iMovie was perfectly straightforward.  Locate it in the App Store, click Buy, enter some credentials, boom.  iPhoto, on the other hand…

The App Store claimed it had already been installed, but I knew that I was two versions behind.  Google revealed that one fix might be to rename iPhoto.app to something else.  Well, you can’t do that in the Applications folder—at least, I couldn’t.  So, I made a new folder called Old Apps in my home folder, moved (well, copied) iPhoto, renamed it to iPhoto Old, and deleted it from the Applications folder. I removed the icon from my dock as well, for good measure.

That did the trick; the App Store reported the new iPhoto as available for me to purchase, so I did.  Except for one problem: I couldn’t find it.  At first I searched help and Googled for how to invoke the new LaunchPad feature, which was supposed to hold all your App Store apps in one, easy to access place.  Then I remembered that was going to be a Mac OS X Lion feature—we aren’t quite there yet.

Huh.  All the help told me that App Store apps are installed to the Applications folder, as you would expect.  But it wasn’t there, or anywhere.  A Spotlight search only turned up my iPhoto Old.app.  Then I figured it out.

Despite moving and renaming the app, the OS kept track of it, and knew that iPhoto Old was still really iPhoto.  So, it had obligingly upgraded that app to iPhoto 11.  Mac OS X is so smart, and so well designed to prevent users from shooting themselves in the foot by “organizing,” moving things around, and renaming them, that it all still just works.  If I hadn’t removed iPhoto from the dock, I could have just launched it from there and got my new app.

I did put things back the way they should be—I like my apps to live in the Applications folder.  You could say that Apple outsmarted itself, by having a bug that disallowed an upgrade while it was in the Applications folder, but it definitely outsmarted me.

Yesterday morning, I got a disturbing report from my wife: “I just tried to wake up the computer by hitting the space bar, and it went ‘bzzzzrrrt’ and didn’t turn on.”

Crap.

That sounded bad, and when I went to check out the iMac, it smelled bad, too, like a popped capacitor. I tried all the appropriate troubleshooting stuff, and nothing worked—the iMac was dead as a doornail.

I surmised that the problem was a fried power supply. A quick look at iFixit (via the app on the iPad) confirmed that it was user-servicable—sort of. This is a late 2006 iMac we’re talking about, which wasn’t meant to be opened by a consumer. Replacing the power supply in this thing looked like changing the heater core in a ‘96 Jetta; you have to take the whole damn thing apart in order to get to it, in about 49 steps. But, the part could be had for a little less than $200. Given that we expected this machine to last a few more years, it was worth repairing.

Still, I wanted as much of a confirmation of my diagnosis as I could get from the experts before ordering any parts, which meant a trip to the Genius Bar. I am very fortunate to have an Apple Store about three miles from my house. Reservation via iPad app—check.

I strolled into the Apple Store, Roseville Galleria, with iMac in hand, right on time, and quickly made eye contact with the check-in dude holding the souped-up iPod touch. It was probably pretty easy to spot the white acrylic iMac in a store full of brushed aluminum. Check-in was no problem. I had to wait a few minutes for my spot at the Bar to open up. Soon, it was my turn with Genius Bar Guy (Update: a follow up Apple email indicates the Genius’ name is Ken).

Now, on the way to the mall, I was full of doom and gloom. Even if I had bought the extended Apple Care, this would have been outside of that. I didn’t assume that the current iMacs used the same power supply as mine, and as in a car dealership, I expected the Apple price to be at a premium, never mind the labor, and the time being sent out to some repair facility. I was just going for a diagnosis here, and I would do the repair myself¹, or sell it as is and get something new. Oh me of little faith!

Ken listened to my story, lauded my thorough troubleshooting, tried one more thing (which of course didn’t work), and agreed, probably dead power supply—certainly, that was the first thing in the power chain and should be the first thing to try fixing. He started punching up numbers to see what we were looking at. I could hardly believe he said $106, plus tax! “No sir, that’s parts and labor. No, we would do the repair here. Sometimes we have the part in stock, hang on, let me check. […] No, unfortunately we don’t have it in stock, but we are so close to Elk Grove, we usually get our parts well under the 3-5 day estimate, so we would estimate we would have it for 5 days max.”

