Solipsism Gradient

Posted by gracion:

Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

– .mac is dead. It’s never worked well (or at all) outside the US, as far as I know. It’s an expensive embarrassment. Apple could close it outright, sell it to Google, or allow people to operate their own sync servers.

Happy New Year, Rainer! Very good summing up of the year, which I agree with, except I’m not sure I want to kill .Mac. Here’s why:

It has a lot to offer as a seamless extension of Mac OS X, especially for nontechnical users. (1) Backup works, is flexible but dead-simple to use. (Yes Time Machine will change all that, sort of). (2) iDisk, ditto. (3) Photo web publishing from iPhoto is again seamless. (3) OS-integrated syncing of a variety of things (room for improvement though) (4) an interesting, already-working API for iDisk access, store-and-forward, and syncing. (5) Amazon discount (6) Comcast, Charter, and other ISPs are starting to blacklist my small independent ISPs mail server willy nilly. .Mac email is my way around these.

One of my very nontechnical Mac user friends had all sorts of trouble doing things until I got them on .Mac. I suspect that is true for a lot of Mac users. Admittedly, I haven’t checked out alternatives. Is there a “GoogleDisk” item I can add to the Go menu in the Finder?

Anyway, I’m looking forward to fun at Macworld, iPhone or noPhone!

Enjoy!

Heh. Seems the year’s over already and I almost didn’t notice.

Looking back, it’s been a busy and surprising year. I traveled more than I’d planned and wrote less. XRay II saw a lot of progress in fits and starts, but my plans to release a public beta this year didn’t work out – mostly because I had underestimated the back-end work necessary to actually save data.

On the Apple front, the year has been busy. No iPhone from Apple. Zune out, Vista out (sort of), AAPL options scandal, Leopard, Mac Pro, the Intel migration has been completed, lots of security flaps, new laptops… it’s a long list, so long I don’t feel like finding all those old links. Looking back, what surprises me most is that Apple doesn’t seem to be as interested in virtualization as I felt they should be.

And of course MacWorld is just a little over a week away. Rumors are already flying fast and furious, of course. Here are some things I believe to be more likely (not that I have any inside knowledge, I hasten to add):

• New Apple displays, with built-in iSights and microphones.
• New Mac Pro with 8 cores, probably with a new case design.
• The transition is over, and people are now sure the Intel Macs are “really Macs”, so new case designs are overdue across the whole line, although in the case of the laptops I’d say that’ll be really hard. Thinner and better/larger screens of course, but there’s only so much you can do with minimalism.
• Leopard? Perhaps we’ll finally see some UI changes. My tip for the release date is March/April.
• iTV, no idea in which direction they’ll take that; I watch very little TV. Regarding the name(s), it would make sense to go away from the whole iThing.
• whateverPhone: I don’t use a cellphone, so the basic idea leaves me cold. Unless Apple breaks the entire paradigm with some sort of VoIP breakthrough, it’s bound to be some sort of weak US-only experiment. Let’s hope they don’t do that. I also see no sense in having music capabilities built-in as a default. Opening it up to developers in a big way would be excellent, and the recent rumors of a stripped-down, embedded Mac OS X dovetail with that.
• .mac is dead. It’s never worked well (or at all) outside the US, as far as I know. It’s an expensive embarrassment. Apple could close it outright, sell it to Google, or allow people to operate their own sync servers.

I’ve written about Apple’s use of the TPM chip before. My basic conclusion was, there’s no evidence Apple is using the chip for anything sinister, or at all in current versions (Tiger). However, I also said Apple should use the chip as a basis for secure vitualization in Leopard:

…Apple should write a fully trusted hypervisor into the EFI (using the TPM) and run everything inside virtual machines, including Mac OS X for Intel itself. Booting some version of Windows into a second VM would be easy, then, and there wouldn’t be a full version of Mac OS X for Intel for people to run on standard PCs either. I don’t think dual-booting is a good solution, I believe Apple was just testing the waters with BootCamp.

