Quenching the firewire and the strange case of the missing diskette

The new Macbook

As you probably heard by now, launched new Macbooks, and you can get the full specs and stuff over at their website. Going through the product page you will see that this is both good news and bad. The good news is obviously the new design and features. The bad news is not so obvious, unless you plan to get a new Macbook and have a slew of Firewire devices. Which you won’t be able to use. Since it completely lacks FW or any kind.

Some people compare this with the introduction of the original iMac, which lacked a diskette drive. These are the people who don’t have FW external hard drives, or don’t have miniDV cameras which rely on Firewire to transfer video on the computer. So you see, it’s actually not at all as not having a diskette drive in the original iMac. Try capturing digital video via USB and you’ll see what I mean.

Firewire, besides being technically more advanced than USB in almost every way, offers some key advantages that make it “not just another port taking space on the side of the laptop”:

- the ability to daisy chain up to 63 peripherals in a peer-to-peer architecture
- Target Disk mode (this is specific to Macs, Windows PCs don’t have this)
- no system overhead during use (unlike USB which relies on the system to manage the data transfers)
- for DV: the ability to control the video camera (play, stop, rewind etc.) via the capturing software; with USB the camera only streams like an old analogue VHS player

Currently I use my Macbook Pro with three Firewire 800 hard disks daisy-chained on the FW800 port, while keeping the free FW400 free for the video camera. I can also connect the DV camera to the last of the hard disks in the chain, so I could even do with one FW port (meaning I could do this with the white plastic Macbook). But having both is still nicer. Having none is impossible.

I don’t think this is a case of the “missing diskette”. I think it’s a case of rev. A hardware corroborated with the rush to get this babies into production in a certain timeframe. Remember the rev. A Macbook Pro? That one only had FW400, no FW800. By rev. B it had both.

I hope Apple engineers are working on squeezing a FW connector on the Macbook right now. The Macbook is a great little machine for doing home videos, or for use in a home recording studio (with all those audio devices that connect via Firewire), so not having any Firewire connectivity cuts out a lot of people out of the loop. And it’s always nice to not have your processor spike up whenever Time Machine starts churning out entire gigabytes of back up data.

Here’s to rev. B Macbooks!

Amilo Dalmatian and the sorry state of laptop design

Fujitsu Siemens updated the design for their line of their laptops. Unfortunately they are still keeping the Amilo name (it always seemed sad and hopeless to me), albeit with a new styling, and the new font is not helping at all. On first viewing it reads “omilo”.

The design itself is all angular with soft corners and black and white. It’s like the bastard child between an Apple Macbook and an IBM Lenovo Thinkpad. The concept, as explained on their site, is interesting but in the end just a gimmick: the black stuff represents technology (all ports and jacks are on black), and the white is “the human interface” (keyboard, power button and cover).

All in all the design isn’t bad, but it just comes off as another computer company trying to crack the “stylish” market, and when you put it next to the latest Dells, Vaios (you know, Sony’s Amilo), HPs and even Toshibas, it really doesn’t stand out from the crowd that much, if at all.

Sony Vaio

 

Dell Inspiron

 

HP Pavilion

 

Toshiba Portege

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I guess the Vaio comes the closest to the laptop that they are all trying to emulate, the Macbook. Now I’m not saying that all laptops should look like Macbooks, far from it. For example I like the look of the new Lenovo IdeaPad (hate the name though). I actually think it looks the way Thinkpads should be looking, instead of the dated design they are still having so many years later.

The big flaw all of these machines is trying to look like some other laptop (whichever that may be). When the Macbook was launched (actually the iBook G4, Macbook’s precursor) it looked like nothing else (even though the first iBook was much wilder in design), and that’s what mattered, that’s what made its design timeless. Everyone trying to reproduce that very same laptop is just producing knockoffs.

WARNING: “Apple is the greatest thing in the world” type rant follows. If you have a low threshold for “Apple fanboism”, consider this post over and out.

It’s really not that complicated to make a really good laptop. Take the very Macbook example, subtract the design, and just look at the process. Find a nice shape, and then refine the hell out of it. Make sure everything looks perfect from any angle. Make sure you don’t have stupid stickers on it. Make sure the blinking blue lights don’t become a pain in the ass after only 10 minutes of use. Make sure that the back of the laptop doesn’t look like something from Alien 2. Pay lots and lots of attention to detail. Forget focus groups. Not having every possible button for every possible feature is a good thing. And pay lots and lots of attention to detail at each step of the process and in between.

This is what separates the Macbooks from the rest, not the design itself, but the execution of that design. Stuff like the overall simple and unobtrusive look of the thing, the way the sleep light glows less powerful in the dark and stronger in the light, the way the back of it is designed to look good even if you put it upside down, the perfect alignment of the ports and connectors, the magnetic power connector, two finger scrolling etc.

See how easy it is? This is really what bothers me when I look at a Windows laptop. It tries to look all designed and fashion-y and stylish, but fails brutally when it comes to the details, and more specifically to the lack of attention to details that “went” into it. A stupid screw somewhere very visible. Too many seizure-inducing LEDs. Those dreadful Windows and Intel stickers (easily fixable fortunately). Manufacturer specific buttons (such as the “go to toshiba.com” button – is anyone really using that button?!). 

Anyway, the list could go on forever. The Macs have their own flaws, but at least the effort that went into the process  of refining them is very palpable. I went into this “Macs are the greatest thing on earth” ranting mode and I really think I should stop before I get the Mac Mac label. Yes, Macs do piss me off sometimes, they crash as well, apps get stuck. But they do it while looking so much better than the rest.