billpalmer.net

Online MUG meeting is this Monday

The November meeting of the billpalmer.net Online MUG will take place this Monday, November 1st, beginning at 8:00 pm Eastern Standard Time (please adjust for your time zone). This will be a general-focus meeting, feel free to bring along any Mac-related topics you'd like.

To become a member of the Online MUG, just send an email to MUG@billpalmer.net with your name and email address. You'll then be sent information on how to log into the meeting.

The Online MUG is an officially recognized Apple User Group.

When was the last time Apple bought out another company?

Over on the iPod Garage, guest columnist David Gregory recently made a case for Apple acquiring XM Satellite Radio, and it got me thinking: when was the last time Apple actually acquired another company?

There's been a rather long list of acquisitions in the Jobs era, but they've generally all been small companies that we'd barely even heard of, if at all. It seems that Steve prefers small, highly-targeted acquisitions that manage to fill a specific need more quickly and easily than if Apple had tried to re-invent the wheel in-house, and has generally stayed away from larger, riskier acquisitions that would change the face of Apple as we know it overnight.

And it seems like, for the most part, he's been proven to be correct over the long term. I mean, does anyone still think that Apple should have paid billions for Universal Music? I'd say Apple did OK by building its own internal music division from the ground up, and doing so didn't cost the company a cent.

Anyway, I guess the real question here is, with the share price of Apple's stock surging to heights not seen in years, and with five billion dollars in cash sitting in the bank, should Apple currently be targeting any outside companies (large or small) for acquisition?

And I'll leave the answer up to you guys. Seeing as we now have forums on this site, feel free to post your ideas about acquisitions on the forums, and to critique each other's acquisition ideas. I've created a forum thread just for it.

New billpalmer.net forums now online

I've always felt that this site should have discussion forums, for several reasons:

- so that you can share your thoughts with me on articles that I post, without needing to email me

- so that you can discuss such thoughts with each other, without needing to go through me to reach each other

- so that we can all have an ongoing open-ended discussion of all things Macintosh, on any topic that any of you sees fit to bring up

I figured it's about time that I finally create internal, home-grown forums on this site, and so I went ahead last night and did exactly that. So, without further ado...

Introducing the new billpalmer.net forums

Unsurprisingly enough, they can be found at http://www.billpalmer.net/forums -- hey, we try to keep things simple when we can.

In order to post anything, you will have to register. But the registration process has been kept as simple as possible. If you have any trouble registering, or if you have suggestions on additional forum categories that should be added, just give me a shout. Otherwise, I'll see you in the forums.

Be sure to register now, before all the good usernames are taken... ;)

What's up with all this lovey-dovey stuff between Apple and Adobe?

Once upon a time, Apple and Adobe were a cute young couple, rather deeply in love with each other. Back in the 80's the Mac was the first and (at the time) only computer that could handle any of what Adobe wanted to make happen as far as desktop publishing. You know, GUI-related stuff and so forth -- I'll spare you the details, because either you're already aware of them or you probably don't care. But 1984 was a long, long time ago. In fact, you could almost say that the companies have been slowly getting a divorce from each other for the past two decades.

So where did it all go wrong?

Well, somewhere along the line, Windows became prevalent if not legitimate, and Adobe figured it might as well also bring its products to the much larger Windows platform, even if it meant that they would become mere shadows of their former selves. It's not that Adobe stopped bringing its products to the Mac, it's just that when Adobe realized that it takes about ten times as long to move software development forward on Windows than on the Mac, the company decided to intentionally cripple the progress of the Mac versions of its products so that they wouldn't be any better than their Windows counterparts, lest Windows users begin asking too many questions. Pure arrogant, short-sighted, self-defeating stupidity, for sure -- I mean, even Microsoft itself allows the Mac version of MS Office to race way ahead of the Windows version in terms of both quality and features, because even Microsoft knows that if the Mac version of a piece of software sucks as badly as the Windows version does, Mac users will sniff it out a mile away and find something else to use instead.

