In the video above you see examples of fuzzy search, a touch-screen UI, a tablet form factor, social search, a recommendation engine, and of course speech-to-text as the main user input paradigm.  It isn’t so interesting that someone as brilliant as Alan Kay had this vision in the first place, but what is amazing is the degree to which Apple has been focused on delivering this vision — a vision telegraphed by a company nearly 25 years ago that was itself less than half that age at the time.

Just as NASA engineers and designers have accredited a great deal of their vision to the work of Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick (via his visual adaptation of 2001) so Apple has slavishly pursued this vision of pervasive and hugely interactive computing with acquisitions like Siri and innovations like the iPad.  Sure, there are many reasons for Apple’s market success in this post-PC era — but I would heap disproportionate credit toward building a corporate culture that cultivates, communicates, and ultimately has pursued that vision over the course of the past 30 years.

The tough nut to crack has always been the speech recognition part.  We are perhaps 25 years into a 50 year cycle in helping computers to understand most nuances of human communication.  Humans have ways to convey context, via body language etc., that computers cannot yet pick up.  Speech is not effectively used without all of these cues and there are many ships on the rocks of this technology frontier.  As such I and most of the consumer marketplace have never taken it very seriously, and I don’t expect this to change with Apple’s emphasis on speech reco this morning.

The question is:  When we’ve checked off all of the boxes from this video what’s next?  What’s the vision for 30 years hence?

The company’s angst, I believe, stems fundamentally from the fact that Apple and other vendors have come to understand that increasingly mobile phones are a consumer purchase decision, and not a corporate one.  And when people can choose, they choose the products they fetishize.  And no one has captured the consumer market’s imagination like Apple, with the iPhone and iPad.  But you, dear reader, already know all of this.

I firmly believe that any turnaround involves deep pain and difficult choices, and I have not seen any sincere effort by the co-CEOs (and now co-COOs) of RIM to make these decisions and brace for the sting.  In fact, judging by their actions it’s not even clear that Messers Balsillie and Lazaridis actually agree with the prevailing notion that there actually is anything wrong with their company.  These layoffs and strategic pronouncements feel mostly like lip service.

At any rate, in the unlikely event that I were to suddenly become the CEO of RIM, a company that is about 1,300 times larger than my own modest startup, here is what I would do:

