This week Apple unleashed the Tiger – a new versions of OS X with a desktop search capability that has been very favorably reviewed everywhere. I didn’t dash out and buy a copy, because I was on the road having fun with the Hurwitz team in New York and Boston.

I ran into Jerry Peterson, who was once a senior executive at HP and at Tandem. Now he spends his days doing advisory board work and taking more holidays than he used to. We discussed the Apple phenomenon, with me being enthusiastic about Apple’s ease of use. (I just plugged my printers and scanner and cable modem in and they all simply worked). Jerry tells me that it wasn’t that good when OS X first came to market. Indeed there were many drivers missing and Apple was forced to put in a good deal of effort with the peripheral vendors.

Jerry has been an Apple user forever. Even when working at Compaq he’d come to work, and to meetings, with an Apple laptop under his arm. It’s a productivity and usability thing. He then goes on to relate how impressive the Apple photography software is, explaining how he recently assembled an album of holiday photos in no time at all. (A few hours at most).

When Apple users get together their conversation gets very in-grown. (We used to meet in secret but not any more!)

I cannot avoid commenting on the phenomenon of Apple customer loyalty. Apple fans don’t like to hear anything negative about Apple. Nothing at all. I had more feedback on the fact that I described the Apple Newton as a failed product than I have had on just about anything else recently – all of it negative.

Well to be honest, the Newton was a product failure, even if it was an innovative idea that would eventually be made into a popular consumer product by Palm. Apple never made the idea work. But it did make the idea of elegant PC design work and others are now copying it. There are now PC models with plexiglass and miniature frames like small hi-fis complete with added  liquid crystal display.

One company, Shuttle Inc, is having genuine success with toaster-sized models in various colours, selling about 50,000 units a month – which amounts to half the company’s revenues. There is even a PC the size of a Walkman CD player (the EZgo from Atoz Technology) ideal for the in-car PC user I suppose. Presumably Dell will dive into this consumer oriented market, it already has the consumer bug, with plans to produce flat-screen televisions and projectors for home theatres.

I stand corrected on the Apple BlueTooth keyboard and mouse. Microsoft had already brought such products to market. Apple claims superiority in having a longer range of usage (30 feet – but I’ll need a hell of a big screen if I use it at that distance) and encrypted traffic. Also inaccurate (bad week, last week) was my reporting of the Eolas v Microsoft case, in that the patent concerned related to running applications locally through the browser. However the newspapers got that wrong too.

Not everything about the Apple Mac is good. For example, I’ve struggled with the Safari browser for months now. It’s better than IE, of course—I banished IE from my Mac a while ago, but I loaded Firefox for use on sites where Safari just doesn’t have the capability. I’ve now moved over to using Firefox permanently because it simply works. That’s one of the reasons for using the Mac itself. Usually, it just works, and it’s a shame that this is not true of Safari in some circumstances. It has specific problems with Writely.com and with ConstantContact—a site Hurwitz uses for monthly newsletters.

I remember the days of Windows when you’d buy some software or plug-in device and for some reason or other there would be complications. It isn’t that it wouldn’t work, but often it just wouldn’t work perfectly. There would be some goofy problem or other. And I’d always lose at least a day or two a year to some unexpected problem or other. Not with the Mac.

Recently I bought a USB BlueTooth capability for it, and a Wacom pen tablet. You plug such things in and they work. I had a minor problem with the BlueTooth capability. The documentation said I needed to go to Apple.com to get a driver (as opposed to loading the CD if I had a Windows machine). I searched Apple.com for mention of the driver, and couldn’t find it. Then I plugged the device in and, well it just worked. The driver was already loaded. That’s how it is. That’s how it should be.