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

Why do a 4.0 unless you are really going to knock it out of the park? I mean, 2.0 brought third-party apps, Spotlight, and of course the multiple springboard screens to hold the apps – that was pretty transformative. 3.0 brought true GPS and compass, and video capability (complete with editing). So what’s left? Maybe iChat, if they plan on including a forward-facing camera in the new hardware. That seems like a long shot, though. Probably iBooks will be in there, but again, that could be an app; there’s no need to rev the OS. I just don’t think multitasking for third-party apps is enough. I think we’ll see something unexpected.

The other big question, for me, is will the iPhone 2G be supported by the new shiny? Clearly, my phone is capable of some multitasking, since Apple’s own built-in apps can do it. I don’t see why an iBooks app wouldn’t run. And a new springboard can’t be hardware dependent, can it? So it really depends on what the new, unknown feature is. If it’s location based, then I can probably count myself out. But then, iPhone 2G wasn’t left out when 3.0 came along with GPS. I’m cautiously optimistic that I’ll be able to run 4.0 itself, even if I can’t take advantage of all of the new features, for lack of the hardware (GPS, iChat camera).

A new thought just came to me: what if the new feature is partner network related? Could this be why Apple has stuck with AT&T – that they have been developing some new network feature for 4.0? In that case, while I’ll probably be able to get the OS, I am shit-sure not going to get to take advantage of the new shiny. It makes sense for Apple to develop something like this, to continue to provide an advantage for people to use the official carriers and not unlock as I have done. I gotta say, as a T-Mo user, I haven’t really missed visual voicemail.

I’ve finally spent a little time on it, and I have three things fixed.

1. You can actually log in to the thing.  Registering used to put you in a terrible loop where you put in your credentials, it tells you you’ve logged in as yourself, and presents you with the login screen again.
2. The Boookmark Importer works.  Save/export your browser bookmarks as an html file, then in Telegraph click the Import button on the top.  (Looks like an arrow going from a star—your favorites or bookmarks—to a telegraph pole.)  You can then upload your bookmark file and—voila—have all the bookmarks you know and love right in Telegraph.  Now, Telegraph will only build tags for bookmark folders one layer deep, so if you have some grand hierarchical scheme going… sorry about that.
3. The favicons associated with your links are correct for the actual URL you save, not just the root host, as it used to be.  That was by design, but I think it’s better to have the right icon for the URL you put in, which might be different than the host site.  Also, the code is more robust; more favicons will get picked up.  In case you’re curious, Telegraph is not going out to each URL in your list every time you load it for the icons–they are cached in Telegraph itself.  Much faster that way.

Second, Macworld:

I’m going, on the Friday, which is February 12.  Once again, no booth (maybe someday I’ll be in TinyTown), just me cruising around on a free expo pass, taking in the booth swag and feature presentations.  So see ya there!

@dthomson

I’ve been saving/selling stuff to try to pick up an iPhone or iPod touch, mostly so I can surf the web and play games while my wife is using the iMac.  The iPad does this on a whole new level, of course, but that’s not what impressed me.

The iPad is a really amazing device for watching movies and showing off pictures, of course, but that’s not what impressed me.

What impressed me, essentially, was iWork.  Not the details, though they were nice, but the mere existence of it.  iWork on the iPad shows that Apple clearly regards this device as a computer, deserving of business applications as well as “lifestyle” applications.  It shows me that this is actually a very, very viable second computer.  Above an iPhone or iPod touch, my pipe dream was to pick up a MacBook, so I could have just a little more functionality.  But now, forget it; an iPad is all I would need.

I say second computer, but contrary to many of the commentators I’ve listened to over the past week, I don’t see any reason why an iPad could not be the sole computing device for a lot of people.  What does it not do?  The only things I do with my iMac that essentially I could not do with an iPad are some web development and edit movies in iMovie.  There’s no earthly reason somebody couldn’t write a decent IDE for web development on it (paging Steven Frank and Cabel Sasser), and you’re on crack if you don’t think Apple has a version of iMovie for the iPad in the works, to be released when Steve-o says it’s good enough.

Consider that, if this is your only computer, you could just get by with the AT&T unlimited data plan—you wouldn’t even need to have cable or DSL in your house!  There are certain demographics this is perfect for.