1. Split the company in two.
   RIM is really the composite of two companies — network and messaging services for carriers and consumers, and smartphones which we users decreasingly hold in our hands.  For the majority of RIM’s lifecycle these two components were strategically and inextricably bound — cool devices with unique features drove demand for the services carriers needed to obtain in order to be able to fulfill that demand, and thus sell more devices — however now that RIM’s infiltration of the carrier market is largely ubiquitous that delta into the mobile network needs to be taken in two directions.  The devices and the network services are now loosely coupled, and the need to tie them together feels more like an albatross.  In order to progress on both fronts these cannot be constrained by the need to support the other’s objectives.
2. Kill the Playbook.
   I’m really not sure why anyone would enter a race not intending to take a stab at winning it.  We have lived with the PlayBook for months now and it still doesn’t have an email client — akin to BMW selling a car without an accelerator pedal.   It is clear to all that aside from the potential for limited enterprise and government sales there is very little chance for the Playbook market to expand.  It has no raison d’etre; no killer app; no je ne sais quoi.  Apparently RIM doesn’t sais quoi either, as the Product Manager for the Playbook and the one of company’s VPs of Marketing have just quit — not a good sign.  As far as branding and marketing is concerned, the Playbook is an attention and messaging sinkhole; and it almost certainly has distracted R&D, preventing RIM from building an iPhone competitor that we could get behind.
3. Focus on 3rd-party developers.
   It would be impossible to deny that much of the demand for iOS is driven by the myriad things that one can do with an iPhone or iPad.  In fact, the iPhone is actually quite a terrible telephonic device, with a bad chipset choice and terrible RF engineering, and it’s consistently suffered supply chain problems as Apple struggles to keep up with demand.  None of these issues matters.  Most iPhone apps suck.  But they suck a lot more on Blackberries, where they exist there at all.  Developers have to run a gauntlet of a horrifically bad developer ecosystem, fragmentation (the need to have multiple versions of each app) that reminds most of us of J2ME, a distribution system which is spotty, and even an enterprise policy shield which allows IT managers to lock down phones and prevent apps from being installed.  If I see an iPhone in someone’s hand I know I can get the ONE version of our app onto it.  If I see a Blackberry in someone’s hand the odds of that user being able to get and run our app may be as low as 3 in 10.
4. Understand that BlackBerry Messenger, and messaging, is the company’s strategic future and open it up to other platforms.
   RIM fears cross-platform messaging apps like Kik and WhatsApp enough to take steps toward actively blocking them.  However nothing could possibly be more powerful, or useful, than a cross-platform BlackBerry Messenger network.  This could subsume the lowly phone number as a primary identifier for communications, and subvert the wireless carriers in a way that Apple has actually been executing on much more poorly than you’d expect.  As part of this strategy I would help the company understand that messaging is not simply “WHAT R U DOING LOL” messages flying back and forth, but also includes Push Notifications for apps, call setup requests, and social networking.  As part of this strategy I would acquire Urban Airship, a modestly-funded private company that could be bought for <$100M and would become a catalyst for radical change within RIM, again leveraging the company’s delta into carriers.  Messaging is the one thing RIM has going for it that is hugely viral, and they’ve got a massive critical mass to build upon in the existing BlackBerry market that they simply need to unlock.
5. Stop dicking around with cheap plastic phones, and own the keyboard.
   One area in which Apple has exhibited significant leadership is the use of real materials, such as glass and metal, in their devices.  This gives them a stronger and indeed perennial feel, while the plastic on most BBs tends to fade in colour and begins to look tired and damaged within a few short months.  Everything about the BlackBerry needs to feel solid — including the keys.  Speaking of which, the domain of the keyboard is an area that the iPhone is unlikely ever to tread upon.  Use this to differentiate the BB and shame Apple.  There are many many users (among them women with long fingernails) who will NOT give up their keyboard for a touch screen, and a generation of teens who have known text messaging as their primary means of communication for more than a decade.  The focus on the keyboard is one of RIM’s core strengths.

I’ve purposefully attempted to avoid reading others’ prescriptions for RIM so I apologize in advance if any of these represents overlap.

I’ve been a shoulder to cry on for colleagues from Telus and Cisco often enough to not want to witness the death of what may well be the last great Canadian telecom company.  Even as recently as 5 years ago, RIM was lauded for its culture of innovation and relentless aggression.  However, the current wave of layoffs and strategic pronouncements are nothing more than hackneyed Wall Street pandering — a movie we’ve seen before at other declining giants that have never recovered — and these moves have already killed that culture.  I have seen what this kind of short-term management thinking and denial can do to a company’s culture, nurturing an internal environment where lifers sandbag their turf and the company’s former wunderkind rest and vest.  Neither behaviour is conducive to the kind of thinking or the can-do attitude that gets companies turned around quickly.  And really, who would want to be CEO and lead that sort of army into battle?  Not me.

Now, I was an early adopter of the Apple TV.  Since then I have had a love/hate relationship with the device, which I think is rather something Steve wishes he had not hit the launch button for.

There is an obscure feature (Steve has an aversion to buttons) wherein if you hold down the “PLAY” button for five seconds, the Apple TV appears to turn off.  But here’s the rub:  It doesn’t, really.  To perform its magic, the AppleTV needs to be able to sync with or stream from a remote PC/Mac.  However, this doesn’t mean it needs to be on all the time.  But it is.   

Strangely, Apple TVs cannot, under any circumstance, be turned off.  This is kind of a pain when you sleep in the same room as an Apple TV, or when it’s summertime.  Or worse:  both.  The tiny little fan desperately struggling to keep your Apple TV’s processor, hard drive and logic board from melting works pretty hard.  As a result, it spins .. well .. all the time.  The only way to give your Apple TV a break is to unplug it.

An OFF function that actually turns the Apple TV OFF (from a user’s perspective .. this would probably actually hibernate) would be a novel and downright sensible function, don’t you think Steve?

In the Apple TV’s world, the “standby” functions merely disable video output.  Otherwise the Apple TV functions as normal — chewing up power, creating heat, and making noise.  Most of this time it’s doing nothing … just waiting to sync.  How boring life as an Apple TV must be!

