Lets start off with New Years resolutions:

• Keep my desk cleaner.
• Eat better. Try modified diets to deal with health issues. But in general, I should really stop eating so much sugary and bready foods.
• Take more photos.
• Speak Japanese to Kaio. This is, for some reason, harder than I expected. I think part of the reason is I don’t really know first-hand what Japanese fatherly baby-talk sounds like.
• Be less of a spec junkie when buying stuff.
• Buy a fricking iPhone already.
• Sell more old stuff on craigslist/ebay. Give away the rest of the crap.

I’ve still got the Mac itch, though it’s somewhat quelled by now having a loaner Mac mini in the house. It’s been over 2 years since I’ve had a Mac in the house, and it is an unsurprising experience so far. The desktop looks nice as usual, some of the basic apps have gotten a lot better (Safari, mainly) and things are overall much faster thanks to the Intel CPU’s. In fact, if it wasn’t for the photo and video stuff, I’d say that the Mac mini is totally sufficient for my home computing needs.
Despite my good experiences so far, the new Windows 7 drama is making me hesitant about just going out and buying a Mac right now. On the one hand, I think I’m finally tired of building PCs. And I can also say that I’m pretty much at the point in my life where I don’t really have time to build PCs. But maybe that’s temporary. I did learn from my Dad, after all. So that means he had time when I was young. But home-built PC’s weren’t really around when I was a baby, the IBM PC was just getting started.
Sorry, random aside, but then again this is a rambling post. I’d say that I’ve been pretty happy with Vista x64 for the past few months. On my new-ish hardware, it performs great. It looks alright. It handles lightroom very well, and is a pretty good work from home solution (though Outlook is still finicky as ever). It looks like Windows 7 will keep the core stuff and bring in a couple pretty useful improvements. It will be, as far as I can tell, one of those “strictly better” type things.
But will it make it better than a Mac? I think that’s really the question. There is an interesting coincidence in timing as well. Apple’s next release is a “no new features” release, while Microsoft’s new release is a “fuckton of new features that we should have put in Vista” release. Can Apple afford to do this kind of release at this point?
Then again, I look at Windows 7, and I ask, “what features are there that go above and beyond what a Mac provides?”. It’s hard to name them. New taskbar (it’s pretty much the dock?) Jump lists (can’t the dock already do this? Homegroup (meh? I really dig how the new Finder just auto-populates the sidebar with shares that it finds). The one thing that would make a huge difference for me would be an improved Alt-tab. If the combined their “peek” idea with alt-tab, that’s essentially the holy grail of alt-tab interfaces. But there aren’t any screenshots of it anywhere as of yet. I guess I might have to try to download the beta that’s floating around.
Usually, I want the better alt+tab because I have tons of windows floating around. But that also tends to only happen when I’m working from home, and I have a bunch of terminal windows open. And in that case, actually, just having a better alt+tab doesn’t help. What I really want is a “sub” alt-tab.. one that limits the set of selectable windows to my putty and/or cygwin windows. In the end, I don’t think Win7 is going to provide that. There’s very few things that do, and that’s why I’ve set myself up with fvwm at work again, since it lets you do very specific things like that. So given that a new better alt+tab isn’t really going to help me in the situation I need it the most, it’s not really a huge plus in the Win7 column.
The other big reasons why Win7 will be nice are the usual. I can save money by building exactly the hardware I want and not pay the Apple tax. Outlook runs natively. Games, I guess. And Lightroom performance, maybe. But for me, all of these reasons are becoming less important. Like I said, I don’t know if I want to build boxes anymore, or I’m not sure I’ll have the time. Snow Leopard will support Exchange, so that’s that. Games, I still don’t play any of them. And if I did, it would only the major titles that probably have Mac ports anyways. Lightroom performance.. well, note to self: go check out friend’s Mac Pro running LR.
But I think the most important thing is that I don’t see Win7 changing the dynamics of the industry in a way that would break the momentum that Apple has right now. Win7 will still be a product that hardware OEMs integrate onto their laptops. Microsoft claims they will try to improve the end-to-end experience, but I’m still skeptical. There’s still too much incentive to OEM’s to load random crap onto these machines — either because they get paid to do so, or because they want to “differentiate”. With Apple stuff, you get Apple stuff, top-to-bottom. And as long as they can stay in tune with what users want, they will be able to deliver a better experience.
The more that I find out about how these OEMs work, the more I feel like their business model is just obsolete. What value are they adding again? They are pretty much hardware integration + hardware design + qa, plus a little on the side from throwing random crapware into the mix. People keep telling me it’s a tough business, and I’m not surprised anymore. They’re doing very standard stuff, and not very well at that. Dell isn’t doing anything that HP or Lenovo can’t.
I’d really like to see the Linux version of Apple. That is some company with design sense, produce a limited hardware range for which they’ve created a Linux desktop stack that works very well on that hardware. Some people have tried various subsets of this idea, but doing any subset of it totally smells of FAIL. There’s System76, which sells crappy looking hardware preloaded with Ubuntu, apparently that doesn’t even suspend properly sometimes. There’s Dell with their Ubuntu models.. sure they’re doing a little QA, but I don’t see them investing in any of the desktop software that would make me want to run Ubuntu in the first place.
Actually, I keep telling people, Apple could move to Linux if they wanted to. If you look at their mess of a kernel, you can tell that they are ultimately pretty pragmatic. If it made sense to use Linux as the bottom layer in the place of Darwin, then I bet they’d do it. It’s not where they add value, so it doesn’t matter.
The more interesting related observation for me is that Apple seems much more open to integrating open source stuff than Microsoft is. Whether its using things like WebKit or LLVM at the core of their system, or just shipping bash, python, and vim, it makes a Linux person like me pretty happy. Microsoft is starting to get into the act a little, with things like php support in IIS, or IronPython, or WiX, but it still seems nascent. Most OSS that runs on windows does so because Windows has such a huge market share that you just can’t ignore it. Aside from apps like Firefox and Chrome, which arguably were built for Windows first, I’d say most of the OSS apps out there feel suboptimal when running on Windows. Compare that to the things that apple integrates.. they don’t feel “weird” at all, and I think the real difference is that you can tell that Apple folks use and rely on this stuff all the time. How many folks at MS use cygwin? I dunno, maybe a lot actually, but it still doesn’t feel like it. And how many use Services for Unix, other than the people who work on it?
So there’s a lot about the MS world and ecosystem that I don’t like. And there’s a lot about the Linux world that I don’t like either (don’t get me started). But it’s also not like there aren’t any bad things in the Apple world too.
The biggest thing that concerns me is Jobs’ health. What happens if he, god forbid, croaks? The really scary part is that outside of the company, it seems nobody has a really strong idea of just how important Jobs is to the company. On the one hand, they have tons of engineers, so it’s hard to imagine that just losing one guy at the top would cause total collapse. And yet, it’s also easy to believe that without Jobs, a lot more crap might get through the “filter”. I honestly don’t give a shit if the replacement CEO is good at putting on a keynote, but if his filter is any way inferior to Jobs, then Apple is going to start to fuck up. With a bad filter, you start to dedicate resources to projects and products that are a waste of time, and that hurts the projects and products that are actually a good idea and that you should have been more heavily invested in.
Ok, I’m finally getting tired of rambling. In conclusion, 2009 should be interesting to see how this all plays out.