that Apple is going to come along and take their market away with an iApp, then ditto.

Adobe recently released a digital photo album program for Windows only. The presense of a free iPhoto on the Mac platform undoubtedly made the cost of developing, maintaining and supporting a Mac port too unappealing. So there's a choice denied to Mac users by Apple's interference in the developer space.

Yep, it's amazing to me that Microsoft is constantly labeled as stomping on their ISVs but what Apple is doing would be unthinkable in Redmond. Even before the browser bundling became a big point of contention in the DOJ case they've been very conservative about including too much stuff, either in acknowledgement of the critical need to keep ISVs happy or to keep corporate customer from complaining about too many toys on their employees systems. This is one of the reasons for the Plus! packs. Vendor selling consumer systems can add the Plus! stuff for a license fee that verges on non-exisitent in large volumes to have more all-singing all-dancing niceties on the machines.

In some cases companies that license their code to Microsoft for system utilites would be thrilled to nogotiate a license for a more complete version. The fee per license would be low but the volume magnificent. MS doesn't do that though, because if for instance they put more of Executive Software's disc utilities in the base install competing companies like Symantec would be furious. Better to stick to a minimum to provide what is needed and let the consumer decide if more is desired. An actively used system will eventually need a defrag and should be scanned for errors once in a while before data loss occurs. The stuff in XP gets that done but you can get a lot more features if you think it's worth buying. The utility companies can try to convince the public of that and everybody has a chance.

Apple doesn't seem to care anymore about ISVs because they're too tied up in hardware sales, resorting to a big pile of frrebies to sweeten the deal. This is one reason I'd rather they got out of hardware (except for demonstration reference platforms so they could still exercise influence where it counted) and concentrated on their real strength in software. Having a wide range of hardware vendor would make certain operations less certain due to the range of variance but such is the price. The hardware vendors could competitively explore every possible form factor without the inventory nightmare Apple faced in the mid-90's with way too many configurations under one roof. This is what I meant about surrendering a degree of control in favor of great growth. (They also have to give up the screwball accounting they used last time.)

And on top of everything else, Lileks was really good today, about nothing in particular. Just talking about the day gone by but so dang entertaining in the process. Sort of a Seinfeld day at the ol' blog.

Eric, thank you for the alternative perspective on AMD and Intel. To AMD's credit, I never would have guessed their size relative to Intel; they outperformed Intel in a performance-for-price matter very early last year and the year before that. I recall reading how RAMBUS was initially a poor successor, especially with AMD taking advantage of generic SDRAM; then the Thunderbird popped out, and then the first few Athlons (upon which my audio computer is based).

Honestly, I've never been loyal to a brand simply by name in the transient computer world - I want performance and I expect to see the best company provide it for my devotion/money. I had just built a trio of Intel P3s in early 2001 when AMD really hit the stage, and so the next few computers I built were Athlons. Now with Athlon stumbling about, I'm looking back to Intel. As a parallel, I've used Quantum/Maxtor drives for years. The latest Maxtor, however, appears to be substandard to Seagate's newest in practically every shootout. I'll keep an eye on Maxtor and trust that they'll try to repeat their earlier successes, but for the time being I'm more interested in Seagate.

The financial situation (Intel's loss-leader work and deep pockets against AMD's tiny domain) makes me wonder, then: could we be having a conversation about AMD's demise as much as we are of Apple's?

Eric,

At this point this is beating a dead horse beyond recognition, but I have to respectfully (annoyingly?) disagree with many of your assertions re the implausibility of OS X on Intel.

Good emulation is not restricted to similar processor achitectures with the same byte order. There is no reason why PPC on x86 couldn't be at least as good as x86 on PPC, which is pretty good right now. If Apple can achieve PPC on Intel at the same performance cost as VirtualPC today, it will soon be a net gain to switch to emulation (if the performance gap continues to widen). If emulation this good has not been done already, it is only because no one has seriously tried, not due to any fundamental issues (except WRT to Altivec, on which, I would argue, Apple is diminishing its dependence).

