The Null Device

7 Confessions of an Apple Mac Specialist:

7. iPods have two fixes. Resetting and Restoring.
If both of those features do not work, your iPod is trash. Unless it's under warranty or you purchased AppleCare, then they will give you two options. First is to trade in your iPod for 10% off any model (except shuffle), or they will give you out of warranty replacement, Which usually means that you will pay around $100-$250 depending on the model you purchased.

6. We have 4 things that we will try to sell you when you purchase a computer.
AppleCare, of course, is your extended 3 year warranty, we are told to sell it as a service plan, but it does not do ANYTHING extra, but extend your warranty, and does not cover anything extra. .Mac is a ripoff unless you use the web site hosting. ProCare has to be the biggest ripoff. All this does is upgrade your AppleCare for one year. It has a little perk for business uses, but otherwise useless. Lastly, One-to-One training, which is the best deal in the store.

(via Boing Boing Gadgets) ¶ apple business mac secrets [1 comment]

Psychology experiments have shown that subliminal exposure to brands can prime people with the attributes those brands have cultivated. For example, when students were exposed to either an Apple or IBM logo and asked to list all the uses for a brick they could imagine, the Apple ("creativity, noncomformity") group came up with significantly more than the IBM ("tradition, responsibility") group. In a subsequent experiment, candidates primed with the Disney logo behaved more honestly than those primed with the logo of E! Channel (which, I believe, is a celebrity-gossip cable-TV channel in the US).

The practical consequences of this are interesting: if this is to be taken at face value then, by the sheer power of subliminal conditioning and marketing, brands do have magical properties, and branded products would perform better than physically identical unbranded ones. A brand logo is a macro, a tightly-encoded package of ideas, instantaneously decoded by appropriately conditioned consumers (and that means all of us; given the studies showing that young children learn to recognise brands before they learn to read), and priming has been shown to work. (In one experiment (previously mentioned here), students were asked to sort words, and then surreptitiously timed as they walked down the corridor on leaving. Those given words relating to old age—including, memorably, "Florida"—walked more slowly than those given youth-related words. Another experiment showed that exposure to alcohol-related words increased men's sex drive.)

Putting these facts together, it seems that using an Apple computer would make you more creative, even if you work in the same version of Microsoft Word you could as easily use on Windows, though so would having an Apple iPod, and Nike shoes could make you run faster than generic trainers of exactly the same composition, and so on. It's not necessarily even limited to brands, but could extend to any perceptible medium associated with qualities or values. It'd be interesting to see whether, for example, if one took two groups of students and, after surreptitiously exposing half of them to Belle & Sebastian and the other half to 50 Cent, asked them to play a game, whether members of one group would be more aggressive or competitive than the other.

Anyway, this finding could be seen as a justification for big brands' steep markups of otherwise average products: they're not exploiting a gullible public, they're selling the psychological magic of their brand. Though if you don't want to pay the markup, you could just as easily clip ads out of papers and tape them around your cubicle/kitchen/locker/wherever, which might get you a similar result, at the risk of making you look like a tragic. Just keep reminding yourself that you're not a gullible dupe or an unpaid human billboard, but a cunningly rebellious pirate, sticking it to The Man by stealing his magic without paying.

I wonder, though, whether candidates subliminally exposed to craptacular knockoffs of Apple products would experience a boost of creativity or a drop in IQ.

(via /.) ¶ apple branding creativity hypnosis influence priming psychology suggestion [1 comment]

Blogging has been sparse over the past few days, as Your Humble Correspondent has been away in Berlin.

Anyway, a round-up of things I've noticed from while I was away:

• After the European University in St. Petersburg, Russia, got involved in an EU-funded project to ensure the fairness of the election process, the Russian authorities shut down the university, claiming that it is a "fire hazard". Opposition figures accuse the Kremlin of moving Russia back towards totalitarianism (or is the goal a Singapore-style "managed democracy"?)
• While we're on the subject of democracy, Charlie Stross weighs in on why forms of democracy are becoming increasingly prevalent these days, with even otherwise illiberal regimes adopting aspects of democracy, rather than autocratic systems.

