Today's new Things (MacBook Air and whatever else was introduced in the keynote)

[Giaguara]

Thoughts?

New MacBook Airs
11" and 13"

Keynote has a link for streaming on the main page http://www.apple.com/ but no active link yet...

11-inch : 64GB/128 GB
1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor
2GB memory
64 or 128GB flash storage1
NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics
$999.00 or $1,199.00

13-inch : 128GB or 256 GB
1.86GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor
2GB memory
128GB or 256GB flash storage1
NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics
$1,299.00 or $1,599.00

As the new MacBook Airs ship in 1-2 days, I might be tempted to have a look tomorrow.. (not that I want to or can buy one yet - first there are a few other bigger things on the shopping list).

Would those fit in the netbook category? The price puts them outside it I think...

 

[nixgeek]

Would those fit in the netbook category? The price puts them outside it I think...

Only when compared to the Sony Vaio P. As to everything being totally integrated inside the MBA, all I can say is backup often. Honestly, the MBA was never a product for me from the start.

I do like the inclusion of more multitouch in Lion and the Mac App Store is nice (something I've rather enjoyed in Linux for years now), but not sure that foisting elements of iOS onto Lion is a good idea. As it is right now, Launchpad (which reminds me of the Launcher in Classic Mac OS) makes the Dock redundant. Could it be that Apple is considering doing away with the Dock altogether? How does this factor in with Finder? I kind of get the feeling that Mac OS X as we know it will undergo an identity crisis.

The iLife '11 suite has plenty nice things for consumers, no doubt.

 

[Giaguara]

Well - if only one could run iPad or iPhone apps on those new MacBook Airs...
If that would work, I might consider (eventually) replacing MBP + a netbook with a small MBA + Mac Mini Server (which I'm getting anyway) + a big display. Plus kind of liberating iPhone from running apps that are too heavy for it + someone else could actually enjoy his iPad when I'm not using it...

 

[Satcomer]

I don't like the idea that they didn't integrate Facetime into iChat.T Plus the Mac App Store guidelines is going to exclude System Utilities that I use like iStat menus and other system sound direction utilities I use on a daily basis. You can read about what I talking about in the article Apple's Mac App Store Reinvents Software Sales. Plus you can read about the Mac store guidelines in the article Apple posts guidelines for Mac App Store (and we have highlights).

I am just afraid that in a couple of years as Mac users we won't be able to get Mac Software anywhere else. Plus I feel the iPhone App Store is VERY HARD to navigate because of all the redundant apps in the store. Also will Mac software as go racing to the bottom of price like the iPhone apps? I feel this would lessen functionality of a lot of third party software that I get from time to time.

One last thing. Will software through the Mac App Store have Apple's DRM on it?

 

[nixgeek]

I don't like the idea that they didn't integrate Facetime into iChat.T Plus the Mac App Store guidelines is going to exclude System Utilities that I use like iStat menus and other system sound direction utilities I use on a daily basis. You can read about what I talking about in the article Apple's Mac App Store Reinvents Software Sales. Plus you can read about the Mac store guidelines in the article Apple posts guidelines for Mac App Store (and we have highlights).

I am just afraid that in a couple of years as Mac users we won't be able to get Mac Software anywhere else. Plus I feel the iPhone App Store is VERY HARD to navigate because of all the redundant apps in the store. Also will Mac software as go racing to the bottom of price like the iPhone apps? I feel this would lessen functionality of a lot of third party software that I get from time to time.

One last thing. Will software through the Mac App Store have Apple's DRM on it?

You're not the only one with this concern about the Mac App Store and installing applications outside of it. Aside from myself, Thom Holwerda at OSNews has this concern as well.

http://www.osnews.com/story/23917/Apple_Unveils_Stunning_New_MacBook_Airs_Gives_Lion_Preview

And I just came across this blurb that Apple is thinking of removing Java from Mac OS X? Does this just mean that Oracle is going to take up the updating and such that Apple has been doing for some time now?

 

[ElDiabloConCaca]

Why would Apple remove the ability to install apps outside of the Mac OS App Store?

Methinks that's just paranoid thinking...

 

[nixgeek]

Why would Apple remove the ability to install apps outside of the Mac OS App Store?

Methinks that's just paranoid thinking...

I would imagine so that they can keep everything centralized as they do on the iPhone/iPad. Granted, it would be harder to do since it's not a mobile device like the aforementioned (and people would be up in arms about it), but you never know. Just something to keep in the back of your mind, I guess.

 

[Satcomer]

Why would Apple remove the ability to install apps outside of the Mac OS App Store?

Greed & Ego. Plus what about those in areas that don't have access to any high peed network and are on dialup? Are you one of those that look down on rural people?

