I wouldn't be MacDoug if I didn't comment on Apple stuff once in a while, eh? It was a bit surprisingly to see how fast they shoehorned the Intel chips into their desktop and laptop lines, but the speed increases are gratifying. Clearly much of the advance work had been done in software, keeping the Intel kernel of OS X alive and updated in parallel, but what wasn't as clear was that the hardware updates done to the iMac just a few months ago were also laying the groundwork for an easy substitution of the Intel motherboard for the PowerPC one. Interesting move, considering that the last iMac rev was awfully attractive and no doubt pretty popular. Now to have a new model that's "2x faster" but otherwise identical released practically weeks after is a bit risky for their image. It also strikes me as a tad precipitous since many apps are not Universal yet and Rosetta remains as yet unproven in terms of performance, at least from what I've read. This will probably impact the MacBook Pro more than the iMac, but still. And they're not mentioning what may be the biggest impact to folks like me who teach using older software - that OS 9 "Classic" apps stop working on the Intel architecture. That's a huge loss for the education division - I depend on many Classic apps for my curriculum, and I'm going to milk my current eMac/G5 lab for all it's worth before upgrading those suckers.
Oh, and I hate the "MacBook Pro" name, all parts of it. If you're going to leave the "Powerbook" brand behind, leave it way behind - don't save the "book" and just tack on a new prefix and an inexplicable suffix. Does this mean that the iBook's replacement is going to be just the "MacBook"? Mmm, that wouldn't be confusing or anything. And just how do you say that asinine, chimeric word? Mac-book? Mcbook? Mac (beat) book? One of my first rules of marketing (and maybe it's a real one, I dunno) is that the product's name should be immediately accessible and unequivocally clear. No questions about how to pronounce it, where to put the emphasis, none of that. I mean, who was confused about the word "iMac"? Despite the fact that they cleverly capitalized the very letter that receives the least emphasis, nobody says it incorrectly. Eye-mac. Bingo, no problem. By this measure, "OS X" is a huge failure. Yes, it's cool looking to have a giant "X" on your packaging - very ominous and sexy - but can I tell you how many ignoramuses I've met out there, many of them in tech-related fields, who still say it "Oh-ess Ex"? Goddamn that bothers me, which is revealing in itself since I'm sitting here ranting about how the name is blatantly obfuscated and therefore stupid. Maybe they did it to create this insiders' club of people who watch Keynotes and hang around at CompUSA who have actually heard Apple employees speak the name, and thus know the secret handshake and have the decoder ring. But if you want to market your OS and hardware to the masses, Apple people, what the hell are you doing assigning names that only the geeks and the faithful can "know"? Kind of uncool for the company that's supposed to be making computers for the non-geeks who can't handle Windows.
The inclusion of cameras on the MacBook Pro and iMac is interesting, though, and may mark an upsurge in video chat and other video-related apps and practices in the future. I'm glad I got my iSight for xmas - anyone want to vid-chat with me? Think I should put out a vidcast :)?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
0 comments:
Post a Comment