Well, Apple have come out with a new set of their (in)famous Mac/​PC adverts. Sur­pris­ingly, this time round I find that I’m not para­lysed with rage — just mildly dis­gus­ted and dis­ap­poin­ted — and can write about them. Obvi­ously, I should make it abso­lutely clear that, as adverts, I hate them. They’re pat­ron­ising, con­front­a­tional and almost exclus­ively focus on per­ceived short­com­ings of the oppos­i­tion. But, as usual, they also make some claims that are gen­er­at­ing some … debate around the net, and I thought — as user of both Macs and PCs without (I hope) any par­tic­u­lar par­tisan lean­ings — I’d be well placed to pick them apart and give an object­ive review of their claims.

So without any fur­ther ado, here are my thoughts on the ads:

Legal Copy

This one is weird. I’m not quite sure what it’s try­ing to claim. That Apple machines don’t auto-​​update? Not true. That they don’t make you agree to click-​​through licenses when they do so? Also not true. About the only jus­ti­fi­able claim I could see here is that PCs tend to have a higher volume of auto-​​updates. But then the vast major­ity of them are Win­dows Defender updates that don’t have a click-​​through any­way. If I had to make a call, I’d say I do more clicking-​​through of licenses loaded with Legal Copy on my Mac than I do on my PC.

As far as I can see, this one is out-​​and-​​out dishonest.

Bio­haz­ard

This is prob­ably the most con­ten­tious issue raised by the new (and old) PC/​Mac ads. Apple have always insisted that Macs don’t have vir­uses, and that PCs are much more at risk of infec­tion or being hacked. But then they do things like quietly post advice to run anti-​​virus soft­ware on their sup­port for­ums, and PC users are under­stand­ably quick to jump on that as evid­ence that Macs aren’t so safe as Apple would have us believe. So what is the deal? Can a Mac really hang around in his cas­u­als while nearby PCs are forced into isol­a­tion suits?

I’m going to say yes, but with a honk­ing caveat. The fun­da­mental truth of the issue is that there are almost no mal­ware threats to the Mac; there have been about five actual cases of OSX mal­ware mak­ing any head­way at all in the wild. Com­pare that to the thou­sands of dif­fer­ent PC mal­ware threats released into the wild every month, to the tens of mil­lions of PCs act­ively enlis­ted in bot­nets and the dif­fer­ence is so stark as to almost make Apple’s com­pla­cency jus­ti­fied. Almost.

The point is that the reason OSX is largely safe from mal­ware attack is that there is no mal­ware to be attacked by. It’s not that OSX is some magical virus-​​proof wonder-​​OS; it’s that it has too small a market-​​share to be worth a cyber-criminal’s time. If Apple con­tinue to grow their market-​​share then sooner or later someone’s going to go for them, and I sus­pect that when that hap­pens Apple, and the wider Mac com­munity, will be woe­fully unpre­pared. There’ll be a few hec­tic months while every­one and his dog gets infec­ted, Apple rush to get a fix out, play catchup for half a year and finally get on top of the prob­lem. At least as much as any other plat­form has.

I’ve heard it sug­ges­ted that telling people they don’t need virus pro­tec­tion is irre­spons­ible because it means that when a threat does arise, people won’t be pro­tec­ted. I don’t really agree, for a couple of reas­ons. Firstly and most gen­er­ally, I’m not con­vinced of the util­ity of anti-​​virus soft­ware on any plat­form. Con­sumers spend mil­lions of dol­lars a year on Win­dows anti-​​virus soft­ware, and infec­tion rates are still through the roof. Not only that but anti-​​virus soft­ware itself feels a lot like mal­ware to me; it insinu­ates itself in every corner of your OS, gives you no con­trol over what it does or when, often kills a machine’s per­form­ance, and all for what seems to be very little gain.

So given that anti-​​virus soft­ware is expens­ive, inef­fect­ive and det­ri­mental to a machine’s day to day run­ning, I fail to see how advoc­at­ing it’s use on a plat­form that doesn’t cur­rently need for it would be a respons­ible act. Espe­cially given my second point, which is that no-​​one really know what Mac mal­ware will look like when it appears, and until they do, how can any­one write soft­ware that has a fight­ing chance of coun­ter­ing it? It’s true that there are cer­tain stand­ard pat­terns to mal­ware design, and by look­ing out for those exist­ing soft­ware might get lucky, but my guess is that it’ll take six months after the first real wave of infec­tions for the anti-​​virus com­pan­ies to get up to speed on the sorts of exploits real mal­ware takes advant­age of and how to close the secur­ity holes.

Those six months should be plenty of time for Apple to reverse its mes­sage on vir­uses and get star­ted on what will, in all like­li­hood, be a continent-​​sized pile of humble pie.