 

[pds]

The length of this thread speaks volumes about 2 things. 1) a generalized "meh" about the contents of the event. Count me in here. The MBA is not something I am interested in, though it is sleek and beautiful and shows that Apple still believes in computers. That's good because the rest of the show was saying that the tin-foil hat crowd is right - that Apple wants total control of your appliance that used to be a computer.

2) MacosX.com is no longer the place to be if you want lively conversation about the implications of every minute detail of hardware and software.

Both things make me sad.

 

[ElDiabloConCaca]

Greed & Ego.

What leads you to believe that Apple would be greedy and ego-centric? I don't know of any historical actions to back this up... kind of like being paranoid about a pacifist suddenly switching and punching you in the face.

Plus what about those in areas that don't have access to any high peed network and are on dialup? Are you one of those that look down on rural people?

I don't get what any of this has to do with internet connection speed. You can download an application from a website just the same as you can download an app from the Mac App Store. If you're on a fast connection, it goes fast. If you're on a slow connection, it goes slow. Rural, urban, high-speed, low-speed... it's just downloading data from the internet.

And, FYI, I certainly do look down on "rural people," not because they're too dumb to move to the city where the internet flows like water, but because they're too dumb to brush their teeth and maintain a standard of sanitation.
[/sarcasm]

I have no idea what any of this has to do with "rural people," or how any of my comment would cause someone to relate it to that.

 

[Giaguara]

pds, I hope the point 2 changes over time. There have been times when it was busy, times when less busy and between. Being out a day and finding less than 2 pages of new threads... oh well, I hope it'll pick up the traffic again.

I had a look yesterday in an Apple store to see if they had the new MBAs... not yet, but should have today. Well, I'll have to go and see one of these days how the screen on the tiny ones looks like and how the usability feels. It's funny how I now consider the 11" models pricy but still the 12" iBook I ended up buying in 2002 was way over 2000 euros (somewhere around that for dollars + premium for buying it in Europe was at that point about what I would have paid for a return ticket to NYC from Italy). 700 MHz G3, 128 MB RAM, 20 GB, Combo... who'd have imagined what the netbooks offer nowadays for like $ 300 or that they would actually make such cute, tiny, and thin laptops as MBA now?

By the way, one curious thing I saw about FaceTime today, in Schneier. FaceTime for Mac opens giant Apple ID security hole. How on earth did they not make the usual pages for the AppleConnect ID change in that software?

 

[ElDiabloConCaca]

1) Facetime is beta software. It is incomplete, buggy, unstable, and may contain security holes -- all of which are definitions of "beta."

2) Beta software is never to be installed on a daily-use or production machine. If you install the Facetime beta, it had better be on a "test" machine that you don't care about access to or security breaches. Beta software is for testing -- not for daily use.

3) The security hole could only be exploited by someone with physical access to your machine, while logged in to your Mac OS X account. If you allow someone physical access to your machine, and access to your user account, then those are security "holes" that no amount of software is going to help with.

4) It's already been fixed: http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/10/22/embarrassing.vulnerability.patched.pronto/

 

[ElDiabloConCaca]

I'll add, pds...

I think the Keynote, thought I haven't watched it yet, was good -- the new MacBook Air is what the Air always should have been (and that's not to take away anything from the last Air), and now it's priced affordably for everyone. It's a good machine with good specs, and even the 11" Air is snappy and responsive for everyday tasks... of course it won't encode video like a bat out of hell, but it will encode video. It won't handle your 542-layer, 6.4GB Photoshop file, but it will run Photoshop, and usably.

With the all-SSD configuration, Apple is clearly trying to mimic a more iPad-like experience on a Mac computer with it's near-instant wake time, and simplify downloading and installing apps.

That last point carries more weight and is very "freeing" to most. I'll explain.

My wife has a MacBook Pro 13". It's awesome. I'm stuck with an older, polycarbonate, white MacBook from 2007 that can't be upgraded any farther... but I digress. So my wife has this MacBook. She discovered Skyping with her mother in California (we're in Texas) via Skype installed on my "work" Mac mini on her account and fell in love with videochatting. So she goes and installs it on her MacBook Pro, and all is well. I used the computer once (I rarely use her computer) and noticed that she had successfully dragged Skype into the dock for quick-launching, straight from the mounted DMG image. The DMG image was still even mounted on the desktop (and I used the computer weeks after she installed it).

While it may seem like a trivial, forehead-slap experience, I'll bet that this happens a lot more than people admit. My wife also has limited (from a technical standpoint) but functional experience and knowledge about the underlying filesystem... music is accessed through iTunes (which automatically organizes the underlying file/folder structure), photos and digital camera dumps via iPhoto (again, filesystem organized for you automatically), and then eMail and the web.

