RIP: XServe 12.31.2010

Well, it's all over the interwebs, and the death of the XServe is not greatly exaggerated. Apple has killed its last enterprise product, perhaps signaling the death knell to the professional market side of Apple completely. Just as Information Week and other "trade rags" write up Apple's gains in the enterprise world with their mobile devices, Apple puts another nail in the coffin of their enterprise business, killing their last datacenter product.

Although in theory, the replacement with a Mac Pro server is a good piece of hardware, you can't rack mount one (it takes up 12! units of rack space to stand one or two in a rack), it's missing critical hardware redundancy (dual power supplies), and the lack of quick parts replacement means you need that 12u rackspace for two Mac Pros in tandem, because when one goes down the average downtime for a hardware repair is going to be in days, not minutes or hours. As for the Mac Mini Server, it is a fine tool for small (less than 20 employees) businesses, but again not a "business-critical" tool with no real redundancy or performance. Utilizing XGrid? How about QMaster clustering? Both tools that are likely on their way to the graveyard as well, without the space-saving convenience of the rackmounted server. One has to take a long look at Final Cut Server as well - an application practically aimed at the XServe/datacenter design, and wonders how long it is until that simply fades into the background as well.

The easy argument "nobody needed the XServe" may be true, but what about the new Mobile Device Management in Snow Leopard Server? Do you think businesses are going to lose 12U of expensive, precious rack space for a pair of Mac Pros to help them manage iPhones and iPads? Not so likely in this penny-pinching IT world. Does apple think for one minute a Fortune 500 (or Fortune 100) company is going to have a tower computer sitting on someone's desk providing centralized management for those mobile devices that have been shooting up the sales charts? If so, the ivory tower at One Infinite Loop needs to look inside itself and see if that makes business sense. Taking their own infrastructure in mind, if Apple was their own biggest customer (and maybe the secret of the new datacenter is IBM Bladeservers?) Apple is hamstringing itself with the end of the XServe as well.

Tablets are great (I mean that truly), and iPhones are leading the charge into an interactive, handheld solution, but it takes a Mac to write the software for those devices, and in larger businesses, it takes a server to manage those Macs. Disconnect? Yes, and at the root of the system.

I for one hope (but don't expect) a rack-mountable Mac Pro by January 1st. Frankly, I've been expecting one since the birth of the G5. Does Apple not realize that professional customers in businesses like audio and video want (or need) those machines rack-mounted? Sadly, here what I fear are the next victims of this elimination of enterprise support:
XGrid
XSan
Final Cut Server
Apple-supported Promise SAN storage

iTunes 10 and Apple's own sauce

So I will be up front. I didn't install iTunes 10 yet. I didn't order a new iPod or Apple TV. I looked at iTunes 10 though, and I wonder if someone missed something quite basic.

You see, a long time ago Apple introduced and pushed hard on their own Human Interface Guidelines so that users would have a uniform and understandable experience with Mac OS X and applications in OS X. Today, however, that appears to be irrelevant to the iTunes development team, who has decided that they don't have to follow the guidelines set out by their own company for design.

Can you imagine IBM using Comic Sans, lower-case, as their logotype?

Or Johnson & Johnson with Copperplate Gothic?

Apple, you created guidelines so users would have a comfortable experience with your OS and applications. Perhaps you need to go back to the drawingboard and review the software you've posted today with iTunes 10.

On a side note, I'm glad they re-introduced buttons on the Shuffle. Sometimes doing something because you can doesn't mean you should...

It's the interface, stupid...

So I just spent 20 minutes on the phone with a potential iPad user, and I realized something during that conversation. The "amazing and magical" hype about the iPad isn't the device itself, it's about the interface. HP has a device quite similar to the iPad (at least in initial visible review) coming called the Slate, but it runs Windows. That will be the actual downfall of the device - because a desktop OS isn't a true touch-tablet interface. I've used the HP all-in-one desktop touchscreen - it's a novelty but you really need a keyboard to use Windows effectively. That's what iPad has going for it, along with the other iPhone OS devices, as well as the Android OS devices - the UI is a unique experience focused on a touch-based interface, not a mouse and keyboard.

If you've never really used a touch-tablet interface like the iPad, or a Surface device, you can't understand - even if you use one of the tablet based PCs out there like the Lenovo X200. The interface and the way you interact with the device is what makes or breaks it - so although I am optimistic about the Slate for those Windows-only environments (like the hospital I work in today), I'm afraid that it will fall flat, with a mouse/keyboard UI that fails on a touch based device. Only time will tell, however, if HP and Microsoft "get it" with touch interface PCs beyond the shiny nature of a Surface....

Symantec Antivirus Server for Mac OS X

Well, one of the contractual obligations we have here at the hospital is that all desktop systems have antivirus software installed.

That's not such a big deal, after all there are some obvious standalone AV solutions for the Mac, ClamAV, Intego VirusBarrier, Symantec AntiVirus, and others. The catch is, for IT, we want to manage that client. Immediately the list shortens, and when I'm doing mostly stealth support of the (now almost a dozen) Macs here, I look for the no-cost option.

Strangely enough, we have a super-massive enterprise license for SAV 10- including the Mac Client-Server model. So I start petitioning for a Mac server, running 10.5, before they are impossible to get (after all, I started this a couple weeks after the relase of 10.6). I ask and ask, and now it's January and I have no server. So I have to run this on my own. Fortunately I have a copy of 10.5 server that I can install on ... a Mac Mini. Yes, I am one of those. I believe the Mini has great promise in the role Apple recently promoted it to, as a small workgroup server. Since I am setting up a test and pilot only, not deploying a full live environment, I go ahead and get 10.5.8 Server, mySQL and Web Services going. After a couple odd installation mistakes (I should know by now to actually read the installation guide first, rather than dive right in) I got it all together, with my little cluster of machines running a managed SAV solution.

Frankly, I hope when I start testing the Endpoint version (assuming there is one, I haven't looked) it's a bit more robust. Although the default web interface is functional, it's not really user friendly. No easy way to re-push policy, updates, or changes to systems that may have errored out, really simple (not always clear) error reporting, and a bit of a kludgy interface. But, as of today, I've been running a managed AV environment for about a week on 3 systems, successfully with reporting and all...

Magic Mouse: Long Term Review

So I got a Magic Mouse when they were released.

I love the multitouch interface on my iPhone, and on the newer laptop trackpads, so had high expectations for the mouse. I unplugged my USB mouse (formerly known as the Apple Mighty Mouse) and went 100% on the Magic Mouse with my work iMac. I use it daily as my primary input device in OSX and Windows (via VMWare Fusion). I can say that after months of use (and a battery change) that it is a satisfying input device.

I have no complaints at all - and it works better than the bluetooth Apple Mouse I used before. Sure, there could be more features enabled for input options, but for real day to day use in an office I actually think it's a great product.

I read a lot of reviews of this product, and many people complained about the shape and size of the mouse, and I don't find it a problem at all. Maybe I'm too ... delicate with my mouse use, maybe I'm crazy (maybe both), but I actually think I like it better than the old mouse, or the mouse on my Wacom tablet, or the stock Lenovo USB mouse on my PC.

After regular use day after day, I can recommend it as a solid interface device. Now if I could only use it on two computers on my desk without fiddling with Bluetooth settings....