The new bold colors of iMacs are for Apple, not you

 I must admit that when I first saw Apple's new iMacs and the bold colors that Apple assigned to them, I was puzzled. Why would anyone want those iMacs?

Not that the colors are unappealing. They are, in fact, quite nice.

But why put such colors on iMacs? That is, why put such colors on computers that are not portable?

I understand the reasoning for colors on laptops. Bright or bold colors (and the Apple logo) on laptops makes sense. Macbook owners identify with their laptops. In an earlier age, when Macbooks were white, their owners festooned them with stickers and artwork. Today, carrying around a Macbook lets everyone else know that one is in the club of Cool Apple Kids.

But that logic doesn't work for iMacs. People don't (as a general rule) carry their iMacs from home to the office, or use them at the local coffee shop.

And why, of all places, did Apple decide to put the colors on the back of the display? That is the one place that the user isn't looking. Users of iMacs -- at least the users who I know -- look at the display and rarely look at the back of the unit. Most folks position the iMac on a desk up against a wall, where no one can see the back of the iMac.

After a bit of puzzling, I arrived at an answer.

The colors on the iMac are not for the user.

The colors on the iMac are for Apple.

Apple's positioning of colors on the back of an iMac, and the use of bold colors, makes sense from a certain point of view -- advertising. Specifically, advertising in the corporate environment.

It's true that iMacs used in a home will be positioned on desks against a wall. But that doesn't hold for the corporate environment, with its open office plans where people sit around desks that are little more than flat tables.

In those offices, people do see the backs of computers (or displays, if the CPU is on the desk or below on the floor).

By using bold colors, Apple lets everyone in an office quickly see that a new computer has arrived. All of the other computers are black; the new Apple iMacs are red, or blue, or green, or yellow. A new iMac in an office shouts out to the entire office "I'm an Apple iMac!" -- no, better than that, it shouts "I'm a new Apple iMac!".

This is advertising, and I think it will be effective. Once one person gets a new iMac, many other folks in the office will want new iMacs. "If Sam can get a new iMac, why can't I?" will be the thinking.

Notice that this advertising is targeted for offices. It doesn't work in the home. (Although in the home, with everyone knowing what everyone else has, bold colors are not necessary to generate demand.) This advertising works in offices, especially those offices where equipment is associated with status. iMacs are the Cool New Thing, and the Very Cool People always have the Cool New Thing.

Apple is leveraging its brand well.

Performance, missing and found

One of the constants in technology has been the improvement of performance. More powerful processors, faster memory, larger capacity in physically smaller disks, and faster communications have been the results of better technology.

This increase in performance is mostly mythological. We are told that our processors are more powerful, we are told that memory and network connections are faster. Yet what is our experience? What are the empirical results?

For me, word processors and spreadsheets run just as fast as they did decades ago. Operating systems load just as fast -- or just as slow.

Linux on my 2006 Apple MacBook loads slower than 1980s-vintage systems with eight-bit processors and floppy disk drives. Windows loads quickly, sort of. It displays a log-on screen and lets me enter a name and password, but then it takes at least five minutes (and sometimes an hour) updating various things.

Compilers and IDEs suffer the same fate. Each new version of Visual Studio takes longer to load. Eclipse is no escape -- it has always required a short eternity to load and edit a file. Slow performance is not limited to loading; compilation times have improved but only slightly, and not by the orders of magnitude to match the advertised improvements in hardware.

Where are the improvements? Where is the blazing speed that our hardware manufacturers promise?

I recently found that "missing" performance. It was noted in an article on the longevity of the C language, of all things. The author clearly and succinctly describes C and its place in the world. On the way, he describes the performance of one of his own C programs:

"In 1987 this code took around half an hour to run, today 0.03 seconds."

And there it is. A description of the performance improvements we should see in our systems.

The performance improvements we expect from better hardware has gone into software.

We have "invested" that performance in our operating systems, our programming languages, and user interfaces. Instead of taking all the improvements for reduced running times, we have diverted performance to new languages and to "improvements" in older languages. We invested in STL over plain old C++, Java over C++ (with or without STL), Python over Java and C#.

Why not? Its better to prevent mistakes than to have fast-running programs that crash or -- worse -- don't crash but provide incorrect results. Our processors are faster, and our programming languages do more for us. Boot times, load times, and compile times may be about the same as from decades ago, but errors are far fewer, easily detected, and much less dangerous.

Yes, there are still defects which can be exploited to hack into systems. We have not achieved perfection.

Our systems are much better with operating systems and programming languages that do the checking that the now do, and businesses and individuals can rely on computers to get the job done.

That's worth some CPU cycles.