Snowed Over

Right, well … I was wrong and right. Usual story. If it weren't for a MacBook Pro pipe-dream, we'd have even had a bingo. As it transpired: this was another Stevenote all about iPhone. Notice a trend?

The $199 iPhone 3G is a big deal so I can forgive that. It's even a £99 =~ $199 in Britain kind of deal, which is quite something. I've got a little something underway of my own in that regard, so actually my interests were well catered to. Except for one.

Cue RoughlyDrafted.

That sounds just the type of Grand Central I could really like. Where on Earth do you think we could be headed with all of this? My bet is on spectacular success on both fronts, but then I would say that…

Jackpot!

Finally, somewhere good on Princes Street!

The Tech World's Cassandra

It's articles like this which keep me reading RoughlyDrafted. Daniel Eran Dilger memorably dismissed the Zune just at the peak of its pre-release media hype with as well a reasoned an argument as I've ever heard in future telling. He did it again in the magnum opus Why 2007 Won't Be Like 1995, which I commend to everyone and ask could you have done any better? He’s a top notch tech commentator, and RoughlyDrafted continues to be among my top RSS favourites.

More on this later.

Leap-Year Time-Warp

As observed elsewhere, leap days are decidedly unintuitive things. The fact the world spins through space in arbitrary measure – while we won't stand that sort of thing when it comes to our own precious conceit of time – is swept under the carpet until just these occasions. There are leap seconds too, now that we've become good enough at measuring time mechanically then comparing with the stars. Events can take place in those as well: including births, deaths and every sort of inconveniently significant thing as already transpires through the other forgotten and foolish times we fake daylight savings with. Just don't get me started on that, not while I'm still living in brief sweet GMT.

So, leap, or intercalary days if you like … what about them strikes as noteworthy?

Well, it's just pleasingly absurd to think the last time it was February the 29th we were all back in 2004. John Kerry was already the challenger-apparent for what was set to be an unjustly dull election while Iraq was such a hotbed. Just why primary voters didn't flock to the better natural politician – John Edwards – I don't know. And I'll not pull out a baloney explanation for why conservatives haven't rallied to Mike Huckabee either! My beloved PowerBook wasn't quite a year old and Panther was the new big cat on its hard drive. Ah, Exposé. I'd only persuaded a single switcher back then too. An already ageing Athlon XP handled Battlefield 1942 for me. All right, in glacial John gaming time it wasn't really all that long ago…

Wind back another one, and it was Feb 29, 2000. The Clintons were still lingering in the White House, and Al Gore was already lined up against some wannabe Texan from Connecticut who pounded poor and honest John McCain with three more primary wins that day on his way to the nomination, and – infamously of course – the presidency. I was running Windows 98 on … a several years outdated Pentium 133 laptop and a crotchety 450 MHz K6-II. Was it the retro charm of Grand Prix 2 I was still in to then, or Civilization II? I've really never been cutting edge when it comes to gaming! But I was already used to 24-7 broadband internet by then, only just not at home.

One more back and things really get weird. In 1996 Bill Clinton was at the prime of his pre-Lewinsky charm, set for an all too obvious win, so it wasn't the presidentials which I remember much from that year. I didn't have my very own personal computer yet, it was a shared household 486 in Windows for Workgroups and very often MS-DOS for games and wavetable soundcard hijinks. It wouldn't be until that summer that I read Hunter S. Thompson for the first time, and really woke up to the potential of writing and far flung thoughts. John Major's Tories were still in power in these parts – wildly villified – making me wonder just what was rotten at the core of democracy if this was what people really felt. I remember actually caring about Formula One back in those days, presumably eager to see how the great Gerhard Berger and Jean Alesi would do with the car Michael Schumacher had just won his second championship with before trading teams and places. It turned out the magic was all Schuey. I also vaguely recall David Baddiel splitting with Rob Newman – an absurdist comedy partnership I had liked – and penning one of the more annoying football anthems of all time with Frank Skinner. It didn't come home by the way … that seemed to actually matter back in those days. Meanwhile I read of chopped Harley-Davidsons, played only the finest half dozen costly Super Nintendo cartridges, and occasionally did battle with System 7 … though only on inexplicably archaic Classics.

