In his column that appears in today’s editions of the Sun, My colleague Mike Himowitz offers advice to parents of recent high school grads regarding the potentially unpleasant prospect of having to buy said grad a new computer to accompany them to college in the fall.

As usual, the column is chock full of useful tidbits, including his recommendation that parents seriously consider choosing a laptop over a desktop. However, but for one fleeting mention, the option of choosing a Mac over a Windows-based PC is not addressed.

A few years ago such an omission could be justified; Macs were in retreat at many colleges in universities. I remember reading stories about some institutions sending notices to incoming students that only Windows PCs would be supported. On many campuses, Macs weren’t welcome.

But things have changed in the past two years. The prevalence of iPod ownership among young people has not only put the Apple brand on their radar screen, but has burned it in their brains as “hip.” Apple’s switch to Intel-based processors in 2006 calendar year and the Boot Camp software that Apple has made a free download means that all Macs can also run Windows, should the need arise.

The stories I’ve been reading over the past two years reflect a change in attitudes toward Macs on campus. Back in March, Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., announced that it would replace its 1,700 Windows PCs with 1,450 Macs over a three-years period. While Scott Byers, Wilkes’ vice president for finance and support operations, said there was no “Mac mandate,” most chose the Mac anyway: “This generation seems to prefer Macs.”

At Princeton University, Macs have become increasing popular, at least among on-campus sales. According to statistics reported in the Daily Princetonian, Macs constituted only 15 percent of sales in 2003, 25 percent in 2004, 38 percent in 2005 and a whopping 45 percent in 2006.

Last October, an outfit called the Campus Computing Project released the results of a poll it conducted of 1,200 full-time four-year undergrads at 100 campuses. Among those students who planned to purchase a new computer within the next year, Dell was the preferred choice of 41 percent of the respondents, but Apple was a solid No. 2 with 19 percent. Most of the students in the poll – 68 percent -- agreed with Himowitz in preferring a notebook for their next purchase. Of that group, 21 percent said they’d get a Mac. The Apple numbers may not appear overwhelming, but they’re four times the company’s current U.S. market share of 5 percent.

There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence as well, which you can read for yourself here.

Of course, whether to go Mac or stick with a Windows PC is still a matter of personal preference tempered by just how Mac-friendly your campus is. But you do have choice.

Posted by David Zeiler at 4:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
                    

In addition to iTunes Plus, Apple added another feature to its iTunes Store that took me somewhat by surprise, as I had seen no mention of it until today: iTunes U, an area of the iTunes Store where colleges and universities can make all sorts of educational content available, including the usual lectures and lab demonstrations but also sports highlights and campus tours. Best of all, everything is free!

As of today, there’s not much content – only 16 schools appear on the iTunes U list – but I expect that to grow rapidly. The files can be downloaded to your iPod for listening anywhere. With so many people owning iPods these days, it’s a terrific idea to extend the reach of our institutions of higher learning.

Listed at iTunes U along with such renowned universities as Duke, Stanford and MIT, Baltimore-area residents will find one neighborhood name: UMBC. On its page UMBC has seven videos from its New Media Studio as well as links to its own Web site.

So, Johns Hopkins, what’s the holdup?

Posted by David Zeiler at 5:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Today Apple officially started selling DRM-free tracks on its iTunes Music Store. Called “iTunes Plus,” it’s a separate section of the store with songs that cost more than regular iTunes tracks -- $1.29 versus 99¢ -- but have no built-in restrictions on where you can play them or how many copies you can make. Better still these songs are encoded at twice the “bit rate” of regular iTunes fare (256 kbps versus 128 kbps), which means less compression of the files, which translate to higher quality.

The availability of music without the much-maligned and detested DRM (digital rights management) is Apple CEO Steve Jobs following through on his “Thoughts on Music” statement he issued in February calling for the elimination of DRM from music sold online. Though some scoffed at the time, Jobs soon convinced EMI to make its catalog available on iTunes without DRM. As of now the iTunes Plus store includes only EMI artists, though there are plenty of heavyweights among them such as Frank Sinatra, the Rolling Stones, John Coltrane, Pink Floyd, Coldplay and Paul McCartney.

The arrival of DRM-free music at iTunes signals doom for DRM. The technically savvy folk most likely to buy music online have savaged the concept of DRM for years on Web forms and will welcome the opportunity to purchase music without it. When DRM-free music proves popular, it will put pressure on the other major labels to follow suit. Online retailer Amazon.com added to the anti-DRM momentum in May when it announced that it was planning a totally DRM-free online music store for later this year. While EMI again was the only major label on board, Amazon said it had over 12,000 independent labels signed up.

