A hub is a hub is a hub. Or so you would think. What distinguishes a good USB hub from a lousy one are the details, and Keyspan gets almost all of them right.

The key merit of the Universal Serial Bus (USB) is its simplicity for users. You can plug and unplug with ease, at any time, without fear of hardware damage. Device drivers load as you need them. You can connect all sorts of devices ­ such as mice, keyboards, printers, handheld computers, and external storage devices ­ to the same ports, with the same cables, on Macs or Wintel PCs, desktops or laptops.

USB is useful enough that, until the recent introduction of the FireWire-equipped iMac DV, all of Apple’s iMacs and iBooks had USB ports, and nothing else, for expansion. Previous generations of Macs, on the other hand, included Apple serial ports for printers and modems, Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) connectors for input devices, and SCSI for external drives.

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The Price of Fame: Mac Support is Sometimes Half-Baked

The birth of my second daughter at the end of January has me in a nostalgic mood, so I’m typing this — my first GearHead column in many months — on a Mac Classic (circa 1990 — I got it for free last year from a co-worker) running System 6 (also circa 1990) and Microsoft Word 5.1 (circa 1992). When I’m done, I’ll pipe the document through the SCSI-to-Ethernet adapter (a few bucks from eBay) that connects the Classic to the rest of my network, then use my 1998-era beige Power Mac G3 to send it to Adam, the MyMac Webmaster.

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SimCity 3000
Company: Maxis/Electronic Arts
Estimated Price: $49.95
http://www.simcity.com

I’m not a typical computer gamer. Doom, Quake, Marathon, Tomb Raider, strategy titles, and role-playing games bore me. My Super Nintendo has been dusty for years.

But I have a weakness for the Sim games, and especially SimCity, the classic title that lets you build detailed virtual cities and watch them grow and mutate over decades of Sim time. It started when I pushed the limits of my Mac Plus after the release of the original (Mac only!) SimCity in 1989, sometimes letting my metropolises run overnight to see how they’d turn out.

Sim Expectations

1993′s SimCity 2000 was a marvel, a whole new Sim world, with its new 3D views, wonderful 256-color graphics, huge playing area, vastly expanded repertoire of infrastructure and building options, cool music and sound effects, and “real-life” city scenarios. After I somehow lost my original copy of SC2000, I tracked down another one at a used software shop in 1997 and started playing all over again.

As you’d expect, I was pretty hyped-up about the Mac version of SimCity 3000 which arrived this summer about a year after its Windows sibling. And though I can’t say I’m genuinely disappointed, the new version of SimCity isn’t the knockout I expected, like SC2000 was in its day.

First of all, the game is obviously a port from Windows. That’s not entirely terrible. The fine folks at Software MacKiev in Ukraine–some of them former Russian nuclear scientists–are known as some of the best software port programmers anywhere, and they have done an excellent job with their SimCity 3000 contract from Maxis, especially in making sure that keyboard shortcuts and the installer, for example, work in a sufficiently Mac-like way.

But the port has its prices. Although SC3000, like the previous games, has its own interface standards separate from the operating system, this time that interface has a decidedly Windows feel, including white Arial-font text on blue window title bars, filenames with cryptic extensions like “.sc3″, and Windows 95-clone Open and Save screens.

Sims Great, More Filling

The Windows port has made the system requirements hefty too, even in these days of 500MHz G4 chips and 10GB hard drives. For comparison, SimCity 2000 needed a Mac II or better (even six years after the Mac II was introduced) and 8MB of RAM (pretty standard in 1993), and once installed, you could run it from your hard disk. SimCity 3000, on the other hand, requires at least a 200MHz PowerPC processor (excluding anything more than a couple of years old), 128 MB of RAM under Virtual Memory (with at least 32MB of real RAM–64MB recommended), and a titanic 260MB of hard disk space–even though the game requires its CD in the drive to run!

The second thing that makes SC3000 a bit of a letdown is that it is exactly what its name suggests: another version of SimCity, but no more. Yes, the simulation area is four times the size, and you can now zoom in far enough to see individual cars and people moving around. Yes, the music is much more realistic, and there are more landmarks you can place. Lots more landscapes are available, including real cities such as my home town of Vancouver, and the interaction with your advisors, neighboring cities, and Sim citizens is more detailed.