  Anyway. Here we have three ways in which democracy is less bad than rival forms of government: it usually weeds out lunatics before they can get their hands on the levers of power, it provides a valuable pressure relief valve for dissent, and it handles succession crises way better than a civil war.

• Barack Obama, it seems, is doing well in the US primaries; so much so that someone in the Clinton campaign seemingly decided to resort to dog-whistle politics and took it upon themselves to circulate photos of him wearing scarily Middle-Eastern-looking attire, in the hope that enough Texans are sufficiently prejudiced to be unable to vote for someone whose name not only sounds like "Osama" but who once wore similar headgear.
• After writing a piece on the mainstreaming of neo-folk music, Momus has discovered Emmy The Great. His great revelation has little to do with her music, mind you, and much to do with her being young, (half-)Asian and fanciable.
• Apple have finally released a new MacBook Pro. It gets the Air's multi-touch trackpad, and the usual quantitative bump in specifications, alas, a higher-resolution screen isn't isn't among them, so if you want 1600 pixels across on something that doesn't look comically oversized, you'll have to buy a Windows machine.
• Meanwhile, Microsoft have been slapped with a US$1.4bn fine by the EU, as well as having made vague promises of being more open in future, and apparently they're working on a Windows Vista-based GNU rival named UNG ("just like GNU, only without all that pesky freedom").

Berlin, for what it's worth, was great; four days, though, is nowhere near enough time to see everything and enjoy the city. Though I was surprised that the attendants on the Deutsche Bahn sleeper train didn't seem to speak English. Hopefully they'll remedy this by the time they start running services through the Channel Tunnel.

For what it's worth, photos are being uploaded here.

¶ apple charlie stross culture democracy emmy the great microsoft momus news personal russia travel [no comments]

New market research has revealed that Mac users are snobs, upper-income-bracket elitist aspirational types who see themselves as better than the PC-using rabble, while, seen from the other side, PC users are cheapskates.

Meanwhile, a filmmaker has made a documentary about the intense loyalty Maccies feel to their brand, which bears out some of the findings:

Violet Blue, a popular blogger and sex columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, who also features in the film, says: "First of all, I've never knowingly slept with a Windows users ... that would never, ever happen."

The intellectual is not one of us. We are ordinary folks, he is a member of an elite. We gravitate around right wing ideas, he's left-leaning. We're family people, he screws men, women and children. We farm, he stays in the city, with his intellectual elite, or on campus, corrupting the minds of our youth. We're religious, but the intellectual is an unbeliever. We run to fat, he stays thin. We're patriots, he's a cosmopolitan, equally at home with foreigners as with his own kind. He puts loyalty to ideas before loyalty to his people. We have the church, he has the liberal media.

¶ anti-intellectualism apple culture culture war mac maccies marketing microsoft stereotypes survival values the long siege you don't say? [3 comments]

Jona Bechtolt of YACHT (and formerly of The Blow)'s latest venture (with partner-in-crime Claire L. Evans): making MacBook Air laptop sleeves that look like manila envelopes, like the one Steve Jobs pulled the Air out of at MacWorld. For people who also have a Banana Phone.

If one had a MacBook Air, that would look either cool or cheesy, depending on the execution. Though I'm not tempted to buy one; given that I use my Mac for music and video, I couldn't justify buying one with only one USB port and no FireWire.

(via Engadget) ¶ apple craft hipsters jona bechtolt mac macbook air maccies the blow yacht [no comments]

As I type this, Steve Jobs is giving his keynote speech at MacWorld. From what I can tell, he has announced a few consumer gadgets (an improved AppleTV with movie rentals (presumably in the US only) and Flickr support, iPhone and iPod Touch firmware upgrades) and a wireless Mac backup appliance named "Time Capsule". Mind you, Engadget's feed doesn't seem to be coping with the load of millions of Maccies across the world constantly hitting reload to see whether any new tidbits have appeared, and Gizmodo's feed, while more reliable, seems a bit lighter on content. It'll be interesting to see what the "one more thing" is, whether it's a solid-state, Asus Eee-sized MacBook named "Air", or whether all the rumours were all off.

