It’s fairly obvious to everyone who stays up-to-date on Apple that there are people who make a living criticizing and underestimating Apple. And we know why they do it.

1. Make money. If you agitate the Apple audience, there is activity. Some of this can be translated into money via Web hits and so on.

2. Manipulate the stock. Just about anything any investment analyst says will be spread throughout the Internet in minutes. People with E-TRADE accounts are able to buy and sell in seconds. We no longer invest in growth, we buy and sell on a whim according to how we are influenced.

3. Hubris. Lots of people have bet on Microsoft and the “PC way”. They don’t like to look bad. They want to be a member of an accepted group, not look like a maverick, and yet not pay the price for being mainstream. When Apple stumbles, it validates them and makes them happy. Some of these people are writers.

Despite all these opportunities to underestimate Apple, the one constant is that Apple is a hard working, tough, resourceful company. The executives are financially shrewd, market savvy, and in tune with analysts. In general they don’t put much stock in the negative musings of the Web, and they don’t pay much attention to idle chatter. So why should you?

So when you hear a big fuss about OS security or the Intel transition or the eventual decline of the iPod, just remember that there are people out there who have an axe to grind or a financial stake in the PC world or want a piece of Apple’s prosperity.

There are thousands of Apple employees working very hard every day and night to tackle every problem they face. They have great leadership. They have a different vision. They are driven to succeed. They have the means and resources to do what no other company can: bring grace, coherence and common sense to the complexities of modern digital life.

Taking seriously people who underestimate Apple for political and business gain just doesn’t make good sense for Apple’s customers.

In fact, just treat yourself like an Apple employee. Ignore the self-serving articles elsewhere on the Web. Make sure your Mac is set up to serve you well. Identify a problem in life that needs solved or a skill that needs learned, and do something positive with the technology at your finger tips.

It’s what your Mac was designed for, and it’ll lift your spirits.

John Martellaro

I am writing this after returning from a week-long ski trip to Steamboat Springs, Colorado. My wife and I have taken this annual vacation to Steamboat for most of the twenty years we’ve been skiing.

The title of this blog refers to one of my top ten favorite movies, “Life as a House” with Kevin Kline. The premise in the movie is that in the process of building a house with his estranged son, a father was able to rebuild their relationship. It’s a fabulous movie. Trust me.

And so, one can rebuild perspective by being outside, every day, all day, skiing on a mountain, bathed in wind and sunshine. You’re building your body and your character – for no sport affords so much opportunity for *judgment* as skiing.

You don’t think about many things when you’re flying down a mountain or negotiating patches of fluffy snow on a mogul, trying to avoid a big fall. Your entire being, mind and body, is connected to the skis, as you work your way down the trail. There just isn’t any bandwidth to reflect or let your mind wander.

Your heart is pumping, your lungs are grasping for every liter of air it can get at 3,000 meters above sea level, your thighs are burning, and you’re focused on both avoiding traffic and being flattened by a snow boarder.

And then you go to dinner and have a feast. Salad. Steak or fish. Potatoes. Desert. Red wine. (Not recommended for beginners!) I call it aboriginal skiing. It’s like the cave man chasing rabbits for food: he runs all day, collapses into a heap by the fire at sunset, eats burned meat, falls into a stupor, sleeps ten hours, gets up at dawn and does it all over again.

It tunes your body to its physical existence on this pale blue dot of a planet. You become one with the mountain and nature. It’s mystical.

After you do this for a week, you’re sunburned, exhausted, a few pounds lighter, and living on another plane of existence. You want to do it every day for the rest of your life.

There are ski instructors and staff who ski 120 days in a winter season. Some then head to New Zealand for the Austral winter and continue for another 120 days. It suspect most of them don’t own a computer, and if they do, they don’t have the foggiest idea who Phil Schiller or what an Xserve is.

In a way, I envy them, but that’s not my heritage. I have to live in both worlds, and so skiing helps me retain a sense of balance in my life.

My dream has always been to ski by day, write by night.

Life as a mountain.

