Apple's new laptop

It's now been two days since Apple announced the first machines ever to ship with Intel processors, due to ship in February. (See my earlier post: Apple's future with Intel.) Steve said something about a new Intel-based iMac or something, I guess, but nobody cares because he also announced a new pro laptop that uses an Intel chip.

The usual flurries of oohs and ahhs, glowing reviews, playful cynicism, and plugs from unexpected directions have all played out. Now people are starting to look a little more closely at the offerings.

Missing Pieces

Finally, for the first time I have no connection whatsoever to Apple and I can talk about a new release without the fear of getting arbitrarily fired. So I'll dig in from my new perspective as an Apple outsider and take a look.

Rosyna examines what's not in the new laptop in his enigmatically titled Lost in Transition: Overcane of Antflower Milk. Don't worry about the title; he's just like that.

To sum up: no S-video, no FireWire 800, no modem, slightly lower resolution (1440x900, when the previous laptop was 1440x960), no dual-layer DVD burning. And from looking at the battery and the power brick, it seems likely that power consumption is actually higher on this machine than the previous iteration. (Not a big deal to me, since that's the natural progression anyway -- but worth noting.)

I'd add two things to that list:

• No PC card slot. It was traded up for an ExpressCard/34 slot, which will ultimately be a good thing... but first, people will have to start making cards that fit it. To call the current offerings sparse would be generous. That'll be fixed in a year, but it may be a concern for a handful of early adopters who need PC cards for one reason or another.
• No two-button trackpad. This doesn't matter when you're running Mac OS X, because OSX uses control-click. But tough luck if you were hoping to dual-boot into Windows; you simply can't run Windows usefully with a one-button mouse.

Many people have noticed that Apple is being suspiciously quiet about battery life. No statements on battery life are available, which is very odd for a laptop announcement. My sources suggest that they're simply not done with the final power management code, so they don't want to release actual metrics yet. If I may insert a side comment here, my own experience and tendency toward cynicism suggests that they will ship a half-assed version of power management with the machine, then patch it later with a couple of system updates to get to a version that actually works. Call it a hunch.

Performance

As the saying goes, "There are lies, damn lies, and benchmarks." Apple is claiming a whopping 4x speed boost over the previous PowerBook G4. But take a look at this breakdown of the benchmarks from Apple themselves:

Notice how only Modo -- an application that is heavily tuned for Intel chips -- is listed as about 4x faster, and everything else gets in the neighborhood of 2x. From Luxology's site:

The modo rendering engine deeply leverages various Intel Technologies to improve scalability and performance. Our bucket rendering provides near linear scales in performance with multiple processors and Intel® Pentium 4 processors with HT Technology.

Everything else that hasn't been hand-tuned quite as much for Intel chips only gets a boost in the neighborhood of 2x. Funny thing, really... 2x is just about the performance boost you'd get going from a single G4 to a dual G4.

From examining those benchmarks, my professional opinion is that it looks like a single core of the new Intel chip runs a little faster in these tests than a comparably-clocked G4, or roughly equal to a comparably-clocked G5.

The real performance boost comes from the fact that there are two cores. It's like the laptop went from a single-processor G4 to a dual-processor G5. That's a real boost, of course -- the machine really does seem to be twice as fast as the old machine, which is awesome and worthy of praise. But it's not because it's Intel vs PowerPC; most of the boost is due to the upgrade from single-processor to dual-processor.

As for people getting over-excited about Intel's SSE vs PowerPC's Altivec, my personal opinion -- as someone who's written code for both -- is that in the final analysis they're really quite similar. Sure, there are differences. Each is good at different things, and optimizing for one is not the same as optimizing for the other. Altivec has more registers, but then again you pay for those extra registers during context switches. Switching to SSE is more of a lateral move than a step back. It'll take a while for Apple and other vendors to convert everything that was Altivec-optimized to be fully SSE-optimized, but they'll get there.

Update: Ars Technica comes through with a hands-on look at the new iMac, and had a chance to run some benchmarks. Since they use the same CPU, the iMac probably has performance very similar to the new laptop. Check it out for more details.

Dreams of Dual-Booting

One of the reasons I was really interested in the new laptop was the possibility of dual-booting into Windows, and later, when the software became available, running Windows in a VMware-style shell.

My current work (contracting for Sony on PSP/PS3) requires me to use Windows XP on a daily basis. While I've mostly managed to customize my Windows system to the point where it satisfies my needs, I still really miss a lot of the nicer little features of the Mac: iChat, iCal, iPhoto, even AppleScript. And when I'm traveling I can't really work on Mac software without bringing two laptops along -- which is obnoxious both because of the extra weight and the extra hassle at the dog-and-pony show that passes for airport "security" in this country.