Point being that a casual Mac user, which there are a lot of, rarely accesses the filesystem on a daily basis. It's slowly being hid from view, which, from a techie's standpoint, can be either a good or bad thing. But Apple's not yanking it away from us -- they're simply providing alternate options, just like they did with iTunes and iPhoto removing the need to manually organize a file structure... but with iTunes and iPhoto, you can manually organize if you like. Now they're doing it with applications...

...so they don't stay on mounted DMG files, or copied to the home folder instead of /Applications accidentally, for example.

It's perfect for my wife. Not only that, but it takes care of updating the apps, too... another thing my wife doesn't prioritize with her MacBook Pro. Plus, you get to use the app on ALL your Macs that belong to you, instead of having to purchase individual licenses for each box you want to run it on (like Adobe and Microsoft products, among many, many others).

I also believe that Apple isn't, in any way, trying to take "total control" over our desktop and laptop Macs -- they're simply simplifying the experience even more by offering an alternate and easy way to purchase and install applications for the Mac, mirroring the seamless experience one has with an iPad or iPhone/iPod. Developers will still be able to distribute apps the old-fashioned way: download a "demo" program from their website, mount the DMG, copy the application to /Applications, unmount the DMG, launch the program, visit the developer's website again to purchase the software, open Mail to receive the email with the registration keys, select "Register software..." from the app's menu, copy-paste the serial number, then finally unlock the app... you know... that glorious experience. Easy for us -- convoluted at best for a casual, non-techie Mac user.

My only gripe is it feels like Apple announces things a lot farther ahead of time these days, making the wait for 10.7 all the more distant.

 

[Satcomer]

W
And, FYI, I certainly do look down on "rural people," not because they're too dumb to move to the city where the internet flows like water, but because they're too dumb to brush their teeth and maintain a standard of sanitation.
[/sarcasm]

I have no idea what any of this has to do with "rural people," or how any of my comment would cause someone to relate it to that.

Well I grew up in a very Rural area. So do you look down on me?

This Mac Application Store seems to look like Apple just all people who uses there Macs all have high speed networks.

I can't imagine what it will look like to rural people that don't have any high speed available to them. Getting the latest software, that has a big software download, via Dial-Up will be horrendous. I know sometimes my aunt asks me to mail them a disk full on software updates for her PC software.

Heck she just got put on her own phone line in 1990 from having a party line phone, after a lawyer threatened Verizon to upgrade her and her neighbors to modern phones. So getting any high speed is a pipe dream even though a fiber line going from city to city goes less then two miles away from her home. My uncle has GPS in all his tractors but sometimes it feels like they live in a different era that time has forgot.

So be kind to rural people because without them you would have food shortages all over the world.

 

[Giaguara]

One interesting discovery about the iPad app store - 1/3 of the consumers don't use the app store.

 

[Mikuro]

As log as this is not Apple's first (second? hundredth?) step in removing freedom of software development and distribution from OS X, I think it's a good thing. But I don't have so much faith in Apple, to be honest. I think they've been going down the wrong road for about a decade. They've been going slowly and at times gracefully, but they've still been going.

The experience of installing apps on OS X has always been kind of shitty. Better than on Windows, perhaps, but that's not saying much. The whole disk image shuffle is truly bizarre. At first I thought it was a cheap hack because there were no suitable compression options for OS X (10.0). How it survived this long is a mystery to me. Things were better in OS 9, even.

I think the app store definitely has a place on the Mac. In fact, it might be necessary as OS X gains popularity, to save the OS X software ecosystem from rotting the way Windows' has. It might sound crazy to say that about Windows, but let me explain.

The thing I hate most about Windows is not Windows itself. While I certainly don't think it's designed well (which I remember every time I need to dig through 7 levels of dialog boxes to get to my IP address settings), the thing that drives me crazy is the Windows culture. Every time I need to install a program on Windows, it's the same song and dance. I load an installer, it makes me go through half a dozen entirely unnecessary screens, and then it does a bunch of crap I don't want. Everything tries to put itself on my desktop. Everything thinks it deserves to be in my task bar. Everything wants to install its own "browser search bar" to squeeze a few advertising dollars out of me (or just spy on me).

And those are the good ones. Let's not forget the enormous number of Windows applications that are basically spam. The smalltime Windows developer world is filled with cheap hacks trying to make a quick buck, exploiting the fact that a huge number of users don't know that paying $15 to expand a zip file is absurd. Just searching for Windows software is a chore, because I have to wade through all of these. The signal-to-noise ratio on download.com is terrible.

And those are the "legitimate" ones! Searching Google is even worse. Then you get the trojans, too.

The fact that there will be an approval process to get into the App Store means that novice users will not be vulnerable to such exploitation. As Mac OS X becomes more popular and people see more opportunity to make money off of it, this is going to be very important.

