Dr. Dobb's Journal September, 2005
I've installed Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and can summarize simply enough—it's Grrreaaat! OS X 10.4 (which quickly upgrades to 10.4.1) is wonderful. It has just about all the features Microsoft promises to have in Longhorn Real Soon Now, but Tiger is here today, and It Just Works. Everything about this inspires enthusiasm.
Of course, just as Apple brings out an OS that makes me seriously consider keeping some fast Windows machines for gaming but switching over to the Mac as my main system for writing, mail handling, and everything but games, Steve Jobs announces that the current Mac hardware is to be replaced by x86 chips, which are themselves coming to the end of their development cycle.
The rumor that Apple would switch to Intel has been around for a while, but without details. There was speculation that Apple would stay with the PowerPC, but it would be made by Intel. That didn't happen. Instead, Apple went whole hog. Apple is changing to x86 architecture, and in fact, all of the recent Apple OS X operating systems already run (in the lab) on the current Intel hardware. With this bold stroke, Jobs is clearly announcing his intent to take Apple out of the niche market and compete for real market share. Given Apple's marketing strategies, it's unlikely Apple can—or even wants to—become the dominant player in the PC market, but it's clear Jobs is aiming to regain at least the 20 percent market share Apple almost had back in the early days of small computers—and do that while staying out ahead in the Way Cool department.
The announcement generated a world of speculation, some of it outright silly, some silly on reflection. For example, the night before the announcement, I wondered if this would now make it possible to build "white box" Apple computers? This seems not unreasonable on first thought, but it isn't going to happen. Oh, no doubt someone will figure out a way to do it, but it won't make sense as anything but a stunt. The whole point of Apple is the "Apple Experience," which is made possible through Apple's system integration. As Peter Glaskowsky observed, with Apple, everything is either very simple or impossible. There's a reason for that. By restricting the kinds of hardware Apple works with, the driver problem is much simplified. You pay for Apple system integration, and one of the prices is that you can't use some commodity peripherals and parts; but if you're willing to accept the costs and restrictions, you get the genuine Apple experience. That's not going to change.
On the other hand, some things do become possible. The development work needed to make a TabletPC work with Intel hardware is already done. It remains to integrate that with the Apple OS, which shouldn't be all that difficult. Apple may not choose to do this—predicting the whims of Steve Jobs is work for a better soothsayer than I—but it becomes possible if there's a demand.
And then there are games. In the early days, the Apple II had the coolest games around. After the Mac came out, game developers tried to work in both Mac and DOS, and then Windows, but as Apple lost market share and game development got increasingly expensive, most gave up. Really popular games might be ported to a Mac well after they were released for Windows, but most never made that crossing. For those who like massively multiplayer online games such as Everquest II, there's no choice—you need a Windows system, and a relatively powerful one at that. Bringing games from Windows to Mac is terribly expensive, because DirectX and other such tools don't exist on the Mac.
That won't change. After Mac switches from PowerPC to Intel hardware, they still won't have DirectX, but there's another solution to the gaming problem—dual-boot systems. Intel's latest security developments, called "LaGrande" (http://www.intel.com/technology/security/), can prevent systems not made by Apple from booting up the Apple OS, while permitting genuine Apple-made systems to boot up Windows. Dual booting has never been very popular, but in this case, it makes sense: Boot up in Windows for games and in Mac OS for everything else.
There's another possibility: Intel's new Virtualization Technology (VT) lets systems run several operating systems at once. Microsoft already sells Virtual PC for the Mac. Current PowerPC Macs aren't really fast enough to allow a satisfactory gaming experience running a Windows game on a G4 Mac (I haven't tried with a G5, but I gather it's true for those as well); but once the systems are running on the same hardware, that difficulty should go away. I can foresee a time when you boot up your system in Mac OS, let that automatically open a Virtual Windows Machine, and have the best of both worlds, letting each OS run the applications it does best.
Jobs touched all the bases. Major software developers such as Microsoft and Adobe publicly promised to support the new "Aptel" platform, and others not consulted before the announcement are scrambling to get on board. There doesn't look to be any impending shortage of software for the new Aptel systems. Moreover, Jobs demonstrated many of the PowerPC Mac applications running on Intel hardware.
That raises the question: If you're planning on changing from Windows to Mac, when do you do it? Do you buy a G5 now? Wait for Aptel Macs? Which generation of Aptel Mac? The first generation of Aptel will be "Yonah," which doesn't seem to have 64-bit support. Is Apple going to launch with Tiger for 32-bit x86, then have another migration to Leopard for 64-bit, at which point it will finally be back to the memory capacity of the G5? This cannot be great news for developers, but I haven't heard any of them talking about such matters. These are all serious questions, particularly for corporate buyers.
I can raise the questions, but I don't have answers. I do know this: When I first saw Tiger I thought "Wow! I've got to get a G5!" On reflection, though, I think I'll wait for some of this dust to settle.
On that subject, Peter Glaskowsky says "This media focus on Apple's perceived demand for Intel's superior offerings is seriously counterproductive. Intel's current offerings aren't superior at all! Apple just thinks Intel's future x86 processors will be better than IBM's future PowerPC chips. That's all they've claimed.
