On the eve of WWDC: What are Apple's three greatest innovations?

An awful lot has been written recently about whether Apple is has lost its spark. "Does Apple have an innovation problem?" asks the Washington Post. Forbes claims to lay out "Apple's innovation problem", although that piece is so muddled and lacking in specific details I came away more confused than illuminated. "Apple hasn't created an innovative product in years", claims inc.com. "Has Apple's innovation engine stalled?" asks USA Today. Fox News tells us "Why Apple is ailing." The Telegraph reports that "three in four investors [say Apple is] losing [its] innovative edge." There are hundreds, if not thousands, of posts like this, and many of them come from the mainstream media -- so it's possible that this is becoming, or is already, the view of the man in the street.It seems Apple has been stung by some of this criticism; Tim Cook took the time to reassure investors that "we're unrivalled in innovation", as reported by ZDNet. Phil Schiller slammed Android in an interview with the WSJ just hours before Samsung launched the Galaxy S4. And the "Why iPhone?" page added to apple.com has a tinge of defensiveness to it, at least to my eyes. Other people agree; Apple was named "most innovative company" in a wide-ranging poll late last year, for example.John Gruber wrote about how strong narratives can displace the facts. I think this is particularly true in tech reporting, which (let's be honest) isn't all that dramatic a lot of the time. As the sublime @NextTechBlog put it: "REVIEW: New Telephone Is A Black Rectangle That Provides Phone Calls, Text Messages, The Internet, And Other Applications, Plus A Camera" and "I'm Replacing My Old, Black Rectangle With This Brand New, Black Rectangle Because This One Is New". That's a pretty neat meta-story for almost every smartphone launch ever. You and I like to obsess over the details, sure; but most people don't care that much. People like you and I read tech blogs. To hook those other people in, though, the mainstream media needs a little drama, and if it doesn't have much to work with; well, it has to sex up whatever it can lay its hands on. Hence, Gruber suggests, the virulence of the "Samsung steals Apple's crown" meme.I think there's a related meme afoot also, though. It comes in two parts. Firstly, the idea that Apple under Jobs was an innovating powerhouse, constantly turning markets upside down or creating them from whole cloth with unexpected new gadgets. And secondly, that those days ended with Jobs's passing, and that Apple's innovating days are over.I think this is pretty risible, but to explain why I'm going to have to dig a bit deeper into what innovation, exactly. For Apple's critics, such as those writing the articles I linked to above, "innovation" seems to be defined mostly as "entering or creating new markets" and Apple's innovation showreel is the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. Consider the Fox News piece, which seems to be pretty typical to me:Since October the price of Apple shares have fallen from $700 to about $425. No one should be surprised -- the company has been misstepping for a long time.Without the genius of Steve Jobs for neat, wholly-new products, it is going to take tougher management, and a change in the company's core business strategy to match its past record of profitability.Apple's remarkable success was premised on being first and better with a succession of new products, dating back to the earliest computers to smartphones and tablets. It was greatly aided by a superior operating system, which provided a more elegant and user friendly experience than rival Microsoft offerings, and the fact Apple both wrote the software and designed its products.This thinking leads to people pondering "what fields could Apple enter next" and in turns leads to people calling for Apple to prove its innovation credentials by releasing a smartwatch or a television, to name but two of the Rumours That Will Not Die.However, I strongly believe this view of 'innovation' is reductionist -- I think concentrating on innovation at the product level glosses over too many details. If we're really going to seriously look at whether Apple has become less innovative we're going to have to be a bit more clear about exactly what we're discussing.Defining innovationLet's start by considering what we mean by innovation in the first place. The concept of innovation is a bit like art: everyone knows it when they see it, but ask five people to define it precisely and you'll get a dozen different answers. The Mirriam-Webster Dictionary defines innovation as "the introduction of something new; or a new idea, method, or device" and defines innovate as "to introduce as or as if new".Merely defining it as "making changes", however, is rather shallow and overly broad. When Apple released speed-bumped MacBook Pros in February, for example it had certainly changed something old into something new; but few would put that in the same sort of class as the release of the iPad mini. It seems to me that if we're to debate the merits of innovations then we're going to need a framework to weigh up the qualities and quantities of very different kinds of changes.When I first started drafting this post, the Wikipedia page quoted a set of multi-faceted definitions I liked; they've been removed now by some capricious editor so I'll summarise them here instead: Innovation as novelty: Most people would agree that for something to innovative it has to be new in some way, either in and of itself or the application of an old idea in a new way or a new context. Innovation as change: The most potent innovations provoke changes, perhaps opening new doors for the user to work with. In the best cases, they might change whole industries, creating new product sectors or new ways of thinking that entirely replace the old. Or to put it another way: these are the changes that a company will be remembered for in fifty years. Innovation as advantage: Assuming anyone actually wants the innovation, then it seems reasonable to conclude that it'll convince people to buy the innovating product. Hence the company will sell more stuff than it would have done so otherwise. The most significant innovations, I claim, will be those that score highly on all three of these fronts.Bubbling under: candidates that didn't make the cutThere were a number of possible things I considered for inclusion in this post but ruled out for various reasons.I dismissed the iPhone, iPod, and so forth because I believe it's more interesting to say "no whole products". To say "the iPhone is innovative" is, to my mind, reductionist and frankly not that interesting. I want to dig into which specific bits of it are innovative, and why. So I ruled out entire products and instead chose to focus more closely on the individual features of products.I ruled out the graphical user interfaces, something which certainly caused industry change and Apple certainly played a crucial role in the history of. As with entire products, I think it's perhaps a little sweeping to count "GUIs" as one innovation -- I think it would be more interesting to dig deeper into individual elements. However, I must confess that most of the real cutting edge early stuff predates me; my involvement in computing only goes back to the mid '80s and I don't want to overreach by claiming I'm familiar enough to be a good judge of what is "most innovative" from that era. If your memory is longer than mine, I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments on what you think might be the biggest innovations from Apple of that era. I'm going to confine the scope of my article to the last fifteen years or so.I've also ruled out iOS itself (or, as we called it when it first arrived, "iPhone OS"). Like Harry McCracken, I also think the first iPhone owes a significant debt to Palm OS: the full-screen apps and app launcher comprised of a regular grid of icons are both very similar concepts, and notably different to how Apple designed the Newton. To my mind, the greatest innovation iOS offered was how it brought a large number of features together and made them work in a brilliantly accessible way; but I think that accomplishment, as significant as it was, is eclipsed by the things I list below.So here's what I did come up with, after some hard thought and bouncing ideas around in the TUAW newsroom.Third place: HiDPI displaysApple introduced the "Retina display" with the iPhone 4 in June 2010, since when it's rolled it out across various iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks. Defining "retina" as "a screen where the pixels are too small to be individually perceptible at typical usage distance" (which is a claim that stands up to scientific scrutiny), these screens were immediately very popular, offering a degree of visual fidelity that few had seen before.Now it must be noted that this was not the first HiDPI display in the