"One more thing..."

Steve Jobs
1955 - 2011

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Tech Talk- Smart-tablet-phone connected thingies!

More changes more quickly every day. This morning Mashable posted about the new Asus PadFone  
 
(ok what is with the names- can't anyone pay someone to think of better names for these things??? PadFone? really?) 

I have been wondering what would be next, this is a pretty nice addition to the field. I like the idea of a tablet and phone that are easy to coordinate and sync, easy to work with depending on what you need. Now of course it depends on the how it works, what's the os like how is the speed and functionality. But I am slowly using my PC less and less and my ipad and iphone more and more. I don't think we are quite at the Post PC mark but we are getting there. 

I still need the robustness of a laptop or desktop for work. I am thinking about a Mac Air now that at friend can get me a family and friends discount. But more and more I agree that the future is not in the regular config of laptops and desk tops. We are fast moving to real portability of everyday computing power.

Be interesting to see what Apple does next if the android OS supports more and more connected phones and tablets. One-upsmanship and all that. In the meantime I am leaning toward the PC as ART at home. 

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Amazing, Phenomenal, Awesome.

iPad Keynote in less than 180 Seconds. Adjectives Galore!

H/T Mashable.
Video Mashup by the amazing artists at www.neilcurtis.com.

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iPad, therefore i...Read?

(in my mind, at Adobe, 1998)

A tablet-type device, 8"x10" (that's a 12-13" diagonal screen) or so, capable of displaying PDF, would be worth $1000. As this is pre-widespread wireless network, no thought of connectivity enters into the picture.

(in my mind, last week)

I don't know what the mythical Apple Tablet is going to be, but I would be happy with a device twice the size of the iPhone, which screen would be about 4x6, so long as I can:

1. read Kindle books and PDFs on it;
2. attach a keyboard in order to be able to type;
3. run some large subset of either iPhone or Mac apps, or perhaps both

I would consider paying $800, possibly $1000 for such a device, depending upon battery life, CPU power, connectivity, etc.

But that would be a very prosaic device to be shipped by Apple as a paradigm shifting device. I find it difficult to believe that Apple would do something that ... straightforward.

(San Francisco, 2010.01.27)

Apple introduced a new computing device today, the Apple iPad. It is an attempt to find a sweet spot as "a third device" between the smartphone and a notebook. Since the smartphone itself is really an Apple invention (that is, the iPhone is the standard by which other smartphones are judged, as evidenced by the fact that every new iPhone is an "iPhone killer"), this is Apple attempting to extend their portable device domination* up the computer power ladder toward notebook computers.

I will start by saying that I find the name "iPad" completely uninspiring. As has been pointed out, it sounds like a feminine hygiene product. It's also easily confusable with iPod, and it's owned by Fujitsu in the USA.

Specs:

7.5" x 9.5" x .5"

16, 32, or 64 GB of flash memory

WiFi and optional 3G connectivity, Bluetooth 2.1

1.5 - 1.6 pounds

1024 x 768 pixel display @ 132 ppi IPS (in-plane switching) Multi-Touch Screen

1 GHz Apple A4 custom SOC (system on a chip)

Accelerometer, Ambient Light Sensor, Digital Compass, GPS

Microphone, Speakers, Headphone Jack

On-screen keyboard

Dock for charging, optional video out, optional physical keyboard

iPhone OS 3.2 (currently in Beta)

10h Claimed Battery Capacity

Notably Missing:

Cellular Voice capability

Camera & Flash

SDHC slot for expanded memory

Front-facing Camera for Video Conferencing

Multitasking (apparently)

RAM capacity unannounced so far as I can tell, but I assume 256MB or above.

