The Flow of Consciousness

Apple iPad

I figure I’ll contribute to the noise and add my $0.02 about the Apple iPad, which was announced today with much fanfare.

Quick rundown for folks living under a rock who for some reason read my blog and no other news outlet:

• 9.7″ 1024×768 132ppi glass multitouch widescreen display
• 1 GHz Apple A4 processor/SoC
• 16 GB, 32 GB, 64 GB flash storage
• 802.11b/g/n WiFi
• Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
• 3G model supports UMTS/HSDPA (850, 1900, 2100 MHz, i.e., AT&T), GSM/EDGE (850, 900,1800, 1900 MHz)
• Compass, cellular network location service (i.e., no GPS)
• 25 Whr battery, 10 hours battery life in use, one month standby
• 3.5″ headphone jack, speakers, mic
• Standard Apple A/V format playback, H.264 video up to 720p
• Access to Apple App Store, iTunes Music Store, and new iBookstore

The pricing is pretty good, too. The cheapest, a 16 GB without 3G, is $499. The most expensive, 64 GB with 3G, runs $829 + $30 monthly for 3G service. Kudos to Apple for negotiating a no-contract deal with AT&T. That’s right—iPad users are not locked into AT&T contractually. They’re just locked into AT&T if they want 3G service. Here’s hoping that T-Mobile springs up similar plans for folks who want T-Mobile and for whom EDGE service will suffice.

In theory, it’s pretty slick device. Lots of innovation, right?

Hardware-wise, I pronounce that Apple has done it again. It’s a new idea, a new form-factor, a new audience. Apple’s going after the folks who love e-book readers and who maybe need to do some typing every now and then. They’re going after the on-the-go designer, or presenter, or other person who would benefit from having, essentially, the capabilities of the iPhone but with a larger screen and faster processor.

Apple iPad Case

Apple iPad Keyboard Dock

There’s a few accessories for it, including a keyboard dock and a case. The case doubles as a bit of a stand, as well. The dock gives the user a keyboard (it’s not clear to me whether or not the keyboard is included) with which to type in programs such as a new mobile edition of iWork for the iPad. It’s a novel idea, but not terribly innovative. It has an audio jack for in-place speakers and likely relies on a USB keyboard or, more likely, Bluetooth.

Unfortunately, it lacks several things it could really use:

• Web cam, front-facing or user facing — no Skype video, folks
• GPS — there has to be room inside for it, and it would make the device truly mobile like the iPhone
• Lid — I understand that this is where the “upsell upsell upsell” case comes in, but I would have really liked to see some kind of lid or carrier. ZAGG will no doubt have a screen protector for the iPad immediately.
• USB ports — sayonara, expandability

Hardware-wise, I’d buy it if I had a use for it. It’s slim, mobile, and the battery lasts forever. Package up a mobile Bluetooth keyboard, and I’d have a nice on-the-go machine for CES or something.

That’s where the good ends. If you’re an Apple fanboy, now’s the time to go elsewhere.

36" hoops and enough room for your iPad

It’s the software which makes it irrelevant to me. It’s a giant iPhone without voice capability. Or, it’s a giant iPod Touch with 3G data capability. Or, it’s a music player in which the only jeans it would be found are JNCO jeans.

It’s an embedded device, as far as I’m concerned, with its own ecosystem (as giant as it may be, given that iPhone apps run on it, too). The books from the iBookstore are DRM-locked to the device, and there’s been no indication if Apple will allow books purchased on it to be transferred to new devices or to desktop machines.

Another big missing feature: Adobe Flash. No Hulu, no web sites which use Flash. This lack makes it somewhat useless as a laptop replacement computer.

Worst of all, and the real deal killer for anyone who would use the iPad in place of a real computer: no multitasking. That means that you can’t listen to Last.fm or Pandora while working on a paper; locally stored music only. AFAIK, there’s not a VoIP calling application on the App Store yet, and there likely won’t ever be, so forget using the iPad as a call center of any kind.

Could Apple figure out multitasking for the iPhone OS, thereby quashing this point and silencing the Android fanboys (myself included) who constantly berate iPhone users on their inability to check email while listening to Internet music while surfing the web while reading a book and not losing place when switching between any of these? Sure, Apple could. Then iPhone and iPad users would realize that their little snappy device is no longer snappy when they try to run more than one or two apps a time.