world. I remember salivating over the IBM T220, a 21" monitor from 2001 with a breathtaking 3840×2400 screen and a $22,000 price tag. At 200 pixels-per-inch, at a distance of 17" it was a true "retina" display, with a pixel density only slightly below today's MacBook Pro with Retina display. It's resolution even tops the cutting-edge 4K format. It required three DVI cables to drive it to an even remotely sensible refresh rate of 41 Hz, because of the sheer data rate necessary to keep this monstrous screen fed. It was sold to a handful of customers, mostly for use in medical imaging, physics labs, and other specialised applications. Still, this behemoth is (clearly!) in quite a different category to a smartphone retailing for under $1000.The Retina display's innovation was not just skin deep, either. Quadrupling the number of pixels on the display means you also need four times the graphics memory and four times the bandwidth, just to maintain performance parity; then you also need a correspondingly more powerful graphics chip, and you have to do all that without compromising battery life, or weight, or making a device you can't sell for a reasonable price tag. This is why many of Apple's devices like the space-compromised iPad mini don't yet have retina displays.Apple was the first to climb this technological mountain -- but far from the last. Since the iPhone 4's release in 2010, no high-end smartphone has dared to arrive without a similar pixelicious screen. As Apple has spread HiDPI screens beyond smartphones and into tablets and laptops, so other manufacturers have followed also, with devices like the Chromebook Pixel arriving rMBP-class screens.So, to sum up: novel? Certainly in terms of consumer level devices. Change? A big fat check. Advantage? Difficult to gauge -- sales of Retina equipped devices are high, for sure, but then the iPhone and iPad were already wildly successful before they were introduced. I think it's hard to imagine that retina displays didn't help, however.Second place: capacitative multitouchI think the iPhone was a good deal less innovative than many people believe. You might have seen this snarky image by Josh Helfferich doing the rounds on forums and Twitter, purporting to show how the iPhone changed the phone market. The inconvenient truth it glosses over is that the iPhone's basic design -- a black touchscreen slab -- was far from unheard of at the time. To name just one example, consider the HTC TyTN, which was the smartphone I had before my first iPhone, and predates the latter by six months.But there was one piece missing, one thing no-one else had, and it was key to massively increasing the appeal of this design with consumers. The clue is in the two elements of that HTC that are radically different from the iPhone: it has a stylus, and it has a physical keyboard. It needed both of those because it lacked a screen that worked when you touched it with a fingertip. It's resistive touchscreen worked only on pressure, and needed the precision of the device's stylus to function. To my mind, the capacitative multitouch screen was by far the most innovative feature Apple brought to the market with the first iPhone, enabling an intuitive UX built around touch, swipe, and natural gestures such as pinch-to-zoom.There were compromises though. Fingers splodge over a much larger screen area than a tiny stylus tip, so on-screen buttons had to get bigger to compensate. That meant screen size had to increase too, by quite a lot. iPhone early adopters will probably remember friends asking how we carried phones that were "so damned big", a puzzling attitude now in this world of 5.5 inch smarphones -- but it made sense in the context of a time when for many years the fashion was for ever-smaller phones.(An aside. A common meme in the Appleverse is that the original iPhone 3.5" screen size was some sort of platonic ideal for one-handed use, as proposed by Dustin Curtis. I think this is bunk, if only because it only works for people with fairly large hands and quite flexible thumb joints, which can only be some small proportion of Apple's desired target audience for the device. I think it's much more likely that the way Apple designed the screen was as follows: (1) work out the minimum width that can hold a QWERTY keyboard and still have the keys wide enough to be typeable on (2) multiply width by 1.5, desired screen aspect ratio, to calculate height (3) There is no step three. Look at an iPhone keyboard some time -- it's hard to imagine typing on it if those keys were even just a few pixels narrower. Just a personal theory. Any Apple engineers reading this are quite welcome to let me know off-the-record if I'm correct.)Novel? I've never encountered any prior devices that used capacitative touch, so if anything did exist I'm pretty sure it was very obscure. Change? This is where Hefferich's picture does have a point -- although all-screen smartphones were not unheard of before the iPhone, they were rare. Now there's very few models that aren't cut from that cloth. So yes. Advantage? Arguably, this was the iPhone's biggest unique selling point -- and Apple has sold nearly half a billion of them now, plus the iPad. I think that's a yes too.First place: microtransactionsNow for the big one.For decades, e-commerce experts were crying out for some feasible way to charge consumers for small amounts ($1-2 or so) without being eaten alive by the credit card fees in the process. What new forms of commerce could be enabled, they would wonder, if this was achievable? We could unbundle albums, and sell consumers individual songs. We could sell them individual TV show episodes instead of box sets. We could unlock all sorts of interesting economic models that simply cannot exist with microtransactions.Then Apple quietly built exactly that for music, turning that industry on its head in the process, and then changed everything again by rolling it out for apps.Think of the impact that this has had. Without microtransactions, the App Store would be far less vibrant; with no middle ground between free and (say) $10, there would be orders of magnitude less developer interest. That bracket between free and how much apps used to cost before the App Store is where almost all of the interesting stuff is. And that's before we talk about the revolution in the music industry, now shifting to an almost entirely digital model, powered by microtransactions, and other digital content distribution channels, undergoing the same seismic shift.Novel? I think so -- I cannot find any substantial adoption of microtransaction before iTunes, with the arguable exception of e-cash systems which skirt the issue of card fees by loading a smart card with some sort of alternate currency. Not really the same thing, in my opinion. Change? Without a doubt. Microtransactions has created the app market, which everyone has copied, and dramatically changed how we can buy other kinds of digital content. Advantage? Content lock-in to the vibrant App Store ecosystem is probably Apple's greatest asset in terms of encouraging customer loyalty at phone contract re-up time. I'd say for sure this is a compelling advantage.So why does Apple bore people now?Wall Street seems to define Apple's innovation according to a simple narrative: Apple enters an existing product category (portable music players, smartphones, tablet PCs), turns it upside down, redefines it, and a few years later, ends up owning it. So all Wall Street wants to see is Apple doing that again and again, to new categories: televisions, smart watches, who knows what else.But when we examine Apple's track record in more granular terms, I think we come to the conclusion that genuine, feature-level innovation is very hard and consequently very rare. I don't think there's any evidence at all that Apple has become less innovative. Sure, Apple hasn't produced anything breathtaking new for a little while now, but when we look back over the last fifteen or so years, it's always a few years between the real big-hitting innovations anyway. So something's probably on its way -- many of you said as much in our recent TUAW poll.But! These are only my opinions, and this is a highly subjective topic. Perhaps you disagree entirely with how I've defined innovation, or perhaps you agree with my framework but think I'm an idiot for overlooking Feature X. Comments are open. Have at it!On the eve of WWDC: What are Apple's three greatest innovations? originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 08 Jun 2013 11:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink | Email this | Comments

TUAW Smackdown: Google Chromebook vs. Apple iPad, MacBook Air

The Google Chromebook, the Samsung-built subnotebook designed for the Chrome browser-only OS, appeared on the market about a month ago. As soon as the MacBook Air-lookalike device showed up online, the TUAW newsroom erupted in discussions about whether or not it would make a good low-cost computer.