It's not that Adobe was the only company who traveled down that particular path of stupidity, especially during the Mac's darkest mid-90's hours. But it was fairly clear that Apple never quite forgave Adobe for it, because now that Apple is enjoying its finest hours again, Apple hasn't hesitated to stomp all over Adobe's territory. Not only did Apple make it so Mac users don't need to download the free Adobe Acrobat Reader in order to view PDFs, Apple actually went a giant leap further and made it so that Mac users don't even need to buy the full Adobe Acrobat suite in order to create PDFs. Sure, Apple's primary reason for doing this kind of stuff is so that Mac users have such an absurdly superior computing experience that more and more people will want to use one...but on the other hand, Apple has made a point of really not caring just how badly it pissed Adobe off in the process.

And not surprisingly, Adobe has more or less responded in kind. When Apple brought out the phenomenal iPhoto just for Mac users, Adobe didn't hesitate to create an underwhelming knockoff of iPhoto called "Photoshop Album" (nothing at all to do with Photoshop, mind you) and market it solely to Windows users. You know, so Windows users could use the old "we don't have what Mac users have, but we have a knockoff product that costs a lot more and it's about half as good" excuse to put off Switching to the Mac for just a little while longer (give up now guys, it's an eventuality).

So it's clear that these two companies are no longer close to each other, don't get along too well, and keep managing to invade each other's turf without too much remorse. So what was the deal this week with Apple promoting the living daylights out of both Adobe Photoshop Album and Adobe Photoshop Elements?

In case you missed all the details, Apple's new iPod Photo product works with both Mac and Windows, and needless to say, on the Mac it syncs with iPhoto (through iTunes). But on Windows, iPod Photo actually syncs with Adobe Photoshop Album (also through iTunes), the very same product that Adobe brought out as a lame iPhoto knockoff. And what's more, although it was a little less pronounced, Apple is now promoting Adobe Photoshop Elements for MacOS X on its "Hot News" page on apple.com.

Coincidence? A sign of closer ties once again between the two companies? They say that technology is the only thing that can create even stranger bedfellows than politics, because the technology landscape can change just that fast. But did I mention that when Apple was first creating MacOS X and wanted to build all the display stuff on top of the PDF standard, Adobe refused to cooperate? And that Apple retaliated by reverse-engineering the whole PDF spec, thereby cutting Adobe out of the equation entirely? Can companies who've placed this many knives in each other's backs once again become partners and co-promoters?

I mean, it's not surprising to see Apple partner with one of its knockoffs in order to make the iPod fly on Windows; when the iPod first went cross-platform, Windows users had to settle for managing their iPod with MusicMatch, which was by all accounts crap, but no crappier than most Windows software. It wasn't until Apple figured out that it could take money from Windows users on both the hardware side (iPod sales) and the software side (online music sales) that it brought out iTunes for Windows. If the iTunes Music Store had never come into existence, I suspect that Windows-using iPod owners would still be settling for MusicMatch or some other also-ran.

So I suppose the big question here is that if the iPod Photo turns out not to be a fad and shows as much staying power as the regular iPod, will Apple then bring out iPhoto for Windows in an attempt to once again take money out of Windows users' pockets with both hands at once?

And that question gets answered with another question: how the hell does Apple make money from photos?

I really don't know the answer to that. On the non-digital side of photography, people pay money for cameras, for film, and for photo developing. On the digital side, they pay for digital cameras, memory cards, and a ridiculous amount of money on printing photos (photo printers, expensive paper, metric tons of ink, etc.). Pretty standard stuff there, nothing jumps out at you like the idea of selling songs online at 99 cents a pop. The closest thing I can think of is that after my sister's wedding, the professional photographer placed all of his pictures online so that wedding guests could log on, pick which ones they liked, and order prints. Maybe, a few years from now, the way this works is that you would just purchase and download those pictures onto your iPod Photo. But what do I know? I'm not a photo person.

So although iPhoto for Windows is still a long-term question whose answer is complicated by many variables, I'm currently more interested in what happens between Apple and Adobe in the near-term. If Apple could just get Adobe to take the shackles off its Mac development, I have no doubt that the Mac versions of products such as Photoshop and InDesign could be absolutely amazing products, instead of just replicas of their Windows counterparts. And I also have no doubt that if Adobe continues to ingore the Mac's superior software development potential, Apple will continue to eat into Adobe's territory by bringing out new Mac-only professional software titles that put Adobe's stuff to shame. But that latter part just somehow doesn't seem necessary, at least not under the current set of circumstances. So I'm glad to see that this week's announcements and subtle hints would seem to point more toward the former than the latter.