Myriad problems are created by Apple’s aversion to this simple function:

1. Frequent overheating of the device (this past August you could cook with it)
2. Unwelcome fan/drive noise (my ATV is in the bedroom) … which leads to
3. Media corruptions when users shut off the ATV the only way they can, by unplugging it or kicking the OFF button on a power bar

I admit that last problem afflicts me frequently, and I am on my second hard drive.. with such small hard drives (40GB or 160GB?  come ON) syncing a large library fills up the drive on the ATV pretty fast, and leads inevitably to various corruptions.. all made worse when power is roughly disconnected by sleepless owners like me.

There is nothing whatsoever to prevent the Apple TV from implementing a soft-power-off and waking the device sporadically to see if there’s new content on the iTunes library or store and then deep-sleeping again after a sync is done.  Nothing to inhibit a simple click of the all-powerful PLAY button on the remote from waking the Apple TV from its slumber within a few seconds, rising to the challenge of trying to render HD video — as it so often struggles to do.

The frustrating thing about the Apple TV is that it’s so very close to being the best product in the category — but inattention to detail and downright boneheadedness in its software implementation, combined with very poor hardware performance, make it almost useless as a mainstream consumer device.

I have hundreds of consumer electronics products in my home. The only other device that doesn’t turn OFF is my fridge.  Get with the program, guys.  Now that Apple is trying to “go green” and appease board member Al Gore, among others, the always-on AppleTV is a black eye.

You’ll notice the Apple TV is conspicuously lacking an EnergySTAR compliance logo.  Wonder why?

It has been a year since Apple and Rogers Wireless launched the iPhone 3G in Canada.  It was that summer, in 2008, I unloaded my first-generation unlocked iPhone for a legit iPhone 3G from Rogers Wireless.  One of the benefits of having a carrier-supported iPhone is, of course, supposed to be seamless warranty replacement.  Shortly after I got it, my iPhone began dropping calls and failing to dial out on the network.  I assumed this to be A) a problem with Rogers’ network, B) a firmware bug in the iPhone itself, or C) a combination of both.

I had heard things about chipset problems afflicting AT&T iPhone customers so I assumed this would be remedied in a soon-to-follow update from Apple.  By October of 2008, I had given up.  I called Rogers tech support and was walked thru the usual “wipe it clean and pray it’s fixed” procedure and tried it for two more weeks but no joy, so in November I instigated the phone swap process from Rogers.  The call was short and sweet and all seemed to be well with a new iPhone winging its way to our house.

On the Friday before my iPhone was to arrive, my SIM suddenly stopped working and my iPhone could not connect to the Rogers network at all.  I later found out that this was due to the fact that my phone number had been reprovisioned to a new SIM that was in the box accompanying my iPhone.  Odd.  It was obviously my iPhone that was broken, not the SIM, and I just couldn’t fathom why they wouldn’t just give me a 1-800 number to call to activate the new SIM when it arrived versus forwarding my phone service to a brown box in the back of a UPS truck, leaving me without my phone service for 3 days.  I called Rogers (from my Vonage line) to complain, spent an hour and a half on the phone, and could not get this resolved after bouncing around 3-4 agents.

On the following Tuesday, the replacement iPhone arrived.  I tried starting it up, but it wouldn’t boot.  It had a substantial hardware problem that led to garbage on the screen and all kinds of other garbage, but in effect the replacement phone was DOA.  As I had to go on a business trip that day, I put the new SIM in my old iPhone and left the new iPhone for a week or so before I tried it again, this time putting the replacement thru all kinds of hardware resets and software reloads.  I could not resurrect it from the dead despite hours of trying.

So I called Rogers.  Again.  After two hours bouncing around various agents in various departments, I could not get an agent to take responsibility for my problem, instead each agent dispatched me to another department as I (admittedly) became increasingly irate.  One agent accused me of lying, and/or not knowing what I am talking about.  Finally I threatened to QUIT Rogers, switch to Telus, and sue them for breach of contract — I was transferred to a magic save department where I met a very nice lady who calmed me down, promised to solve all of my problems, and who would call me the following week which was, now 7 weeks after the Odyssey began, Christmas.

Needless to say, she never did call back.  Never solved my problem.  Probably got laid off.  Might be working for Bell Canada right now, for all I know.

