The big surprise at Macworld last year was that the keynote was pretty much about about one product: the iPhone. This year there seem to be many things that are already known: a slim laptop, an update to the iPhone, a new Apple TV and movie rentals. So none of these is probably the big thing. And the banners saying "There's something in the air" have everyone talking about wireless technologies.

[Update: Less then 100% wrong this year. Home storage yes, but not attached. In fact very unattached: Time Capsule. Apple is moving the world slowly to computer appliances. We did get the rambling CEO again]

Last year my predictions were 100% wrong. Throwing caution to the wind, I present my probably all wrong predictions for Macworld 2008:

A Home Storage System
I keep putting this one up, and one day I will be right. Nobody does home storage right, particularly for Mac users, so there is a big market opportunity there. I think it will not be a networked box (NAS), but instead will be locally attached for performance. If you want to make the storage available on the network, plug it into an Airport or a Mac. Software does the bridging.

Wireless Data Service In Every Laptop
WiMax is a little new to the market, so if Apple has built it into anything, they have been doing an awful lot of work with chip vendors and software in secret. It's quite possible that Apple is putting WiMax into everything portable, but more likely is the addition of 3G or EDGE into the laptops.

No Shows
This is not the venue for for a new release of Aperture. PMA is much more likely. There will also be no new iLife of iWork: we already got those last year. The no-show I am hoping for is the "other CEO" who comes in at about minute 35 and rambles with notes until the audience winces. I really think that Steve puts these in so we can deal with the calls of nature.

A New Mac
I think a new desktop Mac is quite likely. Something that fits between the high-end of the Mac Pro and the low end of the iMac. It would be bigger than a mini, with at least two hard drive bays and at least one open slot for a PCI card. This would keep many people happy who need some expansion and flexibility but don't have the wallet for a full-blown Mac Pro. What makes it possible now is the low-power Intel chips and the subsequent option to package the electronics compactly.

Multi-User Mac Software
This is a long shot, but I think it will come one day. The Macs are already multi-user, but not with with multiple simultaneous screens. This software will allow a number of people to plug mice, keyboards, and screens into one mac and all use that one machine as though it were their own machine. That makes things much cheaper for schools and other high-density applications.

A Recording Device
Except for building it into Macs, Apple has avoided making audio and video recording equipment of any kind. Even the iPhone and iPod can't record video or sound. So there is a product gap for some sort of device that does one or both. You sync it with your Mac or PC just like an iPod and iTunes tracks it in its library. What Apple can better the market with are ease of use, recording quality, and capacity. With iTunes, Garageband, iMovie, YouTube, all the infrastructure is in place for personal event recording, editing, and publishing. We just need the gadget.

Tags: Apple, Macworld, Wild Guesses, Server, Fun, MacPro, Wireless, iPhone, iMac, iMovie

One of the new Apple Airport Extreme base stations now has a home in my computer closet --I mean literally - it is a closet. It's freeing up space, replacing some very old hardware, giving me a way of wirelessly connecting old devices, providing a Mac OS X computer for the kids, increasing my wireless network range, and centralizing a printer. All for $180.

My previous wireless network was based on an Airport Express operating in bridge mode. The Airport Express had a somewhat limited range, but the Airport Extreme gives a much stronger signal and does better against the 2.4MHz interference and other networks around here. The Airport Express will be pressed into service as a way of networking an older computer that lacks a wireless card, or connecting to the Brother printer if I move it.

A now ancient Linksys router connected the network to the internet via a DSL modem, but that is no longer needed. That also saves a huge power brick.

The largest space saving is in the exit of a G3 iMac DV. That used to be a server, but I don't need one any more. The Brother laser printer has a print server built in, so out goes that function. I no longer host anything from home, so no need for those services. The iMac is now running games. All my shared storage needs are met with a USB drive attached to the Airport Extreme. On the network the partitions look like separate shared disks on a server. Mounting the disks can either be done through the Finder or by a utility that uses Bonjour to automatically mount the disk when it is available. I had hoped that the two partitions on my disk could be configured in such a way that one would be public and one local, but that is not the case: the sharing settings are global. Either all the disks and partitions are available to the internet or none are.