Perhaps the twenty-year marriage between Apple and Adobe, which has seemingly been disintegrating for twenty years, is salvageable after all. Or at the very least, perhaps the two can at least agree to be friends.

Don't look now, but here comes Keynote 2.0

Well, Tuesday sure did have its share of new Apple products: iPod Photo, the U2 iPod, even iPod socks. So which of the new Apple products unveiled at Tuesday's event will I likely be buying next?

Keynote 2.0, of course.

Yeah, you read that right.

You probably know the back-story about how Keynote came into existence by now. Steve Jobs wanted something better than PowerPoint to use for making his own keynote presentations at events such as MacWorld Expo, so he had Apple's software engineers cook up something that took advantage of the Mac's inherent strengths and put PowerPoint to seventeen kinds of shame. And then in early 2002, Apple decided to release the software to the Mac-using general public, under the rather self-evident title of "Keynote."

It turned out that Keynote was so good, so powerful, so easy, so cool, so intuitive, that it was equally at home in the hands of a CEO making a worldwide presenation, or a team of fifth graders integrating technology into their latest classroom project. So it's been more than a little disappointing that Keynote has seen little more than minor updates in the twenty-two months since its release. Far from orphaned, it's still the most powerful tool on the Mac today, but just how long can you wait for a new version? Especially when this much intelligence and potential was already present with the initial release.

I'm afraid that I haven't personally had the opportunity to watch the QuickTimes stream of Tuesday's event yet, but Mac blogger Les Posen has, and sure enough, he saw Steve Jobs manage to unveil Keynote 2.0 without even once so much as mentioning the product's name or the fact that it was a new product. So how did old Steve manage to pull that off? Well, remember the part about Steve Jobs using Keynote during his own keynote addresses? Yeah, now you get it.

Les actually managed to capture still frames of some of the new Keynote effects and transitions, and has posted the pics on his site, and something tells me that cool new effects just barely scratch the surface. Just can't wait.

You know, I've been saying for awhile now that I wanted to write a book about all the ways in which I've managed to "mis-use" Keynote in ways that have nothing at all to do with making presentations, but with my luck, Keynote 2.0 would be released the day after I shipped the book. For that reason I decided to put off even beginning to pen the book until after Keynote 2.0 was finally in my hands.

Well, it looks like perhaps I'll soon get the chance to start on that book after all. As much as I'd love to see the software released within the next few weeks, my guess is that Keynote 2.0 will be "officially" announced at MacWorld Expo San Francisco in January, and will be available shortly thereafter.

Guess I'd better start looking for a publisher ;)

Even I didn't know that Windows had gotten this bad

Did I really manage to let the weekend pass without posting anything? Well at least I had an excuse, as I was out of town, and the trip did yield an interesting story that really opened my eyes as to the current state of the Windows platform, which I think I'll share with you now:

On Saturday evening I went to visit an old friend I hadn't seen in quite awhile. I suppose we're both equally guilty of being too busy to find time to hang out together much these days, what with me dumping around 100 hours a week into my various entrepreneurial pursuits, and him working about 50 hours a week, going to school full-time, and keeping up with his wife and 1.5 kids. Whatever happened to the old days back in high school, when we used to have the time to get together to hang out and just do nothing for awhile?

So it didn't entirely surprise me when our original plans to go out somewhere and do something sort of morphed into "Oh, we're both too worn out to go and do anything, let's just see what's on TV." We watched the college football game until it got boring (took about two hours), then we watched the World Series game until it also got boring (took about 20 minutes), and then watched some of Saturday Night Live (but somehow managed to miss the whole Ashlee-Simpson-lip-synching thing). And at some point during the evening, I decided I should probably check my email. I had my PowerBook with me, but my friend (bless his heart) is still limping along on dial-up internet. So rather than configuring my PowerBook for his dial-up connection, I decided to just fire up his Windows PC and check my email and hit a few key websites. And that's when things just went totally down the toilet.

The funny thing about using Windows is that you find out pretty quickly that certain websites you visit every day are guilty of throwing pop-up ads at visitors, except you never knew about it, because Safari's pop-up blocking actually works. For instance, I never knew that MacCentral threw a pop-up ad at you about subscribing to MacWorld Magazine until I happened to visit that site on a PC one day. So it didn't surprise me that pop-up ads began surfacing almost as soon as I began surfing the web. But at some point something goes off in your head, a little voice that kind of tells you, "Hey, you know what? This just doesn't seem right."

