I am typing this in Apple's brand-new Safari browser which Steve Jobs introduced today during his keynote speech at MacWorld Expo in San Francisco. As usual with Jobsian events, the whole affair was massively hyped in the weird symbiosis between Apple and the rumor sites. Add the Jobs Reality Distortion Field and you end up with an entertaining show. As a long-time Mac user I can't possibly pass up a webcast like that. My first Mac wasn't a Mac at all. At the time I had an Atari 1040ST which had the same Motorola 68000 CPU as the Mac. This led various enterprising souls to build Mac emulators for the ST, since the ST was much cheaper than the Mac and had better hardware; the first emulator I used was Aladin. Later I switched to Spectre GCR which could use the 128K Mac ROMs. Aladin was limited to the older 64K ROMs. In any case, it's been much, much longer than I care to admit. I vaguely remember those days as the period when I was marginally less old and grumpy.

So the Jobsian keynotes provide great entertainment to inveterate Mac users such as myself. Today's keynote was true to form as Jobs managed to evoke enthusiasm for many new Apple products including amazingly enough a snowboarding jacket with built-in controls for the iPod. A lot of new software also saw the light of day, of which Safari is definitely the most interesting to me. I already have six browsers on my Mac OS X system alone, and adding another one can't hurt. My first impression is that it's ugly. The brushed metal interface just doesn't look right. On the other hand, it does appear to be the fastest Mac browser I've seen, handling CSS, Javascript and all the other crud quite well. I'll be using it for a bit to see how well it performs, but it might become one of my standard browsers. Best feature yet: it uses the spell-checking services of Mac OS X. Perhaps that'll cut down on the number of mistakes I make here. The creators of Movable Type also have posted their initial comments on Safari.

Despite all the new software, Apple still makes its money by selling hardware and Steve Jobs put the focus firmly on the PowerBook line with two new additions: a small 12" PowerBook and a huge 17" version. The latter has all sorts of interesting gadgets built-in, such as a backlit keyboard and light sensors that adjust screen brightness and the keyboard backlight automatically depending on ambient light conditions. There are many other improvements too, which I shan't list here.

The new focus on portable computers is partially driven by demand, but in Apple's case it's also out of necessity. The desktop line of Macs is beginning to lag perilously far behind the Wintel world. Rob Art Morgan, who runs the Bare Feats Mac benchmarking site, recently enumerated the "Missing Pieces" in Apple's line-up. On the desktop the difference between state-of-the-art on Wintel and Mac is becoming uncomfortably large, while on the portable side Apple can still compete. Lagging somewhat behind has never been a problem for Apple, since raw performance is not what people buy Macs for. (Photoshop is a notable exception). So Apple is making a virtue out of necessity by focusing on the PowerBook line. But Steve Jobs's Reality Distortion Field will eventually buckle if the performance gap is not closed.

If you're interested in following the ups and downs of Apple and the Mac, I heartily recommend As The Apple Turns, the first site really to comprehend what the Apple saga is all about (confused? tune in next week...). The writing is almost Lileksian at times.

I'll be trying to break Safari now.

UPDATE: It sort of broke on me as I was trying to save this blog entry. It took me straight back to the Movable Type login screen and never added the entry to the blog. Fortunately the Back command brought me back to my turgid prose. I had to log in to MT again before it would save the blog entry properly. Weird. It is still a beta after all... oh well...

Since the Return of Jobs the HQ at One Infinite Loop in Cupertino has become a darker, more menacing place. You don't cross Apple of Jobs. He's a perfectly peaceful Vegan vegetarian, but he'll happily rip your head off with his bare teeth if you disagree with him. Ah, those peacenik hippie rapscallions!

But the Jobsian reach is longer than I had thought. Steven Den Beste has long been a vocal critic of Apple and its policies, and this has not gone unnoticed at Jobs Central. Steven posted a comment to this blog below, and the email that Moveable Type sent to announce the comment was immediately classified as "Junk" by Apple's Mail progam. Just shows you how vindictive Jobs can be... in the next version of OS X, all mention of Den Beste will automatically be censored. New Macs will come with earplugs and blinkers. In fact, just to make sure, Apple will ship all new iMacs with a Polynesian midget who'll blindfold you and shout "LALALALALA-IMNOTLISTENING-LALALALALA" in your ear should anything Den Bestian come into range.

You just don't mess with Jobs. You just don't.

OK, I seem to have made it. The installation of Jaguar itself was not too much of a problem, and went smoothly on my newly created parition, which I appropriately named Feles Ferox, or Wild Cat. The biggest problem with harddisk management on the Macintosh is not connecting or installing the harddisks themselves, but finding good names for them. The canonical "Macintosh HD" is far too boring, so now I have succumbed to Latin allitterations. Combine that particular afflictions with my waning knowledge of Latin in the first place, and naming a partition becomes a major undertaking, but one that is concluded in general to the satisfaction of all concerned (being me). That was the easy part.

As the installation was a new partition, none of my preferences or installed apps was carried over. So I created myself as a user again (pesky Unixisms creeping in), then deleted my user directory and replaced it with a symlink to my old home directory on the other partition where I'm keeping 10.1.5. That sort of worked, but few files were accessible. It was, of course, a permissions problem. On the 10.1.5 system, user qsi had a different ID (I think it's kept in NetInfo) from the one in 10.2, so all permissions were screwed up. Fortunately chown and chgrp have the -R flag for recursive modifications, because otherwise I'd have ended up digging more deeply into bash scripting than I had ever cared to. Considering I know next to nothing about bash scripting, this is very lucky indeed.

I spent the rest of the day playing around, making sure everything worked properly (well, some things did). I had to re-enter some registrations for shareware, and re-install haxies and such. I also discovered that there's an Unsanity Blog with some interesting OS X related programming items.

