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OT - An interesting collection of charts depicting W's first-term economic achievements:
http://jec.senate.gov/democrats/ber.htm
The good, the bad and the truly ugly about all those switchers...
Yep, there are a bunch of them. At the end of the work day in the Mac department, I have to go and close all the open apps on every one of our demo units. The looky-loos think hitting the red bump exits the app. In finder windows, they like to hit the white pill on the upper right corner and minimize the tool bar.
When I went to consult for a retired couple with their month-old eMac--their first computer--I finally had to zero out the drive and start over. It turns out their helpful windoze-using neighbor had "helped" them set up their puter. Good golly, I've never seen such a mess! Missing apps, crap all over the desktop, stuff missing from the library. Oy, the descrecation.
The more advanced the windoze switcher, the more they think they need to tinker with the OS. I try to explain my philosophy (and Apple's, methinks), which amounts to leaving well enough alone and going about your computing.
Maybe I should design a 12-step program for switchers, or maybe it should be a 3-step program in keeping with the Mac way of life.
Bootz, you are pretty typical of Americans in their concept of how well or poorly Europeans live. I can speak to this because I lived abroad for 17 years and still have family in Europe whom I visit at least yearly.
What you neglect to mention is that most Europeans do not have to pay for:
1. medical care
2. education (through university)
Add those two items up in your family budget and get back to me to see if the VAT is still too expensive. Also, compare a 15-20% VAT with whatever your city and state sales taxes amount to.
Also, although under siege by the same forces as in the US, European trade unions are still able to protect worker salaries and benefits much more effectively than here.
I would accept a VAT any day if I could have their guaranteed 4-6 weeks annual paid vacation.
A standard of life is more than take-home pay.
Monday, Monday, can trust that day.
In first 3.5 hours, I sold 2 minis, 2 iBooks, and a PB. The guy (IT manager at an art institute) who bought the 2 minis wanted more of them, but we're now out of stock.
Shuffles moving nicely. We have only 1 GB models. Those little $149 hits do add up.
OT-I wonder how these folks would take to an ATM that doesn't print a paper receipt.
Yep, let's not recount nothin'. Too confusing for our peeps.
Lango, I was so busy I had no time to probe my gummit Apple guy, plus he and his wife were hungry. Sorry, maybe next time.
BTW, 4 of the 6 buyers were switchers. Had another one seriously on the hook when we closed. I think he'll be back.
Apple month update: No slow-down around here.
Six Macs sold in 6 hours (that I can remember), a blistering pace for a Sunday. FWIW, with iPods, Shuffles, software, printers, RAM, hard drives, widgets and doodads thrown in the mix, that totals over $14K for me today.
G5s did better today, i.e., 2 iMacs and a 1.8 DP PowerMac.
One of my old friends (a bona fide insider) popped in today and said Apple government sales are likewise up over 100%, closer to 200% in some areas.
We'll see if the rest of February tracks the first half. It's traditionally a slow month.
OT - Louis, dittos all round. Give me a noisy, truth-telling Democrat any day of the week over the lying, snarky, ethically-challenged cabal now in charge of every branch of our gummit.
BTW, did you hear that Gov. Dean told a reporter that he would not answer "blind" questions? As in, "some people say..." Yay! Give 'em hell, Howard. Now you set the agenda and stop the whimpering reactive crap we've been so accustomed to from our side. Maybe even a "journalist" or two might grow a pair as big as yours.
For those studying the fi index, I can report 2 banner weeks of sales, amounting to 2.5 times my previous 12-month average weekly sales.
Today was good, although not as fabulous as yesterday. Sold 6 systems, only one G5 among them. The G5 towers are piling up and collecting dust. The only buyers seem to be video/audio/graphics pros who have no other choice when acquiring new tools.
The PM is clearly the least appealing Mac in the line-up. Allow me, your faithful Mac Mamma, to state that I will never buy a G5 PM as they are designed and configured today. And I'm due for an update to my 3-year-old QuickSilver (Gaw, I love that machine...).
Why would I buy a Humvee that seats only 2 passengers? You get my drift.
And I still can't lift them.
Gonzo, we are not at ChompUSA here. This is a very different type of store--privately owned, with a 26-year history (starting off by selling Apples and IBMs in a little storefront in Ohio) of serious customer service and professionalism.
The sales associates do not "poach" from each other. Our goal is to find the best fit between the customer's needs and the system we sell.
You may be surprised to learn that 3 of our peecee guys are Mac owners and often bring prospects over to the Mac side if they think it's the right way to go. In fact, they prefer selling Macs when possible because of the higher price tag and generally higher attachment rates. I often sell peecees and monitors from their area, when appropriate. Due to sheer volume, sales people work the windoze side to "keep food on their families." My colleagues have long pitied us Mac salespeople because of our paychecks, not out of any disdain for or lack of knowledge of the platform.
