Oliver Steele

One — but only one — reason for Apple’s appeal is that Apple products are luxury goods. (I’ll get to the second reason in a moment.) Apple products compete on design, not price. The Apple stores, with their hardwood floors and wide open spaces, are modeled after a luxury car showroom, and don’t share the convenience store layout and shelving of other computer stores.

Focusing on the high end of the market is a reasonable strategy¹. (Sony is trying it with the VAIO.) In an area that depends on third parties to create programs and peripherals, this strategy has a benefit beyond high profit margins. Hardware and software makers are disproportionately interested in Apple’s customers, because these customers have shown themselves to be disproportionately willing to spend money on computer products. This is why Apple can have 1% of the desktop market but — unlike Linux in 2004 — command compatability from web sites and large software vendors. Selling to Apple customers is like opening a store in Beverly Hills; if the products are good enough to sell there, it’s worth the real estate cost.

However, there’s another appeal to the Macintosh: the absence of choice. When I had thought my next computer would be a PC, I was beset by a number of decisions: laptop or tablet? full tablet or convertible? faster than my old computer, or lighter? or brighter screen? Once a series of viruses² convinced me to switch to a Macintosh, the whole decision process became simpler: Did I want the big laptop or the little one? By deciding to buy a Macintosh, I had given up even the possibility of buying a tablet computer, an ultraportable, or a honking media monster with a superbright screen — and, contrary to what I had expected, this surrender was a huge relief³.

This lack of choice, coupled with the quality of the choices that do remain, is something I’ve found all across the platform. There seem to be at least hundreds of times more programs for Windows than there are for the Mac. Most of these programs are crap. For a while I maintained both a PC (my work computer) and Macintosh (at home). When I needed a draw, or chat, or email program, say, the pattern seemed to be this: On the PC, there were a few dozen programs to evaluate. On the Macintosh, there would only be one or two. But the best Macintosh program was comparable to the best Windows program: sometimes a little bit worse, more often a little better⁴. The real difference was that on the Macintosh, I could skip the evaluation process. Which leads to the other reason that I switched to the Macintosh: despite the greater number of programs available for the PC, the ones that I ended up both being able to find and wanting to use, ran on the Mac.

One could go into why the average program is better on the Macintosh. Some candidate reasons have to do with what the value rankings of people who buy Macintoshes versus PCs, or what motivates someone to develop a program for the Mac versus the PC, or how the nature of ones programming environment affects the kind of program one creates. What struck me instead is the relief of not having choice, or, of having ones choices made for you. It’s like going into, not a luxury goods store, but a boutique. In a luxury store, the brands are better, and the quality is higher, but you’re still doing your own shopping. In a boutique, the owner has picked out one or a few of each item, so that if you trust their taste, you don’t have to choose. (Trader Joe’s is another example of a company that has mass-produced the boutique.) The Macintosh ecosystem isn’t a single person with a single design sensibility. But Apple, through a combination of design leadership and price-imposed exclusivity, has managed to turn it into a boutique.

Notes

¹ “Focusing on the high end is a reasonable strategy”: Clayton Christensen warns about the danger of “retreating upmarket”: that as products or their components become commoditized, one is vulnerable to an “attack from downmarket”. This is true for a company operating within a single product category. Apple has shown repeatable success in either introducing or dominating new categories: the personal computer, the high-end laptop, the modern all-in-one desktop computer, the wireless base station, the hard disk music player.

² “a series of viruses”: I wasn’t actually infected by any of them until Windows XP Service Pack 2, which destroyed much of the remaining utility of my mostly locked-down PC.

³ “this surrender [of choice] was a huge relief”: Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice describes this phenomenon. I haven’t read the book yet (I’ve just read the reviews), so I don’t know whether it describes the Macintosh.

⁴ “more often a little worse”: I ended up with Thunderbird on the PC, but Apple’s Mail client’s ability to perform offline edits on IMAP mailboxes were a generation beyond this. I was never able to find anything on Windows that compared to the combination of power and simplicity in Omnigraffle.

Over the past thirty years, the American Computer Corporation (ACA) has introduced personal computers, and in particular the bitmap display and the desktop metaphor, into the economy.

