A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way

Lots of rumours this week about an upcoming Apple TV reintroduction.

The partnering with major cable players makes sense to me, that is just the iPhone playbook all over again — pick off one carrier, create a great experience with them, help them gain share, and then the rest of the providers will crack. I’d think that Apple would go after the satellite guys first as a solution with them could be marketed and sold nationally, tho of course the internet side of a satellite solution kind of blows. But whatever, Apple will certainly try to work the iPhone playbook again.

On the device side, maybe Apple will roll out a super-TV with iOS embedded in it, but I kind of wonder about this. Apple is already a central part of my TV experience — I sit on the couch with my iPad and use it to fill voids or augment what I am seeing. And the iPad is the best remote control for a Tivo or Comcast box — just install the respective apps, way easier to navigate the guide. So I kind of wonder why Apple just doesn’t hollow out the TV and STB – let them stay as dumb tuners and a display surface, but all the app smarts migrate to the iPad and the cloud. This is basically what has happened to in-car electronics — nav systems and fancy cd players have been replaced by the phone. I’m not convinced jamming iOS and apps into the TV or STB makes for a better experience — my new TVs have all kinds of internet and streaming junk jammed into them and I never use.

I wonder if the upcoming iPad 3.0 will have more features for augmenting TV viewing. Seems like it should.

My grandfather once told me “The day you stop learning is the day you start dying.” I’ve had a lifelong commitment to education and I am still learning every day. There is so much going on in education, the choices are broader every day, with so many efforts to increase access and lower costs. Some things I’ve been learning about:

• played around this weekend with Apple’s new ibook publisher — Tons of coverage of the event announcing this week, see for instance http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/19/apple-textbook-event/. The goal is noble — allow millions of people to create textbooks, targeting the iPad of course, and dramatically cut the price of textbooks, and the carrying weight of textbooks. The tool works although it is a little buggy yet. I made a first textbook — basically i poured all the portfolio company summaries from the ignition partners website into a textbook format (a tool that would automatically pour CMS content into a textbook would be handy). These textbooks are really just another form of app for the iPad with a dev tool that is substantially friendlier to use than Xcode. If you can author a powerpoint presentation, you can author a textbook. There is nothing super revolutionary about the resultant products but this is a good step towards electronic textbooks.
• signed up for a course at udacity.com — We believe university-level education can be both high quality and low cost. Using the economics of the Internet, we’ve connected some of the greatest teachers to hundreds of thousands of students in almost every country on Earth. Know Labs was founded by three roboticists who believed much of the educational value of their university classes could be offered online for very low cost. A few weeks later, over 160,000 students in more than 190 countries enrolled in our first class, “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence.” The class was twice profiled by the New York Times and also by other news media. Now we’re a growing team of educators and engineers, on a mission to change the future of education.
• thinking about taking a course at Digipen as well. They’ve done great work, the team for Portal came out of Digipen.
• at Wolf’s advice, learning about the Dalton research group at the UW. A traditional university setting but exciting content.

My brain’s a little tired but excited about the opportunities!

I’m not the only one — Apple forum discussion on bounce.

OK I realize it wasn’t actually that effective in stopping unwanted email, but I enjoyed using it as a kind of “f%^* you” message to certain senders. I got an emotional lift from hitting that button.

So I don’t really get iCloud storage yet, and Photostream doesn’t really accomodate all my DSLR pictures well. So rather than just whine about what I don’t have, what do I really want?

First — I have a 203G (gigabyte) Aperture library today, that is where my primary photo storage is. Digging into this a little:

• 54G is thumbnails, previews, cache of various sorts. 27G of thumbnails alone! Impressive use of disk space, Aperture. Clearly the team has embraced the idea that disk space is cheap and is getting cheaper. There are probably some settings I could tweak to trim the size of all this at the cost of performance, but whatever, disk space IS cheap, 30% overhead is probably not a ridiculous design objective. This is all derived data tho and could be trimmed, dropped, whatever, as I think about cloud storage.
• My masters are 149G. A mix of RAW and JPG depending on which camera/scanner I used and how long ago I took — tending towards more RAW over time.
  • 19G from this year
  • 34G from 2010
  • 25G from 2009
  • 71G from earlier years.

