Technovia

How my computing needs affected switching to Linux

In response to my post about switching to Ubuntu Linux, Charles Arthur tweeted a question asking about my computing needs. It's a good question, because - obviously - how you use your computer will often determine your platform of choice.
My needs are pretty diverse, but largely I'm a media monkey. Text is the most important medium I generat, which means that OpenOffice is probably my most-used application. But, like most journalists, bloggers and writers I also need to mess around with images, edit the occasional video and play with sound.
On the Mac, the applications I used for these tasks were:

• Graphics: an ancient copy of Photoshop.
• Video: iMovie, although I hated the "upgrade" to 08 with a passion.
• Sound: Fission, and GarageBand for multitracking stuff.

With Ubuntu, these have been replaced with:

• Graphics: The Gimp.
• Video: Kino
• Audio: Audacity

Could I switch to Linux if, say, I was a professional video or audio editor? Probably not. For both of those tasks, specialist applications like Final Cut Pro mean that Linux isn't really an option (no doubt someone will pop up now to contradict me!) But for what I do, all the tools I need are there. Some of them (like Kino) are actually better than what i had before. And, importantly, they're free - in all the sense of the word.

Switching

You might have gathered from some of my more recent posts that I've switched platform. My main machine is now a Dell laptop, running Ubuntu 8.10.

I've been using Macs since 1986, and have owned one more or less continuously since 1989. Machines that have been through the mill of my day-to-day keyboard bashing include the Mac Plus, LC 475, PowerBook Duo, iBook and MacBook Pro. I've earned a living writing about Macs and attended more Macworld Expos than I can count.

But unless Apple has a change of direction and creates some very different machines, I think that I've probably bought my last one.

So I bought a new computer

I bought a new computer. It's not a Mac.

It's a Dell. It runs Linux. It didn't cost me £1400.

And I love it. I'll write some more about why I decided to switch later, but so far I've had it a week, and the only reason I've picked up the Mac again is to get copies of some files which aren't supported by anything other than Mac apps and save them into something sane.

MacBooks, iMovie, and USB HD video cameras

Picking up this comment from TalkBack on ZDNet:

"Actually, you're all missing the point here. Even if you have an HD USB camcorder, you STILL can't use it with the new
macbook - you can't connect a drive via USB fast enough
to play the AIC video that iMovie creates. If you own Final
Cut Pro and you have the option to encode AVCHD to Pro
Res, at HD resolution, the video will not run on a USB
drive. I do, however, have a number of FW drives that will
do it...

Why have none of the tech press picked up on this? Job's
comment was the single most arrogant and ill-informed
thing I have even seen a CEO say in a long time."

I don't know if this is true or not, as I haven't got one of the new MacBooks (and now I'm wondering if I'll bother). It would certainly be worth someone who has access to a new MacBook and an appropriate camera testing.

Could Apple's attitude to developers get any worse?

On the day that Google launched something with a rather different approach, this little gemcomes to light:

"Aparently [sic], Apple has now started labeling their rejection letters with Non-Disclosure (NDA) warnings:
THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS MESSAGE IS UNDER NON-DISCLOSURE"

So Apple's solution to the issue of developers being unhappy about their applications being rejected on spurious pretexts is to try and stop them talking about it to anyone?

It's this kind of crap that makes me want to make the Mac I'm typing on my last. There has to be way which supports neither convicted monopoly abusers or control-freak obsessives.

Google Gears for Safari beta release

It's been a long time coming, and it still looks very much a beta, but at last those of us who use Safari have our own version of Google Gears.

How to get the full version of Office 2008 for Mac cheap

Microsoft produces a very nice, handy student/teacher edition of Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac at a bargain price. There’s only one thing: it doesn’t include the full version of Entourage. Instead, the version which it ships in the Home/Student edition doesn’t include support for Exchange servers – it’s POP and IMAP only.

If you want the full version, you’ll need to buy the full version of Office – and in the UK, that’s the difference between £100 and £300, which for something as simple as Exchange support doesn’t seem worth the money.

However, there may be another way you can get Office more cheaply, with support for Exchange. If you own any of the programmes in the Office suite, going back to Office v.X, you’re eligible for an upgrade, which Amazon is currently selling for about £180. Not quite as little as the Home/Student edition, but still better than full price.

You don’t need the whole of Office – just a single application will do. And what’s more, you’re even eligible if you own a copy that you got as part of a bundle with other products or services. In my case, my Exchange provider includes a copy of Entourage 2004 as part of the service, which means I was eligible for a cut-price update to 2008.

Better yet, even if you only own one of the products in Office, the update gives you all of them – so from my single licensed copy of Entourage 2004, I ended up with full copies of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage.

Are Apple machines really overpriced?

