Tuesday, May 31, 2005
Running and Spunning
- The more I use Tiger, the more I love it. My latest newly discoverd gem: Mail only makes a "new mail" notification sound if one or more of the new messages is not spam. Beautiful. Come to think of it, maybe this was there before Tiger and I didn't notice it; I get so frustrated at the increasing number of websites whose ads include audio that I go long stretches these days with my computer on mute. Next feature I want to see: a variant of pop-up blocker that automatically silences ads. Or maybe a Federal law against such ads. Or perhaps a heavy object dropped on the head of the idiot who thought up the idea.
- I'm not interested in any third-party solutions that might be out there that might already do this, so please don't write in with any.
- Come to think of it, please don't write in trying to convince me to use one of them, either.
- When Detroit won game one of the current best-of-seven series with Miami, every sports analyst on the planet proclaimed that Miami had no chance to win the series because Detroit was too good. Miami then promptly won the next two games, and every one of those same sports analysts reversed their position entirely and claimed that Detroit had no chance of winning the series because Miami was too good. Naturally, in the game taking place tonight, Detroit is killing Miami. What kills me is that every one of those analysts has known the whole time that this is a series between two really good teams that's destined to go down to the wire, with results impossible to predict...but every one of them knows that they'd be crucified for saying so. Recently we've somehow become a society in which you have to take a side, you have to be right or wrong, and while switching viewpoints is okay, you can only get away with it if you do so completely. Perspective, the notion that there might be more than one possible thing happening, none of that seems to be allowed. And so I guess I shouldn't be surprised that (with a few notable exceptions) most of the folks who responded to my most recent article on the Mac mini refused to even consider the possibility that the mini might be doing something other than selling billions of units per second. These are undoubtedly the same folks who, if the product were cancelled tomorrow, would immediately jump sides and claim they knew the mini was the next Cube after all.
- I guess I also shouldn't be surprised that folks still want to try and frame the thing in terms of whether I was right or wrong about it. I've said all along, despite the deaf ears refusing to hear it, that I hoped I would end up being wrong about it. As evidence continues to mount that I was right all along, believe me, I'm not celebrating. My reason for writing about it this past weekend, then? The hope that, no matter how Quixotic it might sound, I just might manage to convince Apple to swallow its pride and get the darn thing off the market before any more damage is done.
- Come to think of it, one of the most annoying things of all about the Mac mini is that even though it has little to no relevance to the Macintosh in the real world, the Mac Web continues to waste more and more words pretending as if the Mac mini were the only Macintosh model on the market, thus becoming ever more of a vast wasteland. Six months ago, there was still some good content. These days it's just a bunch of geeks wanking about the Mac mini from a thousand different geek angles. Almost none of it is worth reading these days, and that's just sad. The Mac platform is reaching perhaps its finest hour, just as the Mac Web is reaching perhaps its lowest point ever. I swear to God, there have to be some talented Mac users out there who want to write about relevant aspects of the platform and would flourish given the chance. Maybe I need to put out a casting call to identify them, and give them that chance. Lord knows it would be nice to have some stuff worth reading again.
- I'm fully aware that "spunning" is not a word. Please don't write in.
- The more I use Tiger, the more I love it. My latest newly discoverd gem: Mail only makes a "new mail" notification sound if one or more of the new messages is not spam. Beautiful. Come to think of it, maybe this was there before Tiger and I didn't notice it; I get so frustrated at the increasing number of websites whose ads include audio that I go long stretches these days with my computer on mute. Next feature I want to see: a variant of pop-up blocker that automatically silences ads. Or maybe a Federal law against such ads. Or perhaps a heavy object dropped on the head of the idiot who thought up the idea.
- I'm not interested in any third-party solutions that might be out there that might already do this, so please don't write in with any.
- Come to think of it, please don't write in trying to convince me to use one of them, either.
- When Detroit won game one of the current best-of-seven series with Miami, every sports analyst on the planet proclaimed that Miami had no chance to win the series because Detroit was too good. Miami then promptly won the next two games, and every one of those same sports analysts reversed their position entirely and claimed that Detroit had no chance of winning the series because Miami was too good. Naturally, in the game taking place tonight, Detroit is killing Miami. What kills me is that every one of those analysts has known the whole time that this is a series between two really good teams that's destined to go down to the wire, with results impossible to predict...but every one of them knows that they'd be crucified for saying so. Recently we've somehow become a society in which you have to take a side, you have to be right or wrong, and while switching viewpoints is okay, you can only get away with it if you do so completely. Perspective, the notion that there might be more than one possible thing happening, none of that seems to be allowed. And so I guess I shouldn't be surprised that (with a few notable exceptions) most of the folks who responded to my most recent article on the Mac mini refused to even consider the possibility that the mini might be doing something other than selling billions of units per second. These are undoubtedly the same folks who, if the product were cancelled tomorrow, would immediately jump sides and claim they knew the mini was the next Cube after all.
- I guess I also shouldn't be surprised that folks still want to try and frame the thing in terms of whether I was right or wrong about it. I've said all along, despite the deaf ears refusing to hear it, that I hoped I would end up being wrong about it. As evidence continues to mount that I was right all along, believe me, I'm not celebrating. My reason for writing about it this past weekend, then? The hope that, no matter how Quixotic it might sound, I just might manage to convince Apple to swallow its pride and get the darn thing off the market before any more damage is done.
- Come to think of it, one of the most annoying things of all about the Mac mini is that even though it has little to no relevance to the Macintosh in the real world, the Mac Web continues to waste more and more words pretending as if the Mac mini were the only Macintosh model on the market, thus becoming ever more of a vast wasteland. Six months ago, there was still some good content. These days it's just a bunch of geeks wanking about the Mac mini from a thousand different geek angles. Almost none of it is worth reading these days, and that's just sad. The Mac platform is reaching perhaps its finest hour, just as the Mac Web is reaching perhaps its lowest point ever. I swear to God, there have to be some talented Mac users out there who want to write about relevant aspects of the platform and would flourish given the chance. Maybe I need to put out a casting call to identify them, and give them that chance. Lord knows it would be nice to have some stuff worth reading again.
- I'm fully aware that "spunning" is not a word. Please don't write in.
Saturday, May 28, 2005
Five signs the Mac mini is flopping
It was going to take over the world. It was going to push Apple to 114 percent marketshare overnight. And, perhaps most important of all, it was going to prove that Apple had been wrong, wrong, wrong over the past seven years by making all of its consumer-level Macs all-in-one models. It was going to prove that the geeks who had spent the past seven years of their lives demanding a Headless iMac, had been right all along.