So, er, to get back to the point of the advert, is it true that Macs don’t have to worry about vir­uses? I’m going to say yes. But with caveats.

Stacks

Another odd one this. I get the feel­ing they were just try­ing to advert­ise that iPhoto has this neat new fea­ture, but had to dress it up in their usual con­front­a­tional format to make it fit the ad-​​campaign. I mean, everything they say and imply is sort-​​of fair enough; iPhoto does ship with every Mac, and does have facial recog­ni­tion, where an out-​​of-​​the-​​box PC is much more lim­ited; it’s just that that’s not a par­tic­u­larly con­vin­cing point to make. Yeah, I guess organ­ising pho­tos by facial recog­ni­tion is sort-​​of neat (when it works,) and it’s nice that it ships with Macs by default, but it’s not like the tech­no­logy is unheard-​​of on the PC; there is free, eas­ily avail­able soft­ware (Picasa), that does it just as well.

This also is my favour­ite of these four new ads, because it high­lights the over­arch­ing mis­take Apple has made with the whole cam­paign; the PC is just a much more like­able char­ac­ter. It’s always true, but I think doubly so in this one.

So are the advert’s claims true? Yes, I think so, just also pointless.

Time Trav­el­ler

Appalling.

This sort of mud-​​slinging just pisses every­one off. It effect­ively says “PCs hang and crash all the time,” which, without jus­ti­fic­a­tion or stats, is just the advert­ising equi­val­ent of “PCs smell of poo!”

Hav­ing said that, I have to add: sub­ject­ively, my exper­i­ence has been that my Macs have been more stable than my PCs. That’s not to say that I’m a typ­ical case, or that my exper­i­ence is neces­sar­ily rep­res­ent­at­ive; it’s just what I’ve noted over the past half-​​a-​​decade or so.

I’m not going to let my sub­ject­ive exper­i­ence col­our my judge­ment on this one though; it’s just not jus­ti­fi­able to make these kinds of claims without sup­port. False.

The End

So there you have it. I reckon roughly a 50% hit rate on truth, only one advert that actu­ally has a con­vin­cing argu­ment for buy­ing a Mac, and even that one is so heav­ily caveated as to make the state­ment in isol­a­tion bor­der­line dishonest.

It’s a real shame Apple insist on stick­ing to this advert­ising cam­paign; as far as I can see, all it does is ali­en­ate people. It’s doubly frus­trat­ing to me because Apple make great products that I really like. I love both my Macs, and while not every­body is going to like them, they are def­in­itely good enough to sell on their own mer­its without need­ing to con­stantly bad-​​mouth the oppos­i­tion. Now, if only Apple would actu­ally tell people what those mer­its are.

So, by now every­one knows everything there is to know about the iPhone 2, so I don’t have much to add. I thought I’d men­tion how dis­ap­poin­ted I am with it though.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, 3G is a big deal, and GPS is nice, but really… is that it?

The thing is, I don’t even know what I was hop­ing for; it just wasn’t this: the device that should have launched a year ago. I mean, they didn’t even up the stor­age to sweeten the deal.

Obvi­ously, I’ll be get­ting one, due to the device’s only really com­pel­ling new fea­ture: its price. O2’s some­what aggress­ive pri­cing means that I can upgrade to one with double the stor­age and a bet­ter data con­nec­tion for a scant £60, which, I sup­pose, is noth­ing to be com­plain­ing about.

In fact, maybe it’s churl­ish to be com­plain­ing at all; the iPhone was already a very desir­able device — I cer­tainly have yet to regret get­ting mine, even with only 8GB stor­age and 2G data — and increas­ing the spec at all while lower­ing the price isn’t some­thing you’d usu­ally com­plain about.

I just can’t help feel­ing that if the most excit­ing new fea­ture is a price reduc­tion, that the hype might be a little mis­placed this time round.

So it turns out that the Mac­Book Air’s bat­tery is a single dis­crete block (albeit a very thin one) that runs across the bot­tom of much of the case, and it’s rel­at­ively easy for an end user to swap out. Some people are call­ing this good news, but to me it just means that there really is no reason bar cost for not mak­ing the thing user swap­pable in the first place. I guess it might have meant weak­en­ing the case, but I’m not con­vinced; this is Apple, after all — I’m sure they could have come up with a neat bat­tery removal mech­an­ism if they had the will (I’m think­ing a covered slot on one side of the device that you slide the bat­tery into — like a really big PCMCIA card). I guess they’re just exper­i­ment­ing to see if people are pre­pared to put up with it. Lets hope people don’t an Apple fix this in the next version.

In a sur­prise (to me) move, o2 have announced a major shift in their tar­iffs, includ­ing a sig­ni­fic­ant change to their iPhone charges. This is great news for cus­tom­ers, as the inclus­ive minute and text allow­ances have gen­er­ally been sig­ni­fic­antly increased.

