Applepeels

The Psychology of the non-Apple consumer

I have often wondered at how someone could have a horrible experience with a computer and turn around and buy another one just like it.   We have some friends who were using a Windows laptop.  On our last visit with them, they told us it had become unusable so they ordered a new one from the same company.

As a Mac user, would I buy another Mac if I had one that died quickly?  The answer might be yes.

To me going back to what disappointed you is illogical consumer behavior, but I suspect we are going to see a lot of this in the coming months as the Windows 7 juggernaut rumbles around the world.

Since I sold Apple's computers for so many years, I came face to face with that fear of the computing unknown many times.  I still remember the completely illogical response from an engineering professor at Virginia Tech when I demonstrated an Apple LCII with 256 colors.  He told me emphatically that no one needed more than sixteen colors.

With fear comes the need to rationalize your lack of interest in neat features.

Only in 2002 and 2003 when viruses and worms threatened to destroy Windows systems did I see people experiencing enough pain to consider switching platforms.

It is also interesting that when Vista's pain was the most severe that many users switched back to XP not to a Mac.  I managed to survive the worst years of Vista and arrive at what I would call the annoying teenage years of Vista.

Of course those users who switched back to XP might have chosen a different path if Apple's OS X had been available to run on their non-Apple hardware.  However, I seriously doubt very many would have chosen to run Apple's operating system on their Windows hardware.

At one time many people thought iPods would lead to more acceptance of Apple's other computer products.

While I am sure Windows iPods have had a limited impact, I somehow suspect that the number of people willing to trust their music to Steve and company is far larger than the people will to trust their whole computing life to Apple.

I have often talked about how the lack of neighborhood Mac experts helps hold down Mac market share. Actually I think there is much more too it than that.

Many Windows users are conditioned to going to multiple sources to solve a problem.  The idea that there is only one place you need to go for help might seem unnatural.

Another perspective might see Apple holding too much power by owning both the hardware and software.

As Apple users we know that you pay Steve's prices and take your chances.  Most of the time it turns out that letting one group make hardware and software that are elegantly fitted to each other is a better way to produce computers.  Still users' opinions can be valuable.

However, we all know that user input means very little to Apple since customer councils appear to have disappeared expect possibly in Higher Ed.

Perhaps the latest Windows 7 commercials which play on the idea that Windows 7 is a result of listening to the needs of users is an attempt to leverage the idea that Apple is divorced from its customer while Microsoft is not.

I know that one of the things holding me back from purchasing an iPhone is that I am already an AT&T customer with spotty coverage.  I am also reluctant give over total control of my life to two companies that are not exactly known for dedication to the wants and needs of their customers.

There was something very liberating when my Karmic Koala upgrade to Ubuntu Linux went flawlessly. In the back of my mind, I know that Linux is a good alternative to Apple.

I am probably one of the few real estate people in the area who does not carry a smart phone.  Most are using Blackberries or Windows mobile phones.  I have yet to run into an agent using an iPhone.  Of course I have yet to run into an agent in Carteret County running a Mac.  While smartphones seem to have taken agents by storm, I am still on fence in this slow real estate market.

I actually think Windows 7 might present a challenge to further Mac growth.  In the same breath I have a feeling that Droid backed by Google, Motorola, and Verizon might at least be a shot across the iPhone bow.

It is the first smart phone that has seemed attractive to me and some other users that I know.

In the end, perhaps Apple still has some work to do before it can own any markets to the extent that it owns the iPod world.  In truth I would rather see healthy competition than any vendor owning a market.

Some vendors, and Apple is one of the them, can become downright annoying when they become too successful.

That is it from the shores White Oak River on this sixth anniversary of my last trip to Cupertino.  I am happy to report that the only runways I am seeing these days are much different than the ones I saw when I worked for Apple.

I was well trained by Apple to manage myself. Now I have a healthy distrust of a company like Apple who wants to control my digital life but that has chosen to ignore social networking which would likely bring it closer to its customers.

There is no question that social networking has led me to an interesting group of non-Apple contacts who also have a healthy skepticism of Cupertino's ambitions to control the digital world and fill their treasure chests.

OS X as just another operating system

I have been an Apple user since 1982.  I have been through every operating system iteration that the company has thrown over the walls at Cupertino including SOS for Apple IIIs.

Without a doubt OS X has been one of the best operating systems that I have ever used.  I am productive with it.  The few issues I have are not serious, but I feel like I am in a real quandary.

My main system, a dual G5 tower, is now out of the mainstream with Apple

In fact of the eight Macs in our extended family, only my MacBook has Snow Leopard on it.  The rest are PPC based.

It is pretty obvious that we have a major upgrade coming to our family. 