"So buy the Mac you want now. You'll be able to use it for one full product generation (three to four years) with no lack of software and no performance disadvantage. Any software you buy during that time will come in PowerPC or 'universal binary' versions, so that's all anyone can ask."
None of this takes away a thing from Tiger, which has just about everything Microsoft promises to deliver with Longhorn—but it has it now.
We installed Tiger on Ariadne, my 15-inch PowerBook, in under an hour, and a good part of that time was used in making sure that Ariadne was completely up to date with applications upgrades installed before we started. Once that was done, we inserted the Tiger DVD and let her rip.
The installation was nearly automatic. I had a short panic when I realized I didn't know my .MAC password, but managed to get around that with the secret questions, and won't have that problem again. There was also a hooray over the serial number for Stuffit: You don't need the number to install the upgrades I needed, but you do need it to download them. That's plain silly. I figured out a way around that problem, too.
Otherwise, the installation was clear sailing. Everything worked. It looks and feels like Apple, but nicer. Things are crisp, and less confusing. Dashboard is fascinating. There's a variety of small applications—widgets—available free (see http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/ for the "official" ones). These include clocks set to almost any city time in the world, weather forecasts, airline flight progress (type in airline and flight number and see where the airplane is), Yellow Pages for your neighborhood, traffic reports, and lots more.
A long time ago, when I was a systems analyst for aerospace, one of the most high prestige items you could have was one of those sun clocks that showed in real time just what part of the world was in daylight. They were electro- mechanical and cost about $1200, and the only reason to have one was if you needed to know just what our satellites could see at any given time. I managed to get one. Dan Spisak was helping install Tiger; I asked him if something like that was available for Dashboard. It took just under a minute to find the proper widget, download it, and install it.
Widgets are apparently easy to construct if you know what you're doing, being written in scripts and XML-like languages rather than coded. There are a lot of them available, and you can expect a lot more—and they're easily added to Dashboard.
Dashboard comes up when you press the F12 key, and unless it's active, it's not using system resources.
There are a hundred other features to like about Tiger. For instance, if someone sends you a pile of pictures in e-mail, you can make an automatic slide show within Mail 2.0 rather than having to open them one at a time. Also, in the past, I had a lot of trouble connecting the Apple to my Active Directory Windows 2000 Server environment. With Tiger, It Just Works. No third-party software needed, no problems with length of path or computer names, nothing. If you're using Windows Server 2003 you will need this (http://www.allinthehead.com/retro/218/accessing-a-windows-2003-share-from- os-x) workaround to make your network visible to your Mac.
And, of course, the really spectacular feature of Tiger is Spotlight, a search system that works wonders. It does take time to build an index, but it was able to do that surprisingly quickly, after which, it can find files, e-mail, pictures, you name it. Dan asked for a word to search for, and Alex suggested "Magneto." Spotlight found two instances, one inside an Apple iMovie PDF in French, the other inside a WinHEC 2004 Power Point presentation. Double clicking on the file name opened the presentation in Keynote, which is Mac's equivalent of Power Point, and took us to the proper slide. All that was automatic. Finding words in documents or in e-mail was trivially easy.
That was impressive enough that I tried an experiment: Find and show the Power Point presentation I had made at Henry Vanderbilt's space conference (http://www.space-access.org/). It was over on Lisabetta, the TabletPC. Tiger was able to connect to Lisabetta and search for the file on *.ppt (I had forgotten what I had named it). Once we identified it ("How To Get To Space.ppt"), it copied the file to the Mac and opened the presentation. All this took under a minute. We then closed the presentation, gave the system a few seconds to digest it, and used Spotlight to search for the word "irreverent," which I knew I had used in "How To Get To Space." Spotlight found it instantly and took us to the proper slide. Spotlight's metadata capabilities are also extensible to new file formats through plug-ins available at http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/spotlight/.
I could say more, but surely the point is clear. OS X 10.4.1 Tiger is what we've been waiting for a long time, and if this doesn't attract a lot of people to Macs, nothing will.
There are two series of computer books well worth your notice. First, there is the O'Reilly & Associates "Annoyances" series, of which the best is PC Annoyances by Steve Bass, now in its second edition. The second set is the "Degunking" series from Paraglyph Press. These include Degunking Windows, by Joli Ballew and Jeff Duntemann; and Degunking your Email, Spam, and Viruses, by Jeff Duntemann. Every one of these books is worth going through. In each case, you'll find a bunch of stuff you already knew, and other stuff of no interest to you, but in every book, there will be a couple of gems.
The book of the month is A New Republic: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century, by John Lukacs (New Haven, Yale University Press). This is a revised and retitled edition of Lukacs's 1983 Outgrowing Democracy. Lukacs points out the profound changes in American values and institutions that often go unnoticed but affect us all. My father once told me that 1956 was a crucial year in the history of America, because the Suez affair was a turning point in the Cold War. Lukacs also identifies the midfifties as crucial for other reasons, although the Suez affair remains important as a reversal of a long-standing set of policies.
DDJ