Joshua Marinacci's Blog

Apple's latest efforts are the triumph of software over hardware.

Normally I don't comment on new products, especially hotly anticipated ones that a million others will pontificate endlessly. However, I'm breaking my rule because I'm quite amazed by the new iPod Shuffle and iMac Mini. Not because of the products themselves but because of what they represent. They are both the triumph of software over hardware.

the iPod Shuffle

If you take an iPod Shuffle and strip off the Apple logo, what do you have? It's just a flash drive in a pretty enclosure. It connects via USB and has a small CPU with a sound chip. Pretty simple and pretty commodity. There are tons of these out there made by a slew of no-name manufacturers, and yet Apple is going to sell oodles. Why?

The iPod Shuffle has two things to distinguish it (besides Apple's great marketing and industrial design). First, Shuffle can play MP4 files from the iTunes Music Store. Other players can't. Regardless of my personal feelings on the matter of Apple's proprietary music format, I must admit this is a feature implemented entirely in software that greatly enhances the actual usefulness of the hardware. I can buy (not rent) music online and play it with a single click. If you like music then that's a lot of power.

Shuffle's second feature is that it's controlled by iTunes on your desktop. Something attached to iTunes becomes a better product because of it. iTunes handles all of the heavy lifting and the larger UI considerations of managing a music library, leaving the hardware to do what it does best: play music. The software, even on a different machine altogether, greatly enhances the value of the hardware. Two points for Apple.

the iMac Mini

So what about Apple's other bombshell (unless you were among the 4.8 billion people who read about it a week early on Think Secret), the iMac Mini? Well, it's a bunch of cheap commodity parts (if slightly better quality than average) packed into a stylish enclosure. Dell and others have been doing this for years, so what's the big deal? The deal is you get a cheap box which runs OS X!

In Mac OS X Apple has created tremendous software-based value. Ignore the MSRP of OSX + iLife + iWork that you get for free. Those are just arbitrary numbers based on intense marketing research that shows what people will pay for software. Think of it as estimated value. (see this great article about pricing software from Joel On Software). What matters to the end user is the actual value, or at least perceived value: What will it do for me? Well, that mediocre hardware, combined with OSX and a bunch of built-in apps will let you surf the web virus free, easily read email, burn cds, manage contacts in a phone or pda, work with digital cameras, produce great documents, and a host of other really nifty things that Apple has been developing the last few years.

Now of course the iMac Mini lets you do all of this only if you already have a screen, keyboard, and mouse. What they are really saying is: For 500 bucks you can hook your old hardware up to OSX and do really nifty things. That you need a new (but small) piece of hardware to do this doesn't really matter. It's the software, the built in ability to do things for a good price, that makes it worth it. A 2 in high shiny brick just happens to be the best way of selling it to you.

Both of these products represent the triumph of Software over Hardware. Excellent software can raise both the apparent and actual value of commodity hardware over the competition. They also serve as another step in the long journey towards Apple's constant goal: making complex technology easy to use. I'd say "the integrated hardware and software solution for the rest of us", but perhaps Apple's slogan is better.

So what does any of this have to do with Java? Just this: if you can create a good experience and provide real value with your software, the fact that you are far removed from the hardware doesn't matter. Being programmers, this is pretty handy. It means that software is more important than hardware, if you build it right. I think it also means the that user experience, what the person using your product actually sees and feels, is the most important thing. The underlying algorthms, just like hardware, are commodities (just look at the many free libraries we have on java.net). What matters is how you put them together.

Comments

• The Mac has always seemlessly integrated software with hardware to the point that most Mac users don't really grok the difference.

  Java really suffers in this respect... Things have truly improved (java.com's Java installtion is truly awesome), but an end user still has to comprehend that a JRE is needed to run a java application.

  Distribution/installation of java applications needs to become truly seemless... For example, if you go to Josh.great.product.com to download a great application, the download process should seamlessly install a JRE if you don't already have one, and update the install JRE if it's old.

  Posted by: johnreynolds on January 12, 2005 at 10:39 AM

• what we need, someone finishing the great stuff Sun started:

  http://weblogs.java.net/blog/joshy/archive/2004/10/webstart_rant_1.html#comments comments by stelt and others.
  on-line development tools: which of course could benefit from WS greatly: say W3 validator on steroids. People hate installing things thanks to all the malware out there, they´re scared to infect their computer. That´s why this is the moment for Web Start to make it´s move onto the main stage.

  http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2004/12/29/jini.html
  it should just run, good defaults, easy wizards for the programmer and administrator to tweak settings.
  Network is THE strong point of Java, with everybody on broadband now and J2ME phones happening, with UMTS now even, Jini´s time is now too.

  Sun should also look more at letting Java cooperate more with other technology (even in marketing), some maybe partly considered competition. For example: Swing will never be THE major toolkit, it´s nice for some things though. I read about some Swing+XUL combinations, that´s interesting. It would even tap into the ever growing OSS community (developers and users).

  And another thing for software triumphing over hardware: SVG, just think of it. It´s in a way cross-platform too and very easy to make a GUI with. It´s there on Java too, Sun could of course do more with it. It´s taking a real flight, especially on mobiles.

  combine these things and we´re talking mindblowing killer apps.