The big question is whether or not we will stay with the Mac platform.  My son, due to his work, and his company providing a computer rarely uses his Mac and can be considered effectively off the platform.

My oldest daughter uses some flavor of Windows in her government related job, but she seems to want to stay with the Mac at home.

My wife would appreciate there being no change in her Mac computing world.

My youngest daughter just took home my old Dell laptop running XP so they could put their business up on Quick Books.  She could go either way.

Aside from my son, whose work has revolved around Linux, I am the family tech support especially for those with the least computer skills.

We have had great luck with the white half moon iMacs.  There are four of them in the family, but they are not exactly the speediest computers on the planet these days.

If we ignore my son, we need at least three iMacs to replace the computers that the women of the family use.  Then I am faced with the fact that an iMac is probably my best choice for me since a tower just looks too expensive.

Three low end iMacs and one slightly up the family tree iMac would cost us %5,100 which seems like a lot in these days of cheap computers.

Do I go out and buy an inexpensive Windows 7  laptop computer and evaluate Windows 7 as the family computer platform?  It could become my new real estate computer even if we stay with the Mac platform.

Buying a Windows laptop to test could just mean the cost of upgrading the family will the $5,100 plus the $700 Windows experiment.

Or it could mean that the cost of upgrading everyone would come down to $2,800.

I would never expect a Mac to cost as little as a Windows box.  However, it would be nice to see the Apple hardware prices on the same planet since much of the hardware is the same.

Would I even be thinking about this if iMacs cost $800 or $900?  I suspect the answer is "No."

I remain skeptical of Windows 7, but if it is a significant improvement over Vista in reliability and support costs, then if might be worth considering if my hardware savings are going to be a couple of thousand dollars.

I also believe that at the next end of life on hardware, I would have no problem switching the generic Intel boxes to Linux if Linux continues on the same improvement curve.  I could probably do the same thing with Macs but you never know about drivers.

In fact if they were using generic PC boxes today, I would switch them to Ubuntu now, and I would not even be going through this exercise.

Right now Snow Leopard is giving me no buzz, but I am very happy with Ubuntu 9.04. I especially like how fast it boots. That means a lot since I have taken to shutting down my systems when I am not using them.

I guess the potential of cheaper Macs might make the question irrelevant.  While most Apple customers would never think of leaving the mothership, I think that I have the skills to migrate to whatever works best for us and our budget.

I wonder how many PPC Mac users are doing the same math as I am?

That would be it for today from the Crystal Coast where summer has returned. It is much too nice a day to stay inside.  Even mowing the lawn will not be bad with all this blue sky, and the potential for another beach tirp.

A different perspective on Apple techno-lust

There is no question that Apple makes very desirable products.  For over twenty years, I sold them and had access to the latest Cupertino products.  It was an easy way to get hooked on the latest and greatest.

I was rarely disappointed.  The products were in general fun, reliable, and a great way to get my work done.  There is still a lot of magic in Apple products.  Typically they get the job done with a minimum of fuss.

When I left the company in the summer of 2004, I bought an aluminum G4 Powerbook which I used until the summer of 2006 when I bought a MacBook.  Along the way I bought a dual G5 desktop in December 2004.  It is actually still my main system, Other than buying and installing Leopard, it has been through a number of hard drive upgrades.

During the same period I bought a Dell desktop and laptop in 2004 and 2005 respectively.  In 2007 I bought a HP laptop with Vista.  Except for my aluminum Powerbook which has a hinge video cable problem and a bad memory slot, all of my other machines are still in use, either by me or someone in the family.

Recently when I ordered a new power supply for my MacBook, I also ordered Snow Leopard.  I was pleased to recover some hard drive space, but I really have not noticed a lot of performance difference after the installation.

I have been thinking about upgrading to the next generation of iMacs when they come out. It is that old new hardware itch that needs scratching once in a while.  I have given up on ever getting another Apple tower.  As much as I like my G5 tower, I hate to be out of sync with the mainstream Apple OS so at some point I have to upgrade.  Still right now there is no money in the account for a new Mac.

Since I am treading water on a new Mac system, I decided to see what I could do with the hardware that I have.  Really the only thing I could do for my G5 would be to add some memory.  At this point I hate to put additional money in a five year old system which seems to be working perfectly fine.

Really the only thing I had left to work with was a spare 300 gig SATA II drive and my old Dell Dimension Pentium system.  I decided to install Ubuntu on the Dell and see how the latest Linux compares with the Mac and Windows.  I have some of a history with Linux as I spent a good portion of my first year after Apple installing different versions and using it.  Eventually the Linux drive that I had in the Dell desktop died in a thunderstorm, and I never bothered to replace it.