A single dual-booting laptop would have been a great solution for me -- I'd sign up to buy it right now if I thought the new laptop would deliver on that front, even without a two-button trackpad.

But it's been reported that Windows XP won't boot the laptop, because it uses EFI rather than a BIOS to boot. Longhorn, aka Windows Vista, should work... but who knows when that's coming out? Right now it's supposed to be the end of 2006, but it appears to be even money on whether Microsoft will actually make that date. The Longhorn schedule and magical ballooning feature list has looked a lot like Copland's so far, which isn't very heartening.

In summary, don't get this laptop for its capability to run two OSes; it will be a while before it can. Perhaps once there's a consumer VMware product for Mac OS X that boots XP I'll take a second look at it.

Update: In an interesting twist, Intel has firmly stated that you can definitely boot Windows XP with an EFI Core Duo system if the vendor provides a BIOS compatibility shim. Interesting! However, Ars Technica reports that they had no joy installing either XP or Vista on the new Intel iMac, so the shim is either not there right now or just not provided with the iMac.

But now that it seems at least technically possible, I bet we'll see a BIOS shim for the new laptop -- either factory installed, or as a download. Keep your eyes peeled; it may not be over yet!

The Good Stuff

So far this has seemed way too negative. That's not really how I feel. Overall I have to say I really do like the laptop as a Mac.

Things like lack of S-video and a modem don't bother me personally. Now that wi-fi has really taken off, it's not the crisis it used to be to be stuck in a hotel room without a modem -- you just have to find the nearest Starbucks. If you are one of the 2% of users who really need to use S-video or a modem regularly, you can get an adapter dongle. No, it's not as nice. But it works fine, and it helps bring the price of the laptop down for the rest of us.

I think the built-in iSight is nice; while not always useful, it's one of those things that's nice to have standard. Video chat and other applications of the camera (think Flickr) will increase dramatically if the iSight is now going to be standard on every new machine. I don't like bringing my iSight with me when I travel, but I'd definitely use a built-in one to video chat with my wife if I had it.

And the speed, ah, the speed. This machine really is fast. If you are looking for a fast new Mac laptop, this is what you've been waiting for.

What's up with the name?

I haven't even talked about the name yet. Apple used to sell the PowerBook. I guess they still do, at least for a while. The brand had good name recognition despite that awkward capital B in the middle that nobody actually bothered to type.

But this new laptop has been rebranded and is no longer a PowerBook. Instead, it's called a "MacBook Pro". Hardly anybody I've talked to likes the name, myself included. But I might be able to guess at the rationale behind it. Bear with me.

"PowerBook" is a brand name. A PowerBook actually has three unique brands associated with it: "PowerBook", "Mac", and the superbrand "Apple". Personally, I think it's a very strong name, and it has the benefit of 15 years of brand-building success behind it. People know what you're talking about when you say PowerBook.

MacBook Pro, on the other hand, is a brand extension. A double brand extension, really. "MacBook Pro" is an extension of "MacBook", which itself is an extension of "Mac". On the face of it, from everything the The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding tell us, this is a much much weaker name. Why on earth did Apple decide to make this change?

The only reason that makes sense to me is that Apple must have decided that they're going to start consolidating the Mac brand. Rather than having separate brands under the Mac umbrella, everything Mac is now going to include Mac in the name. If that's true, then the "iBook" name will going away to be replaced by just plain "MacBook". "PowerMac" will go away, to be replaced by something like "Macintosh Pro".

Why consolidate the Mac brand? Perhaps, and just perhaps -- this is wild speculation -- it's to get ready for a possible future move to OSX running on non-Apple PCs. Let me be clear here: I don't expect such a move of the OS to non-Apple PCs for at least five years or more. But Apple of course has to be thinking about the possibility of competing with Microsoft in the future.

If they were to start letting OSX run on non-Apple PCs, they might want to rebrand "Mac OS X" to "Apple OS X" to make a distinction between the high-end Mac computer brand and other non-Mac computers. But doing that would weaken the Mac brand, right? So that may be why we're seeing the brand consolidation now, years before any of these other changes take place. It's about strengthening the brand in anticipation of possible weakening later.

Just a thought.

I'm so totally Extreme

This weekend I finally upgraded my wireless network at home. For the past three or four years I've been using a second generation AirPort base station, which was 11Mbps with 40-bit WEP. It's been thoroughly out-of-date for a while now, but it met my needs, was rock-solid, and worked like a charm so I didn't feel the need to upgrade. And after all, 5.5Mbps is still more bandwidth than my real-world connection to the internet, so I knew that switching to the higher-bandwidth AirPort Extreme wasn't going to make a difference in simple web browsing.

