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Yesterday saw world-plus-dog in the technology sector glued to Apple’s announcement of their new tablet device, which has now been officially dubbed the iPad. Basically, when you boil it down it’s a super-sized iPod Touch with optional 3G support and a few more apps.

Reaction has ranged, as usual, from the ecstatic “I’ve seen the face of God, and his name is Steve”, to “What a useless piece of junk”, stopping at most points in between. In the more negative camp, lots of talk has centred around what it doesn’t have (multitasking, a camera, a USB port, Flash), and that some people seem to find it hard to grasp the usage conditions of a device that neither fits in your pocket, nor does everything a laptop does.

Personally, I’m cautiously optimistic. The device was never supposed to be a phone or a laptop, so I’m curious why people are comparing it to one – the point is that it’s something else. I can actually think of multiple use cases where a device of this form factor and capability would be useful to me. Here are a few examples:

1. I’ve thought about buying an eReader before, but have always been completely unsatisfied with the existing solutions: current e-ink devices are fine for reading black and white novels, but don’t handle A4 formatted content at all well, can’t do colour, take far too long to flip through pages, and are basically unusable for keyboard input, making searching impractical – and therefore these devices do not satisfy my need for a reader that replaces my bookshelf (physical and virtual) of reference material at all. The iPad, however, looks like it would be able to do that much better.
2. Sometimes I’m in the living room or kitchen and I’d just like to look something up on the web; maybe check some news or look up a recipe maybe – just a 5-10 minute thing. Firing up the laptop just for this is overkill, but the pages are too small to really read properly on a phone. In the end I do one of these things anyway but it’s never ideal. Again a tablet form factor would be perfect for this.
3. When we’re showing photos to family and friends, these days we do it on a laptop because we never print anything. It’s not ideal, even the most elegantly built laptop requires everyone to crowd around the screen behind you or similar – it’s awkward. If I had a tablet to do it, one I can easily hold up and pass around, that would work much better.
4. When I’m in a social situation when it would be useful to have intermittent access to some documents or other information that’s too big to fit on a phone screen comfortably, currently you need a laptop to do it. Laptops are really, really unsociable to have out on a table with others around (say at a meeting), because of the way they need to be used, with a screen forming a psychological barrier between you and whoever else is on the opposite side of the table. This happens all over the place: I strongly feel that laptops are the scourge of coffee shops today, turning a social space into a cluster of virtual mini-cubicles with individuals hunched behind screens not talking to anyone. I also play pen-and-paper RPGs socially, and over the years I’ve tried to use a laptop with many highly useful applications as an accessory, and it’s never, ever worked. Even the smaller laptops are too obtrusive, but a phone is just too small to be useful. I’d love to try using an iPad with some dedicated apps for tracking things.

I’m sure there are other examples. Basically I think people need to get over the fact that it doesn’t improve on what they currently use their phone or laptop for – that’s really not the point. I see the iPad as a ‘gap filler’ – and I can certainly see some gaps for it to fill in my life.

The price is much better than expected too, mostly because it’s an upgrade of an iPod rather than a downgrade of a laptop. I’d skip the 3G option because it’s pointless for me, I’d only use it on wifi, so that makes it not that much more expensive than a top-end iPod Touch.

But, it’s not all roses. The lack of Flash is an issue for web compatibility, although at least video through HTML5 is starting to happen (YouTube added it recently). The lack of multitasking is a bit disappointing, but might be relaxed in an OS update later. The GPU capabilities are a bit unexplored online so far, it seems that it’s probably as powerful as an iPhone 3G, but falling short of the 3GS (so GLES 1.1). I’ve also heard today that iBooks might not be available in non-US countries at launch, which definitely undermines the offering as an eReader.

So, depending on the practicalities when it’s released over here, I may or may not grab one. I can definitely see places in my life where a not-a-phone-or-laptop device would be useful, and frankly, I’m intrigued by the possibilities of where this kind of device may go in future.

