512 Pixels

Verizon and others will have to answer for their throttling of some customers’ data. This should be fun to watch.

In my “Future Classics” series, I try to guess what current-era Apple products may become collectable in the future.

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Back in April 2013, Jordan Merrick shared a bit about his iMac G5 here on 512:

The iMac G5 was far more mature in comparison to its predecessors. This machine was simply a neutral white rectangle, less than 2” thick, held aloft by a single piece of aluminum. Gone were the cutesy colors and childish nature of the infant iMac G3 as well as the nose and lip piercings of the teenage iMac G4 that made sure it stood out of a crowd. The iMac G5 had finally grown up, moved out and got a job. It was the deliberate lack of any ostentatious characteristics in the iMac G5 that would pave the way for Apple’s minimalistic design choices over the next decade.

The iMac had finally reached adulthood.

As Merrick pointed out in his article, the iMac G5 was very serviceable, which turned out to be handy, as Apple had to open a wide-reaching repair extension program due to bad capacitors on the logic board and in the power supply.

In October 2005 — a mere 14 months after introducing the iMac G5 — Apple replaced it, with the iMac G5 (iSight).

Here’s a bit from the press release:

Apple today unveiled the new iMac G5 which features a built-in iSight video camera for out-of-the-box video conferencing and the debut of Apple’s breakthrough Front Row media experience. Front Row gives users a simple, intuitive and powerful way to play their music, enjoy their photo slideshows, and watch their DVDs and iMovies, as well as popular movie trailers from apple.com and music videos and television shows purchased from the iTunes Music Store, on their iMac from up to 30 feet away using the new bundled Apple Remote. The new iMac G5 comes in a sleek, new design that is even thinner than its predecessor, and starts at just $1,299.

“The new iMac G5 debuts our amazing Front Row media experience, and we think users are going to love it,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Plus, the built-in iSight video camera delivers out-of-the-box video conferencing with friends and family, as well as hours of fun with our new Photo Booth application.”

The iMac G5 (iSight) was introduced at Apple’s October 2005 Music Special Event, alongside the 5th generation iPod (the first with video playback) and the inclusion of TV shows in the iTunes Store.

The new iMac had three headlining features, according to Steve Jobs:

• Thinner and lighter
• Built-in iSight camera
• Front Row

Up until this point, the iSight was an external FireWire camera, but with the new iMac, Apple brought video chat to many more of its customers via iChat AV and shipped PhotoBooth, which Jobs called “the funnest app we’ve ever written.”

Front Row is the spiritual predecessor to the Apple TV. The six-button IR remote controlled a new UI that laid on top of OS X:

Front Row pulled in media from users’ local iTunes and iPhoto libraries, could be used to play DVDs and even user-created iMovies and video podcasts.

Jobs hinted that Front Row was going to take on Microsoft Media Manager, and while I’m not sure it took any sales from Redmond, it turned out to be a popular feature for OS X users. I remember installing it on my PowerBook G4, ignoring Apple keeping it just for IR-port enabled Macs.

So, why does the iMac G5 (iSight) deserve to be the considered a future classic?

The software features introduced with this machine helped shape much of what we do with computers today, decade later — enjoy media, hold video conferences and good off. All of that was possible before the iMac G5 (iSight), but this machine excelled at these things. Plopping down on the catch and firing up iTunes from across the room was no longer a task reserved for nerds with crazy hardware setups.

Equally notable is the machine’s lifespan. At Macworld 2006, just three months after being introduced, Jobs announced that the first Intel-powered machine from Apple would be the iMac.

The Intel iMac shipped with the same features, size and price as its G5-powered friend, but with twice the power, thanks to Intel’s Core Duo silicon.

While I’m sure some users were glad to hold on to their PowerPC-based iMacs, having a $1299+ machine replaced within three months didn’t leave a good taste in many customers’ mouths. More importantly, it makes the iMac G5 (iSight) a rare machine.

Maybe even collectable.

I got this as an email since I’ve published using Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform, and could hardly believe what I was reading. Regardless of which group is in the wrong here (Spolier Alert: both are), this hit me as incredibly unprofessional and unbecoming.

With lots of chatter this week about Apple and Intel, the costs of Apple switching to ARM have been on my mind.

I firmly believe Apple has ARM-powered Macs running ARM-ready OS X in a lab somewhere. This isn’t a technical problem; its a philosophical one.

With the platform transition from PowerPC to Intel, Apple had Rosetta, a software layer that let code compiled for PowerPC Macs run at neat-native speeds on Intel machines. It was an impressive feat, and one that Apple could certainly pull off again if OS X were to transition to ARM. However, I think there are three big reasons the Mac is going to stay x86-based for the foreseeable future.

Performance

When Apple announced its move to Intel in 2006, Steve Jobs said:

When we look at Intel, they’ve got great performance, yes, but they’ve got something else that’s very important to us. Just as important as performance, is power consumption. And the way we look at it is performance per watt. For one watt of power how much performance do you get? And when we look at the future road maps projected out in mid-2006 and beyond, what we see is the PowerPC gives us sort of 15 units of performance per watt, but the Intel road map in the future gives us 70, and so this tells us what we have to do.