And of course, when I dared to point out that the Mac mini had no chance of accomplishing any of the above pipe dreams and was in fact likely to cause at least as much harm as good, I instantly became public enemy number one in the eyes of every last one of the geeks mentioned in the previous paragraph. Because I pegged the Mac mini as a near-guaranteed flop, I was told by some folks that I was no longer allowed to write about the Macintosh, and some clowns even accused me of having been bought off by Microsoft to do everything I could to keep the Mac mini revolution from happening. It's the kind of thing that you try not to take personally, because of course very little of it had to do with me. It was merely a very disturbing sign that there were some Mac folks out there who cared a whole lot more about the success of the Mac mini than they did about the success of the Mac.
What I've found most interesting about the whole saga is that for all the infinite hype that the Mac geeks (and the geek analysts) have given the Mac mini, not one bit of that hype has come from Apple itself. All Steve Jobs did was spend five minutes of his January keynote very quietly introducing the product, and that was just about all we've heard out of Apple regarding the Mac mini since. Over the next few months the analysts continued raising their increasingly ridiculous estimates for Mac mini sales, but each time tacitly admitted that they were basing such estimates on nothing beyond their own gut feeling -- which means that they based it on nothing, because these analyst-types are the biggest geeks of all.
A couple of months ago, I resolved myself not to write about the Mac mini an more until we saw some actual signs of what was going on with the product. And while the signs has quietly become more and more clear over the past month or two, I've hesitated to write about the topic until the signs got to the point where it was plain-as-day obvious. Well folks, I think we're at that point, so here are what I think are the five most glaring signs that the Mac mini is in the process of flopping:
1) Hidden sales figures. After the Mac mini's introduction, much of the hate mail thrown my way contained assurances that once the quarterly sales numbers were released, we would all see that Mac mini sales were so off the charts that it would be obvious to anyone who can read that the Mac mini was a smashing success. And when Apple announed its quarterly sales numbers last month, sure enough, overall Macintosh sales were through the roof: a full forty percent increase over the corresponding quarter a year earlier. Unit growth, revenue growth, sales outpacing the industry, marketshare growth, everything you could want. But curiously absent was any mention of just how much or how little the Mac mini contributed to that increase. Even when an analyst asked Apple's CEO and CFO point-blank how well the Mac mini was doing during the quarterly Conference Call, they refused to answer.
Why? Well, there are only two reasons why you don't release sales numbers: you don't want your competition to have them, or they're lower than expectations. Now ask yourself: is there any reason on earth why Apple would be afraid for Michael Dell to find out how many Mac minis were sold? Of course not. All of Apple's competitors are already selling the CPU separate from the monitor as it is, so there's nothing that Dell or HP or Microsoft could learn from it. So the logical conlusion is that the Mac mini's sales numbers were low, and that Apple figured it was better to keep quiet and let the world assume that it was doing well. This can't have been an easy decision for Apple; any time any of Apple's products does something even marginally impressive-sounding, Apple trumpets it in a press release so that every Mac site on the internet will repeat it until they're blue in the face. So how bad must the Mac mini's unit sales have been that Apple's vast marketing machine couldn't come up with any way at all to spin them into sounding impressive?
Logical conclusion: Mac mini sales have been significantly worse than what the world expected them to be.
2) "Sales of the Mac mini have slowed down considerably." Right from the microsecond that news of a possible headless iMac leaked in December, analysts uniformly started releasing increasingly asinine sales predictions that, as I said earlier, were based on nothing. And in the absence of any actual data, the analysts have been free to continue doing so for quite awhile...to the point where I was beginning to wonder if they wouldn't still be increasing their Mac mini sales predictions long after Apple had pulled the product from the market. But two weeks ago, one analyst finally sounded the alarm: "Sales of the Mac mini have slowed down considerably. Our checks suggest Mac Mini sales are somewhat slow, as consumers realize that price including monitor is no bargain."
Hmm, where have I heard that last part before? It seems like it was just a few months ago when I looked at each of the possible buying scenarios and figured out that almost literally every person who bought a Mac mini would, for one reason or another, have to buy a new monitor, mouse, and keyboard (and for that matter, USB hub) to go with it -- meaning that $499 was nothing more than a fictitious price point. I also seem to remember pointing out that once word spread that the $499 price was a flat-out lie, it would become increasingly hard to convince anyone to buy one of these things.
Logical conclusion: As bad as Mac mini sales were from the start, they appear to be even worse now.
3) Tiger's here, still no advertising. About six weeks after the Mac mini launched, I pointed out that Apple had still not run one single ad for the product on television, in print, or anywhere else, and suggested that perhaps Apple had quickly figured out that the Mac mini wasn't sellable, and decided to let it fail quietly rather than failing loudly and embarrassing the company. A lot of folks, and they actually had something of a good point at the time, argued that Apple was simply waiting until its new Tiger operating system was in place on the Mac mini before promoting it. One guy even argued that Apple was waiting for the 10.4.1 update to come out before the multi-million dollar Mac mini advertising campaign surfaced.
But sure enough, Tiger has been with us for more than a month now, and even the 10.4.1 update has come and gone, and still not the slightest hint that Apple intends to advertise the mini in any way, shape, or form. Now, for all we know, Apple could launch a huge TV advertising campaign for the Mac mini starting tomorrow. But if it were going to happen, the odds are strong that it would have happened by now. Unless you think Apple is waiting for MacOS 10.5 in 2007.
Logical conclusion: Mac mini sales are bad and getting worse, and Apple doesn't think they can be saved by promoting it to the world.
4) Apple finally updated the eMac. Back in January, when I tried to help Apple out of the predicament it had put itself in by offering suggestions for how to fix things, the largest component of my argument was that Apple needed to stop pretending that the eMac didn't exist. The nightmare scenario was, and still is, that someone walks into an Apple Store intent on switching to the Mac but not spending more than $1000 to do it, and after dismissing the Mac mini as a bad joke, never finds the eMac because Apple has hidden it, and ends up leaving empty-handed because the iMac costs $1300.
