January of More Than Just a Year

Just read a little opinion piece in the Times, called America’s Riveting Democracy. I quite agree. There's one reason I pay more attention to American politics than the minutiae of Westminster or even Holyrood, just a couple of miles from my doorstep. It matters, and it will keep doing so until much more changes in the world than merely as things seem for now. Obama, Clinton, McCain and Romney are bigger players on that vital stage than any Gordon Brown or Alec Salmond. There's more to it than just scale. As I listen to the last track on last year's best album – Kira Neris' first – I'm minded it's more fundamental than all of that. We are talking of one thing: humanity.

There's Something in the Pair

The blogosphere reverberates with a tell-tale ring. Steve Jobs had something shiny to unveil at Macworld, and this time his showmanship saw a laptop slid from a humble manilla envelope. The attending crowd lapped it up; but the commentators, pundits and bloggers had more mixed opinions. Was this thinnest notebook in the history of man as fully featured as Jobs described? Is it really time to kiss the CD and DVD goodbye? Was this an iMac or a Cube? What was louder: the commotion from the adoring buyers already in line or the furore from the doubters?

I'll lay my cards on the table. I don't want a MacBook Air; at least not right now. That's not to say I'm unimpressed with the laptop. It is – from what I can tell from photos over here in wait-a-few-more-weeks-or-months land – spectacularly well engineered. I don't agree at all with the line of thought that says it's a crucially flawed machine. I just don't happen to be on the market for a new notebook yet either.

Five years and five Macworlds ago, when I was still running Windows myself, Jobs presented a pair of PowerBooks to the world; big and small: 12 and 17 inches. I don't know exactly what the reaction was … it took a few months for their existence to come to my attention, as uninterested as I then was. It was actually a TV advert of all things which woke me up to this sweet pair of opposites, memorably wielded in airline seats by the inimitable Verne Troyer and Yao Ming. It's not all that often Apple advertises Macs in a big way in Britain and it just so happened the timing was auspicious. I'd been through a really bad year of horrible hardware and atrocious reliability while in what turned out to be my last ever attack of home-build desktop mania. I remember muttering about the fact this was a Mac of all things which so suddenly had my desire, but it turned out I was at the right point to make the switch anyway. I read up what I could and decided this "OS X" thing I'd never heard of before was probably for the better. It was. The little 12" PowerBook has seen me from Jaguar up to Leopard and still serves as my daily portable.

Five years since I was using Windows? It feels longer ago than that.

Before Macworld, my expectations were brewing like many that Apple might be about to do to the Mac what they have already done with the iPhone. Something in the air? How about the internet: all the time? John Gruber put it well in his (obligatory) Macworld prediction:

After using my iPhone for a few months, it started feeling weird that my PowerBook doesn’t have ubiquitous wireless networking: Wi-Fi when available, and seamless, instant switchover to something else when it isn’t. … Ubiquitous networking is certainly the most intriguing thing about Amazon’s Kindle. It just feels crippled that I can’t get a network connection — even a slow one — once I’m outside the range of Wi-Fi.

His predictions were pretty much spot on. The article's quite a testament to what a judicious reading of the rumours can do when coupled with Apple's clever evolutionary knack. They just don't release things as early on in development as others do. I don't doubt they have a tablet project with prototypes wandering around their offices as we speak, nor that the ubiquitous networking side isn't being looked into either. It's just that neither is ready, while the MacBook Air certainly was.

Seeing as I'm so inured to my 867MHz of PowerBook G4, and I've an Intel desktop at home, there's not that much which the MacBook Air can offer me … quite yet. If it had summoned the beginning of truly untethered laptop computing, then sure I couldn't pretend I wouldn't be all over it! But that is the essence of what I'm waiting for. The MacBook Air is a fair bit larger than my 12" PowerBook in area: a fact which although finicky, does count for something when you're trying to fit it in your bag and on your travels. I doubt that a more typical sub-portable would have swung me either though, so long as it was still in the current age of a-few-hour's battery and 802.11 Wi-Fi or *nothing*.

The silence … it hurts! What I'd do for the convenience of even slow roaming access, given Apple's polish.

Many of the more controversial design decisions taken with the MacBook Air are ideas I quite agree with. I'm still on my PowerBook's original battery for the use it's had, and the faster my Wi-Fi the less ports I use as my desktop is given the load of hosting these things for me to access at my convenience. It's a different story if you want to edit video on your portable: for which anything less than a MacBook Pro is surely not even worth considering, right? I dare say that it takes a certain kind of user to manage to live entirely from a laptop without these things, without even their own desktop to back it up … although that cunning little Time Capsule box Apple unveiled on the same day solves one side of that problem, for the casual style of users who just might pull it off. Of course, the clamour online isn't from "typical users" but us techno-geek obsessives, so it's best to not read too much into it.

No: I could certainly live with a MacBook Air as my laptop and Mac of first recall, so long as it's backed up with something with all the oomph and sockets when I need it. If I can, most of the market can too. Ergo I think it will do perfectly well enough for Apple sales-wise too.

