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Comments: Mac Writers Eat Their Young
By Senior Editor John H. Farr
One of the most amazing phenomena of this week's Macworld New York Conference & Expo 2001 has been the widespread hatchet job performed on our favorite CEO and what he had to say on Wednesday. Not by everyone, mind you, but it's enough to make a person wonder if Mac sites in general pay too much attention to doing the other side's dirty work for them.
I have been quite critical of Apple in the past and always strive to be objective in the midst of raving love-fests and geek-o-ramas like that which greeted the appearance of the public beta of OS X. I'm also a stimuli junkie and rapidly tire of discussions of whether or not the Dock should be moved, for example. My personal world encompasses much more than the fate of one particular corporation in California or even computing in general, and I hope yours does too. But in response to many of my colleagues' reactions to this year's keynote address, I have to say,
I'm not the only one who feels this way. Witness the following from an Applelinks reader:
"Considering all the negative press Steve received from Mac users, what would a PC user think? It's nice to see at least one positive report about all this. [Note: ours!] It's not the end of the world, I would think Apple has other opportunities in the coming months to make "exciting" announcements when they're ready to do so."
It is entirely possible that Steve Jobs & Co. decided to hold back some new hardware announcements until the national economy improves significantly. What if a new flat-screen iMac had been introduced but not sold well and had to be dropped? But this is beside the point. There was no reason to announce upgraded portables because the TiBook and iBook are selling faster than Apple can make them. The PowerMac and iMac lines were definitely improved, were they not, in some cases radically so.
And in defense of the iMac and its current style and configuration, why mess with (modest) success? You may be yearning for a "new" iMac, but Apple is still selling hundreds of thousands of them to schools and consumers buying their first computer. My brother recently bought a 400MHz iMac for his daughter and she loves it. My wife wants one. And considering the CRT monitor contained within, the iMac's style is, well, perfect. It's gorgeous. Volkswagen sold an awful lot of the orginal Beetles until they changed the design. I hope that Apple always sells a "classic" model iMac, because I and many thousands of others would regret its passing infinitely more than the Cube's.
OS X is being speeded up and is an undeniable advance in terms of performance and computing power. Applications designed to take advantage of what it can do will change the way many of us do our work on these machines. Apple has boosted the standard RAM and hard drive sizes to accomodate the new OS. Everything is moving forward in a logical, progressive way. It's funny how Apple gets criticized for not having enough brand new and exciting products when the other side's offerings are eternally boring.
This dynamic reminds me of how new rock bands' second albums are frequently criticized for being "letdowns." Yet as far as I know, nobody ever dissed Frank Sinatra for not coming up with new songs.
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