Steve Jobs And The Oh-So-Cool iMac 1170
The truly successful technologies and technology companies are utilitarian and dull -- decidedly non-hip. You will never seen a Microsoft or AOL exec talking about how cool the their companies or products are, only how useful and easy to use. They don't really care how much heavy breathing they generate in the media or among excitable teenagers and college students. Those two companies have, in fact, dominated their environments by pointedly focusing on the non-technologically adventurous middle-class and busy business executives and workers and by presenting themselves not as cool but as reliable and accessible. And for this sin they get jeered at -- all the way to the bank. Their motives may be money, greed and power, but they understand what really drives technology in America and much of the world. Steve Jobs does not.
The tech media have served as enablers and co-dependents in Steve Jobs' sometimes-brilliant marketing impulses. Last week, the volatile Jobs projected himself onto the cover of Time magazine by unveiling the oh-so-cool new iMac, a computer as entertainment/culture center, a "hub for music, pictures and movies." It's elegant and affordable, says Time, and takes up little desk space, "but will millions of PC users get it?"
Probably not.
Gates understands something Jobs and media don't. When it comes to technology, it's middle-class consumers and their tastes, needs and expectations that determine success or failure. This is a hard lesson for many hackers and programmers too, who remain bewildered that superior systems like Linux aren't on every desktop. But the middle class, for years abused and exploited by the arrogant tech industry (just think of what poor Comcast subscribers have been going through for weeks now), wants easy of use, safety, utility. Just consider at the telephone, the automobile, or for that matter, Wal-Mart. Apple has demonstrated for years, and so, to some degree, has Linux. Harry and Martha in Dubuque decide which products will enter the mainstream and last, not college kids editing movies or downloading music and DVDs, or using firewire ports to fiddle with video clips.
Apple, perenially aspiring to coolness, has always been the favorite computer of the non-hacker hip and the creative. And of many people (like me) whose entry onto the Net and Web has been made easier for the first programming language that really made sense to non-techies. Jobs' colorful, well-designed, fun and entertainment-centered iMacs and Powerbooks have been getting fabulous press for years. His idea to fuse the desktop with pop culture is, in fact, a powerful one. But it's too soon. The middle-class isn't ready for that. Most Americans don't need the 1,000 songs the iPod can store, and would rather go to the megaplex than edit movies on their computers.
So Apple accounts for only 4.5 per cent of new personal computer sales, according to Gartner Dataquest.
That's probably because Jobs hasn't addressed the central problem facing computer makers: the public doesn't trust them. Burned by years of outrageously poor tech support, increasingly expensive software, and hardware that's almost instantly outdated, middle-class consumers aren't the least bit interested in the coolest new new thing. They want computing that works like TV does -- that's easy to use, takes little space, costs relatively little money and works every time you turn it on, year after year. The public is increasingly wise to tech scams like hardware that's obsolete every 18 months and software that doesn't even last that long. Computers -- even the jazzy new iMac -- are a long way from reliability, and are profoundly mistrusted. In fact, it was only a couple of years ago that the candy-colored iMacs were the next cool thing. Now they're about as hip as Windows 98.
If you're a teenager, Web designer, film editor or visual arts major, or even a loving Grandma, it's great that the iMac allows you to create your own DVDs, organize and edit digital pictures, play CDs or convert MP3's, turn home videotapes into high-quality edited films. What's less clear is whether or not the public -- especially that critical middle-class chunk of it -- wants to do those things on a computer, or is confident about its ability to use machinery that's still more complicated and problematic than its makers seem able to admit.
For nearly a generation now, from Jobs to the makers of instant replay TV machines, some of the best minds in the tech world -- usually the younger ones -- have been crippled and misled by the confusion between what's cool and what's going to be successful, between what's neat and what's necessary. The survivors of the Net's first generation -- brilliant plodders like Gates and Steve Case -- understand quite well that they aren't the same thing, and have, as a result, increasingly come to dominate the Net.
"ONLY 4.5%" (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Total gibberish (Score:2, Informative)
Think about it: why don't you use a Mac? You like the design, right? Then what is it that stops you from using it? It's the same thing that is only giving Apple a 4.5% market share.
Check out this related Cringely rant (Score:3, Informative)
For a far superior article on the difference... (Score:4, Informative)
Sorry I don't remember where I caught the original link. Could have even been here on
Re:Ease of use (Score:4, Informative)
> I agree that keyboarding is one area where windows is in fact better.
> Hopefully Apple will integrate this into os 10.2...
