We ordered our first iPad for Bites HQ on Friday, dropping into the Apple online store to plunk down a $499 pre-order for a WiFi model with 16GB of memory. It was the minimal investment to get a business tool in our hands — and see what it might be worth.

It’s a beloved bromide that you shouldn’t buy a 1.0 version of anything computing-related. Some say that you’re only helping the manufacturer iron out the bugs in such an early version of a product. Apple has fired a warning shot across the bow of us eager sailors, cresting into the uncharted iPad waters. If your iPad develops a charging problem, the vendor advises, it will only be $99 to replace the battery. Yeah, an extra $99, plus tax and the pain of parting with your new tool. Apple will give you a refurbished model as a replacement, so you need to have dumped your data into your Mac before the pokey iPad goes into the post.

Us early adopters take such arrows in the back as an expected part of being the first on our block. Apple enjoyed a healthy 1.0 release of the iPod (I owned mine within the first month in 2001), while the iPhone was much better on second and third releases than the $599 rollout model. (We added ours last year, about two years after the intro.) But we invested in the 1.0 iPad because it might move the needle a lot for quick computing, the kind that a small business needs to keep up with a jammed to-do list. That’s an experience we want to share first-hand, instead of repeat from others.

One of our allies, Bruce Hobbs of Engineered Software, is developing iPad applications after decades serving the HP enterprise business community. Hobbs is enlisting other software writers with experience in COBOL, a bedrock business language, to create something new for the iPad.

I’ve been reading books about and working through tutorials on Objective-C, Xcode, Interface Builder and iPhone and Mac OS X development. Michael Watson and I took a two-day iPhone development course back in November. I’ve also been attempting, with limited success, to lure a couple of other HP 3000 COBOL developers into a joint effort. Not sure yet exactly what we’ll put together, but I’m still hoping to have something in the App Store before Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. Read the rest of this entry »

Apple announced this morning that it’s long-awaited, thoroughly-dissected, hotly-contested iPad will be available for pre-orders in one week, with deliveries to begin April 3. The company will start with its WiFi models first, then add the 3G-capable units by the end of April.

Devices can be ordered online starting next week, or pre-ordered from Apple’s retail stores. Shipments start April 3 for online orders, with in-store pickups available the same day.

In a press release Apple’s Steve Jobs says the tablet, using a trademarked Multi-Touch interface, let users “connect with their apps and content in a more intimate, intuitive and fun way than ever before.”

The device that will deliver a renovated Mail program (included) and runs $9.95 apps for Apple’s Numbers spreadsheet and the Pages word processor, does not yet include a camera. Analysts believe that Apple can sell as many as 5 million of the tablet computers in the product’s first year. Prices range from $499 for a 16GB WiFi up to $829 for a 64GB 3G+WiFi unit.

Some of the biggest enhancements to the business computing experience will come from Apple’s applications at first. The company promises a Mail experience that will let users “see and touch your email in ways you never could before. In landscape, you get a split-screen view showing both an opened email and the messages in your inbox.”

The iPad’s Calendar tool takes a big step toward the functionality of the DayTimer and DayRunner journals of the 1990s. The landscape format and portability, along with the utility of managing several calendars at once, take the mobile device into the realm of portfolios we carried from meeting to meeting.

Apple’s refreshed a Web page that summarizes the initial value of investing in this business tool. The marketing copy focuses on the applications that will be available as included software.

Attendees waiting for the keynote to start covered a wide age range

A trade show is an odd thing, an entity that exists only in a brief span of time like a polliwog, a text message or an NBC talk show host’s gig. Afterward, it’s remembered best by those who were actually attending the conference, like last week’s Macworld Expo. But the Web is full of ace prognoses today about the health of the Apple world’s biggest trade show, many served up by people who want to justify their absence.

I’ve sat in that kind of chair, far away and commenting on a show I didn’t attend, doubting its health and relevance and value. Take those comments for what they’re worth. There was a lot of value in being at this year’s Macworld. In the days and weeks to come, this blog will tell stories from being there, ones you couldn’t report any other way about what’s new or what works for Apple computer users who employ their gear as a work tool.

People at the uber-sharp Macintouch.com site are weighing in on the experience, although a serious share of them didn’t experience the conference. Some who were there are saying they noticed a genuine upward age creep in attendees. It didn’t seem any different to me than in years past, except maybe there were not scores of 25-year-olds in an Apple booth. Nothing wrong with the youth of America, but a robust trade show is built of equal parts managers and explorers. 2010′s show had both in my iPhone’s viewfinder.

Unless there was a fountain of youth bubbling in the basement of the Moscone Center, making us geezers somehow look callow, there were plenty of attendees well under 40. The show itself may be elderly in hitting age 25, but many there were not a lot older than the expo’s own tenure. The picture above is a little clue of who was on hand at the first day’s Feature keynote.

If you want to forecast the lifespan of a trade show, you need all your instruments working to make a prediction. When people talk about this year’s MacWorld as “half as many booths” or “no massive vendor exhibits with savvy people inside,” they’re correct, but not accurate. Those raw numbers don’t matter any more than just measuring the wind speed and then trying to predict weather. You want to work with business measurements, because a trade show is a business opportunity. Read the rest of this entry »

It was a surprising gaffe to see an Apple demo with a hole on Wednesday, when Steve Jobs did a demo of the new iPad. But there on the screen were holes in “the best way to browse the Web.”

