Letter from the CEO

Nothing’s Perfect

by Robert Pritchett

As much as we’d like things to be working correctly or at least not be broken out of the box, stuff happens.  In the Apple environment we’ve seen this with each new rev or product that gets squeezed out of Cupertino, and it is a wonder and purely magical when those things work as well as they do as the engineers who know better, wring their hands and take some antacids to calm their troubled nerves as product finally “goes golden” and gets out the door. They have a pretty good idea where the gotcha’s are, but due to pressures from marketing and sales,  product goes out as good as it can get, based on time constraints and resources.  At least Apple doesn’t always fall into the trap of making its customers be the beta-testers. I know, because I was a beta-tester for a while for the first renditions of Mac OS X before the first official release. Each rev that comes out gets better and seems to be more streamlined while at the same time, adding new or improved features. I was under Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) at the time. And it was really a lot of fun discovering what I could and reporting on my findings.

That Intel Core Duo

So what is all the huff and puff about the “How dare they?” nonsense with the recent revelation that the Intel Core Duo has a few glitches and gotcha’s? Those are not the fault of Apple! I created a table of sorts that shows recent chip technologies and their lists of what the engineering departments call “errata”. What I found to be rather interesting, is that my machine apparently has a few “gotcha’s” of its own with the G5 chip in it; twenty-four “oopsies” to be exact. Even though it is “flawed”, it works well. Compared to the earlier Intel Pentiums or the AMD chipsets, those flaws don’t look so bad when compared with the errata. Meanwhile, the industry has been migrating from 32 bits to 64 bits and from 90 nm down to 65 nm circuits. We see them doing more with less! It is truly miraculous. I grew up through the transistor age.

I currently work in a software firm and I know the revs we send out have their own “character flaws”. Time, energy and effort are expended between revs to clean up the code and our customers are delighted with the improvements – as are we. I’m not privy to the current code issues associated with Mac OS X, but I’ve been very impressed with the outcome so far. The competing OSes have a lot of catching up to do – assuming they ever can.

Back on the chip issues, I remember working with now-defunct Ungermann-Bass equipment that had thick monthly reports we received as we were acting as a beta-site for their network equipment – thanks to the US taxpayer. We were privy to the hardware and software issues because we were under Non-Disclosure Agreements with the company. I am under no such NDA with Apple for hardware today.  I think the “holier-than-thou” attitude by the nay-sayers needs to be tempered with some semblance of wisdom and a modicum of intelligence. Take it from me, I’ve seen worse – and if you have been in the computer industry for any length of time, I’m sure you can cite your war-stories too.

 “By their fruits ye shall know them.”

So am I being an apologist Apple? No, I don’t think so. My experience has been that I have seen healthier fruit from them than from other hardware and software manufacturers and I like what I see.

Many hardware issues can be brought to bear with workarounds. A few issues cannot, and that is why we see this forward march by the techno-geeks to continually improve both their hardware and software products.

If engineers ruled, no product would ever get out the door, because they wouldn’t stop tweaking. True, that is a generalization and perhaps denigrates ad marginalizes most engineers and we will probably see some rubber-band slinging and negative feedback for saying it, but this stereotype is a rule of thumb based on empirical evidence. Someone like Steve Jobs has to raise the bar while still pushing product to generate revenues.  Remember when he was hired back by Apple, he went into Apple’s R&D and cancelled a lot of promising products? Somebody had to ride herd on the cats. We see the results today. I’m looking forward to new and improved products from both Apple and Intel. Aren’t you?

