Questions About Apple’s Software and Hardware Decisions
I would like answers to some lingering questions in my mind about decisions Apple has made recently in UI and hardware design. Let me rephrase that: I would like to view a few key hardware and software developments through a future-tinted lens. There are dozens of articles that address the practical “now” benefits of these decisions, but what if we instead looked at these changes as signs of a larger change. The paving of a wide road for big change to travel toward us.
During the 2007 Macworld keynote address, Steve Jobs quoted hockey legend Wayne Gretzky. “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” Apple operates the same way, striving to be ahead of the curve, and to be future-minded, rather than trend-minded. It’s the little changes that we never give more than a few moments of thought end up spreading through the product lineup. Remember the first time you saw CoverFlow in an Apple product? We’ve certainly come a long way since then, haven’t we? Now, even an app as essential to OS X as Finder sports a CoverFlow feature (a feature, I might add, that only made sense on the iPhone because of the Multi-Touch interface, which makes me wonder why it’s in OS X at all…).
Many Questions
Why the complete, dramatic change to the QuickTime UI?
It’s hard to argue that the old version of QuickTime would have been frustrating at best to manipulate on a touch-screen device. But this new QuickTime 10 seems less like a redesign and more like a replacement – the QuickTime on the iPhone seems to have been lifted, enlarged, and dropped onto the Mac. I don’t know why, but I would guess that if you were preparing a major operating system for future touch-screen interaction, you would want to make sure the key apps performed like touch apps. QuickTime seems to be one of those applications.
Why the very sudden addition of SD card slots to their MacBook Pro and iMac lineups?
I can’t figure this one out. With Apple’s pro laptop line a favorite among creative professionals, and especially photographers, why would it take them so many years to bring a simple (and common in the PC world) feature to their devices? It is not often that Apple simply makes design changes based on consumer feedback (I can only think of the re-addition of the FireWire to the first unibody MacBook), so I don’t think Apple did this because people asked them to do it. No, I think there’s a “selfish reason” behind the feature. I’d like to know what that reason is.
Odd thought: The MacBook Air shows us the obstacles that removing the optical drive presents. No drive, no ability to install an OS disk. But OS X Snow Leopard is small enough to fit on a very cheap SD card. Odd idea, I know, but just putting it out there.</p?
On that note, why the effort to give Snow Leopard a smaller storage footprint?
It sounds like a silly questions, right? The small size gives you more hard drive space for your photos, music and documents. But honestly, what’s a few GB compared to the massive hard drives you can get standard on a Mac these days? My new iMac came with 1TB standard, and even though I’m a graphic designer by trade, I can’t fathom filling it up.
To me, the smaller size of Snow Leopard means nothing for an iMac or even a MacBook. It’s not needed. It’s “decorative” and “nice”, but certainly not necessary. But if your drive were smaller – say, between 64 and 128GB – then I could understand the benefit of recapturing a few extra GB. But outside of the iPhone and iPod Touch, Apple doesn’t make any other devices that have hard drives that small. Yet.
Why the transition of iTMS to WebKit?
I don’t honestly know much about this question, but I know enough to say that Apple has begun some changes to the inner-workings of their primary delivery device for all content. Apps, music, movies and even audio books – all of it is distributed through the iTMS. And as of version 9.0, the iTMS has begun to take on some WebKit (the browser engine used to build Safari and other internet browsers) qualities.
Are they making it lighter, stronger, and more agile? Are they simply “bringing it up to code”? Or are they preparing it for a machine that would find the WebKit framework more friendly. I wish I knew.
Why the arguably controversial change to non-removable batteries?
Ignore the practical answers you might want to offer. Yes, Apple told us (and we’ve seen in real-life usage) how much longer the life of these built-in batteries really is. That’s a surface level answer. Go deeper. These batteries last nearly twice as long as previous laptop batteries.
But imagine these batteries in a device with a less power-hungry processor. They are flat, so they seem to be designed for small, flat devices. It would be like having a large iPhone in the sense that my iPhone really only needs charged once every two days (though I charge it nightly). It might not present Kindle-like battery life, but a device running on one of these flat batteries could last a couple of days with moderate usage, right?
Why the sudden (and pioneering) decision to convert all video ports to the Mini DisplayPort?
Apple obviously saw some potential in the Mini DisplayPort that others didn’t. So what are those core features that made it worth converting their entire product line? I know MDP can carry sound as well as video. It has encoding capabilities for protected content. It’s footprint on the devices is small. And it’s a more “USB-like” connection, as opposed to screwing in an DVI plug.
Why does the 27″iMac have a Mini DisplayPort that works as input as well as output?
This is a move that doesn’t make sense on the surface. If you own the 27″ iMac, I can’t image you have a more powerful computer that would require borrowing the display, unless your Mac Pro’s Cinema Display broke suddenly. But it doesn’t make sense. I don’t think the iMac will ever be advertised as a “great secondary display” by Apple.
What does make sense, though, is this: Apple is building a Mini DisplayPort into their mystery device, and it can power a display up to 27″. Say you own this mythical tablet device, and you want to watch your movie on a larger display. You plug it into an external display and enjoy the show. But what if you don’t have the cash to buy a random 24″ Apple Cinema Display? The chances are really good that you do, however, have another Mac. And if it’s the 27″ iMac, you’re set. Tim Van Damme’s fantastic post on his vision for Apple’s tablet device is a great illustration of the possibilities here. Perhaps the MDP is the ideal connection format for a device pairing like the one he diagramed so amazingly on his post.
No Answers
I obviously don’t have the answers. But I’m open to discussion and ideas. And I have this nagging feeling that, come January 27th, many of these questions find their answer in Apple’s unreleased mystery product. Only time will tell.
New Questions from Others
Patrick Rhone points out another glaring question: “Why would Apple build the handwriting recognition from the Newton into Mac OS?”
