Apple had quite a year in 2000. OS X, the work-in-progress Mac operating system, started showing its pretty blue face; co-founder Steve Jobs pledged to stick around as Apple chief executive; and the kids in Cupertino, Calif., launched a new line of iMacs and a cube-shaped darling computer amid much fanfare. Plus, Microsoft’s new Office 2001 for the Mac garnered rave reviews.
But it went downhill from there.
Apple has stumbled of late. The G4 Cube hasn’t sold well, schools have gotten iMac fatigue, and in Silicon Valley it is suddenly OK again not to like Macs. And the company’s share price has tumbled from above $60 in September to around $15 at the end of the year.
Here is a look at some of the year’s most notable additions to the Mac platform:
Apple iBook SE
$1,700 after rebate; available at Mac retailers and www.apple.com.
With portability and power, the iBook SE provides the best value of all of Apple’s offerings. Its stats are better than the original desktop iMac DV. If you like the idea of mobile computing and are willing to spend up to $2,000, have a look.
On the plus side, it has a crisp screen, a 466 megahertz G3 processor, a DVD drive, FireWire, built-in Ethernet, 802.11 AirPort wireless networking capability, and a 10 gigabyte hard drive. On the minus side, it’s heavy, the screen is a bit small, and 64 megabytes of memory is not enough–be sure to get 128 mb. Conspicuously absent are an option for a built-in CD-R/W drive and an audio input jack. (Of course you can’t have both DVD and CD-R/W built in, but it would be nice to have a choice between the two.)
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Those omissions are the clearest examples yet of a puzzling decision Apple has made to focus its consumer products on digital video to the exclusion of the much-hotter digital audio phenomenon. In response to a question in September, Jobs said audio would play a “very important” role in Apple’s strategy for the next year. Who knows what that means. This much seems certain: If Apple doesn’t hurry up and sell the Macs it has on shelves now, the company will have difficulty releasing new products before the middle of 2001–which, incidentally, is when OS X is due.
Apple OS X Public Beta
$29.95; available at www.apple .com.
Think of this as the trailer for Apple’s new operating system, with the full movie due by the middle of the year. OS X promises a slate of exciting features new to the Mac, including pre-emptive multitasking, protected memory, sharp PDF-based graphics and faster networking. Perhaps most important, OS X is built to be industrial strength. At its core it is related to Unix, the operating system used in powerful workstations–so OS X should be considerably less glitch-prone than today’s Mac and Windows operating systems.
Unless you’re a Unix junkie, know a whole lot about Macs or have easy access to someone who does, don’t expect to get much out of the OS X Public Beta. Think about it this way: OS X Public Beta costs $29.95, requires 128 mb of memory, compared with 64 mb for other Mac operating systems (a value of $150-$200 depending on what kind of Mac you have) and doesn’t support AirPort, Apple’s implementation of the 802.11 high-speed wireless network standard.
What’s more, the OS X Public Beta is not functional without another Apple operating system running alongside it. For example, it’s not safe to install applications in OS X; you have to reboot into an older OS and install them there. I learned this the hard way in my tests when I decided to see what would happen if I tried to install Office 2001 for the Mac directly into my loaner 450 mHz G4 Cube running OS X.
Apple PowerMac G4 Cube
$1,500 and up after rebate, plus monitor; available at Mac retailers and www.apple.com.
If you want a Cube you have to have money to burn and you have to want your computer to say something about you. The Cube is a computer for the user who wears sunglasses that cost more than most people’s entire outfits. With a 15-inch flat-panel monitor (and what’s the point of a Cube with a standard monitor?) the 450 mHz Cube costs $2,500 after rebate. If that price sticker doesn’t shock you, the Cube is worth a look. It’s fast, quiet, and is likely to dress up whatever room you put it in.
Don’t take that to mean everything about the Cube is perfect. I had a few problems that might be enough to keep you away.
After I left it on for a little more than a day–a perfectly reasonable thing to do when you have a broadband Internet connection–the Cube started going to sleep on me while I was typing documents. If I stopped typing, waited a moment then pressed a key, the computer would wake up. But a few minutes later it would fall asleep again. Frustrated, I shut down the Cube for a few minutes; when I powered back up, the problem had stopped. Apple said the problem might have been the 15-inch Apple Studio Display monitor, which sometimes forces the computer to go to sleep or shut down. A possible fix would be to put the Cube at least a meter away from the display, to avoid electrical interference. That was an unattractive option; part of the reason I liked the Cube was that it didn’t take up much space when all of its components were on a desk next to each other. Plus, the problem stopped when I shut down the computer more often.
Getting to the ports on the Cube’s underbelly is more difficult than it should be while the computer is on, because you have to pick it up and flip it over. It’s easy to accidentally hit the power button in the process, which can be frustrating. If you’re dealing mostly with USB connections though, Apple has supplied two handy USB ports on the keyboard. The mouse uses one, leaving the other open for a hand-held computer, digital audio player or whatever. Not sure it’s worth it? You may have tapped into a reason why Apple has a hard time selling Cubes.
Harman Kardon Soundsticks
$200; available at Mac retailers and www.apple.com.
A subwoofer and two breadstick-shaped speaker columns for the Mac. Upside: Thanks to help from Apple designers, Soundsticks look great next to any Mac. Plus they provide amazing sound clarity that fills the average living room and approaches, but doesn’t quite match, a mini-stereo system. Downside: The weaker bass delivered by the subwoofer keeps Soundsticks from being flat-out stereo quality. And hiding all the cords that reach from this thing is a challenge.
My roommate the music aficionado has more than 500 CDs, so I figured he was the ideal person for a sound test. I took the Soundsticks into his room attached to an iBook SE, and placed them next to his Aiwa CX-NA909 mini-stereo. I then had him come in with his eyes closed and guess which unit was playing: the iBook and Soundsticks, or the stereo he listens to every day.
In the end he couldn’t tell them apart (though I inadvertently tainted the test by failing to turn up his stereo’s bass boost). Still, impressive.