Dr. Dobb's Journal, April 2006
Apple Computer turned 30 this April. Its hippie bad-boy CEO is a balding man in his 50s. Its latest computers use Intel processors, and the company just announced another five-year play-nice agreement with Microsoft. Are we no-longer-having-fun yet?
I just have to feel that some of the magic is gone when the most arresting moment at a Macworld keynote is a one-second cameo by Al Gore. You're sitting there in Moscone South waiting for the camera to catch you staring at the screen, and instead there's Mr. Excitement himself on audiencecam, looking a little bored and kinda puffy. Thank god free fruit juice is still an entitlement on the Cupertino campus. It is, isn't it?
I want to be fair about this. Well, no I don't; that would be boring. But I do want to give the appearance of being fair. Apple has moved away from its policy of using the annual Macworld Expo in San Francisco to make most of the important announcements for the year. Now, it parcels them out at various trade shows and press conferences. The biggest announcement of 2005, the revelation that Apple was moving its entire computer lineup to Intel processors, was made at the Worldwide Developers Conference.
With Macworld Expo no longer getting all the press bait, it's increasingly difficult for Jobs to make a big splash with his annual keynote. He does his best to razzle and dazzle and nobody does it better, but more and more often when jaws drop during a Jobs keynote, it's to let the yawn out.
Adding to Jobs's difficulties in creating a stir is the fact that Apple is no longer the embattled underdog. The company is currently an emblematic business success story, its stock a hot issue, its CEO a draw on the college graduation lecture circuit.
Where did Apple go so terribly wrong?
Success, I suppose, is the culprit. Making a hefty profit is so tediously pre-dot-com. Delivering on promises is not exciting. Consistency is boring.
And it would be boring for me to rehash what I saw at the keynote because you can see it memorexed at the Apple site. But I think I might just briefly review the highlights, innovatively viewed as though this were a presentation at a computer industry trade show rather than a sermon at a tent meeting.
Jobs started by selectively quoting from the P&L statements for the Apple stores and the iPod/iTunes music business. Whee. Then he announced one product—an FM radio. Be still my beating heart.
The rest of the keynote was about tweaks to existing products.
Okay, there was one new software product. With the addition of iWeb to its iLife package of media-management apps, Apple extends its policy of protecting you from your own bad taste by restricting your creative options to a selection from Apple's templates. This may be commendable, but exciting it's not.
Instead of adding a spreadsheet app to its iWork bundle, which would at least be an interesting challenge to Microsoft, Apple is adding minimal spreadsheet capabilities to existing iWorks apps. Is this a hint of a future end run around the dominance of Excel? But now I'm really reaching.
When talking about the rather significant tweak to two computers (the move to Intel processors in the iMac and the Computer Formerly Known as PowerBook), Jobs went out of his way to point out that there wasn't much to talk about. Same design, same features, same price. But better performance. Performance is good. I'm not complaining. But it's so Intel.
Even Jobs's one-more-thing gimmick was predictable. Having promised that the whole line would be transitioned to Intel by the end of the year, it was hardly earth-shaking to announce the next computer to make the transition after the one you've already announced as currently available.
Ah, but who else can get a crowd to applaud a commercial and ask to see it again? The message was clever, though: Apple can even make Intel cool. Although I don't suppose that's the way Intel execs read it. Or maybe it is.
Oh yes: The name change. The Powerbook becomes the MacBook Pro. Predictable, right? Since the former name played off the PowerPC processor? So, logically, the PowerMac will later this year become (yawn) the Mac Pro.
Of course, I could be surprised.