TSA can't believe MacBook Air is a real laptop, causes owner to miss flight

Filed under: Laptops The TSA has been known to take issue with products designed in Cupertino before, but for one particular traveler, it was Apple's thinnest laptop ever that caused the latest holdup. Upon tossing his ultra-sleek slab of aluminum underneath the scanner, security managed to find enough peculiarities to remove it from the flow, pull it aside and wrangle up the owner for some questions. Apparently, the TSA employee manning the line was flabbergasted by the "lack of a drive"...

Filed under: Laptops The TSA has been known to take issue with products designed in Cupertino before, but for one particular traveler, it was Apple's thinnest laptop ever that caused the latest holdup. Upon tossing his ultra-sleek slab of aluminum underneath the scanner, security managed to find enough peculiarities to remove it from the flow, pull it aside and wrangle up the owner for some questions. Apparently, the TSA employee manning the line was flabbergasted by the "lack of a drive" and the complete absence of "ports on the back," and while hordes of co-workers swarmed to investigate, the user's flight took off on schedule. Thankfully, said owner was finally allowed to pass through after some more in-the-know colleagues explained in painfully simple terms what an SSD was, but the poor jet-setter most definitely paid the price for trying to slip some of the latest and greatest under the sharp eyes of the TSA (and cutting it close on time, of course).[Image courtesy of ABC] Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

  • ★ BlackBerry vs. iPhone

    1: Wherein Neither ‘RIM’ Nor ‘BlackBerry’ Are Even Mentioned, but Rather the Stage Is Set for Showing Why They Might Be Seriously Screwed Along the lines of can’t-really-be-answered-but-gosh-they’re-fun-to-ponder questions like, say, “Who’d win in a fight, Batman or Spider-Man?” or “Star Destroyer vs. U.S.S. Enterprise?”,1 here’s one regarding the iPhone: What historical Mac is a current iPhone most analogous to, spec-wise? I.e, complete this sentence: “An iPhone is like having a tiny ____ in your pocket?” Now of course the comparison can’t be precise. Different software, different use cases, different purposes. But there’s no denying that an iPhone is a computer. And unless you’re really young, it’s faster — a lot faster — than the computers you owned not so long ago. So, seriously, stop here for a moment and think about it. My first answer, pulled simply from recollection of how fast machines felt to use, was the original iMac. But that machine — announced 10 years ago this week — had a 233 MHz G3 and, by default, a paltry 32 MB of RAM. Apple has never officially released the CPU specs of the iPhone, but Craig Hockenberry poked around with undocumented system APIs which indicated the iPhone’s CPU runs at 400 MHz with a bus speed of 100 MHz, and that there’s 128 MB of RAM. As we all recall from the PowerPC era, MHz is not a precise metric for comparing the performance of CPUs across different architectures; I wouldn’t be surprised in the least to find out that a 400 MHz PowerPC G3 is a faster chip than the 400 MHz ARMwhatever that’s in the iPhone, if only because of the power constraints. But, still, it’s something. So, my answer to the question: the original “Pismo” G3 PowerBook. The numbers match up pretty closely: 400 MHz CPU, 100 MHz bus speed, 64 MB of RAM. (The higher-end Pismo had a 500 MHz CPU and 128 MB of RAM.) Even storage sizes are similar: hard drive options for the Pismo were 6, 12, or 18 GB. Another possible answer: the original blue-and-white Power Mac G3 — again, 400 MHz CPU, 100 MHz bus speed, 64-128 MB of RAM, and 6-12 GB hard drives. Think about that — in just nine years, the specs that then described Apple’s top-of-the-line desktop computer now describe their phone. One thing that makes this comparison hard is that there’s not much software in common. You can’t use most of the real-world tasks commonly used for ballpark benchmarking, like, say, Photoshop image processing or ripping MP3s from AIFFs, because the iPhone doesn’t do them. But there is one processor intensive task we can compare: web page rendering. In the early days of the web, it took a while for even moderately large web pages to render in a browser, even when you were loading them from HTML files right on your hard drive. If you were to plop yourself down in front of one of these vintage 1999-2000 Macs for an afternoon of web browsing, even with a decent Ethernet connection to the Internet you’d find the experience pretty damn slow by current standards. For all the incessant chatter about the demand for and purported certainty of 3G wireless networking in the next generation of iPhone hardware, the truth is that current iPhones are held back, web-surfing-wise, by more than just the speed of EDGE (which admittedly, is indeed pretty slow). Recall this video pitting a 3G Nokia E61i against an iPhone on EDGE — total rendering time was more or less the same, and in a few cases, the iPhone came out ahead. You can see that browsing speed — which is what matters — depends on more than just networking speed simply by comparing how long it takes to render a web page on the iPhone using Wi-Fi: a lot longer than it takes to load the same page in using Safari on a Mac. For example, it takes about two or three seconds for Safari to load the Daring Fireball home page on my new MacBook Pro. Using the same Wi-Fi network, it takes my iPhone about 15 seconds. (Using EDGE, it takes about 60 seconds to completely load, although you can start reading much sooner than that.) Point being that even if 3G wireless networking were as fast as Wi-Fi — which it’s not — browsing on an iPhone would still be pretty slow compared to browsing on a modern desktop or laptop. If you frequently use Wi-Fi on your iPhone, a faster processor in the next-generation hardware would make a bigger difference to the overall experience than faster phone-carrier networking. And so here’s the point I’m driving at. If a 2007 iPhone is loosely equivalent in terms of computing power to a 2000 PowerBook or 1999 Power Mac, that puts the spread at around seven or eight years. Extrapolate forward, and it’s therefore not at all unreasonable to think that a 2014 iPhone will pack the computing power of today’s MacBook Pro. Or, nearer term, that an iPhone introduced two years from now might pack the punch of a 2003 Aluminum PowerBook G4 — quite a difference from the Pismo. Even if your estimate of the iPhone’s equivalent-horsepower Mac is further back in time than mine, there’s no denying that Moore’s Law applies to handhelds, too. Eventually there will be a computer that fits in your pocket that is more powerful than today’s Mac Pros. But the path from here to there is riddled with difficult engineering problems — heat dissipation, battery life, and OS integration chief among them. There is marketing. There most certainly is design. But at the core of this market — by which I mean the market for handheld multitasking web-surfing networked-everywhere “phones” which are really computers — is engineering. Apple is the best handheld computer engineering company in the world today, hands down. They’re also the best handheld computer user experience design company. And they’re not sharing. 2: Why RIM Is Screwed When the iPhone was announced, I saw Apple as staking out ground far afield from the territory RIM occupies with the BlackBerry. Last year, I didn’t see Apple implementing Exchange support in the iPhone OS, and clearly that was, well, completely wrong. The “enterprise” features Apple has announced for the imminent 2.0 release of the iPhone OS — remote wipe, push email, automatic calendar and contact synching — pretty much encompass every single feature that’s been held up as a reason the iPhone wouldn’t sell to enterprise users. It remains to be seen how well these new iPhone features will actually work, but if the answer is “as well as promised”, and if the iPhone’s Mail app is improved in ways targeting people who receive a high number of messages, it’s hard to see a single software advantage in the BlackBerry’s favor. Which leaves hardware, which leaves the keyboard. Two Sundays ago, the New York Times ran a lengthy business-section piece by Brad Stone, titled “BlackBerry’s Quest: Fend Off the iPhone”. Regarding the upcoming BlackBerry 9000, the focus turned to the keyboard: Photographs of the device, leaked to gadget news sites, also indicate that the new BlackBerry will have elegant curves suggestive of the iPhone. It will also have a physical keyboard like previous R.I.M. devices, as opposed to the glass touch screen found on the iPhone. There’s a reason that R.I.M. is averse to the iPhone’s glass pad. “I couldn’t type on it and I still can’t type on it, and a lot of my friends can’t type on it,â€? says Mike Lazaridis, R.I.M.’s co-chief executive and technological visionary. “It’s hard to type on a piece of glass.â€? Mr. Lazaridis thinks that e-mail-dependent BlackBerry owners demand the reliability and tactile feedback of a keyboard. But, despite his critique of the iPhone, he does not dismiss the possibility that R.I.M. may itself one day sell a touch-screen phone, aimed specifically at consumers without the e-mail demands of BlackBerry’s core users. Translation: “We’ll emphasize the physical keyboard as a differentiating factor as long as it seems to work, at which point we’ll try a touch-screen keyboard too.” The only other angle RIM seems to be hanging its hat on is “security”: RIM is also betting on security, which hinges on the fact that its handsets and e-mail systems are relatively impervious to hackers. Mr. Lazaridis predicts that corporations will not give iPhones to their workers because they have already proved vulnerable to hackers eager to pry iPhones off AT&T’s system and make them work on other wireless networks. “It’s not that simple for an I.T. manager to give up security,â€? he said. The idea that iPhone carrier unlocking is a “security problem” is a conflation between what an attacker can do to your phone, against your will and/or unbeknownst to you, versus what a phone’s owner can do to their own phone. It’s not like these “hackers” are attacking happy AT&T-subscribed iPhone owners and switching them over to Sprint against their will. To understand why Apple is making a concerted effort to appeal to BlackBerry users, consider an analogy to the board game Risk. RIM has a large army (read: users), but they’re all massed together in one spot on the map. They care about email, they care about exactly the sort of enterprise features Apple has announced for the iPhone, and they are known to be willing to pay several hundred dollars for a handset. A lucrative target that can be attacked all at once. And the BlackBerry is weakest where the iPhone is strongest: web browsing, music, and video. Compare and contrast with, say, a software platform like Windows Mobile, or a hardware maker like Nokia — their users are spread across a wide variety of phones and platforms. It was far easier to turn the iPhone into something almost every BlackBerry customer might at least consider than it would have been to make a lineup of iPhones that appeal to every Nokia customer. RIM doesn’t really have any lock-in other than user habits. The BlackBerry gimmick is that it works with the email system your company bought from Microsoft. Replace a BlackBerry with an iPhone (2.0) and the messages, contacts, and calendar events that sync over the network will be the same ones on the BlackBerry you just tossed into a desk drawer. In broad terms, BlackBerrys are optimized first for email; the iPhone for the web. What’s more important, an email client or a web browser? For most people, and perhaps even most current BlackBerry users, the answer is clearly the web. Many people in fact read their email entirely through the web. Unless you’re Richard Stallman, you probably don’t read the web through your email client. The iPhone would be a credible, useful device with just two apps: Phone and Safari. But it doesn’t just have those two apps. It has a slew, and they’re all better on the iPhone than the BlackBerry and the difference with regard to anything other than email is only going to get more stark once the iTunes App Store opens its doors. If nothing else, consider games, games, and games. As I wrote when the iPhone’s upcoming enterprise features were announced, the iPhone can do more BlackBerry-ish things than the BlackBerry can do iPhone-ish things. Apple doesn’t wait for someone else to knock one of their hit products off its throne or slowly run it into the ground (cf. the Motorola Razr) — they do it themselves. For six years pundits have been declaring that competitors would “soon” catch up to the iPod, but the iPod has never been a static target — over the same six years Apple has released significant new iPods every year. There are no signs that RIM has the engineering chops on either side of the ball — hardware or software — to compete with where the iPhone is now, let alone where it’s going to be. We know that Apple has an OS that can scale to take advantage of faster (and multi-core) processors, because OS X is doing that already. If a two-years-away 2010 iPhone might be like having a 2003 PowerBook G4 in your pocket, for RIM’s sake a 2010 BlackBerry had better be something more than a BlackBerry with a brighter screen. Correct answers: Batman, Star Destroyer. ↩