And for awhile, there was no question that Apple was losing sales in exactly this manner. It was almost as if whatever geek within Apple's management who talked Steve Jobs into doing the Mac mini, knew that he had bet his career on its success. And as soon as it became obvious to Apple that it was not selling well, this guy made sure that supply of the eMac was as constrained as possible so that people who wanted an eMac but couldn't find one would settle for the Mac mini, thus making the mini appear as if it was more popular than it really was. I mean, how else do you explain a shortage of eMacs? There's no component in the eMac that could hold up its production, so its near-absense from the market from February to April had to be intentional.
But sure enough, earlier this month Apple went ahead and upgraded the eMac with better specs...and started putting eMac units back on the market in abundance. So much for the geeks who, days after the Mac mini's introduction, stated with certainty that the eMac was about to get cancelled because there was no one would ever buy one.
Logical conclusion: After realizing that keeping the eMac off the market to try to force people into buying a Mac mini wasn't working, Apple grew tired of losing sales and decided to put the eMac back out there where people can actually find one.
5) Mac mini sales at Best Buy are awful. This news has to be taken with a grain of salt, because it comes from Merrill Lynch analyst Steve Milunovich, who once argued that the Mac mini would be a great idea because Apple could save four hundred dollars by removing the LCD screen from the eMac. It might have been an interesting argument if the eMac actually had an LCD screen. It's one thing to make a bad prediction, it's another to get the most vital facts wrong on your way to making a bad prediction. So anything Mac-related that Milunovich says isn't exactly worth its weight in gold.
But according to Mr. Milunovich, the Mac mini is not selling well at all in Best Buy stores. Now of course, since he understands nothing about the Macintosh, he tries to come up with possible reasons that include the fact that there isn't some big wall of Mac software in Best Buy next to the Mac mini. Yeah, sure, that's it. I mean, it couldn't be the fact that it's simply not a sellable product, or the fact that it has an insultingly phony price tag on it, or the fact that there's literally no one who's better off buying one than they would be by buying an iMac or eMac. It couldn't be the obvious reasons, could it?
Logical conclusion: The Mac mini is the only Macintosh model that Best Buy carries, meaning that the Mac mini is sold in significantly more stores across the nation than the other Mac models. Despite this fact, Mac mini sales are still bad and getting worse, while overall Macintosh sales are strong and growing stronger.
It's still too early, I think, to speak in the past tense and say that the Mac mini has flopped. But at this point there's very little risk in using the present tense and saying that the Mac mini is flopping. Even at this late hour, some would still argue that the Mac mini can be "saved" by a massive advertising campaign, by putting it into even more stores, by altering the way it's sold in those stores, or who knows what else. But the bottom line is that outside of the geek bubble, this product has almost no appeal to the other ninety-nine percent of the population. It's not as if the very existence of the Mac mini has caused the Macintosh platform to come crashing down. But for all we know, without the mini wreaking havoc on every one of Apple's legitimate Mac models, perhaps that forty percent increase in overall Mac sales this past quarter would have been even higher. Instead of putting the Mac mini in Best Buy, put the iMac and eMac there instead; with the way overall Macintosh sales are growing, it's reasonable to think that they'd both sell well, with or without a wall of software next to them. And instead of wasting money advertising a product like the Mac mini that people don't want, instead spend that money on advertising Mac models that people would actually consider buying.
Apple's been on a roll in 2005, and the last thing it needs right now is a high-profile flop to derail its popularity and dominance. I say it's time for Apple to quietly admit to itself that the Mac mini was a guaranteed flop from the start, and to pull the plug on it now, while this flop still has the chance to be a low-profile one.
It was going to take over the world. It was going to push Apple to 114 percent marketshare overnight. And, perhaps most important of all, it was going to prove that Apple had been wrong, wrong, wrong over the past seven years by making all of its consumer-level Macs all-in-one models. It was going to prove that the geeks who had spent the past seven years of their lives demanding a Headless iMac, had been right all along.
And of course, when I dared to point out that the Mac mini had no chance of accomplishing any of the above pipe dreams and was in fact likely to cause at least as much harm as good, I instantly became public enemy number one in the eyes of every last one of the geeks mentioned in the previous paragraph. Because I pegged the Mac mini as a near-guaranteed flop, I was told by some folks that I was no longer allowed to write about the Macintosh, and some clowns even accused me of having been bought off by Microsoft to do everything I could to keep the Mac mini revolution from happening. It's the kind of thing that you try not to take personally, because of course very little of it had to do with me. It was merely a very disturbing sign that there were some Mac folks out there who cared a whole lot more about the success of the Mac mini than they did about the success of the Mac.
What I've found most interesting about the whole saga is that for all the infinite hype that the Mac geeks (and the geek analysts) have given the Mac mini, not one bit of that hype has come from Apple itself. All Steve Jobs did was spend five minutes of his January keynote very quietly introducing the product, and that was just about all we've heard out of Apple regarding the Mac mini since. Over the next few months the analysts continued raising their increasingly ridiculous estimates for Mac mini sales, but each time tacitly admitted that they were basing such estimates on nothing beyond their own gut feeling -- which means that they based it on nothing, because these analyst-types are the biggest geeks of all.
A couple of months ago, I resolved myself not to write about the Mac mini an more until we saw some actual signs of what was going on with the product. And while the signs has quietly become more and more clear over the past month or two, I've hesitated to write about the topic until the signs got to the point where it was plain-as-day obvious. Well folks, I think we're at that point, so here are what I think are the five most glaring signs that the Mac mini is in the process of flopping:
1) Hidden sales figures. After the Mac mini's introduction, much of the hate mail thrown my way contained assurances that once the quarterly sales numbers were released, we would all see that Mac mini sales were so off the charts that it would be obvious to anyone who can read that the Mac mini was a smashing success. And when Apple announed its quarterly sales numbers last month, sure enough, overall Macintosh sales were through the roof: a full forty percent increase over the corresponding quarter a year earlier. Unit growth, revenue growth, sales outpacing the industry, marketshare growth, everything you could want. But curiously absent was any mention of just how much or how little the Mac mini contributed to that increase. Even when an analyst asked Apple's CEO and CFO point-blank how well the Mac mini was doing during the quarterly Conference Call, they refused to answer.
