Complete Tosh.com

There’s a certain irony – I think that’s the word – in my iMac choosing this weekend to die. I admit that leaving it three years before buying a backup hard drive was somewhat negligent, but the fact of the matter was that I did go to the Apple Store yesterday and buy that backup hard drive. And that the machine was going just fine when I left the house.

When I got back… well, when I got back I restarted the iMac because it was being a little cranky. And now it won’t go at all. Just a grey screen, and the spinning gear icon.

Woe.

I tried reinstalling the OS. Nope. I tried Disk Repair – faults it can’t handle. Safe Mode? Nope. And so now I’m making a disk image, using Disk Repair off the Tiger CD I’d also bought, trying to copy all those files – all those music, image and Word files I knew I should have backed up long before – to the new hard drive, and hoping this will work.

And I’m also hoping that, after reformatting, the old iMac’s hard drive will work too. Because yesterday I’d jauntily said to Mrs Tosh that a new mobile phone deal – we’ve cut our monthly bill by two thirds, simply by threatening to leave Orange (rant on this later – “oh, you’re on an old tariff, sir”) – I’d be able to afford a shiny new G5 desktop. I had no intention, really – but the hoisted eyebrow I’m getting suggests she thinks this is all a ruse.

It could be a long day. If there are any passing OSX wizards out there, do leave some words of help/comfort in the comments…

Update: That disk image thing wasn’t working in any way I could understand. But I had the brainwave of changing the startup disk to OS9 – and suddenly we’re partayyyying like it’s 1999. iMac is happily coping over those 24,561 must-keep files. Once it’s done that we can think about surgery. Or, indeed, that G5. No, no. Just kidding. One thing you really notice about the Classic environment: it’s really bloody fast.

Further update, late afternoon: In the end, I wiped the disk and did a clean reinstall, and just shoved the work, picture and music files back onto the main hard drive after I’d done so. Seems to be working a treat. My fears, especially regarding iTunes DRM throwing up its metaphorical hands in horror at such a straightforward solution, seem to have been misplaced. Now I’ve just got to reinstall all my apps…

If you’re in the tech biz, there are probably a few ways to measure success. Making lots of money might be one. Having your gadgets appear in rappers’ videos might be another. Getting to sue the small guys, and to hell with the PR, might be the cherry on top.

But I’d like to nominate another two checkboxes. First, third parties are motivated to start thinking about novel uses for your latest product within hours of its release. Second, people start analysing its meaning to the industry and wider world within mere days. On both measures, Apple’s Mac mini is scoring well.

On the novel uses, Leander Kahney has done a nice round-up at Wired News, finding everything from the first big fan site (a goldmine in the months/years to come, I suspect) to someone setting up a colocation centre packed with Mini macs (probably less of a goldmine). 

Meanwhile Robert Cringely leads the speculation front with this interesting piece about the ambitions Jobs and Co might have for the little machine. "Yeah, but what’s it REALLY for?" he asks. "Movies."

Cringely says the unit’s petite dimensions and comely looks, allied to a built-in DVI connector and the forthcoming support, in OSX 10.4, for AVC
H.264 video encoding, make it the perfect digital media centre Mac, ready to be stuck under, above or next to your telly, full of good ways to avoid Corrie and Midsomer Murders. Please, make it so.

Those tech features mean the device will do HDTV – the high-definition TV format that’s so good the US teevee networks have had to tart up TV show sets because it’s sharp enough to show up the cracks, and brush strokes, and dirty bits, that went unseen before.

And that capability will allow Apple to mop up a brand-new market – that for the digital movie player market, where HDTV movies get to set-top players via broadband, not cable or disk. Apple will pull it off just as the market emerges into the early mainstream, years before the competition can get going. Just, in other words, as it did with the iPod / iTunes combo – which, as my laser-like powers of observation have illuminated of late – has done rather well.

For the first time in five years, I’m not off to San Francisco and MacExpo this month – the lucky Bobbie Johnson (work | personal), now dep ed at Online, is doing the honours instead. I’ll be reading his reports avidly; it looks like it could be an interesting show.

The Apple rumour machine has, of course, kicked off – John Gruber has a plausible report suggesting Jobs will unveil a new office suite called iWork, incorporating a new version of Keynote, the presentation program, and a new app called Pages, which is presumably a word processor (and spreadsheet?). A patent application filed last August by Apple, and the unexplained name change of a third party app from iWork to iBiz, adds fuel to the fire.

Also rumoured: a low-cost ($499/£262) Mac (finally) – something of a hardy perennial, I know, but more strongly tipped than in previous years, and a flash memory iPod to take on the low-end music player market. Talk of the latter has calmed down of late, but I still think it would make huge sense, as I’ve explained in Tosh Passim, by cementing Apple’s stranglehold on this phase of the digital music revolution.

