The MacBook Air's 11-inch model is a better upgrade from the iPad than the iPad 2

All around the world, people are clamoring for the iPad 2. Apple cannot build them fast enough. The company’s stock lost 7 percent of its value this week, simply on the news that iPad production has slowed in China. It’s clear this device is a hot ticket. But it is one that Apple won’t be selling me soon.

It’s not that the iPad is a bad choice for a business. I’ve worked on websites, articles, spreadsheets, databases, photos and communication (email, social networks and chats). But we already own an iPad, the original model, the unit .3 inches thicker than the iPad 2 you cannot get this month, if you didn’t order on Day One. Our iPad has proved itself to be a business tool that also has a fun side, a home computer as well that’s easy to use.

The iPad 1 has also proved to be a worthy competitor to the iPad 2, once you look at the device in the Apple Store while we’ve held our original iPad. What makes for a better upgrade from the iPad is the MacBook Air. You lose the multi-touch experience when you shift from the iPad to the Air. But I’m counting on Apple to bridge that gap somewhat when the 10.7 Lion release of OS X ships.

That’s why the MacBook Air is going to join the diverse collective of Apple products serving here at our offices. You can make a case for this by the numbers, as well as the feel of the user experience. Apple cares enough about your experience to bring a lot of thought to both the Air and iPad. Read the rest of this entry »

Apple’s been touted as an example of what HP once was: an innovator and powerhouse that built its own successes. The iPad has become so popular so quick that it’s now outselling Macs. And so the mavens of the Apple world now consider how much longer the Mac can survive Apple’s own clever creation: the iOS environment, now driving 70 million iPhones and 15 million iPads, the new nirvana. These ideals are promoted by the people who have little invested in the Mac OS X. They forget to nurture their ancestors’ wisdom.

Exhibit A: A column from new contributor John Gruber on the back page of MacWorld. He seems to wonder if Apple is as typical as HP, because “At typical companies, ‘legacy’ technology is something you figure out how to carry forward. At Apple, legacy technology is something you figure out how to get rid of.”

There’s some problems with this take on how vendors work. First, legacy only gets carried forward at a big customer’s insistence. At typical companies like HP, legacy technology is something you figure out how to marginalize and push into the boutique shadows. Much of the decade before HP’s announced departure in 2001 from the HP 3000 enterprise world — just four weeks from being complete — was spent pushing MPE aside to trumpet Unix. (How’s that choice working for you now, HP? Those footsteps you hear are Linux, not WebOS.)

It’s always easier to sit in a developer’s chair and say the future lies in the newest design, especially if it’s growing more popular by the quarter. But customers — millions of them using Macs today, even in business — sit in different chairs and see investments they want a vendor to protect. A great company learns to balance protection with the innovation. Disney didn’t stop making cartoons just because it discovered live-action movies and amusement parks. Read the rest of this entry »

Apple says it’s learned a lot about making mobile devices smaller by building the iPad. The lessons have been applied to a pair of new MacBook Air models being sold at prices from $999 to $1,599.

Newest to the party is an 11-inch version of the flash-memory laptop, the smallest notebook computer Apple has ever introduced. This computer weighs 2.3 pounds and delivers 5 hours of wireless Web use; the larger 13-inch model adds 0.3 pounds and runs 7 hours on a single charge.

It's mostly battery inside the Air

Most of what’s inside the new models is battery, which makes them identical to the iPad in that aspect. These computers come with no optical drive (DVD) or hard drive, so installing any existing programs is going to be a matter of using an external drive for older programs.

The top end of the notebook line in the Air only has 256GB of memory, a wee acre indeed compared to Apple’s desktop line or even its latest generation of MacBook Pros. But the Air has extended its storage, gone greener and more power-savvy, plus slimmed itself to iPad size.

You can configure a device on the Apple Store that will push the top end of this notebook line beyond $2,000 — Apple wasn’t talking about a processor speed upgrade that adds $200, or the really-necessary AppleCare contract.

Sales of these MacBooks start today.

The big idea behind OS 10 release for next year — Lion — is that it shares technology Apple has polished for the iPhone and iPad mobile devices. “That’s what it’s all about,” said CEO Steve Jobs. “Mac OS 10 meets the iPad. We’d like to bring it all back to the Mac.”

The CEO peeks at Mission Control

Apple will bring applications to Mac users though a Mac App Store. There are two crucial elements in this model: Apple is taking 30 percent of each sale through the Store, a cut that comes out of developer pockets. But there’s extra sales traffic to offset that. Then there’s the automatic install and organization power of the Mac App Store. Anybody who’s tried to install an Adobe app might buy into the App Store to avoid that pain.

