Tick-Tock, Tick-Tock

December 21

Ratings are going up! For a site that never really intended to have them, but was rather to be a creative exercise for a couple of hours worth of writing and the design and care of a website that wasn't paycheck in orientation, this is interresting. One reason is, I've gotten more public in doing research into all the flaming verbage this is spouted by the members of Guy's Macateers that invade various BBS's from time to time. I get the same leads they do - from the EvangeList - so it's no effort to find what target the mob has moved onto. When I get there I usually find a flaming smoking corpse of what was a two sided debate that has sunken under the weight of an unholy - or worse boring - number of me-too posts. When I sit back on a slow night, I'll spout some verbage from the "other side" and sign it with my real e-mail address and my URL. The results is that more people than ever are confounded by my efforts. At the risk of repeating myself, which means I'm going to, I love this stuff. What piques my curiosity is that most of the letters I've gotten haven't been the "you suck - Macs rule" variety (at the moment) but come from fellow artists who wonder if I'm really using just a Wintel machine for my site and the various illustrations and designs. Well, to clue in everyone else, I am JUST using Wintel. I've turned my back on Macs before when the Display Postscript argument was being answered by NeXT - as well as the question posed why the hell does an 040 from NeXT cost half of that of an Mac IIfx of the day? The last time I touched a Mac was in 1996 after several occasions of using Windows 95 and wondering what the hell the all the yelling was about. Sure, I disliked Windows 3.1, but after getting more done with the tools on Windows 95, it was short order before I handed my office Mac to someone else at work, and got rid of my Quadra 800 white elephant for my ThinkPad 365ED. Why would designers think that my site, and my illustrations are still done on a Mac, and couldn't possibly have been done solely on an IBM? Granted I'd say it's still a safe bet that more designers are being thown into using Macs, for now, than Wintels. Whether this is the case for the near-future is the question that's being answered every day by companies like Disney as they standardize their various creative groups with the rest of the IT comittee. Not that I'm saying that design by comittee is ever a good thing, but it's more than easy to make the leap than many designers believe. I've gotten at least half a dozen letters like the one I've posted in the letters section, so it's safe to say that there's still an equally large contingent of Mac designers who think that they'd be up a creek if Apple went out of business. Repeating myself from previous weeks, they won't be. But you have to do something very important to realize otherwise. You have to try Windows youself and see how making that switch makes the whole endless platform debates - as far as they apply to design - about as moot as charcol vs pastels.

