Recently in Apple Category

As an experiment, I decided to bring my Evolutionary Computing presentation on making the journey into free, open-source software — a slide show originally created in OpenOffice Impress 2.4 — into Google Docs, which happens to have a presentation app in addition to the better-known Docs and Spreadsheets components.

I revised the presentation — taking some things out, adding others and providing some updates on what I'm doing — and output it as a PDF.

Download that PDF for your reading pleasure by clicking on the image above or the link below:

Evolutionary Computing (revised July 2009)

Interesting note: I believe that no previous entry on this blog has been filed under so many categories. (And I've been considering dumping Categories entirely and just using tags ...)

The blogospheric din is rising about Apple's supposed $800 laptop, which if it ever happens (and I have my doubts) will really hit hard on the Windows-based laptop market.

With Linux starting to eat away at the very low end of the laptop market on the ASUS EeePC and other netbooks, Apple dominating on the high-end (where it's share is considerable), the mushy middle is where most of the action is.

Having an $800 Macintosh laptop hits the bulk of the market and would steer plenty of people away from Windows and toward OS X. And like the iPod and iPhone's tendency to get their users to think about going all-Apple with an expensive desktop or laptop machine, a relatively inexpensive laptop is a hell of a game-changer.

Should this actually happen, Apple will have what looks like the right product at the right price — and at the exactly right time.

Let's see: Windows Vista not doing so well, and certainly not driving PC sales. Economy in the tank. The holiday season upon us.

If anything, it's a good time to buy some Apple stock.

Even though this Wired article is six months old, it sheds a lot of insight on the initial development of the iPhone, including all the problems leading up to its release, plus a lot of detail on how the financial arrangement works between Apple and AT&T:

The demo was not going well.

Again.

It was a late morning in the fall of 2006. Almost a year earlier, Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apple's top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here, in Apple's boardroom, it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn't just buggy, it flat-out didn't work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, "We don't have a product yet."

...

And what would AT&T think? After a year and a half of secret meetings, Jobs had finally negotiated terms with the wireless division of the telecom giant (Cingular at the time) to be the iPhone's carrier. In return for five years of exclusivity, roughly 10 percent of iPhone sales in AT&T stores, and a thin slice of Apple's iTunes revenue, AT&T had granted Jobs unprecedented power. He had cajoled AT&T into spending millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours to create a new feature, so-called visual voicemail, and to reinvent the time-consuming in-store sign-up process. He'd also wrangled a unique revenue-sharing arrangement, garnering roughly $10 a month from every iPhone customer's AT&T bill. On top of all that, Apple retained complete control over the design, manufacturing, and marketing of the iPhone. Jobs had done the unthinkable: squeezed a good deal out of one of the largest players in the entrenched wireless industry. Now, the least he could do was meet his deadlines.

There's a lot more than this in the four-screen article.

A Macintosh IIci -- with 25 MHz of CPU power -- equipped with NetBSD is currently serving up Web pages and somehow surviving.

If you want to turn your ancient Mac into a server, start here (to use Mac software and find out about other ancient Mac servers), or here (to use NetBSD).

And if a IIci is too new for you, here's an Apple ][e (circa 1984) Web server, and a Mac SE. And here's an Apple Lisa server. (Thanks to The Old Apple Web Server Directory).

I looked for a similar homage to old PCs as servers, but all I could find were endless reiterations of the old "Hey, if you have an old PC, why not turn it into a web/print/file server?" I didn't see any "Here's my 386SX-25 or 486-66 that serves up Web pages."

Google didn't get where it is today by charging end users for software and charging them again and again for endless upgrades.

Back in the early Macintosh days (i.e. the mid- to late '80s), Apple used the OS to sell hardware. Upgrades were free.

Today, Apple sells music at 99 cents a track, but what they're really selling is iPods, iPhones, iMacs, and any other damn thing they can slap an "i" in front of. And while the music is available in 99-cent increments, the iTunes software -- which runs in Windows and OS X -- has always been free. iPods would've never gotten to be such a huge business in any other way.

It's no different for the OS.

With that in mind, Apple wins on the desktop -- and crushes Microsoft -- in one way:

Make OS X free -- or very cheap. And make it run on Windows-compatible PCs.

