Last week was a good one for the “alternative” computer platforms, as Apple and Palm both launched new devices in South Africa
David Shapshak
Everything about the new iMac is beautiful. I could even go further and call it sublime. The revolutionary machine looks less like a computer than the kind of ornate lamp the art deco and nouveau movements produced; while its operating system, Mac OS X (pronounced 10), not only looks beautiful, but runs like a dream.
The unusually designed iMac has been touted by Apple chief Steve Jobs as the “end of the CRT” that cathode ray tube used in most televisions and computer monitors as it features a flat panel screen on a hinged chrome arm. Not only does the screen take up much less space on a desk, but it has a complete digital connection to the computer unlike the analogue cable that converts the signal to analogue and back for a CRT monitor and therefore superior picture quality.
If the original iMacs launched in 1998 were a departure from conventional, square beige box computing with their all-in-one style and bright colours, the new iMac takes desktop computing into another realm entirely.
The actual computer is housed in what looks like an upside down bowl: a half-sphere about 15cm to 20cm wide and high, finished in a pristine white casing Apple calls the colour “snow” with its flat screen suspended by the chrome arm that attaches to the top.
It doesn’t look like a computer but packs all the punch of a pretty high-end one. As much as one can wax lyrical about the new iMac, and as impressive as pictures of it look, the proof is in the pudding.
In the flesh it is smaller and more beautiful than any printed images, while the 15-inch screen swivels with ease; and due to the superior nature of flat panels gives the same viewing as a 17-inch CRT one.
Its revolutionary styling aside, much has been made of it as the hub to the digital lifestyle; and a fair amount of its launch in Midrand last week was given over to the advances of its software.
“The computer is on the threshold of entering a new golden age, the age of the digital lifestyle,” says Apple’s country manager Bruno Verolini. “We are changing the way we work and play and communicate with each other not only through the online world of the Internet, but with an amazing array of devices.”
Indeed computers were once the be-all and end-all of the computing age, but now play an increasing role as the device that anchors our digital lifestyle. Apple has taken this primacy and made the iMac (and its other models) an easy-to-use hub, aimed at simplifying a user’s experience of still-confusing technology. It is a larger trend: Windows’ latest operating system, XP, also attempts this consumer-pleasing simplification.
Sharing the stage at the iMac launch during the annual Macworld earlier this year was iPhoto. Considered the final piece in Apple’s software puzzle, iPhoto is a photographic management package that is truly impressive, or as Jobs put it, “it’s a killer”.
Jobs demonstrated how the software eases what he called the “chain of pain” importing, editing and printing digital pictures. The software does the former very simply, displaying them as thumbnails that can be resized (and therefore display as many as several hundred images on screen) on the fly. Jobs showed how easy editing them can be, while a service where the pictures can be printed and bound was launched in the United States but is not available here.
Apple has already released its music manager iTunes, a movie editor iMovie and a program to burn DVDs called iDVD. All are remarkably user-friendly, with iTunes especially suited to digitising vast collections of CDs which can then be transferred to Apple’s amazing iPod MP3 player. This is tiny, smaller than a pack of playing cards, and can hold five gigabytes worth of music or about 1000 songs.
Although software releases for its new flagship operating system are not as bountiful as previous generations, the OS is a significant leap ahead. It is Unix-based and therefore solid and reliable, and is one of the most user-friendly ones ever.
These software developments are what Macs have been known for in recent years. Apple, despite its small market share less than 5% of the world’s computer users have a Mac has always been a powerful innovator in computing terms; and is the favoured platform for the graphics, media and much of the Internet community.
There are many people who lament what was widely considered to be Apple’s worst strategic blunder: the failure to license its hardware manufacturing. This, it is widely thought, gave the personal computer for which IBM gave away the hardware licensing the leg up it needed to topple Apple from its pedestal as the early mainstream personal computer and the springboard from which Microsoft, and its Windows OS, came to dominate the world.
Even the revolutionary Macintosh could not compete against the cheaper PC, which became less of a hardware-orientated industry than software, and which is now the leading industry in the US.
The Windows world, though, has a lot to thank Apple for. Most of the computing innovations we take for granted were originally devised by Apple. These include the graphical user interface (or the icon-based desktop we are all familiar with) but began with the mouse, the stiffie drive and others.
Apple hit the doldrums for many years but remained the mainstay of the graphics and newspaper industries, where faithful users eschewed the Microsoft revolution .
In 1997 Apple made a startling comeback when co-founder Steve Jobs returned and turned the beige-box world of computing on its head with the all-in-one iMac, which came in vibrant colours.
Significantly, it ditched the ubiquitous stiffie drive and legacy connectors (the parallel and serial ports common on most computers) for the new generation USB (universal serial bus), which are now common.
This new iMac has a row of these new connectors, including a FireWire port (100 times faster than USB and lets you transfer 100 songs in 10 secs on to an iPod), around its rear.
In the front is a neatly concealed hatch that slides open to reveal another Apple innovation: the SuperDrive. It is a combo CD-RW/DVD-R drive, that, in plain English, lets you burn rewritable CDs (the RW acronym) and recordable DVDs (plain R). The iMac comes in three flavours or differing processor speeds, hard drive sizes and variations of the drive. The lowest model has a plain CD-R, the next a DVD/CD-RW and the top-end a SuperDrive.
Time magazine compared the iMac to the lamp logo of that other recent digital innovator, graphics animator Pixar, which gave the world Toy Story. It is an apt and ironic visual link, considering Pixar was another of Jobs’ projects.
Mac users everywhere are hoping it will be as successful as all its predecessors.