The presence of Hollywood heavyweights and mention of Blu-Ray is ominous; given Blu-Ray's strict licensing conditions, any Mac with Blu-Ray would have to have the same onerous internal DRM surveillance infrastructure as Windows Vista, with the same fragility, loss of performance and the actual user generally getting the rough end of the pineapple.

Update: Nothing about Blu-Ray; though the Another Thing was, in fact, the MacBook Air, a ridiculously thin 13" laptop.

¶ apple drm gadgets mac macworld steve jobs tech [no comments]

Tech blog Ars Technica has a meticulously detailed review of OS X 10.5 Leopard. As one would expect, it's 17 pages long and goes far deeper than the usual roundup of cool features and visual effects, delving as deeply as the kernel and APIs. In it we learn, among other things, that Apple are finally killing off the old Carbon APIs, inherited from the old MacOS, meaning that someone at Adobe and Microsoft will have a lot of rewriting to do. Not to mention that, while the UI isn't seamlessly scalable yet, it's going in that direction, with elements (such as window decorations and checkboxes, for example) being assembled from XML-based "recipes" (and all the "Aqua" eyecandy appears to be made by distorting a source bitmap of a glass sphere). On the downside, the article's quite scathing about the new Dock and folder icons.

¶ apple leopard mac osx review tech [no comments]

Two technological death notices: firstly, the latest version of OSX, 10.5 ("Leopard"), can no longer run MacOS Classic (that is on PowerPC machines; the Intel ones, of course, never got Classic in the first place). Apparently this has nothing to do with technological constraints and everything to do with Steve Jobs having decided beneficiently that the users should have moved on by now. Of course, if you still want to run that ancient copy of Fontographer or whatever, you can probably do so on SheepShaver or similar.

Meanwhile, TrollTech have knocked their Linux-based Greenphone on the head, and will be concentrating on developing their phone OS on the very hackable and (soon to be) highly commercially available (though somewhat more cheap and plasticky-looking) Neo1973 phone.

(via Engadget, /.) ¶ apple greenphone linux neo1973 osx rip tech trolltech [no comments]

Apple's newest iPods have come with an unwelcome surprise: a cryptographic checksum in the database file, preventing users from using third-party software to load music onto them, effectively locking out anyone wanting to use, say, Linux for filling their iPod. Now it appears that, in the space of a few days, the checksum has been cracked, allowing anyone to get the encoding key from just their iPod serial number. It appears that someone at Apple hadn't heard of public-key cryptography.

I wonder what will happen now; will Apple play cat-and-mouse with the hackers, Sony PSP-style, by releasing a steady stream of iPod/iTunes revisions with tighter encryption schemes? Will they prosecute those hosting the hack under the DMCA and similar laws elsewhere? In any case, if you're not willing and able to run iTunes, you may want to avoid buying an iPod.

(via Boing Boing, /.) ¶ apple copyfight dmca ipod [no comments]

An email, incorrectly claiming that Apple's iPhone and Leopard had been delayed, wiped US$4bn off the value of the company. Once Apple issued a clarification, stock soon climbed back to most of its original value within about 15 minutes.

I wonder whether whoever sent the email managed to snag some bargain-priced Apple shares.

¶ apple business capitalism email hoax stockmarket [no comments]

As Apple announce that MacOS 10.5 ("Leopard") is going to be delayed until late in the year, ostensibly due to developers having been redirected to work on the iPhone, there is speculation that part of the delay is due to "top secret features" intended for Leopard, in addition to the features currently known.