Support Structure:

iBooks store

Pricing:

WiFi Only: $500 - $700

WiFi + 3G: $630 - $830

The Obvious

The basic specs are nice, although IMO the jury is still out on the 1GHz SOC CPU/GPU combination. No one seems to have much of a grip on just how powerful this chip is compared to what's in the iPhone 3G or 3GS, although it is presumably at least 2/3 faster than the 3GS chip (which runs at 600 Mhz). This is an iPhone on steroids, less the cellular voice capability (it would appear to retain at least the potential for VOIP via WiFi and/or 3G), minus the camera. Alternately, it's an iPod Touch on steroids, plus optional 3G data capability.

The Price

Personally, I found the price surprisingly low, and the suggested data plans very reasonable. I would have paid more for this system, but I'm not Apple's target market. I think at $500 this is a very attractive alternative to a netbook, assuming the text input system works well. With a top end of $830 for the 64GB WiFi+3G model (plus another assumed $100 for the keyboard doc and keyboard or a dock and Bluetooth keyboard combination) you have a new, cheaper, lighter, more portable way to have the elegance of an Apple product as your primary portable computing system.**

Books are the new Music?

Apple also announced a reader application called iBook and the new iBook store. Partnering with five major publishing houses (HarperCollins, Penguin, Simon & Shuster, Macmillian, and Hachette Book Group), books will be presented in the ePub format, an existing open standard for publishing based upon XML. The iBook app looks a lot like Delicious Library and will connect directly to the IBook store. There is brief mention of a partnership with Amazon [@ 10:54], but no details, so I don't know if that is correct or not.

Regardless of their relationship with Amazon, I think it perfectly likely that the Kindle app will continue to work on iPad, making it even more possible for people to buy Kindle books from Amazon. ePub does support optional DRM, making it possible for iBooks to be difficult to copy and opening the door for Kindle to support iBooks and possibly for iBook to support Kindle volumes.

It seems clear that Apple is attempting to disrupt the print publishing world in more or less the same way they disrupted the music publishing world with the iTunes Music Store. Despite Steve Jobs' famous assertion that "people don't read anymore", the iPad and iBook ecosystem is clearly intended to make reading paper a thing of the past if at all possible. Given that 3-5% of the books published today are eBooks, there's clearly a lot of room for growth. Since a lot of the cost of a book is the physical medium on which it's delivered, there's clearly a lot of room for cost savings in the publishing pipeline by switching to lower-cost digital media.

Which raises the question: what do print publishers bring to the party? In an effort to cut costs, book publishers have all but abandoned the secondary services they used to provide authors: copy editing, proofing, and type and layout design. They have become merely infrastructure to turn digital files into physical books, distribute those books, collect money for them, and arrange for the disposal of the excess volumes. Most of those steps are unnecessary in a digital world, and it will be interesting to see how book publishers morph in the face of a potential industry-wide disruption of this scale. When you and I can publish simply by creating a digital manuscript and offering it to the iBook store (or the Kindle store), the major publishers become nothing more than marketing machines and will have to reinvent themselves as such or face increasing irrelevancy. Amazon and Kindle started the process. If the iPad and iBook ecosystem becomes as popular as the iPhone, Apple and iPad may finish it.

The Missing

Let's reprise that list of things "Notably Missing" from the iPad:

1. Cellular Voice capability
2. Camera & Flash
3. SDHC slot for expanded memory
4. Front-facing Camera for Video Conferencing
5. Multitasking (apparently)

1. Cellular Voice: I don't think this is a big deal one way or the other. VOIP will be an option (at least over WiFi, and possibly over 3G depending up carrier -- Apple will not be able to claim that VOIP apps are impinging upon the base phone capability in this device). Using a Bluetooth headset is increasingly required by law when driving, so using a hands-free device with the iPad doesn't seem like a big stretch, so the argument that "you can't put a device that big up to your ear to make a phone call" falls by the wayside. That said, adding voice capability might have increased the cost of the device and would have definitely increased the complexity of the pricing.

2. Camera and flash: I am a heretic in this matter -- I believe in carrying dedicated cameras for specific purposes. I do use the camera in my iPhone on occasion because it is the only camera I carry all the time. When I expect to be doing casual photography, I carry one of two different small point-and-shoot digital cameras, and when I expect to do serious photography, I carry a digital SLR and way too much glass. The iPad is not appropriately sized to use as a camera, even casually, and I don't see the point of saddling it with camera circuitry, battery draining flash, and the software to deal with them for the minor gain of having an inferior photography experience.

