Rubénerd!

Without too much time before WWDC 2013 begins in San Francisco, I figured this was the last time I could pontificate and hypothesise about the potential future of the Mac Pro. Nobody has talked about this, so it's a perfect opportunity.

They're gorgeously functional machines

The Mac Pro is an interesting odd man out in Apple's lineup. In an ocean of iPads and iPhones and iMacs and Mac Minis with their consumer hardware and enclosed batteries, the Mac Pro practically begs to be tinkered with, upgraded and extended.

I mean this literally. As I blogged extensively about in 2012, I've build dozens of PCs in my time, and NO case I've ever purchased, seen and/or used match the pleasure of upgrading a Mac Pro. There are no messy cables, no awkward catches or screws. The hard drives mount on sleds, the RAM and Xeon CPUs rest on daughter cards that just slide in and out.

It's a thoroughly Apple machine, with every last detail teased out and perfected. Competitors and Apple detractors scoff and such user expeirence detail, but it really comes through in their products. Apple cares, and few others do, it's as simple as that.

Or at least, it used to be that simple

Problem as, as many nerds have lamented over the last few years, the Mac Pro has been sorely neglected. Intel's Xeon architectures have continued to advance in leaps and bounds, and the Mac Pro has stood behind, watching the future fade into the distance.

From podcasts to blogs, I've heard several theories as to why this is. The current Xeon platform can't easily transfer dual Thunderbolt/DisplayPort interfaces on PCI Express. Apple were concerned about releasing a machine capable of driving a retina display. To say nothing of the problem with bare fans that prevented their manufacture and distribution in Europe of late.

Then last year, in a phrase that has received more scrutiny by the Mac tech nerd press than anything in a long time, Tim Cook announced there "would be something" for us fans of the Mac Pro this year. Not that there would be a new Mac Pro, but that we'd be delighted by what they have in store for us.

I share similar jitters with my fellow Macheads.

Unapologetic win

My MacBook Air is my sleek little starship I take around with me, but my Mac Pro is my space station. No more masses of enclosures, cables and power bricks everywhere, just a single monster tower with all my hard drives and data, and a gigabit Ethernet cable to talk to it.

I like the analogy of a space station. It doesn't need to be nimble, small or sleek, because it's just sitting there being full of awesome. The little starships in my family fly around the place with us, then return home to dock with the Mac Pro to back up their data, transfer downloaded podcasts and other media.

Assuming Apple replaces the Mac Pro with something at the Moscone Centre today, I can only hope they maintain what's so wonderful about this machine for their power users, scientists, media editors, developers, tinkerers and data hoarders (ahem). It's an unapologetic UNIX workstation that can swallow all the drives and tasks we throw at it, executed with the hardware design and elegance only Apple bothers with.

I suppose we'll soon see what they have in mind. Mind open Ruben, mind open!

Doing group work for our Routing and Internetworks class yesterday, all these terrible network memes started appearing in my head. Initially, I included them in our group report, but for the sake of our marks I'll be putting them here instead.

This is the first one, generated here. You're welcome.

While searching for information on an End of Life Cisco router series, I unwittingly stumbled upon this.

Today ASSA ABLOY Australia is pleased to announce yet another improvement to this range. A new turn mechanism has been developed for use on 1800 and 2800 Series Brass Plate Furniture to improve the ease of installation of these products.

Sharing for your convenience.

According to this article in Xconomy, Google's Eric Schmidt had this to say to people like me who dare to explore the privacy implications of Google Glass:

"Our goal is to make the world better. We’ll take the criticism along the way, but criticisms are inevitably from people who are afraid of change or who have not figured out that there will be an adaptation of society to it"

So they want to make the world better, by being patronising to people with legitimate privacy concerns.

This is disturbing trend, harking back to Scott McNealy in the 1990s. I blogged a few weeks ago about Robert Scoble crudly dismissing Om Malik's concerns about Facebook Home. Google have really honed their technique over the years, even by going as far as framing (hah!) the debate on Google Glass as whether you look more macho using it than a smartphone. Oh please.

The good news is: you can defeat this by simply continuing the discussion.

There are amazing, fun, enabling new technologies out there that will push the world forward in ways we can't entirely see or understand yet. It's exciting. It doesn't also mean we should sit down, shut up and lap it all up without also considering the broader implications.

As I always say, never trust those who tell you to stop thinking.

As a child of the 1990s and early 2000s, I grew up with multimedia CD-ROMs. For the time, they were amazing. When drives were counted in the tens or hundreds of megs, a 650MB CD-ROM with text, images, short video clips and sound were amazing. Or perhaps I was just an easily amazed child.

The medium was largely extinguished with the advent of fast internet access that facilitated free, widely available and constantly updated material that an optically-powered sneakernet could never hope to match.

It's that inflexibility that continues to fascinate me about the multimedia CD-ROM. With so much of the web being created, revised and lost on a daily (hourly... second?) basis, multimedia CD-ROMs are unashamedly frozen in time. While in the past this was a hindrance to wider adoption, today they can serve as time capsules into how the world was seen during the time they were made.