What are these secret features? Well, there aren't any strong rumours. Though I did once read some speculation that Apple are working on a Windows API layer, perhaps similar to WINE on Linux, which would allow OSX to run Windows applications natively (albeit, presumably, in some kind of secure sandbox). Then again, an argument against this theory is that, were Apple to do this, it could encourage developers to dump OSX versions of software, and the Windows API becoming the standard on OSX.

(via Gizmodo) ¶ apple leopard speculation [no comments]

Major recording label EMI has confirmed that it will sell its entire music catalogue in high-quality, DRM-free formats. In a joint announcement in London with Apple's Steve Jobs, EMI's CEO announced that the "premium" versions will be available on iTunes from May for 99p a track, with upgrades from previous downloads available for 15p; standard-quality, DRM-encumbered tracks will remain available for 79p. It is anticipated that the DRM-free downloads will become available on other services (presumably in MP3 or FLAC formats). Doing this, EMI becomes the first major label to join a slew of indie labels selling MP3s through services like EMusic.

Apple boss Steve Jobs shared the platform with Mr Nicoli and said: "This is the next big step forward in the digital music revolution - the movement to completely interoperable DRM-free music."

He added: "The right thing to do is to tear down walls that precluded interoperability by going DRM-free and that starts here today."

Other record companies would soon follow EMI's lead, predicted Mr Jobs.

¶ apple business copyfight drm emi itunes riaa tech [1 comment]

A web site on hacking the AppleTV, Apple's new TV set-top box, which appears to be a low-power Intel-based machine running a customised distribution of otherwise standard OSX. Unlike the iPhone, it seems that it doesn't require executable code to be cryptographically signed. So far, there are instructions on enabling SSH for logging into the AppleTV, installing DivX decoders and the VLC media player and copying things like Apache from an Intel Mac to the AppleTV.

(via /.) ¶ apple appletv hacks osx tech [no comments]

The Reg digs up some corroboration of the rumoured Google mobile phone:

We've been making enquiries too, and a picture is beginning to take shape. In August 2005 Google acquired a stealth-mode startup called Android, founded by Andy Rubin. Rubin was a veteran of Apple and General Magic, but is best known for leading WebTV and subsequently Danger Inc. Danger produced one of the most-photographed phones of recent years, thanks to Paris Hilton: its Hiptop was marketed by T-Mobile as the Sidekick.

But plans have become more ambitious, as the recruitment of Apple veteran Mike Reed and Canadian mobile app company Reqwireless suggests. Graphics expert Reed worked on the ill-fated QuickDraw GX and on font technology at Apple. Google acquired his start-up Skia, which produced a vector graphics suite for resource constrained devices.

(via alecm) ¶ apple google mobile phone tech zfs [2 comments]

The river has a right side and a wrong side... Apparently Apple's flagship store in Melbourne is going to be in South Yarra, in the Paris (Hilton) end of Melbourne. More precisely, the glass cube will be part of a shopping complex on the former Fun Factory site at the corner of Chapel Street and Toorak Road, where the Beautiful People play.

I wonder whether Apple will attempt to fit in with local community values by selling MacBooks encrusted with Swarovski crystals.

(via M+N) ¶ apple bling melbourne [no comments]

In a dramatic about-turn, Steve Jobs denounces digital rights management (DRM), claiming that Apple only use DRM on their iTunes downloads because labels demand it, and urging everyone to join hands and imagine a DRM-free future:

Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. this is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our itunes store. every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Mr Johansen pointed to a New York Times report that showed that tracks wrapped in DRM from iTunes are also available through other download services without copy protection. The implication being that not all record labels insist on DRM, but Apple uses it anyway.

Another thing to watch is Apple's iPhone, whose system is locked down like Fort Knox (software running on it will need to be cryptographically signed by Apple), a state of affairs which has nothing to do with the RIAA holding a gun to Apple's head and seems to have everything to do with Apple wanting to maintain total control.

