Hot on the heels of switching to the Empire’s processors, Apple introduces Mighty Mouse, a multi-button mouse.

OK, maybe the world isn’t completely over, because it’s not shipping as the default. And they’ve got a nice figleaf to hide behind, as they have this cool “360 degree” scroll wheel, and the buttons aren’t buttons but pressure points. But still, it’s not just them selling the Kensington Thinking Mouse, which I owned to much joy in the 90s, but it’s Apple actually producing a multi-button mouse.

Now, if they’d announced that henceforth they would ship it with all their computers, I’d start running for my purple track suit and black nikes. So count this as a sign of the End Times. One guess is that with the transition to Intel, there will be computers with 2-button mice shipping so that Windows users feel more at home when coming to the Mac.

Dunno how unique this is or when Mac OS X got this ability, but I was looking at Wyatt’s blog with my RSS reader. It uses the Mac OS X-native WebKit technology to embed Safari’s HTML rendering in the article pane. I’m used to blog entries with images causing me to scroll, but I was wondering what was up with Wyatt’s image–and then I realized…

The picture was being wrapped:

Kinda cool, huh?

Update: So it wasn’t being wrapped, it was actually several images beside each other for some unknown reason. Dammit. That would have been cool.

The transition debate continues, and John “Hannibal” Stokes, every bit the CPU gearhead that John Siracusa isn’t, puts in his take. He talks AMD vs. Intel, the mystique of PowerPC, and lays out the reasons for the shift away from said mystique.

Good reading for those who look at any Apple move with an eye toward justifying their continued reliance on a platform optimized for zombie DDOS attacks. 😉

In an aside, I read an article that claimed Apple really should have gone with…Freescale? AMD? Stuck with IBM? No…Sun.

This apparently was by somebody who hasn’t seen Sun’s inability to compete with Linux + AMD/Intel on a hardware level, and whose argument was that PowerMacs competed with IBM’s server line, whereas PowerMacs wouldn’t compete with Sun’s…workstation line? Right. And Apple’s been running ads in Scientific American because they want to be the computer for the scientists’ kids and mothers.

Wow, it’s been almost exactly 10 years since I last saw the “Apple should buy/be bought by Sun” fusillades. I know! Maybe they should have gone with SGI!

John Siracusa covers any points I’d thought of related to the logic and emotion of Apple switching to Intel and goes, as usual, quite a bit further.

The only question he doesn’t ask that others are wisely asking is, what will current customers do?

My recommendation will still be for things like the iMac G5, which is a hell of a computer for a hell of a price and it doesn’t require a more-secure OS in front of it (a firewall) to make up for its shortcomings. But that’s going to be a harder sell than it was yesterday. I really wish Apple were shipping their developer system today for the general public so anybody who was really worried about their computer being “obsolete” (never mind that I have a 9-year-old Power Computing Mac clone in operating condition beside me that can browse the Web, do email, and process words, even running Mozilla) could find something to buy.

To answer my own question, my guess is that with emulation being a slowdown-producing hack, most applications would feel sufficiently slow that it would turn off “switchers”. Fortunately the OS itself, unlike the PowerPC days, is running completely natively on Intel. Presumably Safari and Mail will be native from the get-go, and Apple-supplied products like iWork could be updated within days. But Firefox, already an unoptimized application on the Mac, would be slower still, and MS Office, a better but still crufty application on any platform, would also be slow enough for people to balk. I’d love to test it, but not enough to re-join the Apple Select Developer program for $500 and shell out another $999 for the development version. And it’s moot–Intel-based Macs won’t be available for a year, barring some really spectacular things.

It’s sad that a platform that recently produced one of the lowest-cost, highest performance supercomputers in history is having to become merely “as good as” the competition in terms of hardware, but again, most people recently have been asking me about the Mac because they’re sick of Windows problems, not because they feel there’s a speed deficit. The good news is that they don’t feel a speed deficit in the current lineup of Macs, either, and that will continue to be true.