  • Microsoft's Mojave Attempts to Wet Vista's Desert

    Daniel Eran Dilger Nearly two years after Windows Vista was finally released, Microsoft has remained unable to shake off its reputation as being slow, incompatible with existing hardware and software, and generally a poor and overpriced product that nobody wants. Microsoft is now trying to reverse Vista's bad reputation by insisting that the software's problems are not technical but rather just the fault of ignorant customers duped in part by Apple's “Get a Mac” campaign. What's Vista's real problems, and will Microsoft's “Mojave Experiment” help solve them? Blame Apple! Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has joined Windows Enthusiast pundits in theorizing that Vista's image problems are primarily the result of Apple's advertisements that regularly poke fun at the problems in Vista. The company has now taken aim at shooting at the messenger with a $300 million ad campaign. In July, Brad Brooks, Microsoft's VP of Windows Vista consumer marketing, addressed the company's business partners at its Worldwide Partner Conference, saying, “We've got a pretty noisy competitor out there. You know it. I know it. It's caused some impact. We're going to start countering it. They tell us it's the iWay or the highway. We think that's a sad message.” Another sad message Brooks had to deliver was that Vista's problems aren't really the fault of Apple. “We broke a lot of things,” Brooks admitted. “We know that, and we know it caused you a lot of pain. It got customers thinking, hey, is Windows Vista a generation we want to get invested in?” Vista: Pay it Forward! Brooks also noted that “Windows Vista is an investment in the long term. When you make the investment into Windows Vista, it's going to pay it forward into the operating system we call Windows 7.” Pay it forward? Is Windows 7 going to be a free upgrade to Windows Vista users, in the same way Apple is expected to offer the next Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard release to existing users of 10.5 Leopard? That's highly unlikely, as Microsoft can't sustain its egregious profits collected through the Windows monopoly by giving away updates for free. Windows Vista raised the price of Windows, putting a new definition on the phrase “pay it forward.” Myths of Snow Leopard 7: Free?! Microsoft Admits Windows Vista Mistakes, Criticizes Apple Ads - InformationWeek Reality Impairment at Microsoft Talking out one's ass appears to be a job requirement for all Microsoft executives, starting at the top. A serious case of reality impairment has resulted in the paradox of the company both admitting that Vista is flawed and “broke a lot of things,” while at the same time maintaining that Vista's reputation is entirely the fault of stupid customers and a comically unflattering portrayal by its competitor. In the “Mojave Experiment,” Microsoft plans to dispel the notion that Windows Vista is problematic and incompatible by publishing a series of videotaped interviews with users who arrived with negative impressions of Vista and left excited about the new operating system. This was achieved by presenting the users with a demonstration of “Mojave,” a new operating system that Microsoft later revealed to be Vista, much to the surprise of the interviewed users who'd heard so many bad things about it. However, the Mojave Experiment is so full of false information and saccharine gloss that it couldn't possibly appeal to anyone smart enough to turn on a PC. Even setting aside the fact that the ad experiment basically seeks to blame users for being dumb, the attempt by Microsoft to paint over Vista's problems is transparent and flawed, for a number of reasons. What's wrong with Mojave. Microsoft can't seem to decide whether it wants to admit that Vista has problems or not, and its waffling back and forth just makes the company look increasingly disingenuous. Is Vista a poorly launched, flawed product that the company is working to fix as quickly as possible, or is it awesome and wildly successful and just the victim of bad press? Microsoft tries to tell both stories at once, which is purely dishonest. In contrast, Apple said from the start last year that its Apple TV product was a “hobby” attempting to break into a difficult market. Critics lambasted it for not immediately taking over the market like the iPod had or iPhone later did. Apple's more recent problems in launching MobileMe were quickly noted by the company along with the intent to address complaints about it rapidly. Microsoft isn't alone in being able to stumble, but its complete lack of candor makes it hard to understand if the company realizes that it even has problems to solve. With Vista, Microsoft has issued a flurry of giddy press releases claiming widespread adoption based on the number of licenses sold and naming it “the fastest selling operating system in Microsoft history,” ignoring the fact that Windows sales are increasing simply because they are tied to PC sales. Microsoft has no competition in the PC operating system market due to its monopoly position, so it could release Windows Wet Toast and still sell it faster than XP and ME and 98 Special Edition and every other version of Windows in the past that was tied to an increasingly younger and smaller hardware market. Vista Sales to Non-Users. Many of Vista's “sales” were free vouchers distributed with PCs sold in the holiday season prior to its launch. Even more than a year and a half later, PC makers continue to put Windows XP on their systems, even those sold with a Vista license, while corporate users almost always remove the default Vista to install an earlier version of Windows. There's also a busy third party industry developing around removing Vista for consumers. In late July APCMag cited Jane Bradburn, a manager for commercial notebook sales at HP, as saying, “From the 30th of June, we have no longer been able to ship a PC with a XP license. However, what we have been able to do with Microsoft is ship PCs with a Vista Business licence but with XP pre-loaded. That is still the majority of business computers we are selling today.” The arrangement is supposed to end by January 2009, but HP is trying to extend the deadline because customers simply don't want Vista installed. EWeek also noted that between April 2007 and May 2008, its survey of business users indicated that Vista climbed from 2% to 5%, but that Windows XP jumped from 74% to 83%, three times the adoption of Vista. That growth came from migration from older versions of Windows. Even in its wildest projections, EWeek says Vista will only reach 28% adoption in businesses by the end of 2010. CNET reported that a Jully 2008 survey by systems management appliance company KASE found that 60% of companies surveyed have no plans to deploy Windows Vista, a ten percent increase in disinterest from late 2007. A full 42% were actively exploring Vista alternatives, and 11% had already made the switch to Mac OS X or Linux. Microsoft is simply lying about the level of Vista excitement, and it's gotten too obvious for the company to continue to do so. XP still killing Vista in sales volume: HP 60 percent skipping Vista, so Ballmer looks to Apple | The Open Road The Truth Is… oh Look a Distraction! At the same time, Microsoft notes on its Vista website “we know a few of you were disappointed by your early encounter. Printers didn't work. Games felt sluggish. You told us—loudly at times—that the latest Windows wasn't always living up to your high expectations for a Microsoft product.” That's some brutal honesty for a company with a knack for spinning wild fantasies about fictitious product enthusiasm for a product never actually put to use in many cases. At the same time however, in trying to refute away Vista's real problems, Microsoft uses a variety of tactics that just return to blind fantasyland. Microsoft is a Marketing Company, not a Tech Company. The company plays its Mojave Experiment hand on a new website, incidentally designed using Adobe Flash rather than the company's own Silverlight. Despite the site's oddly designed, usability-impared interface, it's still possible to pull out lots of details from the experiment that say as much about Microsoft's crafty, misleading marketing as they do about its technical problems, underling the simple fact that Microsoft is first and foremost a marketing company that flogs third rate technology products. Mojave took 140 people and asked them to score Windows Vista. The average response was 4.4. After demonstrating Vista SP2 under the name “Mojave,” respondents ranked Vista at 8.5, a stunning improvement. But what were they ranking? Microsoft notes that “many said they would have rated it higher, but wanted more time to use it themselves.” That sounds good at first blush, but it really indicates that the responses were biased by hyped up enthusiasm rather than facts, and that participants realized it, reserving their final judgement until they could actually see more. The “Mojave Experiment” What does Mojave Prove? Mojave tries to represent that Vista's bad reputation is the fault of ignorant consumers who have heard bad things that aren't true about Vista, and have made up their mind without getting the facts. At the same time however, Microsoft also publicly admits that Vista “broke a lot of things” and that specifically, “Printers didn't work. Games felt sluggish.” Did Mojave clear up mistaken notions for participants, or did it just erect smoke and mirrors in a carefully controlled demonstration that skirted around Vista's real problems, including those Microsoft admits? That's a question that answers itself. Mojave didn't send uses home with Vista in a Mojave package and then ask them how well it worked with their existing peripherals and games, or how fast it was in comparison to their existing PC software. This is Not the Droid You're Running Vista On. Instead, Microsoft sat them down in front of a HP Pavillion DV 2000 with 2GB of RAM. That's what HP called its “entertainment powerhouse” laptop, although HP only shipped it with 1GB RAM. Microsoft maxed out the RAM for the purposes of the test, making the laptop a bit more expensive than its usual street price of around $1050. According to Windows enthusiast Joe Wilcox, PC laptops actually cost $700, “half as much” as Apple's laptops. At least that's the Average Selling Price for consumer retail PC laptops according to NPD's Stephen Baker, compared to Apple's $1500 ASP. Wilcox insisted that his spin on NPD's figures couldn't possibly be biased because he wrote his article on a MacBook Air running Leopard. However, his $2,700 laptop did help drive up Apple's stellar ASP for its laptops well above the entry price for Mac Books, discounting his theory that revolved around the assumption that every Mac buyer pays the average price of all the laptops Apple sells. Wilcox and Microsoft are both disingenuously dancing on both ends of the truth. Many consumers are actually buying cheap laptops at Target that can't run Vista ideally, while Microsoft demonstrates its Vista on a considerably better equipped system in the Mojave Experiment to suggest that Vista doesn't have the performance problems that users have heard about from the majority of their peers who bought cheap PCs and are seeing Vista run particularly sluggishly on them. Should You Pay Twice as Much for a Mac? I Did! You Get What You Pay For. The fact that Apple sells more high end laptops to pro users at retail, and that it does not sell anything in the range of the cheap junk being hawked at big box retailers like Wilcox' Target both result in Mac laptops fetching a higher ASP. That fact also means that Mac buyers will be happier with their purchase and have a more favorable impression of Mac OS X because they're running it on a better system. That's all obvious stuff. However, selling people cheap laptops that don't work well, and then demonstrating a fake “new operating system” that appears to work well when running on a faster machine full of RAM is simply a dishonest bait and switch scam. Wilcox does nearly admit that PC makers are already stretching their credibility as they attempt to sell cheap boxes based on price alone, citing Baker as saying, “We aren't seeing any particularly substantive moves down in price on the Windows side, either in desktops or notebooks.” PCs can't get cheaper because they're already unprofitable and consumers are already disgusted with their performance when running the increased overhead of Vista. Wilcox also sets up a tilted comparison between a Dell PC desktop with integrated graphics and an iMac with dedicated graphics and claims a price advantage for Dell, although noting that, while “Dell offers more for less than the iMac,” “that 'more' also means Windows Vista, which won't satisfy some shoppers.” Why Aren't Shoppers Satisfied with Vista? Like Microsoft, Wilcox and his Windows Enthusiast pundit friends can't seem to decide if Vista has any real problems or if it's all just an unfair taint suggested by Apple's Get a Mac ads. However, while Apple has taken shots at Vista's incompatibility with printers and other hardware and its scarce updates that have been few and far between over the last year and a half of its being on the market, Apple also notes in its Get a Mac ads that Macs can run Vista, and can run it faster than PCs. So Apple isn't inventing and publishing false reports on Vista, it's merely advertising its Mac hardware as superior to PCs. The Vista flaws Apple's ads have referenced are flaws Microsoft itself has admitted to its partners, so the Get a Mac umbrage frequently voiced by Windows Enthusiasts is both hypocritical and ridiculous. However, in the Mojave Experiment, Microsoft downplayed those well-known faults by only carefully demonstrating certain features on a high end machine, and without actually exposing Mojave/Vista users to 'a lot of things Vista broke,' 'printers that didn't work', or 'games that felt sluggish.' It Can't Even Print. In response to complaints that Vista doesn't work well with existing PC hardware, Microsoft's Mojave website says that “the Windows Vista Compatibility Center lists compatibility status for over 9,000 products (5,500 devices and 3,500 software programs).” It even notes 2,000 printers, 200 scanners, and 500 cameras specifically. That sounds good until you realize that Apple ships support for over 3,100 printers in Mac OS X Leopard, a product that is targeted primarily toward education and consumers and which is not expected by users to run on any old hardware that might be in use by PC users. Vista is supposed to run on 95% of the world's PCs, and yet it doesn't even match the printer drivers that ship with Leopard, a number which does not include all of the third party drivers available for the Mac. Oh, but there's more. Not only did Microsoft dance around the truth to feed its Mojave Experiment participants a carefully controlled stream of garbage, but it also inadvertently revealed more serious problems related to Vista, which I'll consider in the following article. Did you like this article? Let me know. Comment here, in the Forum, or email me with your ideas. Like reading RoughlyDrafted? 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  • August 2007 Zoon Awards for Technical Ignorance and Incompetence