There’s no doubt this topic is still on Apple’s mind, but comparing iPad-class ARM chips and Mac-class isn’t exactly Apples-to-oranges, as Siracusa pointed out on last night’s ATP.

The iPad Air has a 1.4 GHz A7 chip coupled with a 32.4-watt-hour battery that provides 10 hours of battery life. The 13-inch MacBook Air ships with a 1.4 GHz Intel Core i5 chip and a 54‑watt‑hour battery that provides 12 hours of battery life.

While the clock speeds are the same, the MacBook Air is computationally more powerful (roughly twice as powerful, according to tools like Geekbench. The iPad Air is a good bit more power efficient than the MacBook, but that difference isn’t a good talking point with such a wide gap in raw performance.

(When thinking about ARM-powered Macs, many think of the MacBook Air not only because it’s become the default Mac, mindshare-wise, but that the thought of an ARM-powered iMac or Mac Pro seems laughable.)

In short, Apple’s ARM-based A7 isn’t a good choice for a MacBook Air at this point. While I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility for Apple to ship a slower notebook if the tradeoffs were right, but that current performance gap isn’t enough to justify the possible gain in Cupertino’s beloved performance per watt metric.

Virtualization

One huge gain Apple made when switching to Intel in 2006 was the ability to natively run Windows. While Apple certainly made fun of the Microsoft operating system (like in the ad above), the ability to run OS X and Windows side-by-side is a huge selling point for power users.

For example, I use modern.IE virtual machines to QA websites at work. If I were to be running an ARM-based Mac, I wouldn’t be able to do this. As much as Apple might like to think its customers can be OS X-only, I’m not alone in these needs.

(Assumedly, Windows RT could run natively on an ARM-based Mac, but that’s not a robust enough solution for people who need real Windows apps.)

Product Confusion

Of course, the first two reasons can be brushed aside by a simple statement:

Apple could keep Intel chips in the MacBook Pro, and use ARM chips in the MacBook Air.

I think that line of thinking has some serious flaws.

Apple likes simplicity in its products and its product lines. Selling one family of machines that can’t do what another does isn’t a very Apple-like thing to do. A Mac mini can do what a Mac Pro can do, even if its not as fast. How does Apple pitch a slower, less-featured MacBook Air?

Now what?

For these reasons, I don’t think we’re going to see an A7 or A8-powered MacBook Air anytime soon. The Broadwell delay is annoying, but not a big enough reason to do something as crazy as moving away from Intel. Cupertino might not like spending its time waiting on new silicon from Intel, I don’t see what choice it has.

At least that version didn’t insist on installing Silverlight.

via @monkbent

I was honored to be on Tim Smith’s excellent podcast, For the Record. We spoke about work, side projects and why I don’t work for myself full-time.

Robert McGinley Myers, over on The Sweet Setup:

RSS arguably had its perfect device when the iPad was introduced in 2010. Suddenly, you could read the entire Internet comfortably on the couch. You could use RSS to bring the web to you. That’s why our pick for the best RSS reader on the iPad is the $5 Unread, an app designed to help you slow down, lean back, and enjoy good writing.

If you aren’t using Unread on your iOS devices, you really should check out this review.

John Gruber, commenting on Jean-Louis Gassée’s essay about the possibility of ARM-powered Macs:

The delay in truly-new Mac hardware while waiting for Broadwell chips is exactly the sort of reason why Apple wants to own the whole stack. Anything they depend upon, they want under their control — and on the Mac, they depend upon Intel for CPUs. Maybe Apple will never pull it off and thus won’t ever make such a switch, but I’d be shocked if there isn’t a team inside Apple working on it already.

His comments reminded me of this clip of Steve Jobs announcing the switch to Intel:

When I hopped on Skype earlier today to record a podcast and was greeted with a surprise:

Turns out:

We want everyone to experience the best Skype has to offer – from enhanced quality to better reliability to improved security – and the newest version of Skype is the way to do that. So everyone can benefit from the latest improvements, from time to time we retire older versions of Skype across all platforms, including mobile devices. It’s easy to update Skype; once you do, you’ll have access to the latest features our team has worked hard to deliver.

When we retire older versions of Skype, if you are still on an older version, you would be signed out of Skype automatically and won’t be able to sign in again until you upgrade to a new version. Simply follow the steps below to download, install, and sign in to the latest version, and you’ll be back in Skype in no time.

(In fact, Skype 2.8 was unable to make video calls as of months ago.)

As FaceTime Audio isn’t suitable for podcasts in my opinion, I’m at Microsoft’s mercy for a critical tool in my workflow. While I know that holding onto an ancient piece of software is a sure-fire way to be heartbroken, recent versions of Skype are rather miserable. The UI is bloated, the app is slow and can cause odd audio issues even on modern hardware.

Thankfully, Call Recorder works well with the newest versions of Skype, so podcasters should be set as far as recording, but I’m still cranky.

Yikes.

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Sure seems like these Android Wear devices were rushed to market.