But it’s still basically SimCity 2000, with more. If you played SC2000, you’ll know exactly what to do. Some things are new: you have to manage garbage now, for instance, and you can make deals with neighboring cities beyond the edge of your map. Some things are easier: power lines only have to cross open non-zoned terrain, not connect every building. Some things are more annoying: disasters like fires and earthquakes switch to slow speed so you can respond to them, but you can’t speed them up and watch them run wild either; and you can no longer build hydroelectric power plants.

There’s No Such Thing as Too Much Sim

If I sound like I dislike SimCity 3000, I’m misleading you. None of the problems I’ve mentioned detracts from the gameplay. If you have a sufficiently beefy Mac and don’t mind seeing the occasional Windows-style interface element, you’ll have a great time. On my beige Power Mac G3/266, zoning and building are occasionally a little jerky, but otherwise the program runs smoothly and the simulation engine certainly seems to take advantage of the PowerPC processor: if you set its speed to maximum, the months fly by. The graphics are great fun, with lots more animation and four full sides of detail to each structure. The more you play, the more subtle and ingenious detail you discover.

SimCity 3000 is just as addictive as its predecessors, and offers an even deeper canvas on which to let your city-building dreams play out. With the explosion of the Internet since SC2000′s release, you can now find a lot more neat stuff, from pre-built cities to new buildings and landmarks to the inevitable cheat codes, online both at the official SimCity site and at dozens of fan sites such as the SimCity 3000 Resource Center. You can even import cities from SimCity 2000–although you’ll probably have to make some major alterations for them to work well in the new environment, and some elements disappear entirely during import because they work differently in the two games.

Apparently, Maxis originally wanted to make another quantum leap from SimCity 2000, taking you right down to street level where you could roam the sidewalks of your city and talk to people face to face. Yet they realized early on that the hardware requirements for such a game would be so steep that almost no one could run it. They wisely chose instead to improve on the masterpiece they already had. Anyone who liked the previous SimCities will love this one, too.

I wish SimCity 3000 had been more revolutionary, true. But I still can’t stop playing it!

Derek K. Miller
dkmiller@mymac.com

Why the Obsession With Market Share?

It’s been a busy summer. Since my last GearHead column in June, Steve “Surprises Every 90 Days” Jobs has shown us the iBook, Mac OS 9, and the new Power Mac G4s. They all look pretty cool — but of course, as I write this, no mere mortals actually have any of them in their hands, so we’ll have to take Steve’s word that they actually are cool, for now.

We’ve also seen shares in Apple Computer Inc. surpass their previous record-high price, set way back in 1991 — finally clanging shut the door on the rampant speculation of the past two or three years that Apple was, as a company, not long for this world.

Good. We can put that behind us. Apple Computer and the Macintosh are healthy, and that’s no doubt good for the whole computer industry, whether running Windows, Linux, BeOS, Palm OS, or anything else. You can have any color Mac you like, as long as it’s not beige, and as long as you don’t want to connect ADB devices or more than three PCI cards to it. Wonderful.

Pentium-crushing numbers

But something’s still bugging me. People — journalists, industry analysts, webmasters, Mac users, and iCEOs alike — continue to be obsessed by Apple’s market share, and I just don’t get it. Recent articles have touted Apple’s rebound from 5% (or, according to some, less than 2%!) share of the PC market to as high as 13%. Woo woo.

A big part of growth in this share, as Jobs revealed at Seybold in August, is that the company sold some two million iMacs in one year. That got me thinking, “Let’s look at those numbers.”

First of all, in most cases they’re talking about Apple’s current (often month-by-month) share of new computers sold through certain channels, usually a portion of retail and mail order/Web sales. They say nothing about the percentage of Macs (or Apple IIs) in use out there at any given time.

Did we forget the old days?

But more importantly, the figures have no historical context. Apple sold two million iMacs in 1998-99 — about 165,000 iMacs per month — and hundreds of thousands more Power Mac G3s and PowerBooks, representing something like one-eighth (or less) of the overall number of PCs sold during that time.

Think back, though, to when Apple was the dominant player in the PC industry, between 1977 and 1981, before the introduction of the IBM PC. At the time, no one could touch them — not Commodore, not Radio Shack, no one. I’d guess the Apple II’s market share at something like 60%, perhaps more, for much of the period.

Yet back then it still took Apple, on average, about two and a half years to sell two million Apple IIs — about 70,000 machines per month, or less than half the monthly number of iMacs (not to mention G3s and PowerBooks) selling now. It took nine years (1984-1993) for Apple to sell 10 million pre-PowerPC Macintoshes — an average of less than 100,000 per month, or about 1.1 million per year.

