As I’ve made quite clear in recent years, the flat form factor pointing device has presented problems for me, particularly when Apple builds the product. While I do recall favorable encounters with the original Ergonomic Mouse of old, the hockey pock version that premiered with the iMac was a non-starter.

Of course, that product came at a time when form definitely overwhelmed function for some of Apple’s gear, and that may have been particularly true when the Cube arrived, although the squarish form factor survived and was reimagined with the Mac mini, AirPort Extreme, Time Capsule and even Apple TV.

In any case, Apple ultimately reverted to the traditional mouse shape and size and, in response to more and more customer demands about a multibutton model, they begat the Mighty Mouse.

The Mighty Mouse, a descendant of the Apple Pro Mouse, is still available under the name Apple Mouse because of trademark issue. Indeed, it looks for all the world nearly identical to the regular mouse shipped with Macs for years, except for a tiny button used for scrolling. The entire surface consisted of a single switch that somehow could be coaxed to provide right-click functions as well, with suitable changes to the preference pane. Need I say it’s also regarded by some as one of Apple’s ten worst products of the decade.

Continue Reading…

We all should understand the reasons why the Mac Pro remains in Apple’s product lineup, and will be there for several more years at least. Content creators and scientists demand state-of-the-art computing power and the maximum level of expandability. It may well be that only a few take advantage of the latter, but the former comes into play whenever heavy duty 3D rendering or mathematical calculations are called for.

Yes, the iMac with the quad-core processors can handle many of those CPU-heavy chores, but when you check the specs of a mainstream quad-core against an Intel Xeon, you’ll see vast differences in ultimate processing power. Maybe you don’t require that much horsepower, and I’ve come to realize that I don’t either, but tens of thousands of Mac Pro owners each quarter will continue to buy that box unless a better way can be found.

But the Mac Pro one humongous package, weighing just shy of 40 pounds in the usual configurations, plus the shipping box. It’s also huge, ungainly and some feel rather ugly, so I expect most users stick them under their desks. Certainly you don’t want to have to lug them around very often.

However, the cheese grater style case design dates back to the Power Mac G5, where extraordinary measures were required to keep the things running without frying eyes. In addition to multiple and powerful fan assemblies, some G5 configurations even required liquid cooling, and don’t get me started about those occasional leaking incidents. I can assure you that when I had a G5 with two processors, I frequently examined the carpet space around the box to see if there were any wet spots. Rest assured, when it happens, consider your Mac Pro toast as far as repairability is concerned, but it never happened to me.

In any case, as you have observed with the recent iMacs, Apple is fast finding ways to get stuff more power into smaller spaces. Compared to a conventional display of the same size, you can’t say that the 27-inch iMac is necessarily any larger in any dimension. Yet it contains powerful components that can, under some conditions, actually match the power of the Mac Pro, although the latter wins out in the end when all processor cores are stressed.

Now today’s Mac Pro requires space for four internal drives, eight RAM slots in the standard, rather than note-book, form factor, plus sufficient space to install several peripheral cards. At the same time, I am willing to suggest that Apple can cut 30% to 50% of its bulk and still provide all the expandability its customers demand.

Certainly Apple will have to be more clever about cooling, but Intel’s forthcoming generations of Xeon processors will consume less power and will run far cooler than the present chips. This will greatly simplify the need for heavy-duty cooling assemblies.

Now I don’t pretend to know just what’s on Apple’s drawing board and whether they care to invest in an all-new enclosure for a model that sells in relatively small numbers. Certainly they’ve managed to leverage the existing case for several years, although there were a number of internal changes to accommodate Intel chips and reduced cooling needs, so you could add more hard drive bays.

No doubt the folks at Greenpeace, who have for years lambasted Apple over its alleged anti-environmental policies until all those recent design changes were implemented, would be happy with a leaner, meaner Mac Pro. This is not to say that today’s Mac Pro is not energy efficient. Without going into extensive detail, Apple claims, in its product description for the 2009 model, that “the new Mac Pro is designed with the environment in mind.”

Certainly a version with a sharply reduced form factor, which incorporates all the appropriate environmentally safe recyclable parts and power reduction schemes, would even earn greater praise from the appropriate organizations, not to mention customers will appreciate having something smaller to carry around.