Lets assume I continue to take pictures at the last 3 year average rate for some time, that is about 25gig of new photos every year, not accounting for inflation in photo size due to better quality capture chips, light field cameras, etc. OK so you probably have to assume some growth in that 25gig of new storage a year.

Cloud storage of photos — is it important? Hugely so, if my house is burning down, I do not want to be running back in to save a hard disk, photos are emotionally very important. And I do NOT want to have to pick and choose which photos I store in the cloud — too many photos, not enough time, I just want the entire set up in the cloud. I really just want my entire Aperture (and iPhoto) collection replicated to the cloud automagically. And then I need some modest access control features on the folders in the cloud so that I can share selected photo sets with family members, etc.

So I want a cloud storage solution that gives me ~200gig of storage today at a reasonable price, and if I think about the next couple years, a clear path to 300-400gig. And with good web access with some security. What are my choices today?

• iCloud doesn’t begin to work. Aperture doesn’t really talk to it except for Photostream. The max storage I can buy is 55gig. There are no access controls. Doesn’t work along almost every dimension.
• Dropbox. I can get 100G for $240 a year with a nice web interface and some sharing controls. I could even get the team license, store up to 350G, but for $795 a year. If I had this, I could just move my Aperture library into my dropbox folder and voila, it would be in the cloud, on my other machines, etc. However — the Aperture library folder is not really meant to be browsed by humans, the masters are chopped up into some funky balanced tree of directories. Seems like Aperture needs to learn how to work with shared storage. But I could get everything in dropbox, with a very easy UI for me, but at a high price, and probably the ability to share folders with family members would be hard to realize.
• Box.net. Well I get 50G free with their iPad offer, so they pretty much trump iCloud. I could get up to 500G in a business plan for $180/year per user. Similar pros and cons as with Dropbox, but pricing seems better.
• Smugmug. This is what I use today. There is an Aperture plugin, I can save from Aperture. The bad part about this is that it is not automagic — I have to intentionally move folders up there, not happy about that. But — unlimited storage, at $40-150 per year for jpg, some extra cost but still cheap if you want RAW. A great interface for sharing, completely customizable, printing integration, etc.

For now …. Smugmug is the way to go, but as storage costs drop, I can see flipping to box.net or dropbox at some point. I’d give up some of smugmug’s great interface for admin control but that is overkill for me anyway. If Apple made this all work natively in Aperture at a competitive cost, that would be fine too. For people with a more modest set of photos, the Box.net 50G free offer for iPad/iPhone users seems like an awesome option.

Settings…general…keyboard…shortcuts. Love these, will save me infinite amount of typing. Completing web forms, email, everywhere.

But why oh why aren’t these iCloud enabled? I want the same exact shortcuts on my iPad, iPhone, and Mac. And I don’t want to have to re-enter them on each device. The lack of multiple device support is exactly why I’ve given up on so many other text expanders over time, if I can’t depend on text expansion working the same way on all my devices, then it just isn’t that useful.

Here’s hoping that that Apple fixes this in a future release.

I’m struggling to understand why I would ever use iCloud storage. After a couple days of tinkering, I have two sets of data in iCloud — device backups, and Pages/Keynote docs.

• I really don’t get the value of device backups. My apps are all recoverable from the iTunes store. I use primarily apps like Evernote that already store their data in the cloud so there is minimal non-replicated data on my iPhone and iPad. Music isn’t backed up, I will need iTunes Match for that some day. My photos aren’t backed up in iCloud, that is not something that is offered at all (and besides the photos on my device are a fraction of my photo content, I use smugmug and other paid services to back up all my photos). So what exactly is in these device backups that iCloud stores? and why is this substantially better than backups stored on my Mac — when will I ever use these backups? In sum — I’ve been explicit about choosing apps and configuring apps so that all my valuable data and state info is replicated and in the cloud, so that I don’t care if I lose a device (and can use multiple devices). So why should I care about device backups?

