Q&A with Rentzsch

Posted May 14, 2010 By The Macalope and has 17 comments.

The Macalope felt Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch’s explanation of why he was canceling the C4 conference left some unanswered questions, so he took them to the man himself.
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MACALOPE: As the guy behind ClickToFlash (thank you for that, by the way), you don’t seem to have any real love of Adobe’s great gift to the Internet (which they made purely out of the goodness of their hearts, they’ll have you know). So the Macalope is assuming this is less about Flash and more about the free market principles violated by Section 3.3.1. Is that a fair statement? Anything you’d like to add to that?

RENTZSCH: It isn’t about flash (you’ve already noticed ClickToFlash) or free market principles (though I believe Apple will eventually need to tear down the walls on their garden under competitive pressure), it’s about advancing software engineering.

Apple has a bad track record of advancing software engineering. Objective-C 2.0 catches them up to 1995. 3.3.1 means we’ll be forever behind the curve.

MacRuby is the most exciting thing in a decade to come to Apple programmers. Politically iPhone devs can’t use it thanks to 3.3.1 (whether it’s ready for iPhone technically is another discussion).

MACALOPE: The majority of developers are probably not incensed by Section 3.3.1 because they never planned to use a cross-platform IDE anyway and have experienced years of abuse at the hands of Flash. So why should they care?

RENTZSCH: It’s not about cross-platform. It’s about writing Mac and iPhone software *better*. Less code. Less crashes. Faster-than-C runtime speed. Much greater dev speed.

Look, code is UI to programmers. Apple devs have been stuck on Windows 3.11. 3.3.1 means things won’t be getting better.

MACALOPE: It doesn’t seem to the Macalope like anything’s going to change until developers start walking. Any plans on getting out of the business of developing on Apple’s platforms or focusing on other platforms?

RENTZSCH: I’ve always done both Mac and Web programming. The brain damage in both communities tends to counteract the other. I’m focusing more on the web now, specifically Cappuccino and node.js. It’s feels great. Haven’t felt this good in years.

MACALOPE: The Macalope hasn’t followed your blog or Twitter closely but he did go back over them and didn’t see a huge amount of commentary on 3.3.1. Have you opined on it elsewhere? If not, doesn’t it seem odd to expect outrage from the rest of the development community when you yourself haven’t been noticeably vocal about it until now?

RENTZSCH: I usually yell about Apple stuff.

3.3.1 broke my spirit to the extent I gave up.

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The Macalope thanks Wolf for his responses. Also, he’s got a brief follow-up posted to his blog now which clarifies his position further.

iPad Derangement Syndrome

Posted February 6, 2010 By The Macalope and has 5 comments.

More shameless iPad boosterism in the Macalope’s Macworld piece this week. Sorry. He takes down some silly pundits, though. Everyone likes that, right?

Missing the forest for the trees

Posted February 5, 2010 By The Macalope and has 14 comments.

Chris Seibold at AppleMatters gets the ball rolling in one of the most dunderheaded arguments the Macalope’s ever seen.

Is Apple is going to switch to Apple chips for the Mac? The question arises because Apple uses an in house design to power the iPad.

The arguments for the switch are abundant:more control, more profits, a chip expressly designed for Macs. Seems good on the surface but what if the Mac’s surge in popularity is predicated on the chips from Intel?

He goes on to provide a series of charts that show the line for Mac sales rising precipitously after the Intel switch. But a coincidence of timing does not necessarily imply causality.

Over at ZDNet, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes thinks he knows the real reason behind Mac sales.

I have a different idea, one that’s linked to the Intel CPU, but not directly.

Boot Camp. Yep. My take on the Mac sales explosion is that it was the ability to set up Windows on a Mac as a dual boot OS was what really made Macs both viable and relevant.

…

Intel CPUs made Boot Camp possible, so in a way it was Intel that helped boost Mac sales, but only indirectly. What really boosted Mac sales was Windows.

Wow.

The Macalope really can’t believe this argument. It’s like watching two medieval barbers arguing whether leeches or bloodletting saved the patient.