Next I began to receive a torrent of threatening letters demanding that I return my old, somewhat functioning iPhone or I’d be charged $780.    I called Rogers again in January trying to resolve the issue, but to no avail:  Rogers Wireless wouldn’t take the badly broken replacement iPhone back without also sending my other one, leaving me phoneless.  I gave up after the best I could do was an agent telling me I had to send BOTH iPhones in one shipment to their call centre.  Fuming, I waited another few days to call back.

Eventually on my next call,  an agent relented: I kept the semi-working iPhone, sent back the badly broken replacement iPhone.  I packaged up the replacement phone and sent it back, recording the shipping tracking number from UPS.

Then the predictable happened.  They charged $780 to my card.  I was furious, but sugar-coated my attitude and called back AGAIN to ask for a refund.  After bouncing around to various departments, each complaining about the slowness of their computers, they could not track the whereabouts of the iPhone I had returned, despite the fact that I could even tell them the name of the signing agent who had received the package.  I nearly hit the ceiling.  I threatened a complaint to the CRTC (which, in fairness, I have every right to do).  Finally someone agreed to help me.  One quirk:  They couldn’t refund the $780.Instead I got a credit — in effect I was loaning Rogers money — against future use.  A compromise that irritates me, but was under the circumstances acceptable.

Now it was March.  By my logs of various telephone calls to Rogers, I had now spent about 9 hours on the phone with Rogers attempting to address a single issue spanning more than 6 months.  I was so exhausted with the process that I accepted the neutrality of being exactly where I was technically, and further behind financially, than when the problems began — with an iPhone that didn’t fully work and with my wallet $780 lighter but an account credit.

It wasn’t until late last month that I mustered the courage to call again and try to get a new replacement iPhone.  I had assumed that these processes, immature at the time I first endured them, may have seasoned and smoothened with time and experience.  I called again, had a very pleasant half-hour call with an agent, who whisked me a new iPhone 3G toot sweet.  As before, my phone service was disconnected for a couple of days after they shipped the replacement phone, but by now Stockholm Syndrome was taking effect and I was becoming numb to the varied mistreatments by my captor.

The very same day the new iPhone 3G arrived, I cracked open the box, dropped in the new SIM, zeroed my old iPhone, and boxed it up for shipping.  UPS picked it up that very day, May 28, 2009.  I expected to hear nothing of the issue further.  According to the UPS tracking data, the package arrived the following week, on June 6th.  On June 14th, Rogers sent me a letter threatening to charge me $730.

I cannot fathom that within 8 days, Rogers could not process and acknowledge the receipt of my RMA’d iPhone 3G.  I furthermore cannot fathom that when they do overcharge you due to their own error, they cannot refund the excess back to your credit card (which is how I pay for my phone service).

Rogers is a company clearly hampered by its own hugely restricted billing, provisioning, and customer service systems.  Ted Rogers, five weeks before his death last year, spoke to an audience marshalled by the local YEO chapter, which I gratefully attended as a guest of Mario from ShowTime Tickets.  Two thoughts of Ted’s permeated his frailly-voiced speech that day.  He said, of customer service, that “the secret to good customer service is always saying yes” and that his success as CEO was directly tied to the number of layers that existed between him and his customers — the fewer the better.

I know that it’s difficult dealing with the kinds of customers iPhone brings to the table and the scale of operations necessary to support the volume that a device like the iPhone can generate for Rogers.  Not easy.  But I wonder what Ted would think after reading this story?

I’m thinking that might be a dramatic oversimplification, and a statement made by a PR flack who can’t be expected to understand or even correctly parrot the complexities of this kind of issue.  Since Skype uses its own CODECs in many applications it is in a position to choose whichever is most convenient among those which they license and proprietarily own.  I am unaware of any CODECs which apply to the mobile VoIP space, which would be patented exclusively in Canada, that Skype might trip over. 

I’m going to guess that this is probably more related to signaling and/or call setup and I am aware of a few granted patents in Canada that might foul up Skype.  Regardless: given the murky nature of patent disputes, if they were to take on the patent holder in Canada and lose that might have a negative effect on their intellectual property claims elsewhere.  Given the cost and the risk, they may have decided it was easier to fold up the tent and give up on Canada until whomever the stool pigeon is comes to them with a reasonable settlement.