The disk shares the USB port with a printer via a passive 4 port hub. That centralizes my HP color printer.

Set up was easy, but not so obvious in places. Initial configuration with the Airport Utility is straight forward, but you have to know to select Manual set up when you want to change more parameters later. I initially typed in an IP address incorrectly and the base station spotted the error and took me to the page where I could correct it. That was a nice touch.

I did have a hang up that required a reboot. Something happened to the USB disk, and the result was a frozen router. It is also inconvenient that the Airport Extreme must be rebooted to store any parameter change, even if it has nothing to do with communication. So my entire network and file sharing goes down for 20 seconds at a stretch. I am finding that my work PC laptop is much happier with the Airport Extreme than it was with the Linksys router. DHCP actually seems to work now and the weird delays and timeouts have gone.

Tags: Airport, Networking, Server, iMac, Interesting Stuff

I have two 180G Firewire 800 drives that used to be my back up pair (back when everything would fit on that). Since the 24 inch iMac has one Firewire 800 port I thought it might be interesting to see if there is anything to be gained daisy-chaining them and setting them up as a striped RAID set.

I partitioned each drive into ten partitions. This let me pick the first and last partitions for testing: the first being the fastest (closest to the edge of the disk) and the last being the slowest (closest to the center). Then I ran three disk speed tests with XBench.

Single first and Single last tested just one partition on one drive. Striped first tested the first partition on each drive striped. Striped last tested the last partition on each drive striped. Mirrored first tested the first partition on each drive mirrored. Mirrored last tested the last partition on each drive mirrored. For comparison I also included the results from the internal 750G SATA drive and a single Firewire 400 drive. Here are the results in Mbytes per second for 256K transfers and a 32K RAID segment size.

With a 256K RAID segment size I tried a few more tests. I took three very large files totaling 9.89GB and copied them from the internal hard drive to the striped RAID pair, then copied them back to the internal hard drive, then duplicated them on the RAID.

I think this RAID set up will be useful if I need a scratch disk, particularly if the processing that is occurring is reading from one disk and writing to another.

Tags: iMac, RAID, Firewire, Interesting Stuff

I had been toying with two alternatives to buying the 24 inch iMac now: buying a MacPro now, and buying an iMac with the Santa Rosa chip set when they come out next year.

To justify a MacPro and its accompanying hit on the wallet I would have had to keep it for a long time. It would have offered a great deal of expandability that I would have used eventually, but I would have had a mainly empty, unused computer for much of its life. The RAM is expensive and that is a big put-off. And the future of FBRAM is not one of high volume and falling costs. It appears to be a stop-gap measure to allow large amounts of memory at the expense of latency and the market for that is relatively small. I don't think we will be seeing large price reductions for a while. I would have needed a screen (23") and 4G RAM, plus a fast graphics card. And all that adds up very quickly.

The other possibility was a 24" iMac. The better graphics was a big draw, as was the big screen. The 3G RAM limit is a pain: Apple was asking $575 extra for 3G over 2G. So the solution was to wait for the new version with the Santa Rosa chip set due out early 2007. That chip set will remove the 3G limit and the iMacs will support 4G. But Santa Rosa appears to be delayed, and so it was not worth the nine-month or whatever wait to get something that might appear. The cost of the iMac was about half what I would be spending on a MacPro. So for the same money I could get a new computer twice as often.

Buying now means that I get a fairly mature machine. The Intel iMacs have been around for a while now and the 24" has the most space and the least thermal limitations, so it should be reliable. And buying now means that I get the benefit of the faster machine right now. I can live with 2G of RAM and when prices are reasonable, upgrade to 3G. I got the machine with the biggest hard drive available (750G) because I know I will fill it up and it is not replaceable.

