Students.

Many schools suggest tablets for note-taking or engineering work. Heck, some even mandate them. This market is currently owned by Microsoft, and given Apple’s de facto hip-couture status in universities, it’s only logical to see that Apple wants to snatch the remaining Windows tablet users and turn them to the dark side, preferably before Windows 7 strolls along. My own discussions with students of various universities which suggest or mandate tablets (the biggest one which comes to my mind is a school I was considering attending myself and which currently lists as alumni a few of my friends, Virginia Tech), lead me to believe that a vast number of the attending students wish they could use Apple’s own hardware. Sure, there are a few hackintoshy solutions (modbook) but these aren’t official, supported by Apple, or anywhere near as “hip.”

Granted, Apple’s rumored tablet offering isn’t actually aiming for the engineering students, but that’s beside the point. The point is that if one Apple tablet succeeds, they will swiftly aim for turning it into a billion-dollar business, just as they have with the iPod, the iPhone, et. al.

Here’s the problem: Microsoft is coming with Windows 7 on October 22nd. That’s long after classes begin and likely a month after Apple’s seemingly-real tablet offering, which might still find its way into the hands of hipster-poseurs and college students. If Apple’s tablet happens to be an unproductive media device with no purpose other than to watch films and browse the internet, then I suppose only the crunchpad may possibly need to worry, but if Apple’s tablet offers any decent means of taking notes or generally being even slightly productive, Microsoft quickly needs to put it to bed.

Otherwise, Apple’s legions will embrace it like the second coming of choose-your-deity rather than the outcast child the business world would much prefer to see (before these students force said businesses over to the worlds most unproductive OS). Given Apple’s recent streak of screwing the consumer, the last thing people need is another outlet for the consumer to be, well, screwed.

Yes, I wrote this on a MacBook, which thankfully currently possesses no trace of any Leopards, Snow Leopards, or any other endangered sources of luxury furs. I also gracefully stole the article’s image from PC World.

This is the final part in a series of two.

Yesterday, I focused on the un-selling points of the new MacBook Pro line as announced during the WWDC keynote. Today, my focus is going to be on Snow Leopard, Apple’s rather depressing tendency to bash Microsoft, and the rather nasty turn-off this all happens to be. Granted, most of Apple’s recent ad campaigns have comprised of “let’s make things up about Windows!” in order to try and gain market share. Microsoft is only avoiding suing Apple because of the potential for the world’s worst Streisand effect, which is depressing given the libelous nature of the ads themselves.

Having said this, it’s no surprise to see this mentality persist throughout this year’s WWDC keynote, so I’ll pick up from yesterday and explain just why Snow Leopard in and of itself is nothing more than hypocrisy.

I won’t even bother to discuss the Mac v. PC non-Ad that opened the WWDC keynote. Instead, I’ll start with

“Even more complexity is present in Windows 7 – the same old tech as Vista. Just another version of Vista.” -Bertrand Serlet, 10:19 AM

So he slams 7 as another version of Vista and follows it (within the same minute) with:

“We come from such a different place. We love Leopard, we’re so proud of it; so we decided to build upon Leopard. We want to build a better Leopard, hence Snow Leopard” -Bertrand Serlet, 10:19 AM

Holy crap, that’s a new time record for admitting to being completely hypocritical! But wait, there’s more!

“Adding Exchange support to Snow Leopard. We’ve got chills. Chills we tell you!” –Bertrant Serlet, 10:20 AM

If the audience in that room had any idea as to who makes Exchange, I’m sure we would have seen many bricks in their chairs.

Bertrand later admits to the three major changes coming to Snow Leopard: refinements to the operating system, a few new technologies here and there, and Exchange support. What are these refinements of which he spoke? Nothing much; just a few under-the-hood changes to Finder and an installation process which is 45% faster and takes up 6GB less space! It sounds remarkable on face value until you realize that they dropped support for PowerPC.

PowerPC is a platform which Apple stopped using only three years ago, and Snow Leopard has already slapped it down to the pits of hell. If Microsoft had discontinued support for an older hardware just like that, there would’ve been a massive uproar, but apparently Apple users will follow along. Add the fact that Windows 7, which can run on hardware Vista couldn’t run, also installs faster than Snow Leopard and Windows Vista as well as the fact that Leopard is less stable than Windows Vista (let’s see how many times you run into that Rainbow Swirly of I-Want-To-Pull-My-Hair-Out compared to a Blue Screen of Death), and we’ll see which platform is the better platform to build off of. Bertrant talks about how bad a platform Windows Vista is, and yet, Leopard is sadly worse.