    Daniel Eran DilgerIn an effort to recognize the spectacular efforts of individuals and organizations promoting the regression of human achievement in the field of technology, a series of nominations await your vote to determine the recipients of August 2007 Zoon Awards.Meet the Zoons.Segregated by color, the various Zoons highlight the world's absolute worst in small minded ignorance, paid to say propagandism, and blind devotion to products without merit.The Pink Zoon is awarded for a spectacular effort in fear-based propagation of uncertainty and doubt, or efforts to infect headlines with false information with the primary goal of preventing innovation, competition, and the emergence of new ideas, or simply to make a quick profit.
The White Zoon is awarded for the blinding glare of a shiny blank brain, particularly when such ignorance is presented with authoritarian emphasis by an individual or news source operating well outside its abilities. This award may also be assigned to a company or organization in recognition of epic failure.
The Brown Zoon is awarded for squirting extraordinary amounts of intentionally noxious misinformation, whether dredged from an impacted recollection of twenty years ago, sucked from the trusty bucket of canned responses, or simply invented as needed to create an intolerable outburst of stink.These should not be considered as first, second and third placements, as each tie for an equal standing in the Zoon Hall of Shame. It is also possible to award multiple parties for the same award, either as shared participants or, in the case of an unclear majority vote, tied nominations.Meet the Zoon Nominees.As one might imagine, determining the most fitting recipient might be difficult given the wide range of potential candidates standing in line. Here's a brief background on the nominations for August.Troy Wolverton, San Jose Mercury News.A writer for the Street and most recently, the San Jose Mercury News, Wolverton always manages to dig up an unattractive headline for any news related to Apple. A series of articles documented his negative spin and inaccurate reporting, particularly when the subject related to Apple.Wolverton promised me and other readers that he would answer the questions related about his shoddy journalism record, then cowardly ran away. He also wrote emails to RDM readers assuring them that he was only ever honest and unbiased, and that RoughlyDrafted should be read with great suspicion.[10 FAS: 8 - San Jose Mercury News’ False Apple Scandal][Troy Wolverton Documents Faux Apple Shareholder Outrage]Wolverton is nominated for a White and Brown Zoon.Neil Cavuto, Fox News.While actually based on reports from the end of July, I wrote about Cavuto in August, qualifying his nomination for arrogantly complaining about how Apple purportedly over promised iPhone shipments it then failed to deliver. In reality, Apple didn't indicate any sales goals for its first weekend. Cavuto also confused AT&T authorization numbers with Apple's sales figures. Fox News subsequently corrected his comments to suggest that he hadn't made the error, but still failed cover up the core problem that Cavuto's entire rant been a specious bit of ignorant rambling delivered--rather hypocritically--with far too much arrogance than the subject required.Cavuto is nominated for a Pink and White Zoon.[10 FAS: 9 - Troy Wolverton, Neil Cavuto, and the Apple Stock Scandal]Jim Cramer, Scott Moritz and Brett Arends, the Street.After documenting how he would spin false information to manipulate the market as a hedge fund manager, Cramer praised his apprentice Moritz for publishing a string of articles dredging up or simply inventing false information about the iPhone with the intent to knock value from Apple and suggest that Apple's phone was not competitive, not selling as expected, and that Apple's deal with AT&T was an unprecedented deal earning unconscionable profits. Arends is thrown in for good measure after delivering similar work directly from the mouths of Street-savvy Verizon shill, Roger Entner of IAG Research.Cramer, Moritz, and Arends are nominated for a White and Brown Zoon.[More on Scott Moritz and the Jim Cramer Street Misinformation Engine][The Street's Flaccid Campaign Against the iPhone][Unraveling Anti-Apple Panic: the iPhone Launch Success]George Ou, ZDNet, CNET.Nominated in August primarily for his article misrepresenting typography technology and falsely portraying Mac OS X as incompetent in the area of text rendering, Ou deserves extra reason to earn your Zoon vote for failing to admit that he falsified his report, and instead attacking those who pointed out his error.[Tech: Zoon for George Ou]After posting the article detailing why he was wrong and establishing a pattern of his consistently inaccurate and tilted writing, someone who appeared to be Ou emailed me to say:“If you're gonna do a hit piece, at least do it accurately... I'm not going to get uptight about a little man like you chewing on my feet and I'm not even going to bother cursing at you for writing a blatant hit piece on me. It's not worth my time.â€?Assuming that the author was unlikely to actually be Ou, I did a search on the email and found an online comment from the same address mentioning being a former ballet dancer. To determine if the author was Ou or just simply a joker trying to get a response, I wrote back, “Hi George, What was inaccurate in my article? Are you really a ballet dancer?â€?Ou tu?In reply, Ou wrote, “I was a professional Ballet dancer up till 2000 and I still try to perform now and then,â€? but didn’t note anything that was incorrect in the article. When I asked for the correction again, I got two emails, one insisting that, “The 'FreeBSD community' is essentially Sam Leffler. Sam pretty much wrote all that wireless code. Sam is an employee (contractor) of Atheros. Atheros is involved in that FreeBSD code.â€?The second said, “You don't even understand the fact that the same Atheros ‘team’ led by Sam Leffler that wrote Apple's wireless drivers is the same team that wrote the open source MadWiFi drivers for Linux and FreeBSD. The same wireless drivers Apple said there was no problem on had to be patched three times a month later. And here you are slandering me because I defended two researchers against a billion dollar corporation.“When you smear my photograph and slap a "SHILL" on top of it, that is slanderous and insulting. You're accusing me of taking payola which is a crime and only a ‘little man’ would slander someone like that. It's one thing to disagree with me or not like a certain piece I wrote, but smearing someone's photo with accusations of shill is nothing but the act of a coward. Unprofessional? There's nothing unprofessional about calling trash like you little and I'd say that to your face.â€?Pearls Thrown.How could a professional writer fail to understand his subject matter, fail to grasp basic logic, and then be so arrogant about it on top? I wrote, “George, I don't have to prove that people from FreeBSD did not contribute to Apple's driver. I never stated that, and it has no relevance to statements I made. You had to prove that Atheros did not deliver the driver, and that it came directly from FreeBSD without Atheros' involvement. That was the question, and your misunderstanding of the architecture of Mac OS X helped you to confuse the situation.“The truth is that Atheros contracted with an expert to port some of the FreeBSD code for use in its driver for Mac OS X, which only shares significant similarities with FreeBSD in its userland environment. Atheros had to deliver unique work for Apple to offer a working driver for Mac OS X, and paid a contractor to complete that work.“You maintained that Atheros simply wasn't involved at all, and that Mac OS X's driver just came from the FreeBSD repository. That was wrong. Your explanation of why this was the case was also wrong. It is clear you still do not understand the situation entirely. That's why you shouldn't be writing about it as if you are an expert, simply because someone told you something that sounded believable off the record. You don't understand the issues involved, but operate under the assumption that everything you think up as a plausible idea is also the truth. It isn't.“Slander, as noted in my article, is spoken. Libel is written. Just FYI. Also, a shill doesn't necessarily need to be paid, so calling you a shill isn't ‘accusing you of payola.’ Also, payola really only is illegal in broadcasting. There are plenty of people who are paid to say things, and nobody is arresting them. The company you work for largely serves advertisers; that isn't illegal, or all of CNET would be shipped off to jail.“There is nothing cowardly about pointing out that you are a shill and then documenting your attempts to spread misinformation in efforts to make Vista look good and Apple look bad. There is something very cowardly about fuming that you've been outed, and rather than apologizing and correcting your error, and then maintaining that you're simply better that others so your misinformation campaigns don't matter.“I don't have a little man complex, so repeating that doesn't really bother me. It does make it clear that you have some size issues in addition to your general lack of professionalism and technical incompetence.