Info Laptop

Well, it looks like I’m next up to bat as another new writer here at TheAppleBlog. There are a couple things you should probably know about me before we get started.

By day I’m just your average, everyday corporate IT drone. Toiling away in a cube farm trying to make a few bucks and not completely sell my soul in the bargain. I’d say my life was like a Dilbert cartoon, but it’s no where near that funny and tends to involve a significantly greater amount of crying.

Like a number of you I’ve been forced to spend most of my professional life as a pilgrim in an unholy land, trying to get by with my personal Mac on cold and unforgiving corporate Windows networks. Bitterness ensued.

When not trying to jam a square peg into a round hole, I enjoy spending my off time playing at being a web designer/developer and ranting about politics and whatever else I feel like over at the Distress Signal or on Twitter as @BryanSchuetz.

Although I may have started out my early computing life sans Apple with Radio Shack’s excellent TRS 80 and then a blazingly fast Tandy 1000, it wasn’t long before I had a Macintosh SE then a IIsi and became hooked on Apple for good.

At the moment I’m using a quad core 2.66 GHz Mac Pro and it is without a doubt the best computer I’ve ever owned. I also managed to convince my bosses to buy me a new unibody MacBook Pro for my day job. With one Mac at home and another at work you might expect some of that residual bitterness from when I was the lone OS X guy in a room full of Windows IT devotees to wear off, but you’d be wrong. Luckily though I’ve been told there’s help for this on the way. In the meantime if you see some of this bitterness shine through in my writing I hope you will forgive me for it and just know that I come by it honestly.

Before the Internet and blogging, they used to call it logorrhea, and for most of my adult life people have been begging me to shut up. Now readers of TheAppleBlog will get that opportunity, too.

You may recognize me from Ars Technica, where I intermittently wrote about technology in general and Apple specifically. Rumors are a favorite topic of mine — the blurrier the photo, the better. I like the numbers game too, market share, units sold, trends, pretty graphs included. With the astounding success of the App Store, I’m running more mobile applications, and I will be reviewing some of these with an emphasis on the experience. For me, the wonder of Apple has always been the experience. No other purveyor of personal technology has obsessed so successfully about human-machine interaction.

In 2001, my own Apple conversion came when the wil-o’-wisp lighting of the white iBook and “lickable” Aqua interface of OS X proved too powerful to resist. Since then, the Jade household has owned some ten Macs. A Mac mini currently sits by the television, a MacBook Air on my wife’s lap, and my own personal life support system consists of a unibody MacBook and an iPhone 3G. The MacBook is the 2GHz model, upgraded to 4GB of RAM, and flying like a jetpack naked with an 80GB Intel X-25M SSD inside.

I’m really looking forward to writing for TheAppleBlog from the vantage point of my leather armchair overlooking the San Francisco Bay. Perpetually desperate for attention, I also look forward to continuing the conversation with you about all things Apple in article comments and the forums. If interested, you can follow my discrete monologue, as well as reading my occasional ephemeral thought.

Last week Apple quietly upgraded the entry-level white MacBook’s Core 2 Duo processor clock speed from 2.0 GHz to 2.13 GHz, added an additional 40GB of standard hard disk capacity, and upgraded its RAM specification to 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM. Obviously additional speed and capacity is a plus, but as The Mac Observer’s Ted Landau questions, why upgrade this long-in-the-tooth laptop at all?

Significant Value-Added

To recap recent developments in the MacBook world, the unibody aluminum machines, released October 2008, mostly replaced the preceding white and black polycarbonate models, with the entry-level unibody model featuring a 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor, which remains the current spec at this writing (although reportedly there has been an unheralded upgrade of display quality).

Meanwhile, Apple continued selling one, last, lonely representative of the previous MacBook form factor — a white MacBook model, initially with a 2.1 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. However, the “WhiteBook” received a substantial upgrade on January 21, 2009 with the addition of an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M integrated graphics chipset replacing the older and much slower Intel GMA X3100 graphics of the previous model. The standard RAM allotment doubled from 1GB to 2GB, and its system bus speed was increased from 800 MHz to 1066 MHz, but the processor speed dropped slightly to 2.0 GHz, matching the base unibody MacBook spec. With the price remaining steady at $999, this obviously represented significant value-added, and presumably the last revision of this machine.

But Apple wasn’t finished with the WhiteBook yet, and last week, as noted, they gave that machine a nice little spec bump — still at a price $300 less than the base unibody MacBook.

