My mom isn't going to pay $129 to upgrade to Jaguar next month. That's what she told me.
Here at O'Reilly, we do careful research for our stories -- so I called my mom. I talked to a lot of other people too and so this article is a look back at last week's keynote. The most discussed keynote news has been the pricing announcements for Jaguar and for the .mac repackaging of iTools. There were, however plenty of other items packed into the two-hour presentation. I know that other writers had to actually submit their stories during the event, but after last month's semi-coherent wrap-up of MacHack, my editor insisted that I rest a bit before writing the Macworld article.
Much of the Jobs keynote was spent introducing the new and improved features of Jaguar, the 10.2 release of Mac OS X. The Jaguar logo is the familiar "X" sporting jaguar fur rendered by Pixar. Even the logo makes a statement that this is a significant upgrade to the OS. Most of the features were presented at the May WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference) keynote and have already been covered.
Jobs began by noting that Apple is now the number one Unix supplier in the world, "bigger than Sun, bigger than Linux." He pointed out that the new Finder is multithreaded and faster. But the audience reacted more to the "little things": the return of spring-loaded folders to the OS and the integrated search in the Finder (as Jobs noted, now you can use the Finder to find things). The desktop background can now be configured to change periodically so you can cycle through images of your family during the day while you're at work.
QuickTime 6 was released earlier in the week and Jobs reported that there'd been one million downloads in the past day and a half. Jobs took this opportunity to take his first jab at Microsoft. He expressed his hope that MPEG-4 will be the end of the islands of proprietary formats. Jobs said he expects that everyone will embrace this new standard--except Microsoft. Apple's Phil Schiller compared the quality of the MPEG-4 video's smaller files with the MPEG-2 files that are the current standard. He also compared the smaller audio files using the AAC compression to the sound of existing MP3s. You'll want to do your own comparison in a more intimate setting than in a keynote presentation in the Javitz center.
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Schiller's final demonstration showed the improvements to streaming with QuickTime 6. Schiller clicked to different points in a streaming movie and the image and sound were immediately responsive. He scrubbed through the movie. Surprisingly, the audience didn't respond with the enthusiasm that this demonstration generated at the developer's conference in May.
The Sherlock 3 demonstration was impressive. The focus for the new release is on Internet services. Jobs showed how to use Sherlock to track stocks, to check out items and track auctions on eBay, and to search for images based on strings such as "Joe DiMaggio" and "Homer Simpson." The movie option allows you to search local theatres to see what is playing. You can then view previews for the movies, look up show times, and even book tickets from participating theatres. He also used the "Yellow Pages" channel to look up local sushi restaurants. Sherlock 3 returned a list of local restaurants with a map to the selected restaurants. Perhaps this was an obvious next step for Sherlock but, as I noted in a Weblog, Sherlock 3 is a derivative of Karelia software's fine shareware program Watson. Karelia won Apple's award for the most innovative Mac OS X application.
The Mail and Address applications have also been improved in Jaguar. Mail has an integrated Junk Mail filter that uses adaptive, latent, semantic analysis to figure out which email messages are most likely junk. "Adaptive" means that you can train it and tweak it to generate fewer false positives and negatives (mail identified as junk that isn't and non-identified junk mail). The search box in Mail allows you to search all of your mail boxes and not just one at a time. One of the new iApps from Apple is iChat. This is an AIM-compatible chat client with a Mac-like look and feel.
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Rendezvous is still the coolest piece of the Jaguar release. Rendezvous is Apple's product name for Zero Configuration IP Networking. You can get more information at the ZeroConf site. The idea is that two computers connected via Ethernet or AirPort can communicate with each other. Sure, the classic Mac solution was to use AppleTalk and there are other solutions for other platforms. The goal is to find a common cross-platform solution.
Rendezvous features dynamic discovery and automatic configuration of other devices (not just computers) over IP. Some describe this as solving the "last foot" problem instead of the "last mile" problem. Rendezvous can help nearby devices connect without a network serving up DHCP. This dynamic discovery isn't exactly Jini, but from an end-user's experience many of the ideas are the same. It will be interesting to see how the Jini community takes advantage of Rendezvous.