â€?To which Ou elegantly replied, “Go find yourself a bathhouse in the city where you belong. You have no business writing.â€? Using the same address, Ou responded to several other online sites defending himself and ignoring the errors of his article. How does Ou have a job? Ou is nominated for a Pink, White, and Brown Zoon, and his winning will also earn a Zoon for ZDNet and its CNET parent.Windows Genuine Advantage, Microsoft.After choosing a delightfully ironic name for its software DRM system, Microsoft then bungled its validation system for users worldwide. The hundreds of millions of PCs running Windows XP and Windows Vista phone home to Microsoft at regular intervals, but the company set up the system with a single point of failure. An inevitable failure prevented the company from maintaining resilience to downtime--something the company highly touts as an Enterprise feature of Windows Server--but it also highlighted the problem of validating software in general using a system that assumes guilt when there is any question in reaching the validation server. Windows users who tried to verify their genuine software had software features remotely turned off because of the WGA problems.[Tech: WGA the Dog]WGA is nominated for a White Zoon.Oliver Rist, InfoWorld, IDG.Suggested by reader Robert de Bie, Rist yesterday wrote an article titled “Does Mac OS X suck? Apple's desktop platform has impressive technical chops, but it falls short from a business perspective.â€?Never mind the sophisticated and professional headline, the real question is, did Rist back up his headline, or simply cower in a bed of second hand fear, uncertainty and doubt? No need to guess, really; this is InfoWorld, a rag primarily useful for its ads. No competent IT manager wastes much time reading the ramblings of such stuffshirt columnists.Rist brings up the idea that Mac OS X is really just Unix with some frosting, making it easy to coo about, but not really ready for real business. Unfortunately, Rist offers no basis for anything that he says. In fact, his headline and (forgone) conclusion don't even match what he writes in between. Under the subject of networking, Rist says, “OS X has an excellent networking client, both wired and wireless — due in large part to FreeBSD rather than anything coming out of Cupertino.â€? But wait, does FreeBSD write the Mac’s Apple File Protocol? Does it maintain Samba for Windows networking? Wrong on both counts. By spouting the dittohead myth that Mac OS X is just FreeBSD with an Apple logo, Rist has already established that he knows nothing about the subject he's pretending to be an expert in. He then says nothing else about networking, granting that Mac OS X has no real issues.Security Absurdity. On the subject of security, he says “It's a pretty secure system. Yes, ever since OS X has become more popular, attacks and breaches on the platform have become more numerous. And, yes, those numbers are high enough that if I were managing a portfolio of MacBooks I'd be installing anti-virus on them.â€? Rist linked his comment to another IDG article reporting on a Mac OS X worm threatened by the anonymous "InfoSec Sellout," which turned out to be a fraud. That's the extent of the acceleration in Mac OS X “attacks and breeches,â€? a crank call? There are yet no viruses for Mac OS X, and all the malware that exists is proof of concept ideas hatched in a lab. Strike two for Rist in trying to write about security issues. Even so, he concedes, “once the personal firewall is up and the AV installed, I'd fully expect to see far, far fewer security-related problems from my Mac clients than my Windows clients.â€?[10 FAS: 10 - Apple’s Mac and iPhone Security Crisis.]Many Words, Little Point.On the subject of reliability, Rist beats up Artie MacStrawman for insisting that Mac OS X apps never crash. He then provides some recollected figures for estimating how many times he has noticed a Mac app crash compared to Vista crashes. He passes by saying, “Apple's probably less crash-prone overall.â€?On the subject of software compatibility, Rist says Apple “treats third-party developers like the proverbial redheaded stepchild, which results in significantly fewer third-party software options for Apple users than Windows users,â€? then follows up with the genius, “When it comes to mission-critical, vertical-type business software, Windows clients far outnumber Apple clients. If they didn't, Macs would be populating a much larger number of corporate desktops.â€?How does this guy get work writing? By the end of page one, Rist had said nothing at all. On page two, Rist really gets going. He starts off referring to "Apple jihaders," as if he has a fundamentalist shock radio show rather than a column designed to inform IT managers. Rist says people don't want to retrain employees to use Macs, and then suggests that retraining users for the significantly different Vista would not be an issue. He gives the Mac a “grudgingâ€? pass again and moves to hardware. [Paul Thurrott's Merciless Attack on Artie MacStrawman]Mac OS X’s Hardware Features.He says that Gateway has more USB ports and a finger print scanner in the same form factor for less cost, without outlining his comments with any factual basis. He then complains that his MacBook suffered a hard drive failure after four months. “That's a pretty short time frame for serious hardware failure,â€? Rist wrote. It's odd that hardware issues are being outlined in an article about “why Mac OS X sucks,â€? but someone writing to an audience of experienced IT users should be aware that computing hardware--particularly hard drives--is most likely to fail in its first few months. Past that break in period, most hard drives typically have a relatively stable three year life span, after which problems become statistically more likely to occur. It's called the bathtub lifespan curve, because like the contour of a tub, it starts high, then drops low for a long stretch, then begins to rise again. Clearly, Rist doesn't know what he's talking about at all, even when complaining about consumer Mac hardware in the context of Mac OS X as a business operating system.Dude, You’re Being a Shill.After "passing" all of his categories, Rist then fails Mac OS X in “business orientation.â€? There are good and justified reasons for faulting Apple in the IT arena, but Rist doesn't mention a single one. Instead, he prattles on about Apple's consumer ads, and how they portray the typical Mac user with a “SOHO, I'm-cooler-than-you, coffee house image.â€? For all the dittoheads who like to repeat this idea, I'd like to remind you all that Dell's memorable mascot was a smirky pothead who couldn't finish sentences beyond, “Dude, you're gettin’ a Dell! (excited thumbs up).â€? That had no impact on Dell's Enterprise sales, because serious enterprise users don't make their decisions based on watching prime time TV and deciding whether they like the advertisements targeted at families. So please shut up about the Justin Long and John Hodgman Get a Mac ads. Enterprise Worthy Dell Pothead Vs. the Too Good for You Coffee Drinking Mac.Highly Unqualified.Rist is a “senior senior contributing editorâ€? at InfoWorld. With this sort of incompetence and ignorance, it makes one wonder what kind of single celled organisms must pass for junior editors at IDC and its various ComputerWorld, PC World, and InfoWorld properties.While writing “a column devoted to running Microsoft technologies in medium and large enterprise environments,â€? Rist only notes experience in running a small Microsoft-oriented software business and writing for rags like Computer Shopper. That qualifies him as a Microsoft shill, but not as a columnist offering advice about ‘medium and large enterprise’ IT environments.Rist is nominated for Pink, White and Brown Zoons.Microsoft’s Pseudo-Philanthropy in New Orleans.Bob Emery notes that Microsoft is offering free software for hurricane-hit businesses in the devastated New Orleans area. However, in order to qualify, users have to sign up for a three year plan, of which Microsoft only covers the first year. A local paper noted “For the typical small business of 50 employees and 25 personal computers licensing Microsoft Windows Vista and the Office 2007 suite of programs, the free year can result in savings of as much as $12,050.â€?Of course, what that really means is that recovering small businesses will actually have to shell out $24,100 just for software licenses, in addition to buying computers capable of running Vista. One might think that a company earning $50 billion in revenues might be able to offer more than an advertisement to struggling businesses, particularly since software costs Microsoft nothing to deliver.[Microsoft gives free software to hurricane-hit businesses - New Orleans CityBusiness]Votes toward Microsoft's headline friendly, fake philanthropy will help the company earn its White Zoon for its WGA fiasco.Vote in the Forum and add your comments.Official awardees: Pink : George Ou, ZDNet, CNETWhite : Windows Genuine Advantage, MicrosoftBrown : George Ou, ZDNet, CNETWhat do you think? I really like to hear from readers. Comment in the Forum or email me with your ideas. Like reading RoughlyDrafted? Share articles with your friends, link from your blog, and subscribe to my podcast! Submit to Reddit or Slashdot, or consider making a small donation supporting this site. Thanks!