Several bloggers were attracted by the price, which at US$249 is half the price of the least expensive 10-inch iPad, though not that much less than an iPad mini. I took that as a challenge and contacted Samsung to get a loaner Chromebook to test.

TUAW readers might point out that this is not an Apple product, and suggest that we shouldn't be writing about it. But we feel that it's worth pointing out alternatives to our readers that might provide the same or better functionality at a lower price. Also, there's nothing that prevents iPhone or iPad owners from picking a non-Apple desktop OS, or pairing a low-cost notebook with a home Mac.

For a couple of weeks, I used this device, running the most current stable version of Google's Chrome OS, for everything from writing my NaNoWriMo novel to editing photos. I've had plenty of experience using Apple's iPad and 11" MacBook Air, so this smackdown compares the Chromebook, MacBook Air and iPad based on a wide range of criteria. Let's take a closer look at the Chromebook first.

Google Chrome OS and the Chromebook

The first interesting thing about the Chromebook is that if you're familiar with Google's Chrome browser for OS X or Windows, you'll be immediately familiar with Chrome OS. Essentially, the browser is the OS. It's a Linux-based operating system designed to work exclusively with web applications, and the OS is designed for people who spend the majority of their time on the Internet. Essentially, the only application on the device is a browser with media player and a file manager. That dramatically limits its utility when you're disconnected from the Internet -- you're limited to the offline versions of the Google Drive productivity apps, the notepad, and a few other offline-enabled tools -- but when you're connected, it works smoothly.

That file manager givers the Chromebook some advantages over the iPad. For example, when using AOL Tech's content management system directly from Safari or Chrome on the iPad, I cannot browse for and upload a picture; there's no file system to upload from (and no Flash plugin, which the CMS uses for some image uploads).

One of my first tests with the Chromebook was to see if I could log into the TUAW CMS with Chrome, write a post and insert photos. To insert the photos, I took the SD card out of my Canon DSLR and stuck it into the slot on the side of the device. The images were immediately visible in the file manager and could be uploaded to the CMS. Google Drive also becomes available in the file manager.

If you use the Google ecosystem, then moving to the Chromebook is incredibly easy. I have a Google account with a Gmail address, a Google Drive with a number of spreadsheets and documents, a Google+ social sharing account, and more. Immediately after turning on the Chromebook, I was led through a simple setup process that had me sign into that Google account. Once that was done less than two minutes later, I had immediate access to my email, Google Drive and more.

This gallery shows the Chrome operating system and a number of applications at work:

Gallery: Chrome OS and applications

"Applications" for the Chromebook are actually web apps, purchased or downloaded free from the Chrome Web Store. Anyone with the Chrome browser can see and use those apps, and they run identically in Chrome on the Mac or PC.

Which apps are available? Well, there are some familiar apps and services: Dropbox, Instagram, Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Evernote (Web version), Autodesk Homestyler, Pulse, and HootSuite. For productivity, you have the free and very good Google apps. Those include Docs (a Word workalike), Spreadsheet (replacement for Excel, with an excellent forms capability), and Presentation (something like Keynote or PowerPoint).

You can get third-party remote access to the "real Office" Microsoft applications via InstallFree. Scratchpad is similar to Apple's Notes app, and Google Play Music can handle your audio needs. A few key web services like Netflix don't work yet on the new device, but some surprising ones do: both Chrome's cloud printing and its remote access tools are enabled, so you can print from your Chromebook to devices that are connected to a Mac or PC with Chrome, or control the screens of those other computers.

But while all of the Google and third-party web apps can substitute those apps that you normally purchase from the App Store or Microsoft, the target market of the Chromebook seems to be those people who are primarily Web workers. If you're a designer or developer, you're probably not going to be happy with a Chromebook because the tools that you're used to using just aren't available.

However, if you use a computer primarily to write, send and receive email, use Web applications, play some games, and browse the Web, then maybe the $249 Chromebook is for you.

Could I use this device instead of my MacBook Air? Definitely. I use the MacBook Air for writing, showing presentations, web browsing, and blogging. All of those things can be done just as easily on a $249 Chromebook as they can on a $999 MacBook Air -- assuming that you've got a stable and speedy network connection.

If money is not an object, the MacBook Air is the better machine to get. It feels much more solid, it's possible to get three years of support (at a cost of an AppleCare subscription) at your local Apple Store, and the software available for the device is mature. There are many other advantages and a great deal of flexibility to be gained with a "real laptop" versus the Chromebook. But if money's an object, or you don't need the extensive support or software ecosystem, then the Chromebook is an excellent bargain.

Several other TUAW bloggers asked if this would be a suitable computer for a child, and my answer is a definite yes. The price makes it almost a throwaway computer. Would you be frustrated if your child lost or broke a $999 MacBook Air? Yes, you probably would. When the price tag is about a quarter of that of an MBA, you're not going to be nearly as upset.

Finally, I am also comparing the Chromebook to the iPad with an external keyboard -- in this case, it's the best keyboard I've used with an iPad, the Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover. The TUAW team is pretty split over the use of an iPad with an external keyboard as a laptop substitute. In one camp are people like me, who think that the iPad is not a laptop substitute due to the lack of a file manager, the need to touch the screen for user interaction, and fewer business applications. In the other are some co-workers who are regularly using their iPads to do gainful work and who find it to be an excellent substitute for a MacBook of any sort. For the first group, the Chromebook will probably make more sense. Those who have already made the transition to a tablet as a business computer should probably stick with the iPad.

Running Apps

So, how does it feel running apps on a "Web computer" like the Chromebook? For the most part, apps are quite responsive and start very quickly. The Chrome browser on the Chromebook gave me some of the fastest Web browsing I've ever had the pleasure to do, with pages snapping to the screen very quickly.

As mentioned, one of the tests I performed was to write a significant portion of my 2012 NaNoWriMo novel on the Chromebook, using the Docs application in Google Drive. At this point, I'm up to about 30,000 words, and I did begin to notice some lagging with data entry and editing. Using the Docs app in Google Drive from my MacBook Air, I don't see that lag.

Videos ran beautifully on the Chromebook; only occasionally did I see a "stutter" in the playback. Likewise, games ran smoothly. I played Angry Birds on the Chromebook and found it to be smooth and fun. As mentioned, Netflix is not yet working on the ARM-based Chromebook, but Google says an update to enable the streaming movie service is in the works.

Multitasking is actually rather easy as well. Since each app has its own tab in the browser, flipping between them is as simple as clicking on a tab. I did a quick photo mashup using one of the free apps (PicMonkey), used another app to do a screenshot of the resulting image, and pasted it into my doc.