So my putting another drive in the Dell and installing Linux was mirroring what I did in the fall of 2004.  It was also a good way to see how much progress Linux has made.

While I was taking the Dell apart to install the drive, I downloaded the Ubuntu 9.04 disk image on my Mac.  It was pretty simple to hook the drive up and get the Linux installed on the new drive.  The challenge came when installing Grub which is used for dual booting the system.  Somehow it was having a hard time seeing my Windows XP drive and my Linux drive at the same time. I eventually unplugged my XP drive which I really do not use these days.  I might get energetic and fix the dual boot problem, but it is more of a rain day project than anything else.  I know the solution, I just have to make a few changes.

After unplugging the XP drive, everything worked great.  I have to admit to being truly impressed at how fast Ubuntu boots on my five year old hardware.  This installation of Linux is a far cry from my first installation in the fall of 2004 when I got pretty frustrated.  I manged to make it work this time in a few hours compared to a few weeks in the fall of 2004.

That Linux is easy to install, fast, reliable, and will do almost everything you need, means very little in the world of Macs.  The people buying Macs today are not people interested in recycling hardware to get their jobs done, they want the latest and coolest hardware, and they are willing to pay top dollar to get it.

I am actually rather proud of my cobbled together Dell Ubuntu machine.  I have taken stuff that I was not using and made it into to hardware that is useful to me.  When I go up to my office in the evening to work, I boot it up.  It always beats my G5.  I typically run Firefox on it and have my Gmail account with chat open on it.  I have tried downloading pictures, and that worked much better than the last time I tried it on Linux.

What was most impressive was getting my printers to work.  I have two networked printers in my office.  When I got them working with my Zonbu Linux system, I had to ask my son who is computer science graduate for help.

This time all I did was a few clicks, Ubuntu found the printers and figured out the right drivers.  It is an amazing improvement.

Perhaps that is the excitement of Linux, you can see steady improvement in the software, and it does not cost you any money.  The speed of Ubuntu is truly impressive especially if you compare it to Vista.

I know that Steve and the boys would like to see me drooling over their new hardware and that may happen, but for right now my lust for new hardware, performance and features has been satisfied by the Linux folks.  I know that my wife, the keeper of the budget, is very pleased.

Summer weather continues to keep us playing in the water here on North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks.  That is also almost as exciting as having some new hardware with which to play.

It has been a great summer so far.

A good yardstick for Apple

This is traditionally a quarter when the Apple education business shines.  Tonight I  am wondering if the educational computing business still matters to Apple.  Apple's original success in computing was built on its success in education.  While Steve Jobs has never cared for the enterprise, he always has seemed to have a soft spot for education.

While Apple has been transforming itself into an iPod and iPhone company, the educational computing market has also been changing.  Many of the initiatives in K-12 where students got their own computers to take home developed with Apple's help.  Maybe my ear has not been to the pavement enough, but I have heard little about large initiatives that Apple has recently won.

That might have something to do with Apple current education sales force leadership, but that is another story.

A couple of things are conspiring to make this a tough educational quarter for Apple and other vendors in the space.  Apple might be especially vulnerable.   Institutionally many states have cut back purchases on computers.  I recently read that Roanoke County, Va  has canceled purchases for incoming high school freshmen.  Those are Dell computers, but it is a sign of the budget pressure that is pretty much nationwide.

The other issue is that university bookstores which traditionally have been great Apple partners are finding more and more students buying their computers before they come to campus.  This is long term trend driven by the lack of a real education pricing differential.  At one time students could save a lot of money buying on campus. At most universities that is no longer the case.

It was alway a belief at Apple, that if we could get students to buy in the bookstore, we had a better chance of winning their business.  While Apple might have replaced the bookstore for some, the reach just is not the same as the campus store.

You can now get a great deal at Best Buy, Walmart, Staples, or direct from the manufacturers.  Unfortunately if you are just measuring computers on price, Apple is not such a great deal.

While Apple prices have been trimmed slightly, they are nowhere near netbook or low end laptop prices.

Microsoft also continues to take potshots at Apple with their commercials pointing out the obvious that Macs are more expensive.

I actually think Macs are going to do very well among well-heeled students, but I question how well they will do in cases where budgets are already stretched with college tuition.

It will interesting to see if the potential education business challenges are even visible as the iPhone and iPod businesses continue to chug along.

On the other hand if Apple does well in education in spite of the pricing and budget challenges, I think that bodes well for Apple making significant gains over the next year.

If the education business suffers a major hit, and it is unnoticeable in Apple's results, I think we can safely say that Apple has completely transformed its business.