But this week I finally broke down and made the jump to the latest and greatest. A combination of two things finally pushed me over the edge:

1. I've been doing a lot more work lately that involves transferring things between machines in my office. Local transfers from machine-to-machine are where 54Mbps can really make a difference.

2. The signal strength wasn't so great everywhere in the house, and I wanted to use WDS with an AirPort Express to extend the range of my network.

Another small factor was that if I upgraded, I could have iTunes send its output directly to my stereo via AirTunes. Personally I think AirTunes is kind of a gratuitous and somewhat goofy feature. It's certainly not enough to make me spend a couple of hundred dollars on new equipment. But I have to admit that once the other (much better) reasons pushed me over the edge, I was looking forward to giving it a shot.

So I made the plunge and bought an AirPort Extreme Base Station and an AirPort Express, and hooked everything up.

Perhaps because I like pain, or maybe just because I wanted to see if it would work, I decided to set up the AirPort network from a Windows laptop. Okay, the real reason is that my old TiBook recently died from catastrophic hinge failure and I couldn't find where I'd left the charger for the iBook, which meant that I didn't have a wireless-capable Mac handy.

Setting up the main base station worked like a charm. I plugged it in, ran the Windows version of the admin utility -- which I have to say is really very nice -- and saved the configuration from the old base station into a file on my desktop, then imported it into the new base station. Happily, it copied out my DSL PPPoE account and password. In the process I upgraded the wireless security from WEP to WPA, set my server box as the default host (DMZ), and configured the base station so that it would syslog to one of my machines. Restarted the base station, connected with the new password, and everything worked flawlessly. Great!

Getting the Express set up to extend my network, however, was a little bit trickier. I started at the obvious place with the AirPort Express Assistant for Windows. But somewhere in the middle of the setup as it jiggled Windows XP and base station settings, it failed while reading from the base station with an error -4: "bad param". Tried again several times with the same result. Hmmm. Not so great, and virtually impossible to diagnose what went wrong.

Why, no problem, says I, I'll just configure it directly with the admin utility.

That's much easier said than done. I did get it done in the end, but it certainly didn't go as smoothly as I was hoping it would. There are a lot of non-obvious details that need to be just right before everything works. Most of the answers can be found in the admin utility's help if you know where and how to look, but it takes some digging.

Here are some tips from my experience with setting up WDS manually:

• Terminology. You have the main, relay, and remote stations.

  • The main base station is the one connected to the internet via Ethernet.
  • Relay stations connect between base stations, and do not have an Ethernet connection.
  • Remote stations provide services to clients, and do not have an Ethernet connection.
  As far as I can tell there's not a lot of practical difference between relay and remote, since both main and relays can be configured to accept client connections too. It may be the case that remote stations are able to dedicate more bandwidth to clients than main or relay stations, but I'm not sure about that. In any event it seems more like something you'd only be concerned about for a large-scale installation with lots of client computers and extremely heavy traffic -- I doubt it matters for home networks.
• MAC addresses. Before you start, you need to write down the AirPort MAC addresses of all the base stations involved. It's on the outside of the base station, or you can get it from the base station chooser. If you do that, though, remember that the stations will be broadcasting different wireless networks at first. So you need to join each one in turn, then select it in the chooser (no, not that chooser) and write the AirPort MAC address down somewhere.
• "Distribute IP addresses" should only be set on the main base station, not on relays and remotes. Thankfully, the admin utility warns you about this.
• All stations must use the same channel. Pick a channel (I like 3 and 10) and set both base stations to it. The admin utility tells you that you can't use 'Automatic', but neglects to mention that all base stations have to use the same channel -- which is kind of an important detail.
• Set up the main base station first, then relays, then remotes. When you set up a WDS main base station, you'll need to enter the MAC addresses for the WDS remote and relay stations that will be allowed to connect. It doesn't work if you go the other way, because a remote base station won't be able to connect to the main base station until the main base station has been configured.
• Use different SSIDs (network names) at first. It doesn't matter whether base stations connected by WDS have the same network name or different names. Toms Networking recommends that you use different SSIDs, while Apple's Designing AirPort Extreme Networks for Windows recommends on page 38 that you use the same SSID. But if you plan on giving them the same name eventually, don't start out that way! Give the networks different names so that you can be sure you're connecting to the right base station when testing to make sure that it works. Once everything is working you may then decide to set them to the same SSID; it's up to you.
• Know where the reset button is. If you make a mistake and can't find one of the base stations on the wireless network anymore, hold down the reset button for about seven seconds (until it starts flashing quickly) to give it a hard reset. The button is recessed, but can be pushed with a paperclip, staple, ball-point pen, or stereo miniplug.
• Double-check all of your settings if you are importing settings from an older base station to a newer base station. At one point in the process I noticed that my main base station's transmission strength was apparently set to the lowest setting -- 10%, instead of 100%. I can only speculate about why that happened. The older base station didn't have adjustable signal strength, so perhaps it pulled in a zero value rather than the default of 100% when it imported my old configuration to the new base station.