Chip Errata in Perspective

I’ve provided some research finding regarding recent chip technologies inspired by the ebb and flow of chip-talk online by folks on Slashdot.com  and Geek.com.

http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/06/01/24/1537231.shtml

ChipGeek: http://geek.com/news/geeknews/2006Jan/bch20060123034350.htm

Chip	Errata	Source
AMD Athlon 64	123	http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/white_papers_and_tech_docs/25759.pdf
AMD Opteron K7/K8	123	http://www.rojakpot.com/freebog.aspx?sort=date
Freescale MPC7410CE (Apple G4)	21	http://www.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/errata/MPC7410CE.pdf
Freescale MPC7457CE (Apple G4)	36	http://www.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/errata/MPC7457CE.pdf
IBM PPC 970FX (Apple G5)	24	970fx_errata_dd3.x_v1.6.pdf
Intel Centrino	?	http://www.intel.com/products/mobiletechnology/docs/performance_brief.pdf
Intel Core Duo (Apple Mactel)	34	http://download.intel.com/design/mobile/datashts/30922101.pdf http://www.intel.com/design/mobile/specupdt/309222.htm
Intel Pentium	Lots!	http://support.intel.com/support/processors/pentium/ppiie/ http://people.freebsd.org/~fsmp/SMP/smpwebdoc.html

For other system comparisons, check out Charles Gaba’s System Shootouts at  http://www.systemshootouts.org/.  He was also interviewed by Gene Steinberg on The Tech Night Owl  LIVE on  January 26, 2006 at http://www.techbroadcasting.com/.
The Yin & Yang of Ubinaries

Technically speaking, an ubinary is an uncompressed binary - http://maillist.perforce.com/pipermail/perforce-user/2003-January/010379.html.

I’m calling a “Ubinary” a special kind of software fruit that Apple has logoized with Universal Binary symbology, lifted, or rather, inspired from the Oriental Yin/Yang or Tai Chi environment. http://www.chinesefortunecalendar.com/YinYang2.htm

 

http://fly.cc.fer.hr/~shlede/ying/yang.html The Yin is the passive, dark, cold, downward, weak, dark side and the Yang is the bright, active, upward, expanding, strong side. Think of it as the flow of energy.

Universal Binaries are software upgrades that indicate compatibility with both PowerPC chips and Mactel systems.

Apple created the Universal trademark for “software that just works”. http://developer.apple.com/softwarelicensing/agreements/maclogo.html, which is really both the Mac OS X trademark symbol and the Universal symbol combined as one .gif in the Universal Logo program.

 

 

 

Apple, MacInTouch, MacUpdate and VersionTracker have been keeping lists of software that works on both PowerPC and Mactel systems:

http://www.apple.com/universal/applications/

http://www.macintouch.com/imacintel/ubinaries.html

http://www.macupdate.com/macintel.php

http://www.versiontracker.com/macintel/

As of this writing, Apple shows 473 apps that have the Universal logo attached to Apple’s own and other 3^rd-party updated software.

And of course, more can be found on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Binary.

Apple’s previous “fix” is to use Rosetta http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_%28software%29 as an interim project until software moves from emulation mode to native mode on the Mactel systems.

“MACTEL” History

According to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, MacTel Technology of Switzerland, abandoned the trademark “MACTEL” back in 1993, http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=74073332 and Macro Electronics International abandoned it in 1996, http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=73731330. Apple submitted “MACTEL” to be trademarked http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=78644706 as of June 2005, but as of this writing still has not been granted. However, a Priority Action was mailed December 29, 2005. Consider “Mactel” to be trademarked by Apple. http://www.wordspy.com/words/Mactel.asp and not to be confused with Mactel Communications in Canada, http://www.mactelcommunications.com/about/index.html.

Michael Robak submitted “MACINTEL” to be trademarked http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=78648143 and http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=78648099, also in June 2005 and that is still “live” with a “non-final action” mailed December 30, 2005.

And there is even a discussion on Wikipedia about the transition to the new Intel chips at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Intel_Transition.

Meanwhile, I’m calling the Intel iMac the Mactel iMac and I’m not alone in calling it that anymore.

So for now, computing systems still reflect humanity. Not perfect, but progressing. And hopefully, universally speaking, we will spend more time with Yang than with Yin.