Spontaneous Monotony

Apple (the computer one - suppose it needs stating given BBC Chav News’ blanket coverage of Paul McCartney’s divorce) recently varied its trademark to cover:

toys, games and playthings, namely, hand-held units for playing electronic games; hand-held units for playing video games; stand alone video game machines; electronic games other than those adapted for use with television receivers only; LCD game machines; electronic educational game machines; toys, namely battery-powered computer games

The fanboys (and, more depressingly, some proper tech news sites) have made the quite superhuman leap from this to the assumption that Apple is making a games console - ignoring the far more plausible conclusion that Apple has simply amended their trademark to reflect the fact that the iPod now plays games, and prevent anyone from using ‘Apple’ to market any competitor devices.

Aside from the basic principle that the most obvious reason is usually the correct one, there is a very big reason why Apple wouldn’t make a games console: they have no real games experience. When Microsoft decided to make the Xbox in 2000, they already had behind them several years of making the OS of choice for games developers as well as making a great number of computer games themselves. Apple has neither of these. Most of the games on OS X are ported after-the-fact by the likes of Asypr, or run the Windows version in the not-really-brilliant Cider emulation layer (for those who haven’t heard of it, this is little more than a Mac port of the Cedega emulator which does the same job for Linux*.

I fail to see how Apple can jump from this state of affairs to making an honest-to-Jebus games console. Leaving aside the lack of games experience, Microsoft had to sink billions of dollars into the Xbox program to get it off the ground, and Apple would be starting from scratch in the same way - though without the huge cash reserves a behemoth like MS has at its disposal.

*Let’s not get into the whole Wine Is Not an Emulator argument, it’s tiresome and misses the point entirely. The central purpose (certainly of Cedega - there is more of an argument as far as Wine itself is concerned) is to run programs which have been compiled for Windows, on Linux - the job of an emulator - rather than compiling Windows source code in a Linux-compatible fashion.

When Apple put up their ’something in the air’ posters, the fans started salivating at the rumours. Flash-based Macbook Air, new appleTV with wireless bluray streaming! Er… no. It’s a wireless backup server. In other words just an all-in-one version of the ethernet NAS drives you can already get. Big deal (source: ArsTechnica’s MWSF IRC updates)

EDIT: Macbook Air is real, the backup server was just a red herring. Details here.

The official Apple page about the Macbook Air is now available

I’m not usually in the habit of posting about Wordpress upgrades unless they offer some startling new feature that you are likely to be salivating over However, this minor security upgrade is the first I have done from my Ubuntu-powered laptop. Installing the necessary software was a breeze (ftp uploading is one of the few things that Ubuntu Feisty doesn’t support out of the box) - just a matter of running Synaptic, searching for Filezilla (there might be better ones, but I use Filezilla on Windows so I thought consistency might be helpful) and then installing it.

Oh yeah, and I’ve got the upgrade to the new major release of Ubuntu to do in the near future. Unlike Microsoft and Apple, who want £250 and £85 for the upgrades to the full featured versions of their new operating systems, the Ubuntu upgrade is free and done from within the usual Updates Manager. Oh yeah, and the updater doesn’t install software without my consent.

I posted the other day about the surprisingly poor quality of the new version of Safari. People elsewhere assumed that the widespread reports of problems were simply minor bugs, or people who didn’t know how to install it properly, and other such defences usually reserved for the few Microsoft fanboys out there.

Now it’s official. Wired has done a benchmark of various tasks (such things as loading the Gmail inbox page) and Safari came dead last. Yep, worse than IE. Not only that, their review uncovered the sort of crashes and stalls that Apple-zealots have been trying to pretend don’t exist. It’s just lucky for Apple that they weren’t planning to make any money out of Safari for Windows - it’s turning out to be their worst product release since the puck mouse.

EDIT: It’s full of security flaws too! The reputation of Apple’s software division is going up in smoke by the hour.

You might remember that a while back I mentioned a new Windows browser based on Safari’s WebKit rendering engine. That didn’t amount to much, but not wanting to be outdone, Apple have released Safari itself for Windows, and it is even worse!.

Most of the Apple software which is available for Windows is actually pretty good. It might lock out features that every other competitor provides for free (Quicktime), or refuse to work with any player other than Apple’s own (iTunes), but what it does do, it generally does well and with a nice user interface.

Safari blows this reputation out of the water. Its page loading is, according to Apple’s publicity pages, the dog’s dangles:

The fastest web browser on any platform, Safari loads pages up to 2 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2.

Whoever wrote that should be careful he doesn’t put his nose near anyone’s eye. Safari is the most pig-slow piece of garbage that I have ever encountered. I’m not talking about complicated sites using lots of Flash or Javascript (I haven’t bothered to install the former, since I won’t be using Safari in its current state), I’m talking about relatively straightforward text-plus-pictures sites like BBC News. That, of course, assumes that it bothers to load the page at all. Often, during the ~5 second page loading time (by which point in any other browser I’ve reached the page and probably clicked a link to another one) the ‘progress bar’ will simply stop for no apparent reason. Sites that are working fine (as attested by IE7, Firefox 2, and Opera whatevernumber) simply fail to load. At all.

This could be down to individual connection foibles - I’m running NOD32’s Imon, and a router with its own firewall in addition to my software firewall. That wouldn’t be a particularly promising start (given that other browsers work in this setup) but it would at least be sort-of excusable for a Beta release. Unfortunately, from the comments at ‘Two a Day’, it seems that I am not alone:

Mac user at home, WinXP at work. Installed the beta at work and crashed when I tried to access Yahoo mail. Seems awfully counter productive to release a beta this unstable to the Windows people.

I never thought I’d say this, but I think that IE6 has finally lost its long-treasured crown of ‘worst Windows web browser ever’. Who would have thought that Apple, king of user-friendliness, could release such utter crap?