¶ apple copyfight drm tech the recording racket [no comments]

The latest fatwa posted on an Islamist website is against the Apple store in New York; an unnamed organisation claims that Apple's cube-shaped store in New York is "an insult to Islam", because (a) it resembles the Ka'aba in Mecca, (b) is known as "the Apple Mecca", and (c) "contains bars serving alcoholic beverages". Which is fair enough, except that (b) and (c) are false (or at least nobody officially calls it the "Apple Mecca"), and (a) is only true in that both buildings are cube-shaped.

(via The Reg) ¶ apple fatwas islam religion [no comments]

A rather amusing guide on what not to put on an iPod when giving it to your beloved:

Fifth, excessive jazz, blues, or classical music. Surprisingly, many (N.B.) single males fail to understand that the reason Pop Music is called "pop" is because it is popular. Showing your well-roundedness is good, but copying all of your unmarried uncle's extensive jazz collection onto the iPod will not make her think that you are Sophisticated, but that you are balding.

If there was the slightest chance you could get laid in today's market by owning a Sonic Youth ceedee, there would be far fewer former record store clerks making mySpace pages.

Seventh, anyone who can listen to Nick Cave for more than a half hour at a stretch is mentally ill.

And then there is useful advice such as:

You weren't seriously thinking of a Shuffle, were you? Come on! If a Shuffle would work you might as well just offer her the rest of your bag of Dorito's and take off your pants.

Let not the dying battery, cracked screen, or sputtering disk drive end up being a metaphor for the failures of your relationship.

(via Gizmodo) ¶ apple gadgets music sex society [1 comment]

Question of the day: what exactly is the Apple iTV? I mean, we know that it's a wireless video-streaming set-top box-type device. But what's inside it?

Is it:

1. a cut-down Mac Mini-type device with a stripped-down, purpose-specific version of OSX and FrontRow running off a Flash drive,
2. a custom machine, unrelated to PCs, running a real-time OS based on Darwin/xnu, and incorporating relevant OSX technologies (Quartz, QuickTime, Cocoa), or
3. a custom machine running an real-time OS related to the iPod's one, or
4. none of the above?

Inquiring minds must know.

¶ apple tech [no comments]

Apple recalls laptop batteries that were made with potentially contaminated Sony cells. If you have a 12- or 15-inch G4 PowerBook or 12" G4 iBook, you could be a winner. Check the serial number on the battery and, if it matches, fill in the form and a new battery will be sent out to you, along with a pre-paid envelope for the old one. Even in the overwhelming probability that your battery wasn't about to explode, you do get a fresh battery for free.

¶ apple powerbook sony tech [no comments]

The Apple Macintosh now has 12% of the US notebook market. I wonder what proportion of those run OSX and what proportion's owners tried it, didn't like it and installed Windows XP.

(via /.) ¶ apple [no comments]

In the latest round of the what-will-Apple-do-next? game, there is some speculation that Apple may team up with (or buy) RIM, the inventors of the BlackBerry wireless email appliance. The logic, apparently, is obvious:

Such a deal would have huge merit because each company lacks what the other provides. RIM wants a firm foothold in the consumer market and Apple doesn't have a presence in the booming wireless data sector, he said.

The two might jointly develop a new device: Apple could create a cellphone combining its iPod music device with RIM's wireless technology, or RIM might embed Apple's iTunes music into a future BlackBerry, he speculated.

And so on. Replace BMW with another company name, especially one selling desirable lifestyle/consumer goods or services, and the rest of the copy writes itself. And if you suspend disbelief for long enough (easy enough to do whilst salivating over the prospect of shiny new Apple-branded versions of your favourite non-Apple products), it makes enough sense.

Of course, this wouldn't be the first time that Apple inked a deal with another brand. There was the Motorola ROKR, vaunted as an "iPod Phone", but being merely a generic Motorola phone which could connect to iTunes, and on top of that being artificially restricted to 100 songs, as Apple didn't want it cannibalising their iPod market. Needless to say, it got all the success it deserved and died quietly.