John Martellaro

I have been brooding, as I know Beth Lock has, about the frenzy of Internet publishing. What’s fueling this, of course, is massive bandwidth and lots of great software tools for publishing.

The downside, however, is that the American culture can become too fragmented.

I remember when I was in high-school, there were three networks and lots of good libraries. Not so many bookstores. No cable. Everyone knew who the TV heros were, and there was a certain commonality of values. I’m not saying that diverse views are bad; they are good. Too much commonality leads to repression and prejudice. But the pendulum can swing too far the other way: it’s possible to have so many diverse views that the expression of those views can create problems as each of us delves into and fixates on a different subculture.

For example, while I tended towards obsessive reading of Robert Heinlein when I was in high school, there weren’t that many subcultures to get hooked into. Lots of my friends read science fiction. We all watched Star Trek. There were a few other common high school subcultures, sports, politics, business, but we all more or less got along.

Nowadays, however, it is entirely possible to get tuned into so many different combinations of publishing channels and become enamored with cultish ideas that common ground is fading. Internet surfer A hangs in a Myspace.com chat room talking hip hop, Internet surfer B focuses on Libertarian blogs, Internet surfer C does nothing but listen to MacCentral podcasts, and so on. Multiply this by millions of surfers accessing hundreds of different channels of thought, in all possible combinations, and the result is that intolerance for alien ideas rises exponentially.

Last night on the CBS news (another channel with its own unique biases) there was a story about a woman whose husband is in Iraq. She has posted a very discreet “Support our Troops” sign at the edge of her garage. The home owners association wants her to take it down for fear of inciting neighbors who may have a different view. And avoid a “sign war”. The president of the home owners association is a Gulf War veteran, but stated that rules are rules and the covenants allow only for For Sale signs, small security service signs, etc. Her husband sent word from Iraq. Pay the fine and keep the sign up.

Freedom of speech implies respect for other people’s opinion combined with self-discipline. If no one respects anyone else’s right to express a view, then freedom of speech is lost. If we spend too much time visiting and dwelling on all these different channels of thought, too many diverse and argumentative personalities are formed, real communication breaks down, and freedom of expression becomes, instead, a spitting war. Sometimes worse.

It doesn’t help, as has been previously noted by others, that many walk around with iPod ear buds on, further distancing people from each other, tuning each other out.

The next time someone expresses a really wacko idea, on the Internet or in your face, I recommend some wise words from Robert Heinlein. “Eighty percent of wisdom is minding your own business.” In other words, self-discipline, respect, tolerance and grace.

Frankly, I have never seen so much crap in my whole life. People are living in dreamland. All this fuss about Vista’s delay for consumers giving Apple an opportunity for a market share leap? It’s baloney.

Apple’s market share will inch up, but not because of this!

It’s MS business as usual.

Microsoft won’t even sweat it. Can we get back to normal, folks?

I wrote a few weeks back that Vista’s delay would likely not produce any measurable increase in Apple’s market share. And yet, I believe that I have seen Apple provoke Microsoft over and over, especially at the World Wide Developer Conferences (WWDC) each summer into over extending Longhorn/Vista.

Basically, when an operating systems becomes a vehicle for the corporate agenda of a monopolist instead of being a focused tool for the very fussy consumer, it has to create technical problems for MS.

I can see why the MS bloggers are having fits.

Apple is having great fun, making good money, and enjoying their ventures into music and video. Now, Microsoft wants a piece of that action and must fold, spindle and mutilate their business OS to compete.

I always thought I saw Apple goading MS into making that mistake. Anyway, I wrote a longer essay about this here:

Apple’s focus vs. Vista Vision

John Martellaro

From this article:

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/internet/04/03/dvd.downloads.ap/index.html

it appears to me that the movie studios (except Disney) have gone off and struck a deal that gives them some modest bargaining chips with Apple.

I predict not much will come of these download services. The movie is slaved to the PC, so you cannot put the movie on your iPod. From what I read, getting the movie displayed on your TV will be a bit of a challenge.