Why? Well, there are only two reasons why you don't release sales numbers: you don't want your competition to have them, or they're lower than expectations. Now ask yourself: is there any reason on earth why Apple would be afraid for Michael Dell to find out how many Mac minis were sold? Of course not. All of Apple's competitors are already selling the CPU separate from the monitor as it is, so there's nothing that Dell or HP or Microsoft could learn from it. So the logical conlusion is that the Mac mini's sales numbers were low, and that Apple figured it was better to keep quiet and let the world assume that it was doing well. This can't have been an easy decision for Apple; any time any of Apple's products does something even marginally impressive-sounding, Apple trumpets it in a press release so that every Mac site on the internet will repeat it until they're blue in the face. So how bad must the Mac mini's unit sales have been that Apple's vast marketing machine couldn't come up with any way at all to spin them into sounding impressive?
Logical conclusion: Mac mini sales have been significantly worse than what the world expected them to be.
2) "Sales of the Mac mini have slowed down considerably." Right from the microsecond that news of a possible headless iMac leaked in December, analysts uniformly started releasing increasingly asinine sales predictions that, as I said earlier, were based on nothing. And in the absence of any actual data, the analysts have been free to continue doing so for quite awhile...to the point where I was beginning to wonder if they wouldn't still be increasing their Mac mini sales predictions long after Apple had pulled the product from the market. But two weeks ago, one analyst finally sounded the alarm: "Sales of the Mac mini have slowed down considerably. Our checks suggest Mac Mini sales are somewhat slow, as consumers realize that price including monitor is no bargain."
Hmm, where have I heard that last part before? It seems like it was just a few months ago when I looked at each of the possible buying scenarios and figured out that almost literally every person who bought a Mac mini would, for one reason or another, have to buy a new monitor, mouse, and keyboard (and for that matter, USB hub) to go with it -- meaning that $499 was nothing more than a fictitious price point. I also seem to remember pointing out that once word spread that the $499 price was a flat-out lie, it would become increasingly hard to convince anyone to buy one of these things.
Logical conclusion: As bad as Mac mini sales were from the start, they appear to be even worse now.
3) Tiger's here, still no advertising. About six weeks after the Mac mini launched, I pointed out that Apple had still not run one single ad for the product on television, in print, or anywhere else, and suggested that perhaps Apple had quickly figured out that the Mac mini wasn't sellable, and decided to let it fail quietly rather than failing loudly and embarrassing the company. A lot of folks, and they actually had something of a good point at the time, argued that Apple was simply waiting until its new Tiger operating system was in place on the Mac mini before promoting it. One guy even argued that Apple was waiting for the 10.4.1 update to come out before the multi-million dollar Mac mini advertising campaign surfaced.
But sure enough, Tiger has been with us for more than a month now, and even the 10.4.1 update has come and gone, and still not the slightest hint that Apple intends to advertise the mini in any way, shape, or form. Now, for all we know, Apple could launch a huge TV advertising campaign for the Mac mini starting tomorrow. But if it were going to happen, the odds are strong that it would have happened by now. Unless you think Apple is waiting for MacOS 10.5 in 2007.
Logical conclusion: Mac mini sales are bad and getting worse, and Apple doesn't think they can be saved by promoting it to the world.
4) Apple finally updated the eMac. Back in January, when I tried to help Apple out of the predicament it had put itself in by offering suggestions for how to fix things, the largest component of my argument was that Apple needed to stop pretending that the eMac didn't exist. The nightmare scenario was, and still is, that someone walks into an Apple Store intent on switching to the Mac but not spending more than $1000 to do it, and after dismissing the Mac mini as a bad joke, never finds the eMac because Apple has hidden it, and ends up leaving empty-handed because the iMac costs $1300.
And for awhile, there was no question that Apple was losing sales in exactly this manner. It was almost as if whatever geek within Apple's management who talked Steve Jobs into doing the Mac mini, knew that he had bet his career on its success. And as soon as it became obvious to Apple that it was not selling well, this guy made sure that supply of the eMac was as constrained as possible so that people who wanted an eMac but couldn't find one would settle for the Mac mini, thus making the mini appear as if it was more popular than it really was. I mean, how else do you explain a shortage of eMacs? There's no component in the eMac that could hold up its production, so its near-absense from the market from February to April had to be intentional.
But sure enough, earlier this month Apple went ahead and upgraded the eMac with better specs...and started putting eMac units back on the market in abundance. So much for the geeks who, days after the Mac mini's introduction, stated with certainty that the eMac was about to get cancelled because there was no one would ever buy one.
Logical conclusion: After realizing that keeping the eMac off the market to try to force people into buying a Mac mini wasn't working, Apple grew tired of losing sales and decided to put the eMac back out there where people can actually find one.
5) Mac mini sales at Best Buy are awful. This news has to be taken with a grain of salt, because it comes from Merrill Lynch analyst Steve Milunovich, who once argued that the Mac mini would be a great idea because Apple could save four hundred dollars by removing the LCD screen from the eMac. It might have been an interesting argument if the eMac actually had an LCD screen. It's one thing to make a bad prediction, it's another to get the most vital facts wrong on your way to making a bad prediction. So anything Mac-related that Milunovich says isn't exactly worth its weight in gold.
But according to Mr. Milunovich, the Mac mini is not selling well at all in Best Buy stores. Now of course, since he understands nothing about the Macintosh, he tries to come up with possible reasons that include the fact that there isn't some big wall of Mac software in Best Buy next to the Mac mini. Yeah, sure, that's it. I mean, it couldn't be the fact that it's simply not a sellable product, or the fact that it has an insultingly phony price tag on it, or the fact that there's literally no one who's better off buying one than they would be by buying an iMac or eMac. It couldn't be the obvious reasons, could it?
Logical conclusion: The Mac mini is the only Macintosh model that Best Buy carries, meaning that the Mac mini is sold in significantly more stores across the nation than the other Mac models. Despite this fact, Mac mini sales are still bad and getting worse, while overall Macintosh sales are strong and growing stronger.
It's still too early, I think, to speak in the past tense and say that the Mac mini has flopped. But at this point there's very little risk in using the present tense and saying that the Mac mini is flopping. Even at this late hour, some would still argue that the Mac mini can be "saved" by a massive advertising campaign, by putting it into even more stores, by altering the way it's sold in those stores, or who knows what else. But the bottom line is that outside of the geek bubble, this product has almost no appeal to the other ninety-nine percent of the population. It's not as if the very existence of the Mac mini has caused the Macintosh platform to come crashing down. But for all we know, without the mini wreaking havoc on every one of Apple's legitimate Mac models, perhaps that forty percent increase in overall Mac sales this past quarter would have been even higher. Instead of putting the Mac mini in Best Buy, put the iMac and eMac there instead; with the way overall Macintosh sales are growing, it's reasonable to think that they'd both sell well, with or without a wall of software next to them. And instead of wasting money advertising a product like the Mac mini that people don't want, instead spend that money on advertising Mac models that people would actually consider buying.
