Friday, Aug 29, 2008
With these new boxes, Apple seems once and for all to have given up on the corporate marketplace and accepted that the customers for its high-end machines are going to remain in publishing and graphic design -- industries where paradigm-demolishing in packaging is viewed as a plus. But these are the very same Mac users who have invested fortunes in peripheral devices -- like scanners and removable storage devices -- that hook up using a standard called SCSI.
High-end Macs have always come with SCSI built-in -- that's been a significant selling point for Apple. But the new PowerMac G3s leave SCSI out in favor of new standards, Universal Serial Bus (USB) and Firewire. Apple hasn't entirely abandoned SCSI users; it says a $50 add-on card will soon be available for them to hook up their old devices. But as with the mass-audience-targeted iMac's omission of a floppy disk drive -- the least-common-denominator storage medium -- the G3s' abandonment of SCSI seems like an act of rudeness to its primary customers.
The G3 buyers are precisely those Mac users to whom such technical details are not "mumbo jumbo" at all but rather vital information for their daily work. But is Jobs right that, to the rest of the world, box colors matter more than RAM and megahertz? It's certainly true that computer retailers have always overstated the importance of processor speeds and confused novice buyers with unintelligible levels of detail about arcana like cache RAM and video acceleration. But Jobs' statements leave the impression that there's no sensible middle ground: Either you're a geek obsessed with "mumbo jumbo" speed ratings or you're a techno-illiterate who's simply concerned that the iMac not clash with the rug.
It's a false opposition. There is such a thing as intelligent consumerism, as still practiced by the likes of Consumer Reports. And a Consumer Reports-style review of Apple's new product lines would note the appeal of their lively new look -- and then return to the basics. Mac users still pay a premium for their machines. There is still, alas, much less software available for Macs than for Windows PCs. And though the Mac operating system's interface remains more elegant and easier to use than Windows, its guts are sorely in need of a modernization -- to make it less crash-prone and give it more intelligent memory management. Apple has finally begun that revamping, in small increments, over the last year, but it awaits a final unveiling in the form of the new OS X, promised before the year's end. (Reminder to Mac fans who are about to send me angry e-mails: Yes, I use both Macintosh and Windows every day; no, I do not own Microsoft stock; yes, I wish Apple well.)
Steve Jobs has overseen a restoration of Apple's profitability and a colorful repackaging of its products. The brochure for the new PowerMacs declares, "Another year, another revolution." But if there's going to be a real revolution from Apple it will have to take a much deeper form.
The iMac is the shell of an "information appliance" -- an easy-to-use, just-plug-it-in way to get online -- surrounding a traditional personal computer. Consumers who buy the iMac thinking that it will be radically easier to use than previous generations of computers because it looks cool and requires fewer cables are not going to be happy the first time they experience a hard-drive crash or a PPP-connect failure. The computer industry desperately needs to provide the general public with a foolproof on-ramp for the Internet that does not require a training course to operate.
Today's Macintosh is still too complex for true novices. But Apple has always surpassed its rivals in usability, and no other company is better-placed to build the grail of the "plug-and-play" Internet box. If Apple can design such a device -- and revamp the underlying Mac operating system as well -- then it will have earned all the bragging rights to a revolution that Steve Jobs could want.
Get Salon in your mailbox!