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Earlier this week, Low End Mac’s Kevin Webb posted a commentary entitled “Mac Design: Little Room for Improvement.”

“Once you reach the pinnacle of good design, what do you do for an encore?” Kevin Asks rhetorically.

I know where Kevin is coming from. I mused myself in The Road Warrior a couple weeks back about how it is hard to fathom where Apple could go next design - wise with its portable models. I have also, like Kevin, observed that the reason Apple has been able to stay with the same basic Power Mac tower case design for nearly four years is that no one has come up with anything better.

However, when we begin talking about “little room for improvement,” it brings to mind a phrase popularly, but probably unfairly, attributed to Charles H. Duell, U.S. Commissioner of Patents, who is purported to have said in 1899: “Everything that can be invented has been invented,” and alleged to have recommended that the patent office be consequently shut down.

Now, there is no documentary evidence that Duell or anyone else in the U.S. Patent Office in 1899 ever said anything of the sort, and other recorded comments made by Duell around that time make it seem highly unlikely that such a notion ever represented his thinking. Duell’s 1899 report notes an increase of about 3,000 patents over the previous year.

In that report, Duell also quoted President William McKinley: “Our future progress and prosperity depend upon our ability to equal, if not surpass, other nations in the enlargement and advance of science, industry, and commerce. To invention we must turn as one of the most powerful aids to the accomplishment of such a result.”

Not words one would expect to hear from someone who wanted to shut down the patent office because he thought everything possible had been invented.

The genesis of the story may have been in Patent Office Commissioner Henry Ellsworth’s 1843 report to Congress, in which he states, “The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end.” But even Commissioner Ellsworth outlined specific areas in which he expected patent activity to increase in the future.

However, more recently there is indeed a history of people associated with the high-tech industry, who ought to have known better, uttering (or being alleged to have uttered) clangers of the “everything has been invented” genre. For example:

This sort of prognostication is dangerous territory, as you can see.

However, it certainly does seem that we’re stuck in the doldrums right now as far as major advances in computer industrial design and engineering go. Happily, Apple was so far ahead of the pack in design that even though we’re more or less in a stall pattern, Macs are still the cutting-edge packaging and aesthetics-wise.

The flat panel iMac for instance. a revolutionary piece of work in terms of packaging that the PC competition is scrambling to copy. However, in an engineering context, the new iMac owes a great deal to the nearly two-year-old Titanium PowerBook, just as the original, 233 MHz, Bondi Blue iMac was essentially a WallStreet PowerBook in a desktop case with a CRT monitor.

The flat panel iMac has both more and less in common with its PowerBook progenitor than the Bondi beast did, the more being an LCD monitor, and the less being more distinction in the motherboard department. However, both the TiBook and the flat panel iMac are built, and were partly engineered, by one of Apple’s Taiwanese subcontractors, Quanta Electronics.

The success of the flat panel iMac notwithstanding, where the engineering stall is really apparent with Apple is in PPC chip development -- most specifically Motorola’s G4 development. This week Intel released a 2.8 GHz Pentium processor, and 3.0 GHz or higher is anticipated by year end. Apple is scheduled to release 1.25 GHz dual processor Power Macs in September, but that’s less than half the Pentium’s nominal clock speed.

Apple has also fallen well behind the PC platform in bus speed, with 167 MHz the max on his highest and Power Macs, and apparently, is unable to exploit even that bus speed to its fullest advantage, according to BareFeats’ Rob Art Morgan.

One reason Apple has been able to hold its own in a bad market and down on MHz is the Mac OS. Macs have never been about raw power and speed, even when they were, like can 1997 -’98 when the G3s first arrived, punching in the same weight class or even higher than the Intel brigade. Not everybody needs a computer with high clock speed, but everybody interacts with the OS, and with both OS 9 and OS X, Apple has, as someone on a Linux Website recently observed, near perfected something they had already got pretty much right in the first place.

However, once again, in need to be careful about declaring that there’s no room for improvement. The OS 9.2.2 Classic Mac OS likely about as close to perfection, within its inherent limitations, as it’s likely to get, the OS X interface, wonderful as it is, still has plenty of rough edges and shortcomings, but nevertheless, compared to Windows and Linux, it’s in a class of its own, way out in front.

The engineering stall isn’t just a problem for Apple, which has at least managed to stay profitable through the worst slump that the high tech sector has ever experienced. The PC makers may have movement on faster chip development, but the industrial design doldrums have descended on them too. There are no lot of new ideas floating around in PC land.

And aside from consumer perception, or more correctly consumer conditioning, most of us would have trouble coming up with a really compelling reason why we need a 1/25 GHz processor, let alone a 2.8 GHz or 3.0 GHz one. Serious gamers, and people who work with high-end graphics or video can never get enough speed, I suppose, but the rest of us, which is most of us, who use our computers mainly for word processing, email, web surfing, running spreadsheets, and perhaps some dabbling with graphics, movies, and playing a few games, just don’t need a lot of clock speed horsepower under the hood. It’s nice to have, but somewhere between 400 MHz and 600 MHz with the Power PC, and 1 GHz to 1.5 GHz for x86/Windows, should be ample for the vast majority of users. Linux users need even less power.

Heck, until about a month ago, I was happily using a 233 MHz G3 PowerBook as my main production workhorse, and was quite content with it. I expect that there are a whole lot of computer users of their running machines like first generation iMacs or Pentium 3s, who are not computer enthusiasts, who don’t give a hoot having the latest hardware, and who are happy to go on using their old computer as long as it will meet their modest needs, which could be quite a long time.

And that is a sensible, rational approach. My brother-in-law still uses a 75 MHz Power Mac 7200. My daughter has a 117 MHz PowerBook 1400. And my wife uses a very ancient Mac LC 520 with a 25 MHz 68030 processor. These old machines do pretty much all that is asked of them, are reliable, and represent a trivial cash investment. They are bordering on extreme low end in today’s context, but as commodity computers, they are still providing excellent value.

In summary, the computer industry is a victim of its own success. It’s growth over the past quarter century has been phenomenal, but in the 15 percent of the world with high disposable incomes, we are approaching the point where just about everyone who wants a computer now has a computer, or two or three. A few of these people are enthusiasts who will keep upgrading just to have the newest and latest, greatest thing, but many are now quite satisfied with the hardware they have.

In humble opinion, it is rationally absurd to feel compelled to buy a new 1-2-3 thousand dollar computer every two or three years. It not only makes cars - previously the biggest consumer product depreciation sinkhole, look like blue chip investments by comparison, but it is prodigally irresponsible from an environmental perspective. One thing Apple has got wrong is its policy of discouraging hardware component upgrading rather than hardware replacement.

I am constrained to disclose at this point that I have never personally lasted even three years without upgrading to a new, or at least new -to- me system, but I’m a professional user of sorts, usually spending eight to 10 hours a day on the machine. I have also never upgraded without an objective reason to do so, such as the need to run dictation software more efficiently, or to get a reasonably powerful OS X-supporting machine so I could report on it first hand.

However, I’m not counting the innovators out. Computer design and engineering has plateaued, but I’m quite certain that computers are not yet as good as they can be. They’re still too difficult to configure and maintain for technologically disinterested folks; the newer, faster chips still run too hot -- in turn making computers too noisy (cooling fans), and the environmental responsibility angle (the literally mountainous problem of obsolete hardware disposal) still needs a LOT of work.

There’s plenty left to invent.

Charles W. Moore

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