Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

This is a great example of why our increasingly draconian sex offender laws genuinely scare me.

A Misconfigured Laptop, a Wrecked Life

Which of us, through circumstances beyond our control, will have our lives wrecked by malice, paranoia, and the stupidity of “zero tolerance”?

My busy life makes it difficult to write for this blog when I’d like to, but I figure, better late than never for a post-WWDC review of my previous thoughts.

iPhone: The hardware and coming upgrade look fantastic, and I feel confident many very good third-party applications are going to become available quickly. However, the phone is still tied to AT&T (no surprise) and the voice/data plans are still grossly overpriced. If it wasn’t for the discount I’ll be getting, I’d be on the fence about this phone. Great hardware, great software, but the service plan to make it all work is a flat-out rip-off. The question would be, what do I feel I’m getting out of the phone versus how badly to I feel I’m being ripped off? 

.Mac revision/rebranding: I rolled my eyes when the rumors of the “Mobile Me” rebranding of .Mac came true. The name plays to the unimaginative narcissism started by MySpace, named and populated by idiots. The new logo looks like something from a Hello Kitty lunch box, punctuated by the old “me” from Windows Me, just to add insult to injury.

As much as I may dislike the name and branding, the most superficial aspects of the service, I’m very excited to use the new applications it provides in conjunction with my Mac and (future) iPhone. The demos so far look fantastic (Don’t they always?), but it would be inappropriate to say anything beyond that since they’re unavailable for use at the present time to those of us outside the Apple campus. As presented, and if Apple follows through with their marketing, Mobile Me will be much closer to what I’ve thought .Mac should have been for quite a while now.

Also related, I’m interested to see what gets produced from a combination of SquirrelFish (as dumb as it is, a better name than Mobile Me), SproutCore (also a better name than Mobile Me), and Snow Leopard or Windows. Could, for instance, the Mail application in Snow Leopard be the Mobile Me mail application, except stored locally and not pulled from the Mobile Me servers? That would give Apple a single code base to maintain for the app and a single feature set and interface for users at their personal computers and away from them. I’m no developer, and I may be misunderstanding SproutCore, but I’m interested to see what applications, if any, are identical between desktop and browser and different operating systems. Do any real developers have something to add to this?

10.6 Snow Leopard: I was disappointed that Steve blew past Snow Leopard, and that details were given during a WWDC session that’s under NDA. However, what Apple has said publicly doesn’t necessarily disprove my previous hypothesis of two feature-parallel OS X versions existing side-by-side, one that’s universal, one that’s Intel only, for some length of time. Some of the announced guts of Snow Leopard, such as the extent of 64-bit support, OpenCL, and Grand Central, may offer advantages to Intel machines, but they don’t necessarily provide any user-accessible features in the OS that current Leopard is missing. Features that are presumably not Intel dependent, like native Exchange support and a re-written Quicktime, can be provided as upgrades to current Leopard users. Those users won’t necessarily get the optimizations Snow Leopard users would get, but the functionality would be the same.

Of course, I have no idea if this will really happen. 10.5 may never see native Exchange support. OpenCL may enable end-user features I’m not aware of. Re-written Quicktime may not be backportable to 10.5. I don’t know, and neither does anyone else outside the Apple campus, hence, I haven’t been demonstrably disproved. My hypothesis remains valid because it hasn’t been specifically invalidated. To me, it would make sense to keep two feature parallel versions of OS X alive at the same time. To Apple, it may not. It’s difficult for me to say with my complete lack of facts.

“[In a pure democracy], [a] common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert results from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”

-James Madison, The Federalist No. 10

Think about what’s happening to you in Ohio, “obnoxious individuals”. Think about your “personal security”, homosexuals. Think about your “rights of property”, smokers. Individual citizens voting to make law via state referendum and the idea of direct democracy is the mob mentality the great minds of two centuries ago realized was, and would be, poisonous to the Federal government, the government of the combined states. “Because I want it!” isn’t reason enough to make law at any level. It’s sad we’re such lousy students of our own history and origin.

I haven’t written about Apple in a while, and there are a few reasons for that. One reason is that there are others who are better writers who express the opinions I would have expressed, but more completely and more coherently. There’s no use republishing the wheel. Secondly, just about everything I’ve written in the past that is Apple-related is based almost solely upon conjecture with few or no supporting facts. Sometimes I’ve attempted to use history as a guide to the future, which has lead to my final reason for not writing about Apple much lately: I’m almost always wrong.

The WWDC keynote coming Monday, however, has proven to be too hard to resist. I’ve found some of the rumors that always pop up this time of year to be too interesting to go without comment.

