EGOPOLY

OK, I’ve had a few days to think about the iPad. First, I must have one. But that was pretty much a given for me even before I saw it.

What is with the name?

I suppose at some level, it was the inevitable name. It’s the name they had to go with. It really explains what it is in 4 characters: if you know what an iPod is (who doesn’t, with 250,000,000 sold?) and if you know what a pad (of paper) is, you get it right away.

But I am so sick if the iWhatever branding thing, I’m always hoping they’ll start to move away from it. I guess not. I’ll get over it, and I suppose everyone else will too.

This is the part where I say how smart I am.

Even though I got only 8 points out of 15 on my self-imposed prediction test, I’m going to congratulate myself for being exactly right on the main points: it’s a giant iPod running iPhone OS with 3G. Having instant access for iPad users to all the zillions of iPhone apps in the app store is such an obvious win.

Instant Backlash, seriously?

The storm of ‘meh’ from the interwebs is crazy.

First of all, after slashdot’s infamous ‘meh’ of the original iPod in 2001, you’d think people would think a little bit more before pronouncing a new Apple gadget junk. Or any gadget for that matter: until you’ve tried one in your hands, you really should just shut up and think for a while first. One thing I’ve noticed is that in all the commentary I’ve read this week, all the ’so what’ stuff is from people who were not at the launch, who did not get to play with the device in their own hands. For the folks who were lucky enough to try one, the reaction seems to range between journalistic restraint (gosh I love this thing, but I need to talk about a few meaningless flaws so I sound objective) to outright gushing (which is how I expect I would react if I had the chance to play with one.)

Second of all, and more important: the critics and pundits who are proclaiming ‘big deal, nothing to see here’ couldn’t be more wrong. This is a watershed event in information technology, you morons. It’s like NCSA Mosaic. It’s less obvious because Mosaic opened a new age in IT because it exposed millions of people to something they hadn’t known about: the Web. In the case of the iPad, it’s a little different: there’s no clear ‘new’ concrete thing that is being introduced to the world. But it’s there, and it’s going to change everything.

The Big Deal

The huge thing, that most technology writer people just can’t seem to get, is that most people, normal, non-nerd, non-techy, non-computer-hobbyist people are not like them. They don’t like computers. They can use a web browser, they can mostly use word processors, though don’t understand 95% of the functionality of them. They really don’t even think about all the backup, network configuration, and security stuff, except as some vague, scary and complex thing that is rather worrisome.

They don’t like to get new computers, because it takes forever to transfer their stuff over to it, and the OS is probably different. All the menus have changed and moved around. And after they start using the new computer, some stuff won’t be the same, and they will have no idea why, or how to fix it.

For a lot of normal people, and I’m talking about smart people here, lawyers and doctors and writers, they don’t even really get the paradigms that programmers have tried to create for them: windows and folders and files and processes. It’s all just pictures on a screen, and these windows and docks and workspaces are just confusing and complicated. They really could care less.

So, when you read people writing, “The iPad sucks. My netbook does everything I need, is cheaper, and what’s more I can do more things: multi-task; run a terminal; write programs; etc,” you can be pretty sure they are one of the geeks. The iPad is not made for them. They are 5% of the population. Apple, since 2001, has been trying to come up with products that please the other 95% of the people. (Granted, they may have been trying to serve the larger side of the population since 1984, but since 2001, with the iPod, they’ve been succeeding better than anyone ever has.)

The revolution that is starting with the iPad is this: replace the general purpose computer as the information tool for most people with a more automatic solution. It’s like John Gruber recently said: replacing manual transmissions with automatic transmissions. For most people, the iPad is all they will need for news, entertainment, communications and authoring.

The era of computers, as boxes with screens and keyboards, sold in Best Buy for the mass market is ending. People will flock to iPad-like devices, from Apple, and probably from Motorola and HTC and Archos.

Various Red Herrings

They are becoming very tiresome. These are flaws that critics will point to in the iPad, the same ones they have been whining about since the iPhone. I can’t run two third-party programs at once; I can’t install my own system extension for keyboard macros; I can’t replace the battery; I can’t run Emacs. Yes, those things are all true. But guess what? That’s what your notebook or desktop computer is for. If you need to do those things, you need a computer. The iPad is not replacing your computer for you.