This may seem strange to someone like you who comes from the win/lose Repugnican perspective, but we consider ourselves a team. It definitely pays off for the bottom line generated from intense customer loyalty.
I am the only Mac sales associate in our store, but begging for at least a part-timer to help me out. The peecee guys wander over when I'm not there. If the trend of Mac sales continues, we will definitely hire someone. All the previous Mac people left because they couldn't make enough to live on.
Received another shipment of shuffles last night (1 GB only), and they're going fast.
FWIW, lango, I sold 8 Macs yesterday, only one of which was a G5 (iMac). em.
The beat goes on.
Sold five Macs in my first 3.5 hours today, finally on lunch break. Lost a couple of sales, I think, because customers gave up on getting served. Over on the peecee side, they were at zero units to my 3 the last time I checked.
My personal sales this pay period look to be triple my weekly average over the past year. I keep waiting for a slow day...to recuperate.
Selling some of everything, still lots of switchers.
P.S.--I thought I sold half of my AAPL shares last fall. Guess not.
yofie, it's my unsubstantiated opinion that Apple released the Mini way too prematurely, for reasons known only to them.
I base this on:
- lack of AirPort and Bluetooth adapters
- lack of Apple keyboards and meese
- lack of Apple low-end monitors
I've lost a couple of sales due simply to unavailability of Apple keyboards.
Sumfin' strange here.
OT - Sequoia Voting Systems, here's a start:
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,61014,00.html
In case you haven't been following the black box voting issue these past 6 or so years, I believe it makes no difference how well Democrats organize or message as long as the counters of our votes are Republican-owned, private companies using proprietary code.
OT - Before starting work at 11 a.m., I attended my county Democratic re-org meeting. And there, right at the entrance to the high school auditorium, were the Sequoia folks with their happy faces and touch-screen black boxes, showing us exactly how they would screw us in 2006.
I asked to look at the code. Make-up cracked and smiles faded.
Don't tell anyone I broke our one-shuffle-per-customer rule today for a nice kid who'd driven all the way from Fort Collins to buy 3 shuffles for him and his roommates...
Looks like all the shuffles will be gone tomorrow. No more $599 minis, about a dozen $499s left. The two local Apple stores are now sending people our way (temporary smirk on my face).
No time to itemize the piles of stuff I sold today. The store and the Mac dept looked like a tornado had hit.
Three incredible days of sales for my best week ever in Mac retail.
Three in a row. It's even more crazy today in the Mac dep't. I just now finally escaped for lunch. Non-stop crowds and some folks deciding to come back another day. No time to even count what has been sold today, and obviously no time to work with buyers on advising and adding on items.
My feet hurt. My head's spinning. But at least my tummy's full and got a chance to...
What's happening?
Lango, attach rate on minis is still very poor, although I did manage to sell a couple of keyboards and mice yesterday. BTW, Apple keyboards have been MIA since we got the minis. It seems our store, geek heaven that it has become, attracts a fair share of nixies who are adding a mini to their stable of whatever-boxen. They've already got monitors, switches, etc. Hell, I can't even get them to take the "free" Canon printer.
The Denver Post did a positive story the other day on the mini, which brought in more lookers and buyers. Perhaps the Apple stores are attaching more stuff to the sale. Alls I know, as they say, is that I've dropped from #1 in attachments to #2 in the store since we got the the little buggers.
We had to high-five one of my colleagues the other day when he managed to add a $6 tripod and a $.99 mousepad to a mini sale. This was to one of several Asian grad students from CU who've been spreading the word about our $100 rebate on new computers with our Visa card. They are like brick walls when it comes to adding anything that isn't a super "bargain," related to the computer or not. The colleague who sells them extra stuff speaks Chinese...
Forget about ever selling a service plan on these things. We earn much higher commissions on plans than on other merchandise, BTW. Who's going to pay $140 for 3-year AppleCare on a $500 mini? I wish Apple would offer a low-low plan on them.
iLife and iWork (much lower supplies, always out) are selling nicely.
Plenty of eMacs (stacked high) and iMacs. I forgot to mention the SD eMac I sold yesterday with $600 in attachments--a business purchase to Mac users.
FWIW, our dual 2.5 G5 with 30" display demo unit does freeze up now and then. We did not add memory to it.
Groundhog day in Mac sales? Whew, I just completed two banner days with the Mac section packed almost all day long. And I'm just one little ol' MacMamma trying help everyone.
