10 posts tagged “apple”

I'm back, at last! Well, it's been a hectic couple of months and, without going in to all the details of when and how, I am now the proud father of a little girl who has, it has to be said, settled in amazingly well, but has taken my attention away from my blog here and other things that I would usually do i my spare time. In fact, it's simple to say that I have had no free time. I wouldn't change a thing, however - she's perfect and mother and baby are doing astoundingly well.

 So what's new in the world of tech and gaming that I have been tinkering with? Well, first up would be iPhone OS 3.0 - it's funny how a few minor tweaks can turn something cool but not so practical into an indispensable tool, but that's just what OS 3.0 has done. The ability to sync Mail and Calendar to my Google account without requiring extra steps or interconversion on my part, the ability to search the entire phone, the ability to Copy/Paste and, best of all, tethering (where you use your phone as a wireless modem for your laptop) have made my life so much easier - I can copy text from web pages into emails, I don't have to send all my work appointments to my Gmail account, then import to iCal on my laptop, then sync them by connecting my phone and, joy of joys, I can now surf the net on my laptop whilst on the train without requiring a pre-paid dongle for £100+ and pay an arm and a leg for data usage (or pay yet another monthly contract fee). Ok, if you are stupid, your network provider will figure it out and block your phone, but for checking emails and browsing eBay on the move, it totally transparent as its the same level of data trafic you'd get surfing on your iPhone.

 To be honest, the latest Apple Keynote didn't wow me so much - the iTunes news was cool (DRM free songs, etc), but the rest left me a bit cold. With the iPhone 3GS, which has video (big whoop) and is marginally quicker than the standard 3G iphone, I don't really feel the need to rush out and upgrade, unlike the jump from iPhone to iPhone 3G, and the cost of upgrade is potentially huge (O2 and AT&T are not letting consumers upgrade part-way through a contract, depsite the fact the handset will cost £300ish). I also think that, because there was no true "Killer" product (no new Mac Tablet, or iNewton, etc) that Apple probably missed Steve Jobs' presentation style more keenly. Steve is cool in a way that Bill Gates could only dream of and the slightly portly fellow who did this keynote (whos name escapes me temporarily) is obviously a committed board member, who follows the Church of Jobs - I believe he has assisted in a few keynotes before - just didn't have the same charisma. He spoke the same sort of words, but they sounded like a school teacher trying to be "down with the kids" - I truly believe that a lot of Apple's ability to weather the global financial crisis is going to hinge on Steve Jobs' health as without him, Apple struggles to maintain its ice-cool image and begins to look like a bunch of middle-aged men trying to hang on to the image they had in their College days. There is also the danger that, without Jobs, Apple could slip back into the Gil Amelio-era style of iterative design and focus-groups - Apple is only competitive when it stays ahead of the game in terms of design - anyone could build a Xeon-based PC for the cost of the MacPro, but it's the qualit of the design and build and the superlative OS X that gives Apple that edge - lose that hip feel, need to innovate and design culture and Apple would sink faster than SGI, who went from top dog in the Supercomputer and 3D workstation market to bankrupt in a very short space of time and their arena of competition was far smaller. Get well soon, Steve, for Apple's sake not just your own!

  Sticking with Apple, the other news is that I have had to scale back plans to buy a new MacBook Pro 17" and an iMac (babies cost a lot ) and have just purchased a replacement for my old G4 Powermac (which now lives with my Mother who is in love with her "new" Mac) and also for the Dual Xeon PC that has been the staple of my home office for about eight years. This machine (Dual 1.7GHz Xeons, 4GB RAMBUS memory, RAID SCSI 10k drives, DVDRW and NVidia AGP 6800 card) has been more than quick enough until recently, when I just started to feel that it was becoming a bit long in the tooth - as PCs go, it's been great - reliable and fast, but then again, you do get what oyu pay for and, with the huge cost of RAMBUS memory when new, this beast weighed in at £10,000, including a (then) huge 18.1" LCD screen, DVDRAM backup drive and SoundBlaster Audigy with LiveDrive (connection breakout box in a drive bay, basically). Oh, and the Wildcat 5110 workstation class graphics card cost £1500 but was obsolete within 18 Months...still, such is the way with PCs.If you're ever in the market for a PC-based workstation, I can really recommend Boxx - their customer service was amazing over the life of this machine, but I never really enjoyed owning this computer in the same way I have a soft spot for my Macs (and my SGIs). So, rather than put it on eBay and get a pittance for it, I'm turning it over to the network for use as a video and music server and I'm also sacrificing the beloved Blue Dalamatian iMac G3, which is going to live with my parents in their guest room so that visitors can surf the net and check emails, etc. I've already got a G3 Pismo laptop serving that purpose here...

  So, what did I buy? Well, after much hunting, I've just taken delivery of a Dual 2.0GHz PowerMac G5 with 6GB of RAM and the 256MB X800T ATI graphics card. The silver hot rod also has 500GB of drive storage, which means I should need to upgrade for a while. I was after a Quad 2.5GHz machine, but my budget wouldn't quite stretch (although, in true sod's law fashion, minutes after I'd paid for mine, I had someone offer a Quad for not much more - ah well) and whilst I could have gotten a dual 2.7GHz, I picked this one as it had a good solid spec with a lot of RAM (one thing the Boxx did teach me is that 4GB or more of memory can really be worth a good 500MHz of CPU speed, as you'll lose more time writing to disk than you would waiting for a slower CPU to read out of RAM). I'm just awaiting the 22" widescreen TFT that was sent separately and I'll see if I can't get some photos or video of it all when I'm up and running.

 Given that I have a PS3, I'm not too fussed about not having a Gaming PC - I'd like to play Empire Total War, but, frankly, it's more important that the machine I use is stable and lets me do my work on it; I will work from home on it more than I will get to play on it - if I have leisure time it will most likely be spent with my family and games will be played in the lounge, socially, on the PS3.

 The other big reason I am happy with the G5 is that I'm not interested in running OSX 10.5 (Leopard), as it has no support for the old Classic applications and games that I have many of - I'm more likely to want to run the apps I spent money on than games I won't have time to play or be forced to pay out a fortune to update apps that still do the work I require just so they will work on OSX 10.5.

 I know that there is a good business case for dropping the legacy code now that Apple are aligned with Intel, but how many people bought a G5 at a cost of £4000+ that is still useful (and fast) as a work machine only to find it basically being phased out after two years or so - Leopard doesn't support anything less than an 800MHz G4 (according to Apple, anyway, although it might run if you hack the install), but Snow Leopard is due to drop all support for PowerPC systems, which means that machines that are still not end-of-life in studios and small businesses are effectively being made obsolete.

 Not since System 7 dropped support for the original Macintosh machines (68000 CPU series), forcing users to buy LCs or Macintosh Classics, has there been such a cull - by the time OSX rolled around, anything pre-PowerPC chip was basically landfill and most of the Beige G3 machies could run it, so it was a gradual process. A small business (and I know because I am, and have been, one) does not pay out £6k for a top-spec Mac and large screen only to replace it three or four years later - that machine will stay in service until it is literally of no practical use or it breaks down. It might not be the go-to machine after two eyars, but it will be used by junior staff, or as a back up, or for temps...then it might be used as a server or as a render-node, or even just to surf the net and write letters, but it will still be in use. Hell, last year I even saw a Blue and White G3 tower being put to use by an art department who needed all hands to help get a project out the door - sure, it wasn't quick and it ran an older version of Photoshop, but it still actually did the work and that's what businesses care about. The gamer culture of must-have-latest-and-greatest which is vaunted by the PC fanboys in their breating of Apple products is actually not sensible for business users, as those uber-quick gaming rigs tend to be unstable and unproven - agencies and the like need machines that are quick enough but, more importantly, are rock-solid and dependable - hence the proliferation of Apple machines.