(via Gizmodo) ¶ apple blackberry speculation [no comments]

Wired has a photo gallery of obsessive Apple fans; that's Apple, the computer company. It seems that there are people who would do all sorts of things to demonstrate their loyalty, from having the Apple logo tattooed on themselves or shaved into their heads to genuflecting in worship outside the Apple headquarters and dressing up as iPods on Halloween. There's even someone planning a nude calendar of fans posing with their Macs, in black and white with the only colour being inside the sacred machines' screens. Dell and Microsoft couldn't buy loyalty like that.

¶ apple fandom obsession [no comments]

Another casualty of Apple's move to Intel: FireWire 800. Apparently Intel's chipsets don't support it, so the new Macs don't either, and that massive FW800 hard disk you bought at a premium suddenly doesn't look quite so futureproof. Perhaps FW800 will reemerge when Intel pull their finger out and revamp their chip sets, or perhaps it has officially been declared stillborn, with the future of Apple's hardware platforms to be decided at WinHEC conferences from now on, along with all the other PC manufacturers.

(via /.) ¶ apple firewire intel [3 comments]

Apparently another casualty of Apple's move to Intel is OpenFirmware; the standardised, portable, FORTH-based firmware used on PowerPC Macs has been replaced by Intel's proprietary, architecture-specific EFI (originally designed for the next generation of Windows machines). Which further locks Apple into one vendor (unless, of course, they further redesign their platform), and relegates OpenFirmware to the graveyard of cool technologies, alongside the likes of NeWS, Open Look, and numerous non-PC architectures.

And it's increasingly looking like the main architectural difference between the new Intel-based Macs and, say, Dells or Sony Vaios, could be the key in the DRM chip which authenticates it as an Apple, allowing MacOS X to run on it.

(via /.) ¶ apple forth intel openfirmware tech [3 comments]

As Apple starts looking more and more like another PC company (or, more precisely, a MP3 player company with a sideline in prestige PCs and software), it emerges that Apple almost merged with Sun three times. One of these mergers was an attempted acquisition of Apple by Sun. Apart from this, the two companies had abortive talks about a number of proposals, including sharing a user interface (so perhaps we could have seen Solaris with a MacOS Classic interface) and the SPARC architecture.

It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if any of these ventures had been successful. I don't know whether SPARC chips make better laptop processors than PowerPCs, but if they do, then perhaps we wouldn't be seeing Apple capitulating to the x86 monoculture*. On the other hand, if Apple had Solaris offered to them, they may not have bothered buying NeXT, and OSX may be based on a less exotic strain of UNIX.

* not that that's entirely a bad thing; perhaps, once Intel Macs are commonplace, smart hackers will figure out ways of shoehorning Windows code (such as, say, the numerous free VST plugins that never make it to OSX) into running on one. But I digress.

(via alecm) ¶ apple macos osx sparc sun [no comments]

Apple have unveiled their new Intel-based PowerBook-class machine; of course, they can't call it the PowerBook, though one would think they could have come up with a better name than MacBook Pro. The new machine also has a new power connector, rendering your collection of Apple power adapters redundant, and only one FireWire port, doing away with FireWire 800. The PCMCIA slot also seems to have been replaced with something called ExpressCard/34.

All in all, it doesn't look too bad; the lack of FireWire/800 is perhaps a concern (they're not planning on getting rid of FireWire altogether and making it more like a legacy PC, I hope; I wonder whether it still has Target Disk Mode), and it's probably not worth getting one for music or video just yet, until all the plug-ins one uses have been recompiled for Intel (as emulation of CPU-intensive PPC code will certainly be very slow).

I wonder whether, in a few years' time, Jobs will announce that the new version of MacOS (perhaps MacOS 12?) will be based on the Windows Vista kernel, licensed from Microsoft, rather than Mach/BSD, giving Macintosh-quality design on top of improved PC compabilility and access to Hollywood-standard DRM?

(via cos) ¶ apple intel macbook pro [4 comments]

Luke Williams from design firm Frogdesign (who designed the original Mac and the NeXT cube) talks about the design of the iPod and the way design conventions reference other objects:

"So... as I was sitting on the toilet this morning" (this is of course where most good ideas come from), "I noticed the shiny white porcelain of the bathtub and the reflective chrome of the faucet on the wash basin... and then it hit me! Everybody perceives the iPod as 'clean' because it references bathroom materials!"

