With what most perceived as a minor update in 2012, the Mac Pro had gone two years prior to that before receiving a meaningful upgrade. Still, Apple has a loyal following among Mac users looking for power. Apple CEO Tim Cook stated last year that Apple is working on “something great” in reference to the Mac Pro, and we’re still waiting for that.

While things are not quite what they used to be, the company does still have a shot at impressing its seemingly forgotten Mac Pro customers by putting the power back into its Macs.

It was not too long ago when part of the Mac versus PC debate took place in the lab with a series of benchmark tests. Try to find such a comparison since Apple switched from IBM’s PowerPC chipset to Intel; you will be hard pressed to do so. When Apple first introduced the PowerMac G5 we witnessed the worlds first 64-bit desktop computer.  Those days are long gone, as Apple has apparently elected to step out of the computer chip speed race.

To see how big of a gap we are talking about, we must first look to see how much faster today’s PCs are when compared to the Mac.

Benchmarking the current gap between Macs and PCs

Comparing Macs to Macs - If you look at Primate Labs, a long standing provider of benchmarking software on the Mac, you can see how each of Apple’s computers stack up against each other. Looking only at this list, one would think that Apple’s older lineup of Mac Pros is still doing quite well being situated at the top of the GeekBench’s performance list. That is until you look outside of Apple’s product line and see how the Intel Xeon X5675 chip that powers the top performing Mac Pro compares to other Intel chips.

Intel chipset benchmarks scores - One such benchmark to look at when comparing Intel chip performance is the PassMark CPU Mark. Using EveryMac.com as a guide to figure out what Intel chips are used in each of Apple’s Macs, you will find that the chips being used in today’s Macs are not among the fastest currently available. With a CPU Mark of just 9,382 for the fastest chip available in the Mac Pro, and a score of 9,461 for the fastest iMac chip, Apple comes in at roughly two-thirds the performance of the top rated Intel chip scoring 14,969.  Keep in mind that this top performing chip is Intel’s Xeon E5-4650 with a street price around $4,000, for just the chip.

Intel PassMark CPU Mark Scores

A fair comparison to PCs - Looking at the chips used in last years round up of top performing PCs from both PC World and PC Magazine, the Falcon Northwest Mach V and the Maingear Shift Super Stock both used Intel’s Core i7-3960X processor.  Since then, each PC company now offers an updated configuration with the slightly faster Intel Core i7-3970X. It is also worth noting that the newer i7-3970X is currently available in Dell’s own Alienware line of desktop computers. Each of these new systems sell at prices comparable to Mac Pros. With a CPU Mark score of 12,976, the i7-3970X is still faster than the CPUs used inside of Apple’s top performing Mac’s.

And that’s just the current state of where Macs and PCs in the CPU performance race. The GPU race doesn’t look any better for Apple.  What may surprise many is that Apple does in fact support the latest drivers for many of the fastest GPUs on the market in each updated release of OS X.  It is just not an option when you build your own Mac in Apple’s online store.  You have to look elsewhere to get one added to your Mac after you buy it.

Why Apple should design its own Mac chips

Apple has two options to consider when it comes to increasing the performance of its Macs.  A short-term tactical play where it catches up with the PC by continuing to make modest upgrades to its existing lineup of Macs, or a long-term strategic play to surpass the competition by boldly stepping away from the component-based chip market all together.

Matching the competition - The first option is to simply match the fastest PCs in performance by updating the chips being used inside Apple’s Mac lineup.  This tactic of adamantly keeping pace with Intel’s release schedule has been employed by Apple in the past and every other computer vendor to keep making their machines performing slightly faster each year.  So long as Apple continues to use off-the-shelf chips from the likes of Intel, AMD, Nvidia and ATI, Macs will never again be faster than PCs since everyone uses the same exact chips.

Surpassing the competition - The other option open for Apple is to follow the same path that it has taken with its mobile chips. That is to optimize the chip specific to Apple’s own software and hardware design specifications.  Adding to this strategy, by continuing the complete adoption of Thunderbolt technology, Apple will likely be among the first to adopt Intel’s new Falcon Ridge Thunderbolt controller later this year.  And finally with the advent of integrated SSD technology directly on a logic board rather than conforming to a more modular SATA design standard, the design of desktop powerhouse systems should start to change dramatically. Breaking from the modular design that has dominated the top performing computer market for decades now, a radical new design that maximizes the potential of all of these advances in technology is in order.

Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller Benchmarking the A5 and A6 Processors

Apple is not only not losing the laptop and desktop speed race versus the PC at the moment, it appears that it’s not even interested in competing in it. Apple’s own marketing shows how its newer hardware is only faster than its older hardware; as old Macs race against new Macs, PCs have meanwhile moved ahead in a race all their own.  If Apple truly does want to get back out in front of the PC market, and produce a lineup of Macs or even one Mac that outpaces the fastest PCs available, it will have to leave the off-the-shelf chips behind and show the world how to best take advantage of all of the changes we have seen in technology over the last few years.

Taking a chip design and making it your own is not something that just any company can do.  Apple has proven that they can do it with ARM-based chips on its mobile platform.  The question remains if Apple can successfully pull off the same feat with a chip design that places them in the forefront of desktop processor speed.

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Apple said it sold 3.95 million Macs during its second fiscal quarter, which is ever-so-slightly below the 4.01 million it sold a year ago. That followed its fiscal first quarter sales of 4.1 million Macs, which were down 22 percent from the 5.2 million sold a year prior.

Now, the Mac’s quarter seems fantastic when compared to the global PC industry: between January and March, IDC found that just 76.3 million PCs shipped worldwide. That’s a 14 percent decline over a year and made for the worst quarter for the PC market since IDC started counting in 1994.

While Windows-based PC sales have been dismal for several quarters, if not years, the last two quarters have been an aberration for Apple. Before then the company had consistently seen the Mac grow faster than the broader PC market, and CEO Tim Cook has predicted for many quarters on end that PC sales were being replaced by iPad sales.

It’s looking like this is now happening to Macs as well. Cook said of the PC industry, “it’s the largest decline I can remember” while pointing out that “at the same time we sold almost 20 million iPads.” But he admitted that the Mac is not immune.

Still, he tried to put a positive spin on things:

That said, I don’t think this market is dead or a bad market by any means. I think it has a lot of light to it. We’re going to continue to innovate. We think huge growth in tablets may wind up benefiting the Mac. It pushes people to think about the product they’re buying in a different manner.

But a careful listen to other comments about the quarter’s Mac sales made by his colleague show that he probably shouldn’t sound so happy. CFO Peter Oppenheimer noted on the same earnings call that the nearly 4 million Mac sales included “strong desktop sales” but those were “offset by weaker portable sales.”

Strong desktop sales signals that Apple has finally caught up with demand for its new iMac models —  they debuted in October, but supply chain problems meant they didn’t hit store shelves until early December — and that’s good. But desktop sales have not been a consistent relied-upon source of growth for Apple; the Mac’s growth in unit sales has come from the popularity of the MacBook. That sales of notebooks were “weaker” this quarter is potentially worrisome for the overall trajectory of the Mac over the next few quarter when iMac sales drop back to normal levels, given that desktop sales have been on the decline for years across the broader PC market.

So while Apple is still managing to do better than most of its Windows PC brethren, it appears that, if not for problems Apple had during the holiday quarter, Mac sales during this quarter could have seen an even bigger drop in growth.

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The 76.3 million PCs that did ship between January and March this year were down a whopping 14 percent from the same quarter a year ago. It’s leading the analysts at IDC, who have been monitoring the PC market since 1994, to call it “the worst quarter” it’s seen.

And, no, it’s not a blip: it’s the fourth quarter in a row that PC shipments have declined.

The numbers show that people still buy PCs, but not in the quantities of the past. Instead, many people — both businesses and individual consumers — are making the purchase of cheaper, more portable tablets their priority right now.

All the big PC makers are affected. Lenovo, which is the second-largest PC maker by volume, was the only one of the top 5 firms who didn’t see double-digit units sales declines during the quarter — it pulled even with the same quarter a year ago. Not terrible, but certainly not good.