Share is not health

What’s the lesson? Obviously, the computer industry has grown a lot, and on balance it has grown much faster than Apple’s share has. At the turn of the 1980s, Apple Computer was an unstoppable, fast-growing, market-dominating — and eminently profitable — company, all while selling less than a million computers per year.

So is there any reason at all that a company that was profitable selling a million products a year could not, if properly managed, be profitable and healthy selling two or three million?

Of course not.

Market share alone is pretty meaningless. If Apple can manufacture, market, and sell each of its computers at a profit, then whether it has 2% of 15% of the market doesn’t matter at all to whether the company is financially healthy.

On the other hand, IBM, which took Apple’s mantle as the market leader in the 1980s, and which remains in the top five of PC manufacturers, lost $1 billion selling personal computers in 1998, while making $6.3 billion in other areas, from mainframes to services. Even Compaq, which has held the number one spot as long as anyone can remember this decade, is now being called “beleaguered.” So being big — having a large market share — doesn’t guarantee profitability in PC sales either, especially with Wintel PC prices apparently sliding from $500 to free this year.

So what matters?

Since 1997, when its share price bottomed out near $15, Apple’s focus has been on building unusual computers, refining its easy-to-use operating system, and marketing its butt off to sell both at reasonable but not ridiculously low prices. Those three things have improved the company’s market share, returned it to profitability, and brought users, the press, and software developers back to the Mac.

Increased market share is a symptom of those results, not the result itself. Keep that in mind the next time a pundit spouts off about Apple’s market share — whether it’s rising or dropping — or when you’re tempted to talk about it yourself.

What counts is selling computers and making money doing it, so that Apple Computer will still be around — to give us Mac users something to buy, and make money doing it — years down the road.

Derek K. Miller
dkmiller@mymac.com

Mike Wallinga of “Wall Writings” fame here at My Mac sent an email out to the entire staff shortly after Macworld NY, asking what the staff thought about the iBook. The exchange was so interesting that someone suggested we turn it into an article for the website. Hey, what a great idea! So here it is, albeit edited just a bit.

From Mike Wallinga:
Now that it’s seen the light of day, what does everyone think? How about any of the other Macworld announcements (which did get overshadowed, but I know there were a few important ones-MIE and OE 5.0, new versions of Norton AntiVirus and Utilities, Virtual PC 3.0, etc.).

I remember a very good discussion among the staff when the iMac was introduced; that’s one of the reasons I’m eager to hear your opinions. Of course, reply at your leisure-just wondering what my fellow My Mac’ers think about it all!

Adam Karneboge (webmaster here at My Mac) was up next!

Being a laptop user myself, I was also very interested in the iBook, and I’m a bit disappointed, to tell you the truth.
1.) The lack of a built in microphone is inexcusable
2.) I don’t think 3.2 GB or 32 MB RAM cuts it;
3.) The screen is extremely small for the size and weight of the machine.

I’m a graphic designer, and I know that the graphics subsystems in the iBook would not meet my needs, nor would the screen. (Not to mention the RAM expandability or the HD space) However, I’m afraid that some consumers might find the specs inadequate also. Now I’m seriously considering buying one just to have it sit on my desk to look at it every day, but as far as using it, no. $1599 is a little bit too much to ask for email and word processing capabilities. And, while the wireless networking is cool, its functionality in real world environments is not very applicable at the time, from the way I see it. Anyone disagree?

Tim Robertson, the publisher, wrote back

Why, yes, Adam, in fact I do.

1. No built in microphone? Are you kidding me? Let’s have a show of hands: who uses the microphone anyway? I have four of the things, never use any of them.

2. 3.2GB is not enough? Since when? This is a consumer portable, not a professional machine. And with the cheap price of RAM, most users will upgrade anyway. Why not keep the unit price down with less RAM.

3. The screen size is fine for a portable. Again, it’s a price vs. performance deal here.

As a student of graphic design, you should know this is NOT a machine for you. It was never intended to be. Actually, to be truthful, no PB is the right “main” computer for a graphic designer. No way. In the company I start working for in a week, ALL the graphic designers have 256MB RAM minimum, a 21 inch monitor, and a HUGE HD. No PB can complete with that on a price/performance level.

What I find informative is that you’re a bit disappointed, yet you want to buy one. Sounds like Apple must be doing something right! Also, as a consumer machine, I think the price is perfect for a portable with these features. Good luck finding a PC laptop with this speed and specs for even $2,500.

The wireless technology, though, is the biggest news. This will change the whole computer industry. Apple did it with FireWire and USB; they will do it with this as well.