December 22
Passing by the newstand I noticed that Time's man of the Year was Andy Grove of Intel. I'll be damned I thought, the final evidence of the standardization of the latest techno-marketplace is happening. That might have been a reach, but looking at the fact that Ted Turner was a previous man of the year and all of his cable/satalite holdings, you realize this validates the industry like no other. What was being put in the hands of the public were figures like the fact that Intel powers 90% of the CPU's out there. Don't take it from me, bash Time. Fact is, only Mac users ever will bash Time magazine, because all the people using Windows in all of it's previous and present versions are using Intel for the most part - in a multitude of flavors. The biggest price breaks occured when they diversified the lines into MMX, Pentium Pro and Pentium II. At some point it's safe to say that I'll probably give my Cyrix motherboard the heave-ho for a Pentium socket that's upgradable with future Intel processors, within relic reason of course. This isn't far-fetched because the Thinkpad 365 case, is still supported by IBM and only holds Pentiums now. I was curious how expensive such a proposition is, and board swaps routinely are now available for 75 bucks for your basic Wintel box. Granted I'll probably pay double that when I eventually upgrade owing to the nature of this rubix cube the OEM is going to have to wrestle with (or me). The biggest joy is that every Wintel box can have every piece swapped out when-ever the user wants. Given the number of Apple motherboards and shells being, doing this on a Mac is impossible. Sure you can slap in daughter cards and kludge together an "upgrade of sorts", but just picking the chip out of the socket or chucking the whole thing to place into a still compatable shell is a nicer alternative. A lot of Mac users will point to the fact that they've got plenty of antiques still in use. Besides this being a lame argument that scares the crap out of developers who code for today's tech, it's absurd because I'll be able to drop the latest and greatest power plant whenever I want. If I decide to upgrade to Windows 98, I won't have to change a thing. If I must, I can double my hard drive for 160 bucks and do it myself. Memory is the biggest nit-pick I've heard from the Jihad, that you'll have to buy more with each release. Sure if you're going from a 4mb 486 upgrade circa 5 years ago. Most computers don't have the ideal RAM config out of the box anyway. Mac or Wintel. Given the volatility of the RAM price market, it's usually a safer bet to let the consumer buy off the shelf than let expensive RAM stockpiles drop their value every week on the manufacturer shelves. I doubled mine for 120 about a year ago. I could double it for half that price now. If you're going to do this for a Mac, you've got to slog through tons of speeds of DIMS, SIMMS and every other IMS that plugs into whatever fashion of motherboard Apple is slogging that month. I recall having to be cognitive of Quadra 700 vs 840AV vs PowerMac vs PowerBook simms at the time since everyone had a different price point and speed. No such problems on the Intel side. Sure better speed is an issue, but the architecture just doesn't mutate that much. What works 2 years ago still has plenty of parts. Try finding that Quadra 800 to 840AV upgrade. You can't now, and even back then I couldn't at the time it was offered. It amounted to a catalogue number that wasn't ever available outside of California. This wouldn't be a big deal if that upgrade was seperated by 4 years, but in this case the models were seperated by 2 months. That's what the Mac userbase will never understand in terms of upgradability. Sure you can add ram and hard drive space, but what if you want to gut the sucker down to the mother board level if that's the choice you want to have? Good luck! Now I know why Andy Grove is on the cover of Time for the man of the year slot instead of Steve Jobs. Grove has been busting his ass giving people the largest choice for the largest user-base. Something another company hasn't bothered to do ever in it's arrogant history.

December 23

There's been plenty of opportunities this holiday week to watch the arguments scroll past the screen both on my own BBS and that of Yahoo's and MSNBC's. One of the wierder comments that comes up from time to time, is how Wintel owners are into the upgradability of their boxes because they love to tinker with their computers. They must be because they have to install SCSI cards, Sound cards and other pieces to get a Mac. This isn't only wrong, it's ironically warped. When my folks got a budget Wintel, it was loaded to the gills including microphone stand, tons of software, external speakers, and every manner of multi-media preconfigured to their tastes. Actually I'd say beyond their tastes since like most compuer users, they just want internet access and a decent word processor as well as a box that runs some of the stuff that they alone like to do: grade papers with custom Wintel apps, program Fortran etc. They're not really ready to have video conferences with anyone yet. There's not a day that I personally don't thank god for that. The fact is though neither they, nor me have had to "tinker" with their Wintels. They've installed many programs, and haven't had to debug anything. Everything they needed, and everything I need came in the box after doing some basic checking into the features we wanted. Those features in a plethora of configs are all available for parousal on the store shelves and the catalogues. I assume Mac users think otherwise because they've not bothered to pull their heads out of the sand for 10 years. Yes, the true power user back in 1989 had to figure out how to install cards and drivers because the basic configurations that were available weren't anywhere near what you can get today. And I'm talking budget minded - mind you. The better one's give you more than you need, all pre-configured and ready to go. The fact that PC sales have exploded, and are still going boom, is not because there's a planet filled with tinker-ers out there, but more people are finding Wintel's with Windows 95 easy to take home and plug in. Who cares about Plug-and-Play when it's already working as it needs to out of the box? This was the advantage that Mac users previously touted, and still continue to tout day after day in BBS after BBS. The irony here is that while no respectible Wintel owner is tinkering endlessly with their working boxes, there's a lot of Apple owners spending a lot of time online ranting and raving that this isn't the way the world is working. Now whose wasting their time?