My main observation of Jaguar is that it feels snappier (not as snappy as OS 9, or indeed as my XJ40, but that's a different story). The other big observation is that apps seem to be crash-happier. Internet Explorer has crashed on me today more often than during the past month on 10.1.5 while visiting essentially the same sites. In one of the crashed, even Console crashed when creating the crash report. This is worrying.

For the most part, I am up and running. It was definitely not as easy an upgrade as OS 9, but manageable.

The next project on my Mac is to install Jaguar on it. I'm planning to install it on a separate partition so that I can keep 10.1.5 in working order too, but if updates should suddenly stop here, it's probably because my main Mac is caught in upgrade hell. With OS 9.x and prior, I never felt apprehensive about upgrading. Undoing it, or getting out of any problems was easy. Now, with OS X, I feel a slight twinge of trepidation as I set out on the upgrade path. I think I'll be back though.

To those who've been wondering why blogging has been sparser of late, there are two reasons: 1) I got stuck with work quite a bit and 2) in the time that I've had, I've been playing with my antique computers. Putting up a section on some vintage computing equipment on the site is a project I've been working on, but I have not quite gotten around to having something presentable.

Antique computers have charm, spirit and soul. But it's not the age that does it; I feel no emotional connection to an old IBM PC XT, for instance, and a Hercules CGA card with monitor is not going to make my pulse go any faster. Those are soulless machines. Husks. On the other hand, some computers have a deep inner beauty that enchants and enthralls. In part, it is because I've grown up with some of them, such at the Atari ST or Apple ][e. In others, it's the wonderful quirks and amazing hacks that made them great, such as CP/M computers. Besides Z80 assembler code is beautiful, just like 68000 assembler is elegant. Intel assembler rubs me the wrong way.

I am trying to resurrect my old Atari 1040 STfm. The SM 125 monitor works, just about. It has a diode that keeps shorting out every now and then, and rather than re-soldering it on the motherboard, it now sits outside the monitor case with two long leads. Replacing it is dead easy now, but the downside is that I have small bits of unprotected wiring with several kilovolts over them. Touching them hurts. So I don't do that very often. The 1040 has also been upgraded to 4 MB of RAM from the stock 1 MB, but some of the ASICs are a bit quirky and need to be cooled with a BIG fan in order to prevent memory errors. The main problem I now have with the ST is that my SCSI hostadapter no longer works. The ST had its own harddisk interface, the AHDI, and SCSI hostadapters were needed to connect them to SCSI harddisks. My old GE-Soft IV hostadapter does not seem to do much anymore, while my newly acquired ICD The Link hangs the machine on boot. I fear I may have a blown DMA port on the ST now. Very very annoying. And sad. Now I am going to have to buy a new ST, because I do want, I do need a working Atari ST. I can no longer live without one.

In better news, my Apple IIc now has company, as I managed to acquire an Apple ][e and an ITT. Much joy awaits. If only I had more composite color monitors.

Well, it sure took them a while, but it seems our favorite soap opera is back! As the Apple Turns is back from its hiatus, apparently caused by new arrivals at the writing staff, who have turned out to have negative productivity. I think they should be more careful about expanding next time. But it seems the daily fix of saponaceously operatic insanity is there for the consuming again. Hopefully they can return to producing new episodes every day. Especially the psychotic ones.

Ah, the rose-fingered dawn tickles the long-suffering chin of the Mac faithful once again with the temptation of newer, faster, Intel-stomping chips. Ah, cruel Sirens! Having navigated the wrath of Poseidon, been lured into eating the Lotus of RISC, been imprisoned by the Cyclops of Motorola and incarcerated by Calypso on her island of Altivec, finally the seas are now clear to return to beloved Ithaca, where all Macs run faster, all UI quirks subside and where the True Love of Penelope will make the databuses sing!

Yes, IBM is riding to the rescue, to liberate us from the perfidious clutches of Motorola! The POWER architecture is coming to a desktop near you, with 64-bit yummyness oozing from every pin. If you are patient, that is. According to the eWeek report, this is still a year off, and that means it's going to be 2004 before we see these chips in actual shipping Macs. By that time, the Intel and AMD chips will have progressed in speed too, with perhaps some version of Itanium even producing decent performance.

The ravenous reception this news has garnered in the Mac world is understandable. We've been in a funk over performance. The G4 has been a disappointment, right from the start when Apple had to reduce the shipping speeds of Macs because of production problems. And ever since then, speed bumps in the G4 have been few and far between, with the fastest Macs now shipping with dual 1.25 GHz processors. Yes, I know. In Photoshop filters, the G4 is pretty damn good. But for other things, the limited bus bandwidth and the slow clock do hurt performance. An argument can be made that a more efficient ISA can make up for slower clock speeds, but there comes a point where the argument becomes stretched, and then breaks. We are at such a point (or have passed it), and Macs desperately need a serious speed boost. Perhaps the oft-rumored G5 will make its debut at MacWorld in January. I'm not holding my breath.

We've been in this kind of position before, when Motorola's 68k-line was falling behind. The switch to PowerPC did help the Mac keep rough parity with the Intel world for a while, and even allowed Apple to ship the fastest laptops in the world. I will grant that the current crop of machines is fast enough for most people, but that is not the point. People do want "value for money," and if that means getting more gigahertzes per dollar, they'll go for it. Design alone won't be able to sell; Apple can get away with lagging a little, but the divergence has become too large now. And this is also reflected in the response these rumors have been getting in the Mac world, which has greeted the purported news with a massive exhalation of relief, yearning for the salvation of this latest deus-ex-machina.

I'm still reasonably happy with my G4/400, and I'm not looking to get a new Mac just yet. However, if the current state of affairs does not improve, I may become tempted to look for options elsewhere.