For a lot of us, of course, a desktop machine makes sense.  Even the iPad continues the use of a keyboard, and there’s no question that a full-size desktop keyboard is a better text input device than the virtual one, or even the optional hardware keyboard with the dock.  And never mind the vast amount of processing and storage available in today’s desktops.  But unless you are a true road warrior who needs to be able to do the same kind of work on the go, the iPad is just so… right as your mobile computer.

Some of the podcasters and commentators have worried that this kills the MacBook Air.  It just might, but this is what the New Apple does: it kills existing products, even hits, with superior products before they start to fall off in sales.  The MacBook Air is by no means a hit.  I do think people will continue to buy MacBooks ad MacBooks Pro, for the use of traditional old software.  But I, for one, can’t wait to get an iPad, push it to its limits, and see how far I can get on it.  I may well never need to buy a notebook, ever.

And depending on how far Apple takes this new level of OS abstraction, and how fully-featured future iPad-based products become, I may have already bought my last desktop Mac.

Microsoft, as you know unless insert-your-living-under-rock-cliché-here, has opened a couple of brick and mortar stores.  This is laughable for several reasons, most of which are plainly obvious even to Windows enthusiasts, but I’ll repeat them here for the sake of completeness.

• From what I’ve seen, the MicrosoftStore looks very, very, very like an Apple store.  Apart from the mute Windows logo (again, centered on a plain background above the portal like an apple might be), and the dominance of the color blue, you would be forgiven if you thought were actually walking into an Apple store, if perhaps that of a parallel universe.  I’m not suggesting that the wheel need be reinvented here, but it’s kind of embarrassing, anyway.  I assume that over time these stores will evolve to feel definitively Microsoft-y, just as you can definitely tell the difference between walking into a Target and walking into a Wal-Mart, even if you were red-blue color blind.  This is assuming they stay open long enough for such an evolution.

• Here’s where my liberalism comes in to play.  Apple started its retail adventure as a solution to a problem: there was a lack of a distribution channel between Apple and consumers that was unbiased towards PCs.  People had little chance to be exposed favorably to a Mac before; now they can just saunter along in a reasonably upscale mall in a middle- to large-sized metro area and get sucked into an Apple store.  Microsoft suffers no such problem.  Microsoft is not starved for customers, or exposure to customers, or laboring under a widespread conception that its products are not to be taken seriously.  Microsoft is the damn default!  When you say, “I want to buy a computer,” you have to actively try not to get a machine with Windows on it.  In an economy of startling variety and diversity, I am hard pressed to come up with any other product group in which there is such an overwhelming single standard brand.  Therefore, I have a hard time truly understanding why Microsoft needs to have a store in my mall.  This is like offering affirmative action assistance to rich white boys who want to go to college.

• One answer given to the above is that Microsoft wants to have face-to-face interaction with customers, to help them with the problems they have with their PCs.  They call this their Guru Bar; Apple’s version is of course the Genius Bar.  Lord knows the average Joe needs help with his PC, but I have a hard time believing that these Gurus are going to be able to handle the work load.  When you bring a Mac in to the Genius Bar, I suspect most of the time something is really wrong-a pref file got inexplicably garbled, some bit of hardware bit the dust.  Not that OS X doesn’t have bugs and problems that crop up, but there is a finite number of Macs for which you need a script of known fixes.  How many possible combinations of PCs are there?  Now multiply that by the number of OSes they are running (going back to XP SP1, at least) that people are going to be asking about.  Now factor in the likelihood that the problem is PEBKAC or viral.  The Gurus are going to be overwhelmed.  I just wish I had a bird’s eye view and a bag of popcorn.To sum this point up, I don’t think it’s possible to solve PC user problems with a “Bar” in the same way it is with Mac user problems.  It’s inherent to the product.  I’m not knocking Microsoft’s tech support, I’ve heard it’s usually very good, and it has been the time or two I’ve had occasion to use it.  I don’t know how appointments are going to work, or if support is going to be predicated on having a valid license key or what, but giving Windows users carte blanch to walk up to a counter and say fix this, and giving the Gurus 15 minutes in which to do it, is a recipe for disaster.