I still think virtualization is a good idea… however, there’s new evidence that Apple doesn’t think so, or at least not in conjunction with the TPM chip.

First, ifixit posted a disassembly of the new Core 2 Duo MacBook Pros, with zoomed-in photos of the logic board. They’re not detailed enough to show all IC part numbers, but I can say with some confidence that there’s no TPM chip at all. However, to the right of the RAM socket in the second picture, there’s an empty space for a 28-pin flat-pack IC – just the size of the Infineon SLB9635TT chip found on all previous Intel Macs. I’ve been searching for a similarly detailed picture of the Mac Pro’s motherboard, with no luck so far.

Second, Amit Singh of Mac OS X Internals fame – which I bought and read recently, BTW – has posted, in his usual precise style, details on how to use those Macs’ TPM chip. Here are some salient points:

The media has been discussing “Apple’s use of TPM” for a long time now. There have been numerous reports of system attackers bypassing “Apple’s TPM protection” and finding “Apple’s TPM keys.” Nevertheless, it is important to note that Apple does not use the TPM. If you have a TPM-equipped Macintosh computer, you can use the TPM for its intended purpose, with no side effect on the normal working of Mac OS X.

…

At the time of this writing (October 2006), the newest Apple computer models, such as the MacPro and the revised MacBook Pro do not contain an onboard TPM. Theoretically, Apple could bring the TPM back, perhaps, if there were enough interest (after all, it is increasingly common to find TPMs in current notebook computers), but that’s another story.

He then goes on with very detailed instructions on how to write, install and use a device driver for the TPM chip.

All this is very interesting, but as the TPM isn’t anymore standard equipment you could rely on finding on any Intel Mac, this is more an academic exercise. I doubt that Apple will implement anything important in Leopard that won’t run on the new Pro machines, so no trusted hypervisor for me. Ah well…

So, Zune is coming in November. Contrasting with what we’re used to get from Apple, no detailed tech specs or prices were released. The screen has the same 320×240 pixel dimensions that Apple uses, but it measures 3″ diagonal (instead of Apple’s 2.5″). That is, the pixels are 20% larger. The large photos on Microsoft’s site appear smoothed in some way, since no individual pixels can be seen.

What is known of the feature set is… interesting. AAC support, WiFi support for letting friends try out songs, and a FM radio. I suppose FM radio is still in wide use in the US, but I doubt that people will want to pay extra to have it built-in by default. Same goes for WiFi; the impact on battery life won’t be too positive, especially if it’s turned on by default. AAC support may be an effort to get people to migrate from the iPod. There seems to be no built-in recording capability.

I’ve also seen a screenshot of the Zune store. Much like the new iTunes/Store theme, it seems to have a consistent visual appearance. It’s much darker and (to my untrained eyes) more webpage-like. Curiously they use all-lowercase titles in the “source list” where Apple now uses all-uppercase. The last item (“My Zune”) is conspicuously different in that regard. The UI also wastes space on the bottom by reproducing the Zune’s buttons. I’ll be interested to see if anybody complains that this deviates from the normal Windows interface…

All in all, I don’t think Apple has much to worry about in the short term.

The codepoet has got right what I wanted to say about the iTunes 7 interface:

I do like how it looks as a finished product, but it doesn’t make me feel like I’m using a Mac at all. It looks like the new iTunes Store does, right down to the scroll bars and buttons.

The only reason for this that I can put forth is that they needed one unified interface for both Mac, Windows, and the iTS and we thus have this new concept. It’s interesting, and it’s not entirely unusable, but it’s kind of annoying to have this iconic Mac application turned into a bastion of wishy-washy cross-platform interface design, from a place of pure principle.

So, they tried to make something both Mac OS X-like and Windows XP-like, and at the same time abstract it out into a distinct iTS look. Which in turn was probably inspired by Dashboard widgets. If so, they’ve pulled it off quite well. At least in the main window; preferences and popup menus use the native UI, I suppose because users might get (more) confused.