Apple's been on a roll in 2005, and the last thing it needs right now is a high-profile flop to derail its popularity and dominance. I say it's time for Apple to quietly admit to itself that the Mac mini was a guaranteed flop from the start, and to pull the plug on it now, while this flop still has the chance to be a low-profile one.
Sunday, May 22, 2005
I saw the latest Star Wars movie this weekend. It was really good, but the ending just begs for a sequel. I wonder if they'll make one.
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
The search for computer speed -- why am I still looking in the same place?
Quite a few of you have asked why I bought Tiger instead of just buying a new Mac.
Awhile back I swore, publicly in fact, that I wasn't going to put any more money into this old 667 Mhz G4 Titanium PowerBook of mine. I said I wouldn't spend another penny on it, instead I'd just save those pennies and put them toward new a G5 PowerBook.
Trouble is, of course, there's no such thing as a G5 PowerBook, and at this point there's no real reason to believe there's going to be one any time in 2005. The fact that Apple went ahead and dumped all the new features it had been saving for the G5 PowerBook into the most recent G4 revision, signaled that loud and clear. You don't go putting cool new stuff like brace for impact and two-finger scrolling into the G4 if you have any hope that the G5 might be around the corner.
So the logical move, of course, is to upgrade to a new G4 PowerBook. Apple has pulled all the stops out on this latest model, and it's virtually the perfect laptop with the singular exception of the fact that it sportsa chip from the same processor family that's sitting in my current three year old laptop. Two grand is, after all, an awful lot of money to dump into a machine that I'll be looking to dump the minute the G5 comes out (right at a time, not coincidentally, when the resale value of a used G4 PowerBook will have just plummeted).
Regular readers will recall that I toyed for awhile with the idea of "upgrading" to a twelve inch G4 iBook, on the theory that dumping one grand on yet another G4 laptop would be a little easier to stomach...especially considering that the G4 iBook isn't likely to suddenly see its resale value go off a cliff. But I just couldn't force myself to drop down to the iBook's lesser screen real estate, and the fourteen inch iBook doesn't help because it's the same exact resolution, just bigger.
So last week I decided, instead, to go ahead and see what Tiger might do for my current aging PowerBook in terms of speeding it up just enough to allow me to work at full speed. And after waiting for Spotlight to finish indexing my hard drive, after waiting for Mail to finish importing my email messages into itself, and after realizing that Dashboard was too much for my old rig to handle, I'd finally found a significant enough speed boost to satisfy me for at least a little while longer. Worth the price of purchase, even though I'll end up getting Tiger with my next machine anyway.
But then my speed boost disappeared this week. When you're on the phone and you're trying to find information in your computer related to that phone call, and your computer is responding so slowly that you're frustrated enough that you're making hand gestures toward your computer screen in the hopes that the darn thing will move a little faster, you know you're in trouble.
It didn't make sense, though. Was there something wrong with Tiger that was causing the machine to slow to a crawl? Or was one of my hardware components finally melting down? So I fired up Activity Monitor, and it was only then I noticed that my hard drive was more than ninety-five percent full.
And that I'm an idiot.
If one of my clients complained that their Mac had slowed to a crawl, the first thing I'd do is have them check their hard drive capacity. Seventy or eighty percent full, you're not in trouble. But ninety-five? That's like filling a Volkswagen full of clowns, and then wondering why the clown in the driver's seat can't drive very well. Could it be that there's three clowns sitting on his lap, two laying on the dashboard blocking his view, and another one crouched on the floor blocking the pedals? You get the idea.
At least I hope you do, 'cause that's about the best analogy I'm gonna come up with tonight.
I shouldn't have needed activity monitor to tell me that my drive was chock full o' crap; the bizarre slowdowns should have told me that right off the bat. But hey, it's been a busy week, so I'll let my idocy slide just this once. All the extra new and larger stuff that got installed with Tiger, must have pushed my drive to its limit, and I didn't even think to check.
I was thinking I might need to buy an external drive, but instead I went hunting for stuff to part with, and somehow managed to find fourteen gigabytes of old crap that I had no idea why I was keeping it. Problem solved. Now I see how fast Tiger is.
I'll tell you though, with the insane blowout prices that Amazon was offering last week on the previous generation of G5 iMac, I was awfully tempted to grab one for myself (can you say "$400 discount plus $100 rebate"? I thought so). My mother picked up one, thus finally replacing her seven year old (and dead) G3 iMac...and yet somehow the analysts can't figure out that Mac users go so much longer in between computer upgrades than PC users that it skews the marketshare numbers. But that's another issue entirely. I really did think hard about buying myself a G5 iMac and calling it a night, but at this point I'm too deeply entrenched as a laptop user. You, on the other hand, might want to consider grabbing one of those ridiculously discounted iMacs before they're all gone; they come with a Tiger upgrade disc in the box.
But back to our story, I picked up some extra RAM for my mother for her new iMac (what kind of Mother's Day gift is that? I really don't know), and in doing so I noticed that the prices on third-party RAM are perhaps half of what they were all of three months ago. Which means that, depending on which side of the bed I wake up on the rest of the week, I just might go ahead and bump my PowerBook up the gigabyte of RAM that it can hold. I really didn't want to go putting even more money into this computer, but with the price so low, it's almost a no-brainer. I think the only reason I'm waiting is that I want to see precisely what kind of impact the fourteen gigabytes of recovered hard drive space have on the machine's speed over the next few days. Once I get a feel for that, I'll go ahead and order the RAM and see what that does for me.
Why do it that way? Why not? The upside of having an aging Mac as your primary machine is that you do get to sort of turn it into a science experiment. But if I'm still using it when MacOS 10.5 comes out, someone please smack me.
Quite a few of you have asked why I bought Tiger instead of just buying a new Mac.
Awhile back I swore, publicly in fact, that I wasn't going to put any more money into this old 667 Mhz G4 Titanium PowerBook of mine. I said I wouldn't spend another penny on it, instead I'd just save those pennies and put them toward new a G5 PowerBook.