Bill Perry kept his thoughts on it very light, he wrote:

Well said.

And Lonnie Houghton wrote:

Here here, Capn’!

Adam decided to take me to task, and responded with this letter:

Tim,
On the contrary, as a graphic designer, I DO know that this is not a machine for me, as I stated in my original letter. (I disagree that no PB can compete, but I will say that they can’t compete price/performance wise) What I was trying to say is that to the naked eye, it looks like an awesome machine. But the more I get into it, the more disappointed I become. I’m afraid that cost-conscious consumers might become disappointed as well.

I use the microphone, in fact! I use the microphone for the new voiceprint logins in Mac OS 9.0. I use the microphone with Apple’s new PlainTalk 2.0 (Also in OS 9). And I will use my wonderful microphone in my WallStreet when IBM’s via voice software comes out. So Apple’s investing all this in new voice recognition software/technology, but they don’t put a microphone in the one machine that would target the most of this new technology?! Doesn’t make sense to me.

Mike Wallinga joined back in with:

Hi again! Just thought since I started this discussion, I could contribute my two cents, too!

Going by just what the specs say, I would have to agree with Tim and Bill more so than Adam. The iBook is an iMac-level model, not a pro-class machine. I have some of the same feelings as Adam (especially the 32 megs a RAM-the first thing I would do is upgrade it, and I don’t have incredibly large RAM needs), but I think Apple had to make some of the compromises it did in order to differentiate the iBook from the Lombards.

From what I’ve read, it seems that even Jobs was a bit disappointed with the $1600 price tag, blaming it on the high cost of LCDs. I’m hoping that once the LCD supply catches up with demand, and unit prices for the screens start dropping, we’ll see a drop in price of both iBooks and Lombards. Maybe wishful thinking, but I hope so!

I’m just amazed that the iBook costs the same price that I paid for my 1400c/133 only nineteen months ago. Over time, as my budget allowed, I spent close to $1500 more upgrading RAM, hard drive, processor, installing an Ethernet card, and buying a PC Card modem. But just the unit itself cost me $1550, and it had a 133MHz 603e, 128 K of cache, an 11.3 inch active matrix screen, 16 megs RAM, 1.2 gig hard drive, and NO Ethernet or modem.

Now that same initial investment would get me a faster processor, more RAM, more hard drive, a slightly bigger screen, longer battery life, a faster CD-ROM drive, Ethernet and modem, USB, more durability (admittedly, at the expense of a lot of size!), virtually no change in weight, and a cool exterior. Isn’t progress great?

A little-talked about feature that I find VERY cool is the yo-yo style power cord. Man, getting rid of that huge power brick of mine sure would be nice! The loss of the microphone is a minor disappointment, especially since there are new speech-recognition projects announced by companies that have just recently committed to the Mac. I won’t miss it personally, though. The loss of media bays and PC Card slots is too bad, too, but both expected and forgivable. I doubt the intended audience will miss either very much…

The wireless stuff is “gee-whiz” gadgetry to me right now-I couldn’t justify spending an additional $400 for it-but I agree it has potential to revolutionize home, educational, and even business networking. For what it does, it seems very affordable.

My biggest disappointment was when I checked the Apple Store for an educational discount-the price is $1549 for students. For a model aimed at students and schools, I was hoping for a bigger discount. But that was definitely wishful thinking, I guess-the iMac is only $50 cheaper for students, too. Shucks! (I’m not in a position to purchase a new computer, anyway, but if it would have been cheap enough that I could have sold my 1400/G3 for an amount reasonably close to the cost of the iBook and a USB printer, it would have been awfully tempting…

This is a pretty long post by me, so maybe this is more than two cents’ worth. (Can’t be more than three or four, though!

What would ANY discussion on the latest and greatest from Apple be without Mick O’Neil giving us his opinion? As an expert in education, I always find it interesting to hear Mick’s take on the computer world and Apple in particular. He is an expert in the field, and I always take his opinions and thoughts serious.

While the exact specifications of the first iBooks may be important to its immediate success, I think it would be realistic to predict that the price eventually will drop, Ram and Hard Drive increase, and processor speed be bumped up. From my perspective as a home user and as an educational computing specialist, the major attraction is the wireless networking.

I suppose it’s easy to see how attractive wireless networking might be in the home-particularly a home with children and thus more than one system. There’s the convenience of accessing the net from every room, but there’s also the convenience of sharing files and print jobs between systems.