So, I asked, if you get it apart, and determine that it’s not the power supply but the logic board (which obviously I would decline), what will I be into it in terms of labor? “Nothing.” Wow. Probably needless to say, I let them take it for repair².

Of course, they would rightly assume that if I declined the repair, I would be buying a new Mac, so it’s kind of a win-win for Apple, but that’s still great customer service. There was a complete absence of an up-sell attempt of any kind. Furthermore, they let my son use the in-store restroom when nature called (as it does so suddenly for toddlers).

I should not have been surprised by Apple’s handling of this, but given a recent month-long comedy of errors in dealing with auto repairs, I was really prepared for it to go the other way.

This is why it’s great to be an Apple customer.

Yet, folks are upset. Take Alex Lindsay, who was lamenting this turn of events on Macbreak Weekly this week, whose workflow would be seriously disrupted if he couldn’t use Mac-based tools. But does he even use Xserves? In his words, “No.” So there you go; even a serious multimedia shop like Pixel Corps doesn’t use the Xserve for their Mac server needs. It just sounds to me like a product that didn’t have that much reason to exist.

To be fair, some of the worry is that this is a slippery slope, and the Mac Pro is next on the chopping block. I don’t think in a million years Apple would do that, though - as long as they have Pro apps, they will offer a Pro machine with expansion and the raw horsepower that you can only get with a Mac Pro.

For most people, though, I suspect a high-end Mac mini, or even a cluster of them, is sufficient.

My first thought, when this keynote was announced as “Back to to the Mac,” was, “Thank God.  Make all these people who think Apple is going to let the Mac atrophy just shut up already.”  The first major point made bears this out, that even though the Mac business has become a smaller portion of Apple in comparison to iOS stuff, by itself it has continued to grow.  In other words, halo effect aside, if the iPhone had never been born, or spun off into a different company or something, Apple and the Mac would have continued to grow, to gain in popularity, and gain in market share.  It’s hardly a dwindling concern for Apple.

iLife stuff looks really great.  Just like everybody else, I can’t wait to play with that Movie Trailers feature.¹  Ever year I put together a little 10-minute video of the kids for the extended family, and this would be great fun to do something with.

FaceTime for the Mac, pretty well expected.  The other night they used FaceTime on Brothers & Sisters.  They didn’t call it by name—they said “switch to video”—but it was clear they were using iPhone 4s.  I don’t see people in mainstream TV shows running around with Droids, do you?

Likewise, the general UI innovations derived from iOS didn’t surprise me (though before the keynote I didn’t clue in to the double-meaning of “Back to the Mac”—very clever), but my jaw hit the floor when Steve announced the Mac App Store.  I never thought in a million years we would see it in Mac OS X.  A future version of the Mac OS, perhaps, one more fully based on iOS, but not on the current decade-old OS we have now.

Looking back, has been clear that the Dashboard was a UI and functionality progenitor of the iPhone OS.  In terms of widgets, they have always had a sort of “App Store” on the desktop, but it was really kind of behind the scenes, and after Tiger became old hat, it sort of lost its importance.  Kind of like a hobby, if you will.  My wife loves the Dashboard for its quick look at certain things, like the weather, but even though I was impressed by it at first, I never use it now.

Now I think it has come full circle, through it’s transformation into a full-fledged UI metaphor in iOS, back to the Mac desktop as a real tool for real apps.  Nice.  Now if we can just have fully universal apps that work on the iPad and the Mac, which we purchase once, and that would be rad.

The “One more thing…” was somewhat weakened by the fact that everybody knew there were new MacBook Airs² coming.  I love that there’s an 11-inch model, so the 12-inch PowerBook people can have their cake and eat it, too.

As I was watching the excellent coverage by Jacqui Cheng, and the MacBook Air came up, I thought to myself, “This has to be at the $1,000 price point.  It’s the only way it is going to fly or make sense.”   The iPad has set the expectation that smaller and more mobile, in comparison to a full MacBook Pro, also has to be cheaper.  And so it was, and there was much rejoicing.  I actually think I punched the air.  It is always great news when the entry level machine in a category is using the hot new technology.  Clearly they were just keeping that white MacBook on life support so they could have something at the $999 level, while they waited for the tech and economies of scale to get them to this point.