 I guess that there is an incentive for Apple to force people to buy the new Intel machines, but there are a lot of XServe or G5 PowerMacs in academic use (Virginia Tech built a supercomputer for $5.2Million using them) and the custom apps on them either may not recompie on Intel x86 or it might be cost-prohibitive, so what about those users? I know for a fact that the media editing department of a multinational oil company still has a whole bunch of G5 towers under their desks, with only those which die beyond repair being replaced with Mac Pros - the investment is huge and corporate finance dictates that as long as the machines are useful, they won't be replaced and, unfortunately for those trying to sell you a new Intel Mac, Apple machines stay useful for far longer - Snow Leopard feels to me like an artificial attempt to force corporate buyers to replace machines in order for OS support contracts to stay in place, etc. In short, it feels a little cynical - what happened to Apple only phasing out sstem support when it was no longer a viable OS for the platform?

 Given that my old G4 which, although fitted with a Radeon card, larger hard drives and a lot more memory, was only a 400MHz CPU and still felt snappy enough for most work (ok, it chopped a bit when rendering out video and also could take a while to resize HUGE images) - especially Flash and web design work, where the files tend to be smaller, and the Dual 1.7GHz Xeon box was always quick because of the RAM and the drives, I can honestly say that my G5 will be the core of my studio for some time to come - especially as I want to be able to run my Classic apps. I dare say that in a year or so when I have some decent spare cash, I would like to get a Mac Pro 8 Core with all the bells and whistles, but actually....I think I'd much rather buy 5 G5 Quads for the same money and get more work done on a distributed workflow.

  I know it sounds stupid, but I have always preferred the RISC CPUs of MIPS on Silicon Graphics and Motorola/IBM's PowerPC on Macintosh to anything Intel have come up with. The Intel machines tended to run at faster cycles, but their instruction set and bad architecture tended to make them hot and not actually that quick in real-world terms (same goes for AMD). Basically, the G5 I have was proven to be 40% faster in real-world terms than a Dual 3.06GHz Xeon PC (which given I am only now running down a dual Xeon 1.7GHz machine gives an idea of how much more competent the Xeon workstation-class boxes are compared to a normal PC). I know for a fact that my Core Duo machine running at 1.6GHz (a £2000 Sony Vaio) was nowhere near as quick and, whilst I can get a quad core 3.0GHz Xeon for £LOTS, I really cannot justify the expense on a new machine when £500 on eBay has just upgraded my studio to be at least 50% more efficient for when I am working and made an infinite upgrade for my leisure time as I've got more power in less space and have freed up room for miniatures that need painting, the coffee maker that has been languishing in a cupboard and things are way more organised now I haven't got the extra machines taking up space.

 Life is never simple and now the money which was going to buy my new Mac G5, a new mic for podcasting (the Blue Snowball...mmm, yum!), a new set of paints and brushes for my miniatures, some clothes, some PS3 games and Bluray movies and a few days out and meals for myself and my lovely wife (and baby) has now been ear-marked for two single beds for the guest bedroom (not that we have that many guests), more baby clothes (our house looks like a branch of Mothercare collided with a Baby Gap already), a sewing machine (why?) and shopping spree around Babies'R'Us. Still, at least I have my PowerMac, the paints and the prospect of a few nice dinners....can't be all bad!

 As the Euromillions peaked at over £85Million this week, I thought I'd take a punt and bought a ticket (of course playing when there's a mere £15Million in the jackpot would just be a waste of money...). Of course, I didn't in, but I did spend an interesting half an hour contemplating what I'd buy if I did. Of course, I'd build my wife and I the house of our dreams - traditional oak framed manor house with Art Deco interior, using reclaimed tiles and bricks, etc, to make the house look well-aged. I'm not saying we've thought about much, but I can even tell you where the door handles come from. So, we have somewhere to live, but what to put in it?

 Well, there is the question of cars - we'd need a couple to cover all eventualities. We're good for a saloon as we already have a well-loved and cherished Jaguar that my wife calls Honoria, after the forceful girl in the Wodehouse books - I don't know why, but somehow it makes sense. So, what other four-wheeled delights would there be? A Veyron, perhaps? Perhaps - but what is it for? It's too flabby and large to be a back-road scorcher, but it's got zero luggage room for continent-crushing touring. A DB9 or even a Merc SLR is far better suited to whisking myself and the wife off for a weekend. It's too refined to give that seat-of-the-pants driving experience you'd wat from a sports car...ultimately, it's just about two things - the top speed and the price tag and, much as I think it's a lovely piece of engineering, I think it's just basically a £3Million game of Top Trumps. With this in mind, I think I'd pick up a DB9 or a Bently GT for the touring side of things, a Ferrari 430 Spider for the backroads and a Jag SS100 replica from Suffolk Sportscars for sunny weekends and picnics. Oh, and I'd still have only spend about 1/3 of the cost of a Veyron at most. Add a Jaguar XJ220 to the collection and maybe a green or orange Lambo (Murcielago) or an orange Zonda for my wife (god bless her, she does love the lairy Italian hypercars). Finally, my wife would need a Range Rover for snow/horsebox-pulling/trolling around the farmland. So, we have the cars and the house...and we've still only spent maybe £5Million. £10Million including building stables, buying a horse and associated ephemera for my wife, kitting out a nice gym and building the indoor heated pool...

 Ok, let's just say we got a quarter share of the jackpot - a mere £21,250,000. We've spent under half of it and we're already living like royalty, albeit without the claims of racism and detachment from reality...

 So, let's up the ante and be generous. Let's buy houses for our families - £1Million to each set of parents and, say £500,000 to my brother-in-law. We've still got £8.75Million to account for...ok, put £2Million in a high interest account and live off the interest (10% flat rate gives an annual income of £200,000 tax-free for life, over an above any earnings). What next? £1Million to charity, I think - £250,000 to Great Ormond Street, £250,000 Macmillan Nurses and £500,000 to Comic Relief should help a few people, at least. Well, with the remaining £5.75 Million, what is there to do?

 Well as with all computer geeks, there's the techno-porn list - the ultimate haven of computer hardware. That list, for me, would look a little like this:

NeXTs:

NeXTStation, NeXTStation Color, NeXTStation Turbo, NeXTStation Turbo Color, Next Cube (with accellerator, maximum RAM, 4 GB hdd, CDROM, Two NeXTDimension boards and a second motherboard), all with monitors (3 in the case of the Cube). Add a NeXT color and a NeXT laser printer, too. Hell, the Internet as we know it now was basically created on this hardware. Punches well above its weight as far as being useful with a really slow CPU.

SGIs:

Crimson Reality Engine, Tezro - quad CPU, Onyx 2 Infinite Reality deskside, O2 with 1600sw monitor (or should I say, another O2). I like Irix and part of me really wants to run some 3D work on the Infinite Reality hardware...the Crimson would just be there for the love of it and the Tezro and O2 would be used for Maya and Video work, etc.