Just because you don't know about them, doesn't mean that they aren't there. The "Mac OS 9 Bible" lists three pages of keyboard shortcuts (pages 92-94) for the Finder alone. Looking in the Apple Help for 10.1.2 (searching for "keyboard shortcuts") reveals lots of entries on keyboard shortcuts. If anything, the Mac has as many keyboard shortcuts or more than Windows!
Some of my favorites:
Cmd-z Undo
Cmd-x Cut
Cmd-c Copy
Cmd-v Paste
Cmd-a Select All
Cmd-f Find
Cmd-g Find Again
Cmd-s Save
Cmd-o Open
Cmd-w Close window
Cmd-q Quit application
In Finder Only:
Cmd-e Eject drive whose icon is highlighted (have a catcher's mit handy, some Zip drives take this too literally
Apple also took Scotty to heart. Both OS 9 and OS X (at least X.1.*) have voice shortcuts known as "Speakable Items". See the Speech icon in the System Preferences in OS X, or the control panel in OS 9, for further details. And yes, you can make your own "Speakable Items" with Apple Script.
Windows: "Go talk to my friend, an 800 pound monopoly-abusing gorilla!"
Mac: "And here's my good buddy, the 66,000 ton Godzilla!"
Godzilla: Stomp!
"Elegant, floppy-free, and doomed" - Hiawatha Bray (Score:2, Informative)
Look at the game console fights... (Score:3, Informative)
The whole thing is retarded.
Follow the money, all makes sense.
Sony dominated the video game market by selling the playstation cheaply, and offering rediculously good deals to third parties to let them create games. The third parties CRANKED out the games. Some were good, some sucked. Some people made a lot of money, Sony did alright.
Nintendo watched their marketshare plummet (from 90% in the NES days, to 60% in the SNES days, to around 30% in the N64 days)... Nintendo made more money from the N64 than Sony did from the Playstation.
Apple sits at 4.5% of the hardware market. They made much better margins than the PC makers that sell the other 95.5% of the market.
Look, the consumer market? Very little money in it. The companies pushing computers to the middle class see next to nothing. Compaq/Dell/HP make all their money on business sales. Dell did well by not having such a huge split in the consumer/business department.
Interestingly, last time I saw the figures, 12-18 months ago, the big manufactures of PCs, Compaq/Dell/HP/Gateway combined for something like 50%-60% of the market. The "grey box" market (local stores, etc.) was most of the rest (Apple had the 4%-5%).
Apple's share isn't THAT small of a manufacturer, and they make more than the rest.
Yes, Microsoft blows away Apple in marketshare. Compaq does not.
Apple is in a good location.
Re:PC market is not an election (Score:3, Informative)
Apple's monitors are proprietary (because they use the far superior ADC which carries video, data, and USB), but the monitor connections on the PCs are not (you can hook a standard VGA monitor up to them). Hopefully the x86 clones will decide to license this connector from Apple.
You've got some good responses already (Score:3, Informative)
What's proprietary right now?
The mobo spec may or may not be open. At one point they had documented something called the common hardware reference platform, or CHRP. IBM had a few mobos, but no one else took that initiative to make their own. Apple, Motorola, and IBM are the only manufacturer's of chipsets for PPC, I suspect.
The PPC chips isn't any *more* proprietary than the Pentium chips. There are at least two manufacturers, Motorola and IBM, and more to be had as far away as a license and a phone call, or some good reverse engineering teams, no more or less than on the x86 side.
System busses. Electrically they are 66-100-133MHz and use standard SDRAM, no different than a PC. They use soDIMM for their laptops, but that's not a big deal either.
For graphics they use AGP. Only the PowerMac has an upgradeable AGP slot, but if you check out the electrical specs, all the current systems and even the older systems used PCI or AGP video. Also, they used industry standard ATI or NVIDIA graphics solutions, and are no more or less proprietary than any other graphic solution.
Networking. They use standard 10bT, 100bT, and 1000bT on their lineup. They use standard 802.11b wireless network protocol for their wireless connectivity, and that's a IEEE standard as well. They use, surprise, the BSD TCP/IP stack. They speak HTTP, FTP, telnet, SMB, and Appletalk all out of the box. None of those are proprietary.
Connectivity. They use USB and Firewire. Those are about as standard and nonproprietary as the rest of the industry.
Storage. They use DVD-R, CD-RW, DVD, on an EIDE bus. Those are as standard and interchangeable as any other drive. Heck, they use ATA-66 or ATA-100, and that's industry standard too. Their hard drives are the standard Toshibas, IBMs, and Fujitsus.
Expansion. Internally the PowerMac uses PCI, the same as everyone else. On the PowerBook thy use PCMCIA/PCCard, the same as everybody else.
Video. They use VGA on everything, and for digital output they use ADC, which is an industry accepted DVI compatible connector; it's DVI with USB and power bundled along.