December 24

Besides taking personal observations to the fore-front instead of the News, is that I don't really spend as much time in front of a screen when I'm not working. The fact that I'm off for a week compounds the fact that I'm not catching as many blunderes that Apple is making in the popular press - but since the popular press is also enjoying the manditory holiday season, I doubt I'm missing very much. No, this season is being spent like other chasing down a few "odd" holiday gifts, as opposed to what K-Mart offers, and figuring out how in the hell I'm going to rig a massive decorating project for a band - and all of the last-minute logistical paranoia that can sink such a project. As of both, the bandmember's testimonials as they leave San Diego for Denver, as well as the promoter at the theatre contend that while crazy and last-minute it's going to work out one way or another. This same attitude is still being adopted by the MacJihad. While mine mearly involves the logistics of enough balloons to drown a concert crowd of several hundred up to their necks as a holiday diversion, the Mac crowd are avoiding looking into the same headlights that doomed the Amiga and Atari crowd. Oh, pooh Apple will never go out of business. They've made tons of the same decisions in the past and they're still in business. This isn't something to be proud of. Those past decisions were mistakes, and the amount of money that's being steadily drained were the same magnitude that took Atari out of the hands of the present Time/Warner people. Atari struggled on with a new ownership, but they didn't really grasp the changing landscape - nor really had the funds available to make a difference. The headlights this time around, are a severe danger that while at most may be irrelevant to the computer industry today, may insure that they never will in the future. Unless they do something increadible - and believe me NC ain't increadible - there will be no compelling reason to think that they'll ever recapture any marketshare points ouside of their current downward spiral. Who cares!, say the Jihad, they can work as a niche company. To a certain extent that's true as I've mentioned before with my Amiga and Atari arguments. But that can only last so long, and as they fall further into obscurity, the money drain will be loathe to abait. In fact given the fact that Atari and Commodore both weren't nearly as large as Apple's current overhead, it going to be a safer bet to predict a bang than a whimper. In the meantime I'm going to contributing to the noise levels of a very crazy/nekkid crowd with a ton of inflated latex - with a little last-minute luck. Apple is going to need far more luck than I will. Happy New Year.

December 25

With the holiday spirit, you'd think I might abate in my tact in making light of Apple's current woes. Bah-Humbug. A few holiday parties are fun, but with nearly two weeks of available afternoon coffee sipping available, I've got plenty of time to fill even this Christmas stocking. In Apple's case it's not sipping, it's sucking that you're going to be hearing soon. Their own dire-predicitons of SEC reports of devistation is going to be jingling in my ears next month. Which is a pitty because even in Germany people are acutally pulling out handguns to get their mittens on low-cost PC's similar to the one's that Compaq is offering at the moment. Were they're any Cabbage Patch Kids style riots to be had for vendors of Apples? Ho Ho HO! No. In fact while the rest of the public is pushing the envelope for the PC market wide open, Apple has still been a pooper at this party. While Wintel pushes their numbers ever higher as they become even more price competitve for more income levels, Apple is still sticking to it's inflated margins like Scrooge. As we prepare to ring in the new year, there's more than a little chance that PC's will actually cost the same as the average Nintendo 64. This might kill the set-top box market as well as the NC market, but whole PC's on a chip slapped onto a micro-board do pose the probability of a 500 dollar or less PC (including the monitor) in 1998. Once this market heats up, with the help of declining memory and mid-range hard drive prices, it's not unfeasible to consider NTSC RGB savvy or 250 dollar monitors driving this down to 400 or even 350 dollars! Big whoop, Apple pundits say, no one will want to deal with cheap PC's over Macs. Fact is the public is scrambling for them now, and they will have more riots to get the cheaper ones later to get plugged into the internet and stay with the technology curve. The fact that Apple has backpeddled against this tide with expensive Macintoshes and receeding clone licenses, are not only making them sound greedier than your average Dickinsian Chistmas tale, but impractical for the Tiney Tims of the world. In this instance, I'd say that Bill Gates, for all of his shortcomings is looking more like Santa Claus than Steve Jobs ever will be remembered in the long run.