On the other hand, this means that the new UI should not be used as a guide or inspiration for other applications. Or websites for that matter; I imagine Apple’s lawyers will be very zealous in their defense of the iTS theme/platform’s look & feel.

I just realized iTunes is slowly morphing out of being just another application; instead it’s becoming an emulator running the iTunes/Store platform. Inside a window, just like Virtual PC or Parallels. Interesting. (This paragraph actually surprised me while I watched myself typing it out .) I wonder if other hybrid desktop/web multiplatform apps will follow this course… not that I can think of any right now, hm.

So, the big announcement is past and I wasn’t too excited.

New iPods; OK; I’m still relatively satisfied with my 3G, 40GB device. The new Shuffle looks good. Finally a price point and size suitable for jogging, although I’ll probably buy it only when it grows to 2 or 4GB. The new Nanos look less scratchable now, but still, at the price points they’ll be available here for, don’t seem to be a good value for me. The large iPods do stuff I’m not interested in, like photos and video, and I suppose that they – like my current iPod – aren’t suited, speed and reliability-wise, to be used regularly as an external drive.

Games. I very rarely play any games on my Mac these days and I’ve never owned a console, so I can’t see me playing games on an iPod either. The positive part about this is that it shows that iPods are tending towards having some sort of developer API – I wonder if these were all ported in-house or if there’ll be a PodCode announced at next WWDC.

The whole movie hoopla leaves me cold. I watch almost no TV (we don’t even have cable), rent a DVD very rarely (under 10 times a year, or less), buy no DVDs, and wouldn’t know what to do with a TiVo. I suppose it’s all big news in the USA. The iTV thingy looks like it’ll boost Apple’s stock when it comes out, so I’m for it in theory…

iTunes 7 is about the only part of all this which I’ll use soon – in fact, I already gave it a try. The new UI looks quite good. All the Aqua is gone, the exception being the “traffic light” window buttons; the rest is done in muted plastic tones. Some people are decrying this as further dilution of the increasingly varied Mac OS X interface, but I’d say this is mostly dictated by iTunes unique position as a cross-platform application that looks the same on both Mac and Windows. In fact, a quick peek into the package reveals that all the UI elements are present internally – it uses no native widgets at all.

It may be subjective, or the new QuickTime decoders may have had some bits polished, but some songs sound better now. The left-hand column looks nice, though most of the items aren’t relevant to me. The two new alternate library views are somewhat wasted on me; I deliberately erase cover pictures to save on space, and this only helped me find two albums that had slipped through. I wonder whether the pictures must still be stored inside each track, and whether they still are copied to iPods that have no cover display? If so, I’ll continue avoiding them.

Finally, the iPod control screen looks good. I’ll certainly study the whole new UI to see if I glean any ideas for XRay II…

I forgot to mention that now, for the first time, all shipping Macs have at least two CPU cores. Amazing. It also leaves behind with the machines I have available for testing, namely, an iBook (G3) which can still boot 10.0, a PowerBook G4, an iMac G5, and an Intel mini (core solo). So I need a dual-core 64-bit machine to round things out… hm.

I was reading over my own last and some other opinions on the net. Seems some people are expecting an Airport Express optimized for video… I’ve never used (or even seen from close-up) an Airport Express, but I’m not sure this would be all that interesting, or even possible within the current form factor. Wouldn’t it need a DVI or at least S-Video output, meaning a reasonable video card with all the DACs etc.?

Anyway, there are two other products I’d like to see from Apple.

The first might be a RAID network/backup box, but done right. Think Xsan for the home… maybe stackable modules to add any reasonable number of drives.

The second would be something in between an iPod nano and the Airport Express. An inexpensive (under $80) local controller, with a headphone jack, plugged into AC but with an iPod-like screen and controller to allow you to stream any playlist from a central music server. There are some boxes like that on the market, but they’re expensive and more geared towards connecting to an amplifier. Instead, think of something that could be mounted on a each threadmill in a gym, or at each table in a restaurant.