Certainly the switch to Intel chips and the consequential ability to run Windows were contributing factors. The PowerPC was increasingly unviable for running a desktop operating system and there’s a good argument to be made that Mac sales would not have taken off if Apple had stuck with it and fell behind in speed. But that’s different than the chip driving sales. It was more like a pre-condition. Kingsley-Hughes is right that most people don’t care what processor is in their computer. Why should they? They just care about what the computer can do. But how many Mac users really run Boot Camp? Maybe the thought that it was always there if they needed it provided some comfort, a foot in the door, but if anything they were trying to get away from Windows, not run it on different hardware.

The Macalope would contend that three larger contributing factors than simply the brand of processor or the ability to run Windows were:

  • Microsoft’s inability to ship a viable alternative to XP for nine years. This is probably the biggest one. Seibold portrays this only in terms of Vista, asking if Vista drove PC users to the Mac, and there’s no real causality there, obviously, because he’s asking the wrong question. If you look at the graph he presents, the uptick in Mac sales starts about when the normal life cycle of the first machines with XP pre-installed ran out, around late 2003 to early 2004. When people started looking for new machines, they started questioning their choice of operating system and many decided to get something that had actually been updated in the last four years.
  • The iPod. The iPod made Apple a household name and restored confidence in Apple. People loved their iPods and were willing to consider getting a computer made by the same company the next time the opportunity came up.
  • The Apple Store. The first stores opened in 2001, but the company didn’t really achieve saturation in the major urban centers until a couple of years later. Oh, right about the time Mac sales took off.

Is it harder to believe that neither one of these guys even discussed these factors or that the Macalope continues to be surprised by this kind of blinkered thinking?

To Seibold’s question about whether or not Apple switches Macs to its own chips, the Macalope suspects that certainly wouldn’t happen any time in the near future. Boot Camp is a nice feature and some users rely on it. But more importantly ramping up to that volume would not happen overnight. And does the company really want to tell Mac developers they have to recompile again?

From the perspective of a Mac user, however, other than having to go back to relying solely on emulation to run Windows on a Mac, why would they care?

Making it better

Posted January 30, 2010 By The Macalope and has 8 comments.

Fraser Speirs (tip o’ the antlers to Marco Arment):

Think of the millions of hours of human effort spent on preventing and recovering from the problems caused by completely open computer systems. Think of the lengths that people have gone to in order to acquire skills that are orthogonal to their core interests and their job, just so they can get their job done.

In today’s Macworld piece (now up), the Macalope takes to task someone complaining the iPad doesn’t print. Speirs sums up the point he was trying to make nicely.

You should see the other guy

Posted October 17, 2009 By The Macalope and has 1 comment.

This week’s Macworld piece discusses whether the Windows 7 upgrade will be good or bad for Apple, talks about some potential new “I’m a Mac” ads and then Michael Dell goes wild!

Tease

Posted October 2, 2009 By The Macalope and has 1 comment.

InfoWorld’s Roger Grimes reopens the old “is it the size of the installed base or is it the technology” argument, writing Macs’ low popularity keeps them safer from hacking and malware.

The Macalope doesn’t have a problem with his piece, really, and pretty much agrees with him.What he was amused by is that this is how InfoWorld teased the piece in its daily email blast:

Macs are safer because nobody likes them

Ahhh, ha-ha! You stay classy, InfoWorld!

Comparative rates

Posted September 22, 2009 By The Macalope and has 5 comments.

John Gruber’s collected some stats on Snow Leopard adoption that puts it at almost 25% after about a month. This stands in contrast to the Vista adoption rate which appears to be about 20% after over two and a half years.

The Macalope has no doubt that Windows 7 will get adopted faster. It would be hard to get adopted any slower.

Good kitty, bad kitty

Posted September 5, 2009 By The Macalope and has no comments yet.

This week’s Macworld piece does a postmortem on the Snow Leopard upgrade by anecdote (how else to do it?), talks about Flash and asks how do you solve a problem like AT&T?

Revised stats

Posted August 3, 2009 By The Macalope and has no comments yet.

Net Applications has revised their statistics (which the Macalope used below even though he doesn’t take them as anything close to the final word on real market share) to better weight for country, and Vista’s share of the Windows market drops to about 20% (tip o’ the antlers to Adrian Kingsley-Hughes who notes that Safari and the Mac also lost significant share). So, where the Macalope said 65% of Windows users will have a hard upgrade? Make that 80%.

