{"id":977,"date":"2008-01-17T14:41:21","date_gmt":"2008-01-17T14:41:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2008\/01\/macworld-2008-looking-beyond-the-steve-jobs-reality-distortion-field.htm"},"modified":"2008-10-15T00:00:27","modified_gmt":"2008-10-15T00:00:27","slug":"macworld-2008-looking-beyond-the-steve-jobs-reality-distortion-field","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2008\/01\/macworld-2008-looking-beyond-the-steve-jobs-reality-distortion-field.htm","title":{"rendered":"Macworld 2008 – looking beyond the Steve Jobs reality distortion field"},"content":{"rendered":"

Before the Apple fanboys call me a hater, I’m not a PC bigot.  I’ve written here many times about how a PC is a PC, and that the MacOS X vs. Windows vs. Linux thing has gone too far<\/a>, with advocates of each platform treating theirs as the one true approach to personal computing with the kind of fervour normally reserved for religious purposes.  I also like my Apple hardware and have a Mac, three iPods and an iPhone to prove it (as well as an assortment of Windows and Linux PCs), so I think I can be pretty objective in this area.<\/p>\n

Having established my credentials, let me take a few minutes to dissect Steve Jobs’ keynote at the recent Apple Macworld<\/a> conference and push aside the hype to get down to what Apple’s major announcements for 2008 really mean.<\/p>\n

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  1. As is now traditional with Macworld conferences, it started off with a PC vs. Mac advert complete with all the usual bias, lies, and claims that PC (i.e. Windows) copies the Mac in everything… hmm.  I’ve not upgraded to MacOS X 10.5 Leopard as for me it doesn’t represent a huge leap forward<\/a> but I am glad though to hear that it is selling well – Apple claims 4 million copies in first 90 days making it the most successful version of OS X ever.  That’s only half the story though.  It may only have affected a minority but, from the reports I’ve heard (in the Mac-focused press), Leopard upgrades have not been without their problems (how dare users run non-Apple applications!)<\/a>.  And as more and more consumers switch to a Mac (I see no evidence of major businesses switching – except perhaps the odd director here and there who is senior enough to tell the IT department what he wants to use) problems with upgrades between OS releases will appear more significant. <\/li>\n
  2. The next major announcement was Time Capsule – a companion product to Time Machine consisting of an Airport Extreme and hard drive in a single device to backup Macs wirelessly.  It sounds great, but suffers from the same problem as Windows Home Server does for PCs – support for heterogeneous networks is just not as good as it could be (and, as for Time Machine, Windows PCs have had snapshot-based backups for years).  What’s particularly worrying is that Apple claim the device has a "server grade" hard disk yet according to the technical specifications the Time Capsule uses a SATA disk<\/a>. Those of us who frequently specify servers know that major vendors such as HP do not recommend SATA disks for intensive workloads due to the higher MTBF (hence the 1 year warranty that HP offers on a SATA disk compared with three years on a SCSI disk) and consequently I consider that to call the Time Capsule disk "server grade" is taking things a little far.<\/li>\n
  3. Looking at consumer media devices:\n