• The other files in my iCloud storage are docs. I have Pages and Keynote docs in iCloud from my iPad. If I was purely a Mac person, and didn’t collaborate at all with people in my office and business partners who use Office, then maybe I could just use Pages/Keynote on the Mac, and the iCloud doc storage might seem pretty simple. But I use a PC sometimes to edit my docs. And so I use Office so that I can work on my Mac or PC. And so that I can, with no fidelity loss, work with my colleagues on docs they have created in Office. I guess I could still move these docs in and out of iCloud storage, but if I am going to go to the trouble of moving docs around, why don’t I just move them into box.net or dropbox? They both have great iPad and iPhone interfaces, they work with Pages/Keynote on the iPad, I get 50G free on box.net, they both offer sharing options, I can create folders in them to organize my docs and control my sharing (Seriously, iCloud, no folders??), they let me store any kind of doc, they have great Mac/PC clients so that I can sync my collection with local folders easily, etc etc. If iCloud didn’t have the Apple brand, we would all be laughing at it.

• iCloud claims to store your music but practically doesn’t. I have 16,000 songs, 88G of music, in my iTunes library (and flac versions of all this but not in iTunes). 99% of it is from ripped CDs or purchased in mp3 format outside of iTunes. None of which iCloud handles, I have to wait for iTunes Match.

• iCloud stores your photostream but I’ve already talked about why this isn’t very useful to me.

• I don’t care about mail/calendar/contact backup as all mine is already stored on my Exchange server or Gmail server.

So iCloud storage is substantially worse than leading competitive alternatives for document storage; its only unique benefit is device backup, which I can’t figure out why I’d use; and it’s other features don’t really solve any problems. I am sure Apple will improve iCloud over time but as a storage solution it is underwhelming. Am I missing something? Does anyone find iCloud storage to be hugely helpful?

OK like the rest of the working world I spent hours yesterday trying to upgrade my iPhone4 and iPad2 to iOS5. About a dozen retries for the phone, maybe half that for the iPad, and I finally got there. Not a great experience but no harm done, just a half day of my life wasted that I will never get back, Apple.

So now what? Well my iPhone 4 seems a little zippier but I suspect that is largely due to grinding the old OS off and laying down a bright new clean install. I like the tabs in the Safari. The Newstand seems like an utter waste and sadly cannot be off hidden in an “Utter Waste” folder, thanks Apple. Notifications are cleaner. Renaming the iPod app to Music is good.

and iCloud? Well this is just confusing. Settings spewed all over the control panel — in the iCloud section, but also in the mail/contacts/calendar section, the photos section, the notes section, the store section. Much discussion online about how to make this all work with exchange and how it does or doesn’t work with outlook — for instance http://daggle.com/outlook-icloud-google-calendar-sync-2748. I’ve no idea where things are actually stored in the cloud — the photostream for instance that I have turned on, where is it, can I go see it at a URL? Or Notes — they are associated with an account now, my gmail account. So when I create a new note does it go somewhere in the cloud? Where? The only thing that my cloud control panel lists as being stored is a backup of my phone — why exactly do I want to do this, I never had this in the cloud before, why do I want it in the cloud now?

The design compromises of iCloud — storage limits, and trying to work with a bunch of existing cloud services — seem to have led to a really fractured, incomplete experience. Not all my stuff is in the cloud, what is in the cloud is spewed across many services, and I don’t really know where anything is. Yay.

UPDATE: Ok, new Notes show up in a gmail folder named Notes. Which seems strange, why would I want my notes there? And not in Google Docs or Dropbox or Evernote or … ?

Nice writeup of Apple’s manufacturing/supply advantage vs the PC OEMs. Reminds me very much of the way Honda and Toyota crushed the American car manufacturers in the 70′s and 80′s — GM in particular had overly complex product lines, cars with a gajillion options. Honda came in with a simple model, no options, and great great quality, and just crushed GM in core markets. Product line complexity comes at a huge cost, Apple is playing this hand well.