  • Ten Big New Features in Mac OS X Snow Leopard

    Daniel Eran Dilger Apple is marketing the idea of there being “no new featuresâ€? for Snow Leopard and instead promising an overall improvement in how Mac OS X works under the hood, thanks to a diligent code optimization and refactoring cycle discussed in the previous article. At the same time, there are plenty of significant new features coming in Snow Leopard to look forward to. Here are ten big new features (plus a few minor ones) that you probably haven't heard much about from anywhere else, including my previous articles on the subject that already described QuickTime X, Grand Central, and OpenCL. WWDC 2008: New in Mac OS X Snow Leopard Snow Leopard Server Takes on Exchange, SharePoint Pulling Invisible New Features into Snow Leopard. Apple's increasing collaborations with the open source community have pulled back the veil of secrecy on several new but mostly invisible enhancements that will be showing up in Snow Leopard. One relates to LLVM, the Low Level Virtual Machine compiler architecture project originally founded at the University of Illinois. Apple began contributing to LLVM development in 2005, and started using it Leopard to expand support for OpenGL hardware features. Lower-end Macs that lack the silicon to interpret that specialize graphics code can now do it in software. LLVM is also working its way into Apple's Xcode IDE, initially as a highly efficient optimizer and code generator that works as a bolt-on upgrade to components of GCC, but eventually as a complete compiler replacement. That project, known as Clang, was opened up last year. LLVM compiler technology not only makes developers more productive, but also results in code that runs significantly faster on the same hardware. Apple's other open secret: the LLVM Complier The LLVM Compiler Infrastructure Project Another openly hidden secret in Mac OS X is CUPS, the Common Unix Printing System. Beginning with Jaguar in 2002, Apple adopted and licensed CUPS from its developer as Mac OS X's printing engine. It then purchased the project outright. CUPS is also the de facto printing system for Linux distros and is available for BSD and other commercial Unix systems. That means Apple owns the project that develops the printing architecture for Linux. That's not an issue because Apple has established a reputation in open source as a strong contributor and open sharer. According to a review of bug fixes and improvements in CUPS software, 24% of the enhancements came from Apple while 76% came from free and open source software contributors working with Linux, OpenSolaris, and other projects. Of course, 100% of both sides benefited from that sharing. CUPS collaboration has resulted in high quality code and the advancement of new features. CUPS 1.4, the version sources say Snow Leopard will use, adds performance enhancements and a variety of security improvements that use sandboxing to prevent malware attacks on the printing system from being able to read sensitive documents that may be in use by printers. Common UNIX Printing System A third significant new feature originating from an open source project in Snow Leopard is ZFS support, portions of which come from the OpenSolaris project (along with Sun's DTrace technology, which Apple uses in its Instruments performance profiling tool). Leopard debuted read-only ZFS features, but Snow Leopard and Snow Leopard Server will provide both read and write support for Sun's new 128-bit file system. ZFS was designed to provide “simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability.â€? ZFS hype during the development of Leopard helped the new file system reach buzzword status as news of the three letter acronym swept through blogs and the tech media. It is frequently described as being the imminent replacement for the Mac's native HFS+. However, the benefits of ZFS including as storage pooling, data redundancy, automatic error correction, dynamic volume expansion, and snapshots all apply primarily to servers and higher-end workstation users who deal with multiple disk drives. ZFS isn't going to replace HFS+ outright in Snow Leopard, and has limited relevance today to desktop and laptop users, particularly those who never move beyond the single disk drive installed in their system. More Predictions for WWDC 2007: Solaris, Google, Surround Apple - Mac OS X Leopard - Developer Tools - Instruments Symbiotic: What Apple Does for Open Source Apple's Open Source Assault Pushing Visible New Features in Snow Leopard. Apple's extensive work in developing push support for Exchange Server on the iPhone will also be included in Snow Leopard's Mail, Address Book, and iCal. Push support in those client side apps are also being used to power MobileMe's push messaging subscription service and Snow Leopard Server's push messaging services. Apple will be offering both in parallel as alternatives to Exchange, thanks to smart planning on the part of Apple's engineers to develop an interoperable push architecture in Mac OS X and on the iPhone. There is also a fourth application of push that has developed alongside push messaging: Apple's new Push Notification Service. PNS allows iPhone and iPod touch users to set up server side notification alerts that don't require mobile applications to stay running in the background just to update users of the external events they track. Along with Bonjour discovery, PNS will keep iPhones wirelessly connected in all sorts of sophisticated ways that third party developers can imagine in their applications. Whether Apple will integrate a listener for the same PNS system into the desktop side of Mac OS X remains to be seen, but it would allow a single, unified interface for alerting client users of new events. I proposed a system wide, Growl-style notification system in the Leopard Wish List published back in 2005. Snow Leopard Server Takes on Exchange, SharePoint Apple’s Mobile Me Takes On Exchange, Mobile Mesh With the strong push into push messaging, Apple will make mobile devices even more tightly integrated with its desktop products. Leopard delivered Back To My Mac as a novel way to use Wide Area Bonjour's dynamic service registration as a mechanism for sharing resources served from home to any location without configuring static naming services for address lookups. Because any software can register itself with .Mac/MobileMe, this opens the door to third party developers with the vision to exploit the potential of these enabling technologies. A Global Upgrade for Bonjour: AirPort, iPhone, Leopard, .Mac Ten Big Predictions for Apple in 2008 Among the technologies profiled earlier in Myth 3 that have been trickling from the iPhone into Mac OS X, there's at least one idea I proposed for the iPhone that will be in Snow Leopard's Safari: self contained web apps. The new feature will allow users to run web applications as a local app in its own window, essentially making the web platform into a native-looking app that can run outside of Safari. I proposed a similar feature as a possibility for the iPhone prior to the announcement of the Cocoa Touch SDK: web apps packaged up into a set of files that could be run on the device as a Dashboard widget-like standalone app, even when off the network. Why Apple hasn't pursued such an obvious strategy is a little hard to figure out, but it seems they've got the ball rolling on the desktop. That ball will be rolling even faster thanks to SquirrelFish, a new JavaScript interpreter that will make Safari and any other WebKit-based browsers, standalone self contained apps, and Dashboard widgets all a lot faster. Apple's MobileMe, Yahoo's Flickr, and Google various web apps will all gain new speed thanks to faster JavaScript execution. SquirrelFish will also raise the bar in performance and efficiency in the Rich Internet Applications sector in general, giving Flash, Silverlight, and Java a faster, simpler, and more openly interoperable runtime to compete against. RoughlyDrafted: Leopard Wish List: 2005 How Open will the iPhone Get? Surfin’ Safari Âť Announcing SquirrelFish Microsoft's Application Features in Mac OS X, System Wide. Microsoft's business model of tacking on features hasn't been a total wash. The company's desperate efforts to invent novel marketing features for every new release of Windows and Office have pioneered a number of ideas that have later found their way into Mac OS X. One example is the idea of Fast User Switching, which Apple added to Panther. Windows XP pioneered the trick, but built it upon the kluge that is Terminal Services. Microsoft also helped originate the basis of Ajax web apps by inventing XMLHttpRequest in order to make its Outlook Web Access 2000 web app work decently within Internet Explorer. Today, standards-based web apps are eating a hole into Microsoft's monopoly on the proprietary desktop platform, and tools such as SproutCore and resulting products such as MobileMe are poised to tear down interoperability barriers and level the playing field. Microsoft may now regret having opened Pandora's Box in terms of standards-based web applications, but its efforts to seal the web back up with the proprietary Silverlight plugin, which turns web apps into .NET programs, will now be next to impossible. Another example of a Microsoft innovation are the fancy text features in Word, such as red underlining to highlight spelling mistakes and the green squiggle for grammar errors. Word also features a variety of word auto correction, smart dash insertion, and text replacement features (such as typing TM to get the ™ character). The former have already become system-wide features in Mac OS X, while sources indicate that the latter text processing features will find their way into Snow Leopard, and therefore every application that runs on it. RoughlyDrafted: Remote Display part 3: Terminal Server Cocoa for Windows + Flash Killer = SproutCore Super Size Me. On top of injecting Word features into its OS for the use of every application, Apple will also expand the use of its own Data Detectors, a technology it invented in the mid 90s for identifying useful bits of text and making it actionable. Leopard introduced Data Detectors in Mail as a way to extract contacts and events for use in Address Book and iCal, but Snow Leopard will expose Data Detectors everywhere it draws text. Sources also indicate Snow Leopard will expand upon Font Book to provide full Auto Activation of any fonts requested by any application, using Spotlight to track them down. Snow Leopard is also suggested to have a new set of frameworks specifically for working with multitouch trackpad gestures, patterned after those introduced with the MacBook Air. Speaking of the ultra-thin Air, sometimes less is more. However, the high cost and relatively low capacity of Solid State Drives like the $1000, 64 GB SSD option offered for the Air means that one Microsoft feature Snow Leopard could do without is bloat. As one reader noted, “Currently, Leopard requires 9 GB of available disk space for installation and iLife requires an additional 3 GB. This means that a product such as the [SSD] MacBook Air comes with the hard drive 20% full.â€? How the MacBook Air stacks up against other ultra-light notebooks Leopard Predictions for WWDC 2006 WWDC 2007: An Inside Perspective From the Halfway Point Think Small. Snow Leopard aims below the bloat to accommodate the coming wave of SSD-based systems. In the latest build, sources say Apple's own apps are losing weigh dramatically across the board. The apps in the Utilities folder all drop from 468 MB to 111.6 MB, for example. Other apps are similarly svelte, as the graph below indicates. Is this the product of just code optimization and shared resources? One factor likely relates to work on Resolution Independence, which substitutes bitmapped raster graphics (which define every pixel) with smaller vector graphics files (which draw GUI elements and controls by recipe). Vector graphics can be scaled to any size while retaining a high quality appearance, while bitmapped graphics can quickly look blocky when scaled up. Adding larger bitmapped versions can solve that problem, but at the cost of consuming more disk space. Apple earlier told developers it would be providing a library of shared, high quality vector graphics they could use instead of each packaging their own bitmapped art into every app. The dramatic size reductions in these apps must also involve more efficient Localization. For example, Mac OS X Leopard's Mail currently weighs in at over 285 MB, but the majority of its bulk comes from 18 language localizations inside the application bundle that consume 276 MB. The actual Universal Binary code is only a few megabytes and even its associated graphics and other resources only amount to 2.8 MB. Why does Apple default to dumping support for 18 or more languages in every app without providing any simple, centralized way to get rid of the unnecessary ones? Perhaps that question is answered in Snow Leopard, where Mail is reportedly just 91 MB. That's too big to simply to be an English-only, stripped down version for developers, but still far smaller than than Leopard's. Across the board, it appears Snow Leopard apps are about a third as large as their Leopard equivalents. And so while Snow Leopard paradoxically gains more useful features through code improvements and under-the-hood retooling rather than from a Microsoft-style new feature focus that aims to deliver “wowâ€? with flashy marketing gimmicks, the system is also getting smaller and tighter. There must also be some other subtraction, right? Will Snow Leopard scrape away the old Carbon API? That's the next myth. WWDC 2008: New in Mac OS X Snow Leopard WWDC 2008: Is Mac OS X 10.6 the Death of Carbon? I really like to hear from readers. Comment in the Forum or email me with your ideas. Like reading RoughlyDrafted? Share articles with your friends, link from your blog, and subscribe to my podcast! Submit to Reddit or Slashdot, or consider making a small donation supporting this site. Thanks! Technorati Tags: Apple, Development, Mac, Software

  • TUAW Predicts! The October 14th notebook event

    Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Other Events, One More ThingWith the October 14th Apple Notebook Event just around the corner, the TUAW blogger squad decided it was time to look into our iCrystalBalls and make a SWAG predictions about what laptop goodness will be announced by the Cupertino Kids on Tuesday. To make this extra crunchy, we're not only posting our best guesses as to what will actually be announced, but what Steve J. will announce as "one more thing". Steve Sande Best Guess -- The entire MacBook line will be made of aluminum, and the 15" and 17" models will get slightly faster processors and more installed RAM. If that's the only announcement, expect Apple's stock to dive even further than it has during the recent stock market freefall. One More Thing -- The iTablet. Netbooks are selling like hotcakes, so Apple will get in on the action by coming out with a 9" tablet with a virtual keyboard and multi-touch support. Since it is all display and no keyboard, it will weigh less than two pounds. Think of an über-iPhone. Victor Agreda, Jr. Best Guess -- Ditto what Steve said, except I think a drop in price will happen in light of tough economic times. Despite what some analysts may babble about, Apple is interested in the long game, and that means building more market share. To stay in the game they have to get more price competitive on the low end. One More Thing -- Again, I agree with Steve, although I wouldn't call this a tablet. More like a mini-Air with a decent keyboard (Apple has long been in favor of keeping decent-sized keyboards on smaller laptops) and touchscreen up top. I think the form factor will be something clever and surprising. If it appears at all, of course. Robert Palmer I think we'll see higher-end MacBook enclosures made of aluminum, and a sub-$1,000 model still made from white plastic. There's a part of me that says they won't ditch plastic altogether, because of the style factor: I bet there will be some people who still want a black MacBook. Hey, maybe there will be a black aluminum MacBook. Classy. One More Thing -- I'm still bearish on the iTablet. I think Apple has too much invested in the iPhone as a mobile platform to try and dilute it with another form factor with a different screen size. If it's a Mac, I'm not a fan of jury-rigging traditionally mouse-driven operating systems for styluses. Personally, I just don't think there will be "one more thing." He hasn't done that in a while, especially at "themed" events (like the music event last month). Michael Rose I'm also fairly well convinced that the $800 MacBook (dare we call it the MacBook Jr.?) is inbound on Tuesday, although I'm not sure that the manufacturing rumors are completely on target. The mutterings about a mystery port on the new MacBook -- and a dockability patent from years past -- are starting to sound credible too. One More Thing: I would love to see a BTO touchscreen option... and maybe a technology preview of an iTablet for delivery later in 2009. Mike Schramm New MacBooks are a given -- the Nvidia rumor sounds credible to me, not to mention that it's just what would push me to finally replace my old G4 Powerbook (though I'll miss my little 12" screen). "One more thing" seems like it's trending towards an AppleTV upgrade -- we've got HD content on the iTunes store, so it's time to have a set-top box that's fitting to play that content on. I'm hearing lots of Mac mini rumors as well, but I wonder if Apple will ever upgrade the mini -- it's small, it sells as-is, why break what's not broken? Of course, as Victor mentioned in an email, "Whatever happens, AAPL will drop 10% because iUnicorn wasn't announced..." Think we're out of our minds? Let's hear your prediction in the comment section!Permalink | Email this | Comments