As a first example of the technology, Jobs repeated the iTunes demonstration that he showed at the WWDC keynote in May. He opened up iTunes on his Mac. Phil Schiller then opened up his TiBook with iTunes running. As Schiller's PowerBook woke up, Jobs machine discovered it and automatically added Schiller's music library. Jobs could then play music from Schiller's library. The files never moved from one machine to the other, the music was actually streamed from Schiller's TiBook to Jobs' Mac. When Schiller closed his TiBook, Jobs no longer had access to the music.
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The big Rendezvous news at the keynote is that Apple isn't the only company to embrace this standard. Epson, H-P, and LexMark are building Rendezvous into their network printers. Schiller took a document and opened up a print dialog. No printers were available. He connected the computer to the printer with a Cat 5 cable and the computer discovered the printer and listed it in the print dialog. Without any configuration, Schiller was able to print his document on a printer that his Mac discovered after he brought up the print dialog.
Apple understands the importance of Rendezvous and is taking advantage of it in its various applications. Apple also learned from the difficulties Sun Microsystems had in explaining Jini to developers. They worked out compelling demonstrations of a user feature enabled with Rendezvous. Later in the keynote when Jobs demonstrated iChat, Rendezvous allowed him to discover nearby people who wanted to chat with him. By showing demonstrations in three very different settings, Apple is helping developers understand where Rendezvous might be added to enhance their products.
Apple announced the rebranding of iTools as .mac. Jobs took another jab at Microsoft saying that the name was clearly derived from .NET but that "we're actually delivering stuff [and] we actually know what it means." Jobs tried to make the case that Apple is providing a lot of value and only charging a yearly subscription of $99.00 at a time when all of the online service providers are charging. Here he didn't make his case clearly enough. I walked away thinking that if I signed up my immediate family, it would cost me $396.00 each year. Fortunately, www.RAILheaddesign.com, one of the sites I read daily, straightened this issue out for me. It pointed out that Apple explains on its site that .mac members can "purchase up to ten additional email accounts for $10.00 each per year." There are restrictions on this, but that reduces my cost to $129 per year.
On the other hand, this is still pretty hefty. Why not offer the email accounts for $10.00 per year without the .mac membership? The full membership would come with the other perks such as 100Mb of iDisk storage, passwords for folders, backup, and anti-virus software, and support for new Jaguar applications. It seems to me that the email addresses for the mac.com domain were offered in a way that implied they would continue to be free. RAILheaddesign had another great tip when it pointed out that the clock for your yearly subscription begins when you actually subscribe. If you don't need the larger disk space, then don't subscribe until iTools is scheduled to go away in a couple of months.
The new version of iTunes is available online already at http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/index.html. The corresponding software for the iPod will be available in August. Jobs showed off some of the new features of iTunes, including the Smart Playlist options, which allows you to create playlists according to rules that you set. You can take advantage of the new five-star ratings system or the automatic count of how many times you play a particular song to generate custom playlists. iTunes will also now support audio books available from audible.com. You can take advantage of roundtrip bookmarking and listen to the books on your iPod while keeping track of where you are.
The iPod itself is getting slimmer and the 10Gb and new 20Gb models will come with a carrying case and a remote switch. This means you can move through your music without taking the iPod out of the case or out of your pocket. The accessories will also be made available to existing iPod owners. A Windows version of iPod will also be offered some time next month as a way of luring Windows users into Apple stores.
Jobs also introduced the new iApp, iCal. This allows you to create and mesh different calendars to keep track of different segments of your life. The iCal has features that allow you to share calendars over the Internet and to publish your calendar on .mac or on other Web servers. Jobs used the buzzwords publish and subscribe to describe the process of sharing calendars with others. Although iCal will be a free download in September, it will only work on Jaguar and not on the existing release of Mac OS X. Also you'll be able to display your iCal calendar on your iPod, along with your contacts.