Most people, the vast majority of people, don’t even need to do these things. And if they sort of would like to sometimes, guess what: given the choice of the scary headache of maintaining a computer vs. having a simple magic device, they’d happily go with the magic.

The only legitimate complaint I’ve heard that is a use case for regular people is this: I can’t listen to Pandora while I read my email or do other things on the iPhone/iPod/iPad. Yes, there are a few things, a very few use cases where running a background task is actually useful for a lot of people. If that’s a dealbreaker, then an iPad isn’t for you. Maybe Apple will license Pandora into the iPod app; maybe they will actually allow users to designate a limited number of apps to be allow to run in the background. But don’t hold your breath.

The iPad’s Flaw

The gaping hole in my whole thesis is this: you actually need a computer to own an iPad. So this great freedom I’m going on about, about being free from the tyranny of the traditional computer is just so much bullshit. You still need a computer so you can back up all the settings and movies and music you’ve loaded onto your iPad.

Apple needs to build some infrastructure so that you don’t need a Mac to support your iPad. This may take the form of automatic online backup and sync (to me.com), or maybe some kind of sync to a time capsule/airport at home. Android phones, at least as of 2.x seem to have this: when I switched from my Verizon Droid to my T-Mobile Nexus One, I did nothing but sign in with my google account and all my settings, accounts and apps I had downloaded appeared on the new phone in a minute or two. I lost nothing, I didn’t even have to think about it. The iPad will have to work this way for the transition to pad computing to be complete. I’m fairly certain Apple is well aware of this.

My experience with the Nexus One leaves me greatly encouraged that Google totally understands the revolution that is coming with the advent of the iPad. In fact, given my computerless transition from Droid to Nexus One, I’d say they are already perfectly poised to release a pad computer that needs no box computer to support it.

Can you hear me now?

If you didn’t realize where things were headed when the iPhone, the iPod touch and the various Android phones came out, the iPad is your big wake-up call. Everything is about to change in a huge way. Wake up.

Updates: the part where I link to articles that support my position and ignore others

Frasier Speirs – Future Shock

Popular Science – Future

John Gruber – Automatic Transmission

Steven Frank – New world vs. old world

Byte Cellar – Guaranteed Future

Alex Payne – Conflicted but totally sees what’s coming.

Fabrizio Capobianco – iPad scorecard

Ethan Nicholas – My Mom’s next computer

Dan Moren – Third Revolution

All the professional writers are making their predictions and/or wish lists for what Apple tablet/iSlate/iPad/Magic Muffin will be and do. So here are my amateur guesses:

1. It will essentially be a larger iPod touch: mostly a large glass multi-touch screen running multi-touch OS, the same OS as the iPod and iPhone. Not Mac OS X, nor something in between that and the iPhone OS. CORRECT

2. It will have a single camera, mounted on the front/screen side. For video iChat. It will not have a camera on the back of the device. Something that is 4X larger than an iPod would be an awkward camera. WRONG

3. It will have Wifi, bluetooth and some kind of 3G support. The 3G vendor will not be ATT. It will be Sprint or Verizon. You’ll need to sign up for a contract to get the discounted price. Right on 3G, wrong on ATT

4. The discounted price will be $499. The full price with no contract will be $799. NAILED IT

5. I wish, wish, wish it would have an OLED screen. But I don’t think it will. Update 2010-01-11: so I got a Nexus One. The OLED screen on that is so beautiful, it makes the iPhone screen look very rusty by comparison. Clearly, it’s also economically viable since the Nexus One price isn’t too far off the iPhone price. So I’m thinking OLED is a real possibility on the table, especially given the battery life benefit. WRONG

6. It will be about the thickness of the current iPhone 3gs. WRONG

7. It will have a brushed aluminum metal back, like the new iMac. The apple logo on the back will be plastic, and will be the antennae location (like new iMacs). This is a completely random guess, and I’d be just as happy with a black plastic back like the iPhone. YES NAILED IT!