Offline Apps

As mentioned earlier, one problem with a "network computer" like the Chromebook is that apps have to be specifically designed for use offline. If they aren't, you're out of luck when you want to work on a document or play a game when disconnected from the network.

Although Google originally stated that the key Google Apps (Docs, Spreadsheet, Presentation) would be able to be used offline, at this time only Docs will work in unconnected mode. Even there, you have to make sure that you have synchronized the document to your Chromebook to be able to use it offline. If you're nowhere near a network, and you don't have a local copy of the document, you're out of luck. I'm hoping that Google makes Spreadsheet and Presentation available for offline use soon.

Price

Price comparisons require a bit of gearing up to match a tablet with the Chromebook. I've added a keyboard (and a good one, at that) to the iPad to make it more like a laptop; after all, the MacBook Air and Chromebook both come with standard keyboards that make touch-typing a breeze. Let's look at the base configurations for these devices.

iPad (1 GB RAM, 16 GB storage, Wi-Fi) $499 + Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard $100 = $599 11" MacBook Air (4 GB RAM, 64 GB storage, Wi-Fi), $999 Chromebook (2 GB RAM,16 GB Storage, Wi-Fi), $249

Winner: Chromebook

Gallery: Samsung Chromebook, iPad, and MacBook Air

Dimensions and Weight

iPad with Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover attached: 2.22 lbs., 9.5" x 7.47" x .76" MacBook Air: 2.38 lbs, 11.8" x 7.56" x .68" (tapers to .11" at front) Chromebook: 2.42 lbs, 11.4" x 8.09" x .69"

None of these devices are really overweight; carrying them on a daily basis is no hassle at all, and they take up very little space. However, for sheer compactness, the iPad with the Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover is incredible -- plus, the keyboard (and the extra weight) can be removed when it's not needed, in contrast to the laptops.

Winner: iPad with Logitech Keyboard

Technical Specifications

iPad: 1.4 GHz Apple A6X (ARM-based) SoC (system on a chip), PowerVR SGX554MP4 quad-core GPU

MacBook Air: 1.7 GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 (Turbo Boost up to 2.6GHz) with 3 MB shared L3 cache, Intel HD Graphics 4000 GPU

Chromebook: 1.7 GHz Samsung Exynos 5 Dual (ARM-based) SoC, ARM Mali-T604 quad-core GPU

A winner will not be picked for this category, as each CPU / GPU decision is specific to the device and was chosen by the manufacturer for the purposes of battery life, computing speed, display speed, etc. However, in most situations the iPad and Chromebook seemed faster than the MacBook Air.

Construction

The Apple products beat the Chromebook hands down. They both use aluminum unibody construction and solid glass; the Chromebook is made out of aluminum-colored plastic. When you push against the lid of the MacBook Air or the back of an iPad, nothing gives. Do the same with a Chromebook, and you're going to feel the plastic moving. Of course, the Chromebook is a lot less expensive. You get what you pay for.

Winner: Tie -- Apple MacBook Air and iPad

Keyboard

For Mac users, the Chromebook keyboard is going to feel a bit awkward as you'll need to use the Control-C/Control-V/Control-X keys for copy/paste/cut instead of using the Command key. But the Chromebook has a surprisingly good keyboard with an excellent feel to it. I was able to touch-type a good portion of my NaNoWriMo novel on the Chromebook, and it took very little time to feel comfortable with its keyboard.

Of the three keyboards -- the Chromebook, the MacBook Air, and the Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard for the iPad -- the MacBook Air felt the most comfortable to me. However, I could easily use any of the three.

Winner: Tie -- Apple MacBook Air, Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard for iPad, Chromebook

Trackpad

The iPad, of course, doesn't have a trackpad. It does, however, have a full touchscreen that enables multi-touch gestures. The MacBook Air trackpad also support multi-touch gestures. The Chromebook also features a multi-touch trackpad, but it only seems to support two-finger click and scrolling at this time. In addition, I found that the Chromebook trackpad sometimes wouldn't register a tap (equivalent to a mouse click) unless I pushed a little harder than I'm used to.

One thing that I could not figure out was how to use the trackpad to zoom in on windows when using Google Maps and the Google Remote Desktop app. With the Apple devices, I used the intuitive pinch-to-zoom gesture.

Winner: Tie -- Apple MacBook Air and iPad

Display

iPad 3: 2048 x 1536 pixels (264 ppi)

MacBook Air: 1366 x 768 pixels, 11.6" diagonal screen

Chromebook: 1366 x 768 pixels, 11.6" diagonal screen

The Retina display of the iPad third and fourth generations is amazingly good. For the MacBook Air, it almost appears that exactly the same display was used on it and the Chromebook. I found the Chromebook display to be somewhat less bright than that on the MacBook Air.

Winner -- iPad with Retina display.

Camera(s)

iPad (third or fourth generation)

Back-facing camera: 5 MP, 1080p HD with video stabilization, face detection, flash Front-facing FaceTime camera: 1.2 MP, 720p HD

MacBook Air

Front-facing FaceTime camera: 1.2 MP, 720p HD

Chromebook

Front-facing camera: 153,600 pixels, VGA (640 x 480)

Winner: Third-generation iPad with Retina display

Networking Capabilities (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Cellular)

iPad (LTE model option)

802.11a/b/g/n Wi‑Fi (802.11n 2.4GHz and 5GHz) Bluetooth 4.0 wireless technology Available GSM/EDGE/LTE or CDMA/GSM/EDGE/LTE models ($130 extra plus monthly data plan)

MacBook Air

802.11n Wi-Fi wireless networking; IEEE 802.11a/b/g compatible Bluetooth 4.0 wireless technology

Chromebook ($329 3G model option)

Built-in dual band Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n Bluetooth 3.0 Verizon 3G Data service (2 years included), no monthly plan 12 complimentary Gogo In Flight airline Wi-Fi sessions

The Apple devices may have the better specs, but for sheer low-cost networking, the Chromebook's two-year Verizon 3G data plan is incredible. That does require a different model of Chromebook, however: the $329 Chromebook with 3G. If you get the Wi-Fi model, you're saving money but giving up the flexibility of 3G. Of course, if we're upgrading hardware, the iPad can move to an LTE configuration for $129 more, and wipe the floor with the Chromebook's 3G speed.

Winner: Chromebook (an asterisk for the 3G model), iPad LTE (same asterisk, different model)

Cold boot

iPad: 45.0 seconds (timed on iPad 3, could be faster with iPad 4) MacBook Air: 17.3 seconds Chromebook: 9.1 seconds

Winner: Chromebook, although you are far less likely to truly "cold boot" the iPad in normal operation.