To help you synchronize your data on your various machines and devices, Jobs also introduced iSync. This is like syncing your Palm on steroids. The iSync application shows all of your connected devices and allows you to customize what you will sync for each device. Apple's graphic of the digital hub now includes an image of a Palm and of a GPRS phone. This seems to indicate that Apple won't be providing devices for these spaces. iSync will also be a free download in September and will also require Jaguar. You can see that Apple is pushing applications that require Jaguar and that take advantage of.mac.
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Jobs began the keynote by responding to criticisms from Microsoft that the adoption of Mac OS X is slow. Apple estimates that there are 2.5 million Mac OS X users and predicts that there will be 5 million by the end of the year. Jobs reported that 77 percent of the people who have bought new Macs since it shipped with Mac OS X as the default OS have kept Mac OS X as the default OS. He said that 20 percent of the install base is now running Mac OS X and that this constitutes the fastest transition in history. Jobs proudly concluded that not only is this faster than anything that Apple has done, it is also a faster adoption rate than anything Microsoft has done.
So far Apple has targeted the traditional Mac users at one end and the Unix hard-core users at the other end. They have reached out to the education market and to creative professionals. With the recent "Switch" promotion, Apple is trying to attract Windows users who are frustrated with various aspects of that platform. Apple estimates that about 1.7 million people have visited Apple's Switch site and that about 1 million of them are running Windows when they visit.
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Now comes the tricky part. The cycle of life for a platform is this: To attract users you need developers creating cool applications. To attract the developers to create the cool applications you need enough users to target. Apple can't afford to worry either group in this early stage of Mac OS X. With the $129 price tag for Jaguar, Apple is punishing the customers who switched to Mac OS X first. They risk angering their hard-core early adopters. Even if they don't anger these people, Apple should make it easy for the 2.5 million existing customers to come to Jaguar. Apple can't move developers to take advantage of Ink or Rendezvous if a high percentage of the customers don't run the version of the OS that supports these technologies.
But shouldn't Apple get paid for all of their hard work? Sure. I would pay for Jaguar. Switchers will get the new OS for free when they buy the new hardware. Classic Mac owners will get their version of Jaguar free when they upgrade their old Macs to machines that can run this version of the OS. The only ones that will be paying are those who supported Apple through this change from Mac OS 9. As Apple ties more of its applications to .mac they can see revenues from users who actually take advantage of these applications. Apple is now trying to realize revenues from hardware sales, Internet services, and the operating system. By relaxing the pricing on the current release of the OS, they may increase revenue on the other two.
Mom said, "I just paid $1,300 for a new iMac in April that came with Mac OS X in it. I'm not going to spend another $100.00 for something I don't need." As a developer, this worries me. I love developing in Java for the Mac because I know that everyone has Java 1.3.1 preinstalled. As soon as you have a significant number of people not upgrading to Jaguar, I have to worry about which version of Java is running on the Mac OS X Mac, just like my friends who target Windows boxes. I asked mom if she would upgrade if Apple only charged $19.00 for the disks. "I guess so," she said, "as long as it's really easy and nothing breaks."
In the next month, I hope Apple hears the many like my mom who won't upgrade. Apple needs to do three things: attract more people to the platform (the other 95 percent targeted by the Switch campaign and by the attention to the included developer tools), convert existing Mac users running Mac OS 9 and below to Mac OS X users, and get existing Mac OS X users to upgrade to Jaguar.
When my mother got her new iMac in April I bought her a copy of the Pogue Press best-selling book Mac OS X: The Missing Manual. It's helped her better understand Mac OS X. Next month I'm sending Steve Jobs a copy of the not-yet-released book "My Mom: The Missing Manual".
Daniel H. Steinberg is the editor for the new series of Mac Developer titles for the Pragmatic Programmers. He writes feature articles for Apple's ADC web site and is a regular contributor to Mac Devcenter. He has presented at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference, MacWorld, MacHack and other Mac developer conferences.
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