Of course most of you would simply prefer to see a Mac Pro at a much lower cost, but I doubt that’s in the cards. You see, a lot of that is Intel’s fault, because the Xeon processor costs a whole lot more than their lesser chips, even if performance doesn’t necessarily scale up to the same proportion of the price. This explains why what seem to be incrementally faster CPUs inflate the purchase price of the Mac Pro so much.

Now I don’t know why this is so, what makes the Xeon so costly to produce, or whether Intel is somehow inflating the cost of the higher-end variants in order to more quickly recoup development expenses.

Then again, if you can get most of that performance for far less money, I would expect the market for the speediest Xeons will remain quite small. In any case, regardless of how Intel handles development and pricing for its server-grade chips, I am quite convinced they will eventually end up in a far smaller Mac Pro, or whatever Apple chooses to call its successor.

You just know that the iPod had to be a failure. Why? Because the tech press and some alleged industry analysts said so over and over again, year after year. Every time another manufacturer came out with a competing product, it was dubbed the “iPod killer,” although those products soon faded from the scene. Certainly that was true with every version of the Microsoft Zune. After all, it was Microsoft. How could they build a product that wouldn’t take over a market?

This is not to say the Zune was and is necessarily a bad product. But something about it seems forced rather than a natural evolution of design, perhaps the consequence of using committees and PowerPoint presentations rather than depending on sheer human inspiration to build a new gadget.

Of course, the so-called experts didn’t realize that all of the digital media players before the iPod arrived actually never caught on in any meaningful way. They were all difficult to use, with obtuse interfaces from hell, and file downloads were agonizingly slow. Indeed, I reviewed a couple for an online publication and couldn’t find a single product I’d actually use for more than a minute or two after the review process was over — that is until the iPod arrived.

Even after the iPod sped to the top of the market and remained there, the iPhone was greeted with derision from people who should have known better. After all, how could Apple possibly compete in a highly-saturated market with which they had no experience whatever? Against RIM, Windows Mobile, giant Nokia?

Again people who should have known better failed to realize that the nascent smartphone market had lots of unrealized potential, particularly for consumers. The existing products were well suited for the enterprise, but not for people who wanted easy access to their online stuff. Consider why the iPhone consumes tons more bandwidth than the competition, which means customers are actually using them for downloads and other heavy-duty online chores rather than just email and occasional Web surfing.

That the iPhone continues to do exceedingly well despite the arrival of contenders with Google software and friendlier BlackBerrys is a demonstration of how Apple had figured out what other companies couldn’t begin to understand.

Once again, the alleged iPhone killers seem to be designed with bullet points. If the iPhone doesn’t have a feature, add it, or just imitate the ones present as much as they can. So much for actually building a better mousetrap.

So we have two instances here where it was absolutely inevitable that Apple was destined for abject failure, yet they succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, even beyond their own sales projections in many cases.

That’s why so many are now betting on an Apple tablet to be another barn burner. How could it miss in light of Apple’s previous successes? Indeed, although I’m still looking for a reason to buy one, maybe I’ll be convinced in the end, if only for the promised e-book capabilities. Just last night, I was reading an old science fiction novel on my iPhone, and certainly the page navigation process was simple enough. I was even pleased to discover that, while I hadn’t launched the freeware application in question during the previous year, and then on a older iPhone, it opened right on the last page I had been reading when I last quit the app. Nice work, but I still prefer regular paperback books.

Moving on to the PC world, it does appear that Windows 7 will do well for Microsoft and that tens of millions of customers who avoided Vista will upgrade, although the horrendous installation process for XP users represents a huge miscalculation. Moreover, Microsoft’s ad campaign is utterly pathetic. When I am not skipping past those ads on my DVR, I have to wonder sometimes if they are selling an operating system or someone’s note-book computer. Explain to me why the moron depicted in the ad seems to think that, because the PC incorporates a few basic functions all PCs possess, it was somehow customized just for him or her. Truly pathetic!

Well, at least Microsoft is selling mostly to the business world, where the corporate purchasing agents don’t pay attention to lame ad campaigns — or shouldn’t. I would also seriously question whether any of those TV ads managed to persuade even a small number of individuals to upgrade to Windows 7, or even buy a new PC.

In any case, typical of recent Windows upgrades, Microsoft apparently hasn’t made any headway against Apple, which continues to shine in nearly every product category. Arriving in the same month as Windows 7, the new iMacs, for example, have become a major success story in Apple’s current quarterly sales figures, based on what has been published so far.

