Watts Online

December 15  1998

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Baah humbug and all that

IN THE spirit of Ebenezer Scrooge, I would like to report there is a fair bit of baah-humbug around this festive season. Two things I hope do not turn up in my Christmas stocking are an America OnLine subscription and an iMac.

I took advantage of AOL's free 100-hour trial last month, and cannot see much to recommend it to WA people who want to get online. Many local ISPs like iiNet and Wantree, and the big Australians at Telstra Big Pond and OzEmail, offer better value for money with much less fuss. (see list of ISPs).

AOL can be very cheap at $9.95 a month. This gives the user only 15 hours unfortunately. It is $4 an hour after that. There are other pricing plans, but better value for people who want to use the Net is provided by local companies, several of whom offer unlimited use for a flat rate of between $35 and $40 a month.

If you connected for even 50 hours (or about 80 minutes a day) with AOL, it would cost nearly $150. Fine then for a light user. But the heavy-handed, hand-holding and focus on AOL content and channels through its proprietary interface is a turn-off.

Logging on to AOL is easy, but then the user is presented with more multiple choices than a TEE exam. You can go to your e-mail box. That takes two screens. Or you can find answers to frequently asked questions. I wanted to know how to terminate my account. It meant opening six screens (and then closing them) to discover there is no answer and you have to make a phone call.

A simple browse of the Web would have been good, but the proprietary browser which uses Internet Explorer as its engine often failed to deliver, even when AOL's channels were firing up nicely, indicating connections were okay. I started using my Netscape browser with far greater success, and with a feeling of being freed from AOL's big brother presence that, even though it is trying to help the less experienced, gives an oppressive feeling of being made into a passive consumer of AOL-approved goodies.

Obviously these comments are from an experienced Net user and therefore not the newbie AOL is targeting. But all I can say is there are faster, less complicated and cheaper ways to get connected.

Now I know iMacs are all the rage, the hope of the company and look pretty on the desktop. The feeling I got when I first saw one last week was of terrible deja vu, however. Even in all its transparent, designer-colour glory, the iMac reminds me of the first computer terminals I had anything to do with back in 1981.

They, too, were just one solid, bubble-shaped unit with a keyboard. You could never hope to upgrade them, nor add new components. You can add lots of peripherals easily to an iMac, but its one-piece design gives the appearance that you cannot do much to boost its inner workings.

And it has no floppy drive. That seems remarkably short-sighted. A floppy is a super way to transfer small files and get PC-using recalcitrants on to a Mac To me, an iMac looks as trendy as the Bay City Rollers . . . with similar longevity.

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