Oh, how I could go on and on about such a fun topic as multitasking and its necessity to any computer user expecting a real computer experience.

So, software-wise, Apple fails on the iPad software-wise. Had it been granted Mac OS X privileges, plus the camera, I think it could sway a lot more people. It would be a great platform for we Linux geeks to hack upon, and I can’t wait to see what the open source community tries to do with it.

More evidence of the Jobsian Nation’s collective disappointment: my company is comprised of tens of Apple fanboys, and I only heard one or two saying that they’d get the iPad.

Kudos to Apple for actually using its P.A. Semi property—I was hoping to see something out of it.

TL;DR

Apple iPad is great hardware, but the software makes it stupid. I won’t buy one, likely ever.

If you don’t mind being locked to the Apple ecosystem, go for it. I’d love to play with it, just not bring it home and take care of it.

Engadget has a good hands on of the iPad. Mashable has a great discussion, too, and we’re in agreement on a major disappointment: “It’s an unprecedented win for closed computing.” If you’ve seen some other good articles, post them in the comments.

I didn’t blog as much as I would have liked to this year, mostly because of my crazy busyness.

My article on how to install Gears on 64-bit Linux continues to see quite a bit of traffic. I even host a copy of Gears, even though it’s likely out of date. Also in the Linux vein, my articles on how to buy DRM-free music online with Amazon MP3 on Linux and Android were moderately popular. I wrote an article on how to add CACert root certificates to Chromium on Linux and it sees more traffic than most of my other posts combined.

I wasn’t as active in the open source community as I would have liked, but I did make some contributions to Gwibber, Astrid, Celtx, and Lernid. I mentioned the first three in my Launchpad activity update. The latter is a newer development by Jono Bacon. I contributed the entire Esperanto translation less than two days after it was available on Launchpad. I have no way of verifying it, but I think that the Esperanto translation was the first complete non-English variant translation available.

I recently wrote two brief articles on how to automate some tasks on Facebook. One was how to rapidly expunge friend suggestions, and the other was how to select all friends in a friend select dialog.

I met Tom Dickson of Will It Blend? fame at CES last year. He was really cool and friendly.

I also wrote a few articles on politics, my favorite being A Comment on Socialism Defined, a comment left on a friend’s blog, Strike the Root!. I’ll not go into how much I think Obama and his friends have screwed up the country already (it’s not all been bad—he has done some good things). That’s something for another article.

A new hobby this year for me has been stock trading. I’d saved up some money and decided to use some skills I learned in middle school to make a buck or two on the stock market. Ironically, not 12 hours after I blogged about my flagship stock being up near 200%, that stock, SPNG, dropped 27.66% in one day, costing me $23,000 of value on a $10,000 investment in 65 minutes. It recovered, and I still made out with a profit, but I learned a very, very valuable set of lessons. I still kick myself occasionally because of this and probably will for a long time. My goal of getting into stocks was to generate enough money that I could pay off my student loans really quickly. I could have paid off more than 2/3 and I didn’t cash out when I should have.

I did meet many, many new people in the stock world, especially Stockguy22 and the Bulls on Wall Street crew. I said goodbye to StockTwits after I was temporarily banned for cheering on Vonage (VG) when it was less than 50 cents, riding it to 80 cents, and cashing out. They called it a worthless, crappy penny stock. A few weeks later, it spiked to ~2.20 and has been above a dollar since. HA!

I got some neat advice from friends while considering the purchase of a MacBook Pro (which I got and love) and the acquisition of a PS3 (which I did get).

The biggest changes in my life were in my location and work. I got a new job in March at Vivísimo, a search platform maker in Pittsburgh–I even wrote a post on the corporate blog! I moved in with some friends in May, but realizing we were a little cramped, I moved into a new apartment in July (I didn’t write about that!).

I wrote more than 28 articles for Bob Buskirk‘s ThinkComputers. My favorites were the Masscool MP-1371RS Media Player and QNAP TS-809 Pro network attached storage device. I use the former alongside my PS3 for video formats my PS3 can’t stream from the latter. The NAS has become the central storage hub for all of my computers, replacing the QNAP TS-109 Pro I reviewed two years ago.