Not that I think these are too likely to happen, but who knows?

Things seem to be moving along well. Here are some random observations.

As I thought, Time Machine is starting to prompt manufacturers to begin offering affordable RAID backup systems. First out there was the D-Link DNS-323, which has 2 SATA drives and a gigabit network interface, and now there’s the Iomega UltraMax (no URL yet), 2 SATA drives and USB/Firewire interface. At WWDC I actually looked for such a product but couldn’t find anything suitable; they were all too large, too expensive or both. Time Machine without RAID means putting all your backups into one basket, so expect lots of better and less expensive backup drives to show up before or at next MacWorld Expo in January 2007.

The 64-bit iMacs are just out, as well as speed-bumped Mac minis. The timing on this is significant. There’s the mysterious “showtime” event announced for Sept.12, the initial day of Apple Expo Paris – and also the final day of IBC Amsterdam, the “content creation” conference. On the end of the month Apple will be present at Photokina. Of course this means that the upgrade are not significant enough to be presented at these events; rumors are flying about what media-related products will be announced. I suppose that movie sales over the iTunes Music Store is pretty much a given, although that’d a pretty unexciting, US-centric, thing by itself.

I suppose that the putative iPhone might be counted under “media”, as everybody seems to expect a phone-capable iPod instead of a music-capable cellphone under that name. While I’m a happy owner of a 3rd-gen iPod – by coincidence bought in Paris shortly after Steve Job’s last Apple Expo keynote 3 years ago – I can’t see why I would want a cellphone built into it. Or a PDA; I bought the original Palm Pilot when it came out and couldn’t get used to that either.

Should Apple bring out a product that might be classified as a “phone”, as a stockholder I seriously hope it’s not a me-too cellphone/music player/PDA. Just look at the restrictions that have so far hampered world-wide deployment of the iTMS. Combine that with the hundreds of technical and regulatory circumstances that govern cellphones in the various countries, and it’s a recipe for disaster; just check out what happened to that Motorola/Apple phone. So, hopefully, Apple will bring out something pioneering and generally usable – perhaps involving new wireless and VoIP technologies.

The iMac announcement also has deeper meaning. With the new 64-bit chips supposedly running faster at the same price point, it’s mostly a question of chip availability to convert all the line. I seriously expect all Macs to be 64-bit capable in January. Converting the iMacs at this time also means that more developers will have extra time to port their apps, if necessary. When Leopard comes out sometime between January and March a surprising number of applications will be ready for it.

Update: Apple has patented a “multi-functional hand-held device” that purports to:

… include two or more of the following device functionalities: PDA, cell phone, music player, video player, game player, digital camera, handtop, Internet terminal [and/or] GPS or remote control.

The patent covers:

Touch Screen, Touch Sensitive Housing, Display Actuator, Multi-Functionality, Form Factor, One-Handed vs. Two-Handed Operation, Footprint/Size, Full Screen Display, Limited Number of Mechanical Actuators, Adaptability, GUI Based on Functionality, Switching Between Devices (GUI), Operating at Least Two Functionalities Simultaneously, Configurable GUI (User Preferences), Input Devices, Pressure or Force Sensing Devices, Force Sensitive Housing, Motion Actuated Input Device, Mechanical Actuators, Microphone, Image Sensor, Touch Gestures, 3-D Spatial Gestures, Perform Action Based on Multiple Inputs, Differentiating Between Light and Hard Touches, Example of a New Touch Vocabulary, Speaker, Audio/Tactile Feedback Devices, Communication Devices (wired & wireless) and Change UI Based on Received Communication Signals.

…all that’s missing is a biological signal sensor and a recreational pharmaceutical dispensing device, to make this the functional equivalent of the “Joymaker” Frederik Pohl wrote about in his 1965 book The Age of the Pussyfoot. I wonder if that counts as “prior art”…?