The public once thought electricity was dangerous and expensive, so to change this perception, the electricity industry sought to project the image of electricity as a modern and progressive source of energy. To symbolize these qualities, designers used the conventions associated with "technological futurism"--hrome plating and streamlining. In 1955, industrial designer Henry Drefuss wrote that changes in the design of the modern kitchen had been brought about "by two things that had nothing to do with cooking a meal--the automobile and the airplane."

Although the symbolism has changed, the iPod also uses conventions to appear ahead of its time. Its surfaces are seamless and have no moving parts-- two conventions that have often been used in science and science-fiction to connote advanced technology. Remember the seamless, molten-metal bad guy in Terminator 2? Or how about the perfectly seamless, black monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

(via Gizmodo) ¶ apple design frogdesign ipod [no comments]

Apple have broken with another tradition; this time they have acknowledged that Mac users may be able to cope with the idea of (gasp!) more than one mouse button. Of course, just making a 2-button mouse would be too obvious; Apple's Mighty Mouse (whose name they seem to have licensed from Viacom, owners of the old cartoon series) has either one or no buttons but rather and a touch sensor to detect which side of the shell you are pressing. There's also a scroll wheel and buttons on the side, which can be programmed to trigger your favourite OSX window-shuffling effect. And apparently it includes a small speaker which plays a clicking sound every time you press a button.

(via gizmodo) ¶ apple [no comments]

My mind's still reeling from the possible implications of Apple's announcement of abandoning the PowerPC platform in favour of x86. Here are some thoughts:

• After the change, Apple's hardware will be just x86 hardware. Well-designed, well-engineered x86 hardware, but not an entire separate platform. Apple had been heading in that direction since abandoning SCSI and NuBus, though the change in CPU architectures makes it final. It is speculated that Apple will make it possible for those who want to to boot Windows on their Macs; as such, think of the first non-G4 PowerBook as the Apple Vaio.
• Whether Apple will allow OSX to run on commodity hardware is another matter, though. Commodity hardware means loss of control and quality control, which has undoubtedly contributed to the Macintosh user experience. How aggressively Apple will ensure that OSX doesn't run on commodity hardware is another matter; it may be possible for hackers to get it working (though possibly violating paracopyright laws in doing so). Another possibility is of Apple doing deals with individual manufacturers to allow OSX to boot on their machines. (Sony could be a natural for this, given the tightly-controlled semi-proprietary nature of their hardware; and wouldn't you like an Acer Ferrari laptop with a non-crap OS?)
• Over and above that, it is possible that Apple will separate their hardware and software businesses. If their computers are not anything particularly exotic anymore, why not let someone else build and sell those, and concentrate on adding value? Perhaps Apple will spin off and sell its hardware manufacturing business (and the licence to use the Apple trademark on hardware) as IBM did.
• The future of OSX as a separate operating system may also not be assured. Apple own some high-end software (Shake, Logic, Final Cut Pro), which only runs on their own platform. Now that their platform will run on exactly the same architecture as Windows Longhorn, demanding that people boot to Apple's own non-mainstream OS to run it could lose sales. (Anyone remember Linux-based Final Scratch? That didn't do too well, because its electronic-musician audience didn't want to keep rebooting between using it and their Windows-based software.) As such, it is conceivable that, in some years' time, Apple will attempt to redefine OSX as a set of layers (CoreAudio, CoreImage, Cocoa) that runs over Windows, much as its Windows QuickTime does. The layers could be shipped with copies of their software and installed without the user needing to know about them. The remaining Mac faithful will cringe and cry sellout, and techies will dread the loss of OSX's technical advantages over Windows, but Apple will sell more software and gain compatibility with the Windows standard, and, at the end of the day, that's what counts.

¶ apple [3 comments]