Imran Anwar's Opinion on
The Future of Apple Computers

A friend of mine sent me email asking some valid questions about Apple Computer, a company whose products I use and love, but a company that could be better managed by the Three Stooges than by its million$ earning managers. His statements are quoted with a ">" and my reasoning follows.

>I think that the situation with the Mac is really >beginning to suck! There is so much software for >Windows that simply is not available for the Mac --

Statistical fact but relatively irrelevant. Yes, there are 12,987 worprocessors available for WinDoze, and, [egad] only (let us say) 22 for the Mac. So, how manyt times have you needed anything otrher than Wordperfect or (yuck) Word for Mac to write with?

Sure, there will ALWAYS be commercial developers who will decide to write stuff for Windoze95 before or instead of for a Mac, but the reverse holds true for the Mac for REAL stuff for YEARS. eg Photoshop, Quark, PageMaker and so on.

>to wit, HTML coding programs, games, internet access

Same numeric facts. I use Adobe Pagemill or a couple of other HTML programs, so I dont care if the PC has 1245 HTML programs available. I fly the F/A-18 Hornet simulation which is so realistic that my PC using friends drool. etc. etc.

>providers, fin. programs, the list is endless. To >add insult to injury, the Mac version of Netscape's latest (3.0) >browser does not support all the really cool stuff >(like the internet phone) like the Windows version does.

In the case of Netscape the delay is real, and that is quite easily forgiable, there ARE more PCs than Macs so they complete PC software first, not instead of, Mac software.If this were not a valid point why would your favorite UNoriginal UNcreative UNvisionary company Microsopft release its Explorer browser for Mac (costly to develop) and be giving it away FREE.

> >Is this the end? Is my Powerbook going to go the way >of the Betamax?

Yes it will, even if Apple takes over the world. ALL equipment does. AND, No, it won't, even if Apple were to shut down TODAY.

Computers useful lives are long and unles you need the "latest" and greatest all the time, you can survive for years to come. Real example: you have been to my web site http://www.imran.com which, as you may know, takes about 8000 visits a day for public service stuff ke Free news, opinions, exposes of shitty companies like US Sprint, etc etc. Errr.... did I mention it is running for some time now on one of my Mac IIfx machines which is serving the WEB (today's hottest market) **and** is running PowerTalk to receive faxes as my spare third fax machine. Ooops, and did I mention that one of my ftp servers is really... I am so ashamed to admit... just really a Mac IIsi with 5MB of RAM and an 80MB hard drive!

At the same time, the entire email for Pakistan in the *.imran.pk domain is handled by a UNIX running....Mac IIfx with just 8MB RAM and a 160 MB hard drive, which Mac also, incidentally, works as an Internet router for me **AND** acts a print server for my AppleTalk LaserWriter so my Ethernet Macs can print to it without needing extra hardware.

Is this because I cannot afford new hardware? On the contrary, (I am not making this up) I am typing this on a PowerMac 8110/100/AV on which , as I type, I am running at this very moment:-

Adobe Photoshop which is printing a graphic file on my attached **non-AppleTalk** Apple Color StyleWriter, -America Online is running in the background picking up about 200 messages over TCP/IP routed by my IIfx, -Anarchie is picking up an ftp file (I dont know what it is because my favorite program Arrange/WebArrange uses it to pick up ftp files that I schedule in advance on my appointments calendar :-) ), [hang on, I have to go to "about this macintosh" to see what else I have going on], -Burbank, a small utility that is displaying four time zones' clocks for me for Pakistan, London, Geneva & New York. -DayMaker Organizer (my previously favorite PIM) that I now use as my "daily diary" and which is right now printing to my **AppleTalk** LaserWriter through the EtherTalk connection to the above mentioned IIfx -Eudora (in which I am replying to you here) -Finder (the pride and joy of computing power availabe to us, that is running file sharing, so some of the files I have open here are actually on other Macs and some of the files here are opne on my other Macs, without my noticing it) -Megaphone, an EXCELLENT implementation of Apple's technology by Cypress Research, my on-screen full-duplex speaker phone using one of my GeoPorts -NCSA Telnet (which has my account imran@imran.com open on screen also through the TCP/IP gateway) -Netscape 2.0 the still rough around the edges but critical app. which I use for browsing -PageMill (a rather simple but decent version 1.0 HTML encoder from Adobe, which incidentally is used to create all the pages on my http://www.imran.com web site) -Quicken, which is letting me know I really cannot afford to use Macs, because I enjoy them so much I forget to do something to make money to pay for them! [QuickKeys ToolBox] which lets me run QuickKeys shortcuts -Speech (believe it or not, it is SO much fun to use Mac's new free from Apple Speech Recognition, I use it by saying, for example, "Eudora" instead of going to the Application menu and scrolling down to Eudora to make it the active application. And it tells great jokes when you say "Tell me a joke") -Voice Messenger/Phone Pro (This is another excellent Cypress research product) and I am not sure if you knew but I have been adding a new aspect to my free web Pakistani news service by using this application which (using Apples TEXT to SPEECH) will SPEAK a text file through the telephone, this lets people call into this mac, and use touch tone telepohones to hear the latest news from Pakistan without needing internet email or computers) using the same Geoport which is ALSO my primary fax machine for incoming and outgoing faxes. -WebArranger (which I still like to call Arrange, the ABSOLUTELY greatest PIM one can ask for, and can give you the power of 100 in organizing your life and business, from within which I also can dial phone numbers, launch URLs or send email from a person's email address column etc etc) and, last but not least, -Wordperfect, an orphan program more frequently than Apple feels under the weather (by the way, as I type these lines, the phone rang, the Mac brought the program Megaphone to the forefront so that I can answer it, since I did not, the Mac's Express Modem / Geoport control panel noticed that it is a fax call and has run the Fax software to take the fax) so that I can continue to type, as you will notice, with no degradation in my or my Mac's typing ability :-) )