Let’s get to these so-called “new technologies.” Which new technologies did they add? How about Aero Peek?

“Next up, the Dock: We’ve had a feature that we use to deal with clutter, called Expose, and now we’ve built it into the dock.”

Like the way Aero Peek is built into the amazingly more usable Windows 7 taskbar? It’s funny because their particular implementation is the most minor thing, and yet it somehow warrants inclusion within a keynote. Aero Peek is more functional than Expose and a bigger boost to productivity than Expose all because it allows for full window previews, thus boosting productivity in the office, and yet the best Apple can come up with is just adding Expose to the dock. They have three buttons dedicated to it on the keyboard, which lends one to the idea that the only reason they even attached Expose to the dock was because Microsoft successfully created a more usable taskbar than their dock.

Of course, that’s not all. Apple finally started trying to truly join the x64 club, and this is what we have:

“So first, 64-bit. The obvious reason is to take advantage of a lot of memory. When you run in 64-bit, the memory limit is… 16 billion GB. It’s unlimited.”

First of all, it’s actually over 17 billion, but I won’t pick nits. The point is that Windows has been doing this since the days of XP, and that Vista and 7 have basically mastered the art of 64 bit. Apple has been so late to the game that Adobe actually stuck with Microsoft for a 64 bit implementation of Creative Suite 4. The Windows world has almost completely finished adapting to the 64bit world, and Apple is only just now beginning to arrive.

“All the major system apps run in 64-bit mode in Snow Leopard.”

Wow, it’s not even a complete transition! They only ported the major apps over to 64bit; the minor processes and non-system-essential applications are still stuck in the last decade.

Sure, Snow Leopard isn’t a complete disaster. There is one technology which Apple did well to include, and that’s Grand Central Dispatch. The thing about GCD is that it will allow for programmers to easily create their own multithreaded applications without actually having to worry about the threads, which is a wonderful addition to the OS and is a tool I hope developers use to their advantage to create better applications.

Then there’s OpenCL, which stands for Open Computing Language. It’s essentially a framework that can run code along any processing-capable path, such as CPUs and GPUs. Kudos to Apple for making it open, but it’s not even Apple’s technology anymore. While Apple still holds trademark rights (which they’ll no doubt abuse), the Khronos Group is now the managing force behind OpenCL, so anyone can include it if they fit the bill.

However, that’s basically it in terms of any new technology. In the end, Snow Leopard is a partially-64bit OS comprised of Safari 4 (standalone included), Quicktime 10 (standalone included), Grand Central Dispatch, OpenCL, Exchange 2007 support, tweaks to Expose and Stacks, performance fixes to the Finder, and an update to the Common Unix Printing System, all while dropping support for Macintoshes more than three years old.

Apple is charging 29 dollars for this? Keeping in mind that the only new technologies are Grand Central Dispatch, OpenCL, 64bit readiness, and Exchange 2007, it’s time to start picking this price apart for what it is: a rip-off.

Vista Service Pack 1 brought the finalized Server 2008 kernel to Windows Vista. That’s an enterprise-quality near-bulletproof kernel added to consumer versions of Windows for free! In addition to boosting performance just about everywhere (not just in Explorer), Vista SP1 also introduced support for an entirely new filesystem, exFAT. Following this was Service Pack 2, which brought a new version of Windows Search, support for Bluetooth 2.1, native support for burning Blu-ray discs (something Apple still doesn’t support even reading), a new framework for wifi connection management, support for VIA’s new 64bit CPUs, as well as a new power management framework which actually puts an emphasis on saving power both for desktops and laptops as opposed to just being efficient with how it’s all used.

Together, these service packs introduced more performance boosts and features to an already fast and powerful operating system for free. Apple is not only introducing less new features, what they’re introducing is either behind the curve or won’t directly impact productivity, and Apple is still charging 29 dollars for previous Leopard users. Worse yet, if you happen to be one of the holdouts still using Tiger because you figured out that Leopard is an unstable sack of crap for an operating system, you’re out of luck; Apple’s going to flip the bird and charge you “full price,” whatever exorbitant amount that is for a gimped service pack to an operating system which you already didn’t like.

Let’s not forget that Apple dropped support for the ZFS filesystem, which was one of the features many Apple users were looking forward to the most.

As usual, share your thoughts and suggestions in the comments.

Update: Sam chimed in via WLM with the following:

Sam says:
You’ve got to be kidding me.
I just wrote this long comment to explain why Snow Leopard is worth $29.
Just as I was thinking Safari is naturally going to crash now, it disappeared.

Nice.

