The iMac is a great Macintosh-- let's not beat around the bush, here. It represents a paradigm shift for the whole computer industry by presenting a low-cost option to consumers who value simplicity and style. It's also revolutionary for Apple, since the iMac is the first system that Apple's produced in years that even comes close to the simplicity and clean lines of the original toaster-style Mac. But for true Mac fanatics, the iMac is also one frustrating machine-- only because it's both too good at what it does, and not good enough for what many of us need it to do. Confused yet? Bear with us for a moment.

Basically, we're talking about the simplicity vs. expandibility conundrum. We'd love to replace our aging PowerTower Pro with a brand new iMac, but of course, then we'd have to give up our multiple hard drives, our TV tuner and QuickTime capture capability, our QuickCam, our graphics tablet-- all kinds of stuff we kludged onto the big ugly box to let us get various kinds of work done. Sure, there are ways of kludging most-- if not all-- of that stuff into an iMac, but it would wreck the whole aura of simplicity that is fundamental to the iMac's soul. The iMac isn't just a stripped-down, low-cost Mac motherboard in a neat-looking enclosure; it's a being unto itself, both more and less than the sum of its parts. There's the tricky bit: true Mac fanatics would love to get an iMac, but so many of them need More Machine. And if the iMac were More Machine, it would cease to be an iMac. And if Apple Insider is correct, than Apple, too, understands what the iMac represents, and while they plan to revise it every six months, they don't expect to do away with its fundamental simplicity (or inexpandibility). For many Mac fans, it's a tragic love story, indeed.

So future iMacs won't be any bigger, though they will continue to get faster, cheaper, and more spacious (in terms of hard drive space). DVD probably won't show up any time soon-- at least, not until DVD-ROM storage becomes ubiquitous. Graphics and games performance are going to progress to blinding speed, and we wouldn't be too surprised to find that one day Apple is shipping iMacs with Virtual Game Station pre-installed with Playstation-style USB game controllers in the box. New enclosures with different colors, textures, and surfaces, as well as a more consumer-friendly design, are all apparently in the cards. That all sounds really, really cool, and it all sounds like real growth on the iMac's path to continued greatness as a consumer Macintosh. But as we eye the gee-whiz features of the new Yosemites, which are much more suited to AtAT's needs, we find that we don't wish that the iMac better fit our requirements; rather, we wish that our requirements fit the iMac's personality. But that's love for you...

Oh, boy-- Apple's got the whole computer industry in a teeth-gnashing tizzy, again. This time the brouhaha is over FireWire, Apple's keen new high-speed peripheral expansion bus that makes adding hard drives simple-- you just plug them in. No SCSI IDs, no termination worries, and in many cases, no external power supply for each drive. Up to 63 peripherals can be connected at once, and they can be plugged and unplugged at will with restarting or any other such song and dance. In the great Apple tradition, it's simple and it just works. Great. Players across the entire industry, including such bigwigs as Intel, Microsoft, Compaq, and others, are thirsting for simplicity, and would love to see FireWire catch on as the Next Big Thing™. Even better. But then Apple went and changed their licensing scheme to include a royalty of about a buck a port. Consternation! Uproar!

Now, plenty of you have written in wondering just what the whole big deal is about a dollar-per-port FireWire license, and on many counts, we have to agree; what's another $2 or so per hard drive? Why not just raise the price of the whole drive another $5 to absorb the cost and then be done with it? For a device that's going to cost at least a couple hundred dollars anyway, if $5 more or less going to make a big difference? Of course, we're not in the hard drive business, so we're surely missing something obvious-- our naïveté is legendary in such matters. Suffice it to say, the industry is not at all happy with Apple right now; we're reminded of the way the multimedia developers responded with suddenly Apple started charging for QuickTime. We can't judge one way or the other, but either Apple's trying to grab a lot more money than they "should," or the rest of the industry is simply shocked to discover that Apple is no longer functioning as their unpaid research and development center. Whatever.

What is certain is that potential FireWire licensees aren't a bit happy about the whole thing. In fact, according to EETimes, they're considering trying to write Apple completely out of the picture by "designing around Apple patents." Welcome to 1394B, Son of FireWire, the sequel that's twice as fast-- and Apple-free. Or, at least relatively Apple-free; as things now stand, many of Apple's patents don't apply, but not all. But the message certainly seems to be that if Apple doesn't play ball, they could be ditched completely. The only catch is, a backwards-compatible and fully-functioning "Apple-free B" won't make it out of developers' labs for a couple of years yet. So right now, it's pay Apple or stick to SCSI or IDE. We anticipate a long, bitter struggle on this one...

And speaking of long, bitter struggles, what struggle has been longer or more bitter than "Redmond Justice"? (Well, okay, lots of them-- but we're going to talk about the trial anyway.) Calculating purely based on number of witnesses processed, the trial is only about 54% complete, and most viewers place the government squarely in the lead so far. What makes that significant is that the latest witness, MIT economist Richard Schmalensee (Schmalensee... Schmalensee... We are never going to get tired of saying that name!) is the first witness that is on Microsoft's side. Or, at least, he's supposed to be, but his testimony doesn't seem to be helping the Redmond cause very much. Whereas we expected to see the tide start to turn once Microsoft started calling its own witnesses, instead we see Judge Jackson acting visibly skeptical of everything Schmalensee says.

According to an Interactive Week article, the judge directly questioned Schmalensee on three separate occasions in one day last week. Schmalensee's stance, as many of you are aware, is that Microsoft does not hold a monopoly, and therefore all antitrust charges are invalid. First, Judge Jackson was somewhat incredulous as to Schmalensee's apparent opinion that "the ability of affect distribution is no index of monopoly power." Later on, when Schmalensee suggested that the judge ignore that whole "Microsoft threatened to kill Mac Office unless Apple switched to Internet Explorer instead of Netscape" thing, claiming that such deals "are part of normal business practice," the judge countered with the observation that his argument only held water if Microsoft didn't hold monopoly power-- which has yet to be proven. Overall, Schmalensee didn't seem to impress anyone.

So Microsoft's first witness pretty much tanked, and both the judge and the Redmond legal team seem ready to write him off. Not to worry; Microsoft's got eleven more witnesses with which to build their case, and we're sure they'll provide plenty of entertainment in the coming months. By the way, to the industry watchers who predicted that the case would be over by the end of February: since the progress bar's only at 54% in late January, perhaps you'd care to change your estimates now?