Being on the £45/​mo tar­iff, I gain the least; I only get double the inclus­ive minutes (up to 20 hours a month) now, the £35/​mo plan has three times the inclus­ive minutes (up to 10 hours) and two and a half times the texts. The £55/​mo tar­iff is gone, replaced by a totally over-​​the-​​top £75/​mo one that I, hon­estly, can’t see any­one going for. All tar­iffs con­tinue to offer unlim­ited free data over GPRS, EDGE and WiFi (via The Cloud.)

It’s not likely to sell the iPhone to any­one who wasn’t con­vinced, but it’s done a lot to improve the cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion of at least one consumer.

Of all the announce­ments this year, this one is def­in­itely the big­gie (although argu­ably, not the most sig­ni­fic­ant — the AppleTV could eas­ily trump it in long-​​term industry impact.) Apple’s new ultra­port­able was the announce­ment every­one was wait­ing for, and it’s gen­er­ated the most media buzz, most of it pos­it­ive. There’s no deny­ing the machine is desir­able, one thing Apple know how to do is design, and the Air is impress­ive even by their stand­ards. It’s also a pretty impress­ive feat of engin­eer­ing; a 13.3″ laptop, aver­aging about 1cm thick and weigh­ing a just over 1.3kg that man­ages to squeeze in a 1.8GHz Core2 Duo, 2GB RAM and a full-​​size, back­lit key­board, as well as a screen as good as you’ll find on any laptop. Oh and the bat­tery life is quoted at an extens­ive (for the size) 5 hours. It really is an impress­ive piece of work.

Obvi­ously, to get the size down so far, a couple of com­prom­ises have been made; it lacks an optical drive (to mit­ig­ate that can mount one from a nearby desktop machine over WiFi — a neat trick, but I won­der how fast the access will be,) has no speak­ers and sports a redesigned, smal­ler power con­nector, prob­ably mak­ing the device incom­pat­ible with any exist­ing Mac­Book adaptors you may have.

The basic model comes in at £1200, which isn’t excess­ive for a machine like this. It’s obvi­ously much more expens­ive than the cur­rent crop of ultra­port­ables from the like of Asus, and Pack­ard Bell, but that’s not really the mar­ket seg­ment it fits into. This isn’t a low powered palmtop, run­ning a pared down Linux dis­tro on A 500MHz via chip; it’s a full-​​spec PC squeezed into an ultra­port­able note­book form-​​factor. The 12″ Vaios and Think­pads are this device’s com­pet­i­tion, and in that con­text, the price looks fairly competitive.

But I wouldn’t buy one.

Why not? That’s a very good ques­tion. It looks great, it’s got all the fea­tures I care about, is incred­ibly light­weight, runs my favour­ite work­sta­tion OS, and fits com­fort­ably into my accept­able laptop price-​​range. The prob­lem is simply one of longev­ity. Apple con­sumer goods have been com­ing without replac­able bat­ter­ies for a while now, and I’ve always been more-​​or-​​less OK with that because iPods and iPhones, at a couple of hun­dred quid, pretty much fall into the “replace every couple of years” price bracket any­way. Is that because I have more money than sense? Quite pos­sibly, but when we’re talk­ing about what qual­i­fies as dis­pos­able tech­no­logy, even I draw the line some­where sig­ni­fic­antly south of a £1200 (or more) laptop.

It’s a shame; in so many ways, this would be the per­fect laptop for me, but I can really see this really hurt­ing its sales badly — I just can’t ima­gine any­one part­ing with that much money for some­thing that’s only going to last as long as its bat­tery. I know I won’t.

Update: OK — so it turns out that Apple will replace the bat­tery for $130 (US, so I guess about £80.) That’s the cost of the bat­tery, so fit­ting is effect­ively free. Also, a com­menter called Andrew on Engad­get poin­ted out that there’s almost cer­tainly no dis­crete bat­tery to be replaced; in order to get the thing as thin as that, they’ve likely spread the bat­tery out across the whole inside of the case; every­where there was a bit of space will have a bat­tery cell in it.

So, maybe the decision was a genu­ine com­prom­ise, rather than a rip-​​off, and it looks like Apple have made the com­mit­ment to make sure people canget a new bat­tery at low-​​ish cost, but I don’t think this really changes my opin­ion. People like the flex­ib­il­ity of swap­ping bat­ter­ies out, they like the feel­ing of secur­ity of hav­ing a spare. Per­son­ally, I just wouldn’t be com­fort­able know­ing that my abil­ity to replace a dying bat­tery is depend­ant on a third party con­tinu­ing to offer a ser­vice that they’re only offer­ing out of good-​​will in the first place.