To understand the attraction for education, you need to appreciate how many school systems presently approach networking. Our system, for example, features a centralized server (actually several) along with fiber and Ethernet bringing network access to the classrooms. The connections in the classrooms are, of course, static and despite enormous effort, never seem to be where the teacher wants them. The services the kids get from this centralized network are basically email and print services-with most applications software on the local hard drive. We have avoided Windows NT peer sharing at all costs, because it’s just so darn easy to inadvertently or intentionally destroy a work station setup. One approach we’ve used to shore up the integrity of the system is to create a common ‘image’ of a workstation somewhere up on the server. Thus, if a workstation goes down, it’s a simple matter (or so we thought) to restore the system from a server. Unfortunately, we have so many configurations (media center, business lab, science lab, teacher station, keyboarding lab, and so on) with so many different hardware setups, that it’s a full time job just to maintain these images.

My point here is that the vulnerability of Windows precludes most work group types of activities where students actually share files or use workgroup type of software. Therefore, we’re using only a small portion of our network’s potential. Remote, wireless access on the Mac with its relatively solid system software makes it both economically (no static wiring) and practically feasible to use computers in a cooperative learning environment. The mobility of wireless connectivity is important as students can bring their processing power to the learning experience instead of trying artificially to process information after the fact. (I can envision lots of group work where the recorder in each group has an iBook and then information is shared between the groups).

Educational networks finally have a chance to evolve from an expensive public relations exercise (access the Internet at all costs) to a meaningful educational tool and the iBook will lead the way. All of this, of course, IMHO.

Adam Karneboge responded:

The scenarios that you talk about are very well thought out, and do make wireless networking accessible. However, we will have to wait to see what schools invest in these systems before we know if wireless networking will be a success or not.

Derek K. Miller finally chimed in!

As others pointed out, graphic designers probably won’t use this as a workhorse machine-but with more RAM, it would certainly be adequate for taking smaller projects home at night. If not, the pro PowerBook’s would fit the bill better. The iBook is more powerful than my G3/266, which was touted as a graphics powerhouse back in 1998 when I bought it.

The wireless networking is, I think, a brilliant stroke, and like USB, Apple has taken an existing standard and made it its own, bringing it into the limelight and no doubt spurring accelerated development for other machines, including Wintel PCs.

Provided that it actually works as advertised, I think the AirPort system is amazingly applicable. 150 feet is a long way in a home environment, or even in a small office. Right now, for instance, I’m holed away in the basement working on my email while my wife sits upstairs watching a movie and my toddler daughter sleeps. With the iBook, I could plug in an AirPort base station to my ADSL modem via my Ethernet hub and be working on my email-live, not offline-either on the couch with my wife or in my daughter’s room watching her sleep. Or even in bed.

That’s worth money to me.

So, too, would it be worth it for me, who works only two days a week in the office of my employer (telecommuting the rest of the time), to be able to go to work with my iBook and plunk it down anywhere, needing only a power outlet (or not even that!) to do my work, instead of being tethered to my desk all day. I could bring it to meetings too.

I suspect there are a lot of people like me.

Mike, you wrote “The loss of media bays and PC Card slots is too bad, too, but both expected and forgivable. I doubt the intended audience will miss either very much…”

Nor would I, because once the iBook is networked (either wirelessly or with 10/100BaseT cables), it has access to all the other devices on my Macs: Zip drive, scanner, floppy, printer, hard drives-and even the NT Server, printer, CD-R, and other devices connected to my dad’s Wintel/Novell/Mac office network in the other half of the duplex we live in.

I expect Apple is betting that most iBook purchasers will already have another, desktop machine to which they can network it.

Still, there are a number of down points:

- Lack of video out or card slots sucks big time for those needing to give presentations, wanting to play a game on a big screen TV, or those who like to use a second screen.

- No built-in mic is a bit lame, but USB mics are fine if you need them.

- Given the size and weight of the machine, the screen is surprisingly small at 12.1″, but that was probably a cost-saving measure, and it wouldn’t surprise me if later generation iBooks have bigger displays.

- Here’s the big one: this machine does NOT replace the Newton. Originally, when Steve Jobs outlined his four-product-line strategy (pro and consumer, desktops and portables), he implied that the just-cancelled Newton would see a fine, Mac OS-running replacement in the “P1″ consumer portable. This is not it: it’s bigger than other PowerBook’s, it’s not “instant on,” it can’t easily be used while standing, it still has fragile moving parts like a hard drive, and it offers no handwriting recognition.

