Red Hat Diaries/007c

iLife?

January 7, 2003: Steve Jobs gave a keynote today. It's at least a year until the IBM 970s come out. Apple needs sales of hardware to survive and keep their 5% market wedge. Steve came with a number of things.

The most noticeable was the new 17' PowerBook. No one has ever come out with a 17' notebook before, and Apple is making sure everyone realises this. The 17' is an allusion to the size of the screen, but it's also an indication of the size of the box itself. Still only 1' thick, this guy has a display big enough to put your cineplex out of business - and big enough to make people balk at the gorgeous 23' Cinema Display which sells for a cool $3500.

And it's loaded with goodies too. Sargon was quick to point to the specs for the FireWire, at an incredible 800Mbps. And there are other things, such as 'Airport Extreme' with a speed boost from 11Mbps (802.11b) to a walloping 54Mbps (802.11g), and with, unless I am mistaken, a lot more security built into it. There's a big thread at Slashdot about it.

http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/03/01/07/1920248.shtml?tid=107

There's also a new 12' PowerBook, which looks suspiciously like the 12' iBook without the excellent protective magnesium casing. It looks as squished as the 17' looks clumsy. An old expression slightly paraphrased comes to mind when viewing the latter: 'WHERE'S THE KEYBOARD?'

And prices are down too. The old high-end PowerBook models are no more - no more at the Apple site that is - and the price of the new monster PowerBook is right exactly where the old high-end 15' PowerBook was the day before, if you add on $300 to get up to a whole GB of RAM (if you want 1GB of RAM with the new sucker, which you should want, it will cost you $3600).

But that's just the hardware. The really interesting stuff starts happening when you ignore the hardware and move on.

Andrew Orlowski of The Register said that the one thing Apple sorely lacked was a good web browser, and experienced as he is with the platform, he was spot on. Internet Explorer from venerable Microsoft was the best of breed, with the Omni Group's Omniweb taking up a remote last place because of incessant bugs, poor programming, and incessant crashes, and the open source Chimera, a Netscape/Mozilla offshoot, was not much better, exhibiting all the bloat that made Netscape browsers starting with version 4 so notorious. Were Microsoft going to improve their product, make it 'Cocoa'? Were the Omni Group, those darlings of Apple Corporation, finally going to learn how to program and make their browser useable?

It's a moot point now, for Apple now have their own, and it carries the catchy name 'Safari'. You can read about Safari here:

http://www.apple.com/safari

It's based on the KHTML engine used by KDE (and Apple promise to publish changes they make to the engine). Apple are already contending it is soooo much faster than any other browser out there, and its beta is free to download today. In fact, as soon as I am finished with this article, I intend to go 'cross-office' and get on a Mac and try it out!

I still haven't got to what I consider the crux of the matter. And I do believe there is something the matter, and it is not something that started being a concern today, but instead is something which persists.

It's Jobs's new 'iLife' package. iLife is iDVD, iMovie, iPhoto, and iTunes - all in one package. And the package costs. It costs $50 - although new hardware customers will get it for free, and only iDVD will carry a price tag for Mac users. But that's not the point.

The point is in the name, and in a sneaking suspicion of mine that the name really means something to the King of Cupertino. Steve Jobs really believes this is life - he really believes this digital hub thing of his is the all-encompassing answer to everything. He still sees all computer use in terms of digital media and online file sharing.

He doesn't get the point that this iLife stuff is less than boring for businesses out there. Steve Jobs could have announced new office networking solutions, and his crowd would have responded with a casual yawn, and he wouldn't be the media sensation anymore. But Steve Jobs needs business to survive.

Without it, iLife can quickly become iDeath. The sad fact seems to be that no one in Cupertino knows this, and even if they did, they wouldn't have the technical wherewithal to do anything about it.

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