Not as bad as I first thought then. But still a stop­per for me, and, I ima­gine, for a lot of other people as well. In a way, it’s even more of a shame if they have a good reason for it not being replace­able; it means that the product just isn’t viable, rather than has been spoiled by a mis­guided attempt to upsell.

Rumours about an Apple “tablet-​​PC” have been pretty per­vas­ive for the past few years, so I always take them with a pinch of salt, but this one sounds almost cred­ible. I actu­ally don’t know if I want this to be true or not; one the one hand, I’m cer­tain Apple wouldn’t release it unless it worked (good hand­writ­ing recog­ni­tion, decent bat­tery life, a window-​​manager that feels nat­ural with a touch­screen,) but on the other hand, I don’t see how there’s any way I’d res­ist buy­ing such a thing, and it would be bound to be expensive.

Apple have finally announced plans to allow third party developers to develop for their iPhone plat­form, bring­ing the device one step closer to the smart­phone it always wanted to be.

If the qual­ity of share­ware and free­ware avail­able for the Mac plat­form is any­thing to go by, this should lead to a pleth­ora of high-​​quality, reasonably-​​priced add-​​ons for the phone, which should really increase it’s appeal to the more tech-​​savy consumer.

Per­son­ally, this com­bined with actu­ally hav­ing seen one the other week is prob­ably enough to sell me one. Now all I need to do is find the money, and con­vince o2 to let me out of my exist­ing con­tract early…

Hey, it could happen!

So, it looks like the upcom­ing firm­ware upgrade turns unlocked iPhones into bricks. Well, that’s the risk you take when you install unau­thor­ised patches to a device’s firm­ware; it’s always a dan­ger­ous thing to do, and you can’t really expect Apple to pick up the pieces for you when it goes wrong. What does really get to me, though, is the atti­tude to unlock­ing your phone; Steve Jobs is on the record as say­ing “It’s a con­stant cat and mouse game” against the people who want to do so. OK, what the f*ck has it got to do with him what someone does with their phone once they’ve bought it. Really? All these people want to do is use the thing (for which he’s already got his money) on a dif­fer­ent car­rier to AT&T. Hell, to get the phone, they’ve already signed up for an AT&T con­tract (or someone has,) so who’s really los­ing out?

This atti­tude that big busi­ness has is really, really start­ing to get to me. Why shouldn’t I mod the firm­ware in my phone, once I’ve paid for it, to be able to use it on my net­work of choice? No, for­get that, why should I have to? Why can’t I buy an xbox game in the US and play it on my xbox here in the UK? Why should I have to re-​​buy all my DVDs just because I move to another coun­try and can’t get a region 2 player? Why do I have to worry every time I buy a CD whether it’s going to con­sent to be put on my iPod?

Where do these big com­pan­ies get off telling us, the con­sumers, what we’re allowed to do with things that we have already bought and paid for? It’s utterly out of line, and it’s wor­ry­ing just how accep­ted a part of mod­ern life it’s become. Some­thing has to change. It’s time we col­lect­ively remembered that without our money, these com­pan­ies, who pre­sume to con­trol our lives, have no income and no exist­ence. Fun­da­ment­ally, they only get away with it because we let them. Isn’t it time we didn’t?

Apple announced an entire new line of iPods at yesterday’s key­note. Asside from redesign­ing the Shuffle and the Nano, and doub­ling the capa­city of the stand­ard iPod (now called the “iPod Clas­sic”,) the really excit­ing news was the announce­ment of the much anti­cip­ated iPod Touch, which is effect­ively an iPhone with more stor­age and without the, well, phone.

Now I have to say it’s a very sexy device indeed; it’s got a big screen, a new UI and it looks gor­geous, but there’s no way on earth I’d buy one. Why? It’s got a max­imum stor­age of 16GB, that’s why. It’s a move I just can’t under­stand. Why on Earth, would they give what is clearly their new flag­ship iPod 10% of the stor­age of the old-​​style one? Why would they give a device that is clearly inten­ded for video play­back less room than I need to store all my music, never mind some­thing more to put some movies in? It’s a real shame, too. I have no inten­tion of buy­ing an iPhone — not unless it’s a lot cheaper in the UK than the US — and the pro­spect of an iPod that could play movies well, and be used as a handy wifi web browser is quite appeal­ing, but only if it also meets all my require­ments for a music player, and para­mount amongst those require­ments is that is simply must have enough stor­age for my music.

At the same time, the iPod clas­sic has just too muchspace. Not that that’s any bad thing, and it’s the iPod I’d be look­ing at get­ting if mine were to break, but given that my cur­rent model, with 100GB less space, has enough room for my music and then some, there’s just no point upgrad­ing there either.