BIOS LEVEL was fairly inactive this year, largely because of a major server outage from May to August. I did write an article on the Orbita Mouse, which I still use to this day at work. I did record and post several videos from Ohio Linuxfest 2009, including Linux Journal editor Shawn Powers’s keynote, Jorge Castro‘s talk on building a community around an open source project, and more on licensing, making money from open source, democratized design, and talking to policymakers and legislators about open source. All Ohio Linuxfest videos with a write-up are available on BIOS LEVEL, or on BIOS LEVEL’s Blip.tv channel.

Jon Daniel and I spend most of November cranking out a beta version of Profyle.at, a personal profile directory service. We’re not entirely finished yet, but sign up for our Profyle.at beta and you’ll likely get in! We want to help people find you on the Internet so your friends and family can follow you on whatever sites and networks you like the most. We pitched for funding and didn’t get it, but were cordially invited to present again during the next round in a month.

Brigette and I are still together, and going strong. We’ve spent most of her winter break together, driving throughout western PA to be with friends and family, too. She’s been working on her web site for her beagle and vizsla show dogs, Glade Mill Sporting & Hound. She’s come a long way, from using a completely WYSIWYG editor to redoing it with a mix of code and WYSIWYG with Adobe Dreamweaver. I’m eager to see what she’s planning for it.

A month ago, I mused purchasing a 13″ MacBook Pro. My primary reasons for considering the MBP were the freedom of OS choice, “seeing what all the fuss is about,” premium hardware for just a couple hundred dollars more, excellent customer support, and a healthy dose of nostalgia.

Approximately a week after writing the post, a friend let me know of a rare deal: a friend of his who just so happens to be an Apple authorized reseller was in jeopardy of losing her authorization because her sales were really low. In order to meet her goal, she was selling Apple hardware at cost. You can’t beat cost! Combine that ~$300 savings with putting the purchase on a credit card with excellent rewards, and it would put me over the edge of my reward amount needed to get myself with a free flight worth about $400.

So, I bought a stock mid-level 13″ MacBook Pro, the one with a 2.53 GHz Core2Duo, 4 GB of DDR3, and a 250 GB HDD. I did get AppleCare and a remote, although the remote was backordered and mysteriously hasn’t arrived yet (should hear why on Monday).

My thoughts?

Summary

I’ll never go back. Apple has a solid hardware product with bells and whistles which themselves make me glad I bought it, plus a slick operating system which appeases my desire for an easy-to-use, on-the-go environment.

TL;DR version

and it had been on for ~20 minutes

Hardware. Seven hours of battery life. Seriously. I got right around that many hours the day I took this screenshot about a week after I bought it. The multitouch touchpad with its gestures are amazing and have seriously changed how I use a touchpad–even more once I enabled tap-to-click I miss them when I use a non-Mac laptop. The magnetic power cord connector should be on every computer: it’s saved my ass twice now. The graphics card is enough to handle Left4Dead with most of the settings on medium, and it’ll certainly handle the older games and casual games I tend to play more often these days. The screen color is amazing and the keyboard is the most welcoming keyboard I’ve ever used. This is the first line of Mac laptops with an SD card reader, and that’s indispensable for me these days with the dog show photography I’ve been doing.

Downsides? I’m not too hot about the non-removable battery, but I’ve never needed a second battery even on my old Averatec which had approximately two hours of battery life. Apple made a data-driven design decision when choosing this path. I’ve not heard many complains except from people who are resistant to change. Folks who really need another battery can suffice for the hour-long charge time while plugged into something like a HyperMac battery. I also wish it had a real microphone port, but how often do I actually use a microphone? Never. The built-in mic is sufficient for almost everything I’d ever use it for. I’m also not too hot about the lack of a DVI or HDMI port and a mini-Displayport instead, but it’s another data-driven design decision and technically Displayport is a better standard for video. I ordered an adapter from Amazon; it’ll arrive this week.

Software. Mac OS X isn’t new to me. I used 10.5 on Jon’s Macbook when I borrowed it for a few months last year, and used 10.1 back in high school. It’s not a huge adjustment for me, so I’ll not go over such nuances. However, there are a few things I must highlight, primarily so that Linux folks like myself can mirror these features in Ubuntu, Fedora, and the like.

Time Machine is indispensible. I configured Time Machine to work with my QNAP NAS and it backs up regularly. The whole system! Efficiently! Recoverably! With an excellent interface for both setup and browsing and recovery. rdiff-backup pulls this off on Linux, but there’s no “don’t make me thing” GUI for it like there is for Time Machine.

