iPad: Did Apple revolutionize us again?

Long time readers of my blogs might remember in 2007 how elated I was to be sitting at Moscone, watching Steve Jobs just 20 yards away from me introduce the iPhone, a product that in my mind was no doubt going to be a slam dunk. I said at the time, “I don’t care if this thing is $1000, I’m going to have it on day one.”

Today was not like that.

Today was more like 2001, the day the first iPod was introduced. Like many others, I thought, “what, an MP3 player?” And like many of the less-than-crazed-Apple-fans, I didn’t get one the day they shipped. In fact, I didn’t have my first iPod till months later. But once I had one, got to experience it with all of the design nuance and interface touch that Apple is so well known and (at least by me) appreciated for… well, even then, I had no idea that it would take 70% of the market and completely up-end the music industry, but I knew I liked the product and would never have another MP3 player.

That’s how iPad is going to be for a lot of people.

Its appeal is not immediately obvious. I’ve talked to a few people who said something to the effect of “So what? It’s a big iPod Touch.” And they are right – when you get right down to it, that is indefensible. There’s no USB, no optical drive, no Ethernet. It runs the iPhone OS, not the full fledged Mac OS X that runs on a Mac. So that means no third party apps running in the background, and the only place you’ll get said third party apps is from iTunes.

That said, it’s set apart from iPod Touch because of the size and its 1GHz processor. That point is understated: you ever read a book or watch a movie on a Touch or iPhone? I have; it’s…difficult. Heck, even writing this article on my iPhone is slower than had I been at my desk. iPad won’t have these problems based solely on it’s size and speed.

It won’t compete with iPhone because you can’t make calls with iPad, and it has no camera.

Apple never made an eBook reader like the Sony product or the Amazon Kindle but I have to believe it destroys both of those. (Unless the unique screen of the Kindle appeals to you, and I could see why it might.) And with iTunes selling books to go with iPad – this thing could be a hit all on it’s own just doing to books what it did to music. Imagine every kid in school having one these instead of textbooks.

But how does it compare to a MacBook, which is what I think the disappointed groups were hoping for? I think the addition of iWork apps to the platform (on top of the other productivity apps like QuickOffice) in addition to the ability to use a Bluetooth keyboard (or the iPad dock with keyboard that essentially makes it a little workstation) mean that this could substitute for a computer for office work. Apple took the Netbook concept and made something in that same vein but without using a slow, awkward mini laptop. Yet at less weight and a smaller form factor than MacBook Air, iPad is certainly a road warrior’s dream.

Back when iPhone 3GS was released I postulated that a fast capable mobile device with the addition of 7mbps 3G cellular data would marginalize a desktop or laptop computer. iPad is the next logical progression of that theory.

The only question is, can it do everything a typical business person would need it to do? I’m very much looking forward to finding that answer when I get one this summer.

Apple’s Game-Changers

A few weeks ago, Apple announced some pretty big overhauls to their product line with new iMacs, new Minis, new MacBooks, etc. Maybe I’m just jaded from my time in retail, but new product announcements from Apple rarely excite me anymore. I doubt anything is going to top the pinnacle: witnessing the revelation of the iPhone in person a couple years ago and getting in line to get one on the first day. Something simple as the new mouse? Yawn. (To be fair, now that I have a Magic Mouse, I really, really like it.)

But as the title of this blog post alludes, there were a couple of items that gave me cause to do a double-take.

Read the rest of this entry »

Video/Audio Playback

Have you ever tried to download a video from the internet just to click on it and have Quicktime tell you “Unsupported Video?” Or have you clicked a movie and seen picture but no sound? Well my mac loving friends, there is a solution. Instead of downloading tons of audio and video “codecs” to get your files to play, there is a one stop shop media player that will play anything you throw at it. VLC player is “the [ultimate] cross-platform open-source multimedia framework, player and server.” Here you can find out more information about specific types of media that it supports, as well as download it if you like.

From personal experience i have never found a format that VLC handle and that includes video straight off my DVR! If you like to use a lot of different types of media this is a player that offers it all; and its free! Give it a try, you wont be disappointed.