In a couple of years I might want to upgrade. I won't have a highly expensive MacPro that is still half-used telling me that I should really keep it for another couple of years. I will have a slow, maxed-out iMac that is ready for replacement. Another thing to consider is that my Macs get handed down, and it is much easier to hand down iMacs than any other sort of Mac because the screen is built-in. And the recipients of the hand-me-downs don't need the power of a MacPro any way.

Tags: iMac, MacPro, Interesting Stuff

Here are some more observations from running Aperture on the 24" Core 2 Duo iMac for a few days.

Importing is very fast. I think it is faster than the roughly four times speed up I have been seeing in other areas. I plug in my card into the reader and the image thumbnails fly onto the screen at a rate of twenty a second or so. This is probably not all Aperture: it could be just that USB is faster on this machine. Once I press the Import button they are copied into the library at about four times the speed of my G5 iMac, appearing in groups of about twenty. Previously only four or five would appear at the same time.

In full screen mode or if I click on the image in the viewer the scroll ball on the Mighty Mouse flicks through images instantly as I roll it up and down. If I stop, there is about a second before the full-resolution image appears.

Straightening images is still slow, but not as slow as with the G5. If I add adjustments and then straighten it is very slow, so I think I will be straightening first.

A smart album that filters the entire library of 20,000 images takes about 6 seconds to fill the screen with thumbnails. Pressing F to go to full screen takes a second or less.

Creating a web gallery from 335 images takes about three seconds. A smart album of 70 rejects for the whole library appears immediately. It takes about 8 seconds to delete all of them. And album of 660 images takes about two seconds to appear. Books take about two seconds to appear. Autostacking is now usable, stacking in real time and taking about two seconds to fully display all the images.

Zooming on images is limited to five, the same as my G5 iMac.

A full text search for the word "hello" on 20,000 images takes about 38 seconds to return an empty result. Doing the same thing with a limited search for the word "keep" returns three images in four seconds. That big difference is because the full-text search is linear, while the limited search uses the database.

Tags: Aperture, iMac, Performance

What else have I been doing with this new monster on my desk over the past few days? It has not been all plain sailing, but the issues I have encountered have been minor, easily diagnosed, and fixed quickly.

First I backed it up to a 750G Firewire drive using SuperDuper. I use two of these drives in rotation (keeping one off-site at all times) and make a copy of the hard drive onto sparse disk image. I could not use an incremental back up as I usually do because everything had been updated in the move from the old G5 iMac, so this took a long time: about four hours for 160G of data (600,000 files, encrypted disk image). A second back up to a different drive without using a disk image or encryption took 2 hours 15 minutes.

Next I went through all my applications and utilities checking to see what was PowerPC and what was Intel or Universal. I did this quickly by bringing up the file inspector with option command I. It looks just like the file information window (command I), but updates as I click on different files. So this cuts out all the opening and closing of windows I would have had to do. Each time I found a PowerPC only application that I still wanted I made an alias of it on my desktop with option command drag, and when complete, I put all of those into a folder. This gives me a list of applications to go seek out Intel versions later. Pretty much everything I care about is now Intel. A few lingering Classic applications will no longer run (Intel Macs have no Classic support), so those were deleted. I found out later that another way to find all of my PowerPC applications is to use System Profiler. The Applications section finds them all and they can be sorted by CPU.

On opening GarageBand I found that all my audio units were missing. These are plug-ins that provide audio processing and synthesizers. Again this was a CPU difference problem, so I had to go find updates for those. My USB audio box (MobilePre) was showing up, but not working. I had to uninstall and reinstall the driver to fix that. It seems I already had an Intel driver, but the installer only installs the one needed at the time. While applications can be universal, some of the more fundamental parts of the OS cannot and need separate code for each CPU.

Migration Assistant had copied across all my network settings including the static IP address and warned me that I was going to have a problem if I didn't change one. I fixed that by changing the old Mac to DHCP.

RapidWeaver, the application I use to write this blog, developed a problem whereby it would hang loading my site file. I trashed the prefs and that was fixed. There were some interface changes following that, so I think that this was not an Intel problem at all, but a preferences corruption that had occurred a long time ago that just happened to not be fatal on PowerPC.