OS. Heck, even the OS is non proprietary. Darwin is open source and available for the x86 platform. The presentation layer, Aqua, is written in Objective C and uses Quartz, a displayPDF solution, and is 'proprietary', but no more than PDF is proprietary.
Video: Quicktime isn't, as many believe, proprietary. It's well documented and has been for years, from what I've been told. Some codecs are proprietary, but then again, so is WMF and ASF. Quicktime is available in Linux under xanim and Windows provided by Apple.
Sound is traditional PCM and mini-headphone jack. They also support USB sound and industry standard MIDI.
Productivity. Courtesy of Microsoft there is 100% Office compatibility. Appleworks from Apple has good/decent compatibility. There's the full availability of web, email, ICQ, AIM, and IRC on OS X as well.
The reason you have a plethora of manufactureres of $499 pentium IV class machines has nothing to do with proprietary. You just have a bigger market share of proprietary components (95%).
Re:Two issues: (Score:2, Informative)
Have you ever used an apple? I have before, I am a pc user, I have no mac's, but I have a lot of friends who fix them for a living, and when they do break, they are VERY easy to fix. There are rarely any large problems on a mac, and the reason why is you buy the unit as one thing, and you leave it alone. Apple has tested EVERYTHING in that machine to the point where its essentally perfect, and if something goes wrong, its usually easy to fix. (Im coming from OS9, not sure about OSX).
I can understand what your saying, and as I said, I do not have a mac, I want to buy one, but mainly because I think OSX is a piece of art. If I were to buy a new imac, I would use it to read email, play music/movies, things like that. I can say that the machine problably wont have a single problem with it.
Right now I work in a call center that takes calls on pc games. I work with about 15 people per day, fixing their computer over the phone. PC's can get real screwed up real quick, and with windows, sometimes the only thing you can do is reformat and try again.
So, when you buy an apple, your buying a machine that is proven to be reliable. When I buy an apple, im not thinking well, its good enough for what I want to do, Im thinking, this is what I want to do, and its going to perform that well.
So, im coming from the reliabilty standpoint. I might be coming from a skewed perspective (the only computers I deal with are mine, which work, and all my customers, which dont work (ive worked here for almost 4 years, so ive dealt with thousands of people calling me up over those years) but I feel that an apple computer is much more like a microwave then it is a computer. It does what it needs to do, and it does it well. If I want something more. You ask, why would I want to buy a machine that is 25% the speed of the fastest machine, but I will probably not run into as many problems as someone on a pc, unless they know what they are doing.. My home machine really hasn't had to reboot since I put winxp on it. I had to reboot once or twice when installing software/drivers, but not because of my resources going to hell or anything like that. Does that make me still want to get an imac? Hell yes it does =). I used to play a lot of games on my pc, but im getting sick of them now I think (4 years on a tech support call center for games will do that to ya), so now, I pretty much use my machine to download mp3's, look up guitar tabs, and small things like that, read email, look at the internet, bla bla.. The only thing that really kept me to windows was games, but now that I don't play games, why do I need a powerhouse of a computer to read my email?
Anyway, I can see your point, but there is still a place in this world for macs, I hope they never go away myself. Im not saying that a mac is for everyone, as you yourself seem to be stuck on pc's right now, but there are others who may think a bit different then you, who just might beneifit more from having a machine that just works. I hope you can see my point...
Oh and by the way, lets say im a big photoshop/premier and whatever else fan, buying a mac is going to be in my interest because the programs seem to work much better using the g4 processor vs. a pentium 4 lets say. Macs are heavily used in the media sections of many many many companies, and there is a reason why. Its not cause mac's are cute, its because they are reliable and they work... Josh
Re:Total gibberish (Score:5, Informative)
> $1,799 for the iMac.
> iMac advantage: FireWire
Well, a $40 FireWire card for the Dell brings the price points within $20.
> Dell advantages:
> DDR SDRAM vs SDR SDRAM
I'm wondering if anybody notices this kind of thing once Windows is running (or should I say walking?). Windows has so many latencies and bottlenecks
> 80 GB HD vs 60 GB HD
Most people will never notice, and the iMac is always, always ready to receive an external FireWire hard disk just by plugging it in, without any drivers to install. You just plug in and you instantly have more storage. You can boot from that external storage, too. No problem.
> 64MB GeForce 2MX vs 32 MB
> GeForce 2MX
The 64MB GeForce 2MX in the Dell is heavily, heavily compromised by the analog connection to the display. What the user actually sees will be faster on the iMac, with no ghosting or blur. I have both a digital and an analog flat panel here, and I can really, really see the difference when I go to the older machine with the analog connection. Why connect a digital graphics adapter to a digital display with an analog connection? Doesn't make sense today. Apple stopped doing this years ago.
