MAC BLOG SAFARI
Mac Bloggers Chatter Over Chipsets, Bemoan MobileMe, Jerk Geniuses' Chains

Two major stories have been unfolding throughout the Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) blogosphere this week -- the service outages surrounding the launch of Apple's .Mac replacement, MobileMe, and the rumor that Apple could be ready to cut up Intel's (Nasdaq: INTC) chipsets in favor of something else entirely when it releases its next generation of MacBooks.

Plus, not everyone is happy with the iPhone's proprietary nature.

E-mail was up in the air for weeks for 20,000 (about 1 percent) of Apple's .Mac-to-MobileMe subscribers. The loss of messages and faulty or slower-than-expected push services coming out of Apple's new "cloud" created a firestorm of public criticism, with all guns pointing to Apple. Media power writers Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal and David Pogue of The New York Times blasted the service, and Apple even started up a rudimentary blog to publish updates on the beleaguered service and Apple's efforts to restore and/or fix it.

On Tuesday, Apple reported that it had completely restored service, but it also created a dedicated chat line to help customers reach MobileMe specialists if they were still having problems.

Both Apple-loving fanboys and burned customers hit the topic hard.

Trials and Errors

"Forgive me for being cynical but I don't believe MobileMe is working properly for one second. Thank God I wasn't one of the '1%' (Did Apple get the Enron accountants to come up with that figure?) who got totally screwed on email but I have had all the other woes people have reported over the past few weeks," commented No-doz on the Cult of Mac post on the subject. "On Monday," No-doz added, "it simply stopped delivering about 50% of my messages for about two hours. They've never turned up. Today -- after the damn thing is supposed to be working -- I had a 30-minute period a few hours ago where Mail kept demanding my password and wouldn't sign in to my IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) account."

Others noted a better experience, though.

"MobileMe has been working perfectly fine for me for the past week or more," Bruce commented, though that experience describes the minority of posts on the subject. Of course, the millions of MobileMe subscribers who are not having problems probably wouldn't spend much time jumping on blogs and forums discussing those who are having problems.

However, in a post on July 31, Rich, commenting on the Cult of Mac blog, didn't seem to have experienced Apple's fix:

"Syncing between home, the 'mobileme cloud' and my work machine is dead," he wrote.

"I keep getting 'inconsistent data' despite continually resetting, removing, restarting mobile me and sync over a number of days. I'm hoping for a 'second' free month from Apple for this!" he added.

Overall, if this has truly been a 1 percent problem, how big a deal could it really be?

"Every type of publicity has some effect. So how big a deal it is? It's not the end of the universe, but it's not helpful," Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies, told MacNewsWorld.

"In terms of it being expected, what you have to look at is, Apple has a larger and larger footprint in the market, and many of its customers are new to computers. And as it acquires more consumers, it's getting the less sophisticated types who don't know the things like, on the first day of the service there will be lots of calls and the servers will be overtaxed. Sophisticated users will tend to know this, but the [newbies] will complain, and that'll create bad press," he explained.

Apple, Kay also noted, has it own special brand of fanboy -- one that's both extremely vocal in defending Apple and highly capable of complaining loudly about the company. Consequently, the press on the subject has gone through the roof.

Overall, "This is the first stumble that Apple has made in a pretty long while," Kay said.

"I feel that since [COO] Tim Cook arrived, Apple has been executing uncommonly well. It could be that Apple is seeing some of the limits of growth," he added.

Intel, Nvidia, September and a MacBook Redesign?

In a positive flurry of activity, the Mac blogosphere has also been humming with a variety of rumors and news surrounding the likelihood that Apple will release a significant update to its MacBook laptop lineup, including the Pro and possibly the Air models. The basic thinking is that it's been far too long between updates, and both the MacBook and MacBook Pro case designs are aging. The next iteration could key off of the Air's curved aluminum looks, and they might even include glass trackpads.

To add fuel to the fire, AppleInsider claims that Apple resellers received notices from Apple that MacBook, MacBook Pro and iPod supplies would be constrained, so they should stock up to get through the month of August.

Arousing even more speculation is the idea that Apple could be ready to snip out portions of Intel's chipsets -- keeping the main central processing unit -- so it could gain some performance ground with graphical processing and/or add some new features with add-on processors.

Some have posited that Apple could work with graphics powerhouse Nvidia, while other have dismissed the notion, noting that slicing up Intel's chipsets would not only irritate Intel, it would also result in a massive amount of work for little gain. When Intel releases its next generation of processors with a different architecture next year, most of Apple's customization work would be for naught.

Still, possibilities remain.

"As long as Nvidia manages good operations and improves in these areas, they've got a stunning range of products for many industries. Gaming GPUs [graphic processing units], Chipsets for PC and Mac. Open GL has always been their strength - so Open GL or maybe Open GL ES plays to their advantage. We're talking Physics (PhysX) which will probably be integrated into Open CL / CUDA / Etc.," commented nvidia2008 on the AppleInsider post on the subject, adding, "In the desktop, portable and even mobile space, Nvidia has a lot to offer Apple. As long as quality control is maintained."

Meanwhile, Not Everyone Loves Apple's Proprietary Nature

DefectiveByDesign.org, a campaign of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), staged a stunt last weekend where members or willing participants where given a script to use on Apple's support technicians -- a.k.a. Geniuses -- at Apple retail stores. The plan was to book meetings with Apple's Genius Bar experts and grill them under the premise that their iPhone was defective because has created a closed system that owners can't modify or tinker with.

Here's one of the first questions:

"Most smartphones, including those by OpenMoko, Nokia (NYSE: NOK), RIM, Palm (Nasdaq: PALM) and even Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), allow applications to come from a variety of sources, including free software developers. Free 'as in freedom' software development requires that users and developers be able to share and modify the source code for programs they use. iPhone users are not permitted by Apple to share or load modified versions of programs distributed through the App Store -- even when a program's developer wants users to be able to do this! Apple markets itself as empowering, alternative technology -- how does Apple plan to support free software development?"

Follow-up questions include asking for good answers as to why Apple still sells DRM (digital rights management)-laden music, what the company might be doing with the global positioning system found in the iPhone, and why can't consumers unlock their iPhones for use with a different carrier -- especially when, in the United States, the Register of Copyrights has ruled that consumers have the right to do so?

DefectiveByDesign.org has gotten a mixed bag of praise, support and criticism.

"I don't know much about it, but isn't that the point of Android, that it's open source? If they want an open source cell phone, why don't they just use that?" noted Wiggin on the AppleInsider post on the subject, then added, "Oh, right, they think they are 'entitled' to Apple's hardware."

Still, DefectiveByDesign.org is pleased with their results.

"We've had a great response to the iPhone Challenge. It's helped turn the public's attention toward the restrictions imposed by the iPhone -- the restrictions that Apple doesn't want people to know about," John Sullivan, FSF manager of Operations, told MacNewsWorld.