Tag: Macintosh

Tablet Rasa Redux

Steve Jobs all but introduces the upcoming Apple Tablet (hopefully the upcoming Macintosh tablet, but time will tell) in these quotes from an interview with David Pogue of the NYT:

There are some things that I’m focusing a lot of attention on right now—to polish

[…]

We have some really good stuff coming up.

Keep in mind, Jobs has previously stated that he considers most tablet-type computers to be, uh, shit. Additionally, we know that a number of pre-iPhones (for lack of a better term) died on the vine because one SPJ deemed them unworthy (he’s occasionally referred to these as their “best product decisions” or some similar construction: better to shitcan something bad than put it out there prematurely and sully the brand. Witness the Newton.

Likewise, he presages that this doodad will be far more than a reader:

I’m sure there will always be dedicated devices [like the Kindle], and they may have a few advantages in doing just one thing,” he said. “But I think the general-purpose devices will win the day. Because I think people just probably aren’t willing to pay for a dedicated device.

Even if the tablet runs the iPhone OS, it will be a far more capable everything than Kindle is a reader. If it runs garden-variety Mac OS X, it will likely outperform many (or most) netbooks in terms of absolute utility. How could it not? People already get pretty good results hacking the Mac OS onto these devices. An optimized version, from Apple, would dominate the space assuming it was priced within, say, $100 of its most direct competitors (honestly, it’s hard to figure out what those are in a field pretty well suffused with crap).

Copland, Tiger, Box (A Clear Time Braid)

Perhaps the clearest sign of the Steve Jobs’ recent illness and attendant absence from day-to-day decisions over to One Infinite Loop is the Snow Leopard packaging:

snow leopard box

When I originally saw the leak of this, I assumed it must, must be a fake. And a bad one. But here it is.

Anywho, it marks an odd signpost in the evolution of Mac operating system naming… The first instance I can recall of Apple talking openly about future operating systems by code name (as opposed to simply saying “well, in System 7 we’ll have…” and so forth), came during the lead-up to System 8, then referred to by its public codename Copland. The follow-on (which, presumably, would have been System 9, but it never really got off the ground) was openly referred to as Gershwin. Internally, I believe Copland went by “Pink,” an outgrowth of the same project naming schema from the Taligent days, but that’s neither here nor there.

With the debut of MacOS X (initially called Rhapsody, but ultimately (and thankfully) re-branded as simply MacOS X, there began a new, cat-based public codename schema that Wikipedia does a very fine job of keeping track of:  Cheetah/Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard, and (now) Snow Leopard.

With all of that came a steady evolution in packaging design, also courtesy of Wikipedia:

MacOS X Boxes

As you can see, only Jaguar (better known as Jag-wire to one Steve Jobs) makes any reference whatsoever to the public codename, with its spotted X and box side. And this made inherent sense with what was going on under the hood: Jaguar was the first fully polished release of MacOS (to the original Cheetah/Puma first wide-release version which still had various usability or driver issues for certain users). So it seemed quite natural to echo the Aqua-themed original OS X box with a lightly updated, speed-oriented branding.

With the arrival of Panther, apple adopted the minimalistic metallic X, adding a spotlight effect to Tiger (highlighting, you guessed it, the debut of Spotlight searching technology in the OS). This notion was extended with the galaxy effect on Leopard; it kept the basic X design but highlighted and referenced Time Machine, the most notable addition to that OS.

Now we have, uh, a snowy cat. No X, and the codename is referenced directly on the packaging. Yikes. We also gain the subhead:

The world’s most advanced operating system. Finely tuned.

I see.

I understand that labelling it Mac OS X 10.6 is probably a non-starter for the marketing class, and is seen as insufficiently differentiated from whatever it is exactly that 10.5 might be. But I can’t be the only one that has difficulty recalling the order of these damned cats when named in isolation. Tiger was, er, a while ago…but was that 10.4? This seemingly benign issue gets all the more painful when you’re tracking down, say, a compatibility issue: will Google find more results referencing “Tiger” or “10.4” or “Mac” or “Macintosh” or “MacIntosh” or God knows what else? If we’re now going to actually call these operating systems by these names “officially” as opposed to “casually during a keynote when it doesn’t really matter” I can see some serious problems on the horizon, especially when they replace the actually informative 10.5.8 that “About this Mac” reports with “Lesser Plains Leopard” or some-such. However, it should be noted that this is the same company that differentiates a $3500 computer as “(Early 2008) Mac Pro” and assumes you can still easily sort out what you’ve got come 2010…

This is where I’m supposed to roll out my own, vastly better mockup, but you’re going to have to use your imagination caps to see it. The true precedent is with Jag-wire. It was the most conceptually similar release to the current iteration: essentially a big cleanup, with not that many Earth-shattering innovations. While it certainly held more fundamental fixes and so forth than Snow Leopard, the basic idea was very similar: make what we already have put together as good, as fast, and as functional as we possibly can. So, for 10.6 you keep the essential box of the immediate predecessor, Leopard. Perhaps you fade the galaxy a bit, but it’s still back there in its vaguely holographic form. Then you fill the big X with tasteful snow-leopard spots. And the title text? It’s relegated to the side, where it reads simply “Mac OS X Version 10.6.”