3. SDHC (or other removable media) for expansion: 64GB ought to be enough for anybody :-). With reasonably constant network access and USB 2.0 connectivity, I don't feel that expanded capacity is that big a deal -- it hasn't been for the iPhone, hasn't been for the (much more limited) Kindle 2, and I don't see why this should be different. The Macbook Air has less capacity and is doing just fine.

That said, I would have appreciated a CF or SDHC slot for photographic media, like I have in my MacBook Pro. I anticipate an add-on reader and accept that my needs may not match the needs of the majority.

4. Front Facing Camera for Video Conferencing: I think this is a matter of positioning more than anything else. The iPad is clearly intended as a media device, playing music, video, and text. If it were positioned as a business device I think the lack of a front facing camera would be much more egregious.

5. Multitasking: depending upon the power of the CPU/GPU this may be a temporary omission. I think Apple has decided that the simplicity and robustness of a (largely) single-app-at-a-time OS trumps multitasking. It simplifies the user experience, simplifies the programming experience, and makes the system more reliable in a resource limited platform. As a geek, I do rather miss multitasking, but I don't think most users will. At all. Especially if switching between apps is a fast as it can be with a faster CPU with more RAM.

Ultimately, the feeding frenzy of rumours inflated the expectations of a lot of people. A device with all the bells and whistles suggested by the rumourmongers (some of them, I'm sure, planted by Apple deliberately) would have been the hardware equivalent of Microsoft Word: big, slow, expensive, and full of features that few people want. It's a truism that most users use 10% of available features, and it's the overlap of those 10%s which create monsters like Word. Apple is as much about paring down features to the required elegant minimum as they are about discovering new critical features which no one else imagined.

I think the iPad sounds like a good balance. Depending upon its power (which is a bit of a mystery) and its battery life (which must always be seen in context of a specific use profile) and its text input capabilities (and I think I trust that Apple nailed this one -- one way or another), it may create that "third device" category Jobs talked about during the unveiling. Does it have the potential to be a world-changer (like the iPhone)? I believe it does. Might it be the second coming of Newton? It could be, but I doubt it. If it is, I think I will be one of those people still using it a decade or more later, just because it's so cool.

There's a lot more to say, but I think this is enough for now. The iPad obviously has huge potential for vertical markets (especially healthcare) and the ease of programming it (presumably) inherits from the iPhone makes it a more nimble platform than anything Windows based. These (and more) are subjects for a different time.

*Yes, iPhones comprise only 30% of the smartphone market, and smartphones are only a bit over 10% of the worldwide market, making iPhones total penetration a mere 3%. But that 3% is making Apple more money than Nokia's 40% market penetration, and is absorbing 50% of the portable network bandwidth.

** Ultimately, this configuration is cheaper than either a subsidized or unsubsidized iPhone. With the larger display and faster CPU/GPU, it is very probably a more capable computing platform.

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Nah...I Don't Like Macs

Look Who's Ba-aaaaaack...

Death, Taxes, Rudy Giuliani being an asshole, and lots of sparks, flames and smoke in comments on a post on anything Apple computer related.

All of these things are inevitable.

As Hubris pointed out here, there is a bit of history massaging with this new Disney (Urrrrrgh. Sorry Jesse, in spite of some wonderful product—and I can normally overlook issues and focus directly on ‘product”—the company's been a bad actor in too many ways of late for me to dig on 'em) ride exhibit where the history of communications/computing will be depicted via the use of animatronic figures—but one specific animatronic “*LMD” has got some folks in an upoar.

It's the one of Apple's Steve Jobs—to the exclusion of his fellow midwife at personal computing's true birth, Steve Wozniak.

And it's true as Hubris says that “one of the benefits of being on the board is that you can indeed “write people out of history.”

