August, 2012

Happy August:
We have a Q & A meeting coming up on Tuesday the 7th, and on Monday August 20th,
Jesse has been kind enough to volunteer to acquaint us with some of the apps that come with the OS. I’ve already installed Mountain Lion on my Mac Pro at home, and on my iMac at the office, but I’m not sure if I should put it on the club’s MacBook Pro yet. I’ll see what Jesse wants.
I started with the Mac on system 6; through all the versions of system 7, as well as Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9, I really enjoyed getting to know each new system, all the new features, and all the things that made using the Mac easier. Jumping to Mac OS X was a bit of a shock, at least in the first version, because everything was so different. As the Mac OS evolved through Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard, and Snow Leopard, each one added features and made it easier to do things, and it was fun to learn each new OS.
Then came the iPhone and the iPad. They were so different that learning them was easy; there were no preconceptions about how to do things. And of course as iOS evolved, we gained features and better ways to get things done. And iOS 6 promises to extend that.
When Lion was coming out, one of the taglines was “Back to the Mac”, which was a reference to some iOS features coming to the Mac OS. Mountain Lion has surely followed this trend as well.
In all my years helping people on the Mac, the file system has seemed to give people the most trouble. And of course iOS has none of those things. And I think the folks at Apple believe that’s a better way. It seems as though Apple is trying to remove the file system from the user
experience. This may prove to be a good thing, but to me it’s feeling pretty alien; I’m having a hard time getting used to some of the simplifications.
In October I’m going to do a program on Mountain Lion, and I wonder how much of this iOS in the Mac OS stuff I’ll be used to. For now it’s really hard for me to merge the simplicity of iOS with the geekiness of the Mac OS. For new users it may prove to be a godsend.
And now a quick note about Apple’s last quarter. As usual they handily beat their guidance, but they could not live up to Wall Street’s outsized expectations. However, last quarter was Apple’s third best quarter ever, selling 17 million iPads, 26 million iPhones, and 4 million Macs.
Rumors concerning an Apple TV set have quieted down recently. I wonder what surprises they have for us.
For now, that’ll do. By the way, I dictated all this on my iPad, and I didn’t have to do too many corrections. Fun!
Andrew