Is that so hard? Apparently without Steve Jobs around, it is.

Stonecutters

Time for prediction accuracy measurement everyone! Yes, it’s delicious PAM; this time, we review our psychohistorical analysis re: iPhone, Mac OS X 10.6 (aka Snow Leopard), and the magical mystical marble interface. Let’s review. I said:

So, carve it in stone: Snow Leopard will be announced and a full demo given at WWDC, cost $129.00, only run on Intel-based Macs, and probably ship reasonably soon after announcement, say right around 9/1/09.

Alright, Snow Leopard was announced and given demo at WWDC: +1
SL will cost, um, $29.00: -1(00)
SL will indeed run only on Intel-based Macs: +1
SL will indeed ship “in September”: +1

75%. Not too shabby. Take that, eternal asshat Rob Enderle.
On Marble: Clearly, that’ll be the reason the next update reverts to $129 pricing…

iPhone Mini: I “have my doubts” and still do. +1, huzzah! Also a bonus dose of goodwill for noting the notion that existing iPhone tech takes up the “low end” (whether in Mini form or not) while shiny new iPhonery takes the old price-point with feature/memory extension. Fish in a barrel, that one.

The tablet: too soon to score. Certainly the animus directed at AT&T onstage implies a “hey look, it’s that Verizon guy!” attitude amongst the Apple powers that be. We shall see. Score it a zero for now, though.

That gives the staff a 4 out of 5, for a glittering 80%. Everyone feel free to take one extra mint on the way out of the office tonight.

Lost his Marble

Adam C. Engst seems to think that Mac OS X 10.6 (aka Snow Leopard) will or should be free…or at least nearly free. Say, $9.95 for the DVD. His point mostly rests on the perfectly good notion of simultaneously dragging all the remaining Tiger (and, presumably any pre-Tiger OS user still out there) into the future; the net result is a unified system architecture that helps Apple (and any developer) going forward as less heed may be paid to ensuring excellent Jaguar support in some new application.

Here’s why he’s wrong: Snow Leopard will be Intel only. In fact, Snow Leopard will be by definition a system bifurcation. Every operating PowerPC Macintosh: stuck at Tiger or Leopard (I mention both because the finest system for the PPC was clearly Tiger); all other Macs: on to Our Brighter Future.

So, carve it in stone: Snow Leopard will be announced and a full demo given at WWDC, cost $129.00, only run on Intel-based Macs, and probably ship reasonably soon after announcement, say right around 9/1/09.

How do you sell that, when this upgrade is supposedly only under-the-hood changes along with some much needed but not-at-all glamorous additions? Interface change, my friends. Marble, here we come.

Stanford and Son

You can understand a lot about the iPhone and the iPod Nano (which cost more to produce yet still replaced (at the same price point) the most popular iPod ever, the “mini”) from this quote from Steve Jobs, re: Macintosh 25th anniversary

“I don’t think about that,” he said. “When I got back here in 1997, I was looking for more room, and I found an archive of old Macs and other stuff. I said, ‘Get it away!’ and I shipped all that shit off to Stanford. If you look backward in this business, you’ll be crushed. You have to look forward.”

Then consider this, from the then-titan of the industry:

“I’d shut [Apple] down and give the money back to the shareholders.”
–Michael Dell, 1997.

And, perhaps even more telling, this notorious quote from Jobs himself, to Fortune magazine in 1996:

“If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it’s worth – and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago.”

Which is basically exactly what he did the next year. At any rate, worth considering the state of Dell today, run to the whim of Wall Street analysts, and the then-doomed Apple (Wired circa 1997: Silence grips Apple Deathwatch). One commoditized, the other innovated. This despite the fact that even Macworld magazine had inexplicably begun running Windows NT tips. And in every major instance, Apple’s moves were greeted with derision and a fall in stock value (iMac, iPod, Apple Stores, iPhone were all (wrongly) crowned as the last gasp of a desperate company; after all, even might Dell couldn’t figure out how to do bricks and mortar. My stars!).

This is ultimately Steve Jobs value to Apple. The actual products aren’t nearly important as the corporate daring, the brass balls that are necessary to tack hard against the wind and discontinue your best seller in favor of something even better. Or to say “fuck it, we will put no floppy drive in there.” And etc… Very few other companies of size do the same. Hell, very few Mom and Pops will make moves like that. Worth considering.