I'm pretty sure MacMinute.com isn't set up to throw a pornographic pop-up ad at its visitors, and I'm quite certain that visiting the mac.com webmail login in page isn't supposed to trigger a pop-up ad for viagra. In fact, at one point so many pop-up ads were appearing on the screen, one after another, that I had trouble locating the actual browser window. And the kicker was that even after I got them all closed, the taskbar was still showing that there was one pop-up ad still open...and sure enough, one of them was designed to pop open completely off-screen so that you couldn't see it or close it (other than by right-clicking on its tab in the taskbar).

Stuff like this just downright scares me, because the first thing I figure is that Windows is simply getting its revenge on me by choosing to go ape-crap precisely at the time I'm using it, so that the owner of the computer will end up blaming me. But it turns out that my friend was well aware of the out-of-control pop-up situation. And he wasn't just aware of it, he was furious about it. He'd just run Ad-Aware earlier that day, and stripped all kinds of infected crap out of his computer in the process, and yet here was Internet Explorer going crazy again already. So we ran Ad-Aware again, which stripped away 34 new infected items. We then immediately ran it once more, and one new infected file had already found its way into his system, which is remarkable considering that the computer wasn't even connected to the internet at this time.

We checked to make sure that pop-up blocking was enabled in Internet Explorer. We checked to make sure that Service Pack 2 really was installed, and that all of the latest so-called "security" updates were installed as well. And sure enough, this computer was every bit as "secure" as Microsoft deemed that it needed to be. Except whoops, yeah, the usability of the computer was disintegrating in front of our eyes as we sat there watching.

You know, I've heard one too many horror stories of people's Windows PCs falling into what they would describe as a nearly unusable state due to the ad-ware, spy-ware, and mal-ware that had built up in their computer...but I never could have imagined that it was this bad. Of all the dozens of major reasons for Switching to the Mac, I'd really never quite understood why so many potential switchers ranked the security thing so far above seemingly more compelling reasons such as the interface, the consistency, iLife, Safari, all the innovation, and so on. But sitting there Saturday night in front of a one-year-old Windows PC that had been absolutely brought to its knees by security-related issues, I finally "got" it. This really is a huge thing. The Windows platform really is literally being shredded as we speak.

My friend and I both concluded that some kind of deeply buried crap-ware was replicating the infected stuff just as fast as Ad-aware could get rid of it. He asked me what the solution was, and I told him that I honestly wasn't sure whether he would need to upgrade to the paid version of Ad-aware, or purchase some other, more powerful tool. So naturally, he asked me what I use on my computer to fight off this kind of nonsense. And before I could even manage to figure out how to answer that question, he answered it for me. It was time for him to finally "get" something that I'd been trying to get him to understand for years.

"This doesn't happen to Apples, does it?" he asked out loud, not so much in the form of a question, but more along the lines of a lightbulb going off in his head. "No, never," I told him, explaining this that kind of crap just doesn't happen to well-built, well-designed operating systems. And at that point, I pretty much knew what was coming next:

"That's it, I'm never buying another PC again."

And there it was.

The two of us have had many conversations about Macs and PCs over the years (most of them initiated by him, actually), so he's been fully aware for some time now that Macs are better than PCs at just about every aspect of computing. But in all that time, the idea of having a vastly better computing experience had simply never motivated him to do anything about it...because all along, Windows had been "good enough" to get by on. Not "good enough" in the sense that you would even want to try to do anything with the computer that would go above and beyond the bare minumum. But good enough in the sense that you could actually spend twenty minutes a day on the internet and visit half a dozen websites without the system having a total meltdown. Except now, his PC was no longer even "good enough" for that. And he could see that even if he got the infections on his PC cleared up, or even if he bought a brand new PC, the Windows operating system is enough of a disaster that there was no reason to think that he'd be safe from another such meltdown.

All the sudden he wanted to know actual specifics about Macintosh models, specs, prices, retail locations...the kinds of questions that mean that the person's line of thinking has progressed beyond "Should I switch to the Mac?" and even beyond "Yes, I should switch to the Mac," and has now reached the point of "I want to switch to the Mac."