  • TSA explains MacBook Air grounding: just doing its job

    Filed under: Laptops What, you don't read the official Transportation Security Administration blog? No worries, we've got your back on this one with the TSA's official reaction to Michael Nygard's missed flight as a result of its incredulous MacBook Air inspection. TSA agents are in fact trained to look for anomolies. So along come the MBA laptop. It's new (thus, rarely seen), ridiculously thin, and lacks a mechanical hard drive and any visible ports. Requesting further inspection is exactly what Mr. Nygard should have expected. As surly and detached as TSA officers tend to be, in this case they were doing their job just as they were trained. Of course, knowing this isn't going to prevent any of us from bitching and moaning every time we have to remove our shoes now is it? Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

  • TSA works to clear MacBook Air for flight

    Filed under: Odds and ends, Apple, MacBook AirYou may recall that MacBook Air user Michael Nygard was recently screened by the TSA (that's the Transportation Security Administration, to those who aren't in the US.) when he went through security with his MacBook Air. It would seem that the good folks manning the X-ray machine couldn't make heads or tail of what they saw on their screen. When Nygard explained that the MacBook Air was, in fact, a computer (and had that assertion backed up by a younger TSA worker) all was cleared up and he was sent on his merry way (though he did miss his flight).The TSA is working hard to make sure you don't have to deal with this hassle. On the official TSA blog (yes, the TSA has a blog and it is pretty entertaining) Bob informs us know that he is working with Apple to get his hands on a MacBook Air (hey, Bob, just make sure you don't throw it out) for some testing. He wants to run it through one of their screening machines and see if it looks any different than normal laptops. If it does, in fact, look a little odd the image will be sent to all TSA workers in airports so that future travelers won't be bothered.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

  • How would you change Apple's MacBook Air?

    Filed under: Features, Laptops Ah, the MacBook Air. Scorned by many who felt the price tag too high, but loathed by few who actually have an eye for good design. Apple's latest ultraportable is certainly one of the most polarizing products to emerge from Cupertino in quite some time, as it makes no apologies for throwing utility to the wind in favor of absolute sexiness. After Stevie J's keynote at Macworld 2008 concluded, many were left wondering why Apple didn't (re)introduce the compact MacBook Pro, and while this little bugger did indeed demand a double take (for a couple of reasons), the initial excitement of such a minuscule machine was quickly deflated after taking one solid look at the specifications. Make no mistake, the MBA has quite a bit going for it. Three pounds, ultrathin, oodles of attractiveness, a LED-backlit display and a trackpad worth drooling over. But for all the things this device is, it seems that folks are honing in on everything it isn't. During our time with the unit, we found plenty of reasons to love and hate it, but folks looking for an impressive showing at the benchmark marathon won't find it here. We already heard quite a bit of ranting when we polled you dear readers and asked if you were plunking down the $1,799+ that Cupertino was demanding, but now that the MacBook Air has shipped to early adopters and has landed in Apple stores everywhere, how would you owners go about changing this hot hot hunk of aluminum? Integrate a user-serviceable battery? How about the ability to upgrade your RAM? Would you toss in an option for built-in 3G? Beyond the typical hopes and dreams, we're also curious as to how you actually will change your MacBook Air. Got an eye on a specific USB hub? Springing for a Bluetooth mouse to keep that sole USB port open for more critical tasks? We're absolutely positive the choices are endless, so don't be shy -- here's your chance to tell Apple how you really feel about its tiniest laptop ever. Permalink | Email this | Comments

  • ★ Let the Tea Leaf Reading Begin

    The best thing about being an Apple observer is that even when the company does make a long-awaited announcement, it inevitably leads to new questions regarding what exactly they mean. Apple punditry is the Kremlinology of the tech world. So it is with this week’s announcement from Steve Jobs1 that, yes, “We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February.” We now know two new things: (1) that there will be “native third party applications on the iPhone”; and (2) that the SDK is scheduled for February. That leaves a long list of questions. Whither Widgets? For one: What exactly is a “native third party application”? The obvious answer is the sort of UIKit-based Cocoa-ish applications that underground iPhone hackers have been creating over the last two months — the exact sort of native apps that Apple has itself already written for the iPhone and iPod Touch. For all we know at this point, though, it could be something more like Dashboard widgets — but I think that’s unlikely. Jobs wrote: > With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful > hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we > have created the best mobile platform ever for developers. JavaScript, HTML, and CSS are cool in that they’re widely-used, widely-known coding standards — but they’re not a good way to create user experiences that take full advantage of the iPhone, and would be pretty hard for Apple to pass off as an SDK for “native apps”. Third party developers want access to the same dog food Apple’s own iPhone engineers are eating. Plus, there’s the issue of performance. Iconfactory developer Craig Hockenberry, who has been tinkering with the unofficial iPhone developer tools to create an iPhone-native version of Twitterrific, wrote a splendid weblog entry titled “Benchmarking in Your Pants” regarding the lackluster performance of JavaScript code running in MobileSafari compared to compiled Objective-C code running in a native iPhone app. Function calls, for example, were 226 times slower in JavaScript. (Hockenberry also benchmarked JavaScript running on the iPhone compared to the same code running in Safari on an Intel-based iMac; the code ran about 80 times faster on the iMac.) Back in January at the iPhone’s introduction in the Macworld Expo keynote, Jobs described some of the apps on the iPhone, including Weather and Stocks, as “widgets”. My somewhat-informed understanding is that Apple’s original plan was for the iPhone to ship with its major apps written in Cocoa and with a handful of smaller apps written as Dashboard-style HTML/CSS/JavaScript widgets — but that this plan was scuttled for performance reasons, and the Weather and Stocks widgets2 were rewritten as UIKit Objective-C apps sometime this spring.3 My guess is that they ran into what Hockenberry documented: JavaScript on the current iPhone just isn’t fast enough to provide an iPhone-caliber user experience. So my money is that the iPhone SDK that Apple plans to release this winter is the real thing — Cocoa-style UIKit apps written in Objective-C. Security? Jobs wrote: It will take until February to release an SDK because we’re trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once—provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task. Some claim that viruses and malware are not a problem on mobile phones—this is simply not true. There have been serious viruses on other mobile phones already, including some that silently spread from phone to phone over the cell network. As our phones become more powerful, these malicious programs will become more dangerous. And since the iPhone is the most advanced phone ever, it will be a highly visible target. External security — the threat of vulnerabilities that would allow malfeasants to compromise a victim’s iPhone — is a serious matter. There have already been several published exploits against the iPhone, including an as-of-this-writing open vulnerability in TIFF-processing code in the current iPhone OS. So clearly there is some merit to Jobs’s stated security concerns. As it stands in the current iPhone OS, all processes run as the root user; in broad layman’s terms, any process has access to everything else on the phone. So when a buffer overflow can be exploited to allow remote code execution, that code can do anything. To allow third-party iPhone apps to run today would be to trust those third-party developers not to write code with any security flaws. What the iPhone needs before Apple will allow third-party apps to run is some sort of sandbox, a way to prevent application processes from being able to access things they shouldn’t be allowed to access. But iPhone Cocoa apps are no more inherently susceptible to buffer overflow vulnerabilities than Mac Cocoa apps. And the hysteria over the iPhone’s current “everything runs as root” situation is overblown.4 Applications on your Mac don’t run as the root; they run under your user account. But all of your data — your email, your address book, your documents, everything your apps can read or write without administrator authentication — is vulnerable to any sort of hypothetical buffer overflow exploit on the Mac, and would be on the iPhone, too, even if iPhone apps didn’t all run as root. Sure, root privileges allow an exploit to do anything, but the most important thing on your system is your personal data, and an exploit doesn’t need root privileges to access that. I’m thinking Apple is more concerned about internal security — about having third-party apps limited to a sandbox so that user-installed code has no access to things like, say, the phone network modem’s firmware (the component that you need to diddle with to create SIM unlocks). That’s the key difference between the iPhone and the Mac, security-wise. Which Third-Party Developers? Mac OS X is pretty much completely open to development; even the developer tools are free, and anyone is free to write whatever software they want for the Mac. It seems unlikely that iPhone OS X development is going to be like that. One possibility is that the iPhone SDK will only be available to developers with ADC Select ($499) or Premiere ($3,499) accounts. (Premier and Select ADC members are the only ones with access to pre-release Mac OS X seeds, for example.) If that’s the case, it’s not going to be popular with hobbyist developers, but most professional Mac developers already have paid ADC memberships, and, let’s face it, we all know most iPhone apps are going to be written by Mac developers. Interviewed via email, Craig Hockenberry told me, “If there’s a simple way to get third party apps on the iPhone, you keep 90 percent of the developers happy and jailbreak/unlock has much less momentum. Sure, there will still be people that want to ‘buck the system’ but they’ll be in the minority rather than the majority.” The most intriguing part of Jobs’s announcement was this section, regarding security: Some companies are already taking action. Nokia, for example, is not allowing any applications to be loaded onto some of their newest phones unless they have a digital signature that can be traced back to a known developer. While this makes such a phone less than “totally open,â€? we believe it is a step in the right direction. We are working on an advanced system which will offer developers broad access to natively program the iPhone’s amazing software platform while at the same time protecting users from malicious programs. It’s hard not to interpret the scare quotes around “totally open” as a reference to Nokia’s recent “Open to Anything” ad campaign — sort of a you guys aren’t completely open either call-out. This seems like a pretty clear indication that Apple is working on a similar signing system for iPhone apps. Restricting development to paid ADC members would instantly allow Apple to associate app signatures “back to a known developer”. Here’s more information from Nokia on the signing program Jobs mentioned; here’s similar information on the Symbian site. Which Apps? Another question is whether Apple is going to allow participating (trusted-by-Apple) developers to write whatever apps they want, signing the apps themselves, or if apps will need to be approved case-by-case by Apple before being signed. Mac OS X Leopard includes a new “application signing” feature, described by Apple thusly: A digital signature on an application verifies its identity and ensures its integrity. All applications shipped with Leopard are signed by Apple, and third-party software developers can also sign their applications. That same page describes a “sandboxing” feature that seems applicable to the iPhone, too: Sandboxing prevents hackers from hijacking applications to run their own code by making sure applications only do what they’re intended to do. It restricts an application’s file access, network access, and ability to launch other applications.” The prototypical example of a potentially popular app that Apple might refuse to approve would be a VOIP app like, say, Skype, in that it would undermine the need for the phone network, which in turn undermines Apple’s revenue sharing with the iPhone’s exclusive network partners. Or, say, instant messaging, the omission of which from the current iPhone is seen by many as a concession to the fact that heavy SMS users pay handsomely for extra monthly messages. (Personally, I suspect iChat for iPhone simply didn’t make the cut for 1.0 but is planned for a future update.) “Nokia’s model is to run as trusted/untrusted,” said Hockenberry. “Trusted apps get to access more than untrusted ones. This model could be extended to allow different levels of access based upon whatever Apple wants (as owner of the root certificate.) Basic access for Wi-Fi, extended access for EDGE, hardware access for deep pockets, etc.” That makes sense, and strikes me as a likely course for Apple. Development There’s a question, then, of how developers will write the apps in the first place. If iPhones only run third-party apps that have been approved by Apple, how do you develop an application in the first place before it’s been approved? Steven Frank — who, as co-founder of Panic and an unrepentant gadget hound, may well be the single most interested person in the world in a supported iPhone SDK — described to me via email the development process for the Danger Hiptop/Sidekick: “The Hiptop/Sidekick platform has a Java SDK that abstracts away all the low-level hardware stuff so you can’t touch it, while still providing everything you need to write an application.  You test and debug in an emulator/virtual machine that can simulate edge conditions like loss of cellular network availability and so on.  When you’re almost done, and ready to try on real hardware, you apply for a ‘developer key’, which is a small certificate that you install on the phone that enables you to run third-party apps that didn’t come from the on-device for-purchase catalog.  To get the developer key, you have to prove to them you actually have an almost complete app, and aren’t just some kid who wants hot Yung Joc ringtones by submitting a build of your application.  You also have to sign a waiver that says you are no longer eligible for support from your cellular carrier.” The iTunes App Store? Which leaves us with the question of distribution and installation. The obvious route is the same one Apple has taken with iPod games: the iTunes Store. Apple, in this case, would likely get a cut of every sale. From a user’s perspective, it’d be easy and obvious: shop and pay for apps in iTunes, and iTunes takes care of installing the software, and, perhaps, synching data. This is similar to the Danger model — where apps must be approved, and can be sold only through the official channel. Limiting, to be sure, but as Frank put it, “The process [of developing for Danger] is somewhat tedious, but still an order of magnitude better than not allowing third-party applications, period.” Frank also pointed out the most glaring downside of Danger’s pay-to-play development model: “One drawback to this approach from the user’s perspective is that there is basically no free third-party software. Everything costs at least a couple bucks.” The announcement appeared on Apple’s Hot News web page, but with no permalink, so it’s likely to disappear from Apple’s web site in a week or two as newer items appear. I’ve saved a plain text copy here for posterity. ↩ I wonder if the Calculator app was originally a widget, too. UI-wise, it’d certainly be a cinch, because just like with the iPhone’s Weather and Stocks apps, it more or less looks and acts exactly like the corresponding widget in Mac OS X. So my theory is that when Apple made the decision to rewrite the iPhone widgets as native iPhone Cocoa apps, they used the widgets as the specs for the apps. “Make a native app that looks and acts exactly like this widget,” more or less. One thing that makes me think this is that the iPhone Calculator app doesn’t make any sounds when you press the buttons. Pure JavaScript/HTML widgets can’t make sounds when you click or tap buttons. I find typing on the iPhone keyboard to be much more satisfying with the sound on; with the sound off, because the keys are virtual, there’s no sensory feedback at all. The Calculator app would feel more real if it simply made the same button-clicking noises as the iPhone keyboard. ↩ That this change was — I believe — made rather late in the game might explain why vestigial references to “widgets” remained in the shipping iPhone 1.0 software. (It could also mean, of course, that Apple plans to re-expose this feature at some point in the future.) ↩ It certainly is a curious question why all iPhone apps run as root. I don’t know the answer. But I’ll bet there’s an interesting engineering trade-off involved somewhere. If you think the reason is laziness or ignorance on the part of the iPhone OS X engineers, you’re an idiot. ↩