When all the labels eventually cave in and all online retailers are selling music without DRM, those same observers who dismissed Jobs’ “Thoughts on Music” in February will be heaping praise on the visionary Jobs for inspiring DRM’s demise (at least for music –video is a whole ‘nother story).

Posted by David Zeiler at 2:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Is Apple lying to its customers?

When the news broke last week that two California men had filed a class action lawsuit against Apple accusing the company of knowingly using inferior LCD screens in its MacBook and MacBook Pro model computers, it touched off a fierce debate among Mac users.

At issue are Apple’s advertised claims that the MacBook line supports “millions of colors” and offers “a nuanced view simply unavailable on other portables.”

The plaintiffs say that their experience (and that of many other MacBook customers, liberally quoted from Web forums in the lawsuit) falls far short of Apple’s claims. They cite complaints of “sparkly” and “grainy” displays that show banding in color gradients. They further allege that Apple is well aware of the issue and refuses to acknowledge or fix it, instead hoping “to enrich itself with the money it thus saves.”

Could it be true that Apple has maliciously schemed to dupe its loyal customers to reap big profits? Or are these California dudes just a couple of hard-to-please troublemakers, as some in the Mac community are saying?

It’s true that the MacBooks and MacBook Pros use “6-bit” LCD panels instead of “8-bit” panels. The difference is that 8-bit can display 16.7 million colors, while 6-bit can only display 262,144 colors. But, and this is a very big but, a bit of tech magic called “dithering” can manipulate the pixels on the screen in such a way as to trick the eye into seeing far more colors – 16.2 million, in fact, providing Apple an arguable claim to "millions" of colors.

According to experts, the human eye can distinguish at best 10 million colors, so the dithering trick works well enough for most people. In general only those doing serious color work on their computers, such as professional photographers and graphic artists, need 8-bit capabilities.

Although many critics on Web forums have chastised Apple’s use of 6-bit displays, particularly in its MacBook Pros, all laptops, including all those made by rival PC manufacturers and sold with Microsoft’s Windows, use 6-bit displays. As far as I’ve been able to determine, a laptop with an 8-bit capable display has never been available at any price.

If the two men who filed the lawsuit were as serious about the quality of their displays as they claim, they should have researched the subject before they bought a laptop for professional work.

I’m also suspicious of the screen problems the men allege. I’ve owned a MacBook for nearly a year and have encountered none of the issues described in the lawsuit. I even put it side by side with my brand-new 21-inch Samsung 215TW LCD (purchased for my desktop Mac) and detected no dramatic discrepancy in color depth quality, though the Samsung is clearly much brighter and has a phenomenal viewing angle (178 degrees!). I discovered the hard way that 8-bit panels are tough to find even in standalone LCDs, because the 6-bit panels are cheaper and have faster “response times,” which is regarded as better for gaming and viewing video.

A May 23 post on the MacinTouch Web site has me thinking that the real issue is not 6-bit versus 8-bit LCDs, but a bad batch of LCDs that got into Apple’s supply chain. In his post, Rich Cruse says he had a MacBook that suffered from the display issues described in the California lawsuit. He took the machine to his local Apple Store, which replaced the screen. He reported that his repaired MacBook is “bright and crisp with realistic colors.”

So the problem appears real enough, though not universal as the lawsuit implies. Perhaps the most legitimate beef in the lawsuit is that Apple has blown off many of those who have complained about their bad displays, not something we Mac users expect of a company with a top-notch reputation for customer satisfaction.

As for the core of the lawsuit -- the allegations that Apple makes claims its laptops don’t meet -- the uncomfortable fact is that no matter how petty it seems, those claims at best stretch the truth. Apple should come clean on this one, and should do right by those customers unlucky enough to have bought Mac laptops with bad LCDs.

If Apple loses the suit, it (and, presumably, all other laptop manufacturers) will still be allowed to advertise 6-bit screens as capable of “millions” of colors, but will be required to include a qualifying phrase, such as “with dithering” to distinguish them from 8-bit screens. Participants in the lawsuit will end up with little more than an Apple Store coupon worth $20-$25. The lawyers will collect enough money to buy many, many large, expensive 8-bit LCDs.

Posted by David Zeiler at 7:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Welcome to Apple a Day, my latest vehicle for offering my views on the ever-fascinating world of Apple, Inc. I started writing about Macs for the Sun's original Plugged In section back in 1998 and later wrote a weekly column on Apple and Mac-related issues for this very Web site. My plan is to combine the knowledge of a long-time user with a journalist's instincts to add what I hope will be fresh insights on the daily stew of announcements, news, and controversies. Along the way I hope to hear from those of you who agree, disagree, or who know something about the topic I do not (there should be a lot of room for that one). This should be fun ....

Posted by David Zeiler at 2:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)