One thing Apple has proved with the iPhone is that they're not afraid to enforce their rules....even if they never defined those rules.

Butbutbutbutbut........

I'm still wary of Apple. I don't trust them. They change their stances so often that I don't know what their intention is anymore. I wouldn't be surprised if they're gradually trying to take total control over OS X they way they have over iOS, and that would be horrible. It's bad enough on iOS. Maybe it'd be great for Apple, but not for me, that's for damn sure.

 

[fryke]

In more general terms, I guess the time for pressing software CDs and DVDs and putting that into large cardboard boxes is over soon. Sure, there are rural areas, where there's going to be lag for this conversion, but more and more software (smaller stuff, bigger stuff) is coming out online, anyway. But at some point, a software store (whether it's Apple's or someone else's) simply makes sense. Sure: There'll be a couple of years where both things will coexist, but the software stores are coming whether we want them to or not.

So even if Apple weren't the ones doing it now, software developers would start moving away from real-life software boxes on DVDs and on to online distribution. If you buy Parallels, for instance, what you get in a retail box is usually the following:

1.) A serial number, i.e. your license to use the software.
2.) An application CD with outdated software. The *FIRST* thing you do after installing this is download the WHOLE APPLICATION again in a newer version to replace the one that came on CD.

It's just an example, but doesn't this show that basically from a user standpoint, it just makes more sense to buy online in the first place?

I don't think, btw., that Apple wants to close up the Mac the way they did with iOS. If the Mac would start today, maybe they would start it that closed, but in its current state, it would turn too many people off. But Apple doesn't have to do that, actually. The Mac App Store will work in Apple's wish, anyway, because it's going to be so simple to use and easy to grasp: This is where you can download "apps". They'll be instantly installed and will work right away. Updates will appear automatically. Most users (and usually, Mac forum users are not "most users") will find this incredibly appealing and will soon come to find buying a box and installing software themselves something quite strange.

I think it's a good thing. Wherever CDs, DVDs and BluRay discs are cut out of the deal, that's a good thing. Rural areas should simply work towards getting better, faster access to the 'net. Whether it's through 3G/4G or "tubes" doesn't matter: The world's going network and has been for decades.

 

[fryke]

Oh and: I love the MBA 11". I'll get me one on Monday or Tuesday.

 

[ElDiabloConCaca]

To be quite honest, I think anyone who thinks the Mac is going to be "closed up" by this Mac OS X App Store is being overly and overtly paranoid about nothing.

If Mac OS X got "closed up," how would developers operate? What tools would they use to develop for Mac OS X? How would they code in their favorite command-line editors? How would they beta-test software? How would they crash their machines intentionally in order to develop crash-free software?

Gandhi wasn't ever going to do a 180 and turn into a war-mongerer, and Mac OS X isn't going to do a 180 and turn into the iPhone. You will always have the freedom to install software "manually," outside the Mac OS X App Store. As long as there's access to the command line, there will exist the ability to do whatever the hell you want. This is why it exists in OS X, and, not surprisingly, does NOT exist in iOS.

 

[fryke]

Well: That "definite" line could easily be blurred in the future. Just think about it: Autumn '11 could give us that second generation MacBook Air 11", and it could run on an A4 (or whatever the next version of Apple's own processor will be called) processor and a version of Mac OS X that takes even more "clues" from iOS. It's certainly not unthinkable, that Jobs would say that in an ultraportable, that kinda makes sense. "It gives you all the great features of Mac OS X Lion, but without some of the hassle of that 'open' world of it, plus quite a few features well fit for the portable that come from iOS." Or something like that.

A couple of years later, we might see a much clearer distinction between pro and consumer Macs again, with MacBook Pro and Mac Pro models coming with the "real" OS X, whereas the MacBooks, MacBook Airs and iMacs would use the more limited iOS/OSX middle ground. We've already seen Apple move the consumer more into focus for the Mac in OS X' history. There's not really a "Pro" mode in Finder, for example, although it's been rumoured since the Public Beta (since the earliest days of macosx.com, for example).

Give that process a couple of (computer-, not people-) generations, and suddenly a unifying move might seem appropriate to more than 80% of (then) Mac users. With the market for Mac applications _outside_ the Mac App Store decreasing, we'd see quite a bit of lack of interest in producing tools and applications for such a market. If, say, an application can only be installed on MacBook Pro and Mac Pro machines, but not on iMacs, MacBooks and MacBook Airs...

I'm not afraid of such a future, I'm merely saying it's not paranoid to deem it possible. (Remember, I'm not talking 2011 here, I'm talking 2015 onwards, a slow but steady process, led by an increasingly popular Mac App Store.)