Apple:

PowerMac Quad G5 - max out the RAM and storage, add a top-flight GFX card and a 24" display. It's fast enough for Flash, Photoshop and the like, more than quick enough for Final Cut and Combustion and still runs my old Classic games and apps, so I wouldn't want a maximum spec MacPro. Oh, what the hell, throw in a IIfx and a Classic for giggles, too - they can keep my iMac company.

PC:

The temptation here is to go for a single all-in-one wonder PC, but we're not exactly stretched for budget, so I think I'd go for a Tesla-based GPU machine (the Nvidia Personal Supercomputer, for example), dual booting both XP Pro64 and Linux 64 (running OpenStep/GnuStep on Ubuntu seems the best bet) - this would probably default to linux, running as a cluster/render box for the SGI machines and as a really fast server and SETI@Home, etc, box on the Unix side of things. When booted to Windows, it'd be used for transcoding DVDs, etc, at about a million miles per hour.

On the leisure side of computing (not that video editing, coding and writing tech docs is not my idea of fun), I think I'd like something truly funky - something I could game on, watch movies on and do some creative tinkering on and which is relatively future-proof. Ideally, it should be easy on the eye, as this would be in my office/den for home-working, not in the "tech bunker" with all the other stuff. Enter Alienware and their ALX series of "luxury" gaming PCs. I'd probably go for one of their green cases, as it's different and suits the case design (although the black looks good), I'd also be tempted by one of Panoram's lovely multiscreen displays, as I'd have the graphics output to power this bad-boy. In fact, I might also be tempted to use one on the Tesla machine, because this screen is so nice.

 I've become very weary of laptops lately - I have a lovely old Pismo but I need a new battery for it and that will cost probably more than I paid for the machine. i have a white MacBook for work and I really don't get on with it - the sharp edge to the wrist-rest area, the awful keyboard, the constant dropping of wireless signal and the crashing of Safari and Firefox on a regular basis under OS X 10.5 - it's also got less 3d capable graphics than my 10 year old Pismo. The Vaio is nice enough, but is now my wife's machine, despite my upgrading her desktop PC, as she likes it to shop online, browse Youtube, etc, whilst on the sofa. The Dualcore CPU and 256mb GeForce card are rather wasted now she's stopped playing Medieval Total War, but I'm not one to complain. I don't like the new MacBook, I'm not exactly bowled over by the specs/price of the new MacBook Pro (let's face it, they are basically high-end PC notebooks nowadays), so I could see myself coming round to Alienware again, but the machines aren't as funky as they used to be, as they dropped the rounded "alien face" case in green in favour of a more "tech" orientated all-black system that looks like a Toshiba with lights...it's smart, but not cool, I guess. Still, anything that allows me to use SLi graphics in my lap is fine with me...

 So, whilst it staggers me to even think it, I'd not be buying an Apple for either of my three highest-spec machines. Which, as an Apple/NeXT die-hard, is rather worrying to me - how is it that the MacPro is under-powered, or the new MacBook so uninspiring?

 I think the reason is basically that, in standard trim, these machines are great - they are great for designers, or for the office/studio, where they offer more than enough grunt, combined with ease of use and stability. The problem comes in that the hardware is not cutting-edge - there's no 2GB NVidia 295GTX your MacPro, despite it running 8 Cores and 16GB of RAM, so you end up with weak graphics ability for the cost. Even if you stuff the Mac full of cards, you'd still only get 4 512mb 180GTX cards, which is less than impressive when you consider the machine would be settnig you back £7k or more...

 So once we've wired the house up for high speed wireless and internet and have installed a UPS array in the basement to ensure we don't lose power, what's the point of all this? Well, the Alienware is unashamedly for play-time - it's an ultimate gaming rig to allow games like Crysis or Empire Total War to run at huge detail and with zero frame-rate drop. It's the toy I've always promised myself and never bought...oh, and I love the idea of being able to watch a DVD on one screen, surf the net on another and be messing around in photoshop on a third with no slowdown. Basically, anything that makes me feel like Cypher from the Matrix is fine with me!

 Ok, I have an admission to make - I’m not the guy who was cool at school. In fact, I’m happy to say that I would have fitted the geek label quite well. I was into wargames, Heavy Metal and computers, even though I did play sport and get out of the house once in a while.
 
 I used to avidly read Personal Computer World, instead of caring about football and I used to dream of owning some of the more exotic hardware in order to pursue my ambitions of being the next Steve Jobs or, more likely, Woz. So, it should come as no surprise that as soon as I started to earn some decent money, I started to indulge myself in my favourite dream machines - those made by Silicon Graphics.

 

 I grew up in an age of DOS, when Windows was no further along than 3.0 (if you were lucky) and when having to know your EMS from your XMS and what to do if your himem.sys didn’t work. I like a good command line, but most of all, I like a good OS. I didn’t get to have much exposure to Unix as a kid, but when I did, I loved it.
 
 Here was a multi-tasking OS that was network-savvy and (usually) stable. In Irix, it also had a user-friendly GUI (hell, if my father can watch a tutorial and be editing videos within five minutes, anyone can use it!). More importantly, it was streamlined to be usable by creative-types. It was PERFECT (ok, not perfect, but near as dammit!). There was, however, a slight downside - the cost. In an age when a 386 PC (with 2mb of RAM, VGA graphics, Adlib-clone sound and 50mb hard drive) cost around £1400, the stunning Silicon Graphics Iris Indigo (even in basic spec 33MHz R3000 form), cost roughly £13000. If you wanted the ultimate workstation (an Iris Crimson), the cost would be measured in the £50,000-£100,000 region.

 

 However, even magazines felt that the Indigo was good value, as it far outclassed contemporary PCs (and, to a lesser extent, Macintosh machines) - it offered 3d, video, multimedia, easy networking and great sound and display quality, not to mention outstripping the desktop PC for number-crunching tasks. It would be the ideal computer for me….aside from the fact that I was a broke teenager and there was no way on God’s Green Earth that my dad was going to stump up the cash for me…so I ended up with a  PC that was fine for what it was, but never really floated my boat…then eventually, I migrated to Macintosh (which is no bad thing).

 

 Speaking of Macintosh, my other object of desire when I was a teenager was another Steve Jobs product - the NeXTStation. I know that a lot of people go insane over the NeXTCube (and, let’s be honest, I wouldn’t turn down a Dimension-board-equipped Turbo Cube), but I always liked the elegance of the NeXTStation - in fact, I rather liked the Pizza-box format for a workstation (later on in life, my love of SGI would be rekindled by a reliable little Indy I used whilst working as a software developer). I liked the Color version (although it had less colours than the Color NeXTCube), as it had a crisp display, was responsive enough to be useful and was truly multi-tasking. Oh, and NeXTStep is like Irix but even simpler to use. If you go to YouTube, take a look at this video and then try to think what PCs were like in 1990. In fact, NeXT was so far ahead of the curve that people are only starting to come to grips with the concept of interpersonal computing now, some eighteen years later. No wonder that OS X is basically NeXTStep with a fancy dress on - all of the tools required to be an internet-savvy, collaborative operating system were there waiting.
 