Two days, two data points do not a trend make, but I'm feeling something new in these parts. Just for giggles, I actually wrote down the main stuff I sold today:
17 shuffles (the store sold over 50, I think--word is out that we alone have them)
4 minimacs (only one low-end)
4 $799 iBooks (our February special--1Ghz models sans AP)
1 $1299 iBook
1 17" PB (last one of previous generation @ $2299)
Yesterday I sold more desktops, including a dual 1.8 G5 with 20" display.
Almost all switchers today. One Windoze-weary couple bought his and hers iBooks.
Yer welcome, Stevie.
Sorry, lady, I'm too old and un-moody to squabble anymore.
Whatever.
Micro Center appears to be the only retail source of minis and shuffles. We have them all, but they're going fast and we have limited them to one per customer. I had to disappoint a customer today who wanted five shuffles. Checked ebay after she left.
If we don't get any more supplies in tomorrow's truck, I think we'll be out by Sunday at the current pace of sales.
JimisJim! Howdy, yerroner! It's been so long, and you have been missed.
How's life at the underpass?
Tom, we have plenty of minimacs and shuffles. Maybe the Apple stores should send hungry customers our way.
(Did I really say that?)
P.S. - I am intensely disliking most mini buyers--cheapskates like I've never seen. We're trying to figure out some way to add a couple of high-margin attachments, but it's like banging our heads on brick walls.
Happy February at Micro Center! It's Apple Month again, folks:
http://www.microcenter.com/
Get your "old" PBs at these prices while they last:
http://www.microcenter.com/search_results_e.phtml?coordinate_group=F1C%25
And we have a bunch of $799 iBooks again (no special specs on these):
http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0173858
End of unpaid ad.
New PBs are here (on a Monday...):
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/050131/sfm073_1.html
Long, feature article on Salon.com premium site:
Hallelujah, the Mac is back
Weary of spyware, tired of virus attacks, a nation turns its lonely eyes to ... Apple?
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Farhad Manjoo
Jan. 31, 2005 / Twenty-one years ago this month, Steve Jobs, Apple Computer's theatrical co-founder, launched the company's annual shareholder meeting in Cupertino, Calif., by quoting Dylan: "For the wheel's still in spin/ And there's no tellin' who that it's namin'/ For the loser now/ Will be later to win/ For the times they are a-changin'." Then, after a brief diatribe on the stupidity and villainy of IBM, Apple's main rival at the time, Jobs cast himself as the hero in a near-epic, if ultra-geeky, battle between good and evil: "It is now 1984," he said. "It appears that IBM wants it all ... IBM wants it all, and is aiming its guns at its last obstacle to industry control, Apple. Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry? The entire information age? Was George Orwell right?"
Jobs is hammier than an Easter feast, and it's easy to discount his perpetually revolutionary air, but that 1984 shareholder meeting -- at which the company, besieged by IBM, unveiled its radically different Macintosh home computer -- was nevertheless magical. You can read this account by Andy Hertzfeld, a Mac co-creator, to get a sense of the tension and the mania in the auditorium that day, the feeling that this was a moment for the history books. Or watch a video of the event that's recently been making the rounds online: "Chariots of Fire" rises in the background as the Mac is switched on, and the audience gasps as the machine before them actually speaks its name in greeting. And why shouldn't they gasp? Outside of Kubrick films, whoever had seen such an amazing machine before?
If you're into this sort of thing, the clip can give you goose bumps. Isn't it a shame, you say, that Apple hasn't been this cool in decades? And then: Isn't it wonderful that the magic is back?
After all, we've been living, for the past couple years, in Apple's world, a time and place in which the normal rules of commerce no longer seem to apply to the once much-beaten-down firm. The company has seen an extraordinary string of hits recently. The iPod is bigger than Jesus. Apple is literally selling these things faster than it can make them. Now, for the first time in almost two decades, there's a good -- great -- feeling attached to the Apple brand, a haze of optimism that is unlike the sensation we feel for all but the most cherished of consumer tech products. (There's Google, there's TiVo, and there's Apple: Can you think of any other company that has recently changed your life as you know it?)
So, perchance to dream: After iPod, can Apple make a comeback in the world of personal computers? On Jan. 22, the company began shipping the Mac Mini, a diminutive entry-level machine aimed at Windows people. The computer is tiny, beautiful and, at $499, cheap; already, it's receiving generally positive praise from reviewers.
What happens now? The entire effort could fizzle, certainly. Apple releases nice Macs all the time that never spark in the Windows world. There is a theory, though, that this go-round might be different, that the moment may be ripe for the Mac Mini to take off. The landscape of the personal computer market has altered. In recent years, the home computer has increasingly become a digital entertainment center; people use it for the Web, they use it for e-mail, and they use it for photos, movies and music.
The Mac is not just good at these few tasks: It's the best there is. There's simply no arguing that Apple's built-in software and operating system make for the single most powerful photo, music and movie system you can buy.
