If Apple is right – many of you are reading this staring at a beautiful flat screen (over 40% of them portable) and probably running a version of OS X with most of your room now doused in the ubiquitous silver and white.
We all cheer when Apple gets it right, we love when they steal the show – as they have done with iPod. But remember the dark old days? The starting point for this Web site was when Apple released the infamous PowerBook 5300c with a colossal price and colossal design faults to match. So, are we riding high into the sun with Apple these days? Yes on many counts, but…
If Apple is right – many of you are reading this staring at a beautiful flat screen (over 40% of them portable) and probably running a version of OS X with most of your room now doused in the ubiquitous silver and white.
We all cheer when Apple gets it right, we love when they steal the show – as they have done with iPod. But remember the dark old days? The starting point for this Web site was when Apple released the infamous PowerBook 5300c with a colossal price and colossal design faults to match. So, are we riding high into the sun with Apple these days? Yes on many counts, but…
What does it mean these days to be an Apple user? We are told that we are still only 3-5% of the computing community (although we hear that is changing) the iPod trend has brought more to the fold, but what kind of fold is that these days? This is coming from someone who has used Apple stuff for over a decade that sometimes gets the lacklustre feeling lately.
That’s not to say I haven’t been impressed by what’s come out of Apple, they still do have great stuff, they do think differently but I just catch myself with all these straight fine lines and silver boxes and think, where did all the curves go? Where did all the colour and bravado go? It’s as if the design ethos has gone so at that nothing but sheer sleekness will do.
Rumours have it engineers can port Mac 0S X to Pentium chips in a snap, but look at what happened last time Apple licensed stuff, one huge cock up indeed. That brings me to my final point of this strange midnight missive.
Apple is getting pretty mean, they just love it when they stranglehold the whole tech process, but get pissed off when pundits want to report on it and release specs on new products early. We all love the razzmatazz of Macworld Expo and Steve’s corny “One more thing…” but hey, these are just machines after all and putting a sneak peak online does not deserve to be bashed on the head from the suits in the legal department.
I remember reading that Steve Jobs said early on in his second coming that teams work well and at an optimum rate for about 10 years and we’re getting close to Steve’s maximum lifespan with his top team members at Apple. Speaking of which, has any one seen anything of Jonathan Ive recently?. As we crawl towards the dawn of the PowerBook G5 it makes you wonder what can Apple offer back to those hardy Mac faithful who these days seem to hardly figure into Apple’s plans.