 Think about it - in 1990, most of us were drooling over Atari STs and Amiga 500s. If you had a PC, it was likely to be a 286, or maybe a 386. Only the über-rich had a 486 to play with. Even by the time NeXT released version 3.0 of its OS, in around 1994, you were still unlikely to have access to a PC with a CPU over 33MHz, or with more than 2MB of RAM. Modems were rare and if you had one for your home computer, you might dial in to a bulletin board to swap some ASCII art, or maybe a demo program (which was going to be less than 720k in size - one floppy disk). But here was NeXT (remember that Tim Berners-Lee basically created the modern internet on one of these boxes), talking about sending a “mail” over the “internet” that contained postscript fonts, embedded images, embedded documents (that could be linked so that they updated on every recipients computer automatically if you changed it), as well as the ability to add voice annotation to the email natively (a feature that is both highly useful and yet to be implemented on any “modern” email client that I am aware of). This sort of thing was not far off of science fiction at that point in time.

 

 

 In fact, aside from the processor speed, I cannot think of a better system for actually setting up an office/business user group - document sharing is easy, single documents can be updated and change on every machine on the network that downloaded it automatically (like an offline CMS, almost), the graphic quality was high and the display crisp, the bundled OS applications were actually useful for getting work done and it offered raw computing ability/versatility with the most complete user interface ever made. Oh, and you could literally create a custom database application in ten minutes using the built-in tools. In fact, even today, I’d be tempted to say that, for most work tasks, a NeXT network (possibly with a quick Sun or SGI server for storage and Web Serving) would be an ideal setup from a workflow point of view - after all, with Windows 7 and Google pushing for “cloud computing”, we are merely revisiting the dumb terminal idea with a Web 2.0 veneer. Or catching up with Interpersonal Computing some 18 years after NeXT created it.
 
 NeXT was a glorious failure - it’s elegant hardware was lovingly made, yet outrageously priced. Or that’s the myth anyway - I think when you look at its competitors - SGI, Sun, etc - it was highly competitive in its pricing ($13995 for a maxed-out NextCube Color Turbo with NextDimension board, etc, was the same area as the lowest-spec SGI Indigo, after all). I think the problem was that all the hype in the press was introducing NeXT as the “new Apple”, which meant people, including the same Press, viewed NeXT through consumer-level glasses, thus vilifying the systems as over-priced when compared to a PC (or even a Macintosh). If you take that with a pinch of salt and look at the usability, the value to business (Unix machines tend to be more reliable and stay in use for longer periods than a PC - Macintosh do similar, but to a lesser extent), etc, they worked out rather favourably. Of course, once the hype tarred NeXT as expensive folly, it meant that there was a lack of popular support for the hardware and it quickly withdrew to software-only, before being bought out by Apple as part of Steve Jobs’ return to the company fold. Having said that, even the latest version of OS X is just an evolution of NeXTStep - in fact it’s quite good fun to watch the old videos and then go and see what features have been updated for OS X and, thus, to guess what’s been left out and what might pop up at a later date (voice annotation in email, anyone?).
 
 As a life-long computer geek (hey, I’m not afraid to admit it), I’ve spent a lot of time and some considerable money collecting the systems I lusted after as a teenager, with a few exceptions (I’m still trying to find/beg an SGI Crimson, an SGI Onyx2 or Origin 2000 and a Macintosh Color Classic, for example), but the one I most look forward to sitting down in front of is the NeXTStation Color Turbo, once I can find one (or if some kind soul gives me one!). It’s a machine that was truly ahead of its time and which I am truly fond of. I just wish it had more exposure that wasn’t biased towards the “Steve Jobs blew a billion dollars on making this and it cost four times what a Macintosh did” side of the story - the truth is that NeXT created an OS that was literally ten years or more ahead of the competition, matched it to elegant hardware that worked well. Ok, the CPUs weren’t so fast, but they were quick enough for a workstation - you’d let your server cluster do any rendering, etc.

 The problem NeXT had with their machines was that people viewed them like Macs or PCs, not as high-end workstation for a Unix cluster. Viewed as part of a collaborative workflow with a central render-farm/server, I think that a 15 year-old NeXTStation would still be a viable machine for DTP, software development or scientific work, for example.
 
 I would love to get a NeXTStation for office use, not to mention for the hell of it, but now I haven’t the spare cash (what with a baby due in the next month) to pay the exorbitant rates asked by some people and I’ve yet to find a kindly soul who wishes to donate one to me. I guess that’s one computer nerd dream that will have to remain unfulfilled for the time being…

 Ok, so I'm due to change my mobile soon (contract expires at last!) and I had thought that I would get an iPhone, as they seem to be the default choice at the moment, but I've had second thoughts.

 Now, I like Apple's products as a rule - they are usually easy to use, stylish and well-made, but the iPhone just doesn't grip me, even after it's much-vaunted 3G makeover. The simple fact is that it makes a very expensive phone, or a very poor PDA, but it doesn't actually do enough to warrant me giving up a decent phone and my iPod Touch. I know it can sync with Microsoft Exchange now, but email is not the be-all and end-all. Where is the handwriting recognition for faster note-taking? Where is the pocket office suite to allow Word, Excel and Powerpoint to be viewed and/or edited (at least Apple could bring out an iPhone/iPod Touch version of iWork, if they don't want to go down the MS Office route)? In short, the iPhone is not a PDA, it's not even really a smart phone. In fact, what it is frequently escapes me - it's just an iPhone that makes calls. Think about it - you can already check email, watch video and play games on your iPod Touch, but that's not a PDA - it lacks a lot of PDA functions. Exactly like the iPhone.

 So, what am I going to get? Well, I currently like the idea of the latest Motorola Razr or a similar slimline flip-phone and I'm digging out some batteries for my old Newton Messagepad 110 - it'll do as a PDA until I think of a better option...

 

 

 I know that we've had the eight-core Mac Pros and the the MacBook Air and, in fairness, the aluminium iMac (a machine I think is stunning, but I really don't like the keyboard), but they aren't, well, new.

Bear with me, as I think this needs some explanation - yes, we have had a myriad new products, but we haven't had anything to change the world in the same way that the original Macintosh did. Or, I suppose, the Macintosh II in the way it overturned the entire print and design industry and made Desktop Publishing mainstream. The iPhone is lovely, especially now it has 3G and GPS, but it's really nothing more than a logical extension of the Newton, although the Newton had handwriting recognition and the iPhone doesn't. I love my Blue Dalmation iMac G3, but the all-in-one form factor and simple, easy-to-use-yet-powerful design ethos are merely an update of the original Macintosh and all successive iMacs are iterative, rather than revolutionary. The Mac Pro is based on the Power Macintosh, which evolved from the Quadra series which grew from the ashes of the Macintosh II, whilst the consumer/low-end systems went from Macintosh to....well, Macintosh Classic, Colour Classic, LC, Performa (essentially reboxing the same technology), to the iMac. All compact, all usefully quick without setting your hair on fire and all pretty well designed and screwed together.