But the things that the Mac is good at make up just one part of the story. There's a flip side -- the increasingly obvious failings of PCs running Microsoft Windows. Among Windows users, there's a rising feeling -- accounted for mostly by anecdotes and not all that well-measured, but nevertheless important -- that the system is becoming too hard to maintain. Talk to experts at computer security firms and they'll give you some pretty scary straight talk about how spyware, adware and viruses are just killing the user experience on an ordinary Windows PC.
It's not unusual for people to throw out their year-old Windows computers because they've become just too clogged with bad junk, says Richard Stiennon, vice president of threat research at the anti-spyware firm Webroot. The Mac, in contrast, simply doesn't suffer such afflictions.
David Gelernter, a computer scientist and tech visionary at Yale, likens today's PC market to the American automobile market of the early 1970s. At the time, Americans were buying American-made junk -- and because they didn't know any better, they were putting up with the junk. "So what happened?" Gelernter asks. "What happened was that Japan started exporting huge numbers of Hondas and Toyotas, and people saw that for a reasonable price they could buy a car that didn't fall apart in two weeks. When you picked it up at the dealer all the parts were in it, the whole thing worked. Until that happened, people were satisfied with the garbage they were getting from Detroit."
Forget the iPod. What if the iPod's just a gateway drug? What if Apple's future is much grander: What if Apple could become the Toyota of the computer business?
Apple's computer business isn't so bad. But it's not the stuff of dreams, either. In the winter of 2004, Apple sold about a million Mac machines. This represented a 26 percent increase over sales from the same quarter in the previous year, but during the course of the year, Apple's numbers zig-zagged between increases in one quarter to declines in the next. Its share of the world's computer business remains dismal. The company now has about 2 percent of the worldwide computer market; its market share in the United States stands at just above 3 percent, a tenth of the share of the top Windows PC maker, Dell.
We won't pause long to chew on the paradox of the Mac -- the mystery over why, so far, the world's best desktop computers are also the world's least popular machines. That's an old chestnut among tech journalists, and it's a lame one, too, as the answers are pretty close at hand: Consider the Mac's (perceived) high prices, the curse of tech-industry network effects, the business missteps and strategic stumbles Apple has made over the years, and the savvy and sometimes criminal behavior of its competitors -- consider all this and it's no surprise that the Mac's not the main machine in town.
Now, many Mac lovers will argue that market share doesn't matter. BMW and Mercedes, they point out, have a small share of the auto market, and nobody frets about that. This may be so, but computing platforms are different from cars. Unlike automobiles, your computer improves as more people use systems like it -- as more developers become interested in your system, you get more and better software, for one thing. It's true that the Mac's not in danger of dying out as a platform, and that the Mac does benefit, in some ways, from its small market share (it's a lower-profile target for attackers, for instance). But do you remember the famous 1984 Mac commercial, the one that argued that this was not just another PC, that it was instead a revolutionary product? The Mac's current market share does not speak well of the fate of that revolution. If more people used the Mac, and if it became an actual threat to Windows, we'd see two gains: Mac users would benefit from a more vibrant platform, and, perhaps more important, all other systems would improve due to competition.
To tech industry observers, the Mac's tepid sales in 2004 were something of a surprise. During the same year, the iPod experienced phenomenal sales; Apple saw a 500 percent increase in sales of the music device in the winter quarter of 2004 compared to same quarter in 2003. In 2004, the company sold several times more iPods than it did Macs, meaning that the device was purchased by millions of people who didn't own Macs. Their only association with Apple came through the brilliant music player, and some analysts and Apple execs thought it was natural to expect some kind of "halo effect" from the iPod -- all those Windows people with favorable impressions of the iPod might consider switching to Macs.
But that halo didn't seem to work. For some reason, in 2004, vast numbers of Windows people didn't look at their iPods and decide to buy Macs. Why not? Perhaps the answer lies in what Jason Snell, the editor of Macworld magazine, says is the essential difference between Windows people and Mac people: Mac people love their computers on a personal, emotional level. Windows people, on the other hand, prefer to think of their machines as office tools, gadgets no more special than the stapler. Windows users don't expect much in the way of quality, beauty or elegance from their machines; if they did, they'd be Mac people. Instead, they expect their PCs to perform a great many tasks, and they've resigned themselves to having to labor over those tasks.
