January 14, 2006

I sense a disturbance in the force...

WARNING: All the below is complete conjecture on my part and may just be paranoid or deluded ramblings! ;-)

Hmmmm.... Interesting.

As many of you will know MWSF brought the usual $HINY new toys for all lovers of his Steveness' company. These included the new i(ntel)Mac and the long-awaited replacement for the Powerbook, the MacBook Pro (which I expect at least one friend of mine to be toting round next time I see him - me, I can wait until rev B or C) as well as various software packages.

Something didn't feel quite right with the Keynote speech though and I didn't put my finger on it until I watched it recently - what the heck was Steve doing spending SO much time on software when he said about 10 minutes in to the speech that the rest of the keynote was about the Mac? It felt well... Empty! It felt like he'd had to leave stuff out at the last minute. I get the feeling something's coming and the new macs at MWSF were just pilotfish (come on, gotta love the Dr. Who references here!)

Another thing that bugged me was when the Microsoft Mac Business Unit did their bit - they only committed to the next 5 years and then only with Office. This has definitely caused a ripple in the force with me. I get the feeling MS, while understanding they are dominant, have decided that the Mac (and specifically OS X) is becoming a bit of a threat. They have pulled back from the Mac quite a bit recently quoting "business prioritisation" within the Mac Business Unit. In other words guys, the Mac BU is getting scaled back.

As announced recently they are no longer providing any new versions of Windows Media Player for the Mac (and I know, WMP sucks but there's too much content out there to ignore it). Instead, they are promoting Telestream's Flip4Mac Quicktime plugin which used to cost $10 but is now available as a basic plugin for free. Unfortunately (for me at least) this plugin works pretty badly (i.e., it doesn't work at all and causes safari to crash) when you try to get some content from the CTV website in 'high' bandwidth mode - go back to 'dialup' mode and it works fine. It is obviously a problem with the plugin as this works perfectly with WMP.

As Mac users will know, MS also dumped IE for Mac (which really sucked anyway) and shelved plans for MSN for Mac. The only products they're talking about providing are Office and MSN Messenger. There are no definitive plans for Virtual PC either.

I really do get the feeling that MS have decided to attempt to strangle OS X before it gets a real foothold.

Vista must be a real mess if they're getting even half as worried as I get the feeling they are...

Posted by Garry at January 14, 2006 4:32 PM
Comments

In terms of leaving stuff out, I got that feeling the time before the x86 announcement and yeah, the same this time. Realistically I'm sure he'd have liked to announce the whole range of laptops and yeah, maybe a tablet! this time around.

I want the macbook pro.... I want the speed relative to the one I have now and the intelness ;-) but even I have to admit that there are some weird things going on. Same enclosure, no pcmcia, no modem, slower dvd (because it's slimmer) and no mention of battery life which should be *WAY* better given my centrino pc laptop lasts 7 hours routinely.

So macbook pro is probably a stop gap... a Get the people an intel replacement for the aging 15" g4 ASAP model.

That having been said, for the money, I think it's a great laptop and can't wait for mine.

Now, microsloth.

Mixed feelings here.

Office for mac is very nice indeed even though it's an old carbon app. It does some stuff that it doesnt do on windows and does other stuff much more nicely.

virtual pc relies on down and dirty low level stuff and it's reasonable to imagine that converting it to intel is going to be a pain, even though the instruction set has to help a little.

....but yeah, they gave up on IE when they heard about safari. They've given up on MSN. MSN Messenger is SO far behind MSN messenger for the pc that it's not worth using.

.....but but,.... they can't afford for macosx to fail completely. They need it to be out there to say "there's competition" to the monopoly watchers. If they wanted to deal it some death blows, why even sign up for 5 years of office? If I were microsloth I'd say "apple are coming up with their own office apps, we think ours are better so we'll axing ALL Development on the mac and offering you all office PC for £1"

I think they're in the business of saying hey, we think Windows is the better platform but if you must buy a mac, we'll sell you the software you all need for it, office.

Vista ISNT a real mess. I was surprised just how good it was when I tried it. Believe me, I wish I could say otherwise ;-) but it's far from a mess and when winfs comes around, we're all in for a huge shift in how everything works. Sure it's been hard for them to write, but then it's such a fundamental departure from the stupid old filesystems of old.

Don't get me wrong... macosx built on unix is wonderful! I love it (apart from the stupid UI mistakes they keep making)... but windows is far from down and out! I REALLY REALLY REALLY doubt that microsoft is worried about macosx :( sadly, but you better believe Apple needs to worry about Vista! There'll be far fewer reasons for people to swap to macosx once vista is out and about.

Posted by: Keith at January 14, 2006 8:49 PM

Might be conjecture, but have a read of The Cult of Mac blog at Wired (http://wiredblogs.tripod.com/cultofmac/index.blog?entry_id=1385976) for comments from someone else who thought the keynote was odd...

Posted by: Richard at January 15, 2006 1:27 AM