The temptation to look back upon the year just past with fondness and nostalgia is great. But I'll resist and look forward. Without doubt, 2001 was a great year in tech. The list of Good Things That Happened could easily fill this column.

However, 2001 wasn't an unqualified success. A lot went wrong throughout the year, so regardless of whether one subscribes to the glass-half-full or glass-half-empty school of thought, there's plenty to ponder in the realms of both consumer electronics and personal computing.

Mac OS X was Apple's most significant product release in 2001, but it's still far from finished. I guess-timate the next non-minor-update version of Mac OS X--tentatively numbered with laudable conservatism as 10.2--will ship approximately a year after 10.0 did. While 10.0 was an important release to get out as a baseline for developers, and 10.1 was the first release that didn't feel like a beta, I'm inclined to think that 10.2 will be the most important release of all.

Apple has deferred inclusion of features and technologies with the excuse "we have to ship" for, quite literally, years. 10.2 needs to be the release that impresses professional and technical users. It's time for the mass media to stop gushing about superficialities; we need some substance entering the discourse about Apple's next-generation OS.

FireWire 'rocks'--not that this should be a surprise to anyone who's been reading my columns. While I recently learned that this high-bandwidth peripheral connectivity standard isn't quite as developer friendly as it is user-friendly, FireWire--aka IEEE 1394--is still a major improvement over anything else out there, most notably SCSI and USB.

While USB really shouldn't compete with FireWire, many companies have been trying to make the low-speed serial bus interface something it isn't. FireWire is better for many of applications that currently use USB--digital cameras leap to mind as a prime example. The mantra should be 'the right tools for the job'. Leave it to Apple to pick up the ball that Sony (et. Al) dropped years ago and use FireWire's combination of bandwidth and built-in power supply to great effect.

Having a single cable connect the iPod to its host Mac is a stroke of genius, and I fully expect Apple to continue this approach during 2002, albeit with different gadgetry. If nothing else, Apple is once again shaming the rest of the consumer electronics fraternity, hopefully spurring them to use all six of FireWire's lines and make consumers' lives easier. (Sony's defanged version of FireWire, i.Link, has only 4; the two missing pins can provide power.)

Media consumption will improve during 2002, hopefully, though it is probably an act of pathological optimism to even contemplate this notion. The Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America are doing everything in their considerable power to restrict and regulate media consumption, under the deeply misguided impression that totalitarian control over media will improve profits.

If these organisations spent a fraction of the time, money, and effort looking for innovative ways of using new technology to everyone's benefit as they do on making our lives difficult, we might actually be able to have access to more media. To name just one example, catalogues are rife with opportunity for profit). VHS didn't kill the cinema as the studios thought it would, and in fact, opened vast new revenue streams.

Clearly, these organisations have a selective memory, since they remember only the battles where they successfully destroyed something. They remember the RIAA's successful lobbying effort to annihilate DAT (Digital Audio Tape) as a consumer audio format, but forget instances where they panicked, and made out like bandits in spite of themselves.

The overlap between personal computing and consumer electronics will continue in 2002, and I hope this creates more opportunity for users to customise their consumer electronics devices. The days of the non-configurable device are, hopefully, nearing their end.

Console gaming is the final area I'll be keeping an eye on this year. 2002 is going to be a make-or-break year for the latest generation of gaming hardware. The games--quality first, then quantity--are what matters, and this coming year's releases will decide which platforms will merely survive and which ones will thrive. Based on preliminary sales figures for this year-end buying season, it looks like Sony's PlayStation 2 maintains a solid lead, but it's far too early to write-off Microsoft's Xbox or the Game Cube.

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