Wake from sleep

iPad: instantaneous

MacBook Air: 1 to 15 seconds depending on the length of time it has been asleep

Chromebook: instantaneous

Winner: Tie -- iPad and Chromebook

Expandability

iPad: RAM and Storage not expandable

MacBook Air: RAM and Storage not expandable, can use flash RAM drives for extra storage

Chromebook: RAM and Storage not expandable, has built-in SD card slot for extra storage

Winner: Chromebook, simply because no extra card reading device or flash RAM stick is required

I/O

iPad: Audio, Bluetooth, dock connector/Lightning

MacBook Air: USB 3 (2 ports), Thunderbolt, audio

Chromebook: USB 3 (1 port), USB 2 (1 port), HDMI,

Winner: The MacBook Air's Thunderbolt port, with its flexibility to drive video or storage devices of all sorts, edges out the Chromebook's HDMI-only video setup. USB 3 speeds on both notebooks mean that external storage will be fast and readily available.

Battery Life (stated by manufacturer)

iPad: 10 hours

MacBook Air: 5 hours

Chromebook: 6.5 hours

Winner: iPad

Conclusion

When I first got the idea of doing an "Apples and Oranges" comparison of Apple devices against the Chromebook, I have to admit that I thought there was no way that I'd be impressed with the Google device. It took only a fraction of the two week review period to realize that for a growing number of people, the Chromebook or something quite close to it might be the perfect bargain machine.

Out of all three devices compared, the iPad seems to be the most perfect "really portable computing device." But as Engadget's Myriam Joire said in her first hands-on look at the Chromebook, "Ultimately, this is a phenomenal device for the price. If you're used to working in the cloud, you're basically getting 80 percent of the entry-level MacBook Air experience for a quarter of the price." I'd be willing to expand her statement to say that you're also going to be able to do about 80 percent of what you can do on an entry-level iPad for half the price -- although that last 20 percent may include a lot of your favorite games or photography apps.

I also recommend that you read the full-on Chromebook review by Dana Wollman at Engadget, who brings up the point that there are "some people who couldn't be paid to use a laptop where everything is done in the browser."

In my opinion, Apple doesn't do a very good job of developing stellar Web services or applications -- Google does. If Apple is moving in the direction of cloud computing with apps "in the cloud," better get there quickly since the Chromebook really shows how it's done at a low cost. If Google can get the Chromebook experience into its Android tablet OS, then Apple's dominance in the tablet market might be at risk.

Ultimately, though, it's all up to consumers. My recommendation to anyone who is interested in the Chromebook as an inexpensive, lightweight portable machine is to use the Chrome browser on a Mac or PC, and load it up with the Chrome OS apps. If you find yourself spending a lot of time using those apps, then chances are pretty good that you're going to be very happy with a Chromebook and you'll have a lot of spare change in your wallet.

On the other hand, if your use cases tend toward using specialty apps that run on OS X, you'll probably shy away from Chrome OS and the Chromebook. Really indecisive folks can make a $249 gamble and give it a try; you can always return, resell or give away the device if you don't like it.

Would I replace my iPad with a Chromebook? No. But I use the iPad in places and situations where a computer without a keyboard is more appropriate, and I rarely use it with the Logitech Keyboard described in this post. Would I replace my MacBook Air with a Chromebook? To be honest with you, there I'm quavering a bit. I don't use my MBA as my main computer, but as a work travel companion. A Chromebook might just be a replacement for my MacBook Air the next time around.

One final word: Google is making 100 GB of cloud storage available to Chromebook buyers for two years, free of charge. Couple that with the limited, low-cost $80 two-year Chromebook 3G data plan, and this device becomes even more attractive.

This post was edited post-publication to clarify some feature comparisons.TUAW Smackdown: Google Chromebook vs. Apple iPad, MacBook Air originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 23 Nov 2012 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Dekko Debuts An Augmented Reality Racing Game Playable From The iPad

Dekko, a San Francisco-based startup that just closed extra funding to build a platform for augmented reality apps, just brought its first title to market with a racing game that has players drive virtual cars across tabletops. OK, so augmented reality, which overlays virtual items or information over the real world through a phone or tablet’s viewfinder, hasn’t really come into its own yet. There have been plenty of companies like Layar, which built one of the very early augmented reality browsers for the iPhone, which have been around for a few years. That’s partially because the user experience is still a bit unwieldy with people having to take their phones or iPads out and pan their built-in cameras around. But it’s possible that Google Glass could change all of this. Dekko, which recently took an additional $1.3 million in funding, is betting that augmented reality’s moment could be around the corner. Other startups are making this bet as well; another company Daqri just picked up $15 million in a Series A round for augmented reality as well. “We wanted to solve many of the basic user problems with augmented reality. We had a compulsion to at least show something that’s real and fun,” said co-founder and CEO Matt Miesnieks. “We wanted to build an experience that is kind of magical.” The game, which you can demo below, has players hold up their iPads over a table. On the screen, you can see cars racing across a virtual track. It can turn any kind of flat surface into racetrack that’s visible on the iPad. The app is also multiplayer, allowing between one and four people to race each other, do stunts and crash into each other’s cars. The multiplayer mode can show a single, real-time shared view. Tabletop Speed Trailer from Dekko on Vimeo. To me, it sounds like a proof of concept that demonstrates Dekko’s platform, which was built by the startup’s in-house team of computer vision experts. Eventually, they’ll bring their platform to wearables like Google Glass. “One thing we know about Glass is that our tech will work on it,” Miesnieks said. Dekko’s backers include Echo Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Venture 51, Blumberg Capital, Launch Capital, Thomvest, Eniac Ventures, and Zig Capital, as well as angels like Howard Lindzon, Erik Moore, Dan Conway, and Raymond Tonsing.

Mac OS X Lion: This Is Not The Future We Were Hoping For (AAPL)