 So where is the new paradigm shift? It's easy to watch the launch of the original Macintosh on youtube and think of it as hokey and rather sweet in a "aww, look at them going mad over something with less power than my phone" manner, but in 1984 the technology being unveiled was a world apart. In those days, even so-called "Personal" computers required expertise to use, as you loaded your games via a command line, or had to use a DOS Prompt to find your text documents and disparate interfaces and menus for your different packages. To put it in context, your PC keyboard used to have a clear plastic flap at the top under which you'd put your inlay (that shipped with each package you used) that told you what the 12 function keys did (at least three commands per key - the key, the key with Shift held and the key with ALT held). The Macintosh changed all that at a stroke. A child could use it, it worked logically and the interface was consistent across all packages. One of the least thought-about and most beneficial things that Microsoft hijacked when they pillaged Apple's IP during the creation of Windows was that idea of a consistent set of commands - CTRL+C for copy, CTRL+S for save, etc.

  It is very hard for those people who grew up after the fallout of the introduction of Macintosh to understand just how far-reaching its impact was - they expect things like copy/paste and drag and drop. They expect their standard key commands to be consistent and they really fail to grasp the fact that all of it, every single thing they now see as "computing" is, in some way, linked back to that little beige box that spoke like Stephen Hawking and played a bleepy version of "Chariots of Fire" when an excitable guy with floppy hair and glasses pulled it out of a bag. Yes, I am sure that people will come out of the woodwork to point out that Xerox Parc had developed the bones of the WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer) interface and that, no doubt, some guy had created a full windowing, multitasking interfaces for UNIX in the 1970s that I don't know about, but the original Macintosh created the desktop computer revolution as we know it.

  The Newton created the first usable PDA (before we even know we needed one) and the Mac Portable was, despite the execution, the first attempt to make a portable computer that was a full equivalent to a desktop machine (remember, at the time you could buy an Collosus PC which had a 10" CRT monochrome screen and an 8086 CPU and a couple of floppy drives and that was about the size of a suitcase, so the Mac Portable wasn't that bad).

So, the question remains, what's the next paradigm shift? Personally, I don't think it's the "cloud", with everything on the web and computers just accessing information and applications when needed - the restriction of bandwidth precludes any idea of it being faster than a decent machine on your desk working with local files. Besides, we already have web-based applications and data storage, so it's nothing new. Touch and gesture control is just a way of integrating the trackpad or mouse to the screen, so it doesn't really bring anything new and whilst we are already seeing some convergence with data push/pull from handheld/phone to web to desktop and back, you could sync your Newton to your Macintosh many moons ago. I think that where we'll see the next revolution will be in convenience. Think about it - at the moment you might have a MacPro or iMac, a MacBook of some kind for working away from your desk and an iPhone/PDA phone for keeping in touch when you are travelling. This means you have at least three devices, but imagine if you had something like and iMac with a Wacom Cintiq (the display/tablet) that acted as your keyboard/input and document "dock". If you wanted to save a web page you drag it off the main screen and onto an area of the "tablet", which might have a keyboard attached (given how thin the new mac keyboard is, it could slide out). When you then go out of the office, you unplug the tablet and take it with you and it's a fully functioning mobile Mac - low power CPU (like a MacBook Air), maybe even built-in 3G, with an iPhone-esque interface for your stored web pages, documents, etc, but which has fully-functioning desktop applications and, say, 20gb of flash drive - enough to store a few tunes, your presentations and your documents for the meeting, all in a tough A4 sized slab that fits in your bag neatly, unlike a laptop - hell it could even have solar cells to top up the battery. If it's got 3G, you could bluetooth a headest to it and make calls, then get back to the office and dock it back to the main part of your Mac where it automatically updates your files with any changes made to the copies on the tablet and recharges the tablet battery.

From a users perspective, your work becomes seamless, you're not having to use USB sticks, or email yourself files to transfer from desktop to laptop and you don't even need a phone. It's nothing new, really, as it's a logical extension of the old Powerbook Duo/Duo Dock system, but I think it's something that would appeal to home users (surf the net from the sofa or stream movies to the tablet whilst the main machine burns tunes to CD or suchlike) and business users, for the reasons described previously, alike.

I know that it's technically not a new paradigm in computing in the same way that the original Macintosh was, but I think that something that is so flexible and useful would become indispensible to consumers, students and professionals and the fact you wouldn't need to physically transfer files from one machine to another takes a lot of the pain out of using a computer for practical tasks and makes it much more acceptable to those resistant to technology. I think it would be the first step towards making the Macintosh as ubiquitous as the TV remote or the microwave - which is no bad thing, as such a product would form a sound base for stronger Pro-grade machines, or even tie-ins with car manufacturers to create in-car Mac/GPS entertainment systems, for example.

After a fairly heavy weekend, this seemed like a sensible suggestion, but I'm willing to hear your point of view!

As we all know, Microsoft used the tagline "what do you want to do today?" (or "where do you want to go today?" in web-related ads) in a lot of PR, whilst Apple tended to stick with "Think Different" or, in earlier advertisements, "Tomorrow's PC, today" or variations on that theme. So, putting aside all the hyperbole, it seems that both are focusing on pushing the user experience, as opposed to the hardware itself. Windows' advertising aims itself at the audience by asking what you want and, by implication, suggesting that Windows has the ability to get you there. Apple tedns to position itself as a bit left-field, more creative in its thinking and thus better able to understand your needs. In fact, in reality, its products do tend to meed the users' expectations far better, so maybe it's a case of the ads just reporting on the reality. However, all this talk of advertising is getting me away from the crux of what I wanted to talk about, which is that, whilst I love older Macs, just how useful are they? Should I stop lusting after a quad G5 with full RAM and top-spec graphics and settle for a brand new top-of the line iMac instead, given the cost of G5s at the moment? Is there any value in buying last-gen technology when the current stuff is available from such (comparitively) low costs?

 Well, maybe not in the case of a G5, as it's no longer the top-dog workhorse and prices are artificially high from all those private owners who are trying to recoup the cost of purchase and are, thus, maybe being a little unrealistic in their acceptance of depreciation. For example, I bought a Xeon-powered Windows workstation in 2002 that cost in excess of £10000 (for a business I was running). It had 4GB of RAMBUS memory, a 128mb Wildcat graphics card, Audigy soundcard with I/O box, etc and is still usefully quick today. However, it's worth about £4.50 if I stick it on eBay and I think the G5 towers are suffering the same thing - they're more than just useful (in fact, only those who are doing feature film editing or working on high resolution images for use on billboards are likely to call them slow, but adding the full compliment of RAM would help with that). However, if I can buy an old quad G5 with monitor and it costs £1000-£1500 by the time the bidding stops, why wouldn't I just save up a bit more and get a new quad-core, dual CPU  MacPro? Or buy an iMac 24" with dual-core 2.8GHz and 512mb Nvidia graphics? I'm not being a nay-sayer, as I still love the old G5, but the fact is that people are being unrealistic in the market value at the moment, so I'd steer clear for a year until they drop through the floor. They'll still be able to edit your video, or tinker with your photos, but you won't pay through the nose for it.

