Solipsism Gradient

kiltbear wrote:

I think it could quite easily be the primary machine for a decent sized share of the market. I think we geeks forget about how most normal people operate. Surf, email, sync the iPod nano or iPhone. For the “average” user, I think a MacBook Air (with external optical), Time Capsule, and iPhone offers an easy to use elegant combination that will meet most all of their needs.

True, but wouldn’t such a “normal person” be equally well served by a MacBook, at less cost? Not that I remember what such a person is like…

Now that the specs are out, some fast comments on the MacBook Air.

I think most complainers about missing features are seriously mistaken; they’re thinking it’s a replacement for the current MacBook and MacBook Pro lines (and if it were, they’d be right). But it’s a matter of demographics. The Air is perhaps the first Mac specifically designed as a secondary machine – though I suppose it might be OK as a primary machine for some small segment of the market.

The comments remind me a lot of the reactions to the Smart ForTwo car. It just seats two people, its luggage space is very small, it’s not ideal for long trips, and (at least here in Brazil) the wheels are too small for driving on the usually bumpy/potholed roads and highways. But that’s comparing it to larger cars, which makes no sense. As evidenced by its success in Europe, there is a market for it that usual cars can’t even compete in. I’d buy one (or two) if I could afford it – as they’re imported, they’re actually more expensive than locally-built full-size cars.

See, the market for the Smart is very specific. It’s an excellent second car for urban commuters – no sense firing up the family’s large car (or [shudder] SUV) just for driving to work or to the grocery, or for dropping the kid off at school; at least if it’s one kid only. It’s great for people who need to rent a small car for a few days in a foreign city; inexpensive and easy to park. Childless professional couples would get two.

Same thing applies to the MacBook Air. My main working machine is an iMac G5 with a second display; getting a little old but still usable. Every couple of days I copy my working folders to my laptop (currently a PowerBook G4), work on them somewhere, and return in the evening and copy the changed files back. I also use the laptop on trips, mainly for a similar purpose.

Now this is quite different from the days where that PowerBook was my main working machine; then, I needed (and got) maximum RAM, the largest hard drive on the market, lots of interfaces, and a DVD drive. Now, I need very little of that: a good screen, a normal-sized keyboard and a network interface (which can be wireless) is enough for me. I don’t need speakers (headphones are OK), audio input, or even an optical drive.

So, the MacBook Air is aimed right at my demographic. In other words, it doesn’t substitute or update the existing MacBook/Pros; it’s a machine for a specific segment that didn’t have a “lightweight” model directly aimed at it.

I’m glad I didn’t post anything before the just-finished keynote. From my point of view, the only interesting part was the MacBook Air; looks like a great machine for traveling with. So, back to work…

There’s been so many comments about Leopard over the weekend that I stopped reading – and there are too many of them that just repeat each other, too.

I’ve been running Leopard since the first seeds came out, and the last few have been really stable, especially the last one; I didn’t have to reboot it once in about a month.

The final release – 9A581 – was built on Oct. 12 but released to developers on Oct.26, the same day that it (theoretically) was released to users; some journalists got it earlier under embargo. In past major releases, the final build’s release date for developers was uneven – sometimes just a few days before, sometimes as much as a week after.

Buzz Andersen, a former Apple employee, wrote a very good post pointing out the difficulty of interpreting Apple’s actions from the outside. While I personally think Apple’s two-week delay in posting the final release for developers was unfortunate, I must point out that past releases leaked on the torrent sites in less than a day. If some developers won’t honor their NDAs, everybody will suffer for it.

Similarly there’s much controversy about stuff that got suddenly (or not-really-so-suddenly) taken out of the final release; 64-bit Carbon apps, ZFS support, Java 1.6, backing up over wireless are the ones that immediately come to mind. As usual, people are reading into that all sort of background motivations – Apple is following some Machiavellian scheme, or is completely stupid/clueless. I prefer to believe that they’re doing the best they can with their limited resources while trying to follow a multitude of small individual agendas. Ants carrying a large item into their nests come to mind…

For now, I’d just like to point out that, as in previous years, 10.5.1 will be out within 15 days, probably fixing at least one of those omissions. I think Apple made a good decision in, for the last month, concentrating on polishing existing features. Leopard is unusually smooth and “finished” for a .0 version.

On a personal note, and as I posted to the XRay Support Forum a few days ago, XRay 1.1 suffers from some problems in the final Leopard release. The most annoying is that the file browser doesn’t allow you XRay an item – it will crash.

I’m fully resolved to step up efforts to release XRay II, at least in public beta, as soon as other commitments allow. It will be Leopard-only and everybody who paid for XRay 1.x will get a free upgrade to the “standard” edition (there may be a “pro” edition, but I’m not sure yet).

One commitment which, unfortunately, is a great deal more pressing (literally!) is that I’ve contracted to write a book about “Programming Objective-C 2.0”. This also is specific for Leopard, and as you can imagine, deadlines are very short; ideally, of course, the book should be out today! But, the laws of physics and physiology permitting, it will be out as soon as possible. Watch this space for details.