Even Apple, which was able to buck the industry trend of the last year and grow Mac sales until the last quarter of 2012, is seeing its laptop and desktop shipments drop off. IDC doesn’t release global numbers for Apple, but in the U.S. its shipments dropped 7.5 percent from the same quarter a year ago. (However, if you look at data from competing analyst firm Gartner, it shows U.S. Mac shipments on an opposite trajectory during the quarter — up 7.4 percent year over year. The reason for the discrepancy isn’t clear; its PC numbers overall weren’t as far off: down 11 percent versus IDC’s 14 percent.)

What Apple has going for it is its prescience in seeing this shift to smaller mobile computing coming (and of course helping it along). So when people are opting not to buy a more expensive laptop or desktop, it has the iPad to offer.

Apple competitors in the PC business have been slow to adjust to this new reality. And even for those who are trying to offer a good tablet experience, it’s not going that well. Microsoft’s attempt to stanch the bleeding with Windows 8 is faring poorly, IDC says:

“At this point, unfortunately, it seems clear that the Windows 8 launch not only didn’t provide a positive boost to the PC market, but appears to have slowed the market,” said Bob O’Donnell, IDC Program Vice President, Clients and Displays. “While some consumers appreciate the new form factors and touch capabilities of Windows 8, the radical changes to the UI, removal of the familiar Start button and the costs associated with touch PCs have made PCs a less attractive alternative to dedicated tablets and other competitive devices. Microsoft is going to have to make some very tough decisions moving forward if they want to help reinvigorate the PC market.”

This post was updated with details from Gartner’s report at 5:11 p.m. PT.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Alyssa L. Miller via Compfight cc

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There is also a more practical reason for trying to time your Mac purchase just right.  That is the fact that the hardware from Apple will most certainly outlast the version of the operating system it ships with.  A good goal when deciding on a purchase is to maximize the time your new Mac purchase will be able to run on a supported version of Apple’s OS X software.

The following looks at release cycles, processor performance and the history of Apple and Intel release dates to help you determine if waiting for a new release worth it before you go shopping.

Intel providing the performance

Looking at performance, the most important factor to consider is the Intel chip inside the Mac you are purchasing. Intel releases its chips on a tick-tock release cycle. Each “tick” is a major step forward in manufacturing and each “tock” is an improvement on micro-architecture. At this year’s CES, Intel showed off its new Haswell micro-architecture, part of their fourth-generation Intel Core processor family, that will be made available later this year.  Haswell is a “tock” as it enhances the micro-architecture of the chip.

Using the Mac Geekbench scores from Primate Labs for the 15-inch MacBook dating back to the first release of an Apple MacBook with an Intel processor, you can see that (other than the time Apple skipped a “tock” release from Intel) the first release in a tock cycle has had the more significant performance gains than chips that were released during a “tick.”  So provided Apple includes a Haswell chip in its upcoming Mac releases, we can expect significant performance improvements once again since this will be the first release of a new Mac during Intel’s tock cycle of chip enhancements.

The big question is, will Apple have a Haswell chip inside of the next revision of Macs?  It’s always tough trying to predict what Apple will do, but as the above chart indicated, Apple has done a good job historically of releasing a MacBook Pro update within a month of Intel releasing the chipset that is used inside the MacBook Pro. So not only are you getting the latest hardware from Apple, you are also most likely getting the latest chips that Intel has to offer. And if Intel can deliver on its promise, this particular chipset will be just what a manufacturer looking to move away from dedicated GPU chips in their products in favor of sleeker and thinner designs is looking for.

Apple providing the support

Keeping up-to-date with all of the current versions of Mac OS X, including all of the security updates and bug fixes is important too. Being able to continue to run your favorite software on the latest version of OS X also helps.  With each OS X release comes the potential that your favorite software will no longer be supported on older versions of OS X.  It is therefore a good idea to see just how long you can expect Apple to continue supporting the hardware you are thinking about purchasing.

When it comes to the lifespan of a given OS version, Apple has typically been keeping up OS X versions around for about 580 days, or a little over a year and a half. This is the average time from the initial release of a new version of OS X until the date of the last update Apple puts out for that version of OS X. In contrast, we’ve seen, at least historically, a hardware update about every 260 days. That ends up being about two MacBook Pro hardware updates for every one OS X software update.

