WRAPPED UP IN BLUE [380]

IBM System/360 mainframe computer

International Business Machines (IBM) is one of those companies whose name is well-known, but what they currently do is less clear. I say this because my idea of IBM seems to be stuck between the mid-1960s and 2005, covering the use of their mainframe computers by large businesses to run databases, through the introduction of personal computers and the emergence of the “IBM-compatible” PC standard, followed by their from the PC market, hastened by competition, the internet and the emergence of cloud computing.

To my knowledge, IBM has not had made a consumer item for decades, with their typewriters, printers and keyboards continuing under the separate Lexmark company until even they divested themselves of everything but laser printers. IBM acknowledge their past, but their history as an innovating business means they cannot afford to be nostalgic about it.

IBM’s website describes their activities almost like a mission statement: “We bring together all the necessary technology and services, regardless of where those solutions come from, to help clients solve the most pressing business problems.” This currently focuses on providing a “hybrid cloud”, ringfencing access to cloud computing power and resources for individual organisations, alongside the more public access available over the Internet, the sort we use for ordering items and saving files. This sounds like they continue to lease the mainframe computers that used to fill entire rooms in offices, but this time IBM are selling the extension lead to the computers held at their, with support included via software, consulting and facilitating partnerships with other businesses.

This is a million miles away from a company that once invented the floppy disc, made electric typewriters and built the Atari Jaguar games console, and that would be the point they would make as well. IBM are in the business of business, and they have to innovate to stay ahead. Innovations and standards like barcodes, magnetic strip cards and the PC will be challenged as soon as they become commonplace, and IBM have been ruthless in jettisoning anything that no longer supports the business: ThinkPad and ThinkCentre computers have now been made by Lenovo for longer than by IBM did, but their users have almost inevitably accessed a service with IBM technology built into the back of it, whether they knew or not.

Businesses pivoting from one product, service or purpose to another has been done endlessly. Just as IBM sold its PC business to Lenovo in 2005, the typewriter manufacturer Smith Corona, having endured two recent bankruptcies, turned itself entirely over to making thermal labels, leveraging its experience in typewriter ribbons. The car company Peugeot’s lion logo was originally introduced to indicate the strength of their saw blades. Western Union’s declining telegram service allowed them to refocus its network into money wire transfers in 1980s. The advent of vinyl-based, washable wallpaper meant there was less need for Kutol putty to be used to clean coal dust from wallpaper, so it was reinvented as the children’s toy Play-Doh. It is always a case of innovate or die.

GOODBYE BLACKBERRY WAY [350]

Formerly named Research In Motion (RIM), BlackBerry Limited is a Canadian company involved in cybersecurity software and services, numbering businesses and governments among its clients. I only say this to dispel the image of BlackBerry as the smartphone originator that went down in a shrieking ball of flames, outpaced by Apple and Samsung, which devoured both its consumer and business customer base. It would be like labelling IBM a failure for selling its personal computer business to Lenovo in 2005, as they moved to concentrate on cloud computing.

However, BlackBerry did suffer a number of issues that ultimately decided the future direction of the company, coalescing around the release of one phone in January 2013, the Z10. I owned one of these, and despite having owning four iPhones since then, I still think of the Z10 as being a good phone, even still an ideal one in many respects.

My previous two phones were also BlackBerrys (BlackBerries?), a purple Curve 8520 followed by a black Curve 9320. Originally bought because its tiny QWERTY keyboards made sending text messages earlier, these palm-sized devices invented the modern smartphone, shifting me from pay-as-you-go phone calls to stay in touch, to monthly data contracts and productivity on the go, backed by the encryption of BlackBerry’s operating system and messenger software.

The Z10 changed this form factor. Competing at the time with the iPhone 5, the Samsung Galaxy S3, and the upcoming aluminium HTC One, the Z10 jettisoned the keyboard and navigation buttons, and the touch-sensitive navigation pad that replaced an earlier click wheel, bringing in a touch-sensitive screen – for people who needed the original set-up, the BlackBerry Q10 retained a QWERTY keyboard.

The Z10 lacked even a home button, still found on the other three phones, instead using gesture controls like moving a finger up the screen to come out of an app, or up and right to enter the BlackBerry Hub, which collected e-mails, texts and notifications into one place. The virtual keyboard introduced predictive typing, based on what I entered previously, a first for the time. While plastic in construction, the Z10 felt heavy and robust, surviving many drops, and the battery was replaceable, something I now rue when I consider if my current iPhone needs a new battery.

BlackBerry Curve 8520

As intuitive as the Z10’s operating system was, it was plagued by delays and superficially didn’t look too different from Android or Apple’s iOS, especially when those systems were updated, and when app developers moved to concentrate on them instead – I don’t remember downloading many apps on my Z10, having made icons on the home screen that linked to the web browser instead. By the nature of its form factor, the Z10 itself looked like a standard smartphone, and not like a BlackBerry. It also had an odd advertising launch, its SuperBowl ad in 2013 featuring a user of the phone bursting into flames, growing elephant legs, disappearing into a puff of smoke, and turning a crashing petrol tanker into a wave of rubber ducks: “in thirty seconds, it’s quicker to show you what it can’t do,” but the glimpses there were pass too quickly to register.