There is, fellow Canadians, an interim solution that’s pretty easy.  Thanks to a commenter from TMCNet, here’s the easy way to get it:

1. De-authorize the computer you use to sync to the iPhone from within iTunes
2. Grab a coupon code from a place like here.   This allows you to bypass the credit card payment process later.
3. Redeem the code from within the iTunes Music Store … the “Redeem” button is cleverly hidden in the top right-hand side of the screen.
4. Create a new account.  Where it asks for payment select “None” and enter a US address and zip code.  I hear 90210 is FILLED with millions of people!
5. Search for Skype, download, and Sync.  This will *NOT* destroy existing apps you have installed, curiously enough.  YRMV.

I am really hoping that some work I did in 2005 with EQO is not responsible for this everybody-but-Canada restriction.  Here’s Skype’s preview:

Even after the stores opened and the customers have packed home with their lawn chairs, the disaster that has been the iPhone’s launch in Canada continues to ring (pardon the pun) in the ears of consumers. I took a spin around Vancouver on my motorcycle (sorry, going too fast for photos) this morning at 7:30 and counted 250-300 people at the Broadway & Arbutus Rogers store, some TV trucks, and some balloons but otherwise not much fanfare. The smaller stores had maybe a dozen or so people hanging around at best.

I was concerned that the media were going to get taken on a ride by Rogers with this launch. Fortunately, the CBC is reporting that desperately few of the customers who were encouraged by Rogers to go to Rogers flagship stores in 6 Canadian cities have walked home with the prize, while still others are getting denied the purchase because some Rogers outlets are showing preference to new customers (and thus, highly-spiffed new activations) over existing ones. The CBC has thus far been on the money on this issue I hope this REAL story is echoed in other media over the course of the day.

As Daniel Smith reported, Apple may have heard the more than 63,000 voices at RuinediPhone.com and diverted shipments destined for Canada to elsewhere. Plausible, but this clear internal “leak” might actually be a way for Rogers to blame the lack of supply on Apple in a very subtle way.

This is what happens when big, arrogant service providers who fail to remain customer-centric come into contact with a mass-market trend. The launch of the iPhone in Canada could (should) have had a huge impact on subscriber loyalty and shareholder value for Rogers, but today even those few folks lucky enough to actually have paid through the nose and signed their lives away on a 3-year contract to get an iPhone are embittered by the experience.

It seeps down from those obnoxious gouging prices and the three-year lock-in (in an industry where the life cycle of a phone is less than 2 years) all the way to the flagship Rogers store passing out Granola Bars from Costco instead of paying the overnight campers the respect of some eggs or pancakes (they promised ‘breakfast’).

Somewhere in between those two offences is the fact that, with diminished supply on hand, Rogers store managers failed to tell those in the lineups that there weren’t enough devices to go around. Moreover they failed to give those people any promise that they might get one sometime in the future, so as a result many fan boys have now sat on their asses outside a store all morning for nothing.

Rogers created a media event around the iPhone launch.. great for free marketing, bien sur. They made promises about special promotions and breakfasts and early openings for these stores, and encouraged crowds to concentrate at specific stores to make sure they’d be part of the media frenzy and make the event seem much larger in scale than it actually is. It’s an even trade, I guess, when the consumer ends up getting what they went there for. But with the biggest stores having fewer than 100 units on hand you can do the math: of those 200-400 people who waited at each of the flagship stores, as many as 75%-80% did it for nothing.

In essence, Rogers exploited them to generate buzz and get some free marketing, and gave them nothing in return. So let’s do the math: A Triple-Lock for the lucky few, a lost night’s sleep for many, and for everyone a granola bar.

Yeah, screw you too, Rogers.

The next thing I’ll line up for is to be the first subscriber on the nation’s next GSM wireless carrier.

Since I made my purchase, though, there have been three major developments:

1. Apple announced there will be an SDK. This seems (because of odd timing) that either the announcement or possibly the entire program is the result of bowing under pressure built up within the developer (and user) marketplace, or the fact that with jailbreaking they’ve lost control of the 3rd party developers already.
2. Various analysis is leading to a consensus that Apple profits as much as $565 per iPhone, assuming you keep it hooked up to AT&T. Roughly $432 of that comes from the payments from AT&T to Apple over the course of your two-year contract.
3. AT&T said it has activated 1.1M iPhones, but Apple says it has sold more than 1.4M iPhones. This means that there are 250K-300K iPhones which have obviously been unlocked. Unlocking your iPhones means that Apple is losing out on almost $130 million in gross profit over two years already. AT&T loses entirely. Ouch.

