Quarter Life Crisis

Technical Progress¶

784 words

One thing I liked about Apple, was how their hardware had the tendency to be relatively future proof. Seeing friends with IBM compatible computers try to do things like start their computer from a CD, attaching different keyboards or doing similar stuff used to be amusing in a sad way. It mostly didn’t work. And when those people saw you do things on your Mac by plugging in a cable or holding down a key, it was sometimes a strange situation to see people be astonished that the most natural things to do ‘just worked’.

A particularly strong player in this compatibility game was SCSI, as I’ve ranted about before. Sure, it wasn’t all perfect as you still had to manage to give each device a distinct number and handle the termination properly but those were clearly defined and easy to understand problems. I never had any significant problems with them. In particular any Mac with SCSI would quite happily start up from a SCSI device you attached to it. In fact, Nibbler, my Mac SE –a model that was introduced in 1987 – will happily start off my zip-drive – a device that was introduced in the mid 1990s – using System 7 – introduced in the early 1990s. Backwards compatibility is important. But in a way forwards compatibility is more impressive an to me looks like an indication of good engineering.

Fast forward a decade or so and SCSI is mostly gone for the home user. We have FireWire and USB now. And while FireWire is better in some ways, those advantages probably aren’t too significant when compared to situations where you’re using a single drive and a keyboard on USB-2. Particularly USB seems to have brought the world of plug and play to most computer users – although the Wintel-loving world still seems to love using antique ports for attaching their keyboards and they seem to similarly love using very long cables to plug their mice directly into the computer rather than into the keyboard.

Of course you have all sorts of nice problems with USB as well. Such as devices using too much power and you needing extra power supplies or hubs for things to work nicely – with the powered hub I got being particularly strange with my iBook as it often fails to turn on the graphics tablet that is attached to it and it similarly fails to run the USB hard drive I have (which will only run on one of the iBook’s USB ports as well). So here we start to see shoddy engineering. As far as I understand, things should work just fine with USB as long as you’re connected to a powered device. And should some problem come up concerning power, you should get an error message. Those messages do exist, I’ve seen them and they’ve been helpful. But in the case of my graphics tablet and hard drive I didn’t see any error messages and had to remain clueless.

But that’s the new iBook already. Let’s take a step back and look at my old Powerbook again. It only had USB-1, i.e. a slow connection. But still I can attach the USB-hard drive to it and it will read and write just fine. In fact, it even starts up just happily from the USB hard drive. Just as you’d expect. In comparison, the iBook sucks a lot. Apparently it can’t start from USB devices. WTF?! Apple had that technology working years ago. And being able to start from an external hard drive can be extremely useful in case you’re having some trouble with the machine. Particularly if you’re running an operating system that carries the burden of a Unixoid heritage. I.e. one that isn’t easy to copy on another volume like a CD and is rather slow when being run from there. And now – apparently ‘by design’ – Apple chose to prevent the machines from booting from external USB drives. In a time where USB remains a lot cheaper than FireWire and where Apple strongly prefer it over FireWire in the iPods they sell.

A very sucky move by Apple. One that limits the ‘just works’ factor a lot by restricting compatibility. And if I had any trust in Apple as a vendor of a future proof platform, this limits the trust I can build. Will MacOS XI run on my iBook in 2010? Who knows. But it doesn’t seem likely. And will I be able to start the machine from the hot new drives that come out in 2012? Most likely not. But thanks to the iBooks’ track record of breaking rather quickly, I shouldn’t need to worry about that anyway.

October 4, 2005, 0:17