Everybody wants that new MacBook Air. They'll still want it, even if they can also run OS X on a crappy PC. While not getting $129 for each OS X upgrade, Apple would get market share, still move a whole lot of hardaware. And they would gain that all-important "mindshare."

Most people have heard of Linux, but few have seen it on the desktop, even though they "use" it every day when they browse the Web. Most have seen OS X, a significant portion have used it a bit, and a few are rabid fans.

And while I'd like to see OS X go free and open-source, I won't hold my breath on that one. As I said above, I'd prefer -- at a minimum -- that Apple port OS X to Windows PCs, i.e. make a native version that installs from CD and runs on non-Apple hardware.

But even making new versions of OS X free for Apple hardware would prompt more users to upgrade the software. When running the latest and greatest gets slow, they'd be more inclined to buy new hardware, most likely from Apple.

Right now I'm still running my 2003-era iBook on OS X 10.3. I saved $129 twice by not upgrading to 10.4 and 10.5. I can't even use Apple's newest Safari browser because it doesn't run on 10.3. Firefox does, so that's what I use. As a result, Apple misses out on any browser-generated ad revenue. Would 10.5 run well on my laptop? Who knows? I sure don't want to spend $129 to find out.

By flooding the market with a free or very cheap OS X, Apple could blunt the effects of Microsoft Windows, which customers pay for but don't really feel they're paying for because the cost is bundled into just about every PC sold.

Even if a free OS wouldn't fly at Apple HQ, if the company still ported OS X to Windows-compatible PCs, they could -- and should -- compete with Microsoft when it comes to pre-installed operating systems on non-Apple hardware.

Imagine if you could order a PC from Dell with Windows, Linux or OS X ... there would be real competition for the hearts and minds of computer users everywhere from the home to the enterprise.

And since Apple's hardware is so ultra-cool (and ultra-pricey), they'd probably sell even more of it if OS X had a much larger of the overall worldwide OS pie.

Linus Torvalds, father of the open-source Linux operating system, says that in some ways Apple's OS X is "actually worse than Windows. He saved the phrase "utter crap" for OS X's filesystem. He says:

"An operating system should be completely invisible," he said. "To Microsoft and Apple (it is) a way to control the whole environment ... to force people to upgrade their applications and hardware."

I'm no Linus, but that seems a bit harsh. Even so, there's a new OS X filesystem on the horizon, I've heard.

Back in the Linux realm, Torvalds says he admires the One Laptop Per Child initiative as well as the low-cost -power and -size ASUS eee-PC laptop.

My buddy Stevie (yep, I call him "Stevie"; don't know what he calls me back) announced the new MacBook Air today. It's the ultra-small Apple laptop we've all been waiting for. And by "we," I mean people who use hundreds to wipe certain unmentionable areas (note to rich folks: those bills ain't all that sanitary).

The thing looks absolutely stunning -- and for $1,799 it damn well better be. Anyhow, Apple really knows how to break new ground, and this is new ground, alrighty.

Notable: The low-end MacBook Air comes with a garden-variety spinning 80 GB hard drive. For more cash, you get a 64 GB solid-state drive. Hell, the drive alone (the flash drive, that is) must cost $500.

And the thing weighs 3 pounds. That comes out to $599.67 per pound or $37.48 an ounce. At least it's not worth its weight in gold, 3 pounds of which would cost you $43,320 if you paid today's closing price for gold futures on the Comex exchange of $902.50 per ounce. So call the MacBook Air a bargain.

But it does look great, right? And while I might suggest that Stevie Jobs make something -- any damn thing -- under $1,000 (and no, Mac Minis don't count), he's a whole lot richer than I am, so why should he listen to me?

Tom Gapen, who watches Apple way more closely than I do, tells me that Think Secret regularly breaks news about Apple. And Apple doesn't like not having control over ... just about everything.

But now Think Secret and Apple have come to an "agreement," and the blog will go away.

ZDNet on the Think Secret settlement.

It very well could, according to Ars Technica via Information Week.

MS Office 2008 for Macintosh will sync with the iPhone.

So you'll be able to do a PowerPoint presentation anywhere, anytime, on a teeny screen! OK ... you can plug the iPhone directly into the projector with the proper Apple AV cable.

Love or hate the iPhone, it's the future of computing. We'll all be carrying around something similar within the next 10 years.