Out of the Box

For most of the time I’ve been aware of his platform proclivities, my cousin Alan, a cardiologist, was not much of a Mac fan. However, he recently purchased a MacBook Pro and is loving it. I think he is an interesting case study for how Apple is attracting more Windows users.

He first bought an iBook for his wife, a computer novice. Then he had interest in a way to run two computationally intensive Windows-only medical programs on a Mac. After debating Parallels and VMWare, he chose the latter. The result, he says, is just "amazing"; the programs are running well in VMWare’s "unity" mode which allows the running of Windows applications in the context of the Mac operating environment. He also praised the program’s automatic configuration for Windows XP.

He’s not blind to the Mac’s faults and still prefers the way Roxio dealt with rewriteable DVDs and CDs so he’s using that Wndows program under VMWare as well.

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With the 2008 Macworld Expo around the chronological corner and Apple finally in (and by the looks of initial success, for the long term) the cell phone and set-top categories, rumor-mongers are running out of easy targets. One of these is an Apple ultraportable or MacBook mini. It’s not an unreasonable one at all as Sony, for example, is already in the sub-12" market.

In general, ultraportable notebooks have been slow sellers in the U.S. That was before the invasion of the cheap Asus EEE (and coming competitors) but Apple isn’t generally known for swooping in at the low end of the market.. Also, Sony has the right idea in embedding WWAN connectivity in its ultaportables; Apple, on the other hand, has even put off 3G in its cell phones. Still, Apple’s notebook market share continues to grow, so the timing may be right.

As I’ve written, Apple can take a few different paths here. The company could do a great job of something integrated with Foleo-like physical dimensions (sorry, 7" is just too small for OS X (and arguably other desktop operating systems, too), bundling an iWork suite for more of a mobile productivity appliance for $599. If it went this route, the device might not even be called a MacBook. But if Apple’s notebook family grows by shrinking next month, it’s far more likely that it will be a premium-priced 12" MacBook Pro with an SSD.

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Apple today announced the availability of Boot Camp on October 26th and will support the release with a multi-faceted marketing campaign stretching across at least print, the Web and of course its own stores. I wouldn’t be surprised if John Hodgman and “the other guy” reprise their roles in the long-running “Get a Mac” series of TV commercials as well.

One question I’d received from reporters is what happens to Boot Camp under Tiger, which is officially a beta. The straight scoop is that Macs configured with Boot Camp will continue to dual-boot and Windows partitions will remain intact. However, Boot Camp itself will expire at some point, after which the configurability, such as the ability to add new volumes, will no longer be available. This isn’t as ideal as continuing to support Boot Camp under Tiger, but overall is a pretty good compromise.

Now that Boot Camp will be release software, it will be interesting to see to what extent Microsoft will support Mac hardware. Until now, the official company line has been that Boot Camp was beta software and that it would have more to say once it was released.

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I swung by DigitalLife this afternoon and checked out the two big hardware introductions at the show, the Gateway One and the Palm Centro and came away with more favorable impressions. The Gateway One looks a bit like the iMac might have if Apple had continued with the polycarbonate gloss but made it black. It’s more wedge-like than the iMac’s thin “where’s the computer?” look, but may just be the best-looking desktop PC in the market. The multifunction power brick, by the way, is massive but, hey, so is the Xbox 360’s and you can’t plug a tanning lamp into it.

The Palm Centro looks better in black than red and the keyboard, while small, wasn’t that bad even under my large fingers, although part of that may be my greater experience with inferior keyboards in the past few years. I still don’t think the sub-$100 crowd will see a lot of the remaining value left in Palm OS as the consider the Centro versus Sidekicks, EnVs and slim Windows Mobile smartphones with QWERTY keyboards, but EV-DO is a nice plus and the integrated instant messaging looked nice from a cursory glance.

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In looking at the Gateway One, CNet comes away saying the iMac is a better value based on the specs. For $150 less, you get a a faster Core 2 Duo processor (2.4 GHz vs. 2 GHz), higher resolution screen and Bluetooth as well as an integrated Webcam (although I don’t think it’s too fair to ding the Gateway One for its “easily lost” removable one). Gateway, however, ships with 50 percent more RAM (although the iMac RAM has a faster clock speed), a bigger hard drive, and comes bundled with an external ATSC/NTSC tuner. Then there are the other variables. For example, if you really want to run Vista on an iMac, that will cost you.

On the hardware side, though, Gateway has done an impressive job with the power brick for minimizing desktop clutter. I expect to see a lot of these boxes on reception desks. And, simply from the pictures, I think I like the look of the One better than the new iMac, but I hope to get a better look at it today at DigitalLife.

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So, the sleeker new iMacs are here and the 17″er has faded into the history, replaced by a 20″ model that is less, as the car commercials put it, “nicely loaded.” The “chin” has not disappeared, but the black border around the screen minimizes it somewhat. The new keyboards are striking and I had some fun holding the wireless one like a chopping knife; it’s that thin. However, while the iMac is itself now as much of a juxtaposition of black and aluminum as the iPhone, the keys and underside of the keyboard are an homage to the white flat-panel iMacs of yore, as is the Mighty Mouse, which has never saved my day.

I suppose the good news is that the scores of third-party mice from Logitech and Microsoft will now match the iMac’s color scheme a bit better, but it would be great to see something made of the same materials. It will also be interesting to see if third-party keyboard makers include support for the Expose and Dashboard keys that Apple has added.

Incidentally, I’ve been writing enough here about PCs per se to add that as a fixed category as at least a stopgap til we get some proper tags around here.

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