The fanboys are restless these days.
I've been part of the Mac enthusiast community since the day of the
dogcow, and save perhaps for an interval during the mid-90s when
it seemed every media article about the company contained the phrase
beleaguered Apple
Computer, I've never seen so much apprehension and
discontent.
Note that I said Mac enthusiast. If you're mainly an iPhone
or iPad aficionado, things have never been better, notwithstanding an
undercurrent of chafing about "walled
garden" circumscriptions. But those of us who identify more with
OS X and the Macintosh (rather than the iOS) can't help but be
concerned. Mac OS X 10.6
Snow Leopard has been out for going on a year, with just four bug
fix updates, and it wasn't all that substantial an advance
features-wise over OS X 10.5
Leopard, which dates back to 2007.
As for Mac hardware, there were just three upgrades announced during
the first half of 2010, two (the MacBook Pro line and the Mac mini) via no-fanfare press
releases - and the white
MacBook refresh not even that. although the MacBook and MacBook Pro
refreshes represented a substantial upgrades powerwise, and the unibody
Mac Mini is a thorough redesign.
Adding insult to injury, virtually any and all mention of the Mac
was purged from last month's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC),
and notwithstanding Steve Jobs subsequent admonishment "just wait", we've
been waiting a long time and are not seeing a whole lot. Jobs appears
to blow hot and cold on the Mac's future prospects.
Major Ironies
The irony, of course, is that Macs are selling better than ever,
growing 35% year-over-year in May,
according to NPD. They're just no longer the bedrock of Apple's
business.
Fortune's Philip Elmer-DeWitt, in the fourth column in a series of previews
of Apple's results for Q3 2010, notes that between a Steve Jobs' June
keynote that ignored OS X followed by a media feeding frenzy in
July that also had nothing to do with it, we might almost forget that
Apple also makes a line of computers called Macintosh.
Elmer-DeWitt maintains that the Mac will be harder to ignore when
Apple reports its Q3 earnings this week. he estimates that Mac notebook
and desktop computer sales will have generated between $3.4 and $4.4
billion in the quarter, representing the company's second largest
revenue stream (after iPhone sales).
Actually, two great ironies are in play, the other being that much
of the fear and loathing among the Mac faithful has been catalyzed by
Jobs himself - in particular the Jobsian locked-down closed platform
doctrine applied to the iOS sector and concern that it could
metastasize to the OS X orbit, a prospect those of us who cherish
computing freedom recoil from.
Personally, I'm not much troubled by the slackened pace of OS X and
Mac hardware development. I'm a bit of a stick-in-the-mud anyway, as
evidenced by the fact that two of my three current production computers
are 10-year-old Pismo
PowerBooks (albeit significantly upgraded) running OS X 10.4 Tiger, and even my
newest machine is a Late
2008 2.0 GHz Unibody aluminum MacBook. Snow Leopard is a very
decent operating system, and I find it difficult to conceive how Apple
could improve very much on its various Mac hardware form factors -
especially the aluminum MacBook Pros.
Well, the MacBook Air
is getting a bit stale.
Closed Platform OS X?
It's the potential for software lockdowns and closed platform Macs
that worries me more looking ahead. It seems inevitable that the there
will be increasing convergence between the OS X and iOS worlds,
the operative conundrum being whether the Mac OS is destined for an App
Store-like future.
For now, I'm content to wait, and indeed I expect my next hardware
purchase will probably be a tablet, although I'm not yet
positive that will let it will be an
iPad. A machine Samsung is expected to release later this year with
the processing power of a netbook PC and heavy focus on I/O
connectivity will address most of the flexibility, versatility, and
expandability shortcomings I perceive as afflicting the iPad, and if
I've got to learn my way around a new OS anyway....
I'm thinking that an iPad or other tablet may well be able to serve
as a satisfactory replacement for at least one of the old Pismos,
although I remain to be convinced.
Switching to Linux
However, some heretofore Mac OS stalwarts are already jumping ship.
For example, Silicon Valley journalist and longtime Mac user Dan
Gillmor recently announced in a Salon essay entitled
This Mac devotee is moving to Linux that he's switching to Linux
running on a Lenovo ThinkPad. Gillmor notes that his new Lenovo ThinkPad X201 strikes an ideal
balance between portability and power, is much lighter than his MacBook
Pro, and has a much deeper feature set than the Mac.
Gillmor still thinks the Mac offers the best combination of hardware
and software, but he takes vigorous exception to what he characterizes
as Apple "pushing computer users as fast as it can toward a centrally
controlled computing ecosystem where it makes all the decisions and
takes a cut of every dollar spent," amounting to what, in his
estimation, is direct repudiation of Apple's own history and betrayal
of freedom of choice. He is concerned by the slowing pace of Mac OS
development and apprehensive that Apple will migrate its
command-and-control methods up the value chain to the Mac.
With Windows 7 also compromised by heavy-handed paternalism, Linux
is left standing as a
last bastion of computing freedom from topdown control by corporate
vested interests - an OS ecosystem philosophically committed to the
opposite of a "walled garden" and true freedom of choice.
If the Mac OS ever does become a locked-down closed system, I'll be
looking at Linux too,. But for the immediate future, I'll keep my
powder dry. Life on the Mac is still too good to seriously contemplate
imminent defection.