There seems to be some serious business poker being played out behind the scenes between Apple and the movie studios. Should be interesting to watch.

Meanwhile, I saw that Samsung has delayed its Blu-Ray player another month. It’s looking bad for Blu-Ray with the cheapest player at $999. The HD-DVD camp might win by getting out there fast with their cheaper players. That’ll be a shame.

John Martellaro

I was going to write a blog on why, very recently, I’ve begun to suspect that Blu-Ray is going to lose to HD-DVD. What triggered this was a recent financial analysis in Widescreen magazine. They estimated that if Sony lowered the price of their Blu-Ray players to be competitive with HD-DVD players, they would lose an unacceptable amount of money. Billions of dollars.

But if they sell players at a price that loses only hundreds of millions, they still can’t compete against $499 HD-DVD players. Tim Robertson and I talked about this. Sony is being very stubborn and arrogant. (Well, duh…)

I think Sony is scrambling hard to get the price down so that they can sell the PS3 and HD players at a reasonable price. It’s a very, very difficult situation, and time is running out. And now, the HD-DVD players are shipping and media is on the shelves. Could be too late for Sony.

But just as I get ready to write more, I found this, thanks to Tim.

http://www.hdbeat.com/2006/04/19/why-hd-dvd-will-prevail-my-opinion/

Bingo.

Perhaps Blu-Ray will be in future PCs and Macs as a storage medium, but despite our technical fetish for the very best, it loooks like “good enough” is the enemy of perfect. Basically, it comes down to betting on the rather modest amounts Americans want to pay for players. $500 is the magic number. $999 is a number I’ve seen for a Samsung Blu-Ray player due in about a month or two – and $999 is NOT the winning number.

I also read that the initial HD-DVD players will only output 1080i. The Blu-Rays are planned, I recall, to output 1080p and 1080i. Beware.

It’s possible the retailers will change modes. At first they were concerned about confusing the customer. Now that HD-DVD has hit the retail channels, I’m betting retailers will change gears and tell customers that Blu-Ray is delayed and it’s gonna be expensive. “Another Betamax.” Just to make some short-term bucks and settle the issue by exerting their own control. Could happen.

Hey, I think Blu-Ray is fabulous, and I’m still rooting for Sony. What do you think? And remember! Don’t kill the messengers.

Unless you know exactly what you’re looking for or you’re good at using a search engine, you could overlook a lot at Apple.com

Here’s a casual list of URLs you may have never known existed at Apple.com

1. Tech brief on Mac OS X Security. Simple minded? Yes. But it’s
there.

http://images.apple.com/macosx/pdf/Mac_OS_X_Security_TB.pdf

2. An Apple compute cluster on wheels.

http://www.apple.com/xserve/workgroupcluster/

3. Did you know Eclipse is available for Mac OS X?

http://www.apple.com/xserve/cluster/resources.html

4. Apple Public Mailing Lists. Want to communicate with Apple engineers and developers? Discuss everything from Section 508 Accessibility to Xsan?

http://lists.apple.com/

5. Ever wonder what some of the senior Apple executives look like? Want to make their photo your desktop? Read their bios?

http://www.apple.com/pr/bios/

6. Ports of Call. Want to port your application to Mac OS X?

http://developer.apple.com/referencelibrary/GettingStarted/GS_Porting/index.html

7. With the Federal Government and want to shop for Apple products?

http://www.apple.com/itpro/federal/

8. Did you know NSA wrote a security document for Panther? Still applicable stuff for Tiger.

http://www.nsa.gov/snac/downloads_macX.cfm?MenuID=scg10.3.1.1

9. Apple has a group called the Advanced Computation Group. High level stuff.

http://www.apple.com/acg/

10. Did you know Apple supports a website catering to scientists who use Apple products?

http://www.macresearch.org/

and has their own science section that doesn’t appear on the home page tabs…

http://www.apple.com/science/

Should I do more?

John Martellaro

Today, two very different critiques were published about Apple’s
new “Get a Mac” TV campaign.