 So why do I like the G5 so much? Well, aside from the design, which is a thing of Bauhaus-ian beauty inside and out, the fact is that I like the ability to fire up Classic mode and use all my old applications without the need to run an emulator. Not only that, but as someone whose home computing is mainly web-surfing, blogging and the occasional bit of image and video work, a G5 is more than adequate. Even my desire to get back to doing some Flash and Director coding is not going to tax it. Also, I'm always nervous about my main workstation being an all-in-one, as if the screen dies, I can't work, whereas if my old PowerMac screen died, I could change the monitor and carry on. That, and I'd really like the 30" display on my desk for artwork and layout work. Then again, the 24" iMac would be fine for that, too. Basically, whilst I am what would be considered a power user, the G5 would do all I need and be fast enough. Hell, my old G4 was fast enough. This is really the point - do you want the latest, greatest, oh-my-god-it's-so-fast machine to boast to your friends, or do you want to actually get stuff done. If it's the latter, then most Macs still running are useful (for a given value of useful). You can word process, do some DTP or web design, look at your photos, listen to tunes and edit/watch a movie. Who can honestly say they use a home computer for much else? Especially if you own a PS3 for gaming? Not me, that's for sure - I want something reliable (so I don't come in from work and then get stressed during my leisure time by a computer that won't work), well designed and that is quick enough.

 So what is "quick enough"?

 Last post, I talked about my love of Silicon Graphics machines, but the truth is that the central processors in them are slow. The machines are usable because of the huge array of custom hardware taking work away from the CPU, but in the Megahertz wars, they are trounced by cheap Intel chips. What they are, though, is stable. my old Iris Indigo was only ever rebooted when software installations required it. My Powermac G4 was also stable - working quite happily for weeks at a time until Software Update asked me to reboot. This means that renders can be left overnight if needs be, safe in the knowledge that they'll be done in the morning. If I left my windows machine to do that, it'd crash and reboot or run slower and slower until I restarted because Windows leaves junk in the memory and bloats its registry. So, in real world terms, the Windows machine was screamingly quick, but because it would require at least one restart a day, the truth is you only got the same amount of work done. Now, if the MacPro has all of the clock speed and none of the instability of a high end Windows machine, then it will be a thing of wonder, but in the real world, I think I'd get a good two or three years out of a quad G5 mac, because I don't really care if it takes an extra half hour to render out my hour-long film - I'll be billing for time if it's work and drinking tea and chatting to my wife if it's something I am doing as a hobby. In fact, the ability to let it chug away whilst I stare out of the window is a plus point in my books - it forces me to slow down and relax a little, as opposed to tearing along at 90mph all day, then getting in and doing the same in my leisure time. "Quick enough" means that a machine doesn't take two hours to respond to a key-press, but that it might take a little while to think about some hugely intensive task. It means you might not be able to do fifty things at once all at a million miles per hour, but that you would surely be able to do the tasks you were trying to do. Given that criteria, the G5 is perfect for me and, depending on the cost, I hope to pick up a quad G5 with maximum RAM and top end graphics ASAP.

 So, there you go - buy a G5 and avoid a heart attack. Surely that's a tagline that someone can use?

 A while ago I posted about the little G3 iMac and the PowerBook G3 I bought and how I thought they were great, which I am sure you remember and, given that I am typing this on the PowerBook, I think it's safe to say I haven't changed my mind just yet. So, when I was recently left to my own devices for a week, I thought I'd investigate this passion for so-called "obsolete" computer stuff. Or, more precisely, Macintosh stuff.

 There is a very good reason I stayed away from the PC side of things - they are not in any way inspiring. I can recall my first 396SX machine, but I don't wish to relive that experience. No way am I going back to voluntarily creating DOS batch files just to get a game to work, or having to manually edit Config.sys or Autoexec.bat files in order to get Windows to work, no matter how cool I thought "Catacomb: The Abyss" or "The Rocketeer" were. Besides, I can happily run them on my Vaio as it's still fundamentally x86 architecture.

 So, what's so appealing about old Mac stuff? Well, from a purely personal perspective, it goes back to the time I was going to get a computer for studying and doing my GCSE in Computer Studies on. Pocket money, birthday and christmas money and a generous father meant I had about £1500 saved up and I tried out a Macintosh Classic and an LC with 13" colour monitor. Compared to the 12MHz 286-based RM Nimbus harddisc-less machines at school (and they were good for the time, so how old do I feel?), both the Macs felt light years ahead in what they could do, but I couldn't afford the LC, the screen, software and a printer, and my dad wasn't keen on me spending hours in front of a 9" black and white screen. In the end, I was cajoled into buying the 386 and, whilst it did the job, I always felt a bit let down.

 Having been a teenage computer geek, I obviously read Personal Computer World regularly (it used to be interesting and covered Mac and Unix as well as DOS - windows was only at 3.0/3.1 at that point) and I harboured a desire to work on machines such as NeXT, Sun and, the Holy Grail - a Silicon Graphics workstation. Unix, with a friendly GUI-led operating system that had multimedia, 3d and digital audio support in 1992? That was the stuff of dreams. In fact, a review of the Iris Indigo stated that whilst the Indigo cost nearly £15,000, as opposed to an average of £1,000 for a 386/486 PC, it was definitely worth the money as it was far more productive than trying to do the work on 10 or more PCs.

 

 Later in life, whilst working as a software developer, I worked on SGI machines and they were truly as good as I'd hoped they would be. I bought myself an SGI Indigo on eBay for £150 (MIPS R4400 processor upgrade at 150MHz, with 192Mb of RAM and the Elan graphics, with 21" inch monitor) some time ago and I loved it.

 Given that it was made in 1993, my dad (who is now 66 and who has zero experience of video editing) was able to find his way around and tinker with some video clips within ten minutes. I would personally say that the only systems worth using are a Mac running OSX (with Classic supported), a NeXT machine or an SGI machine running IRIX. Anything else is compromised.

 Eventually, I bought myself a swanky new Powermac G4 (I was a early adopter of the G4) running OS9, then later OS X. It was everything I hoped it would be - usable, stable, reliable and a joy to work on. To put it in perspective, I later ran my own business and the Mac G4 was the preferred choice for video editing despite the fact it was sat next to a hugely expensive dual Xeon workstation with 4GB of memory. It just worked better and gave less hassle. Not only that, but I could probably sell the G4 setup for £200 today, despite it's age, whereas the windows machine is essentially worthless. Look on eBay for a used Powermac G5 (a machine that is some 4 or more years old now) and compare that to the cost of a Dell running a four year old Pentium. The price difference is down to the fact that Macs are usable for far longer (their obsolescence is far longer in coming). Windows bloats and bloats and you spend so much time fighting bad OS coding and built-to-a-price hardware, whereas the expensive (comparitively) Apple machines are still good as a workhorse years down the line. If you're more concerned about getting something done than about having the latest new toy, then buy a Mac. You won't ever regret it.

 So, what does this have to do with my original point? Well, aside from an urge to pick up a Mac Classic (or, ideally, a Colour Classic II) for the sake of nostalgia, my love of my old Powerbook G3 means that I'm not likely to be playing Quake 4 anytime soon (ok, I have a PS3 and a PSP, but I was talking about computers!), so I looked into the world of abandonware games. My word, there's a ton of cool things you can play on your old Mac and, because in those days we thought the Megadrive (Sega Genesis to our US friends) was graphically amazing, it means gameplay had to be more engrossing and plots had to mean something. With that in mind, I've explored the universe of Cosmic Osmo (this is the first game any child of mine will play!), along with Broken Sword, Monkey Island 1 and 2, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Day of the Tentacle and Sam and Max.