The ACA is a virtual company, composed of the following departments. The heyday for each department is given in parenthesis after the name of the real company that implements that virtual department.

• Research: Xerox (’70s)

• Development: Apple (late ’70s/’80s)

• Marketing: Microsoft (late ’80s/early ’90s¹)

• Distribution: Dell (’90s/’00s)

As a company’s market matures, it shifts its focus from research and development, to marketing, sales, and finally operations (including distribution). You can see this shift in the dates above.

¹ Microsoft, of course, continued to prosper beyond the ’90s, but not primarily as the marketing department of the ACA — the creation of the market for desktop window systems is complete.

Do you have an old teletype with a 5-bit serial interface sitting around that you’ve been itching to hook up to the Internet? If so, this article at LinuxDevices.com is just what you’ve been looking for. — anonymous on Slashdot

Henry Minsky has written in LinuxDevices about his Internet Teletype. This is a vintage teletype he purchased on eBay, that is connected through a Mini-ITX and a web server to an email account. The email account is in turn connected to his Yahoo calendar.

The upshot of this is that Henry has a Model 28 Teletype sitting in the middle of his living room (right, with Kiki’s Delivery Service on floor), which chatters out reminders for company meetings and other events.

While this project required few of the many capabilities of the Mini-ITX system, the other projects on my list are all great candidates for using this board; high quality video and audio, as well as low power consumption, low noise, and most importantly low price will make this my platform of choice for future midnight engineering projects.

Henry has additional pictures here.

In the early nineties, On Technologies released a wonderful product, called Instant Update, which allowed multiple workers to view and edit a shared rich text document. Many authors could edit the document at once, changes to separate paragraphs were resolved automatically, and a simple dialog box let you choose how to resolve each conflict. Each paragraph was marked as to who last modified it when.

Unlike Microsoft Word, which now does some of this (but didn’t then), publishing your changes was as simple as pressing the “Update” button.

At Apple Cambridge, we used this to collaborate on design discussions within the office, and between Cambridge and California. (Larry Tesler was a frequent contributor from there.)

I’ve missed this tool for a long time. Lately, at Laszlo we’ve been using a wiki for technical and planning discussions. This seems to be the fad in engineering organizations, and justly so.

A wiki is just Instant Update without the wysiwyg interface, without the line-by-line conflict resolution, but implemented as a web application, so that it can be universally deployed.

Monday night, and it’s raining hard. Yahoo weather says the rain ended at noon. No, wait, it says it will end at midnight.

The Yahoo weather page has a strip of icons across the top, and a text description following that. The icon says AM Rain. The description extends it to midnight. Presumably the description was updated more recently.

I find it useful to look at the icon first. It indicates how accurate these predictions are. If the icon doesn’t tell you what’s happening right now, the prediction isn’t likely to tell you what will happen tomorrow.

I’d like a weather page with a history. It would show how today was predicted during the past five days, and then the forecast.

Sure you can do the same thing by showing statistics, but my page would speak to the innumerate part of your brain.

Going beyond weather, wouldn’t it be nice if objects showed more of their history? For physical objects, there’s weathering and aging, but not much else; information objects can be versioned or journaled, but there aren’t user interfaces to present anything high-level about this information.

People maintain elaborate histories of the other people and objects they interact with. Todd Proebsting’s evocative article “Tangible Program Histories” shows how useful it is for programs to do this too. Someday we’ll find a way to join these.

Or, easements for WiFi.

I can use a wireless access point for one of two purposes. I can place it inside my (home or corporate) intranet and make it secure. Or I can place it outside my intranet, and broadcast its presence to WAR drivers. But I can’t do both.

[Actually, I can't do the first, because WEP isn't secure. But WPA will fix this problem, and it won't fix the other one.]

Wireless access points should come with a setting that permits public access through them to the internet, but only secure access to the intranet they’re serving.

Dave Winer misses the point of the Semantic Web. Winer criticizes RDF as though it were an application, intended for direct interaction with users creating and searching content. RDF isn’t an application; it’s an operating system, on which applications can be built.
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