1992 even sounds like another whole age in history. I didn't even have my SNES until Christmas. Guess my main tech was playing with the night sky on SkyGlobe for DOS on a monochrome 286 Amstrad! You could hear the processor struggling with screen updates, I kid you not. I remember the UK general election, in that the media were appalled with the outcome … but not for another few months back in (my arbitrary hook) February of course! A Clinton succeeded a Bush as we were being reminded until fairly recently as well; some old guy who said to read his lips a lot and had some sort of business with notably poor-marksman "Saddam Insane" from one of those countries that started with "IRA" and had lots of sand. There were Scuds too … and a noticeable atmosphere of propaganda which even my 11 year old self didn't fail to notice while the merry foray went on. All the cockpit footage looked very sci-fi and impressive and all – echoed by a whole era of war games hot on its heels – but there was still death and destruction, right? Why weren't we so bothered when the other guys where getting slaughtered, or that bomb shelter full of kids? Not that I was a pacifist … no, I'd already all the cynicism and intrigue in me to make a full blown politico!

1988 … ring any bells? I can remember teachers and classmates, a friend or two I still have kicking around even now, but nothing really big-picture. Maybe I'd learned BASIC already on the (mysteriously ancient, yet again) TRS-80, Vic-20 and Apple ][ (don't know which one) we had at times at home. Maybe not though. Whenever Woz's one arrived, I must admit that floppy disks seemed so futuristic compared to saving your code to cassette!

1984 … original Macintosh. We had BBC's at school though. Or rather our school had one BBC Micro, and that wasn't necessarily 1984 either. (Like I can be bothered checking their history…) I remember it would show up on a trolley maybe once a term, its armour-clad monitor on top and a reading-glasses-twiddling teacher would open a manual and peck at keys until the damned machine did anything at all, much to our youthful ho-hum. There was a time though when I knew enough to summon:

10 PRINT "MISCHIEVOUS MESSAGE OF YOUR CHOICE ";
20 GOTO 10

Now that was an afternoon!

Damn, if only my folks had been wealthy and daring enough to pick up a 128k. I'm sure MacPaint would have impressed me more then than when its ubiquitous clones caught up with me many years later. I can even remember trying my hand at a text editor in BASIC just so I could save files on those instant-off micro's we did happen to come by. Yeah, I know, I'm no Linus Torvalds, but floppies … and the better plastic box-shaped kind, in 1984, oh yeah, let me at that mouse!

In spring 1980 I was only a few months old, so I can't lend any truisms about Carter versus Reagan from any sort of past perspective. According to this system of time travel then, that's as far back as our vehicle gets. No cheating now.

One trusism I can offer though is that tiresome one about the unpredictability of time. Tech gets better – in ways we only occasionally suspect beforehand – while other things, well, I'm tempted to say they disappoint in comparison! Not always though. In politics its so often the leaders which really matter. Things I and many others haven't paid much thought to in years, like oh say the whole Middle East peace process if you can even remember that in earnest, can and probably will resume once Washington has its purge after the election. Obama or McCain, it's all good. Hillary even too, though frankly I'm beginning to make that time honoured mistake of overlooking her before all's said and done. Next Tuesday, yeah, or a ghoullish replay of the machinations which saw the last overthrow of a democratic winner, right before Al Gore's eyes again!

Anyway, even I detect my rambling now so don't worry, this post comes to a close. Obviously the future is the place to point it: what do I think tomorrow's Feb 29 will be like, in 2012? UNIX based, open sourced, well designed, and safer than today? Yeah, sure, like legend's dragon's die so soon. Another maxim I've come to suspect is true over the years is that good and evil are perspective as much as anything. So too can be, alas, up and down if you follow long enough to see this most strained distortion. More on that later, as I cover the extremist's refuge. But for now I'll say the truth, which is I can't even tell you what happens in November yet alone leaps and bounds ahead. The human world in its seething politics and glorious complexity is like that. You can suspect, intuit, and maybe conjure up sound reasoning in retrospect; but projections alone are a mug's game. One I just can't keep from playing.