 

 If you noticed a pattern, then you're right - they are all graphical point and click adventures, a genre which is sadly underwhelming nowadays, but in the days when these were made, they were the nearest you'd get to playing a film and enjoying it.

 I've posted a few clips to give you an idea of what you are missing - if in doubt, you don't need to buy an old Mac (although I would), you can run them under either ScummVM, or you could download a Mac emulator from the trusty old interweb.

 

Personal favourites of mine are:

 

Sam and Max (I love the cartoons, too, as I get the humour)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis - a great sequel to The Last Crusade and very funny in parts.

 

 

 

 

 

Day Of the Tentacle (again, it's funny as hell and looks great)

 

 

 

 

 

The final choice is Broken Sword - great scripting, great graphics, the sound is fantastic and you really get sucked in. I believe I've played Broken sword on every platform it's been released on. The second one is good, too, although the later sequel on the XBox was a bit poor.

  So, have a look, enjoy and realise that whilst new games are lovely, sometimes you can't beat something a decade old for sheer enjoyment. And if anyone has an old Mac Classic/Classic II or Colour Classic they want to donate to aloving home, please let me know!

 

No, it's not the latest guidebook on how to advance your office career, it's about this story on the Mac User site. The short version is that Apple are potentially going to overhaul the ageing laptop designs to come inline with the new MacBook Air and the new iMacs. Possibly.

 As a piece of reporting, this ranks alongside the likes of "some bloke in the pub told me..." and "a friend of a friend said...", but there is possibly some reason to this rhyme. The Macbook Pro design is, to all intents and purposes, something like seven or eight years old now - it's basically unchanged from the days of the PowerBook G4 when it changed from titanium to aluminium. The "new" MacBooks are not much changed from the old iBook G4 and, I'll be blunt (as I have one of them thanks to work), the only good thing about the design from a usability point of view is the trackpad. The keys are unresponsive and badly spaced, the 13.3 inch widescreen feels cramped and there is a nice sharp edge at the front of the palmrest that cuts into your wrists as you type. So, there is definitely room for improvement, but what should the machines be like?

 Well, an educated guess says that the new machines will look like pumped-up MacBook Airs - possibly tapering in the same way as a sop to ergonomics, but mainly to add some sophistication to the MacBook consumer range - I'd guess at an all-alloy case, with black screen surround, widescreen glossy-only displays (LED backlit), iMac style keys on the keyboard and the multi-touch trackpad. I'd also guess that the days of the light-up Apple logo are numbered, as on the iMacs, they even killed off the "sleep" light as a nod to environmental awareness. Shame, really.

 So, that's what they will probably be like, but is that what they should be like? To answer that, let's look back at what machines Apple have made that have led to imitators and devoted fans and at those which are not exactly lamented in their passing.

 From the consumer side, the big winners would have to be the mutlicoloured iMacs, the original Macintosh/Mac Classic and, I would also add, the iPod Nano. Consumer stuff can be limited(ish), as long as it is easy to use, looks friendly and is cheap. The one benefit of the current white MacBook design is that it looks as much at home on a child's bedroom desk as it does in a Soho coffee bar and, whilst the inside edges may cut your wrists, the outside is all radiused curves - it begs to be held.

From a professional standpoint, I'll be honest and say that most businessmen tend to still like the sombre designs as it gives a sense of being responsible and mature. I've won more pitches in a suit and tie than those "modern" types who showed up wearing combats and trainers. Yes, you can wear that stuff at your place of work and, when you are coding CSS or designing sites in Flash, you can do it just as well in shorts and flip-flops, but the truth is that if you turn up to the client wearing dayglo T-shirts and skate shoes when you're 35, you a) look like a pillock and, b) will come across as not taking the deal/client seriously. So, with this in mind, the aluminium MacBook Pro is not a bad design, but aluminium laptops as a rule can look rather cheap or become scruffy easily. Which is why your business Vaio will be gunmetal grey, or black and your HP, Dell, Toshiba or Lenovo/IBM will also be black. It ages better than easily-scratched silver, it looks serious and sensible and it doesn't look like it was made by FisherPrice. Which is why the Pismo/Wallstreet design of PowerBook G3 still looks good today (I use one on my commute and it gets more admiring glances than the white MacBook I also have to haul about) - it was sombre and sensible, but the curves made it sexy and, more importantly, the Bronze keyboard is, without doubt, the best I have ever used on a laptop, if not just the best keyboard I have used ever. The palm rest is perfect, the thumb-clickable button is perfect and it is the one Mac I have owned that people still go "wow, that's cool" about when they pick it up and use it.

 So, how would I design the new Apple laptops? Well, I'd be tempted to basically add the new multi-touch track pad to the Pismo casing, keep the screen at 14 inches, 4:3 (as with letter-boxing, the DVDs will look the same as on the 13.3 widescreen MacBook), but at higher resolution (1280*1024, maybe) and running at least a GeForce 6 mobile card - cheap, but enough to do some low-end gaming on, unlike the intel integrated crap. Use a slot-loading DVD-RW drive and colour it in the way the old iMacs were - translucent white/grey with coloured insets (where the soft-touch areas on the old Pismo were, maybe) and add backlight to the keyboard and Apple logo - in short, it's great ergonomically, it's fun and funky for kids and the latte-lovers amongst us and, as it's in a range of colours, it'll match the Crocs on your feet and the interior of your Audi TT. In effect, it makes it a consumer item like the iPod Nano. Oh, and offer a non-glossy screen option.

 As for the pro-level machine, well, I'd lose the hard-edges, rounding it off to make it ergonomically friendly, as well as sytlish, I'd make the case from metal, sure, but I'd anodise it - scratch-resistant coatings are around in most colours, but a dark grey or black would suit the business ethic. I believe Marin had a nigh-on indestructible finish on thier mountain bikes about ten years ago - possibly this could be used. Or you could go wild and have it black with that "oil on water" finish to make it stand out, as it would only show colours at the points it caught the light. 15 inch and 17 inch only - both widescreen, both powered by the best mobile GeForce available - 15 inch gets 256mb 8800, 17 inch gets 512mb version, for example. No professional Apple laptops should ship with less than 1.5Gb of RAM as standard. Ship them with fast 120GB hard drives, 40GB pre-partitioned off for Boot Camp/Parallels/VMWare Fusion (albeit without Windows being installed) - your Macs can use Windows, Apple, but a PC can't run OS X natively, so make the process easy and you'll convert business users. Bundle the laptops with iWork, as well as iLife and return to the Pismo-style drive modules - if I don't need a DVDRW drive, I might like to swap it out for an extra battery - or at least bring back that Pismo ability to hotswap the battery without the machine shutting down for ten seconds or so - very useful for the roadwarriors out there, I know. Oh, and one final thing, if Apple has the tie-in to AT&T Bell and O2 for the iPhone, why not offer a mobile web function to the laptops - a pay as you go 3G/Edge connection, so Apple laptop buyers don't have to go and get one of those easily lost/stolen USB modem things. That would be a really useful feature, akin to the days when the iMac sold because all you needed to do to get the internet was plug it into the phone socket and it would set up an account, etc, for you - offer the same for mobile web warriors!

 I sincerely doubt we'll get any of this, but if I were Steve Jobs, it's exactly what I'd do....still, no doubt we'll find out soon enough! Feel free to send me your comments - I'd love to hear your views on what they should do.