But a ride at a Disney theme park is hardly Stalin's crew of airbrushers removing no longer favored cronies with a poof-poof-poof of gouache.

Wozniak, post his plane crash in 1981 has been a bit of an eccentric (a mother-of-all-concussions after plowing his aircraft into a steep embankment shortly after liftoff fucked him up pretty badly insofar as all manners of amnesia and odd brain fucnctioning) and withdrew even further (he was already quite the introvert) from the public spotlight cast on those then-young masters of Silicon Valley. He was a brilliant software/hardware designer and builder who simply tired of the rat race shortly after his initial, but mammoth engineering successes.

The whirring and clicking Jobs at the Disney ride will do nothing to dim Woz's accomplishments. They're too well documented and so much the stuff of can-do legend. If the “Hall of Presidents” exhibit was all we had to go by to learn about Abe Lincoln, well...it'd be one sorry-ass world we lived in. It isn't., and Wozniak's legacy is safe.

Plus, even though he's no longer a day-to-day employee at ol' Infinite Loop, he still draws a paycheck and is a shareolder—which is kind of scary to think about how wealthy he must be, having gotten in at the ground level and seeing that stock split, and then double its worth again in the last three years. Maybe that brag of his about always carrying at least $20,000 in cash on him is true.

I mean...Goddamn!

But the fact remains that Jobs is the company's public face—like it or not. Woz's retreat into the shadows may have been a factor in fueling Jobs seeming ubiquity. But remember, he booked up too, and was coaxed back after the Gil Amelio debacle of the mid-nineties. The company was damaged goods and he put his face, name, and ass on the line when Apple needed to pull itself back from the brink. Perhaps he got lucky. Maybe it was good timing, and he sold his soul to the devil for a machine that allowed him to simultaneously tap the brains of superior computer intellects for their ideas, and mass-delude millions of people into believing the resulting products integrated better with their lives than what they were using. I dunno. What I do know is that he NOT a technical genius or the second coming of Modok, The Living Brain.

What he is a genius at is in marketing, style sensibility and trend-sniffing.

Madonna didn't invent “The Vogue”, she just packaged it and sold it perfectly.

Henry Ford didn't invent the automobile. What he did was perfect it's production and market it phenomenally.

Jobs is an iconic figure in that sense—the Ford/Madonna sense. I tip my cap, there.

What strikes me is the venom against him, though. I, and no one else for that matter saw him bounding across the stage screaming “I love this COMPANY!”, in full, crazed Ballmer-mode. That smug, self-assuredness may come off like a screaming boast, but in the end, it's just smug, self-assuredness. The “Come on, you want this stuff and you KNOW IT” smirk sets a lot of people off, evidently. Me? I could care less. There's a lot of “hateration and holleartion up in this here dancery” over Apple's “marketing”. I don't understand it. The company's still in a single-digit share of the market, so why so much venom instead of what should be ridicule? I could see it f they were going all “GoDaddy” with trashy promotions and the like, but that's not it. If there's a “problem” with their marketing, some major annoyance that is patently egregious. I'd love to know just what that is.

I mean...Is it the “cool” factor that so sends people 'round the bend? What makes for that “cool”? Is it the “Reality Distortion Field” button on that machine Jobs got from the devil? Or is it the fact that Apple routinely ties a certain elegance of operation—software, to an equally elegant physical aesthetic—hardware design, and that draws a definite, maddening distinction between them and the competition?

Maybe it's that whole “cult of personality” thing, and a lot of folks just find Jobs' confident soft-sell stealthily arrogant. Crazy-making, in fact.

Again, I don't care. I met the guy and talked to him for a few minutes when they opened the Apple Store here in NY. Went for the opening day free swag, saw him and said ”Hi. I like your company's products.” Told him some ways he could improve on iMovie and Final Cut Pro, and to maybe inform consumers better about the short life of his computers PRAM batteries and how when those cheap items fail, they cause no end of trouble. How they should maintain them to maximize their life. He listened, said they were looking for a way to do away with dealing with that old technology altogether and that they had some ideas on that.