This is not at all how we think about our iPods. The iPod is a consumer electronics device; it does one thing, plays music, and it does that one thing extremely well. The device is also intensely personal: People buy the iPod as much for form, for the way you look when you carry it around town, as for function. Your Windows PC, by contrast, is all function, no personality. Computers are the workhorses of our lives, slaves to the routine and the mundane. You do your taxes on your PC. You pay homage to John Coltrane on your iPod. Thinking about it this way, it seems clear why Windows people didn't look at the iPod as a first step to the Mac: In the mind of the typical Windows user, there's no clear connection between a desktop computer like the Mac and the iPod. The two exist in separate product universes. The iPod is sublime. Your computer is a chore. Why would you ever associate the two?
But the Mac Mini, Snell says, eases the mental transition between the iPod and the desktop machine. Indeed, one way to think about the Mac Mini -- and the way that Apple may be thinking about it -- is as the iPod of computers. Yes, the Mac Mini can do everything that any other Mac can do; it's a full-fledged computer. But "there's a big part of Apple that wants to be a consumer electronics company," Snell says, and the Mac Mini has the look and feel of a consumer electronics device -- a friendly, personal thing that will be marketed mainly for its core functions, its facility with your pictures, movies and music.
"I was visiting some friends this weekend," Snell says, "and they're PC people, they don't own Macs. But one of them was describing going to a friend's house to use iPhoto so she could make a photo book for their daughter's birthday. They loved the Mac, and they were seriously talking about buying a Mac Mini." What's interesting, Snell points out, is that these people didn't want the Mini for its intrinsic computer power; they were going to keep their PC up and running. They wanted the Mini as a household digital hub, as an appliance, rather than a computer, that made it easier to play with their photos.
Windows users often think about the buying of a Mac as a terminal decision. Indeed, you don't just "buy" a Macintosh; in jargon that Apple has popularized, you "switch" to the Mac, you make a change to your life in order to reorient yourself to a whole new platform. Put that way, buying a Mac is a huge decision; it involves learning a new operating system, transferring files, and buying new, expensive software to replace the software on your Windows machine. But if you think of the Mac Mini as an appliance, as a device for photos and making movies, you can conceive of using the Mac without "switching," Snell notes. You can use the Mac alongside your Windows computer, in much the same way you can use an iPod in your Windows home. Stephen Baker, an analyst at the NPD Group, a market research firm, echoes this thought. "The whole 'switching' thing isn't the way to look at this," Baker says. "People who are buying these are not switching all their Windows PCs to Macs. As more and more households get more and more kinds of computers in the house, they have a range of PCs for different uses. It's reasonable to expect that the Mac will be part of that range," he says.
Apple has been down this road before. The iMac, which Apple released in the 1990s, was also supposed to be something like an appliance. It was the Internet computer, the machine that made connecting to the booming and then mysterious Web a very painless thing. The iMac was in fact a hit for Apple -- but it didn't reverse the Mac's dwindling fortunes. So why should we expect Mac Mini to have any more success?
Well, for one thing, the Mini's cheaper than the iMac was. It is still possible to buy a Windows machine that costs less than the Mac Mini, but you'd really be scraping the bottom of the barrel, and even if you got something with comparable computing power -- as fast a processor, as big a hard drive, as much memory -- you still wouldn't be getting what you get with the Mini. A comparably priced Windows computer is a cheap Windows computer; a Mac Mini, with its built-in top-of-the-line software, is a digital media appliance that fits on a countertop, connects to your HDTV, stores all your photos, catalogs your music, edits your movies and (if you slap down $100 for the DVD-burning drive) creates your DVDs. Thanks to the Web, it is also now easier to start using the Mac without really going through the hassle of "switching." Key applications -- like e-mail in the form of GMail, or photos with Flickr -- are available on any platform, reducing your dependence on Windows.
But the main reason that the Mac Mini may find more success in the Windows world than the iMac did is that these days, the Windows world isn't doing too well. There are about 100,000 known pieces of "malware" -- viruses, worms and Trojan horses -- targeted at the Windows operating system, says Vincent Weafer, a computer security expert at Symantec. In addition, there are between 40,000 and 100,000 individual bits of spyware (defined broadly) aimed at the OS. Weafer says that by all accounts, the spyware problem reached a fever pitch during the past year. "Judging by submissions and support calls, it was getting a lot worse," he says. "We are also seeing a trend where a subset of the programs are becoming a lot more viruslike -- to hide themselves on your machine, they're using methods like viruses to try to become more persistent." Some people calling Symantec looking for answers to their spyware and virus problems are just beyond help, Weafer says. "They've tried many different things and it doesn't help. They'll end up reinstalling or cleaning it out or buying a new one -- a lot of this stuff is just so deeply embedded, it becomes more and more difficult to get rid of the gunk, the sludge at the bottom of your machine."