That being the case I wonder how long they will need an educational sales force as large as the one they currently have?

There were some powerful arguments for Apple computers in education at one time, it will the end of an era if that is no longer the case.

I think that I will watch this one from the bridge while I help people figure out where to live.

Why are Mac support costs for OSX not a competitive advantage for Apple?

One of the interesting things about working for Apple is that the company really has a very small information technology staff.  Of that small staff very few  people are dedicated to supporting internal users.

When I was delivering executive briefings to Apple's customers, I could rattle off the number of support people that a Mac organization like Apple required when compared to a Windows centric enterprise.  I guess the fact that even I cannot remember the numbers is a function of Apple not really caring about the enterprise market and certainly not making any effort to push its strategic advantage there.

If you are doing really well, why bang your head against an uninviting brick wall like the enterprise.

However, one of the places I pay taxes is the state of Virginia which seems to have found running its information technology enterprise too complex.  This is a little puzzling to me since Virginia is the home of Va. Tech which graduates a boat load of computer savvy students every year.  I believe this fall the Virginia Tech Engineering program will celebrate the 25th anniversary of requiring students to buy computers.

Of course Va. Tech is not the only school in the state producing technology smart students.  So it came as a great surprise to me when I found out that the State of Virginia was willing to pay $9,000 over five years to keep a laptop in an employee's hands.

In my years as Apple's director of federal sales, I saw plenty of examples of failed government outsourcing of computer support and purchasing.  I mentioned a few of those in my post, Making a bad decision on a grand scale, but the real issue is Virginia's government throwing their hands up at the problem and writing something of a blank check to a private company to keep the status quo going.

Based on my experience it does not matter what kind of contract you write, it is not in the best interest of the contractor to control costs except by delivering outdated hardware and less than perfect support.

The Apple paradigm was not only to enable employees to support themselves but to expect them to do that.  I cannot remember very many internal support issues at Apple other than a few VPN issues.

Much as the United State Army had an unbelievable number of stovepipe systems to supply its soldiers, I am certain that Virginia has a hodgepodge of systems to keep the state running. One would hope that by now that at least many of those systems are web-based and hopefully browser neutral.

Certainly I would expect the state of Virginia, home of AOL and a lot of the country's network infrastructure, had enough sense not to get locked into Microsoft client access licenses. Surely they had enough brains to find a better solution to email than Outlook.

As to server architecture, there are a lot of Linux servers in the world, just maybe that trend for reliable servers without a client access license just might have made it to the Old Dominion?

If just those few directions were taken, Virginia should have some other options in solving its computer problems than writing a blank check to a contractor.

My wife who claims to know almost nothing about computers manages to keep her ancient 12 inch aluminum Powerbook updated.  When she and I were in college, the only computers were ones that used punch cards and teletype machines.  There have been a lot of computer using students graduated from Virginia universities in the last twenty-five years.  They should be able to keep the state's computers humming without breaking the bank.

Perhaps it is in the nature of governments to not really try to fix the problem, but to just set a price tag on it and send us the bill even if they know the price tag is going to get worse each year.

It would have been refreshing to see Virginia to try something different.  It might be a far fetched dream to think of equipping state employees with Macs, but I bet they could have done it lot cheaper than $9,000 per employee. 

What I really would like to have seen is a test of 1,000 Macs, 1,000 Linux boxes, and 1,000 Vista machines. Would all Macs drive down support costs to the point the state was saving money even with having to buy new machines?  My guess is yes it would have.  Perhaps Linux might have be another solution to the problem, but certainly not one where people could support themselves like they do with Macs.

Maybe the reason Mac support costs are not an advantage is that no one knows what they are, and Apple is not interested in telling us or publishing the numbers.

I find it interesting that Virginia can afford to dedicate $9,000 per employee for a laptop over five years but cannot figure out how to keep its rest areas along Interstate highways open.

Well I would like to offer up a nice selection of homes to those Virginians who have had it with their government. Don't miss the new construction in my neighborhood.  Here on the Carolina coast we are a little warmer in the winter, and we have not closed any Interstate rest areas.

While we might have more heat in the summer, we have the beaches, food, and water to deal with it.

Why I still use a PC when I have Macs

I could take the easy way out and say that I use a PC because I have to, but unfortunately that is not the case.  I almost always have a Mac within a few feet of my HP laptop so why would I ever use the HP Vista machine when I have a nice Leopard MacBook?

Without a doubt continuing to use a Vista laptop when you have a Mac available is strange behavior, but there are both hardware and other reasons for doing it.

As to the hardware reasons, I go back to why I bought the HP Vista machine in the first place instead of another Mac.  Two of the benefits were a fifteen inch screen and a larger keyboard for a lot less money than I would have paid for a Mac.