Not Dead Yet

Since around Christmas, many pundits have been predicting that Apple would soon drop the polycarbonate-bodied MacBook, possibly replacing it with a bare-bones version of the unibody MacBook at the $999 price point. But that hasn’t happened, and this latest refresh seems to indicate that Cupertino intends to carry on selling the WhiteBook for quite some time, which is good news for budget-conscious Apple laptop purchasers who have been dismayed with Apple’s decision to drop FireWire support from the unibody MacBooks (the WhiteBook still has a FireWire 400 port).

Landau speculates that Apple hasn’t yet found a way to make selling a $999 unibody profitable, which is a reasonable surmise, and with development and tooling costs for the plastic MacBook long since amortized, they probably are able to turn a tidy profit on the white MacBooks at that price point, even with the two value-added revisions this year keeping it current and competitive in terms of power.

The Education Market Factor

Another factor cited by Landau is the WhiteBook’s popularity in the education market, where it’s relatively modest price (it sells for $949) and scuff and bump-resistant ruggedness of its polycarbonate housing make it especially attractive, as do its FireWire 400 port and mini-DVI connector (as opposed to the unibodies’ Mini DisplayPort connector). Again, I think that’s a reasonable assumption.

The value of the $999 MacBook has again been significantly enhanced without a price increase, and while the WhiteBook still sells for twice as much or more than a typical PC netbook, it’s more than arguable that you get more than twice the computer.

Well, this is a fine how do you do. Today Palm just kicked Sprint in the groin while improving their own outlook greatly. While Sprint is rolling around on the ground, Verizon announced they they will sell Palm’s Pre in “about six months.”

Sprint has always been known to be the exclusive carrier of the Pre. In fact, one of the big complaints about the Pre — right up to Walt Mossberg’s article today — was its exclusivity to a carrier, losing customers in droves. Apparently this criticism was too much for Palm to bear, and they shattered it today. The Pre is still exclusive to Sprint at launch, but only for six months.

Initially, Palm’s stock rose on the news, as did Verizon’s. Sprint? Well, not so much. That’s settled down a bit as of this writing, but the overall damage to Sprint is clear.

It’s not that Palm wouldn’t need to move to another, larger carrier, but this announcement — coming even before the Pre is available — really hammers Sprint in a place they were hoping for the most benefit: getting “switchers” to their network. The iPhone has proven people will switch networks for a compelling device, and while we don’t know yet if the Pre is such a device, it has a better chance of that than anything we’ve seen since the iPhone launch.

But why switch now? Verizon has some pretty loyal customers, and they may very well wait six months in order to keep on the Verizon network. Besides, they may figure it’ll take six months to shake the bugs out of the Pre anyway.

It’s great that Palm will get the Pre on another carrier, but I can’t help but think they just shafted their “partner” in the process. They didn’t even give Sprint the benefit of a couple weeks’ sales. Did they need a stock boost that badly?

From Verizon’s standpoint, it’s a great deal for them. Having lost subscribers to the iPhone, they obviously didn’t want to lose any to the Pre. I also wonder what this means for any rumored discussions of getting the iPhone on Verizon. Maybe the alleged talks were getting nowhere, so Verizon made a big push for the Pre?

Here’s a quick summary on how I see this affecting the major players:

Sprint

They get hurt the most. As mentioned, they lose a major shot at getting new subscribers on board. And those new subscribers are the ones carriers value the most, since they require data as well as voice plans.

Verizon

This seems to be all win for Verizon. They potentially stave off switchers to Sprint, while at the same time adding another “iPhone killer” (the other being the RIM Storm) to their arsenal. While neither one may prove to be an iPhone killer, even if they’re “good enough” then Verizon can stave off switchers to AT&T as well.

AT&T

For AT&T this is another reason that Verizon users may not switch. The iPhone is a strong lure, but when you think you’re getting something just as good (or better), then you’ll stick with the network you’ve got. Put simply, I don’t think AT&T loses because they won’t have the Pre, but rather because Verizon users may feel they have a reason to stick with the plan they already have.

Palm

You’d think this was a no-brainer great move for Palm. Still, there is a dark side. For one thing, there’s potential ill will caused with their exclusive partner at the Pre’s launch. Not much Sprint can do, but an adversarial relationship with your exclusive partner can’t possibility be a good thing. More important is the impact this could have on Pre sales at launch. Like it or not, Palm just may have given potential buyers a reason to not bother with purchasing on June 6, but rather wait for Verizon. This could be a major blunder, and yet another reason why the announcement should have come at least a couple weeks after launch.

No matter how this shakes out, what Sprint learned today is that the mobile industry is awfully cutthroat.