8. It will have an integrated speaker, and microphone. The only inputs/outputs will be dual headphone jacks (so you can watch a movie with your friend on a plane) and an iPod dock connector. 1/2 WRONG No dual jacks

9. It will have the same physical buttons as the iPod: power/sleep; home button; volume NAILED IT

10. There will be two models: 64GB and 128GB. The 128GB unit will be $649/$949. WRONG: models are 16/32/64

11. It will have an ARM processor, not a netbook-style x86 chip. Battery life, people. WRONG: Apple processor

12. It will have a fixed, non-user-replaceable battery. Of course, duh. EASY

13. software: will include iChat, so you can video chat with your friends who are on macs or on other apply tablets.WRONG, given lack of camera

14. software: there will be some kind of Apple ereader with itunes store support for buying content. Amazon will also offer a scaled-up version of kindle reader for the larger screen.CORRECT; amazon kindle app already works on iPhone, so will work on iPad

15. size: about the same total dimensions as the Kindle, but it will be almost all screen. I guess that makes the screen about 9″ to 10″. CORRECT

It took me a long time to figure out why anyone would really want a giant iPod like this. But watching how people consume applications in the App Store, I think I’ve figured it out. People, normal people, not nerds like me, hate computers. HATE them. They are mystified by basic concepts like files and applications and processes.

The dead-simple iPhone model is this: your magic candy bar does one thing at a time, whatever it is you want it to do. You can add more things to it for one or two dollars, sometimes more. You don’t have to install backup software, anti-virus. You don’t have to decide which mail program to use. It does what you want it to do, and you don’t need any of that nerdy computer bullshit to use it.

A large iPod, then, does all those ‘computer’ tasks that work better on a larger screen, but don’t require a mouse and keyboard. Essentially, many small information and entertainment ‘tasks’ that you don’t do all day long. Computers as we use them and think of them today are destined to be work devices, used by programmers, scientists, financial workers, artists, designers, architects, doctors, accountants, lawyers to do their actual work. When they go home, when they want to check the weather, watch a movie, read a book, play a game, they will pull out their little magic mirror. The conventional computer as an entertainment platform, as a budding replacement for TV, as a mass-market consumer electronics item will have been a short-lived phenomenon, from the 1990s to the 2010s.

I’ll update this post later with my score. If I get over 50%, I should be a professional.

Update: here is what John Gruber thinks, and John Siracusa. They are both very clever fellows, and it seems to me that their predictions mostly match mine. Which makes me say: woo hoo! yeah, baby, we’re on to something!

Update: more rumours that support my guessing: http://gizmodo.com/5437479/google-china-ex+president-says-apple-tablet-is-a-101+inch-iphone-with-webcam

Update (Jan 11, 2010): Orange exec giving more weight to my front-video camera prediction.

Update (Jan 21, 2010)): More intelligent analysis that totally supports my ideas. From Gizmodo.

Paul Graham’s recent essay, Apple’s Mistake is a very clear, and I think, fair description of what’s gone totally wrong with the App Store and the associated review process.

The absurdly reductionist summary is: “unless Apple pays attention to what programmers think, the iPhone as a platform will wither and die.” How I hope Apple takes that argument to heart! But the bitter, cranky realist in me says it’s probably not going to happen. Nor do I think Apple will suffer much (noticeably) if they continue on their current path.

I’ve had an iPhone since the second day you could buy them. I love the device, as I have not loved any other gadget. And this is what I believe breaks Paul’s argument: the device, without any apps at all, is so much better than anything else out there, I would not seriously consider switching to some other phone. I suspect a lot of people, most people in fact, who care not a whit of the pain and suffering of programmers to labor to get their wares into Apple’s store, who like the simplicity and elegance of the iPhone would behave the same way.

I actually have two phones. I’ve been carrying a Motorola Droid for about two weeks. There are some things about it that are quite cool: GMail is the best email I’ve ever used on a mobile device, better than Blackberry and several million times better than email on the iPhone. I love that I can use my Google voice number for all calls, automatically.

Aside from that, though, it feels very, um, Linuxy. And nerdy. And clunky. (I won’t even get into how ugly it is next to the iPhone. Some people care about design, and many don’t.)

Linux is great, of course. But UI’s built on top of Linux tend to be oddly inconsistent, patchwork and fussy. The Android UI, at least the one that Motorola has put together for Droid, feels a lot more like a computer UI than it does a seamless mobile UI. Apple managed to take what a phone UI was like and extend it to do things you wouldn’t think you could do with a tiny screen and fat fingers. Android seems much more to have been taken from a computer UI and hammered down to a way you can touch that UI on a tiny screen.

