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Comments: Half a Keynote?
By Senior Editor John H. Farr
This is personal: someday I have got to stop relying on QuickTime for these Macworld Expo keynotes! No matter which state, phone company, connection speed, or Mac has been involved, I have never gotten to see or hear more than 50 percent of any one of them. That said, our man Steve did reveal some important things:
OS X: The number one item is OS X. Make no mistake about it, OS X and its continuing implementation is more important than flat-screen iMacs, multi-gigahertz processors, or even the perennial perpetual-motion machine of Mac mythology, the "Apple handheld." OS X is finally about to spill over into the consumer mainstream, and nothing will be the same afterwards. The next OS X version, 10.1 (shipping in September), is so much of an improvement it will surely win over many of the footdraggers, including me.
The OS X hard sell is definitely on, too. Even Adobe made an appearance during the "10 in X" software demos. All of this takes time, but the developers are lining up and climbing on the bus. By this time next year, most of us will wonder what the fuss was all about.
DVD, "Digital Hub" Strategy: This too is bigger than mere hardware or megahertz, at least as it figures in Apple's overall planning. I confess to be behind the times with regard to DVDs. But I was singulary impressed by Steve's statement that the latest disks could hold "tens of thousands" of digital photos. Beam me up, Scotty! I still think the vast majority of consumers will never care about producing "better than Hollywood quality" DVDs, nor do most people have the creative and aesthetic skills to do so. Most folks don't even put all their photos in albums, much less edit videos. But these are fantastic technologies for the ten percent of you who do care about such things and have the gifts to take advantage of them! And DVDs will be ever-more important in the business world, which means that jobs are being created even as I type.
I just can't see that the average (is there such a thing?) home computer user will rush out and buy a Mac so he or she can crank out DVDs, so I don't see this really helping Apple gain much market share -- but it will certainly shore up the popularity of the Macintosh platform in the design, entertainment, and even scientific industries.
What will grab consumers is the integration of some of these technologies with OS X. When Steve Jobs merely plugged in a digital camera to the Mac's keyboard USB port and OS X 10.1 automatically downloaded all the images and placed them in a folder, I was suitably impressed, to say the least. No Compact Flash card reader required, if the camera has USB (mine doesn't).
The Megahertz Myth: Calling on the very capable services of Jon Rubinstein to carefully dissect the myth that higher numbers mean faster computing, Apple performed a great service for the computer buying public. The key here is whether the journalistic community has the intelligence and honesty to communicate the facts to their readers. I'm afraid that numbers are the easiest thing for most reporters to understand, and why should they give a damn if the public needs to be educated or not? Turning around this particular perception, that nominal processor speed is everything, is a wearisome and daunting task under the best of circumstances. Will your friendly neighborhood Windows laptop-toting newspaper or local TV reporter even want to hear the evidence that mocks his or her choice of computer?
Finally, what I did actually see and hear of the keynote was a major letdown in one particular area I wish more Mac writers would examine: the almost total lack of female participation. This is just plain wrong and more than a little stupid. If anybody should be hip to this, it's Mac people. Enough with the bald guys in polo shirts.
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