After looking at every Mac make and model out there, he decided he wants a 12 inch iBook with a Combo drive, which comes out to $999 (actually $949 since he's a student), comfortably below the magic thousand dollar mark. I couldn't help but think to myself that if this had been two weeks ago, that price would still have been $1099, which I think he would have rejected as being too high. But this new price he was OK with (especially when he saw that it actually came with everything he needed), and he told me that he'd been setting aside money to upgrade his current PC, and he would now instead be earmarking that money for an iBook. It's going to take him awhile, especially with that "1.5 children" thing going on, but he'll get there eventually.

Remember what I said a few weeks back about Windows users making up their mind to Switch to the Mac all the way back in 2002, but only beginning to pull the trigger now here in 2004? Well, here's a case of someone who just decided to Switch now, and who knows how long it'll take him to actually get there. The greater point is, of course, that the great influx of refugees pouring into the Mac platform is only now beginning to get underway. And after finally seeing first-hand just how badly the Windows platform is falling apart, I'm now convinced that the influx is going to be even larger than I'd thought. Now, I know that not every PC is as bad off as his was, but it would now appear that every PC has a good chance of ending up being that bad off, and I can't help but think that it's only a matter of time until the majority of existing Windows machines are no longer usable at all.

It's one thing to be the better platform. It's a whole other thing to be the only usable platform out there. You do the math.

Feedback on the homecoming

Well, it would appear that many long-time readers have come out of the woodwork in order to share their thoughts on this site's recent move back to its original format. Here's a sample:

"You've made the right move."

"I have been following your progress since April. I thought the Web site was nice. However, I was disappointed in that your articles became fewer and farther between. Now I look forward to reading your blog more often."

"Smart move going back to the blog format!"

"In regards to going back to your blog, anything that helps you to write more is great by me. I've enjoyed reading your writings on the Mac world, and have often been disappointed as of late to go to the iPod Garage and find just links to other articles or billpalmer.net and find nothing new for a week. Better to have a couple of insightful, witty paragraphs in a blog every day, then a formal written article once a week."

"Hi Bill......good to have the "old" Bill back! Keep up the good work."

So far, I think the feedback speaks for itself. No need for me to comment, other than to thank some of you for sticking around for so long. Some of the names attached to the most recent feedback are ones that I recognize as having been around since the very start. Without regular readers, this site really wouldn't be much more than me talking to myself.

So I bought a new wireless router yesterday and sadly, it wasn't an AirPort Express.

I suppose I should start off with my own wireless router history, so you can see where I'm coming from on this one:

Five years ago, I stood there in the Javits Center in Manhattan and watched Steve Jobs unveil the very first iBook and then pass it through a hula-hoop (look ma, no wires!) without losing its network connection, thanks to the wireless receptor inside of it and the wireless transmitter backstage. They were, of course, the first products of their kind in history. And within four months of that day, they were mine.

It was an easy decision, really. Now that wireless internet was finally an option, in my mind there was no other option. Today, the iBook has taken licking and is still kicking (albeit more than little slowly), with MacOS X Panther, earlier iLife apps, and more. On the other hand, my $300 AirPort Base Station wireless router lasted about four years before Father Time caught up with it, meaning that I had its services for about $75 per year.

By the middle of 2003, when my own original Base Station died, I had already added no less than ten of them to the school that I worked for. The whole campus was wireless, teachers were gallavanting about with their wireless iBooks, and all was good. By this time several other companies had brought their own (fully compatible) wireless routers to market, but thanks to the utterly bizarre purchasing policies of the district I worked for, buying wireless equipment from anyone other than Apple simply wasn't an option (and even being allowed to buy it from Apple was difficult, but that's a story for another day). So needless to say, we went with all-Apple wireless routers, despite the fact that I was aware that a variety of companies were offering competing products that were considerably less expensive (and again, fully compatible).

But when it was time to replace my own router, the Apple Base Station was actually not an option -- not at the prices Apple was still charging, anyway. So my tight budget and I settled on a bargain-basement router that was such a "no-name" product that it literally didn't have a name on it. It cost me about $75 (at that time an unheard of price for a wireless router), and lasted about a year. Ironically enough, it ended up costing me about the same $75 per year that my "much more expensive" Base Station had.