If the rumors of an Apple-branded Palm Computing device (or a special one from 3Com designed with Apple) come to pass, that will do something, but there was a market for a full-powered PDA that neither the Palm OS (good, but basic) nor Windows CE (deeply flawed) has been able to fill. The only thing I can think of that does do well in this space is the European Psion and its EPOC operating system, but that’s not much of a player in North America.

Mick O’Neil wrote back:

Just happened to be looking over a July 97 issue of MacUser for a column I’m writing about ‘the great software ripoff’ (or how some software prices remain way too high in the light of hardware price drops) and I looked in the back at PowerBook prices. This was the year when the PowerBook 3400/240/32/2GB/CD was relatively new and was selling for $5795.

Now, I realize that the iBook is no PowerBook in terms of ports and expansion options (It would be like comparing say Apples to Tangerines!), but the iBook clearly offers an enormous amount of power compared to a top of the line PowerBook just a few years ago and delivers this power for almost 25% of the price of the 3400. I suspect that there’s still little software around-including graphics software-that would seriously tax the iBook’s capabilities. (Remember Adam, graphic artists worked quite merrily on the Mac Plus some year’s ago.). I know… I know… you need 3D rendering and your Photoshop filters take forever and so on, but I think the target audience for this machine will be as happy as fat little pigs in the sunshine.

Oink

Jay Timmer was the last to join in:

The one thing that caught my attention was the AGP port (I’ve not seen that confirmed, but it showed up in several reports). That’s expected to be the video standard of the future, so it’s important if Apple can show that they have it working.

What impressed me was the wireless networking. There have been all sorts of options for this in the past, but nothing’s really fallen out as a standard, and most of them were Windows oriented, with the expected levels of chunkiness. I expect that Apple will now drive this version to standard-dom, and show everybody how to do it right-easy switching of configurations, plug and play functionality, etc.

There are a few things I think need to be clarified or added, though:
From my reading, the port will act as a router, but not as a firewall. That option really needs to be added, and easy software tools for configuring both aspects need to be put together.

As things now stand, there isn’t any roaming capability-you connect to a specific port, and you’re either on that port or lose your connection. What I’d like to see is something where, as soon as the iBook recognizes that it’s lost its connection, it throws up a dialog informing you of that, and offers the choice of available ports in your new location.

Apple needs to make this backward compatible to everything-every laptop that can support the latest system software should be made to support the wireless networking. They need large-scale adoption if they’re going to make this a standard.

Apple needs to publish information about exactly how the situation works out when there are multiple ports and a saturating volume of users present. Any group considering adopting this as a standard will want to know, and the sooner they can make a decision based on facts, the better. This information may be buried in documentation of the standard, but it needs to be posted in an up-front manner.

Just my ever-so-humble opinions…

And that, folks, about sums it all up! Hope you enjoyed reading this edited collection of emails-turned-into-an-article, but we enjoyed out discussion so much we just wanted to share it with all of you! And be assured that more articles and thoughts on the iBook will be forthcoming next month. (Bob McCormick’s letter to this whole thing, in fact, will appear next month in his monthly MacAmalgamation column!) Editor’s note: Maybe by then Jim Moravec and I will be sufficiently rested from editing the issue that we can finally join in on the discussions!

A Clean Break?

I recently found a 1996 picture of me with my Mac. It’s just me, at my 1986-era IKEA desk. The Mac is the trusty Centris 660AV (circa 1993), with a cheapo 15″ monitor and a very old external 1x NEC CD-ROM drive. That’s it. I look much the same as I do today.

That photo marks the end of my pre-gearhead era. What I mean is, up to that time, my Mac system consisted only of equipment I needed for my work. I used the Centris mostly for writing, email, and web surfing, with a bit of graphics and audio work on the side. A 15″ screen was adequate, as was the HP DeskWriter I had on the floor.

Within a year, however, I’d gone nuts. I’m not sure what changed – other than web design, my work is the same now as it was then – but by the spring of 1998 the Centris was tricked out with a second screen – a 21″ greyscale display I picked up through eBay – as well as powerful new speakers, a Wacom graphics tablet, an ancient external 630 MB hard drive the size of a cinder block (also from eBay), a faster external CD-ROM, and a new printer. Instead of occupying the central section of my desk, my Mac system now sprawled across the whole surface – there was a bit of space to the left of the keyboard for a drink, but that’s all. I did feel more productive, but maybe that was just self-delusion talking.