So, what’s a self-respecting geek to do? The reality is that the iPhone is enticing. Even though the call failure rate is actually pretty high (not sure if this is true of locked iPhones) it is an excellent phone with great acoustics and with a tremendous UI.

I’ve noticed some real flaws, of course: The fact that this is the first Apple device with a keyboard that can’t copy & paste in over 10 years should be embarrassing to Steve-O, as would the fact that you can’t Search anywhere on the platform. The fact that although it has Bluetooth you can’t talk to it from your bluetooth-enabled Mac rather contradicts Apple’s entire modus operandi with regard to connectivity, as does the astonishing iRealization that it inexplicably uses iTunes, and not iSync to.. uh… Sync.. Ouch.

As a new unlocked iPhone user, Apple still might be at war with you. But the reality is that these problems are largely software-fixable. Apple will solve them, or some plucky third-party developer will step in and hand-grenade Apple’s stranglehold on the users.

The best way to play the iPhone game is not to abstain from purchasing one (I know you want to) until RSJ opens the platform properly… The best way to launch your missile attack and enter the iPhone war is to buy one, unlock it immediately, and take it to your favourite GSM carrier (using it with or without the data plan — I’m finding free WiFi to be quite readily available most of the places I want to do email etc.).

In this way, you vote with your feet. And your wallet. And any vote against AT&T is a good one, in my view.

And if half or more of iPhone buyers point their radios at “anyone but AT&T” it’ll start to hit Apple where it lives, and they’re realize that the Blackberry-style lock-in is not the appropriate business model for invoking change in the wireless industry.

The networking stuff used to be the hard part, but Apple’s bonjour makes it easy.  But as for installing the correct drivers, the Windows world knows no delimiters of common sense..  Two hours later I had performed the correct sequence of incantations and solved the problem so I thought I’d share the misery with you here in the hopes of saving you an hour or so.

To save the rest of us the same nightmare I endured, here’s how you do it.  Note that this assumes you already have Bonjour printing working for the Macs in your household.  That’s actually fairly intuitive to set up and I need not cover it here.  Here goes:

1.  You need a driver since whatever printer you’re going to use is likely not a part of your Windows install.  Go to the HP web site and download their giant bloatware driver pack for your Windoze box.
2. Gone are the days when you could just locate the driver someplace and have Windows install it normally.  Once the above pack has exploded itself into your hard drive, you need to “fool” XP into installing the driver.  Plug your Windoze machine directly into the printer via USB (hope it’s a laptop!).  It should detect the printer and automagically install the drivers.  Once done, “Print Test Page” to make sure it works.
3. Don’t delete this printer yet, but go ahead and unplug the USB.  Instead, install the Bonjour drivers for Windows on to your Windows XP box.
4. Open the “Add Printer” tool from the Bonjour folder that now appears in your Start menu.  If you’re still connected to the network and the printer’s again connected to whatever Apple device is sharing the printer, your computer should detect it.  Since the driver has also been installed, the appropriate driver, in my case “HP OfficeJet 6200 series”, should appear as an option.
5. Delete the USB printer and make the Bonjour printer the default from within the Windows  “Printers & Fax” menu item.

That’s pretty-much it.  It only took me two hours to figure out how to fool Windows into installing the driver, as I couldn’t seem to mine it directly from within the installer or the folders HP placed the drivers into (which I still can’t dig up).

On to my next battle.. hope this helps!

-Ian.

Pizza Box or IMac? No, an IBox By Leander Kahney

Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,58310,00.html

02:00 AM Apr. 02, 2003 PT

A Minnesota man has plans to launch his own Macintosh-manufacturing business, building a low-cost, upgradeable Mac called the iBox.

John Fraser, a 21-year-old engineer from Chanhassen, Minnesota, is finalizing the design for his flat “pizzabox” Mac and hopes to go into production in three to four months. If successful, Fraser will be the first third party to make a Mac since Apple shut down its three-year experiment in clone licensing in 1997.

