I was standing in the checkout line at Walmart today, and noticed that the monitor positioned above the checkout stand was displaying a blue screen of death.  Normally, these monitors are displaying a looping video advertising various products that I have no interest in buying.  It was amusing to see the blue screen of death instead.  One would think that since the blue screen of death is such an iconic feature of Windows, that Microsoft would change it, and make it more modern in appearance.  Starting with Mac OS X 10.2,  Apple changed the message that the Mac displays when it crashes (kernel panic).  Instead of freezing, and showing the text of the crash superimposed over what ever was on the monitor, Macs now drop a grey shade over the display with a message in the center of the screen that tells the user to shut down, and restart.  That’s a lot more classy than a blue screen of death.

I am often asked why I’m willing to pay so much more for a Mac when I can buy cheaper Windows PCs with the same, or nearly the same hardware specs.  Aside from wanting a computer that runs Mac OS X (without hacking it), here is another reason.  This article (link below) from Electronista points out that Dell is struggling with high warranty costs from its budget PC line targeted at home users.  Apple, like all other computer makers has to deal with warranty costs, but Macs have a far lower failure rate than Windows PCs.  As a Mac Genius at the Apple store at Willow Bend, I repaired a lot of Macs.  Most of the issues were relatively minor, or due to accidental damage or abuse.  I have always been impressed  (and sometimes annoyed) by the attention to detail paid by Apple in building its computers.  The iMac G4 was the most impressive to me.  I was always impressed how Apple managed to fit the power supply into the iMac G4, and how they used the machine’s inner metal shell – built in for added strength, and rigidity, as an antenna for wireless networking.  High levels of engineering sometimes backfires though.  Some of the later models of the Mac G5 were a pain in the ass to repair, as were the first Mac Pros.  The last iMac G5s, and the first Intel iMacs were difficult to open up, and a pain to get closed after a repair.  Apple quickly revised the designs though.  Mac Geniuses everywhere rejoiced

Dell struggles with falling prices, high warranty costs | Electronista.

MacNN reported today that AT&T has released an iPhone app that will allow users to report problem areas on their network.  It’s about time!  For almost 2 years, I was working out of an office in downtown Dallas where the coverage was horrible.  My complaints reached some of the company’s executives, and AT&T is now — finally, looking into the issue with more effort than just a trouble report to tech support.  Having an application on my iPhone that could utilize the phone’s GPS chip to allow me to file reports would have been a lot more helpful than simply giving the address since the problem pretty much blanketed downtown Dallas, and the surrounding areas.  AT&T should have had an app like this on the iPhone from the beginning.

Click the link below to read the article at MacNN.

New AT&T app prompts iPhone users for network feedback | MacNN.

The first time I had ever seen a Macintosh computer was in the Summer of 1986.  Having first learned how to use a computer on a TI 99-4A, I was fascinated by the graphical user interface, and being able to place objects on the screen exactly where I wanted them.  In the 1980s, the Mac was a revolution not just because of its use of the graphical user interface, but more so because of the creativity that it unleashed.  Although I have always been obsessed with learning and knowing how things work, my first impulse when I first used a Mac was to create something.

I eagerly signed up for my high school’s journalism class when I found out that the school had purchased 2 Macs to use for the high school newspaper.  The first applications that I used on the Mac were MacWrite, MacPaint, and what was then called Aldus Pagemaker.  By today’s standards, these Macs were slow, but in 1987, they were powerhouses.  It didn’t bother me at all that I had to play an interesting game of swap the disks every time I wanted to save a “large” file.  Macs at that time were very limited on RAM, and therefore, they had to temporarily cache data onto floppy disks in order to save files that were larger than a few kilobytes.  If your Mac used one of the floppy disks to boot from, the only way for the Mac to save large files was so eject the system disk, and then ask for another disk that had more available space.  Later, when I was using a Mac SE with an attached external hard drive, the disk switching routine went away.

Did I mention the first Macs that I ever used had only small, 9 inch monochrome screens?  The Mac II was capable of 256 colors.  I had made some really kick ass graphics on the Mac SE, but they were lacking color.  On the Mac II, I could add color using Pixel Paint.  This was a bit like being blind before, and now, suddenly being able to see.  These Macs ran at a blazingly fast 16MHz, and they started out at only $5500!  Desktop publishing had been born on the Mac.  Adding color to applications like Pagemaker, and Pixel Paint unlocked even more possibilities.

I wasn’t a computer geek back in the 80s and 90s.  I didn’t actually become that until after I left the Navy, and bought the first Mac I had ever bought for myself.  That was a Performa 6360.  I had no idea what all of the different model numbers meant, but I had my choice of a Power Mac 4400, a Performa 6400, or the Performa 6360.  In the end, I just bought the one that was the cheapest.  The Performa 6360 came with a lot of really nice multimedia software.  This was back when Apple was touting the Mac as being a great family computer.

Nightmare before Christmas

Most Mac users that I know these days are relatively new to the platform.  For them, Mac OS X is all that they have ever known.  What most people are unaware of is that Mac OS X was not some shiny new operating system that sprang onto the scene just 9 years ago.  It is derived from an operating system that was first launched in 1989 by a company called NeXT.

NeXT, Inc. was founded by Steve Jobs shortly after he left Apple in 1985.  After being sidelined by Apple’s board, Jobs took with him some of Apple’s best and brightest employees, some of whom worked on the original Macintosh.  Jobs also recruited Avie Tevanian from Carnegie Mellon University.  Tevanian had been one of the engineers who developed the Mach Kernel.  His work was instrumental in the creation of NeXTSTEP, the operating system created for all of the computers that were manufactured by NeXT.  NeXTSTEP was light years ahead of everything else on the market at the time.    It had many features contained in operating systems today such as multitasking ability that was not common in the late 80′s.  NeXTSTEP, similar to Linux is based upon UNIX which gave it rock solid stability.  NeXTSTEP also incorporated Adobe’s display postscript technology, which is also part of Mac OS X today.  This is what gives Mac OS X its beautiful, smooth appearance on the screen.  NeXTSTEP, like Mac OS X, and the iPhone OS today, incorporated the Objective-C programming language, and included tools for developers to create applications.  Perhaps the most important contribution made by NeXTSTEP was that a NeXT computer was used by Tim Berners-Lee to develop the World Wide Web.

Video of Steve Jobs demonstrating NeXTSTEP