The first was done by Mac World UK.

In this discussion, it’s interesting to see how some panelists
interpret the symbolism of the actors’ clothing and behavior.

The second one, with a different perspective, was just published over at
The Mac Observer by
yours truly.

In this analysis, the symboilism is interpreted in terms of the
actors being the computers they represent, not the actual users.

There is much to think about in these ads. New meanings, interpretation,
and symbolism will, I suspect, continue to be discovered and discussed.

John Martellaro

1. The Cube will appear in one of the Fall TV detective shows.

2. The Cube will become a major meeting place. “I’ll meet
you at the Cube.”

3. It will appear prominently as a background prop in a
major motion picture.

4. Someone will try to deface it, be caught, and there
will be a big fuss. Steve will ask the New York National Guard
to station troops around it.

5. A couple will request to get married inside the Cube.
For rational reasons, Apple will decline. So the ceremony
will be held a short distance away.

6. Apple will spend $250,000 per year keeping it spotlessly
clean.

7. Nikon will propose to anti-reflection coat it for $5M.
The offer will not be immediately rejected out of hand.

8. This Christmas, a black oblate spheroid will suddenly
appear over the Microsoft campus. Everyone will think it’s
Bill Gates’ response to the Cube, but in fact, it’ll be aliens
seeking retribution because a PC virus infected their navigation
system.

9. Katie Couric will do a story about the Cube, be so awed,
she’ll forget about CBS and become the store manager.

10. Standing inside the Cube for more than 60 seconds will
cause any customer to go home at type 4,8,15,16, 23, and 42
into their Mac’s terminal window obsessively for years and years. No
medical cure will be found.

John Martellaro

There is a very, very interesting and educational article I
want to draw your attention to. Dan Eran over at Roughly
Drafted has written a tour de force article on the Mac
OS X/Linux kernel discussion going around. Basically,
some have suggested that the Mach kernel in Darwin/Mac OS X
needs to be replaced with something better. The Linux kernel
comes up in those discussions.

Someday, perhaps soon, modern Unix kernels may be replaced or
supplemented (as I understand it) with hypervisor technology.

Aside from that, however, there are many design, technical,
and political reasons why Apple has not and would not ever
switch to a Linux kernel.

This article sets a high standard for technical analysis and
common sense, and I urge you to read through this multi-part
series. You’ll learn a lot of interesting facts from a fellow
who has done his homework. On top of that, his writing style is
analytic as opposed to ad hominem — which is
so popular in some circles. First rate stuff.

The article is here. I extend my congratulations to Dan for a job very well done.

John Martellaro

Along with many others, I am a big fan of what Parallels is doing with
their “Parallels Desktop for Mac.” This is the virtualization product
that allows a (Intel) Mac user to run Windows, Linux, Solaris right along side
Mac OS X without rebooting as with Boot Camp. (I believe Boot Camp
supports Windows and
Linux
but not Solaris.)

So far, Beta copies of the Parallels product for Mac have been $39.95.

Today, Parallels announced that, at the request of customers, they are
combining the Parallels Desktop with Parallels Compressor. The latter
is a tool that “can compress the size of a Windows virtual machine (VM)
by 50% or more, to conserve hard drive space, get VMs to a “burnable”
size, and increase VM speed” according to Ben Rudolph, Marketing Manager
for Parallels. Now if you take the price for the release version of
Parallels workstation ($79.99) and combine it with the price for the
Compressor ($179.99) you get a good chuck of change. But Parallels made
this announcement today:

• The $39.99 pre-order price is still in effect, and will be until the
  close of the beta program.
• Customers who already pre-ordered will receive the new, upgraded
  version including Compressor at NO ADDITIONAL COST.
• As a special extended offer, we’ll be offering the new, all inclusive
  version for $49.99 for 30 days following the general release.

So I would recommend that if you have an Intel-based Mac and want to run
other OSes, side-by-side with Mac OS X, it’s time to jump on this offer.

The Parallels Website is here.