Unlike the world of Windows PCs, which has many hardware makers, Apple is the only company making Macs. Apple doesn’t license its operating system to outside hardware manufacturers.

Fraser hopes to sidestep the licensing issues by using older, off-the-shelf parts made by Apple and sold to computer repair outfits as spare parts. He will use Apple-made motherboards preloaded with Macintosh ROMs — the vital piece of hardware-cum-software that makes a Mac a Mac. Customers will supply their own Mac operating system.

However, Fraser may still face legal problems with patents and trademarks, legal experts said. Apple is notoriously protective of its intellectual property, and has not hesitated to go after hardware manufacturers, software publishers and websites for infringement.

Fraser hasn’t yet contacted Apple, and the company didn’t respond to requests for comment.

“I always wanted to build Macs,” said Fraser, who runs a part-time PC customization business, 2khappyware. “But I want to get Apple’s full support. I want to make sure I’m on the up and up. I’m an Apple supporter. It’s not something I want to clash with them about. I want to make sure what I’m doing is legal.”

Fraser’s iBox will be a low-cost, upgradeable machine. It will offer everything Mac customers expect: FireWire and USB ports, Airport connectivity, Gigabit Ethernet and so on — for about a third of the price of comparable Apple machines.

Fraser plans to offer both bare-bones and complete systems.

For $250 to $350, the bare-bones iBox will feature a case, motherboard and power supply. Customers will add their own processor, memory, hard drive and operating system.

Fraser will build full-featured configurations to customers’ specifications. A fully loaded iBox will cost between $650 and $2,000, depending on the speed of the chip, the size of the hard drive and other features. He plans to offer configurations with dual processors, just as Apple does in its current line of PowerMacs.

Fraser will base the iBox on so-called “Gigabit” motherboards built by Apple as spare parts for previous generations of G4 PowerMacs. As well as Gigabit Ethernet, the boards have a daughter-card slot for the CPU, which can accommodate a range of G4 chips, including those yet to be released. The iBox includes open slots for extra memory, two PCI cards and an AGP video card.

Fraser said a clear demand exists for a low-cost Mac that customers can outfit themselves with cheap, off-the-shelf parts or parts taken from older machines.

Now, Apple customers must decide between Apple’s entry-level iMac or eMac, neither of which can be significantly upgraded, or spend more money for a pro-level Power Mac.

Fraser is in the final stages of iBox production. The missing piece is finding a manufacturer for the machine’s distinctive case, which was designed by Mario Micheli, a designer from Milwaukee. Fraser said he is meeting with companies that mold plastic next week to discuss putting it into production.

Fraser has already struck a deal to buy parts from Other World Computing, a Mac parts and peripherals supplier. OWC said it may sell Fraser’s systems through its website.

“I think it has great promise,” said Larry O’Connor, OWC’s founder and CEO. “Mac users like unique and interesting things, and this has definitely got people’s attention. There’s definitely interest in what he’s doing.”

Fraser isn’t new to building PCs. He earned his living with his 2khappyware customization business for a few years before he had a child and sidelined the business to a hobby.

And Fraser said he doesn’t have any grand plans for building the iBox business into the next Dell or Gateway. “I’m not doing it for profit,” he said. “I’m doing it for a hobby.”

The project has already generated considerable buzz on a number of online forums. In fact, it was encouragement from members of the dealmac forums that persuaded Fraser there was demand for the iBox.

But intellectual property lawyer Mark Dickson said Fraser has to be very careful not to infringe Apple’s trademarks, trade dress or patent portfolio.

Dickson, a partner at the Menlo Park, California, office of Arnold White & Durkee, said Apple could challenge Fraser if his machine’s look, name or marketing confuses customers into thinking it’s an Apple product.

Dickson also cautioned Fraser to be careful not to infringe any patents. Even if Fraser uses Apple parts, Dickson said the company may hold patents governing how they are put together. The patents may not even be held by Apple, but by another PC manufacturer, Dickson said.

Dickson said he had no knowledge of Apple’s patent portfolio, but strongly cautioned Fraser to consult an intellectual property lawyer before proceeding.

“I think he would be wise to talk to a patent attorney before he does anything else,” Dickson said.

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