My favourite example: my DK World Atlas 1995 CD-ROM proudly states that "Singapore is the world's largest manufacturer of floppy disk drives". This is why I collect them!

Fast forward to the present

So, long story short, while waiting for some Indian takeaway to be prepared, my father and I inadvertently stumbled across a second hand music shop. While he was immediently drawn to the shelves and shelves of $1 CDs, I ran to a dusty shelf near the door that was chock full of old computer CD-ROM discs!

Within half an hour of rummaging, and for $10, I had these:

• Borland Delphi for Windows (did stuff in HS with this!)
• Cinemania 96
• DK Eyewitness History of the World, from 1995
• Encyclopaedia Britannica 98, International Edition
• Encarta 95
• Encarta 97 World Atlas, World English Edition
• Encarta 98 Deluxe
• Pinball Arcade, from 1998
• Red Hat Linux 9.0 Bible (3 CDs!)
• Starfleet Academy: Chekov’s Lost Missions (from 1998)

Once I've cleared out my dearth of assignments, I'll have to crank up my Windows NT 4.0 Workstation VM and explore some of these. ^_^

Every man and his dog is asking why PC shipments are going down (many of whom don't have as much assonance in their headings... or is that alliteration?) so I couldn't be silent any more!

It's reason season

Some (well okay, most) armchair analysts blame users dropping Windows 8 like a metro-riding hot potato. Others point to the iPad and the general move towards the cloud and virtualisation as reasons why people don't see the need for new hulking towers. The Gruber says sales of PC "trucks" are in decline as we all move to smaller, more efficient "cars".

I suspect a large part of the reason is far less exciting, and has more to do with corporate rather than consumer decisions.

Care to buy a second hand PC?

During the last economic downturn, companies delayed purchasing new machines. New machines translate to new licensing costs, training people, exhaustive compatibility testing. If you're being squeezed financially, it's understandable why you'd look at these expenses, and put them off.

In doing so, it's possible these companies realised they could continue using these machines productively. Extended support can be costly, but still far less than procuring new equipment they've since realised they don't really need. Besides, their employees probably use MacBooks and iPads at home anyway.

What we could be witnessing is the end of the 2-3 year corporate upgrade cycle, and the transition into something far more sustainable. It makes nothing but business sense, though you can understand why corporate IT providers are nervous. Perhaps there's something to this services-orientation stuff.

I'm only speaking from the inside perspective of two large companies, but I think there's a pattern here. Or I could just be entirely wrong; my haters would be the first to point out this possibility.

Which reminds me...

The word possibility looks like the word possum.

Picture of Hatsune Miku and that veritable ocean of windows by 7zu7 on Pixiv.

When we went through the latest family move, I wrote a ton of posts but didn't finish any of them. Here's one from March.

Michael Dell on Apple in 1997:

"What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders," Michael Dell said before a crowd of several thousand IT executives.

Dell on HP's plan to stop manufacturing PCs, which they've since reversed:

Goodbye HP, Sorry you don't want to be in PCs anymore..But we do more than ever. How would you say goodbye to HP? ~ Michael Dell

Dell announcing they wouldn't be selling netbooks, ironically not shortly after that remark about HP:

Dell is [no] longer interested in selling Netbooks--that category of 10-inch class laptops that saw mild success for a couple of years but is now facing a serious existential crisis.

HP on Dell's decision to go private, rather than shutting the company down and giving the money back to the shareholders:

Dell has a very tough road ahead. The company faces an extended period of uncertainty and transition that will not be good for its customers. And with a significant debt load, Dell's ability to invest in new products and services will be extremely limited. Leveraged buyouts tend to leave existing customers and innovation at the curb. We believe Dell's customers will now be eager to explore alternatives, and HP plans to take full advantage of that opportunity.

And now we've come full circle.

Photo by Eustress on Wikimedia Commons.

Remember the orgasmic furore we had to endure when Apple didn't include NFC in the iPhone 5? The Gruber links to this Verge article:

When we asked why Samsung did not include NFC tap-to-pay features in Wallet, the company said that retailers prefer barcodes over NFC because they don’t have to install any new infrastructure to support it.

Good thing I'm not one of those people who says "told you so". Filing under It's Not Apple, So It's Okay™

Responding to my Compaq Presario post, @dai1313 on Twitter posted a link to the beigetastic PC box he had. I recognised it instantly, a early Dell Dimension tower!

While I wasn't a fan of Dell, there was something understated and clean about those designs. This was the height before everyone desperately stuck coloured plastic panels everywhere in a half-arsed attempted to emulate the entirely new iMac. Then everyone went black, and nobody went back.

Just as 1980s Commodore computers have seen a resurgence in interest because people grew up with them, kids who grew up in the 1990s will have seen these, and I'll bet a few would pay for modern replicas of their old machines. Laugh all you want, but nostalgia can be a powerful force!