At the time I paid $849 for the HP.  Almost two years later, for the same price I could get a Dell with double the memory, more than triple the hard drive, and a dedicated graphics card, or I could get an almost as capable machine for $599.  The trouble is that they would have Vista on them, but more on that later.

I am pleased that I could now get a MacBook Pro with a 15" screen for $1,699. With the help of some of old Apple friends, I could probably get that cost down to roughly double the cost of the cheaper Dell.

One of the other things that I liked about the HP was the integrated SD slot, the new MacBook Pros finally have an integrated SD slot.

At this point in my experience with Vista, it would be hard for my next new computer not to be a Mac.  Long ago, I declared Vista to be a quagmire. Apparently I am not alone in my opinion of Vista as the Tech News Blog reports that users say "Windows Vista sucks." 

I do not remember the post where I did the calculation, but I do remember the $700 yearly number in lost productivity that I decided was my tax for using Vista.  That was a conservative estimate and certainly did not take into account events like I faced last night which I had to reboot my Windows machine three times.

So what are the other reasons that I use the PC? Well aside from the need for real estate forms which might be solved soon by one of the forms companies moving their software to the web, I use the PC so that I can relate to the people with whom I work.  In a company of well over 100 people, I am the only Mac user.

Long ago I learned the lesson that you do not want to be the only suit in an environment full of people wearing blue jeans.  While I am no longer in computer sales, I am in the business of selling concepts just as much as I am in the business of selling homes.

I do training, and I also have been working to promote some next generation real estate marketing ideas that revolve around social networking.

If I do a presentation or demonstration with a Mac, I already have a couple of strikes against me in trying to win over my audience.  No matter what the reality is, some people in the audience end up thinking that I am an Apple snob.

The last training that I did was on social media and real estate.  I actually created the presentation on a Mac using Keynote and saved it as a PowerPoint file.  When I presented the training, I used my HP.  While I have no scientific data to back my observations up, I know that I connected better with those users than I would have if I had used a Mac.  I have done it both ways, and the computer on the desk does make a difference.

There is one last reason that I continue to bang my head on the Vista wall,  I actually think it is good for me personally to live in a world of multiple operating systems.  I used to preach that all the time to government users that there was a benefit to having people using different systems.

The benefits to a government entity were pretty clear to me.  If a very clever virus or cyber attack gets inside the firewall, and you only have one operating environment, you will likely be hosed.   The odds of your enterprise surviving are better if you do not bet the whole farm on Microsoft or any one vendor.

To an individual user, having multiple operating systems around is little like a photographer having different cameras.  A camera provides a small windows sized view of the world.  Each camera's view is slightly different in what it returns to the photographer.  My Nikon D50 sees sunsets differently than my wide angle Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX2 camera.  Learning how to get the most out of each camera requires some effort and practice. If I can use both cameras effectively I end up being a better photographer and producing better photographs.

In the same way, my mail looks different in Outlook than it does in Apple Mail or Google's Gmail interface.  In one way or the other, even Outlook, which I consider to be one of the great clunkers in the software universe, once in a while gives me a different insight than I might get in looking at my long daily list of mail in just Apple mail.

I also think the ability to accomplish my work on Linux, Windows XP or Vista, and Mac OS X is something worth achieving.  I have watched at work as my reputation has gone from being the Mac guy to being the computer guy.  While I do not particularly relish the idea of offering advice as to which Windows machine one should buy, at least now if I choose to answer the question, I have some credibility.

You could say if I buy a Mac, it will be my real computer, and any Windows computer I get will just be for looks.  I certainly will not be buying it just to have Windows 7.

We have been having some perfect beach days down here on the Crystal Coast. Come for a visit, or if you are already dreading next winter, check us out as a great place to live.  We have some nice homes near the beaches of Emerald Isle.  We are an especially nice place for those who bring their jobs with them.

I can assure you that Summer is here in force.

While Steve is back at Apple, things will likely never be the same

The intensity and focus of Steve Jobs are legend.  I remember a long ago briefing where we were preparing for Steve's hoped for attendance.  Someone said that he will talk about iMovie no matter what the customers want to hear.  iMovie was what Steve was focused on at the time, and sure enough we managed to have an iMovie discussion during an enterprise briefing.

The iMovie discussion did not bother the customers.  They were just happy that Steve had chosen to show up.  That is a little like the situation we face right now, Apple and many in the technology world are just happy to have Steve show up and do whatever he chooses to do.

