Miscellaneous Apple stuff

melo@simplicidade.org (Pedro Melo) — Sat, 10 Sep 2005 12:12:39 +0000

This week we saw some announcements from Apple.

Monday, we got the bad news: the Paris Expo keynote was cancelled, so the probability of seeing new hardware is low. It seems that I’ll have to wait a little longer for my Powerbook upgrade.

Then Wednesday, you got the iPod nano, the iPhone, and a new iTunes.

I’m not going to talk about the iPhone, I couldn’t care less about a iTunes client inside my phone. Besides, I would be raging mad to switch from my SonyEricsson to a Motorola phone.

The iPod nano is a different story. I so want one. My iPod 10Gb is dead for some months now, and I’ve been using the wife 20Gb second generation to listen to podcasts, the only real reason to have a screen. My music is being pumped by my shuffle and it’s quite enough for me. I have no need to see my 16Gb library in my pocket.

The size is amazing, the capacity is enough for my needs, even the 2 Gigs model. And the black one is very very nice, although it seems that the headphones will still be white.

The only drawback of the iPod nano is the USB-only thing: I can’t use a firewire connection. It’s ok if you have a new Mac, with USB 2, but mine is still USB 1.1. I guess I could get a USB2 PCMCIA card, like João Gomes did. I haven’t used the PCMCIA that is always inside my powerbook, to read memory sticks, due to the fact that it doesn’t support the Duo’s.

Other small things about Apple, iTunes and all the speculation flying around: the fact that you can donate to help the Katrina victims via iTunes; and one interesting view about the politics behing wednesday announcement.

Pfig would not be happy if I didn’t mention the Harry Potter audio book release as an iTunes music store. I’m going to buy one of the books for sure. I want to see how it’s read, and if it works. I’ve been listening to audio-books for almost 3 years now, and having a book read to you, if done right, is a totally different experience from reading it. Some books work much better, other just don’t work at all, but I can tell you that I found myself laughing out loud while listening to Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, read by Douglas Adams.

Also, Mac OS X intel is now everywhere. I’ve seen it running with a normal Intel desktop, and it’s amazing. The performance is very good, even for a developer edition, and the stability, although not what I’m used to, seems good enough for daily work already. Impressive. You can find a lot of info about running it on your hardware at BoingBoing (linking to the OSX86 site how-to) and Diario de um Vadio (also the follow up article).

I’m very tempted to install it on a Shuffle I have more or less idle.

The fact that the Mac OS X Intel edition is possible to be installed on normal Intel hardware should not come as a surprise to anyone. The basic protections that Apple did where simple to work around. The use of SSE3 instructions was more tricky because it’s not a common feature yet, but the amazing work done by the community, providing a patch to change them to SSE2 was jaw-dropping.

One must wonder how far will Apple go to prevent you from running Mac OS X on any PC. On one side, they need to sell you those nice and somewhat pricey machines; on the other, pirate copies of Mac OS X will increase the usage of Mac OS X. Windows has some 80-90% market share, but how many of those are legal copies?

Some say that by allowing even some piracy, Apple will lose sales. I’m not so sure. I think that people who will pirate Mac OS X are unlikely buyers of Mac hardware, due to price. Yes, they will loose some sales, but not that many. And they will gain a lot of people that will try Mac OS X. And maybe those people, if asked by friends which computer to buy, will advise the Macs.

Or not. This is pure speculation. But given all the scenarios discussed in the last week with friends, I think that a little piracy will help Apple improve the awareness of Mac OS X, and with that probably help their sales.

Who knows. Maybe Apple will have some Mac OS X trial CD’s in the future…

Nano on Notes

Miscellaneous Apple stuff