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.

On the numbers: Buying an iPad 2 is a $545 expense, taxes included, at rock bottom. You’ll need to add some kind of external keyboard, an extra cost of $100 if you want one that keeps the iPad portable and light. Onscreen keyboards are good enough, but I write too much for a good-enough keyboard. We’re at a total now of $645, and we don’t have web-everywhere capability yet.

That comes through 3G, and stepping up to an iPad 2 3G will bring our total expense (including keyboard) to $779 with tax. Nothing is simpler than having 3G built into an iPad, but it comes at a cost — you need to decide if you want the Verizon 3G iPad 2, or the ATT model. And when you make this choice, you tie your iPad purchase to a carrier that you might change later.

Now I can walk away from a $199 iPhone if I change my mind about a phone provider. But an iPad 2 expense of $629 plus tax, with some chance I’d want to change my carrier at the end of the contract? Too much. That’s why the Air, plus some HotSpot charges, will win the budget battle here this spring.

I was already at $779 on that 3G iPad, and I own a 3GS iPhone. Yep, it’s ready for an upgrade. With a $219 upgrade to an iPhone 4, I can use a MacBook Air ($949, rock-bottom) in web-everywhere mode, for a total cost of about $1,200. And when I use the Air, I make no compromises that matter. It’s a complete Mac with a battery that lasts at least 5 hours on a single charge. It measures just two inches longer than the iPad, and it weighs less than an iPad plus a keyboard. For this tradeoff, the Air brings the widest range of software for any Apple product designed to travel ultra light.

You will get a different software collection for the Air; the clever array of apps for tablets is replaced by a vast selection for OS X. But that’s going to become a blended list over the next 18 months. What we can expect in the year to come is a strong link between iOS tablet/phone apps and MacBook apps. What you enjoy now on your iPad will have a good chance of appearing on your MacBook, once Lion ships. Apple will take care of some touch experience on the Air.

That last part is a gamble, but probably not a bigger one than spinning the wheel on carrier service, or the prospect of buying a fresh iPad this spring that doesn’t feel much faster than the original model. That’s surely the situation for business apps on an iPad, unless your apps run the range of GarageBand or iMovie.

What this purchase plan doesn’t provide us is a second iPad for the office and home here. That will make our iPad a negotiated computer resource, instead of becoming one dedicated to my lap while my partner Abby gets the hand-me-down iPad. When a more breakthrough model of iPad appears, it will likely make this a two-iPad home office. The Air, which even at rock bottom has four times the memory and four times the storage, looks like the stronger tool for mobile work if you want an upgrade from an iPad this year.

Of course if you don’t own an iPad, the numbers skew toward getting the newest model. Lower initial cost, great array of apps, battery life and mobility that will not be challenged this year. So Apple gets about $1,200 of our new system budget this year — giving us an iPhone plus a mobile computer — instead of $679 for a tablet alone. If your budget has that kind of room, you might make the same choice as we’re making here. New phone, 11-inch MacBook Air — Apple’s stock will stay healthy if some customers make these choices.

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.

At MacWorld’s back page, Gruber chronicles the demise of the non-Intel Mac OS. “The 64-bit Carbon application programming interface died. It’s not that these technologies were no longer useful. It’s that continuing to support them would have slowed the company down. Time spent supporting the old is time not spent building the new.”

In a strident tone straight off his sharp, iOS-cheering blog Daring Fireball, Gruber seems to forsee how Apple might want to pave over the past to save its future.

Apple’s cultural aversion to legacy technology isn’t about a lack of seriousness, or a short companywide attention span. It’s not about being attracted only to the new and shiny. It’s about fear—the fear of being weighed down by excess baggage. Fear that old stuff will slow them down in their pursuit of creating brand-new stuff.

The question isn’t whether iOS has a brighter future than the Mac. There is no doubt: it does. The question is whether the Mac has become “legacy.”

The underlying question is whether Apple is about to become as typical as HP. Because HP has been getting rid of the “excess baggage” of legacy technology for the last 15 years.

Ever since 1984, I have reported on plenty of sound technology re-indexed as Legacy. While the vendors are usually keen to tear this stuff away from their product futures, the customers part with it much more slowly, if at all. HP hasn’t even built an HP 3000 since 2003, but Fortune 100 companies still use the server, even as they plan to migrate. HP dumped on the 3000′s OS futures in favor of Unix, which somehow was tagged as “brand-new stuff” at enterprises in the advent of Open Systems. (Remember those systems? The computers that ran on environments all the same? Turns out we all had a hard time finding those snipes of computing.)

Legacy is an epithet to a customer who’s invested in it, and a millstone around the neck of a company that wants to move onward. The future of the new, if it’s well-built, always looks brighter to a vendor who thrives on churn. I’ve used Macs to run businesses and bought an iPad (tres useful) on Day One. But I hope Apple hasn’t become that kind of scuttle-happy supplier.

If anyone should be careful of wishing for something, it’s the cheering iOS developers and blogging friends. The Mac has become a stable choice of both high-tech developers in their 40s and 50s in the 3000 community, as well as the choice of millions of common users buying Macbook Airs. iOS maturity today is at about the 1993 level of the Mac’s OS, even allowing for a a new-gen rate of evolution. It’s madness to consider that Mac OS is going to the grave, or even whistling past a graveyard, by even 2020. HP figured you’d all be migrated by five years ago. Um, not so much.

At HP, the Unix enterprise business never would have taken hold without the track record of the HP 3000 success. Let’s hope that Apple won’t listen too hard to the iOS cheering and scuttle what made the company a serious force in computing — all because mobile is sexy. The iPad outsells the Macs now, but you can’t accomplish some serious productivity tasks on a 10-inch screen. Try creating something of great scope, or even of modest size.