Snow Leopard and Apple’s dirty little secret

As one of the last of our WWDC posts, I want to talk a little bit about Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.  It may end up being the most important software upgrade Apple has ever done. To understand its significance and why you will want it, you’ll need a little bit of history to set the stage.

For the most part, there’s not a whole lot of new stuff to get excited about.  Yes, there are a few new features – some really good ones, like OpenCL, Grand Central, and QuickTime X.  I’m going to save my thoughts on Exchange support for another time (beyond this article: it begs the question on whether Apple’s own server is now second class to Microsoft’s groupware solution or if Snow Leopard Server will be up to task).

The name and the price tell the tale of Snow Leopard.  And it makes more sense to people, like many of you reading this, who have been using the Mac for a long time… and also to people like me, who have been supporting the Mac for a long time.  Now maybe this is just me being a conspiracy theorist and no, I haven’t done a lot of homework on this – it’s just a combination of remembering things I’ve read and my own gut feeling on some recent experiences.

Read on for why Snow Leopard is most important to the future of the Mac

WWDC Review: New iPhones mean no more laptops?

Yesterday was a busy day. At BestMacs we had a couple of downed servers to deal with (stupid hard drives on both) so we didn’t get to sit huddled around a live broadcast of the keynote. The impact of all the new Apple gear is still settling in with us. All four of your BestMacs team will be commenting on the changes this week.

In case you missed Molly’s cliff notes yesterday, here’s the short list:

• iPhone Software version 3.0
• new iPhone hardware (3GS) and price reduction on existing model to $99
• Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) announcement and preview
• Safari 4.0 release
• All-new Mac laptop line up

Just one of these would make for a pretty good discussion, but all 5 on one day?!  Daaaang.

I’m going to start with the one that for me sets off wild possibilities for the future of computing and asks us to open our wallets again: new iPhone hardware. 

This new model paves the way for a whole new mobile platform – it may make laptops obsolete in a few years. And once again, we have to confront the big hardware upgrade questions.

Read on for my analysis

Utilities You Can Use

Built-In Utilities Every Beginner Should Know About

Leopard has a bunch of useful utilities. Airport Utility for when you purchase a new base station, Migration Assistant for moving data over to a new computer, System Profiler to check the specifications of your computer. These are awesome, but you don’t need to use them on a day to day basis and if you have technical assistance, you may never need to use them at all. In the above article, Nancy Gravley lists a few utilities that might come in handy on a regular basis.

Keep Reading!

My Thoughts on AppleCare

Why should you buy AppleCare? Sure, it can be pricey, between $169 and $349, but it is worth it. It extends your warranty from one year to three years and your phone support from 90 days to three years.

Read about my personal experience.

DroboPro: Part 2

I wrote a couple weeks ago about a cool new offering from Data Robotics here, called the DroboPro. Well, here we are a couple of weeks later and i thought i would share my findings with this cool new tech, now that we have it in the field.

I had previously mentioned that Drobo worked on a technology called iSCSI where as the more expensive solutions currently available will typically use Fiber Channel. I have to admit that installing the DroboPro at a large client had me worried with regard to data throughput. I was unsure whether a device like this could match up to an XServe RAID when dealing with large amounts of data. Apple used to reccomend this product exclusively for server deployments and has since adopter the newer Promise Tech RAID solution. These ranged in price from $7,000 dollars and up depending on your storage configuration. This piece of hardware used Fiber Channel as its only means of data transfer which adds significantly to the cost of ownership. Read the rest of this entry »

Getting Rid of Unused Languages

Your operating system takes up several gigabytes of space on your computer– valuable space you could be using for applications, documents, music, photos, etc. But, you can’t delete your operating system. Your operating system does, however, come with a few things you probably don’t use which you can delete. One of these is extra languages. Do you really nee d to use your computer in Afrikaans, Hebrew and Brazilian Portugese? Probably not.

Read more…

New White MacBook

One nice thing Apple has been doing lately is releasing updates to their line of products quietly but often. We see another example of this today with a shiny new white MacBook. The new notebook will still feature the old firewire 400 port but has received some nice updates. Read the rest of this entry »