By the time I was a junior at Ohio State, I knew that a) i was fascinated with personal computers, and that b) despite my electrical engineering education, I did not actually want to be an engineer. So I was wondering what to do post-college, and a very good friend of the family who was CEO of a tech company in Los Gatos hosted me for a week visit. He set up interviews for me with Bob Noyce, Gene Amdahl, Steve Jobs, and several other notables. The trip was an eye-opener for a kid from Ohio — the west coast was an awakening, and these guys were heroes to me. I remember Steve challenging me very directly on my plans — I was a bit conservative and a conformist, I probably seemed pretty dull to him, but I certainly got a lot out of the visit, I was motivated to raise my sights higher.

About the same time I remember reading the Byte Smalltalk issue and was entranced, my view of computing dramatically expanded.

A few years later I scrimped to buy the first Mac on the first day it was available to students, and was enthralled.

My career took zigs and zags and I never met Steve again or worked at Apple, but my meeting with him and my engagement with his products certainly set my direction.

Wishing him the best.

Some interesting commentary on Google’s business model by Gruber — a total Apple fan, doesn’t view ads as inherently evil, but says you need to be very respectful of your users. And referring to an original article by Aaron Swartz who says you can’t make things worse for users just to make money.

I don’t know what evil is when applied to technology business models. I do know that I feel very comfortable with my Apple transactions — they ask me for a lot of money, in return they give me a product that is mine to own completely. They give me the option of signing up for services for more money, services where they keep data about me, but it is up to me. It feels like a transparent and respectful model. Similarly, I feel good about my Microsoft transactions — they ask me for money, in return I get a software or hardware product that is mine to do what I want with (excluding Bing which I rarely use, and excluding some of their new online service offerings).

I feel somewhat less good about my Google relationship. I do like and use their products. But the fact that they are “free” is bothering, I know that Google is making money off me somehow, but there is very little transparency around it. Who is looking at my data, what are they paying for it, are there certain things I do that are very high value, are there people using info about me that I would rather not, ?

I don’t know any of this and it makes me kind of queasy. Enough to abandon products that are actually useful? Well not yet — and for search,it is not like there are alternatives that are more respectful of me. But I can’t imagine ever having the kind of respect for and attachment to Google products that I have to products from companies with more straightforward business models.

I am fortunate to own two very nice cars, a Porsche Cayenne and an Audi S6. They are both great pieces of engineering, they drive well, they are comfortable, I get a great amount of utility out of them. I have been just as happy with less expensive cars, but these are great cars.

The Audi has a beast of a powertrain, handles very well, and the interior controls and layout are very good. Out of the many OEM and aftermarket GPS systems I have used, it is in the top quartile of usability, tho a touch screen would be nice. The iPod integration is reasonably well done though could make better use of the screen in the dash. The seats are awesome. Overall a super nice car.

The Cayenne also drives well, the interior finish levels are very nice. The interior control layout is a bit of a disaster, clearly the A-Team engineers work on powertrain and suspension, and leave controls to summer interns or MBAs (I’ve been both so I’m allowed some latitude…). But still a very nice car.

Both the cars have interior audio alerts to make the driver aware of important conditions and faults. What would you imagine the shrillest, loudest alarm is for? I could imagine a lot of things that demand my immediate attention. An imminent collision. Backing into an object. Brake system failure. Maybe even the traction control system engaging, indicating unsafe driving surfaces or unsafe driving. Maybe even driving at night without headlights on. All these conditions are unsafe and could result in injury to myself or others. I could make a case for all of them to result in the loudest, shrillest interior alarm.

The Audi has excellent interior controls so of course the loudest, shrillest interior alarm is used to indicate that a rear light has failed. Not necessarily the rear brakelight, but any rear light — turn signal, operating light, brakelight. And the alarm sounds every time you start the car and cannot be silenced. And I am not sure exactly what the “shrill” scale is, but this sound is 3x shriller than any other alarm in the car.