The reality is that even Steve Jobs is not immortal. His recent experience with a liver transplant has to have reminded him of that fact.  While I am part of the chorus of people happy to have Steve back, my mind tells me that it would be very hard for him to have the same intensity that he has shown over the years.

Obviously I am not going to be interviewing Steve Jobs on his health, but I have to wonder if that laser-like focus that he demonstrated at Apple in recent years might be his own worst enemy.

My first question would be whether or not Steve's intensity for technology has dimmed given his health problems?  After all, even Steve Jobs has to worry about his own health given the treatment that he has been through.  Can Steve have the same degree of focus that he has shown for products in the past when in the back of his mind his own health has to have a place at the table?

I would think it would be very hard.  I would also wonder why he would want to do it?

At this point I think whatever time Steve can devote to Apple without harming his health is something for which we should all be thankful.  Steve Jobs running at 10% is probably better than most people running at 100%.

Then there is the matter of Tim Cook.  Apple has been run perfectly well in Steve's absence.  Tim has demonstrated that he has a steady hand on the rudder.  In fact Tim has been responsible for most of the day to day operations of the company for many years.  Steve's being away has probably allowed Tim some additional freedom in managing Apple.  He certainly appears to have made no mistakes.

Apple's measured response to the industry's free fall on laptop pricing is a typical Tim Cook move.  He is more apt to tinker with things until he gets them right than to try something unusual.  My guess is that Tim Cook is exactly what Apple needs right now.

While no one can predict the effect of Steve Jobs leaving on Apple, I suspect it might be less than all of us have been guessing.  Perhaps Steve has one more thing to share with us before he rides into the sunset, but I doubt that any of us would be worse off if that next great thing does not make it out of Steve's mind into the Apple Stores.

We all know that there has never been a shortage of ideas at Apple, the challenge has always been picking the best ones and making them insanely great. Will there ever be another person better at doing that than Steve Jobs?  The answer is probably not, but does that mean Apple will fail in the near future?  I do not see that in the cards.

In a certain respect Steve being gone from Apple or even at Apple in a reduced capacity might be good for Apple.  A lot of very bright people left Apple because of the culture.  I can see Apple's management opening up a little when every decision does not have to go through Steve. My guess is that Tim Cook knows that he is not a hardware guru.  This might mean room at Apple for some additional talent.

Will Apple be able to sustain its growth?  I think the answer is yes.  I seriously doubt that Windows 7 will be much of threat to Apple especially if Apple continues to take incremental steps to deal with the pricing issue. Incremental steps are right up Tim Cook's alley.

I suspect this is Steve Jobs' sunset appearance at Apple.  Whether Steve's return lasts a few months or even a year, I think the time has come to say that Apple will survive and perhaps even thrive with Steve in retirement.

This is summer, so that is about all the intensity I can give to Apple unless they want to start sending me paychecks again.  I would rather watch folks fall in love with the Crystal Coast than speculate on someone else's health.

Time for me to get back to the heat and the water.  Still lots of great places for sale on the Southern Outer Banks.

Linux is the real reason behind Apple's Snow Leopard pricing

While it might seem irrational to say that Linux is driving Apple's pricing decision, I find it hard to believe that it is anything else. A price of $29 as reported by David Pogue in the New York Times looks like it is aimed directly at free Linux instead of the much more expensive Windows world.

Even in 2003 and 2004, my last years at Apple, there was a significant line of thought at Apple that Linux was a threat to Apple while Microsoft and its customers were just a place to hunt for new Mac users.

Apple seriously believes that Microsoft does not have the ability to bring out a modern operating system that can really challenge OS X. Recent history has shown that to be the case.

However, there is a good deal of respect at Apple for the Open Source movement and the code that they have produced.

On the one hand it is easy to dismiss Apple's iTunes, Safari, and Quicktime for Windows as going after the big numbers where Apple's limited programming resources would pay the most dividends.

However, there are not many bones that Apple has thrown the Linux world. When I was director of federal sales for Apple, we went through a huge battle just getting some code released to a Linux VAR to control the fan speed on Xserves. That was the case in spite of this code being critical to the deployment of several Xserves in the Navy.

I see the $29 upgrade for Snow Leopard as a shot across the bow of Windows users who might be thinking about switching to Linux.

All of the sudden free does not sound that much better than Apple's $29. Granted you can take your old Windows hardware and easily install Linux on it legally while the same is not true at this time for Snow Leopard.

However, psychologically this makes a big statement, and casts some doubt on the old argument that even if Apple hardware is competitively priced, Steve's operating system tax will exact a toll from you.

Realistically, this decision makes a lot of sense from a number of perspectives. The funny thing is that in 2003, Apple actually had some conversations about giving its operating system away.

I had an Apple vice president bounce that idea off a couple of federal customers.

