MacTheBlog
Where's our new Macs?
Written by Grant Monday, 29 March 2010 23:09
Sure we'd always like updates — hardware and software sooner rather than later. The flagship iPhone is starting to look as dated as a MacPlus these days, but Apple was ever thus. We've always wanted updates sooner and Apple has always done things at its own pace. Quad-core iMacs appeared maybe a year later than it was technically feasible.
And it's true that chip technology changes so slowly these days. 20 percent CPU improvement can often be bested more cheaply by better caches, busses and faster RAM, which is what Apple has been doing with C2D machines for years.
But the lesson of the 1990s is apposite here. Apple was riding high, and it failed to innovate. When Apple was unable to hold Windows up in the courts any longer (starting to sound familiar), Microsoft walked in with a lipservice-GUI interface and — for a few dollars less — the general public didn't care. Despite record profits now, Apple has never achieved the double-digit market penetration it had before.
Apple is riding very high now and the rumbles of dissatisfaction, no matter how petty, are growing. It would pay Apple' executives and directors to learn from the '90s, if they can. None of them were around to see exactly how Apple fell so low. Many of them were part of the solution, but that's not the same as recognising the signs and the slow burn of history repeating itself.
Apple is in a perfect position to innovate — lots of money in the bank, the Touch OS breaking out of iPhone size into netbook/iPad size, and competitors are breathing hard down its neck, so the all-important motivation should be apparent.
The Zune7 winphone looks slick enough to win customers back (even if it's still a dog to use). Android is starting to find its legs, even if its "integration" relies on customers putting their contacts and calendars (and everything else) entirely into Google. Worst of all, the pundits (and I believe the general computer buying public) perceive Windows 7 to be an equivalent computing experience to OS X. Not true, but the lesson of the '90s was "near enough is good enough" where the hip pocket is concerned.
Apple desperately needs to leap ahead of Windows or suffer the fate of the '90s all over again. Touch Mac OS for all platforms will do this, if it brings the benefits of iPhone's/iPad's more intimate interaction with the OS to the whole Apple line. We know it. The temptation to touch your Mac's screen after your first taste of iPhone was overwhelming. It took me two weeks to excise that automatic action from my brain.
Apple has benefited greatly from the minor "surface" differences between Windows and Mac OS. Mac and Windows developers are more likely to make cross-platform products (even FileMaker gets most of its money from Windows). That's the biggest inertia in the system, that a Touch OS needs to fight.
Touch Mac OS needs to offer significant productivity advantages, as cool as the first time we saw the iPhone inertial scrolling demo. iPad didn't quite grab the imagination that way on launch, no matter how "magical" it was proclaimed to be. Apple will need to work harder on porting Touch to the rest of its hardware line.
Am I unrealistic given the current inability of Apple to meet customer demand for updated MacBook and Mac Pro models? For Apple's sake, and ours, I hope not. iPad is an important first step toward weaning the public off mouse and keyboard. Let's hope it succeeds.
Things are getting steamy
Written by Alex Kidman Thursday, 18 March 2010 00:30
It's been a little quiet on the Mac news front of late, largely due to all the regular news sources anxiously awaiting the first batch of iPads hitting the market. One of the bigger recent news stories was the announcement by previously-PC-and-console-only games publisher Valve that it would be bringing its Steam gaming service to the Mac platform.
The news is everywhere. Here's Macworld's take. Here's MacRumors'. Here, for the sake of shameless self-promotion, is even one I wrote for APCMag.com.
Is it good news? As a lifelong gamer, I'd be tempted to say yes, given that anything that expands the range of Mac games on offer is a good thing for Mac users generally. Even if you're not a gamer, anything that gets more developers on board, more sales at the cash register and more interest generally is a good thing. At a more distinct level, Valve makes some excellent games, and the official release namedrops a whole bunch of them, including Left 4 Dead 2, Portal and Half-Life.
There's even some nifty technology being brought into the Steam client to enable both cross-platform play and even cross-platform purchases and continued play through Steam Play and Steam Cloud.
At the same time, it's worth bearing in mind that Steam as a service isn't perfect, and it does bring some challenges for Mac users with it. I've used Steam on and off in its PC incarnation for a number of years now, mainly when I've had my games journalist hat on.
The very first time I ever used Steam was to install a game I had to review very quickly indeed to meet a print magazine deadline. The client itself downloaded and installed quickly, and then ... nothing. I could get a lovely little splash screen to come up, and nothing else.
A lot of frantic online searching suggested my Windows Anti-Virus package at the time may have been the problem, and replacing it did afford me a speedy resolution to the problem. You may well think that this isn't an issue for Macs (if you're a head-in-the-sand-Macs-will-never-get-viruses variety Mac user), but my problem here was that the solution wasn't forthcoming from Valve at all.
The AV vendor's support forums had people in them that had the same problem I did, and I kludged it together from there. It's not outside the realms of possibility that some esoteric bit of Mac software (or an update to, say, Mac OS 10.7 "Icy Otter") could have the same effect. Is Valve ready for Mac-based support issues?
The next issue is bandwidth. Steam patches itself, and itt patches the games you buy through the service. This is handy to an extent, but it can happen at times when it's not perhaps the most convenient. Even getting past that, the bandwidth usage ramps up rather quickly. I've had Steam games download a full 2GB of data and fail on the last percent, taking my 2GB with them. For users in parts of the world where downloads are unmetered, that may not be a major issue. Here in Australia, at least for the time being, it most definitely is.
It's also very unclear what the status of non-Valve games is.
"Our Steam partners, who are delivering over a thousand games to 25 million Steam clients, are very excited about adding support for the Mac," said Jason Holtman, Director of Business Development at Valve in the official release.
That's a fairly bland statement that does allow Valve to release exactly zero games outside its own catalogue if agreements can't be reached. Just because unnamed "Steam partners" are "excited" doesn't mean anything will definitively happen. Some dogs I know get excited when they see me and start frantically (ahem) "attacking" my leg, but my knee is yet to give birth to a litter of puppies.
The statement also leaves very open the question of older games titles. I could see developers dipping toes into the Mac waters with new releases, but what about older titles, many of which sell on Steam at very low prices? I doubt we'll see many (if any) of the older PC titles currently available on Steam backwards-ported. In fact, some of them already have Mac equivalents through development houses such as Feral Software, and agreements in place might just prohibit it outright.
I'm guessing here, but I'd say that if you're still using a PowerPC-based Mac, Steam won't be for you. I could always be wrong. Likewise, Macs without discrete graphics might be out of the equation, although that's a bet I'd be less likely to put big money on.
All that having been said, I'll be lining up to download the Steam client when it becomes available in April. If only for the lure of Portal 2, and the ability to buy a game once across PC/Mac and play it wherever I wish. Now, if only they'd bring steam to consoles ...
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