By the way, another application I have open is a programming language teach yourself book on CD using Adobe Acrobat. And I just launched, just to prove a point, the EXCELLENT SoftWindows application (more stable than most real PCs!!) on the same computer just to [prove to you, that ONE Mac can empower you enough to take on the world, and one Mac can do enough stuff for the world to regularly ask me "Are you really a one person company?" and I decide not to tell them about all my employees who all happen to be called "Mac" :-)

And I did forget to mention that this Mac IS right now hooked up to my VCR and I can show you some of the video clips I have made on it using Adobe Premiere, another excellent use of Apple's core technology.

All in all, not a bad collection of simultaneous things going on on one computer, don't you say?

So, Apple's (at least until the previos version) management sucked, but the computer is light years ahead of what a PC running even Windows 99 can do in ten years. I have been using Macs for a decade now, and got my latest one (a clone) 2 months ago. Consider this, in my Lahore, Pakistan, office I had taken two of the then latest Mac IILCII computers. Their slow old 030 low cost CPUs and their 4MB/40MB does not make them the fastest machines in the world. My office in Pakistan also has a couple of 486's (there it had not made sense to provide expensive Macs for machine that are just acting as public access dumb terminals). I asked my office to sell off the IILCIIs because they are so old, and they had the Windows running 486s. They came back with a request for permission to sell the 486s because they only use the IILCIIs for daily work (like wordprocessing, email, and invoicing of clients using Quicken), which they feel let them do more (even at US PostOffice speeds ;-) ) than the 486s!

> >Yours in commiseration, > >Askari

Yes, Apple may not be out of the woods yet, and they really need to hire me as a consultant ;-) , but Macs do rule.

So, I dont know about you, but I am waiting either for some spare cash to get more Macs at the really low prices they have on the machines right now, or for some really cool stuff coming out in September or so I suspect.

Your partner in MacUse

Imran Anwar
Technology & Business Strategy Consultant/MacUser/Mac Evangelist
(unpaid, unlike some GUY I know ;-) )
http://www.imran.com [IMRAN-Net, uncontaminated by ANY Microsoft software]

Apple Forever, Forever (c) Serving a World Wide Web, Bit By Bit, Byte By Byte [sm][tm]

(c) 1996 Imran Anwar, please feel free to share this message with colleagues, people who make decisions related to Macs, and email lists without making changes or removing the name of the writer.

This additional comment was given on the Wall Street Journal Interactive site on 8/8/99

For lack of time I will not post an article on why I never lost faith in Apple. In 1996 a MacUser friend of mine, who was worried about Apple's future emailed me if he should stay, and I said Yes. My response, in the form of a conversation/article (available at http://www.imran.com/OOOOO/AppleComputer.html ) covers that topic for those interested. In the current environment, what amuses me is people's need to dramatize everything related to Apple's health. Will it survive? Will it remain profitable? etc.

I think we should let Apple exist/succeed/thrive, along with the ups and downs ANY business can have, and focus instead on how well ONE company can REPEATEDLY change the face of computing.

They have repeatedly successfully shown this influence through concepts or new approaches to using computers (Computers for the rest of us, what you see is what you get, Welcome to Macintosh) to architectural foresight (building networking into Macs from the earliest days, internet focus [when the blind "visionary" Bill Gates {now writing books about the future being on the Internet} was denigrating the net]) to styling (earliest Macs, PowerBooks, iMac, iBook).

The company would be HUGELY more successful if the media and people like John Dvorak (possibly trying to hide some personal complexes) did not continue to sow seeds of doubt in the minds of people who are going ga-ga over the new machines AND need the simplicity, elegance and, yes, the style to help move computers from the den into the living room and beyond.

Interestingly, while Apple is either questioned or attacked for its creativity and design elements, fly by night PC makers as well as "visionary leaders" like Intel and Microsoft are busy cloning everything from the colors to the style to the whole concept of computer and interface design from Apple!

Let's give Apple a break AND a vote of confidence, fellow journalists, and help the world's newest group of buyers approach buying these new machines with confidence. Thank you.

Imran Anwar

Last update 5/31/04 wirelessly over Apple's awesome PowerBook G4 17" Bluetooth to Sony-Ericsson P900 over wireless internet.