In the world of Apple, any time you get a price break, enjoy it. It is a nice summer present from Steve.

Speaking of summer, the weather and water are warm here on the Carolina shore. That makes it a great time for kayaking and other summer activities which are far away from my Macs.

Why I might not need an app for that from Apple's iPhone

I can still remember the look of amazement in the eyes of some Canadian educators when I first demonstrated Adobe Illustrator in 1987.  Those were heady days in the computer world.  Pagemaker had been introduced a couple years prior.  Those great years continued as iMovie was introduced in 1999, iDVD in 2001.  During those years, we also saw some of the first WYSIWYG HTML editors like PageMill which shipped in 1995.

In January 2002 Steve Jobs introduced the white half moon iMacs with flat panel screens mounted on a very cool balanced arm that allowed you to position the screen however you wanted.  At the same time, iPhoto was announced.

While there have been plenty of computer announcements and applications since then, the buzz that I have felt has never reached the level of those prior years. 

Those products and their descendants revolutionized my life.  I can do things today that I could not before computers were introduced.

When I am around a television, I see plenty of iPhone commercials, trying to convince me that I cannot live without an iPhone. One thing is certain.  I do not need an app to find an apartment closer to campus or one to send a picture home to mom.

If the iMac and computers of its generation were the tools to organize my digital life, is the iPhone, the tool with help from its apps, to let me run my life with a small screen?

As I try to understand the iPhone and what it might mean to me, I am more confused than anything about the top ten apps listed on Apple's App Store.  The number one application is "The Moron Test."

As a Realtor®, I had been thinking the Zillow iPhone application might be a reason to get an iPhone, but I have grown a little cautious about their data since I saw a house's value (Zesstimate) drop almost $400K in a couple of day for no reason.

The ability to get emails while away from the office and in my car has been something I might need.  So email and a real estate application might push me toward the iPhone when I switch phones this summer.

There is no question that I cannot function in my job without a computer, but is it also true that the iPhone will someday become indispensable to my job?

Somehow I remain unconvinced, but I can think of some uses that might help convince me.  I read an article in the WSJ Personal Technology section about an app that lets you selectively let people know where you are through your iPhone, Blackberry, or G1.  Clients who are on the way to meet me could let me watch them arrive on a map.  Actually I probably have better things to do, but I can see that being a very useful application for tracking our grown children on long trips.

The job of a Realtor® is one of the most fascinating that I have ever done.  It is probably even more complex than the ten years that I spent as a farmer.  It certainly involves many more skills than I needed to get my job done at Apple.

Apple seems to be holding up the iPhone as something that provides an edge by doing things that you might not be able to do without it.  When I look at iPhoto, Photoshop, and some of the big application successes, they let me as a normal user do things with help from my computer that I could not do without the computer.

Many of those things became indispensable to me. As a Realtor® I measure houses, take pictures, create websites, print flyers, and fill out lots of electronic paperwork.  Beyond that I interact with clients on the telephone, in person, and by computer.

When I am with clients in the car, I depend on my own knowledge, my GPS, information that I have printed specifically for those clients, and occasionally knowledge of others whom I can reach by telephone.

Perhaps if I am in front of a home which we spotted on a house hunting trip, and I could use my iPhone to tell if the house is occupied and available for showing, that might be something of use.  Except that about 98% of the time I can find the same information by calling an agent's cell phone.  Their number or their agency's number is always on the sign in the front of the home.

The real estate business is very computerized already. We carry SmartCards to access lock boxes.  We use digital cameras to capture pictures.  We upload those pictures to centralized data bases run by MLS and a number of other sites.  We scan documents and use movie cameras to create virtual tours.  We view GIS maps and tax data online.  We can even pull digital deeds.  Our county will soon be making available to us a computer program called Pictometry which will let us verify our measurements from a second source.

There seems to be a category of iPhone apps for clients of Realtors®.  It appears that you download the app and send an email to the Realtor® and use it to search for homes in the area.  More than anything it appears to be a way to get contact information from a client.  If you are interested in a property I would bet on the easiest route which would be to call on your cell phone.  That is what we see the most.

Maybe it is enough that the iPhone provides me excellent email and voice mail tools that are integrated with my contacts. Perhaps in the end, the iPhone is more about being able to do some new things wherever you might be than it is about an app that will change my life.

This summer looks to be a great time to buy a smart phone even if there is still no application that I cannot live without.  I do not expect Apple to give up their crown easily, and that killer app still might be just around the corner.

Life on North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks has returned to normal after a fantastic Memorial Day Weekend.  We have great weather again this weekend.