What do you reckon: how many laptops will have disc drives and ports all around their edges in a few years time? Any? Not likely … just think of the first iMac and what heralded for then still seemingly inescapable floppies.

I wonder though. Will my next Mac be a tablet? Would I still need a notebook at all? That depends on Apple of course, who may well have very different ideas for tablets than for Macs. We still have to see. Though I needn't point out that whatever course they choose, it'll be the most interesting out there and do just what they've done time and time before to their lacklustre competition.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Hunter S. Thompson has always been one of my favourite writers. I picked up a couple of his books from the library up town one bored summer when I was sixteen – Hells Angels and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – and I was hooked by the same evening. His anarchic style: half hard-nosed reportage and half striking fantasy, spoke to me like nothing else had done before from all the authors I'd read. The first book's vividly nonfiction biker gangs fired up my teenage interest, but it was the second one which sealed the deal. Twisted idealism in drugged fantastic haze meets the pit of hopelessness and sick pleasure, with the narrator as your guide, already hopelessly out of control; the entire thing a symphony of all too human frailty. Brilliant.

So it comes as no surprise that I find great symbolic pleasure in the recent events at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas no less, especially seeing as Fake Steve created a new persona to cover it in truly Hunter form. Enter Johnny Poison.

It's another of Fake Steve's characters I have more affinity with. This post pretty much sums up how I'd feel if I found myself at that troubled show. Why? Why indeed. The technological ills of the world all summed up in microcosm. Now if only the real Hunter had covered one of these while he was still with us.

Truth be told, CES did pretty much as it always does. A big hoopla is made in downtown Las Vegas about new technologies we'll never see, and new products we'll never buy. Being in Vegas, the whole event is already set up as the perfect environment for the media themselves: who can cover as little as they like with as flaccid an interest as they can muster, while nature calls and the seething city's delights lead them astray. All such events should really be held in similar locations: the party conventions the classic case in point. The best media management there is is simply to keep them on their toes, out of the hall and off camera especially, so that every deadline becomes a five minute fluster and your message is conveyed verbatim and with the least sarcasm available. If I owned property in Vegas that's certainly how I'd be selling the idea to prospective customers!

Another good writer, albeit far from a Hunter just like all the rest of us, summed up the show from his angle over at the highly recommended RoughlyDrafted. In fact I see he's just posted some more predictions for Macworld – my own inescapable next topic – so I'll be on over once I've finished. I should point out though that casting Bill Gates as the good doctor of journalism is way off the mark, besides for making a good Photoshop title piece. The character Gates reminds me of has to be the psychologist who preaches the ills of marijuana before an audience of police officers on their working vacation, and Hunter's alter ego himself, under the influence of far more potent things! I'm not quite sure who Hunter's attorney would be though …

So, what do I make of CES and its wider place in the world, besides for all the drug addled imagery already mentioned? I'll be derivative and concur with the general consensus which is that it's a mess and has become hopelessly overshadowed by Macworld. Compare the two for a moment. One is a highly professional and controlled expo in the Moscone Center in San Francisco where one company is the star, and all else has to come after Steve Jobs' keynote … itself the meticulous focus. The other is more of the traditional trade show where everyone talks in raised voice, trying to be heard over the other guy, and which for whatever reason still features Bill Gates every year as its shadow keynote star. Jobs intros new kit like the PowerBook I'm writing this on from five years ago, or the iPhone as was last year's surprise. Gates tries to push a pet concept or two, which alas are always headed nowhere. Daniel Eran Dilger wrote a comparison which makes it all too clear. But I want to look at another side of proceedings.

Apple like to have their own show without all the competition yelling over each other in the way. Fair enough. But it's what they do with that space which is the interesting part. Simply put: Apple only tell you about something when it's finished. You don't hear Steve Jobs predicting the future, and holding up vague new ideas as a promise for what might happen should things come through. Apple just love to innovate in private and sock you with the finished product as a fait accompli, preferably "shipping today". It's this side of how they think which leads to many of their other issues too, such as secrecy over seemingly inane things like the general timing of every minor update, and it can sometimes drive all of us nuts. But come every January, there's no doubting that what Apple do: it really works.

The Microsoft way meanwhile is to share the spotlight with every other outfit with a pass, albeit keeping the keynote for themselves. Fair enough … when you have the appropriate power. Bill Gates opens up with tales of tech futures, and how tablets and multi-touch (but not that multi-touch!) will change everyone's lives, without bringing much of it along with him. The show then proceeds to the usual din of booth-based demos (with or without "babes"), and for whatever reason Apple keep being mentioned at every turn despite their total absence. Try finding the same at Macworld, outside of Microsoft's Mac BU exhibit. I'm sure it must annoy Gates and his people just as much as it seems natural to those of us with opposite views!