The current version of OS X, Mountain Lion, supports MacBook Pros back to the June 5, 2007 release of the MacBookPro 3,1, the previous version of OS X, Lion, continues to support MacBook Pros back to the Oct. 24, 2006 release of the MacBookPro 2,1, and finally OS X Snow Leopard, whose last update was released on July 25, 2011, supported all Intel-based Macs, the first of which was the MacBookPro 1,1 released on Jan. 10, 2006. This trend continues all the way back to the original release of OS X 10.0.

If historical data is any indication of future expectations, then it is reasonable to anticipate that the next version of OS X will support MacBook Pros back to the Feb. 26, 2008 release of the MacBookPro 4,1 which was when Apple also transitioned from Intel’s Merom to Intel’s Penryn based Core 2 Duo chips. This trend creates a countdown timer for each hardware release. Set at roughly 2,400 days, or 6.5 years, this countdown starts on the first day each new MacBook Pro is released, not the day you happen to purchase your MacBook Pro.

Timing purchases just right

What it boils down to is timing.  Planning out your MacBook upgrade to coincide with Intel’s “tock” releases should ensure that you are getting the largest performance gains with each purchase.  When you purchase your new hardware as close to the release date as possible, you will maximize the number of days your Mac will be running on the last supported version of OS X.  With evidence of testing for the next version of OS X beginning to show online, it wont be much longer until the mid-2012 MacBook Pros are no longer running on the version of OS X they shipped with.  And if you’re like me, purchasing the extended coverage provided with Apple’s own AppleCare program will certainly help guarantee that your Mac will keep running for at least three of the six years that your Mac will be able to run the latest version of OS X.

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Here’s the text of the email Apple sent its resellers:

As of March 1, 2013, Apple will no longer sell Mac Pro in EU, EU candidate and EFTA countries because these systems are not compliant with Amendment 1 of regulation IEC 60950-1, Second Edition which becomes effective on this date. Apple resellers can continue to sell any remaining inventory of Mac Pro after March 1.

Apple will take final orders for Mac Pro from resellers up until February 18th for shipment before March 1, 2013.

Countries outside of the EU are not impacted and Mac Pro will continue to be available in those areas.

This is not the kind of decision that’s going to have many consumers up in arms: the vast majority of Apple computer buyers go with a notebook or the more consumer-friendly all-in-one iMac. And Mac Pro buyers have gotten used to the lack of attention to the product line: Apple’s last update to the Mac Pro was June 2012, and even then it was incremental.

In simply stopping shipments of this desktop to EU countries, it’s clear Apple is gearing up for something newer and better later on. Last summer CEO Tim Cook told a group of Mac Pro users in an email that Apple is “working on something really great for later next year.”

In the meantime, Mac sales have slowed for Apple: in the fourth quarter of 2012 Apple sold 4.1 million Macs, 22 percent fewer than the same quarter in 2011.

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The PC industry has been having a rough go of it for a while with the rise of tablets, but up until now Apple had stayed largely immune. One of the questions Apple’s results asks is whether the Mac is going to follow in its PC brethren’s footsteps soon. The short answer: it’s a bit too early to tell.

The quick, easy initial assumption about why Apple sold fewer Macs during the holiday quarter was that the iPad and new iPad mini were favored by buyers, either because they were newer more portable or more cheaper computing platforms than the pricier Mac.

It’s likely part of it. CEO Tim Cook explained Wednesday how much he loves cannibalization — as long as it’s self-inflicted.

“We know iPad is cannibalizing the Mac, but that doesn’t worry us. On iPad in particular, we have the mother of all opportunities here because the Windows market is much larger than the Mac market. It’s clear it’s already cannibalizing some. I’ve said for three years now that I believe the tablet market will be larger than the PC markte at some point, and I still believe that.”

His enthusiasm for self-cannibalization makes some sense, but it doesn’t look that great on the balance sheet. Macs sell for a high price and the declining sales — whether they truly were attributable to cannibalization — mean Apple lost out on over a billion dollars: it made about $5.5 billion on sales versus $6.6 billion a year ago. Where it can get concerning for Apple investors is if the company is trading those $999 and higher MacBook and Mac sales for $329 to $829 iPads.