• Related to my affirmative action analogy, isn’t this kind of a step backwards?  Never mind Fry’s, Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart, Costco, Office Depot/Max, and others I’ve forgotten, all of which are perfectly valid brick-and-mortar opportunities to buy a PC, there is quite a robust means of buying a PC electronically: the World Wide Web.  Maybe the point isn’t selling PCs so much as software, to which I say that the Web is an even better avenue for said purchases.  Again, what’s the point here?

The only thing I can see the MicrosoftStore is good for, similar to Xbox and Zune, is losing money.  Yes, they will offer classes and training, but those cannot possibly make enough money offset the colossal cost of renting space in a mall and staffing it, and I just don’t know what people would be buying in there to offset it, either.  If they plan on moving PCs in enough volume to make it profitable, I think some OEMs are going to get cranky really fast.  Again, I will want popcorn for this.  Operating these stores as loss-leading advertising for the Microsoft Brand™ seems particularly daft, even for Redmond.¹

I’m a grown man in my 30s with two children, and I’m excited because I scored a second plastic guitar on eBay, so we will have a full compliment of instruments to play with.  It’s such a blast to play, particularly because those songs are so ingrained, even if you haven’t heard them for years, that the rhythms and cadences come quite naturally.  The art, game design, and just the whole package of The Beatles: Rock Band are just genius.

Finally, some observations I’ve made as I watch black-and-white clips of the Beatles on YouTube:

1. Paul plays his bass left handed.  I can’t believe I’ve never noticed before, particularly because I saw him in concert a couple of years ago.

2. As much as Paul is “the cute one,” Ringo is, well, not.  And he has this kind of odd, stilted style, but it’s captivating to watch.

3. I never really knew what George brought to the Beatles equation—Paul had his looks and voice, John had the voice and songwriting chops, and Ringo was, um, Ringo—until now.  Looking with a more critical eye at the performances, I can see George was a hell of a guitarist.  In my youth, of course being aware of the Beatles and seeing the odd clip, I never drew much distinction between the lead, rhythm and bass parts.  Now, an adult lover of music and amateur vocalist myself, I can get as much out of George’s playing as John and Paul’s harmonies.

I try to do the green thing.  Actually, where I live in Roseville, recycling is built-in to the waste pick-up service, so we can just throw our plastic, aluminum and glass in with the rest of our trash, and rest assured that these materials will be sorted out and properly recycled.  But what about that deposit I paid at the register? Lost, at least to me.  I have no doubt Roseville is collecting a tidy sum for all this stuff, and well they should, I guess.  Those funds surely make their way into the budget somewhere; at the very least I would hope they reduce the cost we pay for garbage pickup.

What if I want to recover that deposit myself?  I have to save this stuff up, separately, which in a small house is no small feat.  Then I have to devote time to go to a “recycle center.”  My experience with such centers is that it feels like some kind of dirty, back-alley deal.  They are generally behind the supermarket, hidden from street view, and with good reason.  It’s a smelly, grimy affair—I’m sure I don’t need to describe the blow by blow of it.

I don’t actually consume that much that comes out of an aluminum, glass or plastic container.  My family’s biggest vice is 2-liter bottles of club soda, which are so voluminous that even at 10¢ a pop (pardon the pun) it’s too hard to collect enough of them to make the recycling trips worth the time.  So I collect my aluminum (more club soda, at the office) and glass (the occasional beer or bottled Frappacino), and generally only need to go to the recycle center once a year.

I just made this trip, which is why it’s on my mind.  One bag of cans (pre-crushed by my foot), one bag of glass, which amounted to $8.47.  I can definitely say that I make more at my day job in the half hour it took than $9.  Which is to say, I suppose, that I can really afford not to go at all.  This reduces the financial incentive for recycling to those who you generally see waiting in line at the recycling center—those who really need that money back.

I’m sure I’m about to commit all kinds of broad generalizations and unfair classisms—so be it.  I am a product of my own background, and this is my perspective.  Chiefly, I would say that it would be far better for those who drag up endless bags of 1-liter soda bottles from 7-11 and Budweiser cans to save an awful lot of money and just drink water.  Certainly it would be better for their health.  In this economy, I sometimes feel guilty about the club soda, which is pretty darn cheap. In fairness, on this most recent trip I did see a large quantity of San Peligrino bottles, which while still expensive, at least is better for you than Coke.

I must conclude that recycling is a racket, like mail-in rebates. Most people never collect—those that do tend to be so cash-strapped that they ought not make the purchase in the first place.