[standard request to keep your OS wars in a different thread…here, I’ll do it for you: Macs sux…Windows rulez…Linux rocks…Jesus saves]
Another MacWorld, another rant. My last rant turned out to be short sighted (I mused how the iPod was a dumb, overpriced product that would not get much attention from non mac users. I was wrong).
This particular MacWorld will have to go down as one of the lamest ever. Only 1 real hardware “announcement”…a 17" flat panel iMac.
$teve Jobs announced OS 10.2 …not unexpectantly. (It appears to have some welcome updates…but again, not really keynote excitement here).
And then…
iTools. Kiss it goodbye. In the midst of a campaign to get some Wintel folks to “switch” to the Mac platform, they trash one of the great tools that Apple has had to encourage that switch…a free iTools account.
I currently use iTools a lot. It’s a great way to back up data from either my work Mac or home Mac. It’s got a nice easy way to bang out simple web pages (I used it to make a birth announcement ). And the 20 MB iDisk could hold QT movies as well. I use that feature quite a bit as well.
Well iTools is not exactly “gone”, but it now comes with a bit of a steep price: $100/year. (current iTools users get a the first year at $50). And to be fair, the service level is upgraded (for example from 20MB to 100MB of storage)
Granted there are some serious economic considerations going on, and I suspect Apple took quite a hit on supporting thousands of free iDisk accounts. From a PR point of view though, this really sucks. Will the cash flow that comes in really do the trick for Apple? (will there really be that much cash flow…do individual users, especially new “switchers” want to pony up an additional $100 per year).
I was wrong about the iPod, so maybe I’ll be wrong here. But this has dumb PR move written all over it.
Huh. Well, I didn’t use it much, but it’s still kinda a drag that they’re terminating the free service. This kinda smells like a “we need money now!” move, which is odd, since I thought Apple was doing okay financially. You’d think they’d have “reduced” plans for people who just want the e-mail, or just want the online drive space, rather than forcing you to get the whole ball of wax.
Oh well. One more neat free thing goes bye-bye. Guess I can remove the iDisk icon from my toolbar.
Apple is not doing OK financially. Most computer companies announced shitty earnings this quarter, including Apple.
Anyhoo, I just got back from the Javits Center (have to put in my time as a working stiff) and I think this is probably the most mediocre Stevenote I’ve attended. Rendezvous is pretty cool though. The open address book API makes me worry about the coming OS X versions of Outlook viruses, though.
Rendezvous seems to be a souped-up AppleTalk, with the automatic discovery of devices and all. It could also be a major security risk if improperly configured. I’d still use it, though.
Overall, the new product announcements were more of a natural progression than anything truly new.
Did anyone else think there was going to be a new Newton PDA when Jobs introduced iSync?
… and I’ve been waiting for the 17" imac forever. Now I can finally ditch this 6500 and upgrade. My 500mhz graphite sits here next to the dinosaur on my desk, used only as a jukebox, 'cause the BIG monitor is on the old powermac.
I have a couple of “throwaway” accounts at mac.com, and never recieved a single piece of spam on them. But I am not going to pay $49.99/year for a throwaway, probably just one account.
$4/month for the .Mac package sounds pretty reasonable. I doubt that it is a cash cow for Apple, the free stuff certainly hasn’t been.
I want to keep my mac.com email. I may pay. (It’s $50 for existing users, at least this year.) I’ll think about it. I mostly use the email, not the web space (I already maintain several domains, don’t need any more web space!) but the other stuff—I’ll look into it. Maybe I’ll consider keeping the account after the first year is up. Maybe by then the price will have dropped by then. (I would think so, they are dropping the ball on this one. After they experience the full ire of many irate Mac users, maybe they’ll relent.)
But for now, this sucks. Big time. When you use OS X they practically FORCE you to have a mac.com email address! And now they are pulling the rug out from under all of us, and saying we have to pay? This sucks. I hope they change their minds and at least let us use the email for free.
Glad to hear about the 17" iMac, though. I kept on hearing rumors about G5s, but I guess not this time. But soon! Really! They’ll be coming out soon!
I was more surprised by the simultaneous renaming to “.Mac”. Does no-one in the computer industry have the slightest bit of original thought? I thought Apple had a decent, recognisable brand in their iWhatever nomenclature, but now their iTools service sounds like a cheap “.Net” knockoff. Dumb move (unless of course no-one else notices the similarity, and it’s just me…).
Y’know, this isn’t making me happy, either. I’m a certified Linux nut (well, not really certified, but well-kown :D), but Apple showed promise. It looked as if it was finally recovering from its longstanding insanity: Constantly adding cruft to its childishly under-powered and completely closed OS instead of really rocking the world by developing a new one.
MacOS X, I thought, would turn Apple from a niche player in the world of graphical artists and newsrooms into a seller of *nix boxes developers would want to play around with. A solid BSD base in the form of Darwin finally gave the Mac world memory protection, true multitasking, and other advantages *nix people have known since the 1970s but are vastly underused in the desktop world. I thought that by consolidating the desktop world into *nix and MS camps, software developers would be unable to ignore the rising tide of Unix-derived OSes, and the rest of the world would see a clear, low-cost alternative to Microsoft that has real corporate backing (IBM, Apple, and Xerox aren’t lightwieghts). As a side benefit, if Macs and Linux machines could interoperate maybe Linux would get a really polished GUI as an alternative to X.
Secondly, if Apple was open to the idea of open software, maybe it would decide that porting to an Intel architecture wouldn’t be such a bad move. After all, most of the rest of the desktop *nix world runs on Intels, and porting the rest of the OS to an architecture their kernel already runs on wouldn’t be much of a challenge. Apple’s rather odd way of selling its own (overpriced) hardware instead of taking advantage of the extremely cheap PC hardware has always hurt it. Maybe Apple’s corporate owners were moving closer to seeing that and could be counted on to rectify the problem.
But if they’re going to be doing things like that, perhaps I overestimated Jobs’ sanity.
I think that .mac is well worth $49 for the first year. I do have a use for most of the features. If they improve the bandwidth situation (which I think they will) I’ll be thrilled about it. Jobs mentioned in(I think) a conference call that they don’t expect .Mac to be profitable; but instead of having the cash drain of iTools they’ll now be able to develop more and better services. Hopefully at the end of the first year they’ll have offer enough to justify the full $99.
On the other site that beagledave linked to (the one with the other Mac users’ opinions) someone mentions that there is an option to keep email only, for $10 a year. Sounds much better. I’ll look into it more, before I make a final decision.
As someone who just forked over cash for OS 10.1 only to have it arrive the day that 10.2 was announced, I share your pain.
They want the full $129 bucks from me if I want to upgrade to 10.2 even though I just freaking recieved the product.
Oh well … at least my employer will pay for the product … and not me … but that is still disappointing.
Oh well, with the new TSC for OSX from Microsoft, and a nice dutch TSC for OS 8.1+, we can move all our 5000 series Power Macs over to Windows 2000 Terminal Services.