Where the MacBook Air Fits in Apple's Design

Design in the Age of Intel

Macworld San Francisco in January 2006 was an intriguing time. The Intel transition was the talk of the Mac web and much of the media beyond. Expectations had risen that we would see the first models of the new platform that very show, despite Apple's earlier promise they would arrive by summer. Expectations were right. Steve Jobs unveiled with typical panache the first Intel powered desktop and notebook Apple had ever made and dared to call a Mac! He showed off their performance before an eager audience. There was just one strange surprise: the Intel Macs looked eerily similar to their PowerPC predecessors.

Two models moved to Intel that day. The Core Duo powered iMac was essentially identical to its G5 ancestor in outer appearance. The Core Duo successor to the PowerBook G4 was a little easier to tell apart – it had a built in iSight camera for the first time at the top edge of its display – and it had a name change to MacBook Pro. However, this was still less ado than Apple had made with previous generation changes between G3, G4 and G5. Despite the move to Intel being a far greater technical challenge and accomplishment, it was as though their industrial design was playing it down.

As the year progressed the entire Macintosh line made the leap to Intel. The Mac mini was next and looked identical save for an artfully placed remote control receiver and a more liberal selection of ports on the back. Then came the iBook, which like its aluminium brother, had a name change to now be called the MacBook. Unlike the MacBook Pro, the MacBook was a new design and easy to tell from its predecessor; more on that later. But it was back to business as usual when the Power Mac As the year progressed the entire Macintosh line made the leap to Intel. The Mac mini was next and looked identical save for an artfully placed remote control receiver and a more liberal selection of ports on the back. Then came the iBook, which like its aluminium brother, had a name change to now be called the MacBook. Unlike the MacBook Pro, the consumer MacBookcame to Intel the last of all, picking up a second drive slot (a wealth of useful changes hidden inside) and its new title of Mac Pro. The server oriented relative to the Mac – the Xserve – received a similar treatment although without a name change, completing the Intel transition in surprisingly speedy time.

So, to recap, there was only one new design in 2006: the MacBook. Every other Mac had been transformed on the inside too, but on the outside there was as little change as possible.

2007 brought the iPhone – an entirely new product and an area where Apple have great ambitions – and then a whole new generation of iPods. The iMac received its first major industrial design change since the G4 "sunflower" model was replaced with the minimalist "where's the computer?" G5 some three years earlier. That G5 iMac, incidentally, was considered to bear a lot in common with the iPod in terms of style. The new aluminium and glass iMac in turn shared its design in similar ways to the iPhone. Once the iMac joined the MacBook in the shortlist of new designs, there were no more changes. All the other Macs were not altered on the outside. Hardware evolved on the inside as 64 bit became universal across the entire platform with the Core 2 Duo, but once again the outer design was kept untouched.

There's Something in the Air

Then on the second anniversary of the first Intel Macs at Macworld 2008, Steve Jobs unveiled the MacBook Air, causing a storm of interest and debate which clearly carries on today. The Air was clearly a new class of portable with no direct ancestors at all. Its industrial design made this very clear: it looks quite unlike any other computer.

So much has been written about the MacBook Air – controversies rage about its many trade-offs and where precisely it fits among its MacBook siblings – so much that I needn't add any more to it. Instead, I'd like to compare the external design of the Air to Apple's other recent changes as I've listed above. Perhaps we can get a sneak peak of the future?

A Picture Speaks a Thousand Words

Have a look at the high quality photos AppleInsider took of the MacBook Air compared to the MacBook Pro. Everyone knows that the Air is thin; but seen side by side with Apple's well respected flagship professional portable, we can see the immense design shift for what it is. As usual, I'm writing from my 12" PowerBook which had a reputation for being tubby compared to its aluminium peers. The Air is probably about as thick at its front as the curved lip of my own laptop's battery, creeping round the edge! (The cell itself is far chunkier than that.)

Also note the MacBook Air's keyboard. Look familiar? It should do. This style was brought in with the first MacBook in 2006. Rounded, separate, "chiclet" keys which despite some initial concerns have proven to be well regarded for typing and general use. Last year's aluminium iMac brought the same thinking over to Apple's long untouched desktop keyboards: its new wireless keyboard having particularly strong ties to the MacBook. The Air's black keys come with backlighting … I expect this will spread to other models in time as well.

