Apple computers has a lot to be thankful for in the dog-eat-dog world of computers.
They have a loyal following who are willing to buy a system that is all but incompatible with more than 90 per cent of all the computers on the market. They seem able to weather any storm, and aren’t afraid to innovate and take a few chances. Not everything they make is a hit, but at least they’re trying new things.
They have a few markets cornered, including graphic arts and publishing, and seem unlikely to lose much ground in those areas any time soon.
As computers get more complex, Apple has kept things simple. At the same time, their computers, operating system and software has remained state-of-the-art.
Did I mention customer loyalty? Check around the net sometime and you’ll see that Mac supporters are not your typical computer geeks. Wired Magazine even refers to this group as the Cult of Mac, and it includes some unlikely people.
For example, according to an article by Wired Magazine’s Leander Kahney on "Macspotting", Microsoft’s Bill Gates uses a Macintosh, as does Bill Clinton, Boris Yeltsin, Sylvester Stallone and Martha Stewart. One column at MacCentral, www.maccentral.com /famous/, regularly updates a list of celebrity Mac users, and Mac appearances in movies and on television.
At the recent MacWorld conference earlier in January, cultists were given a few more reasons to strut around like they owned the place. Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs used the annual conference to launch a couple of surprising new applications for Mac users that will go a long way to putting Apple back on top, at least for a while.
The first is a suite of applications called iLife, which includes new versions of Apple’s iMovie, iPhoto, iTune and iDVD software programs which should be available on Jan. 25. Jobs boasted that iLife will "do for our digital lifestyle what Microsoft Office did for office productivity."
The second new release is a new Internet browser called Safari. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the browser wars, but let’s just say the U.S. Superior Courts had to get involved, and several companies, including Netscape, are crawling back from the brink of extinction.
Various studies peg Internet Explorer as the Internet browser of choice by a huge margin – between 72 per cent and 95 per cent of all computer users have a recent version of IE. The other users, except for a small percentage, use Netscape.
Trying to carve a niche in this browser market would be as daring as launching a new cola to take on Coca-Cola and Pepsi – if it weren’t for that core group of loyal supporters that will try anything with an Apple on the label. Most will at least give Safari a chance, and if all Apple is saying about it is true, then Internet Explorer is going to lose some market share.
A beta version of Safari is available right now from www.apple.com/safari/ .
According to Apple, Safari, which was designed to work with the Mac OS X operating system, "offers you a superior Web experience with outstanding performance. Even the most complex of pages load at breakneck speed. In fact, Safari loads pages more quickly than any other Mac Web browser. But that’s not all. Safari uses the advanced interface technologies underlying Mac OS X to offer you an all-new view of the Web, one that’s much easier to use."
In a comparison of the Safari Beta, Chimera 0.6.0, Netscape 7.01 and Internet Explorer 5.2.2, Safari was had the fastest HTML page load speed. A page that took 53.7 seconds to download with Internet Explorer took 16.6 seconds with Safari, 21.8 seconds with Chimera and 33.6 seconds with Netscape.
A JavaScript that took 29.1 seconds to load on Netscape loaded in 10.8 seconds on Safari, 12.7 seconds on Chimera and 22.7 seconds on IE.
Safari was also faster to launch, taking about three seconds to open. IE took five seconds, Chimera 5.9 seconds, and Netscape 9.8 seconds.
That’s not all.
Safari comes with a built-in Google search engine in the toolbar. It also has a SnapBack feature that allows browsers to return to the original address, or the last point they added a bookmark. The enhanced bookmark feature also makes it easier for users to select and organize their bookmarks, and includes the bookmarks from your previous browser so users don’t have to start over.
Another Safari feature is a downloading program that goes right to the file, rather than going through the process of saving them to your desktop first. You can even install applications through Safari.
Apple also claims to have solved a few version problems that make various Web sites look and work differently with different computers and browsers. It reads most Internet standards like HTML, XHTML, DOM, CSS, Java, and JavaScript, and seamlessly includes QuickTime, and Macromedia Flash and Shockwave scripts.
For international customers, Safari also supports Unicode, which lets you view sites in different languages, or even view multiple languages on the same page. Unicode does not come standard with OS X, but was included in the OS X Jaguar upgrade.
Uniquely, Safari does not allow browsers to be hijacked by pop-up ads, if users choose to turn them off – as if anyone would choose to leave them on.
Apple’s new releases for 2003 aren’t limited to these programs either. This year they are the first company to release a Laptop with a full 17-inch screen. All new Mac notebooks will be Bluetooth enabled to allow them to connect to peripherals and the Internet using wireless technology.
To give Microsoft PowerPoint a run for its money, Apple has created an innovative presentation program called Keynote that offers superior control of graphics, fonts, transitions, and other functions.
Apple is also rumoured to be creating a version of their popular iPod music and file transfer device with a colour screen to play movies.
If nothing else, this latest offering of Apple products should silence critics who believe the company’s biggest innovation in the past decade is the all-in-one iMac.