But in this case, it seems probable that one of the big issues this quarter was availability. The two new models of iMacs that Apple introduced in October weren’t ready for sale until late in the quarter: late-November and mid-December, respectively. It’s Apple’s own fault for not having its flagship iMacs ready in time to take advantage of sales in the quarter. But it’s also a reasonable excuse — for now.

With just one quarter of dipping Mac sales to go off of, it’s hard to make a pronouncement about whether the Mac’s growth days are over. We’ll need at least another quarter of shrunken sales before we can start legitimately wondering if the Mac is losing steam.

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“Next year we are going to bring some production to the U.S. on the Mac,” Cook said. “We’ve been working on this for a long time, and we were getting closer to it. It will happen in 2013. We’re really proud of it. We could have quickly maybe done just assembly, but it’s broader because we wanted to do something more substantial. So we’ll literally invest over $100 million. This doesn’t mean that Apple will do it ourselves, but we’ll be working with people, and we’ll be investing our money.”

The reason, he said, is that he feels Apple has a “responsibility” to create jobs.

“I do feel we have a responsibility to create jobs. I don’t think we have a responsibility to create a certain kind of job, but I think we do have a responsibility to create jobs. I think we have a responsibility to give back to the communities, to pick ways that we can do that … and not just in the U.S., but abroad as well.”

It’s not clear that it would be a profitable move for Apple, but it’s sure to be a politically popular move in the current economic environment. It’s even a bit trendy: for some of America’s iconic companies, in-sourcing is all the rage right now.

Cook says the reason Apple doesn’t make most of its products in the U.S. is that the skills and the training necessary are not here. “The consumer electronics industry was almost never here,” he told NBC, in a preview clip available online. “It’s not a matter of bringing it back. It’s a matter of starting it here.”

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There are two OS X modeling programs I’ve become quite enamored with: AmpliTube 3 Custom Shop (free, with in-app purchases for virtual gear) and Guitar Rig 5 Pro ($199). Both can also plug in directly to GarageBand for use in recording. To access them, create a new track as a Real Instrument and choose Edit from the right-hand palette. From there, you can choose from a variety of effect sources. Choosing AmpliTube or Guitar Rig from this menu will allow GarageBand to access these programs via a plug-in.

Plugging in

Unless you have one of the new Fender Squier guitars that has a micro-USB port built in (I have one; it’s nice), you’ll need an audio interface. For these purposes, I’m a big fan of Apogee’s Jam ($99). I also found that I needed to create a separate Aggregate input in Apple’s Audio Midi setup (not the Audio Midi setup in the programs) so I could use the Jam as well as my speakers. Until I did this, I’d get input but no sound.

Guitar Rig 5

At $199, Guitar Rig 5 isn’t cheap. I also found it the more versatile of the two programs. With gobs of presets you’ll have no problems finding the sound you want. Guitar Rig has 17 amps and 27 cabinets, as well as 54 different effects that will really let you dial in your sound.

My style tends to run towards ZZ Top, rockabilly and heavy metal. There were presets available that gave me all those sounds, including a Vai-type pitch shifter sound, so I was thrilled. In some ways, I was having too much fun trying out the different presets to actually get any recording done.

It’s important to note that these amps are “emulations” of popular amps, not licensed models. For instance, The VAN 51 amp is an emulation of Peavey’s 5150 amp. This doesn’t really bother me too much since even licensed simulations are just that — simulations. Even the 6505 model on my Peavey Vypyr is a computer’s best guess of that sound. There is also a Control Room module, where you can model different microphones and their placement which adds an extra bit of customization to your sound.

Native Instruments also has an optional $500 foot controller that would make it easier to swap between presets while playing. You could also use this live, accessing Guitar Rig 5 on a Mac. It’s not farfetched for me to think about having a MacBook angled up next to my stage monitors while I use the Kontrol as my footswitch.

