New Apples from a Frisco tree

I'VE BEEN VERY sceptical about last MacWorld Expo, but as it turned out things went definitely beyond my (and many others') expectations. In a way, at least. The Devil's Advocate is crying out loud to be heard, and what he hates most is people going numb over the (in)famous Reality Distortion Field and a couple of announcements which at most managed to prevent Mac users from rioting in Frisco.

Yes, that's bit cynical. Praising Apple for what they deserve, Safari is a very welcome addition to the web browser's rank (and file) for the Macintosh: iCab is definitely too bare-bones, Chimera is what it has always been--a monster a third lion, a third goat and a third serpent, or in a broader sense "something that will never happen".

To say that Mozilla is bloated and cumbersome would be a gross understatement, although they have to be praised at least for the magnitude of their cross-platform effort. IE, id est nightmare: slow, and buggy, and a son of the Beast. What else do you need to come to hate it? You only need to use it, it'll be enough, I assure you. Netscape is dead, and with Mozilla it has no longer any reason to exist. Opera and Omniweb both have their strengths--and weaknesses, making them probably the best browsers available for the Mac, but they have a feeling of second-choice.

You'll like them, but after a while you'll realise that you'd rather use something else if it only existed. Here comes Safari!

To tell the truth the first beta version had its own share of bugs--most notably that one nasty thing that could replace your whole home directory with the file you were downloading. Try to imagine: you do your usual round of websites and suddenly you only see that Jenna_and_Nikki_pleasure_moments.avi instead of your dear little home directory. You're going to blame your testosterone for the rest of your life!

Fortunately though, the latest beta fixed this potential disruptive problem, and it really works splendidly. There are still some rough edges--like the mouse pointer that refuses to disappear while you scroll down a page via the keyboard--and some missing features, but all in all it makes for a very valid alternative to IE, something that no other browser can reasonably claim.

Following the earth-shaking revolts a couple of days before the keynote, apparently Steve Jobs decided to give away for free the three major iApps--iTunes, iMovie and iPhoto--while charging $ 50 for the whole bundle+iDVD, which is nothing new and frankly understandable, since iDVD is so large that it'd be impractical to download it off the Net, even with a decent broadband connection.

The new versions of the iApps--bundled as i(GetA)Life--will be available next Saturday; expect a thorough review shortly after.

Speaking of the keynote, many have welcomed Keynote as a first step toward a larger-scale rebellion against Microsoft--specifically targeting (and outclassing) PowerPoint. I certainly hope so, but despite this first effort I think it all depends on how attractive and efficient will the next version of AppleWorks be. It certainly needs a major update and a Cocoa rewrite almost from scratch, even more so if his Jobness wants to pitch it against Office.

The gap between iMovie ($ 0) and Final Cut Pro ($ 1,000) has been tentatively filled with Final Cut Express ($ 300), which manages to be almost as complex as its bigger brother while costing 300 bucks more than iMovie--now, that's smart!

All brushy-metal software aside though, there were also some very important hardware announcements--which came in totally unexpected. Closely tied to these announcements was the teaching "there will always be somebody smarter than you, most probably working for Apple's marketing division". You might ask: "Why?" and I might answer: "Apple cunningly managed to turn a defeat into a victory".

How? By declaring that this will be the year of the portables--implicitly admitting that until His 64-bitness the PowerPC 970 cometh, desktop machines from Apple won't be able to compete in any way against the Wintel world. The single still-standing G4 advantage is its relatively low power dissipation, that combined with its mostly sluggish performance makes it a poor choice for a desktop, but a good-enough bargain for a laptop.

Stay tuned for an upcoming analysis and comparison of the 15' and the new 12' and 17' PowerBooks--the Devil's Advocate has still something to say. µ