Bravo, I say.  It’s been a long time since Apple had a presentation that was all about the Mac, and I think they hit it out of the park.  Very satisfying.

Remember when there were no big software companies?  Well, other than Microsoft?  I’m talking about the wild west of PC days, in the ‘80s, when you bought (or, frequently, copied from a friend) little applications developed by nobody you had ever heard of, which did only one thing, but it was exactly the one thing you expected that application to do.  Whenever there was some new innovation in computing, like say the mouse, (I’m talking about PCs here, bear with me) you couldn’t count on your main system, MS DOS, to support it, or deliver an update to you in a timely fashion.  You had to find the driver, and put it in AUTOEXEC.BAT or CONFIG.SYS¹ yourself.

I remember when my dad brought home this terrific suite of office apps called… Eight-In-One.  Anybody ever heard of that?  Appropriately enough, it had eight applications all bundled together in one program, and they worked together and could share data, which was incredible (for a PC) at the time.  But it was one solution in a sea of solutions.  Microsoft Works was among them, but it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that it was the only game in town—there was real competition.

But that’s a bad example, because it was a suite.  There was my favorite file manager from back in the day: PopDos, which used ASCII characters for graphics but let you use a mouse to work with files and let you put shortcuts(!) to favorite programs in a pull-down menu.  Or PrintShop, the old-school grayscale one.  Terminal programs like ProComm.  You even had some system hack-ey things going on, with extended memory managers.

Then things kind of changed.  Your word processor was either Word or WordPerfect, with WordStar a distant third.  Spreadsheets?  Forget it, it was Excel.  With the advent of Windows, you went to MS Paint for your simple drawing needs, and you used the built-in terminal app for communication.  And the basic requirement for mainstream success was that the program had to be a Windows program.

This is something I love about iOS and the App Store.  The good old days are back; the playing field is, for the most part, level. (The App review process notwithstanding.)  Independent software developers, whom you have never heard of, are constantly coming up with new ways to do things, new games to play, and in these days of the internets, new ways to connect with one another.  The vast majority of apps you run on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch do not come from Apple or Microsoft, they come from small shops that are just out to make one or a few single-purpose things that aren’t covered, or covered well, by the base system, and perhaps rightly so.  Look at all the notepad apps, bare-bones writing apps, to-do lists, calculators, communication clients, (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) cameras, navigators… the list goes on.  None of these categories is dominated by an Apple or a Microsoft, it’s all about the little guys again.

Maybe as the ecosystem matures, a few major players will emerge, and things in the iOS world will look more like they do today in the PC world.²  I don’t know.  But for now, I like this.

Contrast this to Apple, who regards the software as the primary driver in the design of everything they produce. Much is made of their minimal hardware designs, true, but the deceptive thing is why it is minimal: the hardware itself gets the hell out of the way of the software and what you are trying to do.  The iMac, iPhone and iPad are epitomes of this.

Steve Jobs’ line, “Where’s the computer?” is almost a gag, but in truth it’s the main selling point.  What used to be an industry of big beige monitors with thick bezels containing myriad control buttons, and even bigger beige boxes with as many disk drives, buttons, and indicator lights the clone makers could think of to put on the front, is now, in its ideal form, represented by a screen. You can’t even see the ON button on the front of an iMac, let alone its ports, and the black border just makes the whole thing disappear.  The star of the show is the OS, the software.

The iPhone and iPad are the same story, only even more-so, because they’ve removed the keyboard—you interact directly with the software.  If Apple could just have an ethereal floating screen appear wherever you want it, and sell that as a product, it would.  I don’t think anybody, obviously not Jony Ive, starts the design of an Apple product with the idea, “Let’s make this really stand out, give it a flashy, trendy case, and put lots of buttons on it to show it has a lot of features.”