Drag-and-drop installation of programs has always been one of my favorite things about OSX. No complicated installer program with click-through EULAs, no broken packages or forced upgrades. Sure, the packages are larger because of universal binaries and statically linked libraries, but I’d rather take up another 10 MB if it means I can simply drop an icon in a directory to install it, or move it to the recycle bin to remove it. I’ve been using iUseThis to track my used programs and combining it with AppFresh for version updates.

OSX is just Unix-y enough for a lot of the stuff I do. MacPorts gives me access to a lot of utilities, especially Synergy, which allows me to use the mouse and keyboard of one computer on another via a network connection. I’ve also used it for up-to-date Python and other scripting and development tools. I use Visor to give me a drop-down, Quake-style terminal in which I do lots of command line stuff, primarily via an SSH connection to one of my many Linux computers.

Perhaps one of the most care-free benefits of OSX for me is painless hibernate, sleep, and suspend. I can shut the lid and forget about it. I’ve rebooted the Mac maybe thrice in the month I’ve had it (outside of OSX updates). I’ve never seen Linux or Windows hibernate/suspend working this well on any hardware.

Downsides? There aren’t many. Sometimes I get frustrated when I can’t find an OSX analogue for a Linux program I’ve used. I have yet to find a decent microblogging client which I like as much as Gwibber on Linux. Despite being written in the highly-portable Python language, Gwibber depends on a few things that OSX just doesn’t provide. I’ve tried Tweetdeck, Nambu, Spry, and a host of others, but just can’t find the feature set I want (eveything most clients have, plus Identica, Facebook, and Flickr plugins). Twirl comes the closest, so I’ve been using it. Eventbox is showing promise as it becomes Socialite, but I’ve yet to actually see it in action.

I’ll eventually get around to trying out Virtualbox‘s 3D acceleration for some Windows games, or Wine and WineBottler for some others.

A major problem I have with my OS choices is that I like to tinker. OSX gives me the freedom to tinker with a lot of things, but its defaults suffice for almost everything. I think it’ll be more difficult for me to screw up OSX than it is for me to screw up Linux or Windows.

TL;DR summary:

I’m pleased with my purchase and haven’t had the buyer’s remorse I’ve had sometimes when making such a giant purchase. The MacBook Pro laptop was designed with both low-level and power users in mind, and I highly appreciate it. It’s just enough to not be too much.

For some time, I’ve been considering buying a new laptop computer. I’ve been primarily considering a 13″ MacBook Pro with a 2.53 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 4 GB of RAM, a 250 GB hard drive, and all of the fixins that come with it. I’d be adding only the Apple Remote and possibly the AppleCare extended warranty.

Why a Mac? Primarily, freedom of choice. If I buy a standard Windows, Linux, or OS-less computer, it’s unlikely that it will run Mac OS X as a Hackintosh. Mac laptops will run Mac OS X, Windows, and (Ubuntu) Linux. Running all three OSes gives me the widest choice of what tool I want to use for a particular task. I imagine that I’ll be using Mac OS X most of the time, switching to Windows for gaming on the go, and using Ubuntu in a VirtualBox, VMWare, or Parallels virtual machine when I need my Linux fix. I’m a software developer, so having access to the emerging mobile market (iPhone development with Xcode, Android development with Eclipse) as well as the established markets (system and web development) is important.

I’m a desktop Ubuntu user and prefer it for my day-to-day usage. I’m open to the idea of seeing what Mac OS X has to offer, but I’ll still have my desktop around for normal usage. I’ve been without a regular laptop for nearly 8 months (been using my XO every now and then), and I hadn’t really missed it until I started working at Vivísimo. It could be peer pressure (I’d estimate that half of the company uses Macs for development, system and web), or it could be seeing a lot of people very happy with their choice.

There’s also a bit of nostalgia in going back to Mac. I used Mac OS from 7.0 until 9.0, then briefly used OS X 10.1 at the end of high school, followed by some OS X 10.5 on a 13″ MacBook earlier this year.

Also, I compared the hardware, and for similar specs, the MacBook is only $100-$200 more compared to most offerings from MSI, ASUS, Dell, Lenovo, and HP at NewEgg, Amazon, and the like. This is a sizeable but understandable difference for the quality of hardware and, most of all, quality of customer support.