It breaks my heart to say this, but Mac OSX Lion's interface feels like a failure. Its stated mission was to simplify the operating system, to unify it with the clean experience of iOS. That didn't happen. If it weren't for the fast, rock-solid Unix, graphics and networking cores, Lion would be Apple's very own Vista. The path to a simpler future When Steve Jobs first introduced Lion, he set a bold goal: to take what has made the iPad and the iPhone so successful and bring it to the desktop. There's nothing wrong with that. The simplification of the computer experience—which actually gives more power to the users by allowing them to focus on their work instead of screwing around with their machine to make it do what they want—has been the Holy Grail of computers since the 80s. It happened then, when we switched from the command line to the graphical desktop. (For the complete history of this evolution, read this). But in the last three decades computers have again become too complicated for a lot of people. The rest of us put up with it because we've gone through years of conditioning, but most people don't know any conventions and shortcuts accumulated over two decades—the layers upon layers of user interface, patched one on top of another. That's why the iPad and the iPhone have been so amazing. They were clean slates that kicked all those conventions to the curb. The result is a simple, powerful environment. It's awesome. It is the future. Lion is the wrong step into that future. By trying to please everyone, the OS X team has produced an incongruent user interface pastiche that won't satisfy the consumers seeking simplicity nor the professional users in search of OCD control. Apple hasn't really targeted a specific population. Or provided varying levels of user control—a super-simple modal interface for normal people and pro-level classic window interface for nerds. That's what Microsoft is trying to do with Windows 8. Ironically, if Apple had taken a page out of Microsoft's book in this case, it would have been a step in the right direction. Lots of good intentions The first time I started Lion I was expecting Launchpad to take over the screen, like the iPad. Apple touted it as the new way to launch your apps. The combined theory of Lion-iOS-iCloud is good, almost magic: Launchpad to access your apps, apps to access your documents which, eventually, would all be in the cloud and accessible from all your devices. Eliminating the physical desktop metaphor completely, the same way Gmail has eliminated the need to have mail folders. With current instant-search technology, there's no need for anal folder organization. Advanced users and other masochists would still have access to their Finders for the time being, of course, just like Microsoft is doing with Windows 8. That could have made a lot of sense for everyone involved. But what Apple did doesn't compute: Launchpad is supposedly the way to access all your apps, but who wants to click once on the dock's Launchpad icon, launch that interface, and then select your app when you can just open the app from the Finder itself? It's an extra click (or two or three). It's added complexity; it's superfluous. Mission Chaos That's one part of Lion's multiple personality problem. Mission Control along with Full Screen apps is another. Mission Control is touted by Apple as the perfect merger of Exposé and Spaces. Beloved by advanced users, Exposé and Spaces are great productivity tools in Leopard. The first allows you to quickly select apps and windows. Spaces helps pro users organize work environments, by grouping different app windows all floating on different desktops. The way they mixed it (check the video for a better understanding) may work for advanced users, but it is way too complicated for consumers. It feels like a broken bridge between the modal world and the windowed world. By default, there's a Dashboard Space, where all widgets live, like in the current Mac OS X. Then there is a Desktop Space, where the windowed apps exist. Again, this is like in Leopard. In Lion there could be multiple desktops grouping different apps, all set by the user. And finally, there is Full Screen App Space, which results in multiple spaces too, one per app taking over the whole screen. iPhoto, Preview and many system apps can run full screen at this point. This is not a bad idea per se. When you work only with Full Screen Apps it all makes perfect sense. It's very easy and smooth to move from one app to the other swiping your three or four fingers left or right. Your mind switches tasks as you move from app to app. I mostly work with Photoshop, my tabbed browser, iMovie/FCP and Mail. Add iPhoto for my personal 70,000-photo album and iTunes for about 12,000 songs. It'd be very convenient for me to switch through full screen versions of these apps. I like the simplicity and the clarity it brings. But when you add Desktop Spaces and the Dashboard Space, it all becomes a mêlée of windows, desktops, squares, Dashboard widgets and icons. When you get into Mission Control by swiping three fingers up, you get a new clusterfuck that is added to the traditional windowed clusterfuck we have now. Click on one of the windows or spaces or whatever to go to it. Does it work? Yes. Is it more confusing for consumers than Exposé or Spaces? Yes. It's more complicated because it tries to mix control of all these different entities in one single place. The mix doesn't work. Allegedly, as all third-party apps include the full screen mode that Apple is advocating, a Desktop Space would become a home for small single-window apps like iChat or Twitter (or at that time, it may be better to move all of those to the Dashboard Space and get it over with). Advanced users would be able to run all their apps in the Desktop Spaces if they wanted so. Normal users would be able to run all their apps in full screen mode, simplifying their lives. Like with Launchpad, full screen apps should be the default mode of apps, unless specified in the System Preferences. For consumers, that would result in a pure, gloriously simple modal environment like the iPad. The pros would still have their clusterfuck. The inconsistency problem This mix and match of concepts brings a lot more problems. Take this example: when you are in a full screen app, there's no easy way to open a new app. You either have to swipe your way back to a Desktop space and launch your app from the Dock or the Finder or Launchpad. Or you swipe your three fingers up to access Mission Control and launch your app from the Dock or click on Launchpad in the Dock and find your app there. Or you can access the Command + Tab menu and access Launchpad from there. Or you can find your app in the Spotlight widget on the top menu of the full screen app. These multiple points of access would make the head of any consumer explode, while advanced users would probably go for a quick third-party launcher like Alfred, something that would allow them to quickly open any app or document from anywhere. That's not the only headache that this mix of multiple concepts introduce. There's the issue of inconsistency in gestures. Never mind the introduction of Natural Scrolling, which basically reverses the way you have scrolled all your life to match the way the iPad does it (your brain will adapt to it in a few minutes—but you can always turn it off). The problem is that gestures are not consistent between applications. You swipe left and right with three fingers to move through spaces, but when you are in Launchpad, you do a similar thing by using two fingers only. One doesn't work. That's because Launchpad is an application, so it uses the two-finger page-swapping gesture. But it feelswrong because your brain is wired to the way you swap spaces. In Safari, the two-finger swapping makes you travel in your history. In Preview, it makes you go through pages. Which kind of makes sense, but it doesn't. There's a problem there, which is likely going to affect other apps. It feels like the gesture language is non-consistent and it's certainly not as intuitive as the iPhone or the iPad, perhaps because the touch element doesn't exist. One tip: If you are going to get Lion, get a Magic Trackpad. The ugly failure of the physical metaphor Another iOS aspect that has worked its way into Mac OS X Lion is the graphical emulation of physical surfaces. Now there's gross faux wood panelling in Photo Booth. The Address Book is a real world hardbound address book. iCal is a bloody pseudo-calendar made of paper and leather. The question is: Why is Apple reproducing things that are obsolete already? Do people still use calendars made of leather and paper? Do people use agendas? Seriously, does anyone under 18 even know what these are? I understand that the iOS guidelines call for physical surfaces to invite touch, but that's because there's a screen to touch. And, let's face it, we are not in 2008 anymore. Everyone knows how to touch a screen. And I can't touch my iMac screen and make it do anything, anyway. It may be the subject for another article, but this emulation of old stuff feels like a juvenile gimmick, much like the old gummy-drop Aqua interface feels old and dated now. In this regard, perhaps Apple software people should have taken a page from Jon Ive and his cronies: Simplify the interface, get rid of the things that don't add any information to the user, all the useless adornments. I'd have loved to see a user interface that echoed Apple's own hardware and use of typography. The right stuff It's not all bad. They got rid of the Aqua jelly scrollbars and—when they are not doing gimmicky real-world object emulation—the graphical aspects of the user interface are simpler and unified. More sober than ever before. The use of animation is also gorgeous, and full of meaning. The sharing interface of AirDrop works great. It's simple, it makes sense, it works. There's nothing superflous there. In Mail, the animation used to show threads works well. It helps the user to understand what's going on ("oh, it's expanding!"). I would love to see more simplification of the graphics and more use of animation to convey information. There are lots of other little things, like iChat and its unified contact list, a much needed fix that third party chats apps already had. The accounts and contact information is also unified in a iOS-like kind of way. Those things feel good. As do things like saving the status of application and the automatic versioning of documents, which saves your data automatically and allows you to go back in time to reverse edits on a document-per-document basis. These little things will be reason enough for many to upgrade to Lion. I don't need Lion, and you probably don't need it either But overall, it doesn't feel like a must-have upgrade to me. I love Mac OS X. I've used it since the very first and painful developer preview, back in September 2000. I love iOS too, because its modal nature simplifies powerful computing, and, at the same time, empowers normal people. I hoped Mac OS X Lion was going to merge both perfectly. Sadly, from a user interface point of view, it has failed to achieve that. And by failing at this task, it has made a mess of what was previously totally acceptable. Mac OS X Lion still works. It's fast. It's solid. Its shortcomings could be partially fixed. And I'm sure that many will learn these new user interfaces patches and live with them. Me? I'd rather wait for a more coherent operating system. Perhaps Mac OS 11. Or iOS 6. This post originally appeared at Gizmodo. Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »See Also:Watch The Atlantis Shuttle Launch LiveNew Kinsey Report Turns Everything You Thought About Sex On Its HeadLEAKED: Rebekah Brooks Secretly Recorded By News Of The World Staffers