My 1st gen iPhone, going on 4 years old now, essentially has the same design as the current iPhone 4.  Oh, the case is a slightly different shape, and the iPhone 4 no longer has the chrome frame of the previous generations, but it’s basically the same rounded black slab with a few buttons on the edges and one Home button on the front.  With the iPad, they didn’t go back to the drawing board and make it “look cool” for the sake of looking cool, they just went with essentially the same minimalist design.  It’s a sign that Apple has the confidence in what their product actually is and does to let those verbs sell it, not the noun of the hardware.

Apple understands that it’s about the software.  So do Google and Microsoft (being software companies), and that’s where Nokia is in trouble.

First up, iPod shuffle. They went back to the little square one with buttons, but kept the VoiceOver functionality as well. Cool, but meh for me.

Next, iPod nano. Shrunk it down to a square, multi-touch screen (not running iOS, though), looks very iPhone-like. But they took away the video capability—not just the camera of the last generation, but the player as well. I suppose one could deem the screen too small now, but until I got my iPhone a handful of months ago, I was routinely watching video on my fat nano, and it was perfectly fine. They have moved the entry-point of video capability to the iPod touch, which I suppose makes sense from a marketing perspective. But in my eyes they really dumbed-down the nano. The only thing separating it from the shuffle is on-screen control, Nike+, and the ability to show photos. For me, meh. I look forward to inheriting my wife’s 5^th gen iPod nano someday.

iPod touch, predictable update to Retina display, A4 processor. I was a little surprised by the inferior camera they added, except it makes sense that they simply took that tiny camera out of the nano and put it in the touch. Oh to be a kid with one of these things! Infinite game and app capability, whose software is so much cheaper than games for the DS or PSP, plus all your teenage social network needs, plus FaceTime, for crying out loud, all on one device. Out of control! Of course, I have an iPhone, albeit 1^st gen, so meh for me.

Having recently got an iPad, I am looking forward to iOS 4.2. I’ve already tried the Project Sword demo, Citadel, and it is astounding. Now, this iPad outperforms the first PC I played Ultima 9 on, so it really shouldn’t be a shock that PC-quality games are starting to show up, now that the developers are taking the platform seriously.

Then there’s the AppleTV. Quite a lot of the l33t geeks out there are saying it’s too little, too late, but I think it’s perfect. The only problem I can see with it is not enough content providers are on board. Netflix is a huge win—that alone ensures that when I move house next (which might be within the year), and my iMac is no long within cable distance of my TV, I’ll be picking up an AppleTV, if only for that feature alone. For a few years now all of my television has come from Netflix, Hulu, network websites, or bittorrent. If more networks were on board with rentals, that would take care of my web and Hulu needs. Let’s break it down: my wife and I watch only three first-run shows with any regularity. Assume 24 episodes a season, that’s $72 a year for that content. Sure beats a Hulu subscription at $120 a year, and it completely obliterates a satellite or cable TV subscription. For HD content, I might add. Add to that the possibility of bittorrent and streaming from the Mac to cover gaps in iTunes, and of course the shows we already watch through Netflix, and it’s a great service and a great device.

I’m currently selling stuff on eBay to “pay off” my iPad, in the same way I paid for my iPhone. After that’s taken care of, it’s on to an AppleTV, for sure.

So, from the start all of the iPhone 4 attenuation bullshit seemed like a non-issue to me.  Some of it is Apple-bashing, and some of it is from people who are true Apple fans, but they still want their magical unicorn, too.

However, I’m not sure there will be a “Mac OS XI” as one would imagine it, either.  I think we have already seen the future of computing, and it’s the iPad and iOS.  The desktop form factor will not go away soon, in terms of raw hardware capabilities, special interfaces, direct access to storage, and that sort of thing.  But I think the paradigm of what we know as the “desktop OS” is going to go away.  Oh, it will still be there for the über-power users, but more and more for the rest of us, what we know as the “file system” and discrete “program files,” or even “documents” is going to go away.  For example, take an image.  What is that?  It’s a certain kind of binary file on the disk, you say.  Is it?  What about metadata?  What about the preview, icon representation, other resolutions?  It’s vector version?  As the data we work with has become more sophisticated, the simple notion of a “physical” file on disk has become inadequate – all of these other aspects have been abstracted away behind a data “object,” shown to us in a media browser as a single icon.