The change in share is presumably because more Vista adopters were in the U.S. and Net Applications considered their previous weighting too U.S.-centric. So, what the revised numbers seem to say is that there are more early adopters in the U.S. than countries like China, which they are now weighting more heavily, which isn’t surprising.

Adrian says:

It’ll be interesting to see how the companies affected take this information and spin it.

Prediction: they’ll ignore it. All of them. They’ll continue to focus on growth and bottom line. Who really cares about overall market share? The trends continue to be good for everyone but Microsoft.

Some stats on upgrading to Windows 7 and Snow Leopard

Posted July 31, 2009 By The Macalope and has 8 comments.

There were some complaints in the piece below (the nerve!) that the Macalope wasn’t taking everything into account when comparing upgrading to Windows 7 and upgrading to Snow Leopard, so let’s take another look at this.

A quick back-of-the-envelope analysis says about 77% of the OS X installed base is on Intel machines. The Macalope figures this by taking the figure of “OS X” installs given on Apple’s most recent quarterly conference call — 75 million — to mean Macs, iPhones and iPods Touch (sic). Subtract the number given for iPhone and iPod Touch sales to date — 40 million — and you have 35 million. (Note that this also means that the Mac is now a minority platform for OS X which is interesting.) Then add up all the Mac sales since roughly early 2006 – which is about 27 million. Apple started selling Intel machines in January of 2006, but doesn’t break out Intel vs. PowerPC sales so the Macalope chose to simply add up sales from the second quarter on, splitting the difference. (By the third quarter of 2006, all Macs were Intel-based.) It’s not exact, but it’s probably pretty close.

What’s the damage look like on the Windows side? Based on Internet usage statistics (the Macalope doesn’t like using these, but you can’t use sales statistics because Microsoft muddied the waters by counting XP sales as Vista sales) Vista’s share of the Windows market is somewhere between 28% and 40%. So, let’s say 35% to be generous.

(The numbers linked to are for overall market share. The Macalope calculated “percentage of Windows market share” by adding the Vista and XP numbers for a total and then figuring the relative percentages. Again, not precise, but close enough for the purposes of this discussion. Interestingly, the 40% number calculated from numbers on Wikipedia says it’s “as of the end of May” and the reference is a link to Net Applications data that doesn’t work. Which is a little odd because the other number is also supposedly from Net Applications data from the end of May, but it has actual charts from Net Applications. Hmm. Clearly, either the reference is wrong in Wikipedia or the number is. 35% is generous.)

So, what does this all mean? Well, 77% of Mac users will have no trouble upgrading to Snow Leopard. The Internet usage stats also show that 65% of Mac users are running Leopard, meaning the majority of Mac users will pay the minumum fee to upgrade (yes, some PowerPC users are running Leopard — the Macalope even has an iBook in the house running Leopard — but you’ve got to figure that the vast majority of the Leopard users are on Intel machines). 33% 23% (Gah! Math!), however, need a new machine.

Meanwhile, roughly 35% of Windows users will have no trouble upgrading to Windows 7 (other than navigating the overly-complicated decision tree to figure out which version to get). About 65% will have to do a clean install or buy a new machine with Windows 7 pre-installed.

It’s pretty much impossible to tell what percentage of Windows users will have to buy new machines, but the Macalope will admit he was ill-informed about the minimum system requirements for Windows 7. It’s only a 1 Ghz processor with 1 GB of RAM. It’s more likely the graphics requirements that will rule out older machines and once you start saying “Oh, but you don’t have to run Aero!” then you’re making excuses. Still, the horny one readily admits he underestimated the number of systems Windows 7 would run on.

Is it 33% 23% or more of the installed base? Who knows? But roughly two-thirds of Windows users are going to have a harder upgrade path later this year than three quarters of Mac users. Are all Mac users going to be happy? No! Of course not! Have you met these people? Bitch, bitch, bitch. All the Macalope’s saying is that 65% of Windows users have to move their files off their machines. The Macalope keeps hearing that Windows 7 is perfectly lovely and is every bit the husband and father that Vista should have been to your family but wasn’t with the drinking and the whoring and the lying. OK. That’s just a lot of people who’ll have one foot out the door after years of mistreatment.