Phew. Anyway, after a little bit of futzing around, I've got it working and I'm happy. The speed on the local network is much better, and the WDS extension has made the signal strength much stronger throughout the house. It wasn't too much of an ordeal and I got it all sorted out in an hour or two, but it was certainly harder than it should have been. Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks so, either.

But as a bonus to reward all my hard work, I can now have iTunes play through my stereo via AirTunes. Dude, I'm like so extreme.

Ohio Needs Reform

[Update 11:20pm: Wow. The full results aren't yet in, but with about 79% of the votes counted it looks like all four of the RON issues got squashed badly. What a shame -- so many Ohioans will be disenfranchised by this, and the state will continue to be mired in economic woes. The current batch of crooks who got us into this mess will continue to rig the system to keep themselves in office. A sad day for Ohio.]

If you live in Ohio, you've probably heard about the Reform Ohio Now proposals that are on the ballot as Issues 2, 3, 4, and 5.

These are at issue in the election on November 8th. That's TODAY! Make sure you get to the polls and vote YES on these issues!

What are these issues about?

I would recommend reading either the summary or the actual text yourself, but in a nutshell:

• Issue 2 makes it easier for Ohioans to vote by mail. This is a growing trend in voting, since many precincts have lines of up to several hours to vote and many people can't take that kind of time off from work to vote. It's proven successful in other states, and it's long overdue here: Ohio has some of the most restrictive rules for absentee ballots in the nation.
  
  
• Issue 3 puts limits on state campaign contributions. These limits are similar to the McCain-Feingold limits in place for national campaigns. These are designed as a step towards making sure that the super-rich can't have an undue influence on politics.
  
  
• Issue 4 fights gerrymandering. This is what it's called when elected politicians redraw political boundaries to favor themselves. Gerrymandering leads to fractured districts and unfair elections, and is designed to artificially skew the balance so that the politicians elected do not actually represent the true mix of views in the state. In Ohio, many counties are sliced up into two or three different districts, and two congressional districts (OH-5 and OH-18) cover parts of sixteen different counties. Ohio as a whole votes almost exactly 50-50 Republican vs Democratic, but out-of-control gerrymandering has conveniently adjusted the boundaries to disenfranchise voters so that our Congressional representatives are two-thirds Republican.
  
  
• Issue 5 creates an independent panel to administer elections. Right now we have strongly partisan career politicians like Ken Blackwell in charge of oversight for the elections of themselves and their cronies, and they do a deliberately bad job of it -- wilfully disenfranchising thousands of Ohioans in order to push the vote in the direction they want it to go.

Issues 2, 3, 4, and 5 are from the people of Ohio

These issues come from people just like you and me, people who are fed up with the amount of corruption in Ohio. There's a phrase that describes the situation here, where the political machine is making the rules for itself and overseeing itself: "the fox guarding the henhouse". Not surprisingly, that fox has been burying its face in all the eggs it can steal.

Corruption? Our state has plenty. You've heard of Tom Noe, the coin dealer and state Republican crony who got $50 million in unaudited sweetheart investment contracts from the Ohio Bureau of Worker's Compensation, and was disgraced for allegedly embezzling and just outright "losing" up to $10 million of that money. He was recently indicted for money-laundering, accused of circumventing the campaign finance donation limits by giving people money that they would then donate to various campaigns. The hell of it is that the money he used was probably from that $10 million he "lost" of the state's money.

Follow the trail: crony given contract by corrupt Republican officials, crony uses that contract to steal money from the state, crony uses stolen money to make sure corrupt Republican officials get re-elected. It's a vicious circle, and we need a change.

A group named Ohio First has been trying to portray these amendments as coming from "special interests". But they're full of shit -- fact is, they are the special interests. The average donation to Ohio First is $12,941. And remember, that's the average. How many Ohioans do you know that can afford to donate that much to a political campaign? Not even a candidate. A campaign against a couple of amendments. Meanwhile the average donation to Reform Ohio Now is $545. That reflects the large number of small donations (over three thousand and counting) from people like you and me across the state supporting the amendments.