The Cayenne is not to be outdone though! The shrillest alarm by far is used to let you know, after you turn off the car, that you have left your turn signal on. Not that the light is actually lit or visible, but the control arm on the steering wheel stalk is in the “on” position and damn it, that is just wrong. Of course, given the general goofiness of the Cayenne interior (the worst GPS ever, cup holders the size of thimbles, two control screens with functions randomly split between), this is to be expected.

OK, no one should feel sorry for me, these are two great cars, but Audi and Porsche — if you are going to spend this much care designing these cars, can’t you spend a few minutes getting this right?

My thoughts turned to the importance of design this morning on the news of Steve Jobs’ leave of absence, here is hoping he is well soon, the world needs more people who care obsessively about the details of design.

• Poor Halo play prompts stabbing threat. Doesn’t seem unreasonable. I’ve heard campers threatened with worse.
• How Secure Is My Password. No idea how accurate, but fun. 17 thousand years for my typical password.
• Rich on photobooks. I just always use the default in Aperture but perhaps I should branch out.
• AR.Drone. Why don’t I have one of these yet.
• Declining energy quality as recession cause. An interesting way to look at things. Not sure it actually makes sense tho.
• Now you can swap useless Amex reward points for useless Zynga crap.(TechCrunch)
• Snoopy themed Windows tablet. Take that, Apple.
• Spiders on Drugs(Design+Milk). We are asking for some serious payback from spider nation some day.
• Umpteenth article on the death of cable TV(TechCrunch), yawn. Until I can watch HD live sports without stuttering I am captive to cable/dish. Going to be a while.
• Charles on breaking up MSFT. Good as always.
• Habitable planet found?
• Languages you’ve never heard of(Gadgetopia). In the future, we will all have our very own programming language.
• Topologist suggests new form of matter. For most of our history we’ve used the forms of matter that nature gave us. It is interesting to observe and think about what we can create as we gain mastery over atomic organization.
• One man’s indictment of iTunes. The thing is a giant hairball of software.
• Exercise and aging. Crap I need to get after it.
• Show Me What’s Wrong. Super useful.
• User experience of F1 telemetry. Always impressed with the amount of money spent on racing.
• MacPaint and MacDraw source code. Nostalgia.

So here is my first week of good and bad apps, I have spent way too much trying things out. My motto — “Buying iPad apps so you don’t have to!”

These look good and I actually use them:

• iAnnotate. As previously discussed, the user interface is byzantine, but it works largely as promised — i’ve read and annotated close to 100 pdfs now. One commentor says it dies on large PDFs so not perfect yet.
• WordPress. Really a much better interface than the iPhone version. It is not bugfree, a lot of people including me are having problems with copy/paste. But nice.
• Evernote. Solid effort, works well.
• Wolfram Alpha. Now that the price is no longer insane, this is a great app to have. I wish it failed a little more noisily when the wifi connection was lost, but still good.
• Pages. Nice looking and adequately featured.
• Kayak. Nice extension of iPhone app.
• Tweetdeck. I find the portrait display to be a little odd but in landscape mode does a nice job of using screen space.
• Weather HD. Doesn’t display nearly enough forecast data, but it is beautiful. The night scenes make me feel like I am getting forecasts for a moon of Jupiter.
• NPR. I’m not a major NPR junkie but a lot of useful info in here.
• Bloomberg. Don’t know if this is the best stock app but it is free!
• Soundhound. Nice looking and faster than Shazam.
• Minigore HD. Beautiful, my timewaster of choice on the iPad.
• Statsmate HD. Might all be available in Wolfram Alpha but I find this useful as a way to quickly get stat table info.
• Apple’s calendar app. It looks beautiful.

Close but…

• Papers. I really really wanted this to work but I cannot get Web of Science access to work via UW proxy. Sigh.
• Kindle and iBooks. Both look fine and I am glad I have them, but I will still do most of my reading on the Kindle, better battery life and easier on the eyes and lighter.
• Apple’s mail app. OK it works and in landscape mode has a nice message list, but not much else featurewise.
• Marvel. Beautiful and I could see using this, but difficult to figure out what to buy/try.
• Crosswords. Looks nice but fatally fatally fatally flawed. Won’t download the NYTimes daily puzzle here on the west coast at 7pm the previous evening when it is available. Pisses me off. I will stay with 2 Across even tho it is lo-res because it downloads at the right time.