The biggest problem for me is simply figuring out where to buy it. I’m cautiously arranging for this purchase in my finances, and I think I’ll be ready before the end of September. I made this chart to show potential places I could purchase it.

The cheapest option seems to be Apple refurbished plus the $124 AppleCare plan from eBay. I’m also considering the MacMall sans AppleCare, as it includes Parallels for free after rebate. Currently, I see it like this: Apple (refurb) > MacMall > Apple (edu) > Amazon > Apple (new) > Buy.com. I have no qualms about refurbished things–they’re good as new most of the time, and I’ll have a hard shell on this within a month of purchasing it.

I’m wary of AppleCare, though, but I see its usefulness. I got a five year warranty on my Dell monitor in 2006 and I’ve used it three times already. I plan to replace the 250 GB hard drive which comes with the MBP 13″ with a 128 GB SSD I can get on the super cheap. I don’t really have a need for a ton of hard drive space, even with three OSes installed. I can stream my music, and my pictures will remain on my desktop. I have a VPN into my FiOS-connected apartment, so remotely accessing things on my NAS or desktop wouldn’t be an issue. I’d see faster boots and faster loads, plus some battery life savings.

The downside–the primary reason I mention this–is that, if I mess up when installing the SSD (unlikely), I void the warranty. An ill-informed Apple Genius tried to convince me that simply opening the back voids the warranty, but he is sorely mistaken. Replacing the insides of a MacBook Pro does not void the warranty based on the simple action of replacing them. One must really screw up something and Apple must prove that the replacement screwed up other things (hard to prove!).

I’ll likely up the memory when DDR3 prices come down, too.

So, Internet friends, readers, countrymen, I ask you this: talk me out of this, or talk me into it. I need a decently powered, long life battery-ed, light gaming capable, webcam having, OSX/Windows/Ubuntu capable laptop for cheaper than the above. Bonus points for benefits and drawbacks of AppleCare, as most folks to whom I’ve spoken haven’t gotten it based on cost alone.

Keep the fanboyism to a minimum, please, and do be constructively critical.

Note: Don’t do what I’m describing. It’s probably illegal and it’s certainly unethical and immoral. IANAL, but heed my advice.

I first considered this dastardly scheme when Bloomberg mistakenly picked up a six-year-old story about the bankruptcy filing ofUAL. I can’t find the Google News story, but that’s where I believe it first appeared. Bloomberg picked it up and it was passed around Wall Street like wildfire.

This old news caused a 76 percent drop in the value of UAL’s stock for a few hours, and it took a day or two to fully recover.

More recently, CNN’s iReport picked up a rumor that Apple CEO Steve Jobs had experienced a heart attack. This story, submitted to the social news site, was “not vetted or reported by CNN journalists” according to CNN.

This false news caused a nine percent drop in Apple’s stock, from approximately $105/share to $95/share for a few minutes between 9:40 and 9:52 a.m.

Can you see, observant reader, a pattern here?

1. Introduce believable, yet false news to a social news site, i.e. CNN’s iReport, Digg, Reddit, Newsvine, etc.
2. Wait for it to get popular and hit the front page and/or wait for a major news outlet to pick it up.
3. Watch company stock the whole time, watching for a major sell-off or drop in price.
4. Buy the stock at the extremely low price.
5. Sell the stock a few hours or days later.
6. Profit!

Someone made a lot of money during those two events.

Someone also made a lot of money last Monday when the house voted down the first version of the Bailout bill and stock plummeted, but recovered the next day. However, that’s very different from this clever, clandestine scheme.

This is nothing new. IANAL, but this wreaks of insider trading and other stock-related crimes. Folks have been attempted, or at least trying to introduce market-shaking news since the inception of the stock market. However, social and automatic news sites make it easier.

Update: The SEC is investigating. Meanwhile, PCworld questions citizen journalism and Slashdot discusses the implications. I for one continue to question the mainstream media and why it doesn’t check the accuracy of reports, not only in the tech sector but in all sectors, especially politics.

WANT.

I could probably afford the cheaper model now or during the summer, but I want the 64 GB SSD. My configuration puts it at about $3,400.

This begs the question: MacBook Air or Lenovo IdeaPad F11?