Update 2: I thought about it a bit longer and decided that not only is Apple issuing a gimped service pack, they’re also doing nothing to embrace the future. Tablets are one of the handiest business and graphics design tools in existence, and yet while Apple could easily have dominated the game, they didn’t bother. Now, Windows 7 is more touch-ready than ever, allowing for a far more favorable user experience on capable computers (such as on the HP TouchSmart and the Dell Latitude XT).

Not only has Snow Leopard seemed to not have any purpose, Apple itself seems to have gotten a bit distracted and lost any desire to improve usability, whereas Microsoft made usability one of their major goals with 7.

This is part one in a series of two.

Apple’s WWDC keynote on the 8th of June (yesterday, if it seems like forever passed between then and now) showed the world just how bad Apple’s core products and services are without the Reality Distortion Field™ Steve Jobs generates through the waste matter exuded from his pores. Apple’s core offerings boiled down, really, to just three things as discussed in the keynote:

• Updated MacBook Pros
• Snow Leopard
• A new iPhone

The wonder in all of this is how badly Apple happened to damage their first two offerings in this keynote. Today, I’ll be focusing on the new MacBook Pro line.

First of all, the MacBook Pro now consists of what used to be the original unibody MacBook. As of now, the only vanilla MacBook is literally the vanilla-colored MacBook, with the remainder of Apple’s Pro line consisting of many laptops which aren’t “pro” at all. Apple was once respected for having solid mobile workstations, but the name has been so heavily diluted and cheapened (while still being too expensive for the feature-set offered) that, amongst the graphics professionals I know, many are considering Lenovo’s W series ThinkPads down the road.

Now, let’s take a look at what actually happened to make the current line of MacBook Pros worthless to Professionals:

The battery is no longer removable from the entire line of MacBook Pros

In the past, many people frequently on the move opted for the 15” model over the 17” model simply because it weighed less and ate less room. Many of these people also carried a spare battery or two in order to maximize how much time they could squeeze out of their laptops while away from power outlets. Apple said “screw you guys” and made the battery non-user-servicable under the guise of no longer needing to worry about the battery because it can run for 1000 charges before Apple considers it to be “consumed”

For mobile pros, 1000 charges can easily be done in less than three and a half years, and that’s not including the fact that the algorithm Apple uses seems to count the battery dropping below 20% and being recharged as one charge cycle. Unfortunately for them, AppleCare maxes out at 3 years, so that’s a guaranteed intake of 129USD to replace the battery on 13” and 15” models and 179USD to replace it on the 17” MacBook Pro.

Getting back to the inability to swap the battery itself: assuming the 30%-per-year asymptotic capacity loss as a result of high temperatures in the MacBooks holds true, we now have a MacBook which will last roughly 5 hours per charge to start, 3.5 hours per charge after the first year, and roughly 2.45 hours per charge after the second year. Meanwhile, users can’t hold or swap batteries down the road, so that means they’re often stuck with just that much charge. In environments typical to video editing, photography, events, and other places where long battery life is critical, this is an embarrassment.

Of course, the battery isn’t the only problem. Let’s look at another critical change:

The ExpressCard slot was ditched in favor of an SD Card slot

That’s right. Apple distanced a broader target audience away from the new MacBook Pro line in favor of photographers. Never mind the fact that the non-removable battery makes the MacBook Pro a very unappealing notebook for mobile use; it’s as if Apple wants to add detriments to their MacBook Pros which mutually exclude various groups of people. At first, a non-removable battery might not seem all too bad if one could still use his HSPA/EVDO ExpressCard to go online from anywhere, but that group has now been slashed by the lack of said ExpressCard slot. The same goes for the many professional videographers who almost always have ExpressCard firewire adapters in order to connect multiple video cameras.

Near-invisible expansibility fell through the floor with this omission. From a practicality standpoint, it’s easier to leave an ExpressCard slotted as opposed to leaving a USB dongle perpetually plugged in. ExpressCards don’t suffer from bent ports and other issues when doing this, and there’s also less to fiddle with when one just leaves an ExpressCard in place. It’s a huge convenience factor as well as being amazingly kind to those who tend to forget to bring the various essential USB adapters they need.

Granted, if these were my only qualms with the new MacBook Pro line, I’d have a pretty shaky argument, so let’s analyze the MacBook Pros themselves.

The spec sheet is inferior for the money

Here’s a rundown of the specs Apple thinks are relevant for the baseline 15” MacBook Pro:

15-inch WSXGA (1440×900)

2.53ghz

4GB DDR3

250GB HDD

9400M Graphics with 256MB shared memory

SD Card Slot (Really? This is a selling point?)