  • Leopard and the History and Future of Mac OS X on PowerPC

    Daniel Eran DilgerHow long will Apple continue to support existing models of Macs in the latest version of Mac OS X? Previous versions of Apple’s OS have drawn the line for officially supported Macs based on practical considerations, rather than just being arbitrary or artificial. Here's what the past suggests for Mac OS X Leopard and the version that comes after it.The Post-Copland Crisis.Apple carried along official support for the 1986 Mac Plus through Mac System 7.5.5 in 1996. That established an expectation for Mac users that any new Mac System Software would be able to run across a decade long generation of old hardware. Further, Apple had only begun officially selling System 7 as a retail product a few years earlier; many Mac users continued to think of the Mac operating system as something that was available for free, as it had been in the past. That unreasonable support expectation combined with the sense of entitlement held by Mac users had helped to complicate Apple’s mid-90s failure to deliver Copland as a successor to System 7 between 1993 and 1995, and would continue to dog the company in its plans to provide a significant system software update after Copland was mothballed. Faced with the task of maintaining full backward compatibility for both existing applications and a wide range of hardware--but without any assurance that a significant number of Mac users would actually pay for the upgrade--it’s no wonder why Apple was stuck at System 7 for over a decade (Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9 were only retoolings of the System 7 operating system released in 1991), and why plans to completely overhaul System 7 with Copland and Gershwin failed.If Apple had the luxury of operating outside of a real market economy and could simply rely on guaranteed future sales at high retail prices, it could have plowed along for twice as long and eventually released something, as Microsoft did a decade later with Windows Vista. As Windows Enthusiasts like to point out, Vista will eventually get deployed no matter how bad it is. [The Secrets of Pink, Taligent and Copland][Has Leopard Fallen into a Copland-Vista Conundrum?][SCO, Linux, and Microsoft in the History of OS: 1990s]Spindler’s Complications.By 1990, Apple CEO John Sculley had recognized that Apple needed to set a reasonable minimum hardware threshold for its operating system releases and to figure out a way to get Mac users to fund the expensive operating system development the company was doing. At that time, both Microsoft and IBM were charging PC users around $100 for retail copies of Windows or OS/2, neither of which were even really usable.Figuring out how to actually accomplish those goals never got done at Apple. Instead, Sculley’s successor Michael Spindler attempted to imitate Sony by releasing ranges of Mac hardware under a variety of vaguely Latin sounding names--Quadra, Centris, and Performa--and a series of confusing, nondescript model numbers. Starting in early 1994, Apple also underwent a complex transition from its original 680x0 Macs to PowerPC hardware. Since much of the original Mac software was written in assembly language, the transition relied on emulation of the existing Mac System Software, which further complicated efforts to deliver significant new features without breaking existing software or prematurely cutting off support for existing machines. Non-PowerPC Macs continued to be sold into 1996.Spindler’s Apple also began plans to license the Mac software to other hardware makers in late 1994, including APS, Bandai, DayStar, Motorola, Pioneer, Power Computing, Radius, and UMAX. That effort skimmed off the cream of Apple’s profitability and handed it to the cloners, leaving Apple to service the low end of the market at Sears with its Performas while also funding the development of nearly profitless Mac System Software to support an increasingly wide range of hardware. [Why Apple Failed]Simplifying the Mac Hardware Lineup Around the G3.When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company's product line was all over the place, although efforts were already underway to simplify things. Apple had only just discontinued the last of its 680x0-based Macs a year earlier. Under Spindler replacement Gil Ameilo, Apple had also scraped together a "Unity" release of System 7, newly rebranded as Mac OS 7.6. That release officially extended support back to all "32-bit clean" Macs, which included the eight year old Mac IIci from 1989.The installed base of Mac hardware not only spanned across two hardware platforms--680x0 and Power PC--but nearly each individual Mac model from Apple had also used its own highly customized and often uniquely quirky hardware design. The cloners were also introducing subtle differences in their own machines, too.Despite using the very modern PowerPC processors and Open Firmware, Macs in 1997 still incorporated old Mac ROMs to maintain software compatibility with the existing Mac OS. After taking control of Apple in the middle of that year, Jobs announced the release of a highly simplified product line using the new G3 processor. The G3 was such a significant leap over earlier PowerPC processors that even the entry level G3s were faster than the top of the line models Apple had been selling. So while Apple had a confusing array of eight different major PowerMac models at the beginning of 1997, by the end of the year it only had two: a desktop G3 and a tower G3. It also shipped a G3 PowerBook.[How CPR Saved Apple]Mac OS X 10.0 - 10.2: G3 Only.The introduction of the G3 processor created a clean line between it and the wide array of odd PowerPC hardware designed prior to 1997. The G3 also signaled the end of the line for the various models built by Mac cloners, who all refused to license new versions of the Mac OS at terms Jobs deemed reasonable. The G3 was also the first PowerPC processor optimized to run Mac software. That made it an easy minimum target for Mac OS X, which remained in development through 2001. In the meantime, Jobs bought out Power Computing--the largest Mac cloner--for $100 million, and terminated other clone agreements by releasing Mac OS 7.7 as “Mac OS 8â€? in mid 1997. That revision also became the first edition of the Mac OS to really be successfully sold at retail; over 1.2 million copies were sold within the first two weeks. The next fall in 1998, Apple released Mac OS 8.5, which was the first version to be PowerPC-only, limiting support to Macs sold over the last five years. In 1999, Apple shipped Mac OS 9. The new Apple had proved it could plan, ship, and sell regular releases of an operation system. The next task would be shipping Mac OS X as a major new leap past the classic System 7.Between 2001 and 2002, the 10.0 to 10.2 versions of Mac OS X limited support to the G3 desktop Macs, including those first introduced in late 1997. It did not support the original PowerBook G3 unveiled alongside the G3 desktops however. The first supported PowerBook was the "WallStreet" revision introduced in May of 1998. That maintained the roughly five year support window for machines to be updated with new versions of Mac operating system software. [Apple Sells 1.2 Million Copies of Mac OS 8 - Apple][Leopard, Vista and the iPhone OS X Architecture]Mac OS X 10.3: New World Macs Only.After moving its hardware line to the G3, Apple next delivered a revised "New World" platform which modernized the Mac's hardware and removed its old hardware ROMs, replacing them with “ROM in RAMâ€? software loaded from disk. The first New World model was the first iMac in 1998. The beige G3 Macs from 1997 were replaced with a single new "blue and white" G3 in early 1999, which used the same translucent plastic as the iMac. Apple shipped its first "New World" laptop in the Lombard PowerBook G3, distinguished by its translucent bronze keyboard. In July 1999, Apple released the iBook.The release of Mac OS X Panther 10.3 in 2003 extended support back to Macs with G3 processors and built-in support for USB. This wasn't due to an actual requirement for USB, but rather a shorthand way to describe a cutoff for the support of the significantly different architecture of "Old World" Macs designed prior to the iMac, as all New World Macs also provided support for USB. Panther retained a roughly five year support window for existing Mac models.Mac OS X 10.4: Modern New World Macs Only.In 2004, Mac OS X Tiger 10.4 retained support for most New World Macs using G3 processors, but required support for built-in FireWire. Again, this wasn't related to a need for FireWire ports, but rather a way to exclude support for the earliest of the now five year old New World Macs, which Apple decided would not run Tiger acceptably, including: the original 1998 iMac.the original 1999 iBook.the 1999 "Lombard" PowerBook G3.These five year old machines can still run Tiger using XPostFacto, a third party enabler designed to force Mac OS X to run on earlier systems. However, significant differences in their hardware--coupled with their limited performance--prevented Apple from officially supporting them.In the case of the Lombard PowerBook, its DVD drive was never supported for movie playback under Mac OS X because the system did not have the power to decode DVD video in software; under Mac OS 9, it relied on a hardware decoder. Rather than holding up Mac OS X to develop custom support for the obsolete hardware decoder in the now half-decade old Lombard PowerBooks, Apple told its users to continue using the playback software it came with. [XPostFacto: OS X for Legacy Macs - Other World Computing]Mac OS X 10.5: 867 MHz Processor Required.For Leopard, Apple is specifying an 867 MHz G4. That excludes support for the now functionally obsolete G3s, and draws a line down the middle of the 2001 "Quicksilver" PowerMac G4s, excluding support for the 2001 G4 Cube and the first three generations of the Titanium PowerBook G4 up to late 2002. This again maintains official support for five to six years of Mac models.This break roughly corresponds to the arrival of the G4+, a revised version of the G4 with support for L3 cache and improvements to AltiVec. It is also near the line for supporting Quartz Extreme and the higher end Core Image, both of which are technologies used to delegate graphics work to the video card. However, Core Image is not a requirement for using Leopard; such a requirement would exclude support for all G4 desktops and laptops prior to 2003. Leopard Looms Large.That indicates Apple is being fairly liberal in officially supporting older models in Leopard. The obvious reason for this is that Apple wants to sell Leopard to as many Mac users as possible, even more than it wants to use Leopard to sell new Macs. Between 2001 and 2002, Apple sold just over 6 million Macs. From 2003 to the present, Apple has sold about 23 million Macs. Apple wants to target the broadest possible market for Leopard, so excluding support for older machines is done with some hesitation. By extending support back into 2001, Apple is selling to an audience of nearly 30 million versus 23 million.At the same time however, the likelihood of selling retail copies of Leopard to users of older Macs begins to drop as six year old machines go out of service or are no longer viewed by their owners as needing brand new software. This spring, analysts estimated an installed base of around 22 million active Mac users, an increase of 6 million over their figures from 2005.