To be fair, it was actually the power outage during the last of three consecutive hurricanes that killed the thing. But even before that, the range was bad, it froze up too often, and so on. I'd even taken to calling it "my piece of crap wireless router" not long after I'd bought it. So when it died, never had the words "you get what you pay for" rang so thoroughly in my head. Somewhere along the line I'd made the mistake of buying an identical "piece of crap router" for a family member, who eventually had intermittent problems with it and gave it back to me. Figuring I had nothing to lose, I gave it a shot, but it just wasn't the answer. The bottom line was that I was going to have to buy something. And considering that I've spent the past six months telling anyone who will listen that my next Apple product will be an AirPort Express, my course of action at this point seemed obvious. So I just ran out and snapped one up, right?

Uh actually, no, I didn't.

I would like to have done so, and I still hope to before too much longer. But sadly, not today. And this time it really didn't come down to price -- at least not where AirPort Express is concerned. I happen to think that Apple's miniature, hold-it-in-the-palm-of-your-hand, ultra-portable AirPort Express is properly priced at $129 (although it'll truly become a mainstream product only when it reaches a sub-$100 price point -- look for $99 after the holidays, says my gut). Smaller, more portable versions of devices use smaller, more expensive components (think laptop vs. desktop), so it didn't bother me at all that Apple's $129 AirPort Express cost about fifty percent more than the $80 top-shelf name brand full-size wireless routers that litter the shevles of every store from Brandsmart to WalMart. Besides, the AirPort Express has AirTunes built in, and while I can't see a scenario in which I'd actually use AirTunes, it's pretty darned cool.

But AirPor Express has something missing, namely a downstream ethernet port or two (or four, actually) that you typically find on a full-size wireless router. It does make sense, as when you go smaller you do have to give up some things that just won't fit. But since my home network currently consists of both a wireless PowerBook and a wired G3 iMac, going with the AirPort Express would have required adding an ethernet hub to the mix or plopping an AirPort card into the iMac. Actually, I could have done either one of those without too much trouble (and no extra cost), but it just sort of defied the point. Let's say I add a wired hub, well now I'm just junking up the place with extra equipment and giving up any advantage I had by going small in the first place. And if I instead went all-wireless, guess what happens when I take the AirPort Express on the road with me, and then someone else tries to use the iMac wirelessly? Just too messy, all of it. Besides, I'm not the type who wants to walk in the door, then fish around in my bag for my AirPort Express, then plug it into my modem, and only then be able to get my PowerBook online. I want to be able to walk in the door, flip open the lid, and be surfing...with the AirPort Express still sitting in my bag, so I'll be sure to have it with me the next time I leave the house.

What I realized, simply enough, is that I needed a standard, stationary wireless router connected to my cable modem, a router that never moved from its spot. And if I was going to do that, I might as well just go with a full-size router, since full-size equipment is invariably less expensive. My first choice, of course, is to go with Apple's full-size AirPort base station, so I look up its price, and...huh?

One hundred and ninety-nine dollars? No thanks. It doesn't make sense on any level. Whether you think that the $129 AirPort Express is appropriately priced or not, I think we can all agree that the full-sized AirPort base station, which ostensibly uses larger and therefore less expensive parts, should cost less than AirPort Express, not more. The laws of electronics, the pricing of the competition, and (most of all) common sense say that this should be the case...and yet here is Apple's full-size wireless router still pushing $200. You know, the last time I was in the market for a router, it was only the cheapest, crappiest wireless routers that had prices absurdly lower than the AirPort Base Station. But now, it's all of them. Like I said, no thanks.

So I settled on a top-shelf name brand wireless router from someone other than Apple, and when I recalled that my current PowerBook still only uses the old 802.11b wireless standard, and that a new PowerBook is nowhere near my sights, I concluded that I might as well go ahead and save even more money by getting an 802.111b router. In the end, I paid a whopping $49. For nearly the exact same product that Apple sells for four times as much.

Needless to say, something needs to change here.

And I suspect that before too long, it will. The problem here, of course, is that here in 2004, the wireless internet market is fully commoditized (with AirTunes being the one lone exception), and so you just can't sell the products at any worthwhile profit margin. I can't imagine Apple still sells more than a handful of full-size AirPort Base Stations at $199 each, so the company is probably struggling with what exactly to do with the product. Reprice it so that it sells well but doesn't make any money? Kill it off completely?