1699USD

Great! That doesn’t seem to unreasona–

Lenovo W500

15-inch WSXGA+ (1680×1050)

2.53ghz

4GB DDR3

250GB HDD

ATI Mobility FireGL V5700 with 512MB VRAM) and Intel AMT (Holy crap!)

ExpressCard Slot and a Smart Card reader.

1534USD

What if I want a decent battery? Tack on 70USD and grab that 9 cell battery over there. 1604USD.

So, for 95USD less than the baseline 15” MacBook Pro, I can have a laptop with a better screen that has a better backlight, the same processor, the same amount of RAM, a workstation-class graphics card with double the dedicated memory, an ExpressCard slot, a Smart Card reader I can use for authenticating to my corporate network, a backwards-compatible operating system with a minimal footprint that has run the rounds through the 64 bit world, and Lenovo’s decent customer service and solid build quality (unlike what I’ve experienced through Apple). That’s not including the significant coupons Lenovo offers from time to time.

I know I’m not the only one who thought the keynote was an embarrasment; my friend Michael from Neowin also agrees with this viewpoint (update: as does Kristan Kenney, who himself has lived within Apple’s Reality Distortion Field for too long). Now that I’ve run through this, what are your thoughts? Do you think I nailed it, or do you think I’m completely off with my entire argument? Feel free to drop a line in the comments, at least regarding the MacBook Pros. I’ll deal with Snow Leopard tomorrow.

This is a shout-out to all Zune 30 owners who remained patient.

This is to you, the faithful owner of a Zune 30, who didn’t buckle under stress and kept a keen eye on Microsoft, waiting for a solution.

This is to you, the discount shopper who picked up a Zune 30 and didn’t want to lose faith in your hardware.

Low and behold, Microsoft dug deep to find out the problem and, within minutes of finding out exactly what it was, pushed out an answer and a solution that didn’t void your warranty (thanks, Gizmodo). There’s a reason for why I’m bringing all of this up. July of 2008 saw cataclysmic server failure when a vast majority of all newly-purchased iPhone 3G units tried activating at nearly the same time, leaving both new iPhone 3Gs and some iPhone Gen 1 units dead in the water until the activation servers came back online. Poor planning led to the creation of a load-intolerant system on AT&T’s side (though the blame hardly belongs to them, given that Apple mandated this system in the first place). However, people weren’t infuriated by Apple’s ineptitude here. They were complacent and merely went with whatever explanation was fed to them. Meanwhile, a sizable majority of people who stuck with their own platforms of choice decided not to point and jeer.

Fast forward to December 31, 2008, and every Zune 30 device freezes due to a bug in a driver from Freescale Semiconductor in this while loop (between lines 259 and 274):

    while (days > 365)
    {
        if (IsLeapYear(year))
        {
            if (days > 366)
            {
                days -= 366;
                year += 1;
            }
        }
        else
        {
            days -= 365;
            year += 1;
        }
    }

(protip: day 366 triggers an infinite loop. To see the context of the code, check out the pastie link above, or just click here. You can see a breakdown of how this could’ve been handled here) 

What happened? Every Apple-loyal iPhone, iPod, and Mac owner threw a fit even though none of them actually owned a Zune 30 (You can’t run a Zune 30… or any Zune, for that matter, on a Mac). Thanks in part to the additional sensationalism promoted by gadget bloggers and, subsequently, news outlets the world over, a problem with a Zune model sold only in North America suddenly became a "Worldwide Zune Outage."

This is the difference between the Social and the Kingdom of Apple. Those with Zunes held out patiently and were rewarded with verbose output by Microsoft, whereas Apple simply vaguely alluded to some other company being the source of their problems (or were otherwise mute for a long period of time) whenever something on Apple’s side went wrong.

Thank you, Zune 30 owners, for living up to the hype of the Social. I’m now quite proud to be an owner of a Zune myself.

Wired has an interesting article on how the iPhone boosted smartphone sales for other manufacturers (most notably RIM and Palm). With the next version of the iPhone now released, you might be asking yourself

• What will Microsoft do to keep Apple from breaking into the enterprise smartphone market?
• Why haven’t I bought this new iPhone yet?
• What’s that pretty thing in the Crystal Ball?

Now might be a good time to analyze the potential impact Apple’s iPhone might have on Windows Mobile.

The current version of Windows Mobile is version 6.1… which is still based on Windows CE 5.2 despite the release of Windows CE 6.0 back in November of 2006, which is well over a year ago. Windows Mobile 7 will be based on either Windows CE 6 or a later version of Windows CE judging by its anticipated mid-to-late 2009 release. Since the last major Windows CE release, two iPhones have come along and, according to the people watching today’s WWDC keynote, eclipsed every smartphone in existence (we’ll disregard the argument that the iPhone is not a suitable enterprise tool for now).