There is no guessing required when it comes to the MacBook Air's display. Apple have stated that they will remove Mercury from all of their products: this means a transition from traditional CCFL to LED backlights. Steve Jobs also pointed out that a key design goal with the Air was to maintain a full size keyboard and display in as thin a package as possible. This sounds like an implicit warning that we'll see no sub-13 inch Macs, and therefore no direct successor to the 12 inch PowerBook. I think Apple are likely to concentrate on tablets like the iPod touch for smaller sizes.

Lessons for the Leery

Back in 2006 I for one had not expected Apple to reuse their designs. As much lesser generational leaps like those between G3, G4 and G5 had brought new cases, materials and geometries in turn; I really anticipated brand new shapes and forms. If the glass and aluminium iMac of 2007 had come out at Macworld 2006 instead: I would have actually been less surprised than I was with the G5 iMac's doppelgänger!

Since the move to Intel: the MacBook, iMac and MacBook Air are new designs. This leaves the Mac Pro, Mac mini and MacBook Pro waiting for their overhaul. What are they likely to look like?

The aluminium PowerBook design which the MacBook Pro still bears, dates back to the start of 2003 and my own rather quaint laptop. It has worn well – often considered a true classic among notebook designs – but the MacBook Air's sudden arrival has given it something of a dent. I know it is controversial to suggest that the professional oriented MacBook Pro take a diet as radical as produced the Air, but I think looking forward a few years it is inevitable. The Air shows that the compromises needed right now are still too steep for its bigger brothers. I am certain however that this is precisely the direction they too will go in good time. Flash storage replacing hard disks as it has done in all but one iPod now, optical drives becoming external peripherals, replaceable batteries exchanged for iPod-like integration, and ports being selectively culled or delegated to USB. Such changes aren't necessarily as harsh as the Air itself has taken: there will be more room by definition on a 17 inch notebook, and professional machines may well hold on to select ports the Air has boldly dispatched. Thin, though, is certainly in. MacBook Pros today will look as over-sized to their descendants as the Air does against them now.

Reports of the Mac mini's demise are – fortunately – greatly exaggerated. This most miniscule of Mac desktops appears to be with us for the long haul. It's difficult to imagine just what Apple might have in mind for it next as the Mac mini, uniquely, has never been redesigned since its inception in 2005. There are G4 minis and Core Solos, Duos and Core 2 Duos; but their appearance is unchanging. Having been inside of one myself – upgrading its 1.6 GHz Core Duo for a 2.0 GHz 64 bit Core 2 Duo – the only obvious space to be reduced would be the omission of the optical drive; though it's hardly as appealing a proposition for a desktop! Apple could really do anything with the mini. It has long been speculated that it could be merged with the thinner but wider AppleTV. Unlikely I think: the set top box has a very different purpose in mind.

And then, lastly, the Mac Pro. Like the MacBook Pro, it still wears the outer design of the well established PowerPC model it replaced: the Power Mac G5, also introduced back in 2003. Popular opinion has it the Mac Pro is too large, a sentiment often shared quite naturally about the G5 Power Mac. History suggests the Mac Pro may well borrow from the iMac in appearance, as did its distant ancestor the Blue & White G3. The Power Mac line did not however take on the snow white style of G4 and G5 iMacs, so it's not necessarily so! Again, Apple have quite the opportunity for a new design in the headless desktop Macs. Aluminium is a favourite to still have some part in it.

Twists and Trends

In summing up: Apple are a great example of evolving industrial design. In many ways they are conservative and reuse a great idea wherever they can once it has succeeded. The great brushed aluminium tide of 2003 is a prime case in point: even today the Mac Pro and MacBook Pro utilise what was made then, some five years back. Balancing this is a drive for new design, which emerges as a great surprise whenever it is ready and soon enough takes over from the last major change. The iPhone was just such an innovation: in form as well as function. The iMac's subsequent shift from a white iPod to glass and aluminium iPhone-inspired design is the natural consequence. This is why I expect the MacBook Air to be a seminal work, influencing future models just as the first aluminium PowerBooks did, and indeed the original iMac. Apple design in waves. Once again, on such a crest, we are in most interesting times.

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.