While there has certainly been churn at Apple/NeXT over the years, many of the key players remain at Apple, and corporations make a great (though admittedly not always successful) effort to preserve expertise across personnel changes. While they may or may not have lost some experience in this regard, I stand by my statement that no country in the world is better positioned WRT to experience to manage major platform migrations. (This is, in part, a backhanded compliment, I suppose.)

It is not only Darwin or the NeXT development environment that has been ported. The entire NeXT OS began in big-endian Motorola and was ported to little-endian Intel, with most apps following. NeXT was pioneering in designing the OS and development environment with portability in mind. Re: OS X, while only Darwin is public on Intel, multiple (admittedly unreliable rumor-ish) sources indicate that Apple maintains a full OS X build on Intel. The NeXT GUI and development environment, on which Quartz and Cocoa are based, were on Intel before they were ever on PPC.

Anyway, this is an empirical question. I predict that, within 12 months, Apple will a) release IBM-based PPC models that in reality (rather than Steve-Jobs-reality-distotion) radically diminish the performance gap; or b) publicly announce Intel or AMD-based Macs. Apple has a problem, they need to address it, these are the two strategies available. I think they are quite evidently pursuing them simultaneously.

Michael, AMD's survival is certainly one of those mysteries of survival, along with most of the hard drive and DRAM businesses. A lot of folks don't even know AMD is a major supplier of flash memory but a lot of analyst assess AMD more on that market than the CPU business.

They've been through a lot over the years. The first time I ever really looked closely at the company was when Atari indicated some interest in building computers on their 29000 RISC line back in the 80's. Nothing ever came of it and one engineer I knew from YARC shuddered at the idea but I wasn't equipped then to follow his technical explanation of why the 29000 wasn't a CPU for processing but rather for lying down quietly and leaving alone.

Anybody else remember when it was a big deal that AMD had a 40 MHz 386 when Intel's topped out at 33 MHz? They also went on to make 486 clones twice as fast as Intel's best or at least what Intel last made before they completely lost interest in favor of the Pentium. AMD did a nice little commodity business in SBCs using those chips for several years. Part of their life sustaining but invisible to the general public businesses.

As with Apple, I hope AMD sticks around if for no better reason then to add some variety to the world and avoid complacency.

Bryan: "The Mac I have came with a non-standard keyboard, which lacked the requisite cd ejector button, and being a Mac it lacks such a button on the box. I had to go on the web, download and install a specialized driver, then map a Function key to be the cd ejector."

While in Win 98 and up, if you don't want to reach for the eject button on the box, just right-click on the drive letter and select eject from the pop-up menu. Too bad you Mac'ies don't have a right mouse button, either... I think the biggest issue here is a large dose of corporate arrogance, AKA the "not invented here syndrome."

I was shopping for a new computer when the first Mac's came out. What a nice toy, but it cost too much and could do too little. 128K RAM and not expandable??? (That was the first dose of arrogance...) About 19 years later, sounds like it's back to the same point.

Actually, OS X knows about additional mouse buttons and has a set of defaults if you plug in something like a MS Intellimouse. For me this is a major priority whenever I spend a prolonged period on a Mac, so the Targus mini-scroller optical I keep in my laptop case comes in handy.

The single button design isn't my main beef. It's the horrible form factors Apple has chosen for two generations. When I saw they'd replaced the incredibly ill-conceived hockey puck (it was the Xbox controller complaint in reverse, are tiny hands common at 1 Infinite Loop Drive?) I was relieved but then discovered that in their unending quest for form over function they'd screwed up again. I was amazed this afternoon at CompUSA to see that they charge $70 for that thing.

As I said, I can get by with the single button but it's always annoyed me, all the way back to the Lisa. I can recall the ad copy, "There's just one mouse button, so you can never press the wrong one." In other words, we think you're a drooling uneducable moron who cannot summon enough neural wattage to choose a button as needed. I've never been dedicated enough to master a musical instrument but a literal handful of mouse buttons is not a steep learning curve.

I know one pianist who also took affront and created a program to map all 88 keys on a Yamaha synth via midi to commands on an Atari ST. It was amazing to watch him go. computer operation as performance. In the case of this input device the price of mastery was somewhat high.

Apple users have been quite happily paying exoirbitant prices for inferior hardware for over a decade, why stop now?

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