  Posted by: steltenpower on January 12, 2005 at 11:11 PM

• johnreynolds is spot on here. Webstart could have been packaged in such a way that the user did not have to have Java installed, and then the *essential* parts of the runtime and library were downloaded along with the program. The JVM would then almost be spread virally and incrementally, rather than having the user go and download a sizeable installation.

  I also think that the article misses one important point - OS X is tied very closely to the hardware, and it is this that gives it a huge part of it

  Posted by: andylarder on January 13, 2005 at 06:53 AM

• .. huge part of its appeal.

  Posted by: andylarder on January 13, 2005 at 06:54 AM

• Just a touch of nitpicking...

  It's the "Mac Mini" not "iMac Mini"; the screen is not integrated into the computer like the iMacs. Also, unfortunately, it apparently uses Apple's proprietary video out connectors, and doesn't have PS/2 ports for keyboards and mice, so you can't really use legacy PC monitors or keyboards/mice.

  It's still really neat, though. If it had a G5 processor and ran J2SE 5.0, I'd order one now. :-)

  Posted by: afishionado on January 13, 2005 at 09:01 AM

• You can! There is an adapter for VGA included and DVI is the standard for TFTs! And there are PS2/USB-adapters for about 7 EUR available. I heard that OS X works using them!
  I don't have a Mac (I have an iPod but no iMac, iBook, ... ... but I think I will have one. I like OS X and the style of Mac. And for just 500 EUR, I think it's a nice price to get started!

  Posted by: chbeer on January 13, 2005 at 09:28 AM

• Cool, I didn't know that! :-)

  Posted by: afishionado on January 13, 2005 at 02:01 PM

• When I saw the iShuffle my first reactino was, eh, so what.

  Then later on when they were talking about using it as a usb memory stick, that was when I sat up and took notice. Just casting around quickly online a 256mb stick cost what, $30?, and a 1GB stick is say $80.

  I'd been wanting a memory stick to move stuff around between work and home, so the concept of spending an extra $50 and getting one that can also use as an mp3 player for music (for the half gig), or an extra $70 (for the full gig), makes me think... hmmm... maybe...

  As for the mini-me, er, no wait, thats Dr Evil, the mini-Mac, that looked interesting from the point of view of either hooking it up to a TV (frankly I have no idea whether that is easy or not, based on the above discussions it sounds like it talks to crt monitors (vga) and flat screens (dvi?) - I wonder if it would drive a flat screen tv? I have no clues for this sort of thing, can someone please explain how to do this if it can be done?)

  .... or .... since my work places idea of a 'new' (as in October of last year) PC for a J2EE developer is one with a 6 gig hard drive (no, seriously!) and win NT/2K, I'd been thinking about hwo to sneak a mac into the office without anyone noticing....

  :D Now I have my answer to that question (I just need to find an old beige box, throw out the intel inside, and maybe pop out the panels in the back for usb cables). (If they whinge about the screen looking different I'll just tell them its a skin for XP :D... and they will be so awed that I got XP out of the purchasing department that they will forget about looking too closely at it... muahahaha!)

  (NB: I thought about the disk slot, how to insert disks if its inside another computer case, but since we're not allowed floppy or cd drives on our pcs anyway, I won't notice it (hence, also, my interest in USB sticks for moving data around))

  Here's some questions for anyone using a mac in pc land. If I hook up my own keyboard, what will the splat/apple/command key be?

  Also, although I loathe and despise Outlook with a passion, most of the meetings here are booked through it. Is there some way I could get at them without polluting my beautiful machine with the evil virus incubating abomination that eveyone else is forced to use?

  What about logging onto the network? I understand this is supposed to be fairly painless for a mac in pc land, but is that just hype or is it actually easy?

  Posted by: rickcarson on January 13, 2005 at 04:05 PM

• Gaah!!! The evil java.net end of line swallowing beast has struck again! *sigh*. (grovels and apologises for the double/triple post) ... Once more, with proper paragraphs this time:

  Posted by: rickcarson on January 13, 2005 at 04:07 PM

• Bother. The evil java.net bad preview/back button combo erased my attemtps to beautify my post. *gives up in disgust*.

  Posted by: rickcarson on January 13, 2005 at 04:14 PM

• Josh--you make a good point here. One way you can extend the argument is that ITunes itself pushes the heavy lifting of a music search/display onto the Apple Music Store itself, by rendering the UI for the music store as HTML (from what I can tell). This sort of division of responsibilities is key, because each tier/component can do what it does best. Imagine if you had to render music options and search using only forms-based development (like Swing), instead of HTML: would be a heck of a lot more work to build initially, and to change. Likewise, the local music library management in HTML would be a losing proposition in terms of functionality.

  Second thought--there is also an analogy that extends to Java in its various deployments. We have Java on mobile phones--how about a connector/adaptor that allows me to plug in my phone to manage my address book using an LDAP interface? Or where I can email new contacts to my cell phone--an SMS arrives to the cell phone, which queues it for a later WAP request. Or let me request--via my cell phone--that a song be purchased and downloaded to my PC at home. In Berlin, where I live, I can send an SMS using a unique bus stop id (printed on the bus schedule at the bus stop) and will get an SMS back with the next five buses (estimated actual time of arrival). What if I could send that SMS to my PC, and have it download the bus schedule so I could print it out when I get home? And etc. Figure out what each component does well, and apply it in that area.

  Cheers
  Patrick

  Posted by: pdoubleya on January 14, 2005 at 12:24 AM

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