Those holes on the browser’s screen were Flash videos, built in to sites like The New York Times and Time magazine. Flash is everywhere except the iPad and iPhone. Apple doesn’t like it because Flash is a hog, a tar-pit that brings the iPhone to a crawl. And apparently the iPad, even with the hot A4 processor Apple built to drive the device.

What’s a business need Flash for, anyway? Well, information presented quickly. Hit the Wall Street Journal’s front page with an iPhone to see what you’re missing. All the video, that’s what. A 2-minute video summary can be the best way to find an overview of a business story. It’s a stubborn oversight for the iPad and Apple to sneer at Flash. At the WSJ site it’s especially important, because the paper is now owned by News Corp., which runs a little thing called Fox News.

There will be a lot of business information on the Journal’s site that won’t appear on an iPad. Jobs’ blinders during the demo were among the most un-Apple-like facets I’ve seen from the company. Especially in front of an audience of journalists in the media.

The articles are starting to appear today about Flash being missing. The LA Times posted an item this morning that compared Apple’s absence on the Flash team with Adobe’s desire to put the product onto iPads and iPhones. The disconnect shows two things to a business customer. First, Apple wants a video standard they can control or influence, like the pretty-green HTML5. Second, that no matter how fast you think your hardware is on your business tool, there’s always something to stop it dead. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s apparently a lot to complain about since Apple launched the iPad era yesterday. A gauntlet of Engadget writers gave a series of ho-hum, “who-needs-it” reviews today. Some wanted to chide Apple for not reinventing the personal computer, especially after the rumor mills and hypesters had lifted this tablet to breakthrough status.

It still looks to us like a good tool for a small or home office business. Apple wants us to believe this, or it wouldn’t have spent so much time showing off its Excel echo (Numbers) or PowerPoint knock off (Keynote) facets from the iWork suite.

In practice the iPad will have to deliver real-world results. What doesn’t look sexy and necessary onstage alongside Steve Jobs? (I know, CEO Paul Otellini of Intel, even if you put him in a clean suit at the 2006 Macworld.)

The complaints about a lack of phone ability are off base, though. You’d never put this thing to your ear, but if you use a laptop to Skype-call today, the iPad will permit you to do this. Permit, I say, because yesterday Apple dropped its restrictions so apps can use Voice Over IP, the engine that enables Skype, over 3G networks. Skype already runs on the iPhone.

But Skype illustrates one of the biggest questions about the iPad. The new device is supposed to be a step up from a smartphone, but not so smart as Apple’s laptops. Using Skype on a laptop enables an add-on like eCamm’s note-taker Voice Recorder. Since the iPad runs only one app at a time, how will applications like Voice Recorder and Skype integrate? Never mind multitasking, I just want helper applications. And how do we get our documents onto and off this thing? Please don’t tell me that iTunes is in charge of synchronizing that, too. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s easy to forget how many strides Apple made since the Year 2000 to become a force in computing. This article from TechRadar.com sums up the magic, from the iPod to embracing Unix as the new Mac OS X to those stores jammed with customers for advice, repair and business counseling.

Here in Austin on Dec. 26, the busiest day of the retail year, the Apple store in The Domain retail village (shown at left) was buzzing with customers. I visited a handful of shops in this retail mecca and Apple’s was busiest. So busy, in fact, that the crowds were overwhelming the network that could connect them to schedules of free workshops and training. Of course, that mob at the end of the store might have been bringing in holiday gifts for the Geniuses to repair, or just getting on-the-spot training on a new tool. Or just asking why they couldn’t discover when the store’s network was going to be back up. In a legendary episode from the series Californication, our hero Hank writes his first paid blog entry from an Apple store and posts it.

The Apple Stores have their shortcomings — the red-shirted floor staff is wildly uneven in its expertise about the Mac line — but these places are a hub of face to face advice and counsel. One such overlooked resource is the One to One training, a year of lessons available for $99 that entitles you to a one-on-one session of an hour per week. It’s a great way to go deeper on an Apple solution, especially something like Numbers, Pages, or iPhoto, the software that Apple makes and nobody else seems to know how to teach.

One to One has its own limits, too, such as scheduling: the Apple Concierge Web site won’t let you book more than one session in advance. But even if you only used 10 visits out of 52 weeks, this would be a $9.90 consult. You can even bring your own laptop to train, and so take away more than just learning. You can finish a production.

Apple announced its new iMac and Mac mini systems today, but the smaller of these two Macs is bringing the biggest improvement in capability for small businesses. The iMacs with their 20- and 24-inch screens got modest bumps in speed, and each model got faster graphics, the latest implementation of Apple’s shift to NVIDIA. (Apple does a compelling sell of the new graphics in a pop-up screen, comparing the four new graphics sets to the prior graphics. Be aware that faster screen speed comes at a price above the entry-level, though.) All models also received more base RAM — so that will tell you how important it is to increase memory on anything that Apple ships you.