Spyware is big business; in the strange economy that is the spyware market, a parasitic piece of software can earn its owner $2.95 per year for every computer it's installed on. "If you want to earn some free money, you infect a million machines and you make almost $3 million a year," says Richard Stiennon, of Webroot. These incentives have caused spyware writers to build quite harmful applications, some of which are nearly impossible to get off your machine. "There are about a dozen pieces of spyware that are installing themselves in such a way that they're pretty much destroying the machine when they get on it," Stiennon says. People who are infected with such persistent bugs will notice the damage. Their machines will run slower, and key applications -- like the Internet Explorer Web browser -- basically cease to function. For Windows users, protecting against this software has got to be a full-time job, the experts say, involving multiple pieces of anti-malware software.
Compared to Windows, the Mac is a Fort Knox of security. There are only about 200 pieces of malware known to attack the Mac platform, and security analysts could not identify a single instance -- not one -- of spyware aimed at the Mac. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that the Macintosh operating system is inherently more secure than the Windows platform. As a technical matter, the Mac operating system, which is based on Unix, has a much smaller "surface area" for attackers to target, Stiennon says. Windows, by contrast, "is a really dirty OS that requires thousands of system calls to do simple functions -- and every single system call is an opportunity" for an attacker to get at the system, Stiennon explains.
According to experts, though, it isn't the Mac's better structure that accounts for why so few pieces of malware and spyware are aimed at the operating system -- it's the size of its user base. If miscreants really put their heads to it, they could probably come up with many dangerous attacks against the Mac -- but who would want to? Faced with the choice of disrupting 95 percent of the computer users in the world or just 3 percent, which would you choose? The choice is especially obvious for the purveyors of spyware, who, remember, depend on high numbers of infected machines to make money. If you want to make a killing in the spyware business, you're not going to get far by attacking the Mac.
This is, though, a distinction without a real difference. To the individual Mac user, it matters little why the machine is less vulnerable to attacks. The only thing that matters is this: "If you switch over to the Mac," says Weafer, "you'll be relatively safer."
A couple weeks after Apple unveiled the Mac Mini at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco, I called up Andy Hertzfeld, one of the engineers on the original Mac team, to see what he thought about the idea that the Mini could create a new opening for Apple with Windows users. Considering its appeal as a digital-media appliance, and its relative security from malware, wasn't the Mac Mini ideally positioned, I asked him, to take the Windows world by storm?
Herztfeld, who left Apple in 1984, is still a dedicated fan of the company's wares and a keen observer of its fortunes. (He recently published an insanely great memoir, "Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made.") Because he buys just about every piece of hardware the company makes, Hertzfeld had ordered the Mac Mini, and was awaiting delivery of his unit on the day I spoke to him. He planned to use the machine as the hub of his home theater system, and he said he expected many people would use it in similar ways -- as an extra machine, or as a digital media appliance, or just something cool to have around the house. The Mini, he said, was the product of a "confident Apple," a company buoyed by the success of the iPod and unafraid to take the fight to its rivals.
Pleased as he was by the new machine, though, Hertzfeld didn't think it could overturn the Microsoft monopoly. For one thing, he didn't believe that the Mac could really capitalize on its security strengths over Windows. If Apple were ever to take out an ad promoting the Mac's security, "it would only motivate attacks," Hertzfeld pointed out. "Even I have enough of the perverse hacker in me to try something." And certainly as the Mac's market share rose, so would the number of attackers targeting the system.
Hertzfeld believes that the Mac Mini, given the timing and Apple's recent successes, could likely increase the Mac's market share by a bit. If the system did extraordinarily well, if it were successful beyond Apple's wildest dreams, maybe the company would get to a 10 percent market share, he said. But Apple's problem, as Hertzfeld sees it, isn't in getting to 10 percent of the market. The company is smart enough to do so; and if that happened, it would be phenomenal for Apple -- but would it really be a revolution in the PC business? Hertzfeld didn't think so.
The problem with the modern personal computing environment is that, in some fundamental sense, it's a broken business. "There's a poison in the computer industry," Hertzfeld says, "and that is the fact that the common software base is controlled by a predatory software company with a lack of ethics." In case you didn't get the reference, Hertzfeld is talking about Microsoft, which, through Windows, controls the underlying software development base for the PC industry -- essentially, it controls the standards, the keys to empire. "Microsoft is not a good steward of the standards," Hertzfeld says, and if Microsoft is to be beaten, and if a company like Apple is to exert more dominance in the PC world, Microsoft has got to first lose control of the standards. Hertzfeld actually believes that this is occurring; Microsoft is in fact slowly losing its grip on the software development standards, he says. "But I don't think Apple is the driver of that dynamic -- I think the free software movement is pushing that."
