Computers
Apple hits back
by Russell Brown
Apple Computer's presence in the media has long outstripped its share of the market. This has not always been an unalloyed blessing – in the mid 90s, technology and business writers queued up to announce its impending demise or sermonise on how its management had screwed up.
It’s a little different now. Apple’s PC market share might be as little as three percent (a slightly misleading figure, given that it includes innumerable office-drone PCs – user stats for the websites I maintain show that between eight and 10 percent of real-people visitors are on Macs), but the pundits have lately queued up to praise its sense of style and innovation.
Apple’s biggest source of glamour has probably been the iTunes Music Store. The music download service is still only available in the US, and it has a few drawbacks – the only portable player its files work with is Apple’s iPod, for instance, although you can always burn your music to a CD and use that – but it has energised a market for legitimate music downloads that seemed to be going nowhere.
Suddenly, there are more than 30 music download services operating in Europe alone. Napster is back with new management and a business model that won’t get it sued, and even Microsoft is weighing into Internet music retail. But Apple, whose store is now open to Windows users, still has an amazing 80 percent of the market, and has sold 17 million songs at US99 cents each since it launched in April. This month, the iTunes store was declared the Invention of the Year by Time magazine.
Then there’s the iPod itself, which is not only the most popular portable MP3 player, with sales of more than 1.5 million, but also, by broad agreement, the best – and the player with which leading rap stars choose to accessorise their videos.
Apple’s laptops, especially the higher-end PowerBook line, have been getting plenty of press, too, as the company’s share of the portable market creeps over seven percent. The praise is warranted: I recently took a new 12” G4 PowerBook away on business for a week, and I can faithfully say that it was the nicest portable computer I have ever used. Apart from it coming to me without enough memory installed (I’ll get to that later), I really couldn’t fault it.
On the desktop, Apple is shifting the new IBM-produced PowerPC G5 processors as fast as it can get them out the door. The G5 fixes a problem that has plagued Apple for years – speed. Apple’s previous supplier of PowerPC chips, Motorola, seemed to be on a permanent lost weekend when it came to engineering. Chips made by Intel and AMD streaked ahead of anything Apple could put in its Macs.
The G5 has emphatically fixed that. And in doing so, it has accelerated Apple’s re-entry to scientific computing, which recently hit its peak with the unveiling of the Big Mac – a supercomputer composed of 1100 dual-processor Mac G5s lashed together, which vaulted from nowhere to become the world’s third most powerful supercomputer. And, dollar for dollar, one of the cheapest.
The science and academic communities have also been drawn back to the Mac by its operating system, MacOS X, which is based on the well-known and highly stable Unix. It has been easy to port mature applications over from other flavours of Unix, and geeks can play happily at a Unix command-line if they so choose.
The new version 10.3, “Panther”, has continued the tide of good press. “The best OS on the market,” enthused one mainstream reviewer. Which might well be true, but Panther isn’t flawless. Its speed improvements might be lost on you if you don’t have quite a lot of RAM installed. I habitually work with four or five applications open, and it seems now that 500MB isn’t enough to prevent it occasionally dipping into virtual memory and thus slowing down markedly. The Finder, the key application for viewing and managing files, has changed yet again, but still doesn’t seem quite right.
On the other hand, it rarely crashes and updates are smooth. A new feature called Exposé is simply brilliant: with a single keystroke, you can see all open windows at once (laid out like a flat plan), all the windows in a particular application, or none at all. The enhanced Preview application is the fastest PDF viewer I have ever seen. It handles .zip files and disk images equally well at system level. The Safari web browser rocks.
So, yes, Panther is very good. But some of its myriad little differences from 10.2 seem arbitrary or even unwise. It’s not quite the perfect operating system. But it is clearly going somewhere good – and, it appears, taking a few more people with it.
