If you haven’t been by MacZealots lately, stop on by. This is not some lame, thrown-together-quickly teenage Mac lover site. The three brains behind it are seniors at Purdue, in business and technical fields. The site’s design is clean and uncluttered, and uses XHTML and CSS, with RSS feeds where appropriate. I’ve been enjoying their Macworld Expo coverage this week, and they have some informative articles to boot.
Month: January 2004
MacCentral interviewed Bill Amend, creator of the comic FoxTrot, last month. My favorite quote:
Amend previously worked on a Blue & White Power Mac G3, but a few months ago he treated himself to a 2 GHz Dual Processor Power Mac G5, complete with a Cinema HD display.
“I can finally play Warcraft III!” Amend said. “Oh, and it helps with work, too, in case the IRS reads this.”
(Thanks, MDJ)
On the one hand, it’s pretty amazing that Andy Ihnatko nails–in advance, mind you–what would go down at the Macworld Expo Keynote Steve Jobs delivered this past Tuesday. On the other hand, it’s pretty sad that the semi-annual Stevenote has gotten this predictable…
MacMinute points to a BusinessWeek Online article by Alex Salkever wherein he lays out his wish list for a stronger Apple.
I have to say that Salkever is dead-on in two of his three points: better corporate governance and improved quality control. As an investor, I agree with Salkever’s analysis of the board and its lack of control over Jobs and the lavish awards it showers him with. The board does need to act more independently, but still let Steve do what Steve does best. It can only help Apple in the long term.
The second point, improved quality control, is a must. Granted, every tech company, every computer manufacturer, is going to have bugs, flaws. But to my mind, at least, 2003 lowered the quality bar in what we saw from Apple, both in its hardware and its software. Apple used to have, even in those “dark days” of the mid-1990s, a top-notch quality-control division, and the company was consistently rated tops in that area. Apple needs to reclaim that title, even if it’s only result is greater mindshare.
On Salkever’s third point, of more hardware upgrades, I have mixed feelings. Yeah, I’d like to see every system in the platform get upgraded once a year, and I believe Apple is more than up to that. I think Salkever misses the mark in his analysis over why Apple wasn’t shipping upgrades in earnest in 2002, however. Apple didn’t “chill out” because of the economic downturn; Apple was still having problems getting faster procs from Motorola to put in their systems. That was the driving force behind the move to IBM’s PowerPC chips, and voila! now we have G5s.
All in all, though, some totally reasonable analysis of Apple on the part of someone in the business/financial world. It’s about time.
The January issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available. ATPM has now entered its 10th calendar year of publishing!
As a typophile-fontaholic, I thoroughly enjoyed Andrew Kator’s article on Type as Shape. Ellyn, as usual, makes us think, Matt takes a non-rumormongering look at what we might see announced at Macworld Expo, and Paul has the usual assortment of I-can’t-believe-that’s-actually-on-the-web sites.
New staffer Wes Meltzer starts a column that rounds up the latest and greatest from the Mac blogosphere. Raena begins a series on making web sites more accessible to those with various impairments. The usual goodies–desktop pictures, cartoons, product reviews–are included at no extra charge, available, as always, in three fruity flavors for your convenience.
In an endeavor to fully separate the personal from the tech talk, per the rejection of my Google AdSense application, consider this the formal announcement of the re-opening of my original weblog, digitalpembroke. The process for moving over all photo albums, reading lists, etc. is in progress.
Yes, Michael, I am quite insane.