Shook my hand, got an extra free T-shirt and he had a floor person give me a 20% discount voucher for my next purchase. Seemed decent enough.

And I wasn't kidding. I very much like—no, let me piss off the detractors here—LOOOOOOOVE Apple's products.

Why? Because they work consistently—unlike the Windows stuff I've had to use when under a deadline. Maybe it was bad luck on my part, but I had four major failures of Windows-based items during four major projects, and I have come to not trust the stuff. Never liked the A,B,C,D drive set-up. Drivers (Sweet Jesus...DRIVERS!) and their machine and project-wrecking instability—Urrrrgh! The needless difficulty in doing simple tasks?

I walked away easily to Macs. Even with the instability issues of some iterations of OS's 8 and 9, they still worked far better for me. I'm a graphics/audio/video professional, and the Mac was seemingly made for me, and people like me. My brother switched after an album he was working on ran away to hide in a Windows-seizured system. A teacher friend I gave an old Mac to switched and bought a G5 when he started work on a chlldren's book he was creating. He got tired two years ago of his Windows computers (2 of 'em in three years) barking at him and going down at inopportune times. I have found that if you DEPEND of a computer for your graphics and art production (audio/video/film/multimedia), a Mac just seems to do that better.

If you're a gamer, and don't stress your computer with all the dedicated horsepower, and data path zipping that high-end creative applications require, a Windows box is probably more your speed.

But in the end, both camps are beginning to meet in the middle—the Windows stuff is getting better at system reliability for creative professionals, and the Mac stuff is doing much better at general computing beyond the creative.

I just need something that consistently works—and in my personal empirical dealings, the Macs are it.

They're NOT trouble free. You have to maintain 'em, just like a car that needs oil and an occasional tune-up. You have to mind your free drive space. Occasionally rebuild permissions. Keep your desktop cleaned up and so on. That being said, my problems with them have been miniscule compared with other platforms. I did have a problem with my old PowerBook 540C, where it kept forgetting the date and needed a double start-up to get going. I took it to a repair facility here in NY that shall remain nameless, and I saw the technician do a key command and I was charged $49.00.

I said never again, and I set out from that day to learn more about the damned things so I wouldn't get ripped off by another tech. Two years later, I could tear a machine down to the Mother Board and rebuild it or upgrade it. Ram, processors, video cards, hard drives, ROM swaps, overclocks—I could do it. I haven't been to a repair facility since, and began to make money troubleshooting on my own, though I mostly worked for free for friends doing upgrades and customizations.

Yesssssss, you can customize a Mac. I've done several. Started out with a shell or laptop case with no HD, processor, RAM or anything and rebuilt the damn things to newer, more powerful specs. Steve featured my re-tooled old Wallstreet PowerBook at the New Blog two years ago. Pimped the shit outta that one. Swapped out the G3 for a G4 brain, maxed the RAM, swapped in a DVD burner, made her wireless, added Firewire and USB and ditched the old 6GB HD for a 60GB.

Even pimped the case. Machine's corporate code name was “Wallstreet”, but I wanted it to look not like a broker's hoopty, but something a CEO would rock, So I tricked it out with a case customization. Deep red to simulate the leather of a bigwig's office couch, and a mahogany inlay to get that wood-paneled “club” look. I changed the machine's name from Wallstreet, to “Mogul”

That machine is pictured at the top of the post.

And in my troubleshooting, hobbyist travels over the years, my red beauty is not alone here at Casa de LM. So many Macs have passed through my hands—cast-offs that people handed me, trades from other repair folk, and my own curiosities that I've gathered out of my collector's spirit (Computers, vintage sports jerseys, vintage radios, records, and action figures), that I've got quite a group of Macs of my own—not including the numerous ones I've rebuilt and upgraded and given away to schools, friends and family.

This picture is of the various Macs in my personal collection. More than enough to make an Apple hater sick for months. And every one of 'em works!