Ah, but the Mini. It continues its ascent as the best Mac for the dollar. For the same prices, the system now has solved its old-dog-slow graphics speed with an NVIDIA chipset; doubled the limit for RAM (see above); and increased the top speed of the processor to 2.26 GHz. Mind you, you’ve got to buy the faster of the two Mini models to get all that, but at just a $200 increase, it’s well worth it.

Apple makes much of its new Mini DisplayPort on the mini to connect monitors. It’s a genuine value for the mini if you’re got DisplayPort monitors, but not much of a bump for the mini customer already using a DVI screen. Like Firewire, DVI is getting pushed to the door by Apple, which is shifting its display focus to DisplayPort. The system includes a mini DVI to DVI adapter, but you can see the trend here. Smaller is better, but it demands peripheral replacements, too. Read the rest of this entry »

Inside the crowded halls of the Moscone Center the buzz runs steady today, as hundreds of products for Apple users make their debut from the third party community. Apple has limited its product announcements to a new suite of iWork and iLife apps, many which have significant upgrades. People are raving about the person and place identification in iPhoto ’09.

Of course, the most significant missing element is CEO Steve Jobs, who skipped Apple’s final MacWorld keynote. The vendor says it won’t participate in the 2010 edition of the conference, but some attendees and industry veterans here say that might change by next January. I doubt it, since Apple keynote address included the fact that Apple Stores bring in the equivalent of 100 MacWorlds every year, some 3.5 million.

Nobody here on the expo floor is bemoaning Apple’s exit, at least not in any public way. There are 40,000 attendees at this conference, down about 15 percent from last year. But putting 40,000 people in an expo center for three days generates a vastly different kind of energy, enthusiasm and optimism. The take-away walking out of these halls is a quantum leap of power over leaving an Apple Store, even after a One-to-One class, personal shopper session or a business consult.

Much of that is because of the vast range of solutions the Store knows little about. In a 300 square foot section of the expo floor I found four different document scanning and data storage solutions. Ways to capture business cards, store receipts. Some advertised integration with Filemaker, (Intelliscanner Mini) others could read data off a PDF created by an included scanner (NeatReceipts), and other offered communication using the auto-sync features of Address Book. Then there’s the mailing solutions, all demonstrated by people who answer questions without hesitation or reference to their company’s experts.

That’s a range you will never find in an Apple Store, because there’s 40,000 customers waiting to walk the aisles of two halls. The keynote, the classes — they’re just the icing on the cake and between the layers. As with any in-person conference, the networking and even listening to other customers questions at the booth teaches so much more than any Apple Store.

Best of all, arriving here on a $45 expo pass can earn that much in a discount for a single purchase, like a renewal for Lynda.com, the premier training Web site for applications and Macintosh and iPhone basic skills. It’s $250 for Lynda for a year, but just $200 here. And signing up got me a free $40 MacBlast ticket for tonight’s party. Perhaps it was the media badge, but perhaps not.

Read the rest of this entry »

MacBook Pro owners face an eventual failure from their SuperDrive CD/DVD reader-writers. The 2006 batch of MB Pros all shipped with a fouled run of optical drive hardware. User after user complained and found failures in the only device that would load their new applications like Adobe’s Creative Suite or Microsoft’s Office Applications. Read the long and sad tale of failures at the Macintouch Reader Report Forum. Even the new MacBook Pro owners are getting bitten.)

The included device gained some stability in later MB Pro units, so by 2008 you had a better than even chance of having a SuperDrive remain operative within the one-year warranty. But hundreds of thousands of MacBook Pro SuperDrives went out the door with a Mean Time Between Failure  (the old MTBF ranking for professional storage) of well under 20,000 hours. A weak figure at best, and unacceptible for small business or enterprise use.

Replacing these units can be simple, or not too costly. But not both. By simple, I mean the $310 replacement drive from the Apple Store, plus an $85 replacement fee. “It’s pretty much $400,” the Apple Genius Bar tech told me tonight. (Then there’s the tax, but at least there’s no shipping.) That’s a total cost of 40 percent of the price of a new MacBook, and about one-third the cost of the lowest MacBook Pro. But this solution is easy, so long as you can do without your MacBook for a week or more. (This is where having the Apple Pro uplift on AppleCare gets you to the front of the line, I’m told.) Read the rest of this entry »

I managed to schedule a One-to-One training session at the local Apple Store today. The first available date was, sure, the Monday of the week following Christmas, December 29. What a coincidence, a date that follows the ultimate purchase and return week.

Anyway, for my meeting I’ll try to make some sense of what Apple has done to the iMovie in iLife ’08, at least what I can understand during my 50-minute session. This baseline movie app for creative types who still don’t have Final Cut Express in their budget got gutted in its latest version, all to make it behave more like the Final Cut series. Somewhere in Apple’s software management this made sense, probably because nobody there ever spent three years working with the perfectly-useful iMovie from 2006.

I probably will come away from the training with a yen to move up from iMovie to the $199 Final Cut Express. That’s one thing you could learn from 50 minutes of training.