It’s hard to describe exactly what things make it seem that way. But probably it comes to things like: too many nested menus; two ways of navigating apps; no direct manipulation to delete an app; and too much awareness that there is a ‘file system.’ To install music on the Droid, you have to find a special menu, enable and mount the phone as a drive, and then copy mp3 files from your computer to the droid. How many normal people are going to even know what the heck “mount” means?

So, the problem with Paul’s warning scenario actually affecting Apple is this: the iPhone is so much better as a device, hardware and software, out of the box, that millions and millions of people will prefer it to other devices. And there’s no close second: you have the crappy phones from Samsung and LG, and the meh phones from Nokia, and the almost-good-but-too-geeky phones from Motorola. And they all have different quirks and sizes and input methods. So where will most developers put their time? The ones who actually want to make some money? On the one phone where ALL the screen sizes are the same, and all the APIs are the same.

I wish it weren’t so. I wish Apple would think something like “Gee, we are just crushing everybody on industrial design, simple interfaces and marketing. Let’s also crush them on making the developers love us too.” But they don’t seem inclined to care, and I don’t really think it will impact their bottom line if they don’t.

Motorola: if you want to beat Apple, make one phone. One single phone that is the expression of all the very best your industrial designers can put together, and one UI on top of Android that is the most carefully researched and tested that your UX experts can come up with. Or Samsung or LG, or Nokia. Make one single phone, and make it better every year until it beats the iPhone. Then people will buy it. Then the developers will come. And you can treat them like crap, or not, it doesn’t matter.

I was completely stumped by an error in the build of our iPhone app. It just said ’something something exited with status -1.’ Said something wasn’t any kind of actual program or file you could find on the disk, so I had no way of getting further into it.

I actually had a support call into Apple Technical Support, who were trying to help figure it out.

But then the final Snow Leopard iPhone SDK 3.1 came out, and that revealed much more detailed errors. In particular, it showed that Xcode was trying run an old Leopard component of the iPhone SDK, which no longer exists. So I wiped the entire /Developer hierarchy off my machine, and reinstalled Xcode 3.2 and the single Snow Leopard 3.1 iPhone SDK. Kapow, everything works now.

I didn’t see this written anywhere, but I just tried it, and it works. With the iPhone, you can click the microphone to pause the currently playing song, or double-click to skip to the next track. This makes it very pleasant to listen to music, and IMO is what made the iPhone the “best iPod ever.”

What was really annoying was that the first iPod Touch didn’t have this feature: to skip songs, or pause, you had to pull the thing out of your pocket, look at it, wake it up and pause/skip. This made the iPod touch the “worst iPod ever,” at least as far as listening to music goes. For me, this seemingly hostile feature drop, even more than having no physical volume control, relegated the iTouch to watching movies and web browsing.

But all is forgiven. Plug your iPhone (or compatible, presumably) headphones into the iTouch, queue up a playlist. You can pause by one-clicking, skip by double-clicking. I’m hoping the new Nano has the same improvement.

For me, MobileMe has been a fucking disaster. First, during the first few days I had ENDLESS contact/calendar conflicts, and MobileMe actually deleted a random set of about 100 contacts.

That’s all settled down now, but now iDisk has become so unreliable that it’s almost pointless. If I don’t explicitly sync up a computer, and then check that something made it up to the server (via the web UI), then get on the other client computer, and push the sync button, and sometimes reboot, and push the sync button a few more times, nothing syncs. This is despite the fact that everything is set to “Automatically” synchronize.

Guess what? Copying stuff to my personal web site and manually copying it back down is less of a hassle. And I’m paying for this? Bleah.

It’s time for a new laptop. Should I get a black MacBook or a MacBook Air? I keep waffling. I basically use it for remote access to my work/home desktop computers, for web browsing and email.

Black:

Faster (33%50%)
More Disk Space (3X)
Faster Disk (5400RPM)
Has DVD
Cheaper ($300)

Air:

Awesome LED backlit display
Smaller

I’m leaning towards the BlackBook.

Update: BlackBook it is! What put me over the edge (aside from *cough* $300) was lack of an ethernet port on the Air. I don’t want to carry around a stupid dongle to plug in to a LAN.