AmpliTube 3 Custom Shop

With AmpliTube 3, The base software is free, with a minimal amount of basic amps included. To buy more amps and effects, you can purchase credits, which can be used to acquire more virtual gear. About $40 will get you get 45 credits. Most licensed amps run about 30 credits, and effects ranging between from five credits onward. Once you’ve bought a piece of gear, you’ll run AmpliTube to use the gear. Note: If it prompts you to authorize the software, you’ll find the key on your Account page.

During my testing of these two packages, all sort of sounds and squeals were coming from studio without much mention from my girlfriend, who is also a musician. However, one strum from the Carvin V3M I bought brought a “wow, nice tone” comment. Given that she likes Carvin amps, I took this as an endorsement that their official model was pretty damn close.

The chief advantage I see that AmpliTube has over Guitar Rig is that AmpliTube has official models of Carvin, Fender, Orange, and some Marshall amps, and more. When I started an app to play my guitar through, more often than not I gravitated toward AmpliTube and that Carvin V3M amp. It’s not that Guitar Rig’s settings were bad, I just found that Carvin model to be so pleasing to my ears. So pleasing, in fact, that I’ve added a real Carvin Legacy 3 amp to my wish list.

IKMultimedia also has a generous demo period for virtual gear. You can try a piece of gear for up to two days, every two months. This really lets you compare the sounds and evaluate how well they fit into your style.

I liked the customization in AmpliTube 3/Custom Shop. You can throw amps, cabinets and effects into a preset at will. While I found it look a little longer to get a sound I liked from AmpliTube than it did with Guitar Rig, I preferred the sound I ended up with more.

How I use them

It’s impossible for me to recommend one over another. My usage so far seems to fall into this pattern: my rhythm and general practice sounds come from AmpliTube (I love the Carvin V3M and the Orange Dual Terror amps), while my lead and exotic sounds come from Guitar Rig (there’s a setting called 1993 Hot Solo Rig I use for a vague hint of David Gilmour’s Division Bell sound, as well as just a cool echoey distorted lead channel). If you can afford it, I’d suggest getting Guitar Rig 5, and about $50 worth of amps and the like from AmpliTube’s custom shop. I think this will let you get some great sounds.

With any of these programs, even if using signature gear and settings, you’re still going to sound like yourself, not a famous artist. This is true even in physical gear. My live amp has a model of Joe Satriani’s amp. When I play it, I still sound like me, but with a better tone.

I’m thrilled with these two programs. With them, I can get any sound I want, and the presets usually spark some creativity just playing riffs while randomly cycling through them.

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As a forewarning, I’m not going to go too far into the various bookstore formats, other than to say that at the least you’ll need to start with a Microsoft Word or ePub file. While Amazon and the like will accept a Word file to publish, to ensure your book converts to the various proprietary formats, I recommend creating an ePub file as your base. EPub is the most common ebook file standard, and I think you’ll have fewer problems starting with that. Fortunately, the ebook creation apps I’m going to tell you about all export an ePub natively. While there are Automator scripts to convert text to ePub, by using these packages you’re pretty much guaranteed to keep your document formatting.

One quick note up front: I’m not going to include Apple’s own iBooks Author tool. That’s because my goals for this piece were simple: talk about ebook-making programs that can be used in multiple bookstores and create files that aren’t just static images of a page. iBooks Author creates static pages that can only be used in the iBookstore. That’s great for getting an interactive textbook into the iBookstore, but not so good for other kinds of books.

Pages

Apple’s Pages app ($19) is probably the most straightforward and easiest way to create an ePub file. You will need to use a Word Processing template, not a Page Layout template. Other than that, you pretty much just type, type, type until your Great American Novel is done. You’re going to want to use consistent formatting, taking care to use document styles while typing away, or you’re going to have to go back and reformat the thing. Document styles are important because an ePub file is basically an HTML file with some CSS formatting applied. Therefore, using the Body style for your body text, and the heading styles for your headings will make your life a lot easier come file export time, especially if you need to create a Table of Contents. This support article by Apple has some handy tips for using Pages to create ePub files.