2010 will be a truly fascinating year for Apple, regardless of how well that promised tablet computer sells should it be released as expected.

Up until October of this year, the conventional wisdom such as it is had it that note-books would soon supplant desktops in most homes and offices. The easy portability and the flexibility of having one computer that does virtually everything represents an extremely attractive proposition for everyone.

Indeed there have been theories, some I’ve expressed myself, that the entire desktop market would be restricted to content creators for whom no portable can provide the speed and expandability they need. That is the reason why Apple will likely include a Mac Pro in its lineup for a fair number of years, although I wouldn’t be surprised if the form factor was slimmed down substantially over the next few years.

I mean, do you really need all that extra bulk to house four hard drives, eight memory slots, and additional expansion slots? I’m certain Apple is busy devising ways to use the newer generations of Intel chips with reduced power and cooling needs to their best advantage in making it possible to actually carry a Mac Pro without suffering a back ache.

However, the quiet introduction of an updated Mac mini and iMac in October certainly took lots of people by surprise. Yes, there were the expected minor speed bumps, memory boosts and larger hard drives. But the iMac proved a revelation, particularly the 27-inch model that’s in a class by itself.

Indeed, a lot of former Mac Pro owners, including your humble editor, gave up their minitowers and embraced that new iMac, so much so that Apple was still quoting two-week shipping delays after the Christmas rush.

Up until now, the iMac was a basic all-in-one consumer computer, a descendant of the original 1984 compact Mac in terms of packaging. From the original Bondi blue model introduced in 1998, up till very recently, you didn’t buy an iMac to get state-of-the-art performance. Indeed, most of these products used mobile-class parts, essentially the same components Apple was using in its portables. This certainly helped keep the costs down, since Apple would simply buy more of the same parts, and it also made for lower power requirements and easy, flexible cooling.

While the iMac over the years became more powerful, you didn’t expect content creators or anyone requiring massive computing power to buy one, except perhaps as a home computer for the rest of the family. Or maybe to serve as a backup system.

However, Apple threw a monkey wrench into the process by delivering a 27-inch iMac with quad-core processors. Not a Xeon, but incorporating the latest tricks from Intel’s Nehalem processor family, including the ability to boost the speed of one core substantially when more number crunching power was needed, and the other cores weren’t being stressed. The Core i7 adds Hyper-Threading, which lets you run up to eight threads in parallel on a quad-core chip, said to deliver eight core performance under certain circumstances.

As you might expect, the benchmarks for the quad-core iMacs reveal performance levels that rival the Mac Pro. Since most of the applications Mac users are apt to use, even under Snow Leopard, don’t really stress multiple cores anyway, how many of them really need to spend all that extra cash on a Mac Pro?

Preliminary retail sales reports show that hundreds of thousands of iMacs reached the homes and offices of customers since October. Even though the potential sales impact was likely blunted somewhat because of the delays in delivering the 27-inch models, evidently enough of them are out there to count significantly towards Apple’s total sales figures for the current quarter.

Now I don’t know where the final numbers might lie. That won’t be known until January. Even though Apple doesn’t traditionally break down unit sales beyond the basic desktop and note-book categories, any huge jump in desktop sales can likely be attributed to the iMac. The Mac Pro only accounts for a small part of the sales picture, although the Mac mini appears to continue to do surprisingly well, more so now that there’s a special Server version for small businesses and educational institutions.

As the owner of a 27-inch iMac with the optional Core i7 CPU, I can tell you that it is every bit as fast if not faster in any respect I can measure compared to the Early 2008 Mac Pro that it replaced. Moving the 27-inch screen somewhat closer on my desktop results in a perceived size very close to that of the 30-inch display that was connected to its predecessor.

Yes, I know some of you are upset that Apple doesn’t offer a non-glossy screen. I tend to think they are catering to the 98 percentile here. If a reasonable demand existed, you’d have another option, just as you do with the MacBook Pro.

In 2010, all eyes will be focused on the expected arrival of a tablet computer, which will, of course, be another portable device. But Apple has demonstrated that there’s a whole lot of life left in desktops, and you can expect even further refinements to the iMac, although the chances for any all-new desktop form factors are slim to none.