You’d think this would just be on the install DVD, but I couldn’t find it.

http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/resources/

Most firewalls now support IPSec tunnels for VPN access. My experience has been that you need to buy some client that matches the firewall, and of course that means it has to support the OS you are running. That means that Mac support is hard to come by on the vast majority of firewalls. Cisco supports Mac with their client, but there are two problems with that: Cisco is darn expensive, and their software is ugly.

A little bit of research turned up some interesting stuff. First, OS X has IPSec support (via “kame/raccoon“) built-in. Unfortunately, there’s no GUI or wizard, so configuration requires knowledge that is pretty unattainable to non-network programming geeks, and an inconvenient learning curve for the geeks. Second, there are at least two solutions available to configure IPSec on Mac with various documentation for different firewalls.

One is VPN Tracker, which is a commercial product that costs between $150-$250. It appears to have a very good UI, a great web site, lots of documentation and a responsive support staff. The documentation and support is important because there are hundreds of firewalls out there, and they all have their own specific ways of setting up IPSec tunnels. VPN Tracker seems to have pretty good coverage: every VPN-capable firewall I’ve seen is on the list. I was not able to get the trial version working with either our Fortigate-60 or our Netscreen-50 here at work, but I might be able to; their support staff has contacted me with some questions. I’m pretty confident I could get it to work.

The other solution I found is IPSecuritas. It’s totally free, which is kind of mind-blowing as the software and website is maybe 95% as nice/slick as VPN Tracker. There seems to be a lot less documentation on various firewalls, but there’s a community-driven mechanism where people can post their solutions. I was able to get IPSecuritas working through our NetScreen 50 with the help of this web page. (And, I think I’d be able to go back and get the VPN Tracker working as well. The documentation for VPN tracker didn’t include policy changes, which I thought was odd at the time. Turns out it was odd: you need to add policies to allow the tunnel from the internet to your LAN.)

One disappointment is that the IPSecuritas software promises “split DNS.” The idea is that for hostnames internal to your LAN, it will send requests into the LAN DNS server, and for others, it will use the DNS server of where ever you are. It doesn’t work for me. This seems part of the larger problem I have with DNS on Leopard: it is exceedingly difficult to override a DNS server that comes with a DHCP address. I’m trying to figure out the story behind that.

I’m a computer geek, and I mostly hang around other computer geeks. So my views of what is really popular in terms of information technology are very skewed. I’m very aware of this bias, because at work we are trying really hard to make our software easy to use and popular with norms. That’s normal people, not computer dorks.

A vast portion of the technology arguments we have, I fully realize, are irrelevant to the norms. They don’t give shit about Unix, or Macs or Vista. They know that there are computers, and there’s the internet (or Google, which is, for a lot of people, the internet). People just want something simple that works, and all the other bullshit that we Valleywag readers care about doesn’t even register on their personal radar.

That’s what I thought as of a few days ago, anyway. I had jury duty the other morning, that great democratic cocktail shaker that stuffs a couple hundred citizens from all the American castes in one room for 4-5 hours. Mostly I just kept my head down and read my sci-fi novel. But I couldn’t help overhearing a conversation of three norms sitting nearby. One guy, maybe was in his late 50s, seemed like he owned a small business of some kind. Sounded like a good guy, I think maybe with a Woburn accent, probably not a college type. Definitely a norm. There was a college-age woman or maybe a little older: she seemed like a typical Gen Y-er, but not technical. And there was a kid, maybe 21, a semi-goth maybe. A video game junkie, probably. Also not a tech person.

I heard bits and pieces of stuff and then started listening. They were having the Mac vs. PC discussion. It wasn’t the religious thing. Nobody in the conversation was saying PCs were better. The older guy and the woman were basically spouting the party line benefits of Apple and Mac, getting some of the ideas a little wrong or garbled, but mostly getting it right. The younger guy was the PC user and he was playing the role of “I have this old PC and I need a new one, but I don’t really know about how to use Macs.” The other two were right on this, talking him through how it wasn’t a big deal, it just takes a little getting used to, and everything works so much better.

I was floored. I didn’t think it would be possible to dislodge Windows from it’s preeminent position on the desktop. No matter how bad Vista sucked, or how great OS X was. Now I’m not so sure.