October 1999, Vol. 10, No. 10

Gee, four Macs

Apple shows new hardware, but is there a commitment to publishing?

SAN FRANCISCO -- As I was walking into the keynote address that Apple Computer’s interim chief executive, Steve Jobs, was about to give at Seybold San Francisco ’99, my companion was amazed.

"What are all these people doing here," he asked, astounded by the size of the audience, which probably numbered close to 2000.

"Haven't you ever seen Jobs?" I asked. "He’s a great showman."

Over the course of the next couple of hours here Aug. 31, Jobs proved me right. He put on a great show (detailed by Correspondent L. Carol Christopher inside).

The highlight of the presentation was the unveiling of the G4 product line of workstations. In addition to three new high-speed models of Macintosh, the company also showed its new flat-panel monitor, which it has dubbed the Cinema Display.

The workstations are as astounding as the size of the keynote crowd -- they actually process data at a rate in excess of a gigaflop (or 1 million floating point operations per second). They were called "the ultimate Photoshop machines" throughout Jobs' presentation and there’s no question that the power of the new processor makes using the sometimes-sluggish ubiquitous Adobe image-editing program sprightly.

Correspondent George Powell -- whether he started using a Mac before me is an open question, but we've both been Mac-o-philes since the Reagan Administration -- gives us his thoughts on the new hardware (as well as other interesting Seybold exhibits) inside.

But the real question is whether Apple is still really concerned about the publishing industry. Until the G4s and Cinema Display, the company’s focus had definitely shifted away from the publishing market (the business market in general) and toward the consumer market.

The wild success of the iMac -- coupled by the shipping that just started at the end of last month, of the new iBook consumer portable -- has turned plenty of heads at Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters.

The downside is that the margins for these products are woefully slim. The company makes far more on the high-priced professional products like G4s and Cinema Displays. So, you would think that Apple executives would be pointed mostly toward the professional market.

The problem is that the consumer-side issues are driving many technology decisions, some of them not-so-good for publishers. Specifically, the move toward Universal Serial Bus (USB), Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) and FireWire to replace Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) and Small Computer Serial Interface (SCSI) is hobbling a number of publishers.

Even the now-ancient blue-and-white G3 machine, which came exclusively with PCI slots, is a problem. One publisher of my acquaintance has an extensive investment in ECRM Autokon scanners which are hooked to Macs via SCSI connections. To use the new G4 computers (which is what you'd want to do, so that those scans could be manipulated the fastest), the company has been seeking Scsci-to-PCI converters to allow connectivity. Though there was once a supplier of such converters, it appears to have gone out of business.

Many potential web sites won't be hosted on G4s because of the lack of ADB circuitry in the machine, which is needed for keyboard restarts of server equipment.

Though I am not advocating no progress, for the professional market Apple should have provided circuits and connectors for ADB and SCSI in its newest line of computers.

In another case of a computer mass-marketer not understanding the issues of our niche, Correspondent Steven E. Brier takes a look inside at a nagging problem: as newspapers have standardized their word processing needs on customized versions of Microsoft Word, how have they adapted when the Redmond, Wash., supplier upgrades the program? When the company changes the formats and the macro programming language then suppliers and papers must react.

There’s a real question as to whether our small piece of the mass-market can influence giants such as Microsoft and Apple. Nonetheless, the G4s and Cinema Display are the best news for professional publishers coming out of Apple in a long time.

-- David M. Cole