Kind of a waste:

• Apple’s Contacts and Maps apps. All this new screen space and nothing notable feature wise. Yawn.
• The iPad store. I use this a lot but boy does it need work. With a kajillion apps, it is hard to find what you want, hard to remember what you’ve already mentally discarded, etc.
• Numbers. Does not have enough spreadsheet functionality to be useful.
• USA Today. No depth.
• Twitterific. All this screen space and I get one lame list.

Never used — what does that say?

• Apple’s iPod and iTunes apps. I just don’t use this as a music consumption device.
• Apple’s Notes app. This one is so lame compared to so many of the other billion alternatives.

No shows: Facebook, Byline, Tripit, RTM, Echofon

Hoisted from the comments:

For all the great things on the iPad, file management is currently a disaster. I’ve got two different apps that can connect to my ftp server and my iDisk, but neither one can get the downloaded documents to Pages or iAnnotate. I have to use iwork.com to get files into Pages, and the desktop app for iAnnotate. If we can’t have a complete Finder on the iPad, we at least need a set of common folders that can be shared between applications.

Boy is this dead right. I can use Safari/Web Of Science or Papers on the iPad to find journal papers, but I can’t download them to the iPad and then use them with iAnnotate — I have to go to my desktop, download them, and sync them. I can comment on papers with iAnnotate, but I can’t important the comments into a Pages doc — I have to sync the annotated PDF back to the desktop, copy comments over to a doc, and then sync that back with iTunes to edit on the iPad with Pages. Geez even MS-DOS 1.0 had shared file storage.

This is way more important to me than multitasking. And in fact, I’m not even sure I care about multitasking without this.

How bad would it be to be a Nook pusher right now? The Kindle has its adherents, the iPad is out there, why would anyone buy a Nook? I have to think that B&N is going to bail on this strategy at some point.

Amazon on the other hand I think is playing its hand well. At the end of the day, I doubt that Amazon cares that much about maintaining control over the Kindle hardware — it was just a vehicle for jumpstarting ebook sales. If people prefer to consume ebooks on phones or iPads or PCs or whatever, Amazon is there with the Kindle software and nice sync’ing of state across all your bookreading devices. I’d expect to see them continue to invest in the software and service asset, and it wouldn’t shock me if they sold the Kindle asset to some hardware company at some point.

Apple faces an interesting conundrum — why would you buy a book in the Apple store which can only be read on the iPad, when you could just as easily buy it in the Kindle store and read it in a dozen places?

Another thought — so many people look at the Kindle vs iPad battle as if it is some head-to-head winner-take-all cagematch. In fact tho, as the cost of electronics keeps driving down to zero, I’d suspect that rather than one unified device in my bag, I’ll have many smart devices all sync’ing to shared data in the cloud. Magazines, books, and newspapers all coexisted just fine in the old world, I carried them all in my bag. No reason why I won’t carry several different smart devices in my bag with different form factors and benefits. As long as they all sync data to the cloud, I’ll be happy (again, nice job Amazon).

Yesterday was a brutal technology day. First, I wedged my Kindle between my rear and a chair and heard a nasty “crack”. My Kindle display has a nice shattery image on it permanently now. Sad. I had to open a paper book last night. New Kindle arrived today (thanks to Amazon Fresh trucks), and because the content is all stored at Amazon, I had my full library back working in less than a day. It sucks that e-readers are fragile (well I do weigh >200 lbs so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at the Kindle’s failure, it is not sold as a stadium chair), but back and running fast.

Second, the battery failed on one of our Macbooks which is about 3 years old. But of course Apple replaced for free at the Genius bar. Because they replaced the motherboard a year ago under some dubious warranty claim after we dropped the machine, again for no charge. Really, why would a regular human buy a machine anywhere else?