It all runs through an interface demonstrated as Mission Control. It will remind the Mac user of Expose and Dashboard and Spaces, but better integrated — and controlled by multitouch gestures on Apple’s Magic Mouse.

Apple plans to put out the Mac App Store first, within 90 days, for any Mac user who’s using Snow Leopard. The vendor is taking applications for apps right away. Lion is set for release in the summer of 2011, or as Steve Jobs said, “this summer.”

Lean Steve leads into iPhoto

You must use Safari, apparently, but it’s been place online at http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1010qwoeiuryfg/event/index.html. Tim Cook, Apple COO, announced that the Mac installed base is now 50 million users, and the Mac has outgrown the market for 18 quarters in a row. Apple’s Mac business — not the mobile iOS units — is already $22 billion a year. Apple claims to have a 20 percent consumer market share for PCs.

The first 10 minutes of this event provides accurate ammunition to prove that the Mac tent is getting large enough to justify a switch away from Windows. “Whether you look at the products, or the numbers, or the products behind the numbers, the momentum has never been higher,” Cook said.

New themes for slide shows

Then comes the new iLife demos, starting with iPhoto. Phil Schiller, Apple’s VP of Marketing, is showing off “Full-Screen” interfaces for the app. iPhoto now makes slideshows automatically, an aspect that can be used for marketing presentations in lieu of the everyday PowerPoint decks.

There’s also an extended look at the new, more powerful editing features in iMovie. It’s hard to describe how much this program has improved over the last two years. The trailers shown look Hollywood-caliber, using included music and effects. Frankly, iMovie became an embarrassment about three years ago, but Apple has rescued it and driven its capabilities much closer to Final Cut Express.

As always, during a major Apple event, the company’s online store was taken offline so the new products can be unveiled for sale afterward.

Over the first 30 minutes of the Apple event, the brief on the Mac business state and the two most visual iLife apps dominated  the stage. iMovie has credits now, storyboards, themes to speed up editing. If you’re using a Mac to create marketing materials, these are marked upgrades to the apps which Apple ships for free with new systems.

Which might be the point here — selling the new systems over a holiday season is going to be easier with this included software’s new features. Apple will be selling the iLife ’11 package for existing Mac users, too. In a real upgrade to the value of these apps, existing users of iLife won’t have to re-purchase the product as we have in the past. There’s a $49 upgrade. Previous versions sold for $79.

There’s no update at all for iWeb and iDVD that is worthy of a demo in the conference. The former never had the simple-build ability for websites in its early releases, and later updates came after the blogging habit replaced a lot of websites with WordPress blogs. iDVD works well enough to burn movies built in iMovie, but the latter’s enhancements seem to have frozen any improvements on iDVD.

GarageBand got a nice demonstration that shows massive editing improvements for the tool we use to create podcasts, one of the most cost-effective marketing and customer-outreach tools. The Mac’s included software make it dead-simple to build podcasts with GarageBand. The fact that a six member band can better mix its music is nice for your off-hours, unless your business is producing music.

The UPS driver was smiling when he delivered my iPad at midday today. “Have fun,” he said while he matched my grin. “I’ve delivered a lot of these today.”

Once the brown truck rumbled around the corner and the brown box was opened, the iPad demanded that it be linked up with iTunes. I’d read ahead enough to have the 9.1 version ready, and even downloaded and bought some iPad apps the night before. (Apple opened the App Store’s iPad wing on Friday. In anticipation of a first-day rush, I downloaded 27, including some fun as well as the requisite work tools.)

That meant that the bill for the download, including a $14.95 Major Legue Baseball app, was $40-plus including tax. One thing to understand about owning an iPad, or an iPhone: it’s a device that carries a cost of ownership bill, because you will want tools and toys to use on it. The App Store bill arrived this morning with a handy list of the initial apps. As you can see, much of the programs useful to small businesses to keep in touch are either free (news service feeds, social networking) or included.

But Pages and Numbers made their way into my budget, because Apple’s got $9.95 versions of the word processor and spreadsheet. More on those a bit later, but this note: the keyboard included in the multi-touch screen will be just fine for short drafts. Apple has moved up its promised date of delivery for the combo keyboard-dock I ordered March 12. Originally set for April 20, now it’s coming on April 8.

One surprise comes in seeing how smooth the device is: I’ve adopted a knees-bent posture on the sofa to type and enter long data. The third party market will do very well in selling cases for these. I’ll be reviewing some from ColaSac and UNIEA as soon as they get them into our hands.

Apple’s new tablet is called the iPad. The breakthrough device is starting at $499, somehow — a price point nobody predicted, although larger memory capacities (up to 64GB) will be more. The base model is 16GB, still a lot of storage until you start downloading video. The pricing points kick up a lot for access to a 3G network-enabled version of the iPad. Add $130 to be able to access data — and that’s books, magazines, video and movies and TV, music — from anywhere you can get a 3G signal (ATT’s, although there’s no contract required.)