Slightly over two years ago, shortly after the Intel switch announcement, I wrote:

…the current installed base is something over 30 million PowerPC Macs (or even more, depending on your sources). By the end of 2007, Intel Macs will be perhaps 15% of that. It will take at least 5 years, probably more, for Intel Macs to surpass the PowerPC Mac installed base.

I’m pleased to see that Mac sales were so good that this milestone – equal number of PowerPC and Intel Macs – will apparently be reached before the end of 2007. At that time, some people feared developers would start releasing Intel-only versions of their software soon; as far as I know, except for natural exceptions like Parallels and VMWare, this hasn’t happened.

And, while recent news indicates that the upcoming Leopard’s hardware requirements have been upped a little, most recent G4s and all G5s will still run it well. Older G4s will, I suppose, be more disqualified by video speed restrictions than by CPU speed as such.

This is the latest (and, I hope, final) post about my hard drive heat problems. (All in a 2G iMac G5, 20″ – the last one without a built-in iSight camera.)

By a fortuitous coincidence my friends at Deltatronic offered me a 400GB Samsung HD400LJ SATA drive at a reasonable price, and I bought it. Reviews on this drive indicated that it was quieter and ran a little cooler than my previous Seagate drive, at the expense of being slower in some situations; well worth it for me.

After mounting it, I saw that the new drive has no convenient smooth surface on its face to mount the temperature sensor, so I took advantage of the cable length (which I had increased in the previous installment) and tacked the sensor onto the part opposite from the connectors, just for testing. It turns out that this is also conveniently out of the fan’s airstream, so chances were this would be the hottest part of the drive.

And indeed, after 10 days of testing the temperature sensor tracks consistently 4-5C higher than the internal SMART temperature – remember that, with the standard sensor mounting, this was the other way around. As a result, the drives were usually hovering right near their upper limit of 60C; not a desirable situation. With the new placement the SMART temperature oscillates between 48 and 52C, still not ideal but much better. The tradeoff is increased fan noise, which I don’t mind much – although I must be one of the few iMac G5 owners who doesn’t. I was hoping the new iMacs, which have a larger fan directly below the drive, would run lower temperatures, but from what people say, they decided to lower fan speeds at the expense of maintaining the 58C operating point.

The Google paper (pdf) about drive reliability did conclude that temperatures weren’t a significant factor, but the majority of their drives ran in the 25-40C range, with almost none over 50C. Their graph does show that failures begin to rise when you get over 45C, so I prefer to err on the side of caution here. I couldn’t find a single working fan control program for the iMac G5 but there seem to be several for the Intel iMacs – I’ll certainly get one when I upgrade, perhaps next year.

Currently, I have a G3 iBook/600MHz which can run any Mac OS X between 10.0 and 10.4; a PowerBook G4/1GHz; the iMac G5/2GHz, which is my main working machine; and a Core Solo Mac mini with 512MB. I only lack a Core 2 Duo machine to have all CPU platforms of the last 10 years for compatibility testing. (Justifying all these Macs to my wife is, as yet, an unsolved problem…)

Since I now have two left-over SATA drives without a convenient external case to use them in (not to speak of several older PATA/IDE drives), I also bought a Cables Unlimited USB-2110 drive adapter. This is a small cable header which plugs into both 3.5″ and 2.5″ IDE drives and also (over two extra short cables) into SATA drives, with an external power supply. Works quite well and I now can switch among my old drives for backups, and easily test others that come in.

After Leopard comes out with Time Machine in a few months we’ll probably see a boom in external RAID or NAS drive cases, and then I’ll have a place to put the two SATA drives. None of the solutions currently on the market quite fill my requirements. Ideally I’d like a drive case that has USB2, FireWire and gigabit Internet interfaces and with space for at least 3, ideally 4, internal SATA drives…

Wow, over 20 days without a post, and I didn’t notice. Yes, I’m still here… though not that much “here”, but offline. Here’s some of what happened.

About 5 months ago I posted about my temperature problems with the hard drive inside the iMac G5. I’d solved them somewhat preliminarly by buying a new (and supposedly less-hot) drive and putting some heatsink paste under the thermal sensor. Here’s the sensor picture again:

Well, about 3 weeks ago I left the iMac overnight, downloading some large file. I came back to it in the morning and it had frozen, and I heard some faint beeping which appeared to come from the UPS I keep just behind the machine. I turned everything off, waited half an hour or so, and restarted – everything worked fine but in two hours it froze again when the faint beeping started. This time, I could ascertain that

1) the beeping was actually a buzzing coming from the hard drive

2) the hard drive sensor said a reasonable 53.5C

3) the hard drive SMART sensor said the drive was actually at 61C!

