on 23 May 2008Remember, you read it here first. Apple is working on something. It’s very, very secret. And it’s going to be very, very big. How do I know this? Read on.
And before you ask, I’m not talking about the 3G iPhone. Not just because it’s neither big nor secret, but because phones don’t count. Apple, as far as I’m concerned, is a computer company. I neither own nor want one of those fiddly music player things. My phone does that. And no, it’s not an iPhone. It’s a Sony Ericsson that cost me about a hundred quid without a contract. Who the heck wants a contract? It’s a phone, not a job.*
There’s little enough logic in paying line rental on a landline. The line sits there quite happily without anyone feeding or watering it on a monthly basis, as far as I can tell. And there’s naff-all I can do with it except buy services from the very people who are charging me line rental. I’m paying for the right to pay for something! Which is still quite sensible compared to shelling out umpteen quid a month for 45,000 minutes that somehow turn out not to cover the calls you actually make.** Weirdly, being suckered into overpriced monthly payments is considered chavvish when you’re buying a tumble dryer at BrightHouse, yet with a mobile it’s cool and sophisticated – only plebs pay as they go. The cellphone industry might as well just set up a fly-tipping site for cash and wait for young urban professionals to flock to it, 4×4s piled with Bags for Life full of crisp new twenties. ‘Hey Alex, save some for the Sky Sports bonfire, yeh?’ ‘Nice, just gotta zoom and drop in a kidney at the car lease place.’
Anyway. I’m grateful, of course, to those metropolitan twentysomethings for spending their dwindling disposable income on Apple’s less important products. As they struggle of an evening to disentangle the earphone cables from their jacket/hoodie combos while trawling iTunes for another obscure Canadian band they can pretend to have been into long before its one decent track appeared in a TV ad, their money is safely tucked away at Infinite Loop, underwriting the vast R&D effort that keeps the real stuff going.
Except the real stuff isn’t going, is it? I started this year with the firm intention of buying either a new iMac or a MacBook Pro, whichever was first to make my jaw drop with its awe-inspiring power and beauty. Since then, Steve’s wheeled out both, and my jaw remains shut. In fact, I think I may be grinding my teeth. No Apple portable could be described as undesirable, but the 2008 MacBook Pro is surely the least enticing since the one that used to catch fire. This column has already remarked on the lunacy of adding gesture-based input to a machine where the bit you look at and the bit you touch are different bits; it‘s not so much ‘putting lipstick on a pig’ as ‘finding a small mammal which might in itself be more endearing than a pig, then attaching it to a pig’s arse with a nailgun and calling it Pig 2.0’.
And as for the ‘new’ iMac – well, having already ordered one I can hardly claim it’s unsellable, but innovative it ain’t. Same cases, same screens, same bizarrely inadequate range of connections, still no Blu-ray option. At last, it’s got a half decent graphics card, but even the 8800GT is last year’s news in Windows circles, and the iMac’s best option is the inferior GS. Just as well that PC games take years to get ported to the Mac – we need that long for our hardware to catch up.
To the seasoned Mac-watcher, this brings a worrying feeling of déjà vu. Surely we can‘t be seeing a return to the dark days of the early 1990s? But that’s what they said about the economy. One of the first things Jobs did on his return to Apple in 1997 was to rationalise the Mac product lines, which had got far too complicated. Let’s take a look at today’s Apple Store. MacBook, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Mac mini, iMac or Mac Pro? Pick one and you get up to four models to choose from. Choose a model and you can reconfigure any of half a dozen components, except the one you actually want to upgrade, which is only available in the next model up. Plus ça change…
But I would never be so pessimistic. I cling to the belief that if Cupertino’s finest don’t have time to produce any decent new Macs, it can’t be because they’ve lost their touch. They must all be down in the basement working on something so mind-bogglingly ground-breaking that day-to-day chores like maintaining a credible product portfolio pale into insignificance. Mustn’t they?
MacUser’s editors are eagerly awaiting a new Adam Banks that writes the same words but 0.66GHz faster.
adambanksdotcom @gbarl Bah, missed your Watchdog. Do they do it on iPlayer?