Back in the days of those mid-80s, I worked at a publishing company where we produced tabloid-size trade newsletter layouts on 9-inch Mac Plus screens. Such torture is no way to grow a market. Apple needs both OS choices; let the HPs of the world cast off good technology. And Gruber gets to this, eventually, in his column.

Long term—say, 10 years out—well, all good things must come to an end. But in the short term, Mac OS X has an essential role in an iOS world: serving as the platform for complex, resource-intensive tasks.

And then the 10 years becomes 15, just like those customers are taking more than a decade to drift away from the 3000. Welcome to the world of computer success, Mr. Jobs. You gotta feed your ancestors, not set them adrift on ice floes.

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 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.

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.

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:

The device will run “just about every iPhone app unmodified,” so it’s got business applications immediately. More than just Maps or Mail, but also every customized app aimed at niches use like medical reporting or scientific testing. Apple will double the pixels on an app that comes up on the iPad.

When considering that ATT is the only 3G provider here at first release, it might as well be considered a Wi-Fi only device– because the only useful data plan for 3G is $30 monthly. If you already use an iPhone, this will be an extra data charge. On the other hand, you might downgrade your phone away from the iPhone, if you can use the 3G experience in the larger format. The summary:

Apple’s entered the processor derby with this product, a reinforcement of its love of control of the entire offering. The iPad runs on an Apple-built 1GHz chip, the A4. That’s a first; Apple has used chips built by other suppliers in all of its devices up to now.

Apple promises 10 hours of battery life on a charge and a 1-month standby time. That would improve on the standby time of the Kindle — you can’t leave that unattached for a month and expect it to come to life. But 10 hours advertised will be less than that in actual use. Steve Jobs demonstrated the product and said he could fly to Tokyo and watch video the entire time. Good luck on using the product with the Internet for 10 hours. We’d bet that in practice the battery will last probably somewhat more than average iPhone use. But compared to a notebook, and the 10 hours sounds good.

McGraw-Hill has said its textbooks will be available on the iPad, and the New York Times is hoping to sell articles through the iTunes store. The whole paper — rendered as a product you purchase for the iPad — looked like this:

But the motherlode, what’s could give it an edge over Amazon’s Kindle, is the included iBooks software and the iBookstore. Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, Hachette, five of the six biggest publishers, are on board. Here’s a shot via Engadget of iBooks:

Most important to the average business user who’s making a mobile device do the work of a Mac is the iPad’s keyboard. Here’s a shot of the onscreen keyboard at the introduction.

as well as the 10-key pad running below while using Apple’s Numbers application. Numbers and Pages (the iWork apps) will run on the iPad. And Apple says that Numbers and Pages are going to cost just $9.99. This is one of the reasons why Apple bothered to create these competitors to Word and Excel. They can control the price of their users’ tools.

But the best business aspect of this new computing device — and this is unlike anything mobile released for serious business use — is a dock that includes a keyboard. You don’t have to use a virtual keyboard on the screen, if you’re at a desk working.

This device is going to generate more than revenue for the hardware part of the solution. A new Apple iBookstore joins the App Store and the iTunes store. Books are going to be more costly at the iBookstore, at $12.99 to $14.99 — about in line with the Sony eReader titles.

If you own an iPod Touch, this iPad is a book-sized version of that device, sans microphone — but with external input options and 3G capability. Considering the Touch’s cost today, the price of $499-$829 for the iPad looks like it might attract more business users to Apple’s multi-touch interface experience.

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.The Microsoft blasts are just a click away in this story:

Just another full-blown Ballmer clownboy fiasco. Courier was vaporware. MS went out of their way to throw their cards down on the table and show that they’ve got NOTHING, and plenty of it. If Jobs shows up to demo a yo-yo, he beats Ballmer now.

Journalists still want to write stories that kill off or condemn with faint praise the interesting mobile device coming from Apple. Predictions are a loser’s bet, but we all want to deliver them.

Far better advance reports on the iSlate are coming from Jon Gruber at his daringfireball.net site. I’ll just echo what he’s forecast — an impressive range of content, sculpted for the Apple device, will be part of the vendor’s rollout solution. You want to read a Conde Nast publication online? Some say those pubs will be ready on Day One of the iSlate rollout.

Gruber is also dead-on about an App Store or iTunes experience for the iSlate. Apple takes 30 cents of every dollar for apps and music. This new mobile tool will be a revenue generator for Apple, and not just from the sales of the hardware.

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.Or get that geek-pal’s number and a backup system for when the Mini gets to be hot stuff. Cooling is an overlooked part of keeping computers happy. You could crank up your air conditioning to Stun, but that would spend the same $175 in the power bill. Seems safer to leave the insides to the Apple on this Mac.

Adding those bigger replacement disks also seems like a lot of work for not much boost to the computer. Agreed: The Mini’s built-in disk is a slowpoke at 4200 RPM. But the replacement disks only run about 30 percent faster while they add that heat. It’s a plastic case, friends. Leave the extra storage outside, attached to one of the five, count ‘em, five ports, USB 2.0 or Firewire 800.

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.Small business buys with an eye toward durability. Consumers, not so much. You can go back to the old bromide of thrift to find a route around this “Macs are expensive” mirage. Some people know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. People will always want a lower cost for whatever they’ve bought. A $72 HP printer has a terrible cost: hours of struggle to get it to work with Windows, plus the flimsy construction that will give out quicker than a more costly model.

My only retort to my friend’s Macs=Expensive slur? “More expensive than PCs, yes. But we don’t have to use Windows on them, do we?” He could only nod in reply. Me, I’ll take any week with an 8 percent price cut in an improved product. That’s something like a Starbucks grande at the price of a tall.