Why Apple will not deliver a knockout punch to the PC world

When I started selling Apple's computers back in 1982, the competition was Commodore, Tandy, and at a later point Osborne.  Eventually we sold Sperry, Texas Instruments, and finally IBM PCs along Macs.

Apple had gotten into my blood so it was no surprise that I got on-board the mother ship in 1984. For the next almost twenty years I bought into the idea that Apple was always just one or two moves away from getting back to a key position in computing.

As an Apple believer, it was easy to swallow the marketing hype du jour.  I remember the almost annual showdowns where Steve or Phil Schiller would demonstrate how much faster a Mac was than a PC.

At one time there was talk from Apple's normally intelligent System Engineers that there was no way that Intel would be able to get a chip as powerful as the G4 in their laptops without them melting away.

Then there was the whole RISC verses CISC debate, and the supercomputer on a chip, the G5.  Surely Apple would grind the competition into the dust.

Finally there was the switch to the Intel architecture.  That had to be it.  Once everything was on the same processor, people would see the light and flock to the Mac in droves.

Apple has even taken some half serious shots at being price competitive over the years, the Mac LC, the iMac, and the iBook.  None of these have really challenged the low prices of the PC world in anyone's mind but that of Apple's executives.

I recently saw this in Appleinsider.

(Apple) plans to produce less expensive Macs in the near future that the Cupertino firm hopes will cancel out Microsoft's few remaining arguments against switching to a Mac.

It seems the old knockout punch metaphor has escaped into the wild from the fourth floor of One Infinite Loop.

The problem with the theory is that Apple is a company with less than 10% of market share that actually likes to behave as if they have as much market share with their computers as they do with the iPods.

Apple really has ignored the competitive landscape since Steve got back.

They have written their own rules and produced only what they wanted to produce.

Before the missiles start heading this way, let me say that Mac OS X is the best operating system there is, and in general Mac hardware is very good.  I depend on both, but I think the company has some internal limitations that will make its latest knockout punches even easier to duck than they were in the early days.

If you cannot see a pricing differential between Macs and PCs big enough to drive a tractor trailer through, do not bother finishing the article.  You will not agree with the other points either.

First and foremost Apple rarely reacts to the market.  Apple likes to create the market and set the rules.  In order to get to 10% and beyond in the market, Apple has got to have some better answers to low price laptops than their old white MacBook at $999.  It is just not going to cut it.

People are moving to inexpensive laptops of which Apple has none.  Even in the desktop market Apple does not make it easy.  They push their customers to either the iMac or their very expensive towers.  You can argue all day about what great values can be had in Apple's towers compared to a similarly configured Dell, but the real point is that few users buy computers at those price points.  There is a large sub-$1000 market that Apple poorly addresses with its Mac Mini.

At this point in history, Apple has had a really long time to take a serious shot at Vista.  Many users despise Vista.  Countless users have refused to move from XP which is seriously long in the tooth.  Yet Apple has been unable to put together a compelling argument to move those users.  We have some very cute and subtle ads, but no campaign to lure dissatisfied Windows users to the Mac.

Enough users have gotten comfortable with the iPod to grow Apple's computer share, but when you look at the the big picture numbers, Apple has not made it to double digits, and we are on the eve of what is being presented as the Microsoft version of finally getting it right.  I suspect Windows 7 is also wishful thinking on Microsoft's part, but that is another story. 

However, without a compelling campaign from Apple, millions of users will gamble on the next version of Windows.  Apple will have missed yet another chance to really move the needle.

If you want to hurt Microsoft and get more Macs on the street, you need to get aggressive.  With Apple's billions in the bank, Apple should start a campaign to modernize America's computing infrastructure.  Why not offer a $300 trade-in for the first 3,000,000 PCs brought to Apple?  Load up special bundles with iWork and give them a free coupon for the next version of the OS X operating system and for some training in the Apple Store.

You would see a stampede in the streets.

This would work better than lowering prices.  It will not even bother current Mac users, most of whom seem happy to pay higher prices.

It would take less than one of Apple's billions and think how many PC would be pulled from homes.  I have an old Dell Dimension that I would yank out.  They could be recycled and everyone would win, especially those who are no longer forced to use an out of date PC.

I will not be holding my breath for the great Apple trade-in, but I really do believe that Apple has got to start paying more than passing attention to the computer market. 

Perhaps Tim Cook should walk the asiles of the Morehead City, NC Best Buy to see how tough it is for Apple products to compete in that environment.  I will be glad to host the tour.  We will stop by Staples and see how easy it is not to buy a Mac when none are around.

Then he can sample some of our peaceful beaches.

If you missed my online interview and chat session with the Toronto Globe and Mail, check it out here.