John Martellaro

I played with a MacBook over the weekend. I was prepared to be
skeptical of the glossy screen. I ended up liking it a lot.
The coating seems to direct more of the light perpendicular
to the screen, so the display seems brighter and more saturated.
I tested the MacBook at the Apple store in the Aspen Grove
shopping Center in Littleton, CO where it was right next to
the front windows filled with light. There was no
noticeable washout. Then I went over and looked at a 15-in
MacBook Pro without the coating, and it looked, well, washed out.

Then I tested the keyboard. I was also prepared to be skeptical
of the MacBook keyboard because it reminded me of the chicklet
keyboards of the past. Well, I’m here to tell you that this
is a very good keyboard. As a writer, I’m excessively picky
about my keyboards — so much so that that on the
basis of Charles Moore’s reviews over at Applelinks, I went
out and bought TWO Matias Tactile Pro keyboards. I was looking
for the holy grail of keyboards, which some define as the
IBM Selectric typewriter of long ago. Anyway, I typed
for some time on the Macbook’s keyboard, and I could spend
all day on that keyboard. It’s that good.

Finally, I discovered that even though the display is 1280 x
800, I felt a little cramped in the vertical space. I’m
accustomed to my 23-in Cinema which is 1920 x 1200 and have
spent years and years on 15-in PowerBooks which, despite specs
not much better than the MacBook, don’t feel as cramped
vertically. Even though the vertical pixels on the MacBook is a
respectable number, I still had the subjective feeling of being
restricted, probably due to the wide-screen aspect ratio of
1.6:1 on a smaller physical display. It is one of the oddities
of our Internet life that text, pages, and reading flow are
oriented towards up and down, but our sense of aesthetics in
movies takes us to a 16:9 wide screen aspect ratio. (16:10 for
Macs.) So I would say that if you value seeing a larger chunk of
vertical space over portability and you want or need a more
serious graphics card, then the 17-in MacBook Pro with 1050
vertical pixels makes a huge difference. (But then there’s a
huge price difference.) Either that or be prepared to work with
sharp eyes on a slightly smaller scale: smaller text, icons,
etc. One thing that might help for some MacBook users is a small
Bluetooth mouse with a scroll wheel to allow fast vertical
scrolling. It depends on your facility with the trackpad.

I had a good feeling about this computer, and I’ll end up
owning one some day soon because it’s so perfect for travel.

Black, of course!

John Martellaro

There are many people who have known and worked with

Michael Bartosh in the last six years. I was just one of them.

I first met Michael at Apple’s EduCause booth in Nashville in
October 2000. I was a Senior Marketing Manager and he was an
Education Systems Engineer. He struck me right away as one of
the sharpest and most enthusiastic people I have ever met. Back
then, his mastery of all things Macintosh was already complete,
and that early knowledge base and passion would eventually lead
to his O’Reilly

Book on Mac OS X Server years later.

Michael was laid off from Apple, in one of their routine
shuffles, because, he told me, he didn’t have his bachelor’s
degree. I was disappointed to see Michael let go, but he picked
himself right up, went back to Texas A&M
and quickly finished his Bachelor’s degree. Along the
way, he founded a Macintosh href="http://www.4am-media.com/">training and consulting
company, 4AM-Media.

Michael, it seemed to me, was one of those people who never
quite got over leaving Apple. How deeply this affected him, I
cannot say for sure because I was merely a casual friend, not a close
friend. But I know that everyone who works passionately for
Apple for a time eventually has to come to terms with their
departure. It usually manifests itself in the person
using the skills and passion they developed at Apple to
move on to new adventures, and Michael certainly was doing
that.

Michael was a very self-confident fellow, and I know that
there are some people who didn’t like him. But when one of
our colleagues dies in a tragic accident, we must forget all
that and simply acknowledge the personal loss. The set of all
people who knew Michael is poorer today for his absence.

I’ve told my wife that, if she survives me, my tombstone
should read: “He left to pursue other interests.”

That’s what Michael will be doing, I am certain.

John Martellaro