So if you are in the market, go ahead and buy a Mac if it meets your needs now. If it doesn’t, wait until it does, and don’t worry about the processor underneath. But I realize that such a rational calculus is not necessarily made in the market, and I expect there will be a year of depressed Mac sales, and a few depressed long-time Mac aficionados.

Just found out that screen captures generate PNG files instead of PDFs in the new Mac OS. Not sure if it’s good or bad, just something I hadn’t seen mentioned. Makes it a little easier to share with people, since the files aren’t likely to be quite as big.

So my new shiny pretty is a 19-inch…monitor. LCD monitor. Specifically, a Samsung Syncmaster 193P.

Quick take:

I have it hooked up via DVI and at native resolution (on Macs, you can specify other resolutions even with the DVI interface). I was able to play Unreal Tournament 2004 at full resolution and didn’t notice any issues beyond the detail and immersiveness of this screen–I think I actually get more area than the Dull CRT it replaces.

The default calibration on the Mac is pretty much dead on–nice and bright and with great contrast. Color gradients look better than any other LCD I’ve seen. I can, as usual, see JPEG artifacts more easily. Text is not as pretty as on a CRT at certain font sizes, but it is much more readable. (I just checked, and sure enough, Mac OS X had already switched to an LCD-optimized antialiasing setting. I also enjoyed reading about the driver installation and setup instructions for various flavors of Windows and Linux but not Mac OS X–It. Just. Worked.) Since the monitor size is fairly large compared to the resolution, I can see a little teeny bit of the mesh pattern of pixels and a hint of moir� in some flat color areas. Blacks are the blackest I’ve seen on an LCD. No dead or stuck pixels that I’ve yet detected.

Ergonomically, the monitor is very adjustable unless, as I do, you like it to sit a bit high. However, I was using a stand on every CRT I’ve ever used. I now have room to push the monitor back where I like it and stretch my arms out to the keyboard where they belong. However, the monitor adjusts along the z-axis as well (twisting the display to 90°). This is nearly useless for me as they don’t provide this software for the Mac (hello, one of your more loyal customer bases, Samsung). So it means that I’ve been twisting it a half a degree in each direction trying to find completely level.

Aesthetically it’s wonderful. A nice tannish silver which not coincidentally complements the color of both Mac laptops and G4 and G5 desktops. It works well with my charcoal electrostatic Monsoon speakers (the flat panels of the speaker world, and, by the way, well worth it–unbelievable the depth, richness, and lushness these electrostatics produce. I’d always thought electrostatics were dry and overly precise). It has a thin bezel, and the panel attaches to folding arm that rises from a round base. In the back of the base, under a lip, are three connectors: power, DVI, and analog. There is one button and a blue power light on the front. That’s it. All adjustments are made via the software.

The only place I’ve seen the dreaded ghosting is when switching between two Web pages with black backgrounds. I never saw this during the game I played. I’m prepared to live with it for the extra real estate.

It’s a little pricey but I’m satisfied I got what I paid for, and then some.

Jason calls attention to the news that Jef Raskin died last night. I have little to add, but as a Mac user, I wanted to point to the collection of stories about the founding of the Macintosh that have Jef Raskin in them over at Folklore.org, a great collection of first-person accounts by many members of the original Mac team.

Since I bang on and on about the Mac here (well, I mention it occasionally at any rate), I thought I’d give equal time to those who disagree. So, forthwith, here is a switcher story about moving from Mac to Windows.

I think liberals in particular will find the reasons compelling after the election of 2004.

If you are an old Mac hand, as, young and vital as I am, I seem to be, you may have odd old files lying around, possibly on floppies.

Assuming you can get them onto your Mac OS X system (floppies? How…1984), you may find they are unreadable. You might even find they are labeled “DD”. Stuffit Expander doesn’t know how to deal with them. However, it turns out you can trust that backwards compatibility on a Mac will actually rival Windows.

