August 2001 || Volume 02, Issue 01

Connecting...

Welcome to Connect, our column for reader email! We want to hear your thoughts and opinions about things you've read in Mac OS Journal, about Apple, your computer, Mac OS X, and so on. So let us have it people! Send email to connect@macosjournal.com or use this form.

MacWorld Duds...

MacWorld Expo must have been a disappointment for you people. You were all expecting terrific new hardware like iMacs with LCDs. But what did you get? New chips that get you back up to half the PC's speed. New drives. Wow. Even you must be wondering about the Apple Myth now.

Sean Nock

Sean,

Look at it this way. People do expect a buzz from Steve Jobs' annual keynote, but that's because they often get one - and almost as often, it's a lot different from what all the pundits were expecting. This year, the new machines showed only incremental improvements, like the much wider dissemination of the SuperDrive, which is far ahead of anything at comparable price in the PC world. Record DVD video to play back on your TV: the PC world is confused about that, to say the least, with horrendous prices and a minefield of incompatible standards. Wait years to see who wins or end up with orphan hardware.

Then your jab about clock speed. I thought that hoary old one was dead. Depends what you want the speed for, of course, but it's a long time since I waited any perceptible time for a character to get drawn on the screen after I pressed a key, and for the ordinary computing task like that, well, every computer does it instantaneously. One big exception: graphics apps. And that's where the design of the processor comes in as well as its clock speed. Look at apple.com/g4/myth, and you'll see that a single 867 MHz G4 does Photoshop Filters 58% faster than a Wintel machine with a 1.7 MHz Pentium 4. Dual Processor Macs are even faster. The reason: better design.

Incidentally, it's not only Apple Staffers who have reached this conclusion. See this link for example.

In one way though, Sean, you're right. People do have high expectations of Apple as an innovative company, to the point that some are disappointed when, hey, this year there's no revolution. The difference between Apple and the Wintel world is that nobody even expects any excitement from Wintel any longer; they haven't had anything remotely resembling it since Windows 95. C'mon now, there's a new version of Windows coming up Real Soon Now; along with most Wintel users, I can't recall its exact name, and do you really think any actual users (as opposed to MS marketers) are the slightest bit excited about it?

Think about it though: the whole industry is in a phase of incremental improvements at the moment. To me, the really big deals this year are cheaper and bigger hard drives, affordable LCD screens, and really ridiculously cheap memory. Lots of people, either of either Wintel or Mac persuasion, would get a huge speed boost for their buck with about thirty of 'em spent on new memory. Right now, I have on my screen an email offer of 256 MB for $27 and 512 MB for $74. Anyone who works with powerful apps with 32 or 64 Megs of memory will have their lives revolutionized by this kind of upgrade.

(Warning: memory prices change from day to day. You can’t blame me if the price goes up before you read this – blame Marc for being so slow to get the mag out. But you __can__ and __should__ kick yourself if (when?) it goes up after you read this but before you get around to buying it.)

For more, read on to the next letter.

The foregoing applies equally to the Mac and Wintel platforms. Let no-one accuse me of being one-sided or biased. [Huh? - Ed]

But of course, with the Mac, there's OS X. It'll take some of us a while to feel ready for it, but for each of us, when that day comes, it'll be pretty exciting. Better than anything on the Wintel side, anyway. Or is that showing bias? [Yep, but it's OK because for once, you got it right. You know what they say about all those monkeys typing - Ed]

Dennis Field

A Glowing Endorsement

I want to endorse what Craig said about memory. I recently bought an old-style iBook with 64 MB. Slow, poky, crashed a lot, and that was with OS 9.1. I got an extra 128 MB fitted so that now I have 192 MB. I can't believe the difference: it's like replacing a five year old machine with a new one.

What bothers me is what I paid. The installation charge was more than the price of the memory. Apple could have bought the new memory cheaper than I did, and installed it as part of the machine's assembly cost - no extra, in other words. They could have made more money from me, and I'd have had a far better machine at lower total cost.

So what gives here? Isn't Apple interested in satisfied customers?

Blain Smith

Everyone keeps wanting me to act as Apple's spokesman. OK, here goes.

Prices and specifications of our machines are determined by many factors: volatile component prices, design considerations, government regulations, inventory status, and the wishes of our customers. We review all relevant considerations on a frequent basis, and from time to time make changes and improvements to our products. Your business is important to us, and you will only be kept on hold until the next available operator is hired from a bankrupt dot.com and trained to Think Different. Thank you for your Interest in Our Company.

Made up of course. But spare a thought for poor Apple. One of the fastest ways of annoying their dealers must be to make existing stock obsolete even faster than happens in the industry anyway, and suddenly upgrading a machine with extra factory memory would do just that. With the inevitable lead time between design and final sale from the store, volatile prices must be a killer both ways: up and down. Hence the "free extra memory" offers by the big retailers. They're just more nimble than Apple or any other large manufacturer could ever be.

Bottom line: right now, don't even think of a 64 MB or even a 128 MB machine. Insist upon having more at reasonable cost, and shop around. Make the usual compromise between dealer relationship, trust, and the like on the one hand, and the bottom line of price on the other. But don't go without the memory that the machine needs before it'll work decently.

Dennis Field.

Why the MiniView?

I read Shawn DeLosh's review of the Iogear MiniView. What an absolutely useless piece of kit. Why not connect the machines by ethernet, and do everything on the Mac side with the PC used just to get files from - and put them back to if you really need to. Of course, if you really have to work with a PC, you'd need Timbuktu or some such so you could operate the one machine as a slave of the other over the network. But the MiniView: what a klutzy thing.

Brian Baldwin

I think you're beginning to answer your own question, Brian. What seems at first to be an easy problem gets more complicated as you think about it. First just a cable, then software at both ends, you'll be telling poor Shawn all about TCP/IP settings and Winsock next. And you may end up paying more for the software than Shawn would have for the just the MiniView, and not getting anything for it that Shawn needs except a bunch of complications and hassles. Shawn doesn't need that. Marc yes, but Shawn no.

Bottom line: if you don't need it, don't buy it. Kinda like a PlayStation, y'know, and it doesn't hurt anyone for you to be scornful of that either. Isn't the Marketplace wonderful?

Dennis Field

Send your rants and raves, questions and comments, compliments and criticisms to connect@macosjournal.com or use this form.

Dennis Field - dennis@macosjournal.com
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