Hertzfeld is an ardent believer in the free and open source software movements -- in which software programmers all over the world voluntarily write code that anyone can share, modify or distribute. In the late 1990s, he co-founded Eazel, a company that created a slick file manager app called Nautilus for use on the open-source Linux operating system's GNOME desktop environment. If Apple really wants to change the personal computer business, it will need to do more than release a machine like the Mac Mini, no matter how good it is, Hertzfeld says. It will, instead, need to commit to free software. "Eventually the fix [in the PC business] is for the Windows monopoly to get marginalized by free software, and Apple could make a gulf of difference in that effort" by contributing some of its code, resources, energy and branding power to the free software movement.
Does Hertzfeld have any real hope that Apple, which guards its code just as closely as Microsoft holds Windows, may go the free software route? "I don't predict they will," he says, "but I don't predict they won't, either. They're smart people." What he means is that they may eventually see that it's in their interest to do so.
When discussing the PC business, an important thing to remember is that nothing's quite settled yet. The personal computer is a young product, and the PCs we have today are not the PCs we'll have forever. David Gelernter, the Yale computer scientist, raised parts of this argument in December in an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal, published on the occasion of IBM's sale of its personal computer business to Lenovo, a Chinese firm. Gelernter lamented that sale; it indicated, he wrote, that IBM no longer saw potential for the greatness of the PC, and that this "is a shame, even a tragedy -- because the modern PC is in fact a primitive, infuriating nuisance. If the U.S. technology industry actually believes that the PC has grown up and settled down, it is out of touch with reality -- and the consequences could be dangerous to America's economic health."
A conversation with Gelernter is an eye-opening experience. As modern computer users, we go through our lives resigned to mediocrity; this is true of Windows users, but it's even true, he says, of Apple users. The computer can be so much more than the systems we have today. Gelernter wants machines that are "transparent," that are more like appliances than fancy gadgets, machines that put your data, your information, before their own idiosyncrasies. "I don't care about the machine, I care about my documents," he says. It shouldn't matter which computer he goes to in his house, or whether the machine he's on is new or old; he should get access to his life on any machine. And why should anybody spend any time at all "securing" your machine from outside threats, he wonders. Why can't the machine do this for you? "Most people don't want to spend their time to download the latest thing to deal with the latest disaster to strike," he points out. Would we deal with such tediousness for other products we use on a daily basis? "Would anyone ever say, 'Hey, my brakes don't work but that's O.K., I can just download a new anti-lock breaking system.'" No; you wouldn't use a car in which the breaks didn't work. Yet we put up with computers all the time in which key functions just stop working, and, routinely, we are OK with that.
The industry desperately needs a new player. Some new company, or new idea, needs to come along to shake the PC business from its foundations. Which company could this be? Well, he knows which firm it won't be -- it won't be Microsoft. "I don't think Microsoft has the freedom to do it," Gelernter says. "If you were the most successful company in the history of mankind, if you were running this moneymaking machine that has done a better job making money than any similar mechanism in history -- if I were that person, I would be far too cautious. Why would I change what I was doing?"
Gelernter believes that IBM or Sun, tech firms that have a long history of research, are two Americans companies that have the best chance of creating a fantastic PC experience. Or, he believes that an unknown Asian company, some firm in Japan or India or China or South Korea that we have not yet heard of, will come along one day and surprise the American PC business in much the same way Japanese auto companies surprised Detroit in the 1970s.
But there's one more American company he thinks has a chance of profoundly altering the way we use computers: Apple Computer. "When we all reluctantly turned off our Macintoshes five years ago, we dived into the PC world, and we haven't looked back," he says. But Apple's recently been building machines that are headed in the right direction, Gelernter says. And God knows they're smart engineers.
"Apple could get a brainstorm," he says.
And Apple's brainstorms, from the Apple II, to the Mac, to the iPod -- and, now, maybe even the Mac Mini -- have a tendency to set the world spinning in directions we'd never thought possible.
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About the writer
Farhad Manjoo is a staff writer for Salon Technology & Business.
Lango, excellent analysis of Mac base defections. I see it a lot here in the trenches. It has to do with price and peer pressure.
In an anecdotal case from yesterday, a couple seeking to replace a 5-year-old iMac were shopping with one of my peecee sales associates, a very savvy man who recently purchased his first Mac. After qualifying the customers as a computer-phobic pair who only want to use their AOL email and print Christmas letters, he brought them over to the Mac department.
I realized their friends and neighbors had been spreading Mac FUD, and all they wanted was a new system to get back their AOL address book, which wasn't working under OS 9.x.
They ended up with a $599 mini, a $299 19" Acer LCD, a new Epson AIO plus the free Canon printer, a new mouse, and a new surge protector--less than they paid for their old iMac (after rebates). They were thrilled, having expected to lay out a big wad of cash. The mini may open the eyes of many previous Mac buyers.