(CLICK TO ENLARGE)


Clockwise from top left:
A.) My workhorse Graphics Dual 1.25 GHZ G4—tricked out with 3 HDs (one for system, one for media, one as a scratch disk), then my son's tricked-out GarageBand G4 Dualie (3 HDs also), and my first truly powerful desktop, a G4-upgraded Blue & White “G3” (with 4 HDs). All had their old optical drives swapped out for DVD burners. The Quicksilver and Blue & White I got from a swap list. So cheap, it hurt! :)

B.) The displays for those machines—one's an Apple monitor, the other a castoff Dell I rescued from a canvas dumpster.

C.) My workhorse PowerBook G4 1 GHZ. maxed out the RAM, dropped in a 120 GB HD...Ohhhh, she runs sweet. Note her twin in the BG at left. Got 'em both free for brokering a deal with a guy who had a surplus of 'em gently used and I put him in touch with a program that needed laptops.

D.) My red beauty “Mogul”. Steve was gonna clonk me on the head for this baby when I let him hold her in his hands. He and I had gone back and forth “nyah-nyah-ing” each other online about Macs supposed inability to be customized. They can be. This was an old 233 MHZ G3 when I got her from eBay for $150. Two months later it was a 550 MHZ G4 with a DVD burner, monster HD, maxed RAM and the custom case pimping. Pop ya' collah, son!

E.) My wall of vintage PowerBooks. from L to R, the aforementioned 540C (“Blackbird“), as featured in Mission: Impossible I (Ving Rhames used that model), my beloved 1400C (“Epic”) that started life as a 133 MHZ but got Frankensteined into a 466 MHZ G3 with a fat HD, and lastly, my still awesome 3400C (“Hooper”) 240 MHZ sub-woofered monster. Some of the best sound of any laptop ever produced—4 speakers! (and the model Jeff Goldblum used in “Independence Day”)

F.) The same 1 GHZ Titanium as shown on the opposite side—except the desktop pic of a Bond-era Jill St. John is visible minus the browser window. Redheads...“sigh!”. (Mrs. LM never sees that desktop pic. I switch to my Dodge Charger from “Bullitt” when she strolls by.)

And G.) The Wonder Twins at the bottom—2 Mirror Drive Door G4s. One is my main A/V machine (I do the YouTubes on it), a Dual 1.4 GHZ rip-snorter with 2GB of RAM, three HDs, Two burners) and the backup/loaner (for friends) machine, a total twin. Atop the twins are the fraternal twins—the aforementioned “Mogul” PowerBook at left, and at right its twin under the hood, but with a shiny black marble inlay. My brother's getting that machine for Christmas.

Just fell in love with the look of 'em, and how they worked. Not pictured—my first PowerBook, a 145B with a B&W screen. That one's packed away at Mom's house in the attic. Also not pictured, the display for the A/V machine.

As you can see...I don't like Macs even a little bit. :)

Okay, I'm being facetious. I love my Macs. As for Jobs? Eh. He's just a dude.

Put him in an animatronic exhibit? Don't really care. Want to impress folks? Truly represent computer/communication history with a Cheeto-chomping (with cheesey scent piped in) animatronic internet troll. Yeah!

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Steve Jobs, Inventor of Everything

Cory Doctorow has the story of Steve Jobs deciding to put himself into a Disney ride.

Disney is renovating the Spaceship Earth ride at Epcot Center and will include Steve Jobs (but not Steve Wozniak) in its animatronic depiction of the history of communications -- but not Steve Wozniak, the pioneering hardware virtuoso who created the early Apple computers. --boingboing.net

What a jackass. I will never get the image out of my head of this megalomaniac parading across the stage screaming about the iPhone. "Its a phone, Its music player, are you getting it? are you getting it?". Yes you dunce, because we aren't ninnies and personally I've had a phone that played downloaded music in Japan for 3 years.

Its just one of the benefits of being on the board at Disney, you can write people out of history.

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