Apple is set, with its leadership in iOS, to determine the standards by which these objects are constructed and communicated.  I would far rather my desktop already treat things with this abstraction.  I love working in iMovie or iPhoto for this reason, or even my iPhone when I can get away with it.  They take care of all the messy details of what things are actually called on disk, where they are stored, where the original and backup versions are, all of that.  Indeed, on the Mac the only time I deal with a “file” is when I have to convert a download from one video format to another.  And even then, now it’s down to one app I run to convert it and drop it into iTunes, and from there it’s not longer a file, it’s just a movie object I can put on my iPhone if I want, or just have it ready to play in Front Row.

So to me, the question isn’t, “What will OS XI look like and when will it get here?” it’s, “How soon will iOS be running on desktop Macs?”  Look, they’ve already got iWork and iMovie, and the equivalents of iPhoto, iTunes, and the like for iOS, not to mention the GIGANTIC, unprecedented, largest library of software for any platform, EVER, to do just about everything else you would want to do on a computer.

My evening entertainment is still primarily a book or television. We keep our food in a refrigerator. I drive to work in an internal combustion engine automobile. (Mine actually looks like it came from the ’40s, to boot.) The telephone on my desk at work has a cord, and operates through a switchboard (albeit electronic). “Memos” are still the internal communication method of choice, it’s just that they’re electronically delivered and called email. At home, our range, oven, hot water heater and clothes dryer burn gas. (Hell, our house was built in the ’40s.) The microwave oven, for all of its convenience, is still just reheating in an oven, though faster. People still go to movies, listen to the radio, listen to “records” at home (even if they are embodied in digital files). So very little in our lives is truly modern, in terms of how we live our lives… except for computers. Computers are the only really new introduction, going back almost a century.

But here’s the thing: men like Steve Jobs have been working to get the computer out of our face, to give us the benefits of computing and the Internet without actually having a “computer” around. Even at my house, we’re almost there. A century ago, we would still have needed a desk somewhere; instead of being occupied by an iMac, it would have been a typewriter, or perhaps a sewing machine, and all the other accoutrement of a desk: pens, paper, pads, etc. (Okay, we have some other doo-dads like tape, a stapler, and such. But those are just new-fangled fasteners in an otherwise old paradigm.) We have drawers of stationary, old paper records, and other desk crap.

The laptop, or notebook if you prefer, has gotten us most of the way there, which is to say back to the way we lived before the ’90s and the Internet and personal computing exploded on society at large. I think the iPad takes us the rest of the way. The computer almost disappears. So, I wonder if that doesn’t partly explain the resurgence of classic design in our lives. The physical requirements of the technology no longer have to dictate the design of the product. Look for starters at the design of the recently-revealed iPhone 4 hardware (loath as I am to link to Gizmodo): very Dieter Rams. Look at automobile design over the last 20 years, and the return to popular or classic lines: the Beetle, the Mini Cooper, the PT Cruiser, the HHR, even the Mustang and Charger going back to their muscle-car days. Look at the renewed interest in font design (now that modern electronic delivery methods can employ the designs of old), and the interest in the TV show Mad Men.

Steampunk, which I love, is another thing, but that’s going back to an aesthetic that either never was, or existed but during a time when our way of life was truly different. Notably, of course, the reliance on steam for the operation of large machinery and for heat, but also the reliance on horses for local transportation, gas for light, and the pen and ink for writing. Never mind the modes of dress, cooking, and entertainment. No, it’s a bit of a stretch to go back that far and still maintain our modern way of life.

But you could drop a 1950s businessman onto the street of a present-day city and he wouldn’t look a bit out of place. In fact, he would look kind of cutting edge, in terms of style. We no longer have to adapt ourselves to this new computing technology; it has evolved sufficiently to adapt to us, and is now letting us get back to the way we were before we had ever heard of IBM, Microsoft or Apple.

On that note, I want to give some links to sites I have come to love lately, for their devotion to design.  I’ll not give explanations; please explore at will.

• Cool Hunting
• Hipstamatic
• Hipstamatic App
• SwankoLab
• Swissmiss
• Well Placed Pixels
• Wintercheck Factory