My first instinct would be the latter -- why even waste the effort making the product? But Apple has two things going for it that would probably allow the company to get away with selling a whole lot of AirPort Base Stations at something like $99 when the competition charges $79. The first is AirTunes. After having successfully piloted the feature on the AirPort Express, it's just about time Apple rolls it into the full-size Base Station (Apple loves to do this kind of thing, see the scroll wheel on the iPod mini). And Apple's second trump card here is the fact that people buying Mac computers will tend to gravitate toward an Apple-branded wireless router over a third-party one, even if the Apple product is priced moderately higher. I do this because I know for a fact that Apple just flat-out makes better stuff than the competition in any given market. Many others do this simply because they feel it's the "safe" thing to do. Even many Mac users have their heads so screwed on backwards when it comes to the myth of compatibility, that no matter how many times you try to explain to them that third-party wireless products are fully compatible thanks to Apple's ongoing insistence on adhering to open standards, they still can't force themselves to believe it, and so they'll buy the Apple-branded accessory no matter what. It's one of those few areas in which the ongoing hoax about "compatiblity" actually benefits Apple.

Oh, and one other thing -- if you haven't noticed, AirPort Express has been marketed as a Windows product from day one. And it's not just a revenue stream; it's Apple's second chance (think iPod) to put an Apple product in the hands of Windows users for use with their Windows PC, so that they can see first-hand that all the vicious lies about "Apple compatiblity" are just that -- vicious lies. So even if Apple has to reprice the AirPort Base Station such that it doesn't make any money at all, it should do so, because it can still be profitable for the company in the long run.

So yeah, it's a bit of a sad day. If I was ever going to spend money on router technology again, I really wanted it to be an AirPort Express. But that day will come soon enough. In the mean time, let's hope Apple figures out its gameplan for wireless internet products going forward.

This morning's announcements are exactly what the Mac needed right now

There are so many different things driving people to consider the Mac platform right now, it's almost hard to keep track. The iPod is driving people to the Mac because it casts a coolness factor on all Apple products, because it shows that Apple products are well-designed and easy to use, and because it proves to users that Apple is far more "compatible" than they'd been led to believe. The new G5 iMac is driving people to the Mac because it's cool, sleek, powerful, moderately priced, and yeah, it looks like a giant iPod. iLife if driving people to the Mac because Windows users are just plain tired of hearing how (and seeing first-hand how) Mac users have it better when it comes to digital photography, digital video, and DVD creation. MacOS X is driving people to the Mac because it not only thoroughly embarrasses Windows on every level, it does a nice job of embarrassing the previous Mac operating system as well. And last but not least, Windows is doing a great job of driving people to the Mac because Windows is quite literally being torn to shreds by viruses and security issues, while the Mac remains essentially impervious.

But this morning's announcements from Apple had nothing to do with any of that. In fact, they were pretty boring. The iBook line saw speed boosts, price drops, and pre-bundled AirPort wireless cards. The PowerMac G5 line saw the addition of a slightly slower, considerably cheaper model. And the XServe line saw some improvement so arcane that I didn't even finish reading about it. Gee whiz, no headline grabbers in there. Almost a snoozefest, really.

And you know what? It's exactly what the company needed at this moment.

You see, we've gotten past the stage of the Switch Campaign merely framing the question of whether the Mac is a viable option. We're at the stage where answers keep coming in, and the result is that Windows users are actually saying to themselves, "Yeah, I've heard all the reasoning, seen all the evidence, my PC is finally near the end of its life, and I could definitely go for a Mac this time around. I'll have to take a look at the different models and specs and see which one is right for me."

With more and more (and more) people not just thinking about the possibility of a Mac but actually going so far as to want to know the specific details of the different models, it's increasingly essential that Apple's Macintosh model structure actually make sense and come off as appealing -- and it very much does. The new iMac is finally enough of a powerhouse that it outclasses the eMac enough to justify the price differential. And in turn, the PowerMac G5s are whiz-bang enough to stand out from the iMac, for those who actually need a minitower. The iBook line has been fairly aggrressively priced, and the PowerBook line, despite not yet mating with the G5, is impressive enough to merit its pricing (again, for those who actually need what the PowerBook offers).

But there's always room for improvement. And for whatever reason, ever since the iBook leaped to the G4 processor family, its entry price curiosly leaped up above the thousand dollar plateau, to $1099. It had to be done initially, I think, to protect Apple's profit margins, which are at least as essential to the Mac's continued success as any of the myriad reasons I mentioned in the first paragraph. Now, though, is the time to be aggressive if you can. And the new entry-level iBook announced this morning not only starts off at a much sweeter-sounding $999 price, but also comes with a built-in AirPort wireless card, making the iBook not $100 but $200 cheaper than it was yesterday...at least for those who want to use it wirelessly. And isn't that just about every laptop user these days?