OTH, most of my mini sales are disappointing from my point of view, as a salesperson who is rated on attachments. So many switchers bop in, grab a mini, then bop out, saying they have everything they need to get going. A couple of the windoze techie types have already bought their RAM upgrades online and viewed the video on how to open the box.
In general, it's going to be tough to add fries to these burgers.
found the iPhoto culprit and promptly trashed it.
If you're running Photoshop CS, there's a thingamabob called Keyword Assistant.bundle that hoses iPhoto. Dump it.
It's just so obvious it took me 2 hours of research to find the guy on the Apple support boards who knew the answer. Silly me.
No problemo on systems sans Photoshop.
Code orange on iPhoto '05 -- Moi and lots of other folks can't get it launch or, if they can, it crashes constantly. And yes, I did back up my library, repair permission, dump the thumbs and the plist.
Guess I'll have to boot from my back-up drive and finish my project in iPhoto '04 until Apple fixes this POS.
We usually have 17" LCDs for $199 (after rebates), brands vary among BenQ, Acer, ProView, etc. Same for 19"ers for $299. So many manufacturers are getting into the game I can't keep up with them.
BTW, even the cheapos look marginally better when running Mac OSX.
Strange RAM situation on the mini. The tech specs say PC2700 (DDR 333), but our demo model's system profiler showed a PC3200 chip. So that's what I'm selling, assuming it clocks down. 512 chips start at $100, 1GB chips go for $250.
One customer wanted the 1GB upgrade and an AirPort Extreme card installed by our service department. The service manager was the first person to open the wee box and was confronted with a couple of surprises. The tool to use is a putty knife (we actually found one in our janitor's closet), a special model of which may be ordered from Apple service.
The big disappointment is that there is no AP mount in the unit. The kit has to be ordered. We're working on it. Customer couldn't go wireless right now, but was so happy with the mini he didn't mind waiting.
We sell only the 2 stock models and can't do internal Bluetooth or SuperDrive options.
I sold 4 of the $599s and 1 $499 model, a couple of our bargain basement LCDs with them. Unfortunately, we're out of Apple keyboards (great planning). I figure I can attach $100-$300 on average to every mini sale. Switchers will likely account for over half the sales.
I still have plenty of minis to sell today.
Our situation is unlike the Apple stores because we did no advertising on the minis or shuffles.
I'm tired. I'm going home now...after setting a new personal sales record for a day.
We didn't know we'd have minis and shuffles until Thursday evening so didn't do any promotion. Still, I sold 5 minis, a dozen or so 1GB Shuffles (no 512s), 2 G5 iMacs, 2 iBooks, and a G5 PowerMac. Ten computers in one day is more than the windoze guys usually do, so I'm happy.
miniMac up and running, installing iLife 05 (in the box).
Piece of cake install, even with the noisy audience watching me do it.
Hooked it up to a clearance Samsung 17" LCD, Apple keyboard, Macally scroll-wheel mouse. The most adorable detail is the itty-bitty set-up manual.
Extry, extry, hear all about it!
Apple air-shipping mini-Macs to Apple stores and US for Saturday 1/22 sale.
My local supermarket is advertising iTMS gift cards at the check-outs. It doesn't get more ubiquitous than that.
I had to chuckle this afternoon at the store at a nice young man trying to find accessories for his Dell music player in our iPod section. Aside from the occasional FM transmitter, it was all iPod all the time. It's a funny feeling being part of a monopoly.
Blue, I explain as little as I can, unless they ask specifics. The keyboard, mouse, monitor absence doesn't seem to matter. Specs don't matter. Size matters (small size, that is).
Five hundred bucks is a magic number.
Please, please, Apple, just crank them out.
I wonder how Apple customer service will be impacted by all these newbies (hello, Bangalore?).
Interest in the minimac? Now that's an understatement. Since I returned from vacation on Thursday, it's been practically non-stop, between the walk-ins and the phone calls.
With the majority of inquiries coming from potential switchers, I have to explain the basics of Apple product launches, i.e., maybe March.... The Mac folks roll their eyes at such impatience. They've been there before.
In short, based on what I'm seeing and hearing the mini will be HUGE
Lango, patchburn is a fabulous find! We're testing it in our tech support area with various cheapo burners connected to our Macs. It works--which means I can sell a huge range of drives to Mac customers.
Now I have to replace my old SuperDrive in my QS...with whatever I want, eh?
New question: Is there any decent synchronization software out there for someone who just wants to keep the PB and the home iMac synched? I used to use Synchronize! but the latest versions are disastrous. Can you really use Carbon Copy Cloner for synching?
TIA
Blue, re display spanning on iBooks, iMacs, eMacs: Oh yes you can.
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/15401
We've used it just for fun. It works.