December 26

Now that the mass frenzy of holiday sales and exchanges have begun, might I recommend that for anyone who got stuck with a Mac do the same? The difference in price alone will probably get you a printer or a faster CD-Rom Drive for your PC. But if you want to put this in a more important light, you may wind up with something that will work like a sled-dog in the long-haul rather than looking like a undesirable mongrel after it stops being a cute puppy. This will occur once the new Mac owners find themselves with dwindling store shelves for software. It will increase in mangyness once you discover that more of what you're doing at work, is looking less like what you're doing at home. But the rabies that will kill your K9 aspirations will be the probable orphan syndrome that awaits you down the road. If you're not a first time buyer, then you probably have nothing to worry about. Surely you're doing SOMETHING with your Mac now, and will be able to continuing doing it long past Apple's demise. New users, are a different story. Given the up coming figures indicating Apple's continuing sales slide, this scenario may indeed be rare. But there's still the risk that some poor-sap is going to be pissed when he finds himself the proud owner of a spanking new Amiga-like device on the heels of the next Commordorish company going down with the ship. I don't know about you, but I'd never wish anyone to be behind the technology curve, let alone be the buyer of a new white-elephant. The fact remains that there's a lot of dumbos out there who are missing the obvious, and when they finish patting themselves on the back for helping a first time buyer get an Apple Macintosh, they may be running for cover when the headlines show they've helped dupe someone. In this respect I feel the MacJihad have more than a bizzare mission in mind in getting the word out about Apple. Because what they're saying is only half the story. The fact that there's a chance they might actually be finding a willing audience of dupes only keeps me pounding away at the keyboard while the lines at the exchange counter get longer.

December 27

The DOJ drama contiues with most of the charges and accusaitons being thrown out in favor of prolonging the agony in yet - ANOTHER - investigation into Microsoft's alleged misdealings. Personally I don't think I or any sane user would give a fig about two versions of Windows 98, one with and one without the browser, and with press coverage like this, I don't think any dealer of Wintels in their right mind would "unbundle" and downgrade their offereing's with the spot of the limelight on them. I mean "we've taken software off our new Pentium PCs!" isn't going to start a stampede of customers. However the real gist of the BS, is that your tax dollars will continue to find themselves in teams of legal pockets channeled in finding something, ANYTHING wrong with what Microsoft is doing. The fact that 10 years of probes into Xerox and IBM did little to change the corporate landscape, why not try again with the latest members of the peanut gallery. Of course it's interresting that Apple didn't get so much as a nod from the DOJ for buying up every competitor that didn't bow out of it's reversing from the Mac clone market. The only one that protested the loudest was bought out. The difference between this and outright racketeering is that the Chicago Mafia used bullets, not buyouts. The results are the same. But for the DOJ to look at Apple the same way the DOJ looks at real companies like Microsoft and IBM would be a severe exercise in microscopy. I'm sure that after all this exposure that Microsoft is getting, Apple and it's user base is starting to feel a little left out. Of course the MacJihad is pointing fingers and saying, see we told you so - Bill Gates is evil EVIL! Most people are interrested because it's deciding the fate of what will be included in their next upgrade and how this will affect their stock in a legitimate company. No one gives crap one what happens to Apple anymore, but they do want to know if their ability to surf the net is going to be compromised by some lobbiests from Netscape and the Government. Personally, I think Microsoft should just get out of this silly nit-picking and announce the two versions of Windows 98, and call it a day. The fact that they haven't is probably tied to the fact that after 10 years of his legal go-nowhere needling they're pissed off or bitter enough to have the tunnel vision necessary to expose the whole thing for the collosal waste of time that it is. I don't care either way. Which is, pretty much, the same way the rest of the world feels about what happens with Apple's business practices.