Trouble is, of course, there's no such thing as a G5 PowerBook, and at this point there's no real reason to believe there's going to be one any time in 2005. The fact that Apple went ahead and dumped all the new features it had been saving for the G5 PowerBook into the most recent G4 revision, signaled that loud and clear. You don't go putting cool new stuff like brace for impact and two-finger scrolling into the G4 if you have any hope that the G5 might be around the corner.
So the logical move, of course, is to upgrade to a new G4 PowerBook. Apple has pulled all the stops out on this latest model, and it's virtually the perfect laptop with the singular exception of the fact that it sportsa chip from the same processor family that's sitting in my current three year old laptop. Two grand is, after all, an awful lot of money to dump into a machine that I'll be looking to dump the minute the G5 comes out (right at a time, not coincidentally, when the resale value of a used G4 PowerBook will have just plummeted).
Regular readers will recall that I toyed for awhile with the idea of "upgrading" to a twelve inch G4 iBook, on the theory that dumping one grand on yet another G4 laptop would be a little easier to stomach...especially considering that the G4 iBook isn't likely to suddenly see its resale value go off a cliff. But I just couldn't force myself to drop down to the iBook's lesser screen real estate, and the fourteen inch iBook doesn't help because it's the same exact resolution, just bigger.
So last week I decided, instead, to go ahead and see what Tiger might do for my current aging PowerBook in terms of speeding it up just enough to allow me to work at full speed. And after waiting for Spotlight to finish indexing my hard drive, after waiting for Mail to finish importing my email messages into itself, and after realizing that Dashboard was too much for my old rig to handle, I'd finally found a significant enough speed boost to satisfy me for at least a little while longer. Worth the price of purchase, even though I'll end up getting Tiger with my next machine anyway.
But then my speed boost disappeared this week. When you're on the phone and you're trying to find information in your computer related to that phone call, and your computer is responding so slowly that you're frustrated enough that you're making hand gestures toward your computer screen in the hopes that the darn thing will move a little faster, you know you're in trouble.
It didn't make sense, though. Was there something wrong with Tiger that was causing the machine to slow to a crawl? Or was one of my hardware components finally melting down? So I fired up Activity Monitor, and it was only then I noticed that my hard drive was more than ninety-five percent full.
And that I'm an idiot.
If one of my clients complained that their Mac had slowed to a crawl, the first thing I'd do is have them check their hard drive capacity. Seventy or eighty percent full, you're not in trouble. But ninety-five? That's like filling a Volkswagen full of clowns, and then wondering why the clown in the driver's seat can't drive very well. Could it be that there's three clowns sitting on his lap, two laying on the dashboard blocking his view, and another one crouched on the floor blocking the pedals? You get the idea.
At least I hope you do, 'cause that's about the best analogy I'm gonna come up with tonight.
I shouldn't have needed activity monitor to tell me that my drive was chock full o' crap; the bizarre slowdowns should have told me that right off the bat. But hey, it's been a busy week, so I'll let my idocy slide just this once. All the extra new and larger stuff that got installed with Tiger, must have pushed my drive to its limit, and I didn't even think to check.
I was thinking I might need to buy an external drive, but instead I went hunting for stuff to part with, and somehow managed to find fourteen gigabytes of old crap that I had no idea why I was keeping it. Problem solved. Now I see how fast Tiger is.
I'll tell you though, with the insane blowout prices that Amazon was offering last week on the previous generation of G5 iMac, I was awfully tempted to grab one for myself (can you say "$400 discount plus $100 rebate"? I thought so). My mother picked up one, thus finally replacing her seven year old (and dead) G3 iMac...and yet somehow the analysts can't figure out that Mac users go so much longer in between computer upgrades than PC users that it skews the marketshare numbers. But that's another issue entirely. I really did think hard about buying myself a G5 iMac and calling it a night, but at this point I'm too deeply entrenched as a laptop user. You, on the other hand, might want to consider grabbing one of those ridiculously discounted iMacs before they're all gone; they come with a Tiger upgrade disc in the box.
But back to our story, I picked up some extra RAM for my mother for her new iMac (what kind of Mother's Day gift is that? I really don't know), and in doing so I noticed that the prices on third-party RAM are perhaps half of what they were all of three months ago. Which means that, depending on which side of the bed I wake up on the rest of the week, I just might go ahead and bump my PowerBook up the gigabyte of RAM that it can hold. I really didn't want to go putting even more money into this computer, but with the price so low, it's almost a no-brainer. I think the only reason I'm waiting is that I want to see precisely what kind of impact the fourteen gigabytes of recovered hard drive space have on the machine's speed over the next few days. Once I get a feel for that, I'll go ahead and order the RAM and see what that does for me.
Why do it that way? Why not? The upside of having an aging Mac as your primary machine is that you do get to sort of turn it into a science experiment. But if I'm still using it when MacOS 10.5 comes out, someone please smack me.
Monday, May 09, 2005
A year in the life of...
So it would seem that LoadPod has been with us for a year now. I didn't even realize it until I was giving an interview to the Fox News station in Tampa, and they asked me how long the company had been around. While the answer I gave them was "about twelve months now," the chime going off in my head said to myself, "hey, that's, like, a year." And so I looked up the date, and sure enough, May 9th signifies a year to the day.
It also happens to be today.
So when I got last-minute word this afternoon that the Fox News story about LoadPod would be airing in Tampa this evening, I began to fret -- for just a moment -- over the fact that this was my television debut. I've done newspapers, magazines, radio...but not TV. LoadPod has been covered on local TV stations in more than two dozen markets, but this is the first time that I've ever actually been in one of the stories. Further frustrating was that I live just far enough away from the Tampa market that my cable company doesn't carry its local stations, so I wouldn't even be able to watch the finalized news story.
Oh well, what are you going to do? I wasn't going to sit around the office all evening worrying about it. So I called someone in Tampa and had them tape it for me, and I headed out for the Orlando release party for the new Dave Matthews Band album. Good stuff, totally unexpected, full of life. The album, that is. The party, on the other hand, consisted of half a dozen college kids drinking beer, most of them not even aware that they were at a release party or that music was even being played. So I just sat alone and listened. The very cute hostess, who apparently had nothing else to do, kept inquiring about the LoadPod logo on my shirt until I'd told her enough about the company that she finally got the hang of it.
"So you work for LoadPod?" she asked.
"Well, I guess you could say that," I offered back. But she forced the issue, so I ended up telling her precisely what role within the company I play.