With Apple and Android phones becoming more attractive propositions in 2013, more people making the switch to smartphones chose these over BlackBerry, the cybersecurity layer of their apps also being matched. By the end of 2013, the company’s leadership had changed, and begun restructuring. The first BlackBerry phone that ran Android instead of their own system was released in 2015, and moved to license their manufacture to outside companies from 2016 – as of 2022, no new BlackBerry phones are being made.

I replaced my Z10 with a new iPhone 6 in 2014, my support for BlackBerry not having wavered despite a massive outage of their servers in 2011 that disabled its services for a number of days. However, their best phone at the time was the Passport, a passport-shaped phone with QWERTY keyboard too wide for me to use with one hand. In hindsight, it was a bad choice at that moment – iOS had only just added predictive text to the keyboard, but the iPhone’s main processor was slightly slower, it had only 1 GB RAM instead of the Z10’s 2GB, the home button was a step backwards from the Z10’s gesture controls, and I could no longer replace the battery. At least the iPhone still had a headphone jack.

BlackBerry Passport

COME ON, MAKE IT MAC TONIGHT [283]

This article is my first to have been written on my new computer, and therefore about why I took what amounted to a calculated leap of faith into spending a large amount of money on a tool to help me work better and more creatively. The leap of faith is hoping that the most obvious decision to make was also the right one. 

My current computer is a Lenovo tower PC, a former display model bought in December 2015 from PC World. Its processor, an Intel Core i3, is really only suitable for web browsing, and while it could probably cope with making basic videos, what I need now was something more professional – video and audio production, 3D graphics, photography, things that require as much processing power as you can find. I could have gone for a Lenovo ThinkCentre, or an HP EliteBook, but in the back of my mind, I knew that PCs are not the industry standard for what I want to do.

 

What I bought is an Apple Mac mini, the first desktop computer to use their new Apple M1 system-on-a-chip processor. The company is moving away from using Intel chips to using ARM-based processors made to their requirements, just like similar chips found inside iPhones and iPads, but tests users have made after buying them have shown they are so much faster at rendering video and processing on-screen graphics, Intel-powered PCs have difficulty keeping up with them – “snappy” is a word often used in reviews I have read. 

 

There is never any shortage of people online telling you how good their products are, but what Apple seems to have done this time is create a desktop computer that can genuinely command the premium paid for their name. The new Mac mini replaces a model using a newer version of the same Core i3 processor in the computer I am replacing, but sold for twice the cost.

 

Once I finished setting up my Mac mini, I realised the premium is not just being paid for the computer, but for the escape from Microsoft Windows. After over twenty years of PC ownership, from Windows 3.1 to 10, ownership of a Mac appeared only to be for those that could absolutely justify their decision for buying one, whereas Windows-powered PCs are so ubiquitous, choosing to go elsewhere is to choose compromise.

 

However, in the light of what the Mac mini can offer me personally, staying with Intel processors and Microsoft Windows is its own compromise. Apple’s operating system, macOS, only has to work for the computers it is designed to work with, rather than needing to work with any and all computers, so the program only needs to take up as much space as is actually needed. A nice side effect of this tighter control, and other security measures, is not needing to buy anti-virus software. 

 

I am taking the transition from PC to Mac slowly in case that, if a problem does come up, I can address it easily. For example, I can connect to work remotely on macOS, but we use Windows at work, and Windows expects you to use a two-button mouse, which Apple has never made. You have to supply your own mouse and keyboard for a Mac mini, but if you decide to buy an Apple Magic Mouse, remember to look up how to enable a virtual “right click,” or keep a PC mouse on standby, in case you have to go back to old ways. 

 

It also turns out that software compatibility can be artificially enforced: I already bought and downloaded Microsoft Office 2016 for my PC, and thought I could move it to Mac until the next new version is released, but it turns out that the program for which I own no physical copy can only be downloaded for PC, which wouldn’t have mattered at the time. I had thought the Rosetta 2 program Apple provide to translate Intel-based programs to their new processor would bridge the gap, but no, because I didn’t originally specify “for Mac” when I bought it, I can’t have it at all. 

 

The biggest lesson in switching computers has been the face that software is not really something you own anymore, as if it ever was. From just buying the licence to run a program you need, the standard is now to subscribe to a suite of them. The Microsoft Office issue was solved by subscribing to Microsoft 365, which was cheaper than I imagined – although this could be economies of scale due to how many people still need Word, Excel and PowerPoint – while Adobe’s Creative Suite is more expensive, although the likelihood is you are only buying the use of these because you need them for work, not to play with in your spare time. This has led me to explore what you can download for free, like the Photoshop competitor GIMP, and the 3D graphics program Blender, both open-source and provided by foundations dedicated to keeping them free to use. The Mac mini’s compatibility with iOS mobile apps means that LumaFusion, the video editor that has been used to piece together “Gatekeepers” videos for YouTube, can now take advantage of the faster processor.

 

I have never spent so much on a computer before this one, so I intend to make the most of what the Mac mini can offer me as someone who wants to expand what they can do creatively. With that hope in mind, no better computer has been made for the job.