Square COO Keith Rabois Explains The Death Of The Web And How Square Will Move Beyond Payments

Keith Rabois has already lived several successful lives in Silicon Valley. Like a lot of today's tech bigwigs, Rabois started his career at PayPal, then moved on to become an angel investor in tech successes like YouTube, Yelp, and LinkedIn. Now he's helping to run one of the fastest growing startups in San Francisco: payments company Square. In 2010, Square founder Jack Dorsey recruited Rabois to be the company's Chief Operating Officer. Since then, the company has grown from a few dozen to more than 250 employees and has reportedly been valued at more than $1 billion. More than 1 million customers are using the Square reader and apps, and Square will probably process more than $4 billion in payments this year. And that's all with minimal advertising and no direct sales force. But Square's ambitions don't stop at payments — the company wants to solve all sorts of pain points for small business owners. We caught up with Rabois in Square's ultra-modern offices in the old San Francisco Chronicle building. Here's what we learned.

Square is thinking beyond payments. "Square's mission is to reinvent commerce on both sides of the counter .... We actually look at all of those pain points [small businesses face] and try to rank order them in terms of how much friction is there for that small business person, how much of a disadvantage do they have. We will try to find the solution for them over time. It won't all happen overnight."

It's harder to build great tech companies in great economic times. "One of the perverse things about a bubble in Silicon Valley is, it tends to fragment talent across too many companies, so you get sort of a suboptimal number of successful companies. If everybody starts their own companies you don't wind up with a density of talent at one place, which is what really is required to build an amazing company, whether it's PayPal or Apple back in the day, or Yammer or Square today."

Want to recruit great people in a talent crunch? Solve a real problem. "We have a mission of helping local businesses thrive so that they can grow their businesses so that they can hire people so that they can help the U.S. economy. It's not social gaming — that's a very good business, it can be a very creative exercise for the people who work there, but it's not clear that it has any societal impact, and if it does it may be negative." 

Mobile devices and apps are killing the web. "When I [first] said it, it was a little bit provocative. Now it is so obviously true that actually I find it boring. I don't know any smart person in the Valley who doesn't agree with that now .... Which is going to be more important to the future of society: a web site with www-dot-url or one of these?" [pulls out his iPhone.]

Google SHOULD be nervous about mobile. "If every American is going to carry around a fully functional computer 24 hours a day with different censors and different pieces of information available, that radically transforms the type of content and the type of applications that are going to be most important. Steve Jobs famously said 'people don't go to Google on this [the iPhone], they go to Yelp.' So search is a last resort on this, it's not a first resort. On the web, before Facebook, search was pretty close to a first resort."

Physical credit cards aren't going away — and forget NFC. "Every American of almost any age and certainly any demographic knows exactly how to use one of these pieces of plastic .... There's absolutely nothing better about taking a phone and kind of waving it around than pulling out a credit card and swiping it. It's actually more complicated because usually the phone is locked behind a password and there may be a separate password for your NFC app."

Why a lot businesses won't give you a free cup of water. (It's not because they're cheap. To see the real reason, read on...)