Whoa. Something clearly had changed since February, when I said the average difference between the two sensors had shrunk to 4C. I did some cautious testing over the next week. Indeed, the external sensor never went over 53.5C – and the fan begins to rev up only at 54C, but it never got there. The sensor actually tracked the SMART value reasonably well – to 1C below 50C, to 3-4C until 53C, but then the internal temperature just soared. As soon as that went to anywhere over 59C, the drive froze and started buzzing. After cooling off everything started working again.

Up until last weekend, I tried changing the heatsink paste – no change. I tried out several fan control programs, none worked with the iMac. I tried finding out some software way to kick the fans up, but didn’t have too much time to really study the problem. A friend gave me a small flat fan from a laptop which I tried to mount inside, but there’s no space available anywhere near the drive.

About the only thing that helped a little was mounting a couple of other small fans blowing into the air intakes below the iMac – I glued them in place with some gaffer tape and ran them off a spare 12V supply. But it clearly wasn’t a definite solution; it sort of worked for a few hours as long as I kept the CPU speed on “reduced” and didn’t open too many programs at a time. I suppose someone should make a supplementary fan unit sucking air out of the iMac, like we had for the MacPlus… I wonder if the current Intel iMacs also overheat?

Anyway, last weekend I gave up and performed minor surgery on the sensor cable, making it about 10cm (4″) longer. The main trick was to convince it to part company with its original mounting place – people who’d performed this procedure before recommended using a “thin blade”, but none I had were thin enough. The optimum solution is a length of dental floss. If you try this, work it under the double-sided white tape that glues the sensor board to the metal bracket, so the tape stays stuck to the board. I got it off cleanly with its adhesive properties still intact.

I experimented with a few locations, but the only easy one was a small flat space between the drive spindle and the PC board. In that location, so far as I can see, the two temperatures track each other to 2C – usually even to 0.5C. One shouldn’t check the SMART temperature too frequently or the drive never sleeps; 20 minutes seems OK. The temperature hovers between 52C and 57C under normal workload… still not ideal. But the fans kick in and the iMac now sounds louder, much like it did when it was new. I suppose I’m the only iMac G5 owner who’s glad to hear loud fan noises…

However, today, just when I was finally ready to start working on my usual stuff again, the @#$%^& thing froze again – and while both temperatures were at 52C, where it should work. So either I need to reformat, or install air conditioning, or get a new drive while the current one is under warranty. Or all of these. There goes another weekend…

Just found time to read John Gruber’s first impressions of the iPhone. Worth a read, but the most interesting part is where he says that iTunes showed him a crash report, which he posted.

Several interesting items are evident in the crash report, the most interesting is the following line:

OS Version:      OS X 1.0 (1A543a)

which sort of answers my previous question; how is Apple planning to handle the Mac OS X/”OS X” division? So unless this is just a stopgap or beta version of “OS X”, version numbers of that aren’t tracking their Mac OS X counterparts at all. We’re back at 1.0.

Elsewhere, Gruber says, referring to some limitations in the iPhone’s “Notes” application:

…Both problems with Notes seem to me an indication that it was designed under the assumption that iPhone would debut alongside Leopard. Mac OS X Leopard includes a system-wide “notes” feature, exposed through Apple Mail, and as you can see in the screenshots, it looks a lot like iPhone Notes – Marker Felt text on a yellow legal pad background. Presumably, some sort of synching is coming eventually, at least with Leopard.

This makes sense to me – I always thought that iPhone and Leopard were originally supposed to come out on the same day, and that by that time we’d see the “Mac” taken out of Mac OS X – OS X 10.5 would be the new version across all Apple products. But apparently this was a little too much for the Apple folks to chew, and Leopard had to be delayed so the iPhone could still come out in the nick of time.

Well, the iPhone seems to be fully capable of being easily updated, and this version convergence may still happen in November (?) when 10.5 Golden Master should be out. Meanwhile, the crash reports yields some other nuggets. There are frameworks with suggestive names like UIKit, Celestial, CoreTelephony, MeCCA and CoreSurface. We can also see that the iPhone uses many known frameworks, but Cocoa’s AppKit is conspicuous in its absence – the Objective-C, BSD and C++ runtimes are there, however. I also see sqlite (backing store for CoreData) and OpenGLES (OpenGL for Embedded Systems) in there.

With all this, I suppose next year’s WWDC will be extremely interesting…

Update: Fraser Speirs has more comments on the crash log.

Update#2: rereading the crash log, I just noticed two more important lines:

Code Type:       0000000C (Native)
Effective UID:   0

The first one probably implies that it’s running the ARM native instruction set instead of the Thumb 16-bit instructions – although that specific ARM CPU also supports Jazelle, which is a hardware-assisted Java virtual machine. The second one indicates that the MobileMail application (and no doubt the other apps) are running as userID zero, also known as “root”. No doubt this will be received with extreme dismay and derision by Unix-savvy folks. While it’s not unsurprising in an embedded device with no user-installable software, I doubt this will be retained when the next major software update comes out – probably together with Leopard.