Vote YES on Issues 2, 3, 4, and 5

On November 8th, vote for reform. Vote YES on Issues 2, 3, 4, and 5. While you're at it, I'd suggest voting YES on the following:

• YES on State Issue 1 -- investment in high-tech and Ohio businesses. Ohio needs to invest and plan for the future, and this seems like a good start.
  
  
• Cuyahoga residents should vote YES for County Issue 6 — funding for Tri-C.
  
  
• Cuyahoga residents should also vote YES for County Issue 7. If this issue doesn't pass, funding for the Cuyahoga County Board of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities will be cut by 60% and many programs that help retarded and developmentally disabled kids and adults will be cut.

Any other Brecksvillians out there? Here in Brecksville we've got Issue 14, which appears to be an adjustment of zoning height restrictions to make it easier to build McMansions in the new developments. Currently each McMansion has to get individual variances, which are almost always granted. I believe this would just make the variances permanent across the board. Personally, I am probably going to vote against it because I'm not in favor of McMansions in general -- they tend to be energy-wasteful and detract from the small-town atmosphere of Brecksville. But given their popularity around here and the deliberately vague wording of the issue, I'm afraid it's going to pass anyway.

Thick as Thieves

Have you noticed there've been an awful lot of politicians getting busted lately? I was curious so I started to make a list.

• Jack Abramoff, famously influential Republican lobbyist with close connections to Tom DeLay. Indicted on five counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, August 11, 2005.
  
  
• Adam Kidan, influential Republican lobbyist and Abramoff's partner. Indicted on five counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, August 11, 2005.
  
  
• David Safavian, Republican procurement chief at the White House Office of Management and Budget. Arrested and subsequently indicted for five counts of obstruction and related charges for lying to investigators in an attempt to cover up Abramoff's dealings. September 19, 2005.
  
  
• Senator Bill Frist, Republican Senate Majority Leader. Under formal investigation by the SEC for insider trading, for dumping large quantities of HCA stock just before a bad quarterly report. Frist originally claimed the stock was held in a blind trust, but that was proven completely false. No indictment yet, but seems very likely. September 23, 2005 and ongoing.
  
  
• Congressman Tom DeLay, Republican House Majority Leader. Indicted on charges of conspiracy to break campaign finance laws. Indicted again on charges of felony money laundering just a few days later. September 28, 2005 and October 3, 2005.
  
  
• Tom Noe, Ohio rare-coin dealer and top Republican donor. Indicted on three counts for illegally circumventing campaign finance limits to funnel money to the 2004 election campaign of George W. Bush. Also continues to be under heavy investigation for losing up to $12 million belonging to the State of Ohio that Republican buddies got the Workers' Comp Bureau to invest in an unprecedented, unsecured, and unaudited "rare coin mutual fund" that he ran. It's not a big leap to suggest that he may have been embezzling from the state and turning that money directly into campaign contributions to Republicans, but investigations are still pending. October 27, 2005.
  
  
• I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice-President Cheney's chief of staff. Indicted on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice for lying to investigators in the CIA leak case involving Valerie Plame Wilson. October 28, 2005.

Notice anything? Number one, they're all Republicans. Why do you think that is? If you are the type to foolishly insist that this is some sort of partisan thing, and all of the indictments are frame-ups or something, then why aren't Republicans retaliating by getting Democrats indicted the same way? Is it because the Dems are all evil and bad, and the saintly Republicans are "above all that" and prefer to practice squeaky-clean politics? Pfft. Yeah, that doesn't even pass the laugh test. Pull the other one.

Number two, they're all very big fish in their areas of Republican politics. Frist and DeLay are the Senate and House majority leaders, people. It doesn't get much bigger than that. The lobbyists are huge in their field, and wield vast amounts of influence with the money they command. Safavian was director of procurement at the White House. Libby is no mere functionary in the Vice-President's office, but rather his chief of staff. And Noe is so thoroughly wrapped up in Ohio state politics that five out of the seven Ohio Supreme Court justices had to recuse themselves from a case that came before them as part of Noe's Coingate because they had received campaign funds from him. Look it up; he's connected to nearly every single major Republican office-holder in the state.

Worst of all, that whole list described above does not represent all the criminal activity that's gone on. It's just the stuff where they have enough evidence to go after these guys.

Beyond the criminal activity, don't even get me started on incompetence. Where do you think FEMA is going to be when there's an emergency near you? Will the National Guard have enough troops and equipment on this side of the globe to respond?

These guys are out of control.