Third — every week, I update a task list document on Google Docs for a mission-critical subcontractor we use, print/save as PDF, and email to the sub. It is not a complex doc but it does need to be right. Last night Google Docs kept failing during the PDF save process (which is also how to print from Google Docs, so this is a pretty important function). After many tries it worked and I forwarded the downloaded PDF to my sub without examining it. Disaster — the PDF was for the version of the task list from January 24! The sub got all the wrong materials and did the wrong things totally, I had to scramble today to patch things back up.

I use the intrinsic functions in google docs to datestamp my doc, and the delivered PDF had the january 24 datestamp in it, and the content in the pdf is completely different than what is in my current doc on google docs, and i assume is a faithful representation of the state of the doc on january 24. how did google deliver me this pdf? My best guess is that some part of the PDF rendering process failed badly in the Google server farm, and they restored from some earlier version, and the restore picked up old queued files. I really have no idea how they could have delivered a two month old PDF rendering of my doc.

Corruption of data and inability to faithfully print documents are pretty damning problems for an office suite. I really can’t imagine continue to using Google docs with this class of problem. I haven’t bothered to file a bug with google yet because, well, delivering a product with this level of data corruption for basic scenarios is pretty much a deal breaker for me.

Commendations to Apple and Amazon for creating systems and businesses that are incredibly customer-focused, even when products fail. The Google Docs failure may be an isolated incident, but I do wonder if Google has this same level of customer focus.

Ok well the day arrived. I can’t quite figure out what the ipad is for. I still need to carry my iPhone for phone calls. I still need to carry my MacBook Pro for real software — Matlab, Mathematica, Aperture, LaTEX-heavy docs. I’ll still carry the Kindle for its awesome battery life. Would I carry the iPad as well??? Or are there occasional trips where I’d carry instead of the MacBook Pro?

Or maybe it is for the couch at home. But usually I again need to run real software. So what is this thing for?

So I only ordered one. 

Well of course I will buy one because I am a geek. That said I am unconvinced.

• I still have to carry my iPhone around because I need to make calls. Actually the iPad could free me to switch to a better phone/carrier without having to lose my apps…
• I still have to carry my MacBook around. I use real software, Aperture and MatLab and Mathematica and Photoshop and Word. With big datasets, complicated docs, etc. The limited iPad apps don’t cut it.
• So am I really going to carry around another largish device? Hmm.
• I do carry the Kindle2 around but it is a lot smaller and I get 2-3 weeks of battery life. That is the beauty of a point device.

So I am not really sure what the iPad does for me. But I am sure I will try.

All the “Amazon is dead” talk I find misguided. A, if you are a heavy book reader, the iPad is not superior — battery life, library size, readability are all Kindle advantages. B, Amazon is not stupid, you can read Kindle books on the iPad. C, the Amazon store may not be as cute as Apple’s book thing but it is way more functional. Amazon will be fine even if the Kindle hardware fades away.

Apple’s quarter (NYTimes): “We’re making our most innovative products ever and our customers are responding”…”unexpectedly strong sales of Macintosh computers and a surge in iPhone purchases pushed Apple’s profit up 15 percent in the third quarter”…”PC shipments for the industry fell 3 to 5 percent over the last three months. But Apple said it sold 2.6 million Macs in the quarter, up about 18 percent from the 2.2 million it sold in the previous quarter”…”overall gross profit margin grew to 36.3 percent, from 34.8 percent in the year-ago quarter”…”Revenue rose to $8.34 billion, from $7.46 billion last year”.

MSFT’s quarter (NYTimes): “has been humbled, both by the recession and by problems of its own making”…”Year-over-year revenue and full-year sales of Microsoft’s flagship Windows software dropped for the first time”…”29 percent drop in net income”…”17 percent drop in quarterly revenue”…”warned that people should not expect a major bounce-back in technology spending when the economy recovers.”

Hmm. Apparently the economic downturn is worse among PC buyers than among non-PC buyers.

Racing the Beam: How Atari 2600′s Crazy Hardware Changed Game Design | Game | Life from Wired.com. I remember also the goofy Apple ][ graphics. Yet both systems had tons of great games — these tight and arbitrary resource limits pushed programmers to become really inventive. A good lesson in many walks of life.