Not much maxes out the CPUs. They are usually very evenly loaded (I use Menu Meters to view their activity), so this implies that most applications are efficiently multithreaded. Even when I do max them out, the machine is still perfectly responsive, handles network traffic, launches applications, etc. Exporting from Aperture, converting video files, that kind of thing are the only activities that are limited by the CPU. I can hear the fans if I stress the machine, but I have to think about it. The hard drive is the noisiest part when it is doing a lot of seeking. Audio applications like GarageBand and iTunes hardly make a dent in the CPU.

Window resizing is silky smooth. I'm doing it right now while converting a 250MB AVI file from my digital camera to H.264. Playing two 1080p HD movies at the same time certainly makes the machine busy, but doesn't slow it down. So where are the limitations? Probably mainly in the hard drive -- seek time and transfer speed. Sometimes in the memory access. I can't do anything about the RAM except for an upgrade to 3G when the 2G sticks come down in price. But I could speed the disk access with an external RAID system on the FW800 bus.

Apple Remote Desktop 2.2 did not work as an administrator on this Intel Mac. But there is a fix. It involves deleting some files that cause the incompatibility. A side effect is that it becomes impossible to manage this Mac remotely. But that is not a problem for me.

Tags: iMac, SuperDuper, Migration, Interesting Stuff

On Monday I ordered a Core 2 Duo 24" iMac from the online Apple Store with some extras: better graphics, big hard drive, 2G RAM. I'll be busy over Thanksgiving I thought, moving over all my stuff from my 20" PowerPC G5 iMac and fixing problems.

It arrived Thursday morning. It is big. The screen is perfect. And it is fast. I repartitioned the HD, loaded the OS, downloaded 400MB of updates (1.8G if you include the XCode tools), and generally checked it out. On Friday morning I left Migration Assistant doing its thing for about 4 hours. It's Friday evening and there is basically nothing to do except reenter in a few application serial numbers. Total time actually spent at the computer to achieve this: about half an hour.

Seriously, Migration Assistant is the closest thing to magic I have experienced in a long time. It really epitomizes the It Just Works aspect of Apple. Everything works: preference panels, applications, background processes, drivers. You name it, it's there working. All the junk on the desktop is there too, the layout stretched so that it covers the screen in the same way it used to on the smaller machine instead of being huddled in one corner. A nice touch.

Aperture is about four times faster. Much more usable. Tons of screen real estate. A bright, bright screen that makes the G5 look dull and gray in comparison. The only thing that has maxed out the CPUs so far is Aperture. Rosetta is in there somewhere, but I don't notice it running my old PowerPC code at all.

No wonder Apple's stock is doing so well. They have perfected the experience of driving a new computer off the lot. I've been a Mac user since 1992 (this will be my 5th Mac), so I shouldn't be surprised or excited, but I am. They are that good.

Tags: iMac, Migration, Interesting Stuff

Now that Apple has axed the CRT-based eMac and replaced it with a cut-down iMac, there is the opportunity to go one step further. The regular iMac can support two screens. If the eMac has the same facility, then with some software Apple could provide one Mac to support two students.

Since Mac OS X is based on a multi-user OS, all that is needed is the ability to handle two keyboard/mouse pairs and associate them with the users correctly. In an educational setting you can place the eMac facing one student and have the other either sitting opposite with the second screen's back to the back of the eMac, or side-by-side, both facing the same way. The additional cost is small: use existing monitors, keyboards and mice. Now the educational system would be spending half as much per student.

What I don't know is what this would take software-wise. Although the OS is multi-user and the file system is multi-user, and fast user switching is supported, the applications are not so savvy. One option would be to bring the OS and applications up to scratch (Leopard?) Another is to use virtualization to support the second user: just create a new machine and do it on the other monitor. All that remains is to associate the mouse and keyboard appropriately.

Tags: iMac, Crazy Ideas