Since the moment news of the first iPhone broke two Januarys ago, companies such as Meizu and HTC have tried to revamp the Windows Mobile interface with their own code, though only HTC has actually managed to push anything to the market. A number of threads discussing the new HTC Touch Pro have come and gone, with many people as-yet-unaffected by Mr. Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field seriously weighing the unreleased Touch (less so with its Diamond sibling) against the new iPhone and another HTC project, the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1.

The impact of the iPhone is already visible in the preparation of new user interfaces for both Windows Mobile and RIM’s Blackberry (the Bold UI). However, with the announcement that iPhone v2 will carry full Exchange support, the latest iPhone is also making an attempt to invade the enterprise smartphone realm, and third party innovations for smartphones in this department typically have a high FAIL rate in catching on, so it’s up to Microsoft to keep itself awake and running. HTC pulled a lucky rabbit from its proverbial top-hat, but HTC’s experience lies in what most people in the Orient prefer with their phones: glitz, glamour, and lots of overly pretty animated functions, menus, spinning icons, and other similar user interface clutterings enhancements which missed the Longhorn boat back in 2004.

This gets me to what I think Microsoft might be forced to do with Apple’s growling 2ft-tall-and-growing-fast presence in front of it.

Background Applications won’t go away. Even though Apple had a fun jab at how background applications eat battery power and performance, I personally don’t believe Microsoft will let background applications go the way of the dodo. Instead, Microsoft will likely make enhancements to how Windows Mobile manages background applications. This will save battery power (good!) while making it less likely that your phone will be infected with spyware (good!), while also preserving backwards compatibility (good, but not as enthusiastically good).

A revamped user interface will likely be issued with Windows Mobile 7. While this has already been discussed many times in the past, I personally think the new UI will be developed in tandem with Windows 7’s User Interface. We’ve seen Windows 7’s poorly executed touch demo at D6 (I’ll keep my 50 cents Steve, thank you), but I think that Microsoft will keep a similar but highly condensed touch-centric user experience for Windows Mobile 7 for two reasons:

1. The iPhone has already made touch look cool, and with companies such as HTC pulling off some of the most ingenious touch interfaces , touch and gestures won’t be going away.
2. Microsoft has a history of keeping things looking alike (and yet disjointedly different at the same time) for the sake of branding. Windows Mobile 6 had this mildly Vista-esque feel through the use of gradients and glossed elements. On the other hand, this is a phone. One of the problems some people have with the iPhone is that while the user interface is great, the time it takes to go from one place to another (despite the presence of the home button) can get a bit annoying with the animations and other UI tidbits in place. In consumer environments, a glitzy UI is great, but in snappy business environments when CEOs are jumping from cabs and limousines to business meetings in skyscrapers while trying to arrange that multi-million (or billion) dollar merger during the only 30 second time slot available in the elevator trip to the top floor, the last thing that is needed are animations which eat time.

With that in mind, Windows 7 might be less of a festival of motion than Windows Mobile 6.1 with HTC’s TouchFLO, with a new interface likely catering to both businessmen and consumers alike.

Accelerated Development might split priority between Windows 7 and Windows Mobile 7. Should the two systems share a similar user interface, seeing Microsoft split its resources down the middle for both Windows and Windows Mobile might not be the largest surprise. One of Microsoft’s most successful areas is within the corporate sector, and with the iPhone trying to barge in, Microsoft might be much more inclined than before to put more emphasis on Windows Mobile development. With connectivity becoming the ultimate focus for Windows 7, seeing a heavy emphasis on connectivity between Windows Mobile, 7 and Windows 7 might be less of a shock now than it might’ve been, say, three to six months ago. This doesn’t mean we’ll see Windows 7 launch in 2009, nor does it mean that Windows 7 will come before the second half of next year (but it might). All it means is that more teams might be devoted to Windows Mobile 7, with collaboration between both Windows and Windows Mobile development climbing much higher than ever before. This could also mean that a number of Microsoft’s Windows 7 “pillars” will carry over into Windows Mobile.

Mind you, all of this is my own mindless speculation. The iPhone is not a crystal ball, I can’t see into the future, and the phone in the ball is an HTC Touch Pro. If you have any other ideas as to which directions Microsoft might take with Windows Mobile, post! Comments are below, but before you post, here’s a dose of irony, courtesy of Paul Thurrott.