This was pretty interesting; CNet reports that according to NPD stats, Apple has 91% of the retail PC sales in the US above $1,000.

Now, let’s add the caveats here:

• That’s retail PCs. Of course, loads of people build their (desktop) PCs from OEM parts rather than buying a prebuilt machine, so it’s safe to say that these sales are almost all going to be laptops, where Apple particularly shines.
• Also, these are primarily going to be consumer purchases, because businesses tend to buy in bulk and not at retail (excluding the smaller businesses) – again Apple is far more popular in the consumer space than in business (barring the iPhone).
• The above $1,000 range is a minority of all sales; a majority of people buy cheap rubbish
• This is only the US, where Apple seems more popular

So, the headline isn’t quite as accurate in its crushing assessment as the wholesome reality, but even so it’s pretty impressive. When it comes to laptops, I always buy quality because I’ve been disappointed many times by machines that looked good on paper but turned out to be poorly constructed, poorly designed, and had all kinds of heat / battery life / general robustness issues, which led me to always buy from the ‘premium’ range in the last 6 years or so. At first that was the likes of the top-end Sonys, but after being convinced to try a MacBook Pro, I’ve been so pleased with the overall construction / design and the ability to use OS X as well as Windows that I’m very unlikely to buy anything else next time (my next hardware revision will be 2010, I generally switch every 3 years, which is reasonable if you buy something decent to begin with).

The talk now is about whether Apple will start making a netbook, to compete at the cheaper end of the market. Personally I don’t care – I quit buying cheap laptops ages ago, I don’t think it really ends up being cheaper in the long run. Powerful and cheap machines tend to be poorly built – I’ve burned through (literally in a couple of cases!) far too many laptops that couldn’t handle their power actually being used regularly, or which developed problems because the build quality was naff. Cheap machines with decent construction but lower spec (e.g. netbooks) just need upgrading faster if you have my sort of needs, or are just a supplement to a ‘real’ machine, either of which costs more in aggregate, and the resale value when you do upgrade is usually not even worth considering. In the round, buying a premium laptop relatively infrequently works far better for me, and as such Apple already provide what I want. YMMV

In the grand scheme of things, nothing really very surprising was announced at the WWDC 09 keynote; sure, we got a few hardware revisions and some more specific details on the next version of OS X, but there wasn’t anything singularly shattering about it. And yet, when taken as a whole, I think it was one of the most important WWDC’s yet.

iPhone 3GS

A speed increase, more memory, better battery life, better camera, addition of a compass so it can know which direction you’re facing as well as where you are. All fairly minor but no doubt welcome changes. But, in my view perhaps the more important fact is that following the release, the previous standard 3G revisions are being sold off for $99; I think that’s going to make a big difference in the number of people taking up the iPhone. I didn’t pick one up because of the price (especially because we get screwed on it over here, since we have no O2 to subsidise it), but had it been a $99 base price – well, that’s a lot easier. Being able to offer an iPhone to a wider range of buyers is certain to give more steam to the iPhone popularity train.

MacBook Pro

More speed & RAM, FireWire 800 is back (no use to me, but some people missed it), SD card slots are in, and perhaps more importantly, Lithium-polymer battery tech is in, for up to 7 hours on the go. Sweet. Interestingly, the entry-level MacBook is now replaced by the 13-inch MacBook Pro, with the same overall design but just lower specs. This allowed Apple to claim that the MacBook Pros now start cheaper, but really they don’t – the 15 inch (the one you’d really want to start at as a power user) is exactly the same price as before. [edit]Actually, it has dropped in price, but back to the same price as the 15″ MBP was in 2007, when I last bought one. 2008’s unibody design came with a price increase, so this decrease puts it back to how it was, hence my confusion.[/edit] But still, a faster chip, double the memory and bigger HD are welcome for the same price; I’m glad I didn’t buy a unibody yet, but I’ll definitely be tempted by the new ones.