Scrivener

If you’re a serious writer, odds are you’re already using the wonderful Scrivener ($44.99) by Literature and Latte. Scrivener is a sort of Swiss Army knife of writing programs. It’s very flexible, and allows you to essentially merge and move around text files to create a piece of finished work (be it a printed manuscript, file, or ePub file). I’ve used it for some screenwriting, where I want to change the position of a scene. Rather than cut and paste, I could just drag that text file to the place I wanted it. While you could just use one text file for your entire body of work, laying out your file similar to the screenshot below will allow you to take full advantage of the program’s offerings. It’s a fantastic way to work on bits of chapters at a time without worrying about mucking the whole file up.

Once you’re done, just go to the file menu and choose Compile and then choose whether you want to create ePub, .Mobi, or .iBook chapters.

Adobe InDesign

Yes, that’s right: I’m recommending a $699 page layout program to create ebooks. No one is more surprised about this than I am. When I was offered a briefing from Adobe on using Indesign for this purpose, I tried to put it off due to my preconceived notion that using Indesign to create ebooks would yield a result similar to a Zinio magazine: a big honking static PDF-type file.

I was wrong.

Indesign, as it turns out, is a pretty powerful ebook creation program. In short, you can take a file you’ve created a smashing page layout of and turn it into an ebook. You can adjust the typography and create an ebook that looks almost exactly like a printed book. It’ll even fairly easily convert your initial drop caps into something the ePub file can understand. If you really need your ebook to look its very best, Indesign may be the best option.

But Lordy it’s not cheap. InDesign is a full-featured page layout program that designers use to create all sorts of material (ads, books, flyers, etc.). At $699 if your books are just text you’re probably better served with Pages or Scrivener because Indesign’s strengths are in layouts combining images and text.

If you’re working on an ebook that’s, say, a technical reference book with a ton of images and you want it to look damn good, InDesign is worth the expense. I was thinking of working on such a project a while back; had I gone through with it, I likely would have reached for my credit card quite happily.

InDesign also has a serious learning curve. It’s not a program you master in a weekend, or, say, a week before a deadline. In my case, I used to run a pre-press shop so my InDesign knowledge was pretty good, albeit rusty.

The app I use

Right now I’m using Pages, for the simple reason that it also runs on my iPad, meaning I can use my lunch breaks at work to write. Literature and Latte is working on an iPad version of Scrivener, but it doesn’t sound like it’ll see the light of day for quite some time. So, an app that I can use on multiple platforms and sync via Documents in the Cloud wins. It also helps that right now I’m working on short stories and novellas, which are well within Pages’ means to handle.

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Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But here’s why it makes sense that Apple is looking into this:

• Apple is hungry for fast, low-power chips, and Intel isn’t leading in this area. While Apple has been using ARM-based chips in its small, thin iOS devices, the company has increasingly been making its laptops smaller and thinner too. Mobility and longer battery life are key concerns for Apple when it designs Mac notebooks, and ironically enough, were the main reasons Apple switched to Intel’s chips back in 2005: the older PowerPC chips simply weren’t as mobile-friendly as Intel’s designs.
• Apple’s been buying up its own chip design firms. The Bloomberg report cites two unnamed sources who say that it’s aiming to use those chips for more than just mobile devices and “a shift to its own designs is inevitable as the features of mobile devices and PCs become more similar.”
• Apple has already built its own CPU core. It’s the A6 that’s inside the iPhone 5, released in September.
• SVP of Technologies Bob Mansfield is now in charge of his own division that governs chip research at Apple. Recently ousted executive Scott Forstall was in charge of the team designing mobile chips at Apple. With him gone, Mansfield, who used to run the Mac hardware engineering group, will be able to influence how mobile chip designers at Apple spend their time.
• It’s in line with Apple and CEO Tim Cook’s core philosophy. The company aims to own the all the technology in its products: from the hardware inside and out, to the software, and the method for putting content onto these devices. It’s not quite there yet — Apple still sources plenty of components from third-party vendors — but it’s been moving in this direction for a long time. The thinking is that it allows Apple to (ideally) guarantee the quality of the product and ensure that all parts work together seamlessly.

A switch away from buying computer chips from the world’s largest supplier of them is not going to happen right away, if at all. The timeline mentioned in the report was after 2017. Plus, there are lots of ramifications that Apple needs to think through beyond simply the hardware: the software that people currently use on their Macs isn’t built for ARM-based chips.

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