A pair of tickets to the upcoming Dave Matthews Band show were being given away, and I guess she could sense that I was the only actual fan in the building, as she kept telling me that she hoped I would win them. But as it turned out, not only did I not win the tickets, I also somehow managed to not win one of the five copies of the new album that were given out, either. I guess you can't have all the luck.
The hostess came back over one more time to tell me how disappointed she was that I hadn't won. "There are worse things," I told her.
She said, "Yeah, like, you still own your own company."
Never, but never, underestimate the ego-boosting abilities of someone who works for tips for a living.
But in any case, there it is, a year ago to the day. In one sense, I can't wait for today to end, because I can't wait for Year Two to begin. This is just starting to get fun.
So it would seem that LoadPod has been with us for a year now. I didn't even realize it until I was giving an interview to the Fox News station in Tampa, and they asked me how long the company had been around. While the answer I gave them was "about twelve months now," the chime going off in my head said to myself, "hey, that's, like, a year." And so I looked up the date, and sure enough, May 9th signifies a year to the day.
It also happens to be today.
So when I got last-minute word this afternoon that the Fox News story about LoadPod would be airing in Tampa this evening, I began to fret -- for just a moment -- over the fact that this was my television debut. I've done newspapers, magazines, radio...but not TV. LoadPod has been covered on local TV stations in more than two dozen markets, but this is the first time that I've ever actually been in one of the stories. Further frustrating was that I live just far enough away from the Tampa market that my cable company doesn't carry its local stations, so I wouldn't even be able to watch the finalized news story.
Oh well, what are you going to do? I wasn't going to sit around the office all evening worrying about it. So I called someone in Tampa and had them tape it for me, and I headed out for the Orlando release party for the new Dave Matthews Band album. Good stuff, totally unexpected, full of life. The album, that is. The party, on the other hand, consisted of half a dozen college kids drinking beer, most of them not even aware that they were at a release party or that music was even being played. So I just sat alone and listened. The very cute hostess, who apparently had nothing else to do, kept inquiring about the LoadPod logo on my shirt until I'd told her enough about the company that she finally got the hang of it.
"So you work for LoadPod?" she asked.
"Well, I guess you could say that," I offered back. But she forced the issue, so I ended up telling her precisely what role within the company I play.
A pair of tickets to the upcoming Dave Matthews Band show were being given away, and I guess she could sense that I was the only actual fan in the building, as she kept telling me that she hoped I would win them. But as it turned out, not only did I not win the tickets, I also somehow managed to not win one of the five copies of the new album that were given out, either. I guess you can't have all the luck.
The hostess came back over one more time to tell me how disappointed she was that I hadn't won. "There are worse things," I told her.
She said, "Yeah, like, you still own your own company."
Never, but never, underestimate the ego-boosting abilities of someone who works for tips for a living.
But in any case, there it is, a year ago to the day. In one sense, I can't wait for today to end, because I can't wait for Year Two to begin. This is just starting to get fun.
Wednesday, May 04, 2005
Tiger: the death of helper applications
As my first of hopefully many happy weeks with Tiger winds down, and now that I've used it to do some real work instead of just throwing stuff at it to see what happens, one subtle trend has stood out above all others. Can anyone guess what it is?
Dashboard? Nah. Well, sort of, in a way.
Spotlight? Ah, it's part of it, I suppose.
But these are just new creatures in a monster mash that's been accumulating for as long as you've come to know operating sytems by a certain Roman numeral. Right from the first time you downloaded a PDF in MacOS X three years ago, and saw it open in Preview instead of Acrobat Reader. And it's been creeping up on you ever since. Figured it out yet?
It hit me, just a little bit, when I clicked on a PDF document on a website, and it rather understatedly opened...right in Safari. Hmm, in three years we've gone from downloaded PDFs opening in a separate third-party application (Acrobat Reader) you had to install yourself, to opening in a separate application (Preview) that's more or less an extension of the operating system, to now opening right in the browser itself. In other words, from lots of hubbub, to a little bit of hubbub, to none at all.
It hit me a little more yesterday when I double-clicked on a document that had been compressed in the ".sit" format, and it unstuffed itself just as you would expect -- except Stuffit Expander never launched. The Finder simply unstuffed the document by itself, and that was that.
The ongoing trend here, of course, is the death of the helper applications. And it makes perfect sense. Why should you have to wait for an entire separate application to launch and do its business before you can get on with a mundane task? But it's not just about the helper applications dying off. The even larger trend, which you have to step back a little more to fully appreciate, is the ongoing reduction in the number of times that you have to move from one application to another.
Look at what's going on with the iLife suite. Sure, iTunes controls your music. But if you're making a movie in iMovie and you need a song, you don't launch iTunes and then scratch your head about how to get it from point A to point B. In fact, you don't launch iTunes at all. Because the music in iTunes is automatically accessible from within iMovie whether iTunes is running or not. And more recently, we've been given iWork, in which you can pull a picture from your iPhoto library directly into your word processing document without having to go anywhere near iPhoto.
Which brings us to the new and shiny stuff.
Dashboard is, in a nutshell, a way to take all the little applications that don't deserve to be full-fledged applications and stapling them all to what is essentially the backside of your desktop. Flip it over, and they're all hanging out there, ready to be used, like a bunch of tools all sitting pretty on the same shelf. None of them have to be located, launched, or anything else that might waste a fractional moment of your time. Because now, you can just dip into any of them without ever really leaving the application you're currently working in.
And then we come to Spotlight. About a year ago a wrote a column on this site whose title asked if Tiger represented the "death" of the Finder. Perhaps a misfortunate choice of words, as what I was really trying to look at was simply a reduction in the number of times in which you have to go to the Finder. Think about it: why should you have to go to the Finder before you can perform a search of your hard drive? The Finder is designed to help you navigate to files and folders whose location you're already aware of. Why should you also have to go to the Finder to search for files whose locations you don't know? The Finder isn't going to help you. You have to do a search. So why not just go ahead do the search? And that's, more or less, what Spotlight is. Sure, it's a lot more than that. It brings up everything relating to your search term, but that fact is perhaps not nearly as important as the fact that you no longer have to go to the Finder before performing a search.
So what does Spotlight have to do with a reduction in the number of times you have to change applications? Well, when we moved to MacOS X, we saw the Finder itself become just another application. And although the Finder reached near-perfection with the release of Panther (thank you, Apple, for not messing with perfection for Tiger), the bottom line is that the fewer times you have to leave the application you're being productive in to go to the Finder, the more productive you'll be. In this particular case, the Finder simply represents another helper application that's no longer needed.