Go to ye olde HyperArchive, a site you may dimly recall from the mists of time. Find the line that says:

Abstract of dd-expand-40.sea.hqx 181K (12/20/1993) Download

And click the “Download” link. Yes, the file date is 1993, and yes, that’s a 181K file. That app will browse your filesystem to this day and expand any DiskDoubler archive. This is what we used before hard drives were cheap. It used the LZW compression algorithm, apparently, which is why open source tools don’t decode it. It is now basically abandonware by Symantec. Thanks, Symantec.

But anyway, this file from 12 years ago opens and runs just fine in emulation, and it managed to get a bunch of my old files recovered.

Woot.

The neutered Napster wants you to Do the Math and compare how much it takes to fill up an MP3 player on their site versus on iTunes. They claim it’s $10,000 compared to $15.

How? It’s $15 a month (roughly) to use the Napster To Go service. A 40GB iPod holds 10,000 average pop tunes. They offer as many downloads as you want (they use the term “unlimited,” which is misleading as I’ll show in a moment) for $15 per month.

“D’oh!” say you, “Why have I been such a schmuck on iTunes when I can sign up for a month of Napster, download all the songs to my iPod I’ll ever want, and then sign off again?” This is of course the calculation Napster is making.

Several things of course are wrong with that statement. By the numbers, math students:

1. Napster isn’t compatible with the iPod. That means they have lost 70% of the MP3 player market right there. So if you have an iPod, you’ll have to shell out another $350+ for a “Napster-compatible” MP3 player. If you have one of the few Napster supports, you’re golden. If you don’t, it’s off to the store with you. So add $350 to their price right off the bat.
2. If you are superhumanly quick and perseverant, you might be able to download a tune every five minutes (this includes searching for as well as actually downloading and transferring your tune to your non-iPod MP3 player) for 18 hours a day. Well, you’re already spending $30 as it will take you a month and a half at that pace to download 10,000 songs. Of course a normal human might, if they were very invested, do it for an hour a day. You’ll have to do this every day for 2.2 years or so, meaning that the downloads have cost you $420, not $15. Do you really plan to spend $420 on downloadable songs in the next two years? I sure don’t.
3. But wait, there’s more! Act now and you’ll hear the songs. Stop your subscription and…wha? Oh, no, wha happa? No tunage! Suck, dude! Yep, you’re renting the songs, not owning them. So if you go off Napster and want to listen to that cool tune you discovered, well, you’re toast. So number of songs you have the month after your $420 to Napster? 0. 0/$420 sucks much worse than 420/$420.
4. We’re not done yet, weird bad-math cat-like creature! If you’re clever, you think, “Ah, well on iTunes if I ever want to have completely unrestricted access (using non-iPod MP3 players, putting them on an MP3 CD, moving them to more than 5 computers, whatever) I just burn them to a CD. I’ll just burn my Napster tunes to a CD and re-rip them. Score!” Bzzzt. Nice try, but if you want to burn your Napster tune to a CD, guess what you have to pay? 99 cents per song. So add $420 to your $420 if you want to keep them. So, price on iTunes for 420 songs: $420. Price on Napster for 420 songs? Two months of download fees ($30) plus 99 cents per song: $450. Whoa, that’s, like, smart, dude.

So, what are we left with? A service that is better described as for-fee, very personalizable and time-shiftable radio. There may be a market for that. If there is a big market, you can bet iTunes will have it soon. However, I doubt there’s a big market for that, as people will cease wanting to pay $15/month once they’ve finished collecting the tunes they want to keep. Simpler to just pay for them the first time, and never really worry about it again AND keep your iPod. Don’t have one and don’t want one? Burn them to CD and re-rip, or, consult one of the many DRM-cracking programs out there or exploit the analog hole.

Napster is never getting me, as a) the vast majority of my collection is from my own CDs, b) those few songs I want to pay for (to date a whopping 5) I don’t want to have to pay for again, and c) I don’t own an MP3 player. I just play them on computers, and iTunes is available for Mac and Windows.

Do the math, and you’ll find out that Napster costs you more money in the long run under realistic assumptions.