Here's a lightly edited transcript of our conversation: Business Insider: I asked this question to Yammer CEO David Sacks as well, so I'm curious what your take is. What was so special about PayPal back in the day? Why did so many people at this relatively small company go on to such big things? Keith Rabois: I think a decade ago, we had a group of very talented, wicked smart, entrepreneurially driven, ambitious folks that sort of banded together to try to revolutionize payments. It's very rare to collect in one place a reasonable number of those people, they tend to fragment. Part of the reason was at the time, 2000 to 2002, the rest of Silicon Valley [collapsed]. So we had something like an 85% acceptance rate on all of our offers. One of the perverse things about a bubble in Silicon Valley is, it tends to fragment talent across too many companies, so you get a suboptimal number of successful companies. If everybody starts their own companies you don't wind up with a density of talent at one place, which is what really is required to build an amazing company, whether it's PayPal or Apple back in the day, or Yammer or Square today. Also, we were quite contrarian and had — today it would be described as a missionary zeal — and I think that that's one of the biggest reasons. We approached problems from scratch, rethought a lot of axioms. BI: How does Square overcome the talent crunch now that everybody is running off and building their own startup?KR: We started January of last year with 37 people, we started this year with 210. So we have done a great job of becoming a magnet for talent in the Valley. First, we have a very clear vision of what we are trying to do, and it's very ambitious, and that attracts the best people in the world. People who are really good at what they do, elite engineers, elite designers, are all motivated by difficult challenges and confronting them. The second thing is that we have significant and substantial momentum in the marketplace, so it reinforces that vision. Then the third is that we have a positive impact. We have a mission of helping local businesses thrive so that they can hire people, so that they can help the U.S. economy.  It's not social gaming — that's a very good business, it can be a very creative exercise for the people who work there, but it's not clear that it has any societal impact, and if it does it may be negative. BI: So, about a year ago you made an interesting comment that you thought the web was dying. Do you still think that's true?KR: When I said it, it was a little bit provocative. Now it is so obviously true that actually I find it boring. I don't know any smart person in the Valley who doesn't agree with that now. The three biggest fans that have sort of proselytized this view in the Valley have been Marc Andreessen, Jack [Dorsey], and me. But Marc, Jack, and me sort of articulated this two years ago. So even by [a year ago] all of the evidence suggested this — like you guys are running graphs actually, just pull up Business Insider and see what consumption of the Web is on an iPad, it is already passing PC consumption and browsing, so that's almost like a no brainer at this point.BI: When you say the web is dead you mean the PC, desktop based browsing?KR: Yes that's dying, but even web sites as a whole arguably. So for example, which is going to be more important to the future of society: a website with www-dot-url or one of these? [pulls out his iPhone]. And in fact the original vision of Square was the proliferation of these devices, whether an Android phone or iPhone or an iPad, means the entire world of payments and commerce can be completely rearranged. Similarly, the reason why you see people investing in things like Instagram and photo sharing apps is because they believe you can reinvent social from a bottom up, from scratch, for a mobile device. We do that for payments and commerce.BI: Larry Page just said the other day that the Internet has a tendency to revert back to these balkanized walled gardens. (Exact quote: "It's the tendency of the Internet to move into a well guarded state"). Do you think that's a problem?KR: I don't know. Each of these apps [on his iPhone] is sandboxed. I actually find it to be a quite high quality user experience. I don't have any problem opening an app for Twitter or opening an app for Facebook or opening Yelp, Square, or my calendar app. So I'm not sure about how much it matters. I am more observing what the future is, not saying what is better or worse. But the truth is if every American is going to carry around a fully functional computer 24 hours a day with different censors and different pieces of information available, that radically transforms the type of content and the type of applications that are going to be most important. Steve Jobs famously said "people don't go to Google on this [the iPhone], they go to Yelp." So search is a last resort on this, it's not a first resort. On the web, before Facebook, search was pretty close to a first resort. But it's not on this. It's the thing you do when you can't find the app for that. Two other points. If you are installed on a home screen, it's not accidental. So being installed on a home screen encourages more use, whereas on the web you don't necessarily have that home screen. Then secondly, what's on my home screen here is self expressive. I know people are going to see my phone so I have Yelp here intentionally, and I have Twitter here intentionally, and Quora is here intentionally. So it's not just a shortcut.BI: It's a personal statement.KR: Exactly, but then it reinforces — which apps do I use the most? because by the time I start flipping around like here [to the third page of his iPhone's screen], it's like highly unlikely I'm going to use those apps. BI: So you said you have a very clear vision. What is Square's mission?KR: Square's mission is to reinvent commerce on both sides of the counter. Both the process of buying and the process of selling in the real world. Empowering local businesses to have the tools to compete with the elite. So we started with credit cards. Historically in that space if you wanted to accept a credit card it was a privilege that you were afforded, if you were lucky enough to jump through certain hoops and hurdles without falling. You had to apply but usually it would take days to weeks to months. You had to submit to a credit check. And often you were disqualified if you had never run a business professionally before. However, if you got access, it was highly likely that by processing credit card for the first time your sales would grow. So every new entrepreneur starting a business who couldn't get access to credit cards was losing sales and was losing volume to big businesses like Target, Walmart, Starbucks. We stopped that and we said everybody is getting access, everybody is going to get to have that tool. The next thing that big business have lots of information. Store managers are pushed all kinds of analytics, how to optimize sales, pricing, we give everybody that now for free. So you take your iPad, you install Square Register, and you have analytics that allow you to manage your business. Traditionally, the businesses we serve were basically counting cups, and they would literally stack their cups up in their coffee shop that they would know the number of coffees that were being sold or cappuccinos that were being sold by the end of the day. That's exactly why they won't give you water if you've ever tried — it screws up the inventory management system. So with Square Register, every business now gets tools that help them manage their business. Should I open an hour earlier or should I stay open an hour later? Should I change the pricing on this Diet Coke Cherry Zero, should I raise it, lower it? What happens when it rains, what happens when it snows? Nobody whose been a sole proprietor or who has been a small business person has ever had analytics like this before. BI: So in theory you could all of the other things that sole proprietors and small businesses struggle with, like financials and taxes.KR: Yep. We actually look at all of those pain points and try to rank order them in terms of how much friction is there for that small business person, how much of a disadvantage do they have. We will try to find the solution for them over time. It won't all happen overnight. BI: The small business market is incredibly fragmented, it's hard to reach all those business owners. How do you overcome that?KR: I think it's because the product speaks for itself. The Square card reader plus the experience basically creates an epiphany for people. They never thought they could do this before. So if I am running a restaurant and you buy this Coke from me, you swipe your card through Square on the iPad or on the phone and then you sign and you say "what is that?" And I say "Square." And you say, "I am a taxi driver, that would be perfect for me." So our growth comes from people actually seeing Square in the real world. It turns out if I am running a coffee shop I have real world customers of every type like personal trainers, SAT tutors, math teachers ... journalists. BI: Have you guys done any advertising? KR: We occasionally test advertising in different channels but the primary driver of the Square option is actually seeing Square in the real word.BI: So no sales force.KR: No sales force, none whatsoever. We have bought an online ad here and there but not in any serious sense. We do sell Square to retailers. So Square is available today in roughly 11,500 retail stores. There's Apple, Walmart, Radio Shack, Best Buy, Office Max, Fed Ex stores, and UPS stores. A lot of people go to the store to get Square. They already knew about Square and they want to find one near their home then take it back tonight they don't want to wait for us to ship them one.BI: It seems like there's still this thing, particularly in San Francisco and among some kinds of businesses, like small restaurants and coffee shops, where they take take cash only. It's almost like a point of pride. Do you think that's a reluctance to pay anything to anybody? Or do you think they don't realize that they are losing of business from people like me who get annoyed and then walk out?KR: One is that free is free. Free is attractive to lots of people. That said, I think the knowledge about how much they are sacrificing isn't obvious to everybody. So what I tell friends of mine who have small business I say, just run Square for one day. Just take out the Square, it's free, the app's free, try it for a day and see how much your sales go up. If you have just run a bar forever, a cash-only bar, do you know how much you're losing? You may not. And so we have to frame that for them and explain that. Visa [a Square investor] does a good job too. I mean Visa's business for the last 40 years has been to communicate this. AmEx does a great job of this. The second thing is, in San Francisco I would say a lot of businesses certainly know that Square exists, but across the United States, no. That's what were working on. BI: Are you guys going to move outside of the United Sates?KR: This year we will launch outside of the United States. We haven't specified yet the exact dates and in what order for new markets.BI: Are different regulations the main challenge with that?KR: Well a variety of things are different. Different currency, different language, sometimes different rules, different partners, different processing partners, so there's definitely complexity to launching outside the U.S. when you move money around. But we now have a lot of experience with all of this stuff in the United States so actually it's incrementally easier to launch in new markets than people think. Launching Square from scratch was a Herculean effort by a very small team here. Now that we have a lot of expertise and a lot of traction and proven success it's actually a lot easier.BI: Will payments evolve to the point where a card reader is no longer necessary? Is that one of your goals?KR: I don't know. Every American of almost any age and certainly any demographic knows exactly how to use one of these pieces of plastic. Doesn't have to be trained. You show them a card and they know what to do with it, they know what it can be used for, they know how to swipe. So I think physical cards like that are gonna be used by Americans for a very long period of time and we're gonna embrace that. Now we have started to shift a lot of users to pay with their name, pay with their real world identity. All a credit card is, in some ways, is just 16 digits uniquely identified with you. PayPal figured out in 1998 into 1999 that email address is a very good unique identifier as well and that drove a lot of the magic behind PayPal. It sounds kind of trivial now but in fact it was fairly revolutionary.  So ultimately your name, your photo, and your phone are very good unique identifiers. So people will start finding out that this specific piece of plastic is not necessary, and in fact can actually be an incremