Hi again. I thought it might be amusing to do a few predictions for Apple related announcements for the next six months to a year (hey it amused me anyway).

- Apple Media Centre Mac – 98%
After Steve’s “we hear you” comment and Apple’s interest in the movie delivery market, I think this is more or less a given. Bit annoying as I just bought a Mac Mini to do this but hey thats life

- Apple Phone – 60%
Still a bit sceptical on this, We would all have a OS X/Newton hybrid phone that synced naively with the Mac and had all the features and more of Symbian and PocketPC right. I just not sure that a) Apple would be able to pull it off and b) they want to and risk caniblising the iPod market. I’ll wait and see on this one, but I think my next phone is an HTC Wizzard.

- iPod business spun off into another company – 35%
If you had asked me about this three months ago would have given it a higher chance due to the business in Europe regarding DRM, but as France now seem to be capitulating and Apple have threatened to just pull out of those countries that oppose its DRM I think its less likely.

- MacOS X for anyone’s Intel PC – 50%
Apple is a hardware company and makes great software to sell their hardware, however the door that let hackers re-engineer some of the OS to let it run on third party platforms has begun to close with the removal of the Intel MacOS X kernel as OSS under the Darwin Project. You could argue that the Blind eye that was turned away from these clandestine portings has been focused because Apple are going to release OS X as a stand alone product = possibly as soon as Leopard. Four Apple Execs are taking to the stage at WWDC to demo Leopard, there’s the new datacentre recently purchased (to run the registration and support systems perhaps). Another factor is Microsoft’s inablility to ship Vista which has allowed Apple to do something cool with leopard and has sparked interest in the Mac in desperation by Wintel users.
We have seen this sort of play from Apple before, they milk the hardware switchers and then release the software, take the iPod which was Mac only for the start of its life in the hope that it would spark interest in the Mac platform and then released for Wintel to get the real numbers.

Apple has a long term strategy that it plays very close to its chest. I guess we will just have to wait and see.

….A tropical heatwave.

My ReadyNAS was feeling the heat today. It was 31C in the shade and in my loft it was 55C/131F.
Well that’s what the device told me 16 times before it finally gave up at 6:45pm this evening and crashed.

I was sure the thing was meant to shut itself down in the event of an error. I will have to check Infrant tomorrow evening.

Rant time.
On the divide between Mac and PC people I (as is widly known) come down firmly on the Mac side. I have been using and breathing Apple products for pretty much most of my working life and I love ‘em like I love bacon and eggs or the dip in my sofa. Probably more.
Sometimes in my almost religious ferver, I paper over the cracks to make the point that it could be worse, it could be Windows.
Mac OS X is a nice looking OS but I am fast realising that you can’t really trust it to be reliable.
Let me explain. When I open my fridge the food is cold. When I dial a number on my phone, another phone somewhere rings.
I dont have to have a degree in thermal dynamics or have BT engineer on call for me to use these devices, they are appliances, they just work. I want to have the same level of service from my computer.
Why can’t Apple get the simple stuff sorted.
OK, this is not unique to Apple and in fairness they go further than anyone else in making all the complex stuff under the surface of the user interface hidden, but even Mac OS X is flakey sometimes.
For example, if I want to copy some files around, I expect them to copy reliably. In the same way as I dial that number on the phone, I should be able to tell it to do a function and leave it in the safe knowledge that when I get back to the machine it has finished the job with an air of quiet superiority not waiting to mention that something may be open by an application that isn’t running anymore. If there’s a problem, like a file has permissions that prevent the system performing the function you asked it, why doesn’t the machine finish what it can and report all the problems after and provide a method of correcting the issue at the end?

This is the second draft of this posting and previously I wrote “Mac OS X Finder is creaking, its crap”, A little harsh maybe however basically true. OS X finder is not all it could be and should (will) be improved in leopard. I guess we’ll see the changes at WWDC in August.
10.5′s new Finder, should be written in Cocoa and fix all the niggles that 10.4 has at the moment, that little voice in the back of my head is telling me that they the fixes are less of a priority than putting more features into an already overblown system.
Mac OS is not an enterprise level OS, it is a consumer OS that has been modded to work with some enterprise features. They are following not leading in this environment. Consumers tend to put up with bad software for some reason. Although they pay for their software they are in a position of little influence with the manufacturers because they only represent one unit sale. Corporates have mass purchasing power that gives them some clout and a voice with their vendors.

Apple have a catalogue of software horrors; Workgroup Manager is barely good enough for Education and works (just) despite Apples efforts. It is nasty and I don’t trust it as much as I should or need, Apple Remote Desktop – all versions up to 2.2 are flakey and work when they want to.
I could turn this into a list of Apple disasters but I won’t because it is too depressing.
There is a reason that in the Apple Ts & Cs you are instructed not to use the Mac to run anything more important than a lightswitch, they know that the OS is flakey and dont want to get sued when the nuclear reactor melts down because the plist for MacNuke v1.5 has corrupted.
Where’s that Linux disk?