Category: Apple

Is Apple in trouble?

I was reading this great post from Scoble: Why doesn’t Microsoft get the love? « Scobleizer which was spot-on, but for some reason it got me thinking about Apple instead of Microsoft.

I think Apple is in serious trouble.

  1. The Amazon digital download store is much better than the iTunes store. Not the design or that dumb downloader, but the fact that they are selling high bitrate MP3s for the same price or less than iTunes sells the DRM’d files. Apple might be paying the price for being the ones who made legal downloading of music a reality. Losing the store isn’t a huge issue for Apple’s profit. The store exists to sell iPods, Apple doesn’t make much money on it. However, once you don’t need the store, you don’t need iTunes or an iPod. Apple’s innovation on the iPods will keep this business strong for them, but without the whole ecosystem, they become vulnerable.
  2. The desktop line is stagnating. I’m assuming that there is a reason that Apple hasn’t really bumped their desktop line in a while and I’m also assuming that we will get news soon. However, the GPUs on their highest-end machines are years old, and due to Apple’s locked-in nature, it isn’t a user-serviceable part. Letting this go so long is a problem. I and at least one friend of mine are waiting on new desktops before we upgrade our PPC-based machines. The GPUs in the laptops are better than what we have at the moment.
  3. The iPhone debacle: I think Apple is handling the iPhone all wrong. The phone is a triumph of technology, but even $400 for a phone is a lot of money for the average consumer. The phone doesn’t have enough features or speed on the network to replace serious smart phone competitors and it is still lacking some fundamental features that free-phone-with-subscription-phones lack like MMS and MP3 ring tones.

I don’t think Apple is dead or anything like that. I’m still an Apple fan-boy (as a user, not as a developer), but I think these signs are troubling and Apple can still snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

What do you think?

Apple: No BS iPhone Review – Gizmodo

Apple: No BS iPhone Review – Gizmodo
Gizmodo iPhone review

I think I’ve been a fairly restrained geek for pretty much ignoring it on my blog before now. No, I don’t own one. No, I don’t plan on buying one… yet. Like the gizmodo writer, there are some fundamental things missing for me: MMS being something I use a lot on a phone that cost me 1/4 the price of the iPhone, video capture being a second. The iPhone is missing both low-end obvious features that I use a lot, and also high-end features that I want in a phone that is so expensive. So, I’ll wait.

more Apple developer badness

Apple distributed a different build of 10.4.10 to those using MacBook Pros to fix a problem with the audio, which in itself is all good. No one wants to have crummy audio on their laptops.

One MAJOR glitch though, since this means that my MBP has essentially a different version of the OS than the desktop machines. Therefore, when I try to build using Rendezvous in X-Code, no machines match my configuration. Therefore, the slowest building machines will build even slower than before.

Sheer freaking genius. Thanks Apple, you’ve now made my builds take about 20 times longer than before. Do you think we’ll see a fix before 10.5? I don’t.

Steve, this is what happens when you give a lame keynote

Is Google Going To Buy Apple? | dmiessler.com

With no good rumours to go on, no new hardware, no new iLife, the Apple rumour mill goes into overdrive.

I think this a fairly unlikely thing. Google needs a hardware and consumer appliance manufacturer like Apple needs to get into the catering business. The Google business model is all about making the operating system irrelevant. Everything lives in the cloud delivered for free with some targeted advertising. Buying a hardware company makes very little sense in that world. It’s also a crazy low-margin business. It would drag Google’s profitability down in a serious way.

Dell or Sony makes a lot more sense as a partner if Apple was really an acquisition target.

The difference between being an Apple developer and a Microsoft developer

At the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference

Check out this new technology! It will be shipping next year, and it is super awesome! It is the way we are going and we’re putting a huge amount of effort behind it!

It sounds neat, you drop your old silly code and jump on the bandwagon figuring you’ll be ahead of the game . The next year: silence. No mention. What happened? Microsoft dropped it. Whoops, too bad.

At the Apple World Wide Developer Conference

Hey, we’ve completely changed the OS! You’ve got 30 seconds to rewrite all your apps!

This sucks. It happened with the switch to universal and it is happening now with the switch to 64-bit. The worst part is the arrogance that comes from the stage when Steve talks about how easy it is. It makes the software vendors look like crap to their users. The switch to universal was as simple as checking a check box if you were doing nothing interesting. Wolfram Research’s products are unix products, there isn’t any altivec assembly in them. Real products of real substance like Adobe’s or Microsoft weren’t so simple. Everyone in those companies had to drop what they were doing and spend months rewriting code (switching to X-Code was a serious en devour in itself) just to get back to where they started. Now, with the switch to 64-bit, Apple is now saying that they are dropping Carbon support. However, that is not what they were saying up to a week ago. If you look at the cached page on google for Leopard 64-bit, you’ll see the following quote:

Leopard delivers 64-bit power in one, universal OS. Now Cocoa and Carbon application frameworks, as well as graphics, scripting, and the rest of the system are all 64-bit. Leopard delivers 64-bit power to both Intel- and PowerPC-based Macs, so you don’t have to install separate applications for different machines. There’s only one version of Mac OS X, so you don’t need to maintain separate operating systems for different uses.

Dropping carbon is MAJOR. For apps that exist on both windows and OS X and for apps that predate Objective C, Cocoa is a non-starter. Many of Apple’s own major apps are written in Carbon. Apple just shafted their ISV’s and then told their user base that 64-bit was going to be awesome gearing them up for a second major revolt when the next set of apps come out and they aren’t 64-bit. This is the universal thing all over again. And WTF with Steve on stage saying “you’ve done a great job switching to universal, well, most of you.” Jackass.