> Scrollwheel mouse with 3 buttons vs 1-
> button mouse
$20 value. You could look at this from a consumer perspective and say "OS only requires one mouse button, not three". In other words, the iMac user can use one or more buttons, while the Dell user can use only two or more buttons. Mouse choice is a personal thing, though, so go ahead and get a third-party mouse and plug it into the iMac. No driver install will be neccessary, either.
> 1 yr phone support vs 90 day phone
> support
The included phone support on the iMac is paltry, but for $300, you can get an AppleCare plan that gives you free phone support for 3 years, as well as a full warranty for 3 years. They basically take care of you like they were your IT department. And if you call up and you don't know square one about computers, they don't treat you like an idiot. They don't ask you to get inside the thing and test stuff.
iMac advantages you didn't mention are:
easier to set up
UNIX compatibility
much, much smaller size
higher-quality display
digital connection between graphics adapter and display
built-in 802.11 antennae for the best range
56k modem is a real modem, not WinModem, so you can install Linux and still use your modem
iMac can mirror its display on an external VGA display, or a TV
easy to use, high-quality software included for making DVD Video discs (iDVD 2)
OS level support for writing data DVD's and CD's as easy as floppy disks used to be (just drag and drop stuff onto the disc in Finder)
no need for anti-virus software and update subscriptions
easy to use digital photo management software with advanced photo printing features for best results with your own printer, and easy ordering of Kodak prints and photo books
iMacs music management software is fully MP3 (no WMA), and is fully featured and not crippled at all
no need to get a Microsoft Passport, or even interact with Microsoft at all
included UNIX software like Apache, emacs, vi, etc.
included office suite (AppleWorks) with MS Office compatibility, and very, very, very easy to use
can boot from any attached storage, including CD's, FireWire disks, iPod, SCSI disks, whatever
boot in Target Disk Mode, and the iMac acts as a FireWire disk you can plug into another computer in order to access the internal drive at high speeds (excellent for service and support people)
iMovie is the best consumer video-editing software, and it's included in the iMac's price.
low-latency audio is possible with even the internal audio on the iMac, and a $35 USB audio adapter can give you low-latency 24-bit stereo audio just by plugging it in and using it (again, no drivers or software to install)
overall, the Mac and UNIX software platforms offer much higher quality than Windows software
better design, better "fit and finish"
easy open RAM door, so the end user can install RAM without even risking losing a screw
higher RAM capacity
more standards support (even the Mac's "BIOS", called Open Firmware, is an IEEE standard
graphical boot loader built into the Firmware, so you don't have to play boot loader tricks to run multiple operating systems (in fact, it identifies attached Linux volumes with a cool Penguin icon by default)
the hard drive in the iMac is the loudest component
iMac wakes from sleep almost instantly and doesn't need to be rebooted or switched off thanks to Mac OS X and Apple's deep sleep modes
Mac OS X is a full multi-user UNIX compatible OS; the Dell's Windows XP Home runs everything as root
I could go on about this for a long time, because I've put in a lot of time on both Mac and Windows systems. Mac OS X itself is outrageously better than Windows. I mean, forget the hardware, forget the RAM and the HD and whatever else
Honestly, to someone who has used both, your Dell vs iMac argument looks WEAK. Very, very weak. You're treated better at every turn with the Mac. While the rest of the industry has increased the numbers in their specs over the past few years, Apple has been very busy actually improving the personal computer. It's been adding up for years now and the new iMac plus a mature Mac OS X is the breakout for all this stuff that they've been pretty quiet about until now. Try one out at an Apple Store
Re:Computers != Cars (Score:3, Informative)
It has shown profits for the last 3 quarters, and for the past three years before that. Not bad compared to the chronic year after year losses they used to post.
They've been losing money. Lots of it.
I will conceed that lost money in the 1st Quarter but they have shown a profit every quarter since. For the year they are down a paltry $25 million - not exactly a massive loss considering the size of the company and the size of the profits they stacked up in prior years $786 million in 2000, $601 million in 1999, $309 million in 1998.
You are right I should not have mentioned Dell which has done great - only showing a fairly small $101 million loss in the second quarter and on track to show a sizeable profit for the year. But Dell is the exception not the rule in the Wintel world. Of the other two companies I mentioned Compaq is just as fair a comparison and it has lost money 3 out of the last 4 quarters (as opposed to Apple of which the opposite is true) and Gateway has lost money every quarter this year.
I didn't mean to claim Apple was the most profitable or larger than its hardware competitors - just that recently it has done better than MOST of them.