The MacBook Air however did get a set of serious price cuts; they’re impractical for me still, despite being sexy as hell, but I’m sure people that don’t need so much local power and who desire sleek looks will be very happy.

OS X

We already knew that Snow Leopard would be basically a leaner, meaner version of Leopard with go-faster stripes and a few feature tweaks. The big announcement was that Apple would be releasing the upgrade for a mere $29 (or $49 for the multi-machine family pack), which was very well received. That basically makes it a no-brainer for all users, I know I’ll be upgrading soon after launch.

Most importantly, it’s a big contrast to the price that Microsoft want to charge for the Windows 7 upgrade, which contains roughly the same degree of change over Vista as Snow Leopard has over Leopard (although Leopard is a more efficient base than Vista is – does that make W7 worth more as an upgrade?). It’s rumoured that a Home Premium upgrade for W7 will be around $50, and a Professional upgrade about $100. Of course, OS X has no ‘graduations’ like Windows has, where you don’t get everything in the OS unless you buy an expensive ‘Ultimate’ version – OS X is just OS X (personally, that lack of fannying about with variable feature sets is attractive to me as a customer).  This is an obvious attempt to undermine Microsoft’s claim to be the ‘value’ player in the OS market, and frankly, it’s a good argument. Of course, you still can’t buy cheap-and-cheerful hardware to run OS X on like you can with Windows, but when I shell out $100 per machine for my Windows 7 Pro upgrade but only $29, or $49 for up to 5 Snow Leopard upgrades, hell yeah I’m going to notice the difference.

So, I think despite the lack of shattering announcements, this was an important WWDC for Apple, a consolidation move which in many ways is more important. Despite the often fiercely held opinions of people who haven’t even used them, Apple products are generally pretty damn good, and earn brand loyalty for a reason. Making them more accessible can only lead to more people trying them, and perhaps coming to conclusions for themselves, rather than just writing them off based on what they’ve heard from other people who haven’t used them either. 

It’s always fun to watch Apple and Microsoft slug it out in the advertising space – here in the UK we mostly have to do this via YouTube, since apart from a short stint of amusing Mitchell and Webb Apple ads and those pretty bland “I’m A PC” ripostes, we don’t really see the front-line assaults which take place on US TV screens.

So I hear that MS have a new set of ads out, where “regular” people go and look for a laptop, whereby they look at the Mac and say “whoah, far too expensive!” and then go and buy a Dell instead. Fair enough, the 3rd party PC market certainly gives you a wider choice of blending specifications than Apple does – in practice, Macs aren’t actually much different in price to a similarly specced PC, it’s just that all the components are generally of similar ‘grade’ – so you can’t cut corners to save money like buying something with a big screen but a crappy GPU, or a large HD with a slow motherboard, or a fast CPU but crappy battery life.  Of course, many people don’t realise they’re making these sacrifices and just look at the price – but if you do know what you’re doing, you can tailor a machine closer to your needs. Anyway, I enjoyed the “Homeless Frank” spoof of these new ads:

A couple of years ago I would have made the same arguments against the Mac that MS makes with it’s Laptop Hunter series; and indeed I did, when a Mac-owning friend tried to convince me to buy one, despite being a .Net guru (who now works for Microsoft!). However, now that I’ve owned a Mac for almost 2 years, I feel completely different – in a laptop at least, I’m very willing to sacrifice a little configuration flexibility in favour of having a device that is of uniformly good quality, and is nice to use. After all, laptops are always compromised in terms of upgradability once you’ve bought them, so it’s generally better to buy something decent from the outset anyway.