[Mac install base estimated at 22 million pre-Leopard - AppleInsider][Market Share vs Installed Base: iPod vs Zune, Mac vs PC]Is Leopard the Last Hurrah for Power PC Macs?The reports of PowerPC's obsolescence have been greatly exaggerated. Last year, the rumor was that Leopard would be released only for Intel Macs. This year, with Leopard looming on the horizon, the new rumor is that Mac OS X 10.6--possibly named Lynx or Cougar--will be Intel-only. However this is only uninformed speculation. When this rumor came up earlier about Leopard, I posted the article, “Unraveling The PowerPC Obsolescence Myth.â€? It pointed out that Apple would not release an Intel-only Leopard for an audience of the roughly 3 million new Intel Macs sold in 2006 when it could reach an installed base of around 20 million Macs with a Universal Leopard.It noted, “If Apple continues to sell new Macs at current rates, it will be 2008 before Intel Macs begin to outnumber PowerPCs, and that assumes that every year, 4 million old PowerPC Macs will be destroyed. There will be a significant proportion of PowerPC Macs still buying software well into 2010, and the market will accommodate them.â€?[Unraveling The PowerPC Obsolescence Myth]Why the Mac OS X Backward Compatibility Window May Increase.Apple’s Mac OS support troubles back in 1996 related to the support of multiple platforms, a wide variety of different models, and an inability to effectively market the Mac OS. Those issues are no longer factors today. Despite Apple’s maintenance of dual platforms since the transition to Intel began in 2006, technology has erased the barrier as a real problem.The majority of the installed base of around 22 million Macs is PowerPC; less than 10 million are Intel Macs. Apple has started to sell dramatically more new Macs at a faster rate over the last couple years--displacing the PowerPC majority more rapidly--but there will still be a lot of PowerPC Macs well into 2010. Worrying about 10.6 or even 10.7 being Intel-only shouldn't be among anyone's greatest concerns. By 2009, the likely ballpark release date of Leopard's successor, the trailing end of officially supported Macs would include over 8 million PowerPC Macs sold since 2004, even more machines--and more recent models--than Apple is targeting now by reaching back into 2001 to support QuickSilver G4s in Leopard. Further, supporting machines from 2003--including the first G5s--will be no difficult stretch, because the Mac architecture didn't change dramatically between 2003 and 2005 in the way that it rapidly did between 1997 and 2000. In addition, Mac OS X hardware dependancies have been designed to degrade gracefully. For example, the acceleration framework and Core Graphics libraries make use of specialized hardware if available, or simply run on the general purpose CPU if it isn’t.It's also interesting to note that prior to 2000, Macs weren't sold with Mac OS X because it didn't yet exist. That means earlier versions of Mac OS X supported years of Macs that were never really designed to run it, while Leopard still supports the vast majority of the machines anyone ever bought with the expectation to actually use Mac OS X. New generations of Mac OS X will have fewer reasons to exclude support for existing hardware, leaving the support line tied to practical performance.[Why Apple hasn't used Intel processors before]Intel-Only Not Necessary.Around 11 million Macs were sold between 2003 and 2005, and all of them were PowerPC. It would be foolish for Apple to simply exclude that audience in the next revision of Mac OS X without good reason. As it works out, there really isn't any good reason for Apple to ditch PowerPC. Apple's Universal Binaries architecture makes it relatively easy to maintain support across multiple platforms. It's not like the move from Motorola 680x0 classic Macs to PowerPC, where old 680x0 software was emulated at significant cost on PowerPC, and new PowerPC code couldn't run at all on 680x0 Macs. That situation left developers to wonder which they should invest their support in and for how long. Universal Binaries means there isn't any tough choice to make.Universal Binaries not only support PowerPC and Intel, but also make supporting 32 and 64 bit architectures easy. Leopard supports all four Mac platforms in the same software release:32 bit PowerPC G464 bit PowerPC G532 bit Intel64 bit Intel Microsoft faces big problems in migrating its users to 64 bits, because it has no seamless architecture to waltz its 32 bit Intel users onto 64 bit hardware. Instead, Windows users have to obtain a separate 64 bit edition of their operating system, new 64 bit drivers, and new 64 bit applications. Supporting both is problematic, and deploying software across both is also trouble. Even Microsoft hasn’t delivered its portfolio of applications for its 64 bit versions of Windows. Microsoft faces enough troubles selling Vista, let alone its deferred plan to deal with 64 bits and EFI at some point in the future. Apple already has both issues covered, allowing it to concentrate on more interesting tasks. [How Apple’s Firmware Leapfrogs BIOS PCs]Applications that are Intel-Only.For Apple and third party developers using Apple's Xcode tools, supporting both Intel and PowerPC architectures is really no more difficult than supporting just Intel Macs. In fact, Apple has also ported Mac OS X to the ARM architecture for use in the iPhone and the iPod Touch, demonstrating that it can flex its multi-platform muscle in several directions, not just as one-time, disposable transition plan. Universal Binaries isn’t a crutch, its a powerful deployment technology.There are only three types of developers that will have any reason to deliver Intel-only Mac apps:Companies like Adobe, which base their applications on their own custom, internal cross platform architecture. Since Adobe maintains its own system that is based on Intel-centric development, its new apps such as Soundbooth aren't ever going to appear for PowerPC. If it used Xcode’s Universal Binaries, this would not be a problem. Xcode doesn't target Windows though (at least not in a way Adobe can use!), so Adobe rolled its own system.
Software designed for Windows and ported to Intel Macs using a WINE-like engine. This is how EA is porting its new games to the Mac. They are actually Windows games running on a thin portability layer that emulates the Windows APIs. Since games don't integrate into the desktop UI, a full Mac port isn't very valuable for users or worth doing for the developer, particularly since the Mac gaming market is still pretty small. Porting over Windows games is far faster and keeps new releases in sync so that Mac gamers will have access to new titles sooner, and won't miss features such as network play. 
Environment emulators and other software tied directly to the x86 architecture, including Parallels. These can't be ported to PowerPC for the same reason that it makes no sense to port Virtual PC to Intel. Apart from running Windows--which is tightly bound to the 32-bit x86 architecture--there is really very little software that needs to run on a specific processor.For most other software, including the vast majority of what makes up Mac OS X, it really isn't difficult to deliver both PowerPC and Intel versions, so as long as there are PowerPC Macs around, there'll be PowerPC software. That makes it extremely unlikely that Apple would drop support for PowerPC in the next generation of Mac OS X after Leopard.Maintaining and Growing the Mac Installed Base.What about the argument that Apple would prefer to “forceâ€? users to buy a new Mac to get the latest system rather than simply upgrade their existing hardware? Consider that Apple’s Mac profit margins are around 20% or less, while its Mac OS X margins are closer to Microsoft’s 80% Windows margins. [Office Wars 2 - Microsoft’s Outrageous Office Profits]Mac users paying to upgrade to Mac OS X are likely to buy a new Mac eventually as a replacement, so Apple’s delaying that hardware sale for a profitable software upgrade makes more sense than forcing existing Mac users to go out and buy new hardware, which might involve comparing a new Mac against a PC running Windows.The more Macs that can run the most recent version of Mac OS X, the more attractive the target is for third party developers. Apple wants to maintain the majority of Mac users on the latest version of its software. In contrast, Windows Vista is competing against Windows XP, and the fact that Microsoft only earns 20% of its revenues from (the much more expensive) retail box sales indicates that most PC users upgrade when buying a new PC. More Mac users pay to upgrade their software.That fact contributes toward making the Mac platform far more valuable than Windows; despite having only 3% market share of the entire world’s production of PCs, Apple makes more money on hardware sales than Dell with its 15% share of the market, and--after including Microsoft’s tremendous losses from its non-monopoly businesses--made half as much money in software as Microsoft did with its 98% share. Windows Enthusiast prefer not to think about this.Even stripping Apple of its iPod revenues, which PC pundits love to do, the company still earned $4.4 billion on its Macintosh business last year, over a third as much Microsoft brought in from its entire Windows, Office, and server operations combined. Apple’s 2% of the PC market doesn’t seem so small anymore. [Can Apple Take Microsoft in the Battle for the Desktop?][Market Share vs Installed Base: iPod vs Zune, Mac vs PC]What do you think? I really like to hear from readers. Comment in the Forum or email me with your ideas. Like reading RoughlyDrafted? Share articles with your friends, link from your blog, and subscribe to my podcast! Submit to Reddit or Slashdot, or consider making a small donation supporting this site. Thanks!

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