The iPad is supposed to start to ship by late April, one month earlier if you want the more less expensive Wi-Fi models without 3G. There’s no camera of any kind, still or video, something of a disappointment. No ability to video-Skype from an iPad, alas. And you won’t be able to do more than one thing at a time, which will keep the Apple notebooks a protected niche in the mobile product lineup. Cue the screaming from the world of multitasking fans. This is a bit of good news for Palm and its Pre — which employs a screen about one tenth the size of the iPad. Of course, that Pre’s a phone, too. The iPad has a built-in microphone, so it could be used for Skype-style calling.

The Apple.com site has extensive technical specs and a sassy sales video. A lot of what this tablet can do is best observed from Apple’s video. Significant strides have been made in display technology (for reading, and sharing the screen), enabled by Apple’s custom-built chip to drive the whole device.

Shots from today’s rollout showed the scale of the tablet as well as the interface:

Read the rest of this entry »

For a few hours yesterday, a breathless rumor floated up about HP and Microsoft unveiling a tablet mobile device that could steal Apple’s thunder about its upcoming iSlate. The interesting part of the rumor was that it emerged in The New York Times.

The Grey Lady used to be more cautious about its speculations, but the staff flowing in from online jobs have stretched the rumor envelope. The tiny article in the Times‘ Bits blog was written by Ashlee Vance, new to the newspaper’s staff after a long and flashy run at the Web site The Register.

The Microsoft “slate computer” was supposed to be part of MS VP Steve Ballmer’s keynote speech last night. Alas, what some around HP are calling The Courier didn’t debut. Vance wrote great articles for The Register, but the standards for rumors are limbo-low over there.

Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, will unveil a novel take on a slate-type computer during his evening keynote.

The Times only posted the initial rumor article on the Bits blog, not in a printed edition, so the editors only figured they had to post a generic follow-up today on the non-story. The rumor report shows how little can be counted upon for innovation from Microsoft. HP has had its hands on touchscreen technology since 1984, but the last two years it has had serious touch products released. Last night’s cobble was not one of them.

One of the best summaries of What Just Didn’t Happen came in the comments to the Vance article. One reader quoted the line from the article, “So the last thing Mr. Ballmer wants to hold up is a me-too device,” then added

The good news for MS: That didn’t happen.
The bad news for MS: Nothing else happened, either. Read the rest of this entry »

Five places to do a better disk upgrade than inside

Mac accessory supplier iFixIt is selling a solution to add two bigger drives inside the well-sealed-up Mac Mini. The concept means cracking the case on this half-shoebox sized computer and replacing the Superdrive with a faster and bigger disk. No more CD/DVD option after this.

Any plan to crack a Mini for this is crackers. The Mini runs without a fan and manages to keep itself cool enough to keep operating. But the back of that little miracle is warm-plus with just one drive running inside. With a Firewire 800 port on the back, putting another heater of a drive inside asks for trouble that Apple won’t fix.

Upgrading the memory inside is a different, better reason to use a putty knife to get that case open. Apparently once you get 2GB of memory inside, the Mini can recognize 256MB of it for better graphics performance.

But adding that memory happens one of two ways: You buy the $799 unit from Apple in the sealed and warranteed case, or you get inside to beef up the $599 model to 2GB. Just because you or your geeky pal can do something like update memory for you doesn’t mean you should. Saving $200 on the cheaper unit (well, about $175 after you buy the extra memory) could cost you later in warranty. The smaller the Mac, the more chance it will need Apple’s service if something goes awry. It’s close quarters inside there. Read the rest of this entry »

The price tags did not rise, but Mac features advanced this week. Is this a way of discounting Macs? Maybe more to the point, can a small business owner or an independent Mac user call his computers inexpensive? I had a chat with a longtime Mac owner this week who doesn’t think so, but still keeps buying Macs.

Analysts and pundits have estimated that the average price of a Mac dropped 8 percent this week. The 24-inch iMac sells for $300 less than its predecessor, and the only thing a buyer seems to give up is one Firewire 400 port and the numeric keypad portion of the keyboard. In exchange there’s twice the memory, more than double the graphics speed, and a disk twice as big as its predecessor. (I know these numbers well, since I bought the 24-in predecessor in January.)

But it’s still a $1,499 computer, my friend says. You can get PCs like this for a lot less. A lot turns out to be around $200 if you stick to a name brand. How much value that $200 represents is the genuine question. Around here, we buy Macs and use them for five years or more. That’s $40 a year difference, about what you spend on one tankful of gas, no matter how big a car you drive. Read the rest of this entry »