“For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;”
~Richard II, Act III, Scene ii, by William Shakespeare
Will Apple's 2011 OS X Lion go the way of the ill-designed 1962 Univac computer?
The demise of leaders makes for great literature. And timeless quotes.
I started my last blog entry with a quote from Blade Runner. It triggered a memory and a train of thought. (This train takes the scenic route, so you’ll have to bear with me.) The first stop on this journey is at something called the Blade Runner Curse.
The 1982 film included a number of prominent brands which form part of the film’s assumed futuristic backdrop ( made in 1982, it was set in 2019). The product placements included Atari, Cuisinart, Pan Am, Bell and Coca Cola. In real life, over the next few years, the first three went bankrupt; Bell was broken up and Coke went through the failed introduction of “New Coke,” though this last was only a brief setback.
Pan Am, though, is newly fashionable, due to the new American series of the same name. In case you haven’t seen it, think Mad Men meets the peculiar 1950′s and 1960′s glamour of civil air travel – a winning combination. A couple of recent articles introducing this series in the UK in turn referenced an older movie, the 1965 comedy, “Boeing Boeing.”
Never seen it? You’re missing out. The plot is simple: Tony Curtis is a playboy living in Paris (obviously). He conducts a series of affairs with a number of airline stewardesses, all mutually oblivious to one another. He can do this by meticulously managing his shenanigans according to the airline timetables, so that as one paramour leaves, another one arrives. But suddenly, all the airlines upgrade to faster jets. The schedules change. Farce ensues. Add to that his predatory best friend, Jerry Lewis (who presumably arrives in France with an honor guard), and the typecast sarcastic housekeeper, Thelma Ritter, a fixture of this kind of 1960s movie.
How is this relevant?
Bear with me – this is still the scenic route. At one point, as chaos descends, Thelma Ritter turns to Tony Curtis and tells him, “You don’t need a housekeeper, you need a Univac.”
Now that’s a company we haven’t heard of in a while. Univac, the ur-computer. At one time a brand so powerful that you could use it, without explanation, as the punchline in a Hollywood comedy starring two of the biggest attractions in the business at the top of their game, and expect a laugh. Whatever happened to Univac? The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Which brings me (finally!) to Apple. How does Apple turn into Univac? I’ll tell you how.
I’m typing this on a MacBook, running OS X Lion, the latest version. The MacBook is beautiful if a bit of monstrosity. It’s the 17” model, and frankly it’s beginning to do my back in. But the hardware’s not the issue.
You see, this MacBook is near the top of the range. It has 8GB of memory. (8GB! When I started at IBM one of my jobs was to help out with the home computer program, which involved upgrading new PC-XTs from 64k to 128k of memory.) And a lot of the time it runs like a dog.
Various applications seem to have memory leaks. If Adobe Flash somehow starts up within Safari, it can kill the entire computer faster than an outbreak of Ebola in a densely populated area – hence Apple’s entirely reasonable, in my view, issue with Adobe. Worse, the Mac App Store, written by Apple, is currently running at 2.6GB of virtual memory. Does it think I want to run my own app store? And why, over the last couple of months, has Apple Mail started to refuse to work with MobileMe, a service I was stupid enough to pay for, despite Apple having said it was useless – hence the plan to to fix it and turn it into iCloud, which is kind of free. (MORE FOOL ME being the subliminal message here.)
The point is, this is what happens when Apple begins to lose interest in something. It lost interest in OS X a while ago. Now advances are grudging, fixes are hard to come by, and sympathy comes at a premium. Though in an Apple store, geniuses are ten a penny. For example, one in the San Francisco store told me even he wouldn’t have bought MobileMe.
Apple used to be known for its careful consideration of usability, especially in software. It’s how it took stolen ideas (see my previous blog) and made them beautiful. I have a book on my shelf, near where I’m writing this: “Tog on Interface,” by Bruce Tognazzini, wherein one of the Apple UI designers pontificates on his views on interface design. Now, you may not agree with him, but one thing is clear: they tested the hell out these systems, especially on user ergonomics. If you want to argue with them, you’d better have more testing data than them.
Did they really test Lion to this extent? I don’t think so. It’s beginning to feel like a collection of bright ideas turned into half-tested software.
Maybe that shouldn’t matter to Apple. But it should. Complacency spreads like a contagion. For Lion now, read iOS tomorrow. And where they might have had the shouty, intense imperatives of Steve Jobs driving perfection (Jobs on one occasion is said to have rejected a circuit board design because it “looked ugly”), well, they don’t anymore. And as anyone in the business can tell you, when things start to go badly, it happens quickly.
So, when you hear those finely honed, topical references to Apple in today’s sitcoms: savor and appreciate them. Some day they may be antiques. Now, where’s that Univac?
Tags: Apple OSX Lion, Intermittent Signal, Mark Watson, Univac
