Whenever I get caught up in thinking Steve Jobs can do no wrong, I remember the NeXTcube, a box breaking new ground on so many fronts (M-O RW drives, Display Postscript, heavily graphical unix OS, a cube, not to mention objective C) that it couldn't find a market.
Apple's new directions are great, but they're not without their growing pains, specifically:
Abandonment of CRT Displays - I know, flat-panel displays are good, right? They're light, very crisp, give you plenty of desk space, and they're oh-so-cool. Yes, except if you're a graphic designer. The color consistancy on an LCD is abyssmal, more so on notebook displays than desktop LCDs, but they're still inappropriate for print and new media graphic design. Every professional designer I know has a 21" display, yet Apple chose to discontinue theirs, forcing third-party, non-pretty solutions on the design community, admittedly the group most attracted to Apple's industrial design.Now the 17" is all that's left, and you can bet Apple's itching to scrap it as soon as they can get their 18" LCD out the door for under $1200. (Did I mention LCDs have higher profit margins?) The price for this progress is leaving a host of Apple's most ardent supporters on the side of the road to fend for themselves.
Rewritable CD drives - Steve said Apple was 'late to the game' on CD-RW, and put in CD-RW drives into all but the highest Tower G4 machines (which get the SuperDrive, which in my day was the name for the 1.44 meg floppy drive in the Mac SE). CD-RW is great, but he doesn't mention that in joining the CD-RW game, he's abandoning the DVD game for these people. As of now, you can't even order a tower G4 with a DVD drive as a custom option, and the only tower that has a DVD drive isn't shipping until March. The worst part is what happens when Steve brings CD-RW to the iMac. Unless SuperDrives suddenly become plentiful, we'll see iMacs without DVD drives, and Steve's advancement will actually be a step sideways, and for many, backwards. If it's been hammered into us that we don't need floppy drives in our macs, why do we need rewritable CDs, in essence, big floppies? That's great, but not at the expense of DVD.
Mac OS X - Nuthin' to say here. I was worried about it when I installed Public Beta 1, but the changes to the UI are in the right direction, and a slow release is the best way to go. I'm really excited about BSD under the hood, especially once most of my Mac apps work well on top of it.
Ah well, just an unanticipated morning rant to start the week off right. I hope you all had a good weekend, got a good laugh out of the XFL. (Do the cheerleaders also get paid more if they win?) I've got a quiz in 90 minutes so I really should be off to study now.