None of which is to say that the Finder is dead, dying, or otherwise diminutive. Nothing beats it when you actually know where something is located. No matter how much we pretty it up, performing a search is akin to failure. We've come a long way when it comes to searching both the internet and our own computer. But when it comes down to it, advancements in search technology are akin to having a really good method of breaking into your car when you accidentally leave your keys locked inside. The bottom line is that none of it would have been necessary if you could have simply remembered where you saved that document to in the first place.
Finally, I'll leave you with this thought: six or seven years ago, Mac enthusiasts could barely refrain from tripping over themselves to proclaim how the future of computing would revolve around the QuickTime player. You'd use it for communication, multimedia, accessing information, creativity, and even commerce. Well, if you're fairly new to the platform and you have no idea what the "QuickTime Player" is, it's the blue "Q" in your Dock that you've never once clicked on and likely never will.
So what happened, did QuickTime die? Were the enthusiasts wrong? Nah, not at all. You see, Safari, iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, Preview, half a dozen other apps, and even the computer's interface itself are all built on top of the QuickTime foundation. There's no need to launch QuickTime before doing anything in any of the apps that depend on it; they each have full access to what they need without you ever having to worry about it. At this point, the QuickTime player is, after all, just another helper application that has successfully faded out of your face and into the background.
I know it's a little early to be saying this, but I can't wait to see what MacOS 10.5 brings us.
As my first of hopefully many happy weeks with Tiger winds down, and now that I've used it to do some real work instead of just throwing stuff at it to see what happens, one subtle trend has stood out above all others. Can anyone guess what it is?
Dashboard? Nah. Well, sort of, in a way.
Spotlight? Ah, it's part of it, I suppose.
But these are just new creatures in a monster mash that's been accumulating for as long as you've come to know operating sytems by a certain Roman numeral. Right from the first time you downloaded a PDF in MacOS X three years ago, and saw it open in Preview instead of Acrobat Reader. And it's been creeping up on you ever since. Figured it out yet?
It hit me, just a little bit, when I clicked on a PDF document on a website, and it rather understatedly opened...right in Safari. Hmm, in three years we've gone from downloaded PDFs opening in a separate third-party application (Acrobat Reader) you had to install yourself, to opening in a separate application (Preview) that's more or less an extension of the operating system, to now opening right in the browser itself. In other words, from lots of hubbub, to a little bit of hubbub, to none at all.
It hit me a little more yesterday when I double-clicked on a document that had been compressed in the ".sit" format, and it unstuffed itself just as you would expect -- except Stuffit Expander never launched. The Finder simply unstuffed the document by itself, and that was that.
The ongoing trend here, of course, is the death of the helper applications. And it makes perfect sense. Why should you have to wait for an entire separate application to launch and do its business before you can get on with a mundane task? But it's not just about the helper applications dying off. The even larger trend, which you have to step back a little more to fully appreciate, is the ongoing reduction in the number of times that you have to move from one application to another.
Look at what's going on with the iLife suite. Sure, iTunes controls your music. But if you're making a movie in iMovie and you need a song, you don't launch iTunes and then scratch your head about how to get it from point A to point B. In fact, you don't launch iTunes at all. Because the music in iTunes is automatically accessible from within iMovie whether iTunes is running or not. And more recently, we've been given iWork, in which you can pull a picture from your iPhoto library directly into your word processing document without having to go anywhere near iPhoto.
Which brings us to the new and shiny stuff.
Dashboard is, in a nutshell, a way to take all the little applications that don't deserve to be full-fledged applications and stapling them all to what is essentially the backside of your desktop. Flip it over, and they're all hanging out there, ready to be used, like a bunch of tools all sitting pretty on the same shelf. None of them have to be located, launched, or anything else that might waste a fractional moment of your time. Because now, you can just dip into any of them without ever really leaving the application you're currently working in.
And then we come to Spotlight. About a year ago a wrote a column on this site whose title asked if Tiger represented the "death" of the Finder. Perhaps a misfortunate choice of words, as what I was really trying to look at was simply a reduction in the number of times in which you have to go to the Finder. Think about it: why should you have to go to the Finder before you can perform a search of your hard drive? The Finder is designed to help you navigate to files and folders whose location you're already aware of. Why should you also have to go to the Finder to search for files whose locations you don't know? The Finder isn't going to help you. You have to do a search. So why not just go ahead do the search? And that's, more or less, what Spotlight is. Sure, it's a lot more than that. It brings up everything relating to your search term, but that fact is perhaps not nearly as important as the fact that you no longer have to go to the Finder before performing a search.
So what does Spotlight have to do with a reduction in the number of times you have to change applications? Well, when we moved to MacOS X, we saw the Finder itself become just another application. And although the Finder reached near-perfection with the release of Panther (thank you, Apple, for not messing with perfection for Tiger), the bottom line is that the fewer times you have to leave the application you're being productive in to go to the Finder, the more productive you'll be. In this particular case, the Finder simply represents another helper application that's no longer needed.
None of which is to say that the Finder is dead, dying, or otherwise diminutive. Nothing beats it when you actually know where something is located. No matter how much we pretty it up, performing a search is akin to failure. We've come a long way when it comes to searching both the internet and our own computer. But when it comes down to it, advancements in search technology are akin to having a really good method of breaking into your car when you accidentally leave your keys locked inside. The bottom line is that none of it would have been necessary if you could have simply remembered where you saved that document to in the first place.
Finally, I'll leave you with this thought: six or seven years ago, Mac enthusiasts could barely refrain from tripping over themselves to proclaim how the future of computing would revolve around the QuickTime player. You'd use it for communication, multimedia, accessing information, creativity, and even commerce. Well, if you're fairly new to the platform and you have no idea what the "QuickTime Player" is, it's the blue "Q" in your Dock that you've never once clicked on and likely never will.
So what happened, did QuickTime die? Were the enthusiasts wrong? Nah, not at all. You see, Safari, iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, Preview, half a dozen other apps, and even the computer's interface itself are all built on top of the QuickTime foundation. There's no need to launch QuickTime before doing anything in any of the apps that depend on it; they each have full access to what they need without you ever having to worry about it. At this point, the QuickTime player is, after all, just another helper application that has successfully faded out of your face and into the background.
I know it's a little early to be saying this, but I can't wait to see what MacOS 10.5 brings us.