 Well, here we are in 2008 and, as a technophile, what have I bought? That's right, two Macintosh computers taht are at least five years old. The big question is "why?" and the answer is, simply, because they work.

 

The fact is that I am a little wary of trundling around london on the tube with a £750 Vaio laptop for when I am working at the client sites. With this in mind, I wanted something cheap, reliable and quick enoguh to run Office, etc - nothing strenuous, but I might add the need for a DVD player to while away the long commute back home. This list, along with a long-held love of the pre-Intel Macs, meant that I looked on eBay for a nicely specified G3 Pismo. I ended up with an upgraded laptop that has a 500Mhz, 512Mb of RAM, a DVD/CDRW combo drive and 60GB hard drive. Given the legendary Pismo reliability and the fact it still holds a great charge (let alone the ability to hot-swap out the DVD drive for a second battery) and I am more than happy - not bad for £100! Especially when you consider that it's running OS X 10.4 and is more than happy running my copy of Office for Mac.

 

 Whilst I was on the prowl on eBay, I also picked up a 600Mhz iMac with 640Mb of Ram in the rather nifty "Blue Dalmatian" colour scheme. I was going to give it to my mother to act as her web/letter-writing machine, but having used it, I think she can have my old G4 Power Mac instead - the little iMac is more than snappy enough for me to blog on, etc, and I am currently trying to decide between buying a new 24" iMac outright or financing a huge MacPro (and erring towards the latter) and, until I make that choice, I am in need of a little box to sit in my hobby studio to let me watch movies, surf the net and suchlike - once I have my new Mac, I'll either keep the iMac for web surfing and the like (so as not to clog up my new machine with crap), or put it in one of the guest rooms at our house with a selection of games on it - it's something I have seen done before and I like the idea of it, especially as I have always gotten itchy fingers when I have stayed away from home and been unable to check my email, etc. I know a lot of my friends will appreicate it.

 Then, once we have a kid (or kids), they can have it with some nice learing-freindly games on it - I am thinking of things like Cosmic Osmo, although I might need to run that in OS 9, rather than OS X. I am a firm believer of not letting kids spend their days watching TV - play sport rather than watch it, children! However, I do think that children should be encouraged to use a computer as soon as possible and, ideally, it should be an older amchine taht is not doing everything for them - I grew up with BBC Micros, Commodore 64s, Sinclair Spectrums and pre-Windows PCs. I remember Windows 3.1 being state-of-the-art and, because of this, have never felt fazed by a newer machine - every child should learn to use a command-line, or at least a non-plug and play system - it means that anything they will face in a normal working life will simply not scare them. Let me put it like this: once you have written an essay in Wordperfect 5.1 and done your mail-merge using DataEase on a Dos PC, being asked to do a letter in Word is never going to get your palms sweaty. Not only that, but you'll be able to fix your computer without recourse to expensive helpdesks or call centres.

 Still, a lot of this doesn't apply to Apple kit, as it just works. Then again, they are friendly, useful and, unlike a PC, still capable of being of use fve or ten years after they were made, unlike a PC which will devalue quicker than a Lada and generally stop working entirely after five years or so. If all you want to do is surf the net, buy yourself an old iMac for £50. Happy surfing!

  Apple recently launched the new aluminium iMacs and very nice they are too – all brushed metal and glossy black, it seems strange that the same material combinations were used so effectively on my old Bang and Olufsen stereo, but then again, that was one of a few pieces of technology to be recognised as a design masterpiece and displayed as “art”, so maybe there is something in it. Or maybe I, like all the other thirtysomethings associate such aesthetics with quality through some memory of seeing such a stereo that belonged to a friends’ dad and coveting it. Who knows? The end result is that, as with the release of the first OS X, Apple have once again created a product that (in the words of Steve Jobs) “looks so good you want to lick it”.

 

  In days gone by, the review would have taken a bit of a downturn, if I wasn’t a total Apple fanatic, where I’d have to say that it was a lovely design, but it was expensive compared to the performance I could have got from a similarly-priced Windows PC. If I was a rabid believer in the Cult of iSteve, I’d probably have trotted out some line about performance not being all about Megahertz and being more about usability (and, admittedly, I’d have had a point), but ultimately I’d have had a really tough job of convincing you that the machine was worth switching away from Windows and the world of the dirt cheap PC in preference for a machine that looked nice but seemed over-priced for the performance it seemed to give on paper. However, those days are over – with the death of the G5 (something I actually feel a bit upset over – I like true RISC architecture and wish IBM/Motorola could have got it up to speed), we’ve now got a Dual-Core Intel processor with some nifty Apple architecture around it, so we’re talking about a machine that uses the same CPU as a PC, but which uses it better. Not only that, but if you absolutely have to have Windows, because of a Windows-only application (Microsoft Project springs to mind – we really could use a port of that, Mr Gates!), then you can simply install Windows on a partition or run any one of a number of programs that allow you to run Windows as an application on your OS X installation.

 iMacs in previous iterations were always a bit underwhelming – great if you just wanted to surf the Web, type letters or send emails, but a bit lacking in grunt if you wanted to play games, or work with video or large PhotoShop files. If you were anything approaching a creative professional, you had to lash out and buy a PowerMac  and a separate monitor costing thousands of pounds. The new iMacs, however, ship with high-end ATI Radeon graphics (128mb or 256mb, depending on your preference) and the minimum of a 2.0GHz Dual-Core processor means that you can revel in PhotoShop on your lovely glossy 20- or 24-inch screen. Not only that, but because the hardware is all DirectX 10 compliant, you can play the latest Windows games if you boot to XP or Vista (whichever you choose to install). No longer do you have to wait three years to get a game that was released on PC and now costs £10 when the Mac version is £40 – it could be the ideal compromise: Work on a Mac, play your games on a PC, all in the same machine.

  A quick note about the screen as there is a lot of mixed reaction about it on the internet and in various reviews. Yes, it’s glossy, so it can make it harder to match colours across media when working, but the Sony Vaio I am writing this on has a glossy screen, too, and I would rather have the higher image quality when viewing video and have a few viewing-angle issues than go back to the dull screens I used before - the same can be said for the iMac screen. Also, if you are that worried about how things might look when you work on digital work that has to match print work, then either use the Pantone number or a hex code to define the colour used in the print work and simply ensure you work to that. It’s not difficult and the rewards offered by the glossy screen far outweigh the negatives. Photos look vibrant, DVDs look fantastic and even a task as menial as writing a letter in Word or Pages becomes a joy to behold. Trust me, as long as you don’t aim a lamp at it, you’ll be fine – whether the screen is matte of glossy, it’ll still wash out to grey if you sit in strong sunlight or by a window, after all.

 There was an advert for electric shavers in the 1980s where the CEO would say “I liked it so much I bought the company”, well, I am going to follow his example and put my money where my mouth is – I will order myself a 24” 2.8GHz iMac with 2GB of RAM and 750 GB hard drive as soon as possible. After a few years away from the fold, I have returned to Macs and the joys of OS X and given a choice between a second-hand G5 Powermac and 20-inch Cinema Display or the new iMac, I would pick the new iMac any day of the week.

 A wise man once said: “In a world without wall, or fences, to constrain our imagination, who needs Windows and Gates?” – come with me and bask in the glow of Apple!