Red Hat Diaries/0080

TWTYTW III

It's been an expensive year to 'have fun' with Apple and their NextStep OS X.

And now, if the latest marketing campaign for the 17' PowerBook (cutely called the 'AnalBook' because it's made out of anodised aluminium) has any effect on me, it will be another cool $4000 down the drain. For there is a disadvantage with the otherwise spectacular TiBook: It mars easily. It almost wants to be destroyed. The AnalBook supposedly corrects this. But we shall have to wait to see: they're not available for inspection anywhere except the Apple store in Pasadena California.

Back on topic. What's happened to the Red Hat Diaries people, and to Apple, in the year that's been?

1. Apple reports profits down. http://forbes.com/2003/01/15/cx_ah_0115aapl.shtml. This basically because of accounting exigencies. Otherwise they're doing good, all things considered.

2. Apple still hold only a 5% market share, if that, and their hold on education has gone way down from a previous high of almost 40% to about 25% today. Apple's market share used to be about 10%, but it declined in the mid 1990's, and even though they're doing better today with the co-founder back at the helm, they're still suffering.

3. Although it's widely publicised that returning CEO Jobs worked for a $1 salary, it is not as well publicised that he gives himself generous bonuses for his effort. His official salary for the past two years is indeed $2; his bonuses on the other hand exceed $80 million. So much for poor Steven P Jobs, who also got a cool $400 million just to turn up at One Infinite Loop again in December 1996.

4. Apple shipped around 750,000 computer units last year. They shipped about 150,000 PowerBooks and about 150,000 iBooks. They regard desktops on the decline, and have called 2003 'the year of the notebook'.

5. OS X underwent a significant facelift for version 10.2, code named Jaguar, and Apple charged their loyal minions the full $129 fee to upgrade. Mac users didn't like this, but the system itself - called 'Jagwyre' today because boss Jobs mispronounces the word and all the sycophantic employees have to follow suit - has been universally acclaimed.

6. The undersigned started the long-planned OS X website, http://rixstep.com, and started churning out apps for OS X.

7. The undersigned joined a number of OS X developers mailing lists. Initial experiences were good, although the communities were rather down in the mouth about the general outlook for OS X developers. The undersigned did his best to cheer them up, and to a certain extent succeeded. He seemed to be making many friends.

8. The undersigned grappled with a very resistant OS X 'control' called the table view. It was his objective to be able to port all his daily work to the Apple platform, and to do this he needed to port a number of key XPT applications, one of which was X-base. However this proved nigh on impossible because of the lack of flexibility - and lack of scalability - in the Apple control.

9. The undersigned was to later receive verification of his misgivings when BeOS guru Scott Hacker published his article 'iPhoto, iTunes Falling Down on Library Size' on 7 January of this year. But before that date, the shoot was definitely going to hoot the foon.

10. When the undersigned finally published his misgivings about the weaknesses in the Apple platform around Thanksgiving week 2002, he was attacked and insulted. The only voices eager to help were those who were beginners like him. The 'establishment' - the 'Apple Nazis' who control the flow of revenue in that Goldingesque world - came down hard, because they saw a threat.

11. This same threat was perceived at the Apple discussions site when the undersigned's article questioning the wisdom of the .Mac product was considered too dangerous and was peremptorily removed.

12. .Mac - the old free mac.com email system along with a number of additional features of dubious value - was instituted at school start last fall, to overwhelming protests. One website garnered nearly 40,000 signatures - which at the time represented one third of the total number of .Mac subscribers. The undersigned kept three .Mac accounts alive, not so much to use them, but to prevent others from hijacking them.

13. At the time of writing, the general consensus seems to be that even if .Mac is not worthless, it is still managed in a very unprofessional way, with severe recurring outages, and should be considered a 'beta' and run as such - and for free - until Apple learn how to 'scale' their software.

14. Apple are now going to charge Mac users for iTunes and iMovie. Mac users are overjoyed at this news.

15. Steven P Jobs gave a whale of a keynote at this year's Macworld, a two hour play in one act which the experts say he must have been rehearsing for months. He stands on stage and shows off all this great stuff, and everyone applauds - and then they rush to their phones and PDAs to order the stuff and overhead can be heard Louis Armstrong's 'What a Wonderful World'. (Flight bags are not available.)

16. The new 12' AnalBook is nowhere to be seen yet. Neither is the 17' AnalBook.

17. Safari, the KDE browser Apple announced at MWSF, is already available, and has caused quite a storm. First, it is fast - possibly the fastest browser in all respects available for any platform today. Second, an early build of Safari started nuking people's computers - really trashing them and making them unusable - and Apple have never owned up: They have just replaced the destructive build with another. They have acknowledged one bug in the first build, a really innocuous one, but they have deliberately side-stepped acknowledging the other fully lethal one, which is extremely weak.

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