I know that buying a Mac laptop is going to encourage me to spend a little more money than I otherwise might get away with. But, what I get for that is a really nice device, that has the added bonus of being able to run OS X as well as Windows. I still use Windows every day, almost exclusively because of Visual Studio these days (and some games) since everything else I use runs on the Mac too anyway, but running both Windows and OS X on the same machine merely serves to make me love OS X more, despite still being a newbie with it in many ways. Windows is fine to use and all, but there’s something about the way OS X just gets out of the way, doesn’t pester me with stupid warnings all the time, doesn’t need a virus scanner to slow it down, allows me to unmount my USB drives without hunting down every Explorer window that is using it first, and countless other little things that have slowly endeared me to it despite being a total skeptic to begin with. I’m a technical guy by nature, but even I can appreciate technology that doesn’t waste my time with trivial stuff I don’t want to care about – and at the end of the day Windows (and Linux) still feels like it’s designed for “PC users”, whilst OS X feels like it’s designed for people, specifically people with stuff to do other than worrying about keeping the computer happy. The day that XCode equals Visual Studio in functionality (it’s not far off, but it’s not there yet), and I can run Steam on OS X, is the day I might seriously consider not using Windows on a daily basis anymore. But, we’ll see whether Windows 7 changes that view.

Via TechCrunch, Steve Jobs’ first public presentation of the Mac on 24th Jan 1984. And the crowd goes wild

I was 10 years old when this happened, and still using BBC Micros in school, so I guess I would have gone nuts over this too at the time, had I the chance to see one.

I’ve always admired the iPhone purely because of it’s sleek looks and elegant design, but it was encumbered by an excessive price tag, a lack of 3G (which for the price was scandalous), and a ridiculous telco tie-in that meant you could only (officially) use it on O2 here in the UK, which made it even more useless to me since O2 do not operate where I live.

However, the new 3G instalment which made its widely anticipated appearance at WWDC 08 is looking much more interesting. Obviously there’s the 3G support, which really should be a given in a modern high-end phone, although I can understand that since the US cell phone networks have been very slow to deploy it, it might not seem as important across the pond. GPS is in too, which is good, and Exchange support is probably for those who are wedded to it. But more importantly, they’re slashing the price; it’s half what it was last time ($199 for the 8GB model). Even better, Jobs is claiming that people are not going to pay an inflated price outside the US – they’ve promised that you won’t pay more than the converted price. Of course, given the fluctuations in the dollar rate, I’m not sure what rate they’re going to pick, but it would be a refreshing change not to get ripped off so badly here in Europe if they deliver on it.

The final issue is whether they’re going to lock the phone to a provider again, something I considered to be manifestly stupid from an adoption point of view. In the US they’re still doing this, via AT&T again for a pretty inflated monthly price which I guess is the point of them doing it. If they repeat this in the UK with O2 they’ll once again make it pointless me getting one. Sure I could try to bypass the locks, but the potential for my device to be bricked by a future update isn’t exactly enticing.

So if they lock to O2 again it will be a shame, because otherwise the new iPhone would be a likely purchase for me. It’s a great device, and if I have an excuse to have one I’d love to get Ogre running on it – the SEGA Super Monkey Ball demo in the video was certainly pretty cool

I don’t use my iPod as much as I used to, owing to the fact that I work from home now so I don’t have my daily walk to / from work in which to listen to it. Updating it for the first time in ages I was presented with a lovely "iTunes has detected an iPod in need of recovery" error message, which I thought was odd. Nevertheless I dutifully followed the instructions and performing the recovery, which is a pretty laborious process involving some waiting, disconnecting, rebooting of the iPod and reconnecting, at which point I got the same error. Rinse, and repeat. Scratch head.

Long story short, the eventual cause was a drive mapping – I had forgotten that since I last updated my iPod, I’d mapped the I: drive to a local folder (using subst) to replicate a customer setup on my machine, completely forgetting that I: is the drive the iPod likes to use, and if it’s in use it gets rather confused it seems. The resolution was to either to stop using the I: mapping (which is what I did, since I didn’t need it anymore), or telling the iPod to use a different drive letter in Disk Manager.

This is reported in the Apple knowledge base, although it’s a couple of links down from a typical Google search so easy to miss. You would have thought a more specific error message would have been better, since something like this is pretty easy to do by accident and then forget about, like I did.