It's no overstatement to say that the tech industry as a whole relies on Microsoft. The vast majority of computers run Microsoft's OS and software, while the company tries to fulfill the same role with phones and decreasingly sensible other platforms. This is not a good thing. Many of the companies involved seem to have woken up to the fact as well, as Microsoft appear at least to be going through a rough patch with a heightened environment of criticism from many partners. It's just plain foolish for so much to rely on so little: namely one single company's ability and discretion. Microsoft's big bugaboo is Linux of course which over time promises to meet every need … depending on who you listen to. Though at the moment I'd argue that it's Apple who are the bigger problem, as evidenced by their elephant in the room status at every place consumer electronics companies meet.

There's a meme going round that says "Apple is the new Microsoft". I'll believe that when I see it. The open alternative though is definitely still some way behind. Or else would we still be talking about a world full of blighted boxen, stillborn technologies and (so many a blogger's favourite) DRM?

So yes, there's been some good fear and some sweet loathing going down in Las Vegas. It makes me wonder why so many other greats of the tech industry, big and small, haven't done what Apple has since it bought NeXT eleven years ago: namely develop their own damn platform and reap the rewards which only those who make the whole widget can do. Rallying around Microsoft certainly does not equate to a smart strategy, nor does friendly but shamelessly empty words about Linux. Apple is not the roaring success it is right now because of voodoo and Steve Jobs' mercurial guise. It's back in good times because unlike so many others, it is not actively shooting itself in the foot.

I may just be mistaken, though, in thinking that is not a hard thing to do!

Thank Huck For That

As a long-term politics junkie, I had been dreading the Iowa caucus. The US presidential election of 2008 had been building up promise since the midterms – the promise of credible candidates who might not be white males of all unheard of things – and was lined up to be the fall back down to earth. The good caucus-goers of little Iowa could well have seen to it that the historically wide open field was chopped right down to size. "Barack Obama? For real?" "A Mormon?" "Hillary?" Well, actually, I'd been fearing a simple win for Romney and Clinton. If they had managed that, the primaries may well have been a foregone conclusion … the process being as it is. The two of them were clearly able candidates and each had institutional backing to put shame to many others. But they lost anyway. Suddenly things took a turn for the better.

Back in 2000 I was looking on from over here in Scotland and rooting for John McCain. I still quite like him, despite his choice to be the last standing contrarian on Iraq, though I don't rate his chances. Eight years ago he won a pretty resounding victory over the fellow the BBC insisted on calling George Bush Junior in New Hampshire, but Iowa's choice turned out to be the real winner. Bush and his people had money and manpower on their side and steamrollered the noted Vietnam vet and outsider. The Democrat race of the time proved to be even more boring. Indeed, that election only heated up after everything was over and it turned out to be the closest (and sourest) of modern times. Let's not dwell on the rightful winner!

In 2004 my perfectly ineffectual support went to John Edwards. Bush was irredeemable after the horrendously fateful decision to overlook Afghanistan and invade Iraq. I basically – as armchair expert – saw Edwards as the best possibility to unseat the incumbent. It was Iowa again which saw the early end to that idea. John Kerry, erudite bore, rushed to an early victory among the Democrats and went on to the brutally effective defeat written out for him in the first place. Edwards, the much more interesting running mate, got to lose his Senate seat for nothing other than an implied stain of failure. America and the world won four more years of misdirection. Happy-happy joy-joy.

So yeah … dread. I'd been listening to the commentators and watching the polls, but I didn't really think anything good would happen. Thankfully it did.

I'll make no secret of it: this time round I'm supporting Barack Obama. History making racial equality issues aside, he's the one who seems to understand the complexity of the wider world the best. Most of what he says about Iraq, Iran and the other regions where American influence is crucial, just sounds better grounded to my distant ears than what comes out of Hillary Clinton or (sigh) Rudi Giuliani. (Believe me: I'd like to be on Rudi's side in some ways but his foreign policy vision is nearly indescribably catastrophic!) I know it's hardly a surprise that a European would be backing a Democrat, and that Obama's obvious ability at speechmaking makes him an easy choice, but I like to humour myself and claim that there's real substance to this. He comes across to me as that rare combination of educated intellect like Kerry's, with charisma such as Edwards' or Clinton. No: Bill Clinton before you ask. That really is a weakness for poor Hillary … though she of all people can get around it.

Then there's Huck. Why would a moderate like myself be happy about an Evangelical conservative from Arkansas coming in first in the Republican caucus? It's not the easy and obvious answer I more or less suggested by saying that! I take Huckabee seriously. I really do think he's been the dark horse of recent weeks and might well reach nomination. I also wouldn't count against him winning in November, whether up against Obama, Clinton or Edwards. So why am I pleased?

Because he's just the sort of candidate to really wake the Republicans up again and make this into an epic contest, that's why.

There's a tremendous amount to be decided by whoever becomes the next president. I'm not just saying that as one of so many who couldn't abide George W, but as a fairly self evident piece of fact. We live in thoroughly interesting times. Climate change? Global terrorism? China? If anything, the Bush administration have been putting off everything that's come their direction since at least 2006. Much more is to come as well of course. Who expected national security and foreign policy to be so all-consuming back in the January snow of 2000? Not me.

I was busy cheering on plucky old John McCain. Who knows what could happen…