Joe Wilcox on the Price differential between Macs and PCs:

"On Saturday, Aug. 2, I got to wondering about Mac versus Windows PC pricing after seeing two HP notebooks on sale at the local Target. One of them, a 14-inch model, the HP DV2946NR, sold for $699.99 and packed 4GB of memory and a 320GB hard drive. Capacity for both features is twice that of the $1,299 MacBook—and shared graphics is 356MB compared with a meager 144MB for the MacBook. I wondered: If Vista notebooks are selling for so little and packing so much, how does this compare with Mac desktops and notebooks?

Today I contacted Stephen Baker, NPD's vice president of industry analysis, about computer average selling prices at retail. That HP notebook is right on mark: ASP for retail Windows notebooks is $700. Mac laptops: $1,515. Yeah, right, they're more than twice as much. But there's more: The ASP for Mac desktops is more than $1,000 greater than for Windows PCs, and Mac desktop ASPs were higher in June than they were two years ago."

I'm not surprised by this, because Apple's pricing is always cyclical. It introduces a new, upgraded model which evens things out, usually to the point where people are paying a premium of 10% or so over equivalently-specced Windows machines.

However, it then maintains those specs until the next product rev, rather than continually incrementally upgrading them, as, say, Dell does. That means that over the lifetime of a product, the price differential increases until the point where Apple's machines are really overpriced for what you get - which is where we are now.

Of course, none of this seems to be damaging Apple's sales, which have shown excellent growth.

But in an economic downturn, will Apple be able to maintain this in the face of fierce price pressure? Even though I can't imagine buying another Windows PC (except in markets where this is no Mac, like ultraportables or tablets), I would be reluctant to buy an Apple at the moment, as the hardware you get for the money just isn't that great.

Even if, for example, my MacBook Pro broke down I probably wouldn't buy another one - I couldn't justify the expense, given that the hardware I'd get just isn't all that leading edge. I'd probably buy a MacBook instead - and curse its crappy graphics every time I wanted to play games.

Should Apple make a low-cost ultraportable Mac?

There's a small hacking community building up around the MSI Wind/Advent 4211 which is using the low-cost, ultra-portable machine to run Mac OS X. It takes lots of work - you need to replace the WiFi card for one thing - but it's always great to see people hacking around with hardware to do crazy stuff like this.

But it raises a question: how much would you pay for an ultraportable Mac from Apple, and what would you expect the spec to be? I've heard Mac users dismiss the whole low-cost ultraportable scene as "nothing more that toys", but in fact machines like the Wind are anything but.

It packs a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, 80GB hard drive, 10in screen, nice quality keyboard, and 1GB of memory into a package that's lighter than a MacBook Air. Plus, of course, you could buy four of them for the price of a MacBook Air. Sure, you're not going to be doing heavyweight Photoshop work on them - but you're not going to be doing that on the Air, either.

Whether Apple will embrace this category of machine I don't know. The profit margins on them must be low, and low-margin categories are ones that Apple traditionally avoids. But if it did actually make one, here's what I'd like to see:

• A ten inch screen. Anything smaller is hard to use with web applications.
• 1GB RAM, expandable to 2GB.
• 80GB hard drive. SSDs are nice, but at the moment I'd prefer an 80GB drive over a 20GB SSD. Plus, the killer feature for these machines is that locally-synced iDisk, which means having a bit more storage than SSDs allow at this price point at the moment.
• Five hour battery life. Actually, I'd like all-day battery life, but that's stretching it!
• 1KG weight.
• £399 price point ($699). I'd stretch to £449, but much further and the temptation to upsell to a MacBook becomes too great. Knowing Apple, they'd probably go for £499.

I'd be first in the queue for that kind of machine. What about you? Do you think Apple should make a machine like this - and would  you buy one if it did?

The irritating thing about Microsoft Office for Mac

If there's one thing that I can't stand, it's needless segmented product lines - and that's something that Microsoft continues to be more guilty of than any other company.

Today's example is Office 2008 for Mac. As well as it's upgrade options (more of which later), Microsoft offers three variants of Office: Home and Student Edition, Standard Edition, and Special Media Edition. The differences between them are largely artificial: Home and Student Edition is for, erm, home and student use, and has had support for Exchange servers hacked out of it. Special Media Edition bundles Expression, which no one uses.

And of course that hacking out Exchange support not only makes it unsuitable for some students - there are universities who run their email and calendaring on Exchange - but also means that home users who use Exchange need to spend £312 on the "full" version, just to get a single feature.

"But," you might say, "how many home users use Exchange?" To which the answer is "a whole lot more in the future, thanks to Exchange support being in the iPhone". As I've mentioned before, I'm using Exchange rather than MobileMe for my "home" email for a wide range of reasons. It's simple, it's reliable, and it just works.

And ISPs are likely to start offering it as a "value add" service for their customers in the not-too-distant future. That, of course, means more Exchange licenses sold for Microsoft - but no one is going to want to pay more than they paid for their iPhone in order to get Exchange support on their Mac. Charging £300+ for client code is a disincentive to users to switch to Exchange, which is something that will probably lose Microsoft more money than it gains.

In the meantime, I'll be sticking with the old, sluggish Entourage 2004 - which includes Exchange support, but sadly doesn't include Intel code.