I’d pretty much maxed the Centris out. Any rational person would have left it at that, I suppose, but by now my gearheadedness was in full force. So I bought a new machine, a beige Power Mac G3/266 desktop, which in early 1998 had only recently been displaced as Apple’s top-of-the-line computer. (And no, of course I didn’t get rid of the Centris. It’s in a box in the corner of the room right now; my wife and I just brought it back from her classroom, where she uses it to tabulate her students’ math marks during the school year. I’ll unpack it as soon as I clear off some of the junk from the other desk.)

Happily, almost everything from the old system moved right on over and plugged in. I’m looking at the same 21″ screen as I type this, and the 630 MB drive keeps some of my regular backups. I’ve also added a scanner, a joystick, a new four-button mouse, an ADSL modem, and a keyboard tray to make some space on the desk surface for more drinks. I only had to replace the old Nubus video card with a PCI one.

Now, though, I’ve put myself in a bit of a bind. Or, perhaps, Apple has. By the time I need another new Mac a few years down the road, surely all that will be available are Gummi Bear-style machines (just so you know, I like the new designs of the iMac and “Blue and White” G3s, but I do know a number of people who hate them). Today, the iMacs have only Universal Serial Bus (USB) expansion ports, and the G3s have just USB and FireWire, plus a token Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) connector, which will supposedly disappear with the next design change.

So even now – just a year after I bought my G3/266, and little more than two years after starting to collect Mac stuff semi-obsessively – if I bought another new G3 system, then my scanner (with its SCSI connector), external hard drive (also SCSI), and Apple-brand printer (serial) wouldn’t work with it out of the box. Even my 21″ monitor, with its Mac II-style monitor port, would require an adapter for the G3′s new, small, PC-style connector. Sure, I could add a serial card and a SCSI card, but with my second video card already in there, that would fill up all three slots in the computer. Not an acceptable situation for someone sure to “need” another card for something or other in the next year or two.

(Okay, okay, I could get a USB-to-serial adapter and save a slot, but I’m being dramatic here. Gimme a break.)

So, by the time I actually “need” another Power Mac, USB and FireWire will be the only way to go in Apple’s systems (the new “Bronze” PowerBook G3s already have no ADB port). Let’s see, my:

• printer
• scanner
• external drive
• keyboard
• mouse
• joystick
• graphics tablet
• maybe the big monitor

will all be obsolete, or at least difficult to connect. Now, that provides a fine excuse (a few years down the line) for me to go spend a whole bunch of money on new peripherals, or at least sort out which of them I really need (not just “need”) to replace.

It also provides an incentive to do something else. No, no, not switch sides and buy a Wintel PC. (What were you thinking?) Since all newer Power Macs are pretty easy to upgrade, by the time I would normally be buying a new Mac, I might instead choose a processor upgrade to a new PowerPC G4, keeping my old G3 and all my old peripherals for some time to come.

Like those who bought the first generation Power Macs (the 6100, 7100, and 8100) back in 1994 – who can now upgrade to pretty decent G3 performance at a reasonable price – I’ll be prolonging the life of my Mac and my peripherals, and saving myself some money.

Of course, Apple, which doesn’t make upgrade cards anymore, won’t be getting any of the money I do spend. Strangely, Apple’s bold attempt to move us all forward into USB, FireWire, and funky colors by making a clean break from the serial, ADB, SCSI, and beige past may actually be helping to hold back some of the truest, most dedicated Mac fans.

I’m talking about:

• People who are not video editors, but who’ve still filled all six slots in their Power Mac 9600s.
• People with enough mice, trackballs, joysticks, and tablets connected to their machines simultaneously that you’d think they were octopi, not humans.
• People who have their desktops spread across four monitors, just because they can.

These people – we people – are gearheads. We like our Mac stuff, but we don’t necessarily have the latest and greatest. Many of us scrounge, since we don’t have tons of money to spend (otherwise we’d be happy to shell out for USB keyboards, mice, tablets, scanners, and joysticks, and FireWire drives).

Part of me would be quite happy to buy a nice new fruity-flavored Mac when I next need a new machine. But another part of me knows that if I do, I’ll be reduced (for the first time in years) to a computer that doesn’t occupy my whole desk with its entourage – an unsatisfying feeling. I’m not sure I like having Apple force me to face my unhealthy gearhead habit.

Then again, I hear you can attach up to 63 devices to a FireWire chain. I see some possibilities there.