[Update: Quite a witty Pass notes in today's paper, based on that low-end computer]

I’ve been guilty recently of moaning about Apple’s apparent built-in inability to stock enough of its products. Sure, today it’s the iPod and iMac you can’t lay your mitts on, but this problem has gone back years. It’s an old Apple gripe: they price things too high, or announce months ahead of availability, or don’t make enough, or do all three, and the Macolytes mutter stuff about BMW and exclusivity and let them away with it.

But, at least in the case of the iPod, Apple may have a decent excuse. Via John Naughton, this Appleinsider report has some astonishing numbers. We’ll pause to admire, first of all, the analyst’s mighty price target for Apple in the next year – a heroic $78 a pop. At the time of writing they’re at an admirable $67 a shot, so that’s perhaps not a huge climb, but given the historical place for Apple shares – sloshing around the $20 mark, apart from an iMac/dot.com boom-based surge around 2000 – you might begin to see my point. This chart shows Apple’s recent climb outperforming the rest of the NASDAQ – this is no irrational exuberance, at least none on a market-wide scale.

Is it Apple-centric irrational exuberance? Surely the surge isn’t isn’t based on Apple’s fading computer business, which continues to see its market share slide? Well, I’d expect better news out of that once they iron out the – yep – supply problems for the new iMac. But for real good news, it’s obviously all down to the iPod.

Back in that Appleinsider report, there’s an analyst – who’ll have an inside tip from the company (this being How These Things Work) – upping his "estimates" for iPod shipments this quarter to 4 million units, up from previous "estimates" of 2.7m and 3.5m. That’s 4 million units in a quarter, when they’d only sold 4 million iPods total by summer this year.

Onto shakier ground, the analyst also predicts a flash-based iPod to be unveiled this year at MacWorld San Francisco. Jobs has always said "no" to such things, insisting such chip-based devices are naff because they can’t hold many songs, but he can always change his mind saying "we waited until we could release something great!" and "we’ve finally made flash devices cool!" and "this is awwwwwsome – the best thing we’ve ever made!". In the resultant flat-out Apple Store-bound stampede of slightly sweaty Mac fanboys, I doubt I’ll be hearing many dissenting voices. And it’s never a good idea to write off the chances of a device appearing only a month ahead of the show. Ahem.

More importantly, such a lower-end device would add volume, give Apple complete and utter dominance across the entire music player sector (as opposed to complete and utter dominance at the hard drive-based end). And, super super super importantly, it’ll increase the lock-in factor. This last point is key. If you’re selling four million players in a quarter, that’s four million more souls ready to use iTunes, buy music from iTunes music store, and build a collection of digital music that recoils at the very thought of Windows Media (WMA).

Even if Samsung, with the aid of Bill Gates, abducts Jonathan Ive, and forces him at gunpoint to create a real iPod killer (as opposed to those ugly devices branded as such almost every month in some gadget mags), you still have a vast audience of people who are facing real hassles, and hefty financial outlay, to make the move to WMA.

It’s not just the cost of the device any more. It’s the new PC software, it’s re-ripping your CDs, it’s waving goodbye to your iTunes Music Store purchases, it’s getting rid of that iPhoto collection and fiddling around with your Audible.com buys. And, if Apple does the sensible thing and introduces an optional subscription model for iTunes Music Store, as a third of young adults apparently would like them to, it’s about actually losing half your music if you leave the fold. You might think of quitting the cult, but you’ll never <i>really</i> get away…

In other words, these sales are quickly creating a market where technical supremacy becomes secondary. Just as long as Apple remains competent – and at the moment it’s on screamingly good form – it stands to win, because the total cost of moving to another player becomes more than it’s worth for the end user – even if their iPod has reached the end of its useful life, or they want to upgrade from flash iPod to hard disk iPod. Times that by two if the rumours of a media centre unit – please, Jobs, make it so – finally become reality.

Apple’s tight vertical integration, such a handicap in the decentralised PC era, suddenly looks like a formidable barrier to entry for music player hopefuls in the near future. And that could explain those investors piling in as fast as they can. They see a new market twisting into shape right in front of them, and suspect they know who the big winner is going to be.

I was on t’ telly this morning, blinking a great deal and talking about the new Apple Store in London. For the benefit of friends and family I didn’t warn (ie – all of them) the video, featuring a mercifully short soundbite from me, is here.

The store itself is, as you’ll see, both vast and lovely, as far as shops go. Tons of space, impressive glass staircase and walkway, neither of which you’re likely to see for the next week as hoards of Macolytes descend on Regent Street and squeeze in. I’ll be trooping along too, but maybe not tomorrow. Indeed, if you want to make the opening day, I’d start lining up… ooh… now. Like this chap who has flown in from Texas for the event, is about to spend his second night on the street outside, and is keeping a blog about his experiences. Amazing.

The reporter on the story, incidentally, is another member of the Scottish Media Mafia. Quentin Sommerville and I were contemporaries in the Scottish student political "scene" in the early 90s. He held the loftier position of President at Edinburgh, while I was a deputy president at Napier, editing the student paper. "We," he said by way of introduction to a colleague yesterday, "used to know each other when we were thin!"

Aye, but he’s got a better tailor than me now, damn him.