So the new iBook is faster, comes better-equipped, and comes cheaper than it did yesterday. And the addition of the "new" PowerMac G5 model, despite being simply a low-end addition to the line, follows the same principles: no flash today, just added value. I suppose whatever Apple did to the XServe line was more the same, although I still don't intend to spend time reading about it. Yeah, I suspect it's just that boring. But when you've given people big, broad, far-reaching, idealistic, scary, cool, flashy, and (most importantly) legitimate reasons to migrate to your platform, and you can see that after a few years of banging your head against the wall they're finally beginning to buy into the idea, it's more important than ever that you get the little things as right as you can -- that after the big reasons have brought them into your reach, the little reasons plant them firmly in your grasp.

So now that Apple has reached the stage of sealing the deal, does that mean that the company is going to be just plain boring with its announcements and initiatives? Hardly. If I'm not mistaken, Steve Jobs is co-hosting a major media event one week from today with U2's Bono and Edge (who just happen to be the stars of Apple's latest TV commercial), and I can't begin to imagine just how cool and flashy that event will be.

But in the mean time, we'll just have to be content with today's boring announcements, knowing that it's merely further evidence that our platform and its company are firing on nearly all cylinders.

Hi honey, I'm home!

Bet you didn't see that coming, now did you? After sixteen months of masquerading as a website, my blog is now officially back to being a blog.

Anyone who's regularly been following along knows that I've been struggling to keep up with the task of cranking out new content for this site on a daily basis since...well, since August, really. Part of it is that I just haven't been able to find the time in the day (building your own start-up company from scratch can do that to your schedule), but there's been more to it than that. Even though the Macintosh universe is in the best and most exciting place it's been in since I've been a Mac user, I've found myself having a harder and harder time writing about it -- and I really had to take a step back and look at why.

Somewhere along the line, I'd gotten myself wrapped around the idea that this site needed precisely one full-length, well-rehearsed, single-topic, standard-issue article per day. The funny thing is, though, that the Macintosh universe just doesn't ever quite manage to unfold in that manner, either on a personal or global level. There have been days when there were five different things I wanted to write about but, not being able to focus on just one, ended up not writing about anything. And then there are days when I don't really have anything of my own to write about, but man is there ever something I wanted to link to and then just blab a little bit about...but I just couldn't figure out how to work it into one of my standard-issue articles. It seemed that gradually, I'd locked myself into a format that forced me to either crank things out in a certain manner, or not crank anything out at all.

And as much of an impulsive, manic, spastic writer as I am, being locked into a wooden format is not a good place for me to be. So I decided to go back, way back, all the way to the beginning, to see what was different back when I was at my best on this site. And you know what? It was only then that I even consciously remembered that this site began life as nothing more than a Macintosh-themed blog. And you know what else? It was a good one, too. I was busy as heck back then, posting bits and pieces here and there, when I could, often making four or five separate entries in the same day on various different topics and in various different manners...and above all, I was never, ever locked into any kind of preconceived notions about what I should or should not write about. As long as it was somehow about Apple or about the Mac, it fit here. It didn't matter if it was five paragraphs about my latest trip to the Apple Store, or simply a reposting of an interesting Mac anecdote someone sent me via email. But here I am a year and a half later, busy as all heck once again, just as excited about the Mac platform as ever (even more so, I think), and yet somehow, I've backed myself into a corner in which I can't manage to come up with anything to say about it? Nonsense.

So I'm taking the shackles off and just going back to the old blog format. The goal will simply be what it was back in March of 2003 when I founded this site: to write about Mac-related stuff that I find interesting, and hopefully you'll find it interesting as well. Anything else is just a distraction, and so I'm just going to keep it all as simple as possible. It just so happens that my old Blogger account is still intact after all this time, so I've simply decided to move back to it -- same old template and everything. Alright, so a few little changes to the old template here and there, but not so much as to spoil things.

And so we'll see what happens. I've learned a thing or two in the past year and a half, so I very much doubt things will be exactly as they were way back when I founded this site. But I think this is going to be fun. Feel free to let me know what you think.