Apple: The last bastion?

Apple put some fire behind its campaign to take as much share of the PC market as possible yesterday, with the announcement of new G5 machines, the "Panther" version of OS X, a digital camera and several other goodies besides. It also announced the five millionth download from its online music store. At US$0.99 a pop, that's a serious chunk of change in anyone's language.

Launching new machines, operating systems and highly profitable online music services would be a challenge for even a big player, but within the somewhat niche Mac market, it's an avalanche.

(Editor's disclaimer: I don't own a Mac. I did until very recently own an Apple II, and can advise that the 5.25 floppy drives make great doorstops once they stop working.)

While new machines are always welcome, and the Apple Music Store is the first genuine crack at a legitimate online music distribution scheme we've seen out of the big labels -- although sadly not in Australia yet -- arguably the most interesting, and possibly the most important news went and came during the week; Microsoft is dumping future development of Internet Explorer for the Mac.

You may be reading this thinking "so what? There's always Safari or Mozilla or Opera to surf the web with", but I have this inkling that removal of Internet Explorer has more to do with Microsoft's overall strategy than just getting back at Apple for the development of Safari. At essentially the same time that it's dumped the Mac platform, Microsoft's also announced that it'll stop making IE as a standalone Windows product as well.

Before the cheers break out, it's not getting out of the browser game at all; it's merely repositioning IE as a core part of future Windows releases. The dumping of the Mac side of IE plays well into a company wanting to shift even more copies of Windows, but there's also a troubling association for all computer users here.

By most estimates, IE has something north of 95% of the browser market; certainly the figures we see here at ZDNet Australia back that assertion up. That's a pretty strong argument for developers to code for IE almost exclusively; as a non-IE user I'm fairly used to the concept of hitting a page with proprietary IE extensions, or buggy non-standard code that just happens to work under IE and nothing else.

With a virtual monopoly on the browser space, though, this is just something that happens, and I'm one of the few voices in the wilderness against the tide of people who just want their browser to work. IE works for them, and there's nothing wrong per se with that, from their perspective. With newer versions of IE being Windows-specific, however, it becomes more and more likely that you'll hit sites that plain don't work under IE; it's already happened with Microsoft's own MSN site, leading browser maker Opera to release its browser with modifications that render the MSN site in Swedish-Cheferise.

As more sites shift to the IE way of thinking, it becomes easier to sell the Windows message; why buy a Mac system (or for that matter, a Linux one) that 'doesn't work properly with the Internet'? That's what I see as the real challenge behind the discontinuation of IE for the Mac.

With all due respect to the Linux community, it's not the easiest platform for new users to get to grips with. Compared to Linux, and even arguably Windows, OS X is a comparative cakewalk. A new user -- and at one time or another, we're all new users -- could be tempted towards the Mac, but unless it's possible to ape IE extensions and coding, that temptation could quickly sour. Steve Jobs can talk up the premium nature of the brand and the speed of new Macs all he likes, but if it can't work with the web, is there a future for the Mac at all?

What do you think? Is the shift of websites towards IE-specific code a good thing for standardisation or a power-grab for Microsoft? Are the new Macs enough to keep the company relevant? Let us know at edit@zdnet.com.au.