3G iPhone: This one’s a lock. As some of you may know, I’ve resisted purchasing an iPhone. The device itself has certainly been compelling, but not compelling enough to overcome AT&T’s ass rape service plans. Exclusivity with a crummy carrier is a point I used to argue against the iPhone’s existence way back when, and now it’s a factor that prevents me from having purchased this device in its inaugural year. Contrary to all of that, I have a feeling that the new iPhone hardware and software revision that’s going to be announced Monday are going to be compelling enough to overwhelm whatever reservations I have about service plans. That and the fact that my employment status earns me a 20% discount with AT&T. I’ve got the debit card warmed up and ready for my purchase Monday.

.Mac revision/rebranding: I’ve been a proponent of .Mac since its first day, despite the bitching and moaning of people who feel they’re entitled to the service for free instead of paying $100/yr retail. (Is $100/yr too much for an optional service? Really? Skip a few cigarettes, drink a little less beer, pack a lunch a few times, and you’ll more than make that up. The problem isn’t that you don’t have the money, it’s that you’re cheap and entitled. Ugh, idiots.) I will agree that .Mac has the potential to be, and should be, more than it currently is. Service levels can be improved, .Mac members could be offered more discounts and product tie-ins from Apple and third parties, and most people have a favorite service they’d like to see added. While it’s obviously not possible to meet everyone’s expectations, it’s certainly possible to improve.

What those improvements will be, I can’t say. The rumor mill has been sparse in that respect, and I have no reason to believe any single improvement may come to fruition. One rumor that has been knocked around a bit is the new potential name, MobileMe or .Me. Based solely on that tidbit, excluding any technical merit an upgrade to the service may have, I think the name would be silly. We already live in a narcissistic world, lead by MySpace (shudder), where just about every damn thing has the stupid word “my” in front of it. The idea that Apple would want a service with the word “me” anywhere in the name makes me want to grab some marketing hack by the hair and bang their head against a concrete wall until I feel satisfied that this unfortunate individual has paid the price for my personal frustration. Please, please, invisible giant in the sky, hear my prayer and make this whole MobileMe name thing just another dumb rumor.

Beyond that, I’m excited to see what happens to .Mac.

10.6 “Snow Leopard”: Ok, here’s another one with a funny name, but it’s better than *me*. (”Leopard Extreme”? “Leopard Take Two”? Not any better, really.) Rumor is that Apple may preview Mac OS X 10.6 and it will be, in effect, an Intel-only Leopard step-up, with lots of performance and security improvements and no major new features. I can believe this rumor.

As we saw with the Intel introduction a few years back, Apple has some sneaky squirrels in the basement somewhere who work on secret projects that are parallel with public projects. At the first day, Apple had universal binaries, Intel compilers, and Intel machines ready to go, for all practical purposes. Who says there isn’t an OS X team that has been working in parallel with public Leopard developers to create a very optimized Intel-only build of Leopard?

This is where I show my ignorance, but you’ll be able to follow my train of thought. My understanding is that Intel has produced a compiler that’s much more efficient at compiling for the Core 2 Duo than GCC 4 is. (And now some developer who actually knows will tell me why that statement is dumb.) It’s within the realm of possibility that Apple has been compiling parallel builds of Leopard with the Intel-optimized compiler, and they’ve reached a point where they feel comfortable enough to make that OS build its own product. Apple is selling, and has sold, a bus load of Intel Macs, and will continue to do so. Why not give Intel Mac owners the best performance the Core 2 Duo is capable of in their own OS build?

But what about the many PPC users still out there? I see 10.5 and 10.6 as being sold and supported at the same time. If the feature sets and a large chunk of the code are roughly equivalent, it’s no extra burden to Apple to support both, and creating both may simply be an issue of minor code revisions and compiling twice instead of once. (”Simply”. Yes, I said that. Some developer is yelling at me right now.) Having both operating systems out in the world at the same time would also explain why 10.6 follows 10.5 so closely. PPC and Intel users keep the same feature set for another year or 18 months after the introduction of 10.6, and 10.7 becomes Intel only, with universal binaries relegated to 10.5 only. PPC fades out, Intel becomes the focus, and during that transition, nobody is left behind in terms of features.

I also think of 10.6 along the same lines as 10.1… as an improvement that will be provided free or for the nominal cost that Apple has charged in the past for other such upgrades. People have always asked why Apple has those little coupons included in the latest OS box. The last time they were used, I presented mine to acquire a free copy of 10.1. Maybe that’s the case again.

There it is, all the baseless conjecture and hedging an outsider can muster. We’ll see how wrong I am Monday.