Does virtualization herald the end of the platform war?

I was reading Marc Andreesen’s new blog and I came across this quote:

Virtualization — in the form of software like Parallels and VMWare Fusion — lets you deal with an individual operating system as if it were an application.

from blog.pmarca.com: At long last, switching back to Mac

and I realized that since Apple has completed the standardization of the X86-family as the chip architecture for 99% of the world, the platform really has gotten irrelevant. Now that OS virtualization technologies don’t require massive amount of processing power, you can mix and match all you want. Like OS X, but need to run some windows programs for work? No Problem. Like Vista, but really need to run that Linux app? Easy-peasey. This really got cemented when Parallels officially released version 3 of their windows virtualization solution which theoretically gives virtualized apps access to the GPUs for the first time. We’ll have to see what the cost (in performance) is, but we know that it will get more and more seemless over time.

This goes beyond just the OSes though. Flash/Flex/Silverlight all enter this as well, further blurring the lines between operating system, platform and application.

I could see that very soon, the OS that you run will be 100% based on personal preference and all the worries about compatibility will be gone. If that does happen, Microsoft better be scared. I think that Bootcamp and Parallels are much more of a long-term threat than Flash ever will be.

ok Apple, now you are really starting to piss me off

At this point, I’m just used to the horror show that developing software for the mac is. But as a user, it has always been sweetness and light mostly and with Apple service, it has always been awesome.

Now, Apple is crossing the line. My 30 GB iPod photo is busted. It has been lovingly taken care of, never dropped, doesn’t have a scratch on it. The problem? Sometimes (not always), the buttons on the scroll wheel are treated like you are pressing the middle button instead. This will last for a while and then go back to working. However, when you are trying to pause your iPod and you just keep flipping between the song, the rating, the position, the cover art, etc… it can be insane making.

So I put the details into a service report and got a box delivered lickity-split. Score one for Apple service. 3 days later, I got a box back! Joy! Apple service would remain in my heart. Until I opened it and read the note that said, (I paraphrase) “works fine, no problems found”. When in my description, I had said that the problem was intermittent, so I hope they did more than try it out for half a second. They reformatted it, of course. I tried it and it seemed to work ok. So I loaded up my music onto it and was able to repro the problem again within 10 seconds. I didn’t update the OS of the iPod, I just put music onto it.

So, I sent it back, saying in my service report, “no really. you have to try it before reformatting it. It really does happen. It is intermittent.”

I just got it back. Same story. “works fine, no service performed”

So, now I have to drag my ass into the genius bar to get some pimply faced UW freshman to ask me stupid questions since there is no fucking phone number I can call to talk to anyone at Apple service. The net result of which will probably be that they drop the DHL box in the mail for me and I get it back reformatted AGAIN with no service performed.

It is this kind of crap that made me switch to Apple in the first place, and it will be this kind of crap that will make me switch again.

weird iPod moment

I’m not sure if this was an anthropomorphic moment or a fetishistic moment, but as I put my old iPod in a box today to send it back to Apple to get it’s click-wheel fixed, it turned on, showing my favorite A Silver Mount Zion song paused. It was like saying good bye to an old friend for the last time. I was actually kind of sad.

I’m scaring myself.

Apple TV

Nope, didn’t buy one… yet. Not sure if I shouldn’t just get a Mac Mini instead.

Turns out that it is a mac super-mini (from The Forums at Something Awful):

bash-2.05b# system_profiler
Hardware:

Hardware Overview:

Machine Name: Mac
Machine Model: AppleTV1,1
Processor Speed: 1 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 1
Memory: 256 MB
Bus Speed: 400 MHz
Boot ROM Version: ATV11.00D9.B00
Serial Number: CLOWNS666
L2 Cache: 2 MB
….
System Version: Apple TV OS 10.4.7 (8N5107)
Kernel Version: Darwin 8.8.2
Boot Volume: OSBoot
Computer Name: AppleTV
User Name: System Administrator (root)
Graphics/Displays:
…
GeForce Go 7300:

Chipset Model: GeForce Go 7300
Type: Display
Bus: PCIe
VRAM (Total): 64 MB
Vendor: NVIDIA (0x10de)
Device ID: 0x01d7
Revision ID: 0x00a1
ROM Revision: 3144
Displays:
HP LP2465:
Resolution: 1280 x 720 @ 60 Hz
Depth: 32-bit Color
Core Image: Supported
Main Display: Yes
Mirror: Off
Online: Yes
Quartz Extreme: Not Supported
Rotation: Supported

Also it took about 25 seconds for someone to hack it with a larger drive

Warning on installing Apple Updates

Unsanity.org: Shock and Awe: How Installing Apple’s Updates can Render Your Mac Unbootable and How You Can Prevent it


When you see the “Optimizing System Performance” phase of a software update, Mac OS X is really updating prebinding. Updating prebinding has a very, very nasty bug in it (look at _dyld_update_prebinding). If multiple processes are updating prebinding at the same time, then it is possible for a system file to be completely zero’d out. Basically, all data in the file is deleted and it is replaced with nothing. This bug is usually triggered when updating Mac OS X and every update to Mac OS X has the potential to render your system unbootable depending on if the “right” file is deleted or not. It’s triggered during the “Optimizing System Performance” phase of installing an update. This phase is actually just running update_prebinding. If you launch an application that links to libraries that are not yet prebound, there is a chance one of those files will be zero’d out as dyld automatically redoes the prebinding on that file.