Derek K. Miller
dkmiller@mymac.com

For a certain variety of Mac geek, of which I am one, there’s great satisfaction in formatting a hard drive. I don’t mean just choosing Erase Disk from the Special menu either–that’s lightweight stuff, reserved for floppy disks that have been sitting in a drawer for four years with unfinished SimCity scenarios on them.

I mean wiping a drive down to the bare metal. Fire up the Drive Setup utility (the very latest version, freshly downloaded from Apple’s servers), set it to do a Low Level Format and to Zero All Data, and just willy-nilly click “OK” to all those ugly dialog boxes warning you that you’re bringing on a little magnetic apocalypse inside your Mac.

It’s even more satisfying if the drive is from a flaky machine running something like System 7.5.2 and about three dozen RAM-chewing extensions–formatting one of those yields the same kind of self-congratulatory pride as clinically cleaning out a fridge that you accidentally left unplugged for two weeks. Perhaps it’s also the same feeling nuclear weapons test engineers used to get each time they converted a tropical island paradise into a vast, radioactive crater in the sea. It may be time-consuming and even a bit dangerous, but in the end you can say “I did that!”

Waiting for that bit-by-bit format also gives you time to think, which is what I did the other day while I was resurrecting an old Quadra 630 for my dad. (In case you’re wondering, no, my dad is not a timid first-time computer user who needs my help whenever something goes wrong. In fact, he has five Wintel desktop machines and three laptops, all hooked up in a homebrew Novell network–in his den. He could easily have set the Quadra up himself. But I said I enjoyed this, right? With a dad like that, how could I not?)

Anyway, I was thinking. You see, my dad has lots of monitors, but they’re all the kind with PC-style VGA cables on them–with teeny little monitor plugs–and to run one of them from the Mac he’d need a Mac-to-VGA video adapter. And so I faced a dilemma.

Where, I asked myself, should I buy the adapter?

Whenever I buy some big piece of Mac equipment, such as a new machine, a scanner, a monitor, or a printer, my course of action is simple. I visit one of several nice Apple-focused dealers in the general vicinity of my home in Vancouver, Canada. (Okay, maybe I surf to the eBay online auction, but let’s not complicate things too much.) The Apple dealers deserve my business for sticking with the Mac even in the pre-iMac days when it was far from cool (or very profitable) to do so.

However, when it comes to small stuff–inkjet paper, games, cables, Zip disks, printer cartridges, and yes, adapters–I’m not sure where I should go. Part of me says that I should still buy those things from my local Apple dealer, to show my support and send a bit more cash their way.

But another part of me thinks like this: If enough Mac users buy at least some of their supplies at generally Mac-hostile stores (think Best Buy or Circuit City in the U.S., Future Shop here in Canada–I’m sure those of you elsewhere have your equivalents), then those stores are bound to notice over time that, hey, we’re selling a fair bit of Mac stuff here.

I have a lot of Wintel-using friends, largely because I work for a software company that develops only for Windows. Before the iMac and “Think Different” came along, they were convinced the Mac had been dead for years. After all, they never saw Macs, Mac supplies, or especially Mac software in stores. I tried to explain that Mac users mostly buy at Apple specialty stores or mail order, but I think they dismissed me as a relic, like someone still clinging to his Atari 800 or Coleco ADAM.

If, at that time, even a small percentage of the millions of Mac users had come out the woodwork and started snapping up all the weird Mac parts that Mac-hostile stores still seemed to carry (you know, Mac mice, Mac serial cables, and adapters like the one I needed for my dad), then maybe those stores would have realized sooner how many of us there are, and started stocking other stuff, like actual software applications.

Maybe Apple’s apparent death spiral of 1995-97 wouldn’t have seemed so dire, and maybe fewer Mac users would have been forced over to the Wintel camp by Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Maybe the company’s recent Phoenix-like recovery wouldn’t have seemed so miraculous to the doomsaying industry analysts.

Maybe.

With that in mind, and after the Low Level Format on my dad’s Quadra was finished, I trucked off to the nearest Future Shop, intent on striking my own thirty-dollar blow for the Mac cause.

Guess what? Now that Future Shop is selling a ton of iMacs, they don’t have any use for Mac-VGA adapters. iMacs don’t have video ports, as you know. Sigh.

But they did have an old Mac aircraft-style joystick in the bargain bin for half price, so I bought that instead. Then I drove to the local Mac dealer and bought the adapter there. Victory on both fronts!

Of course, I’d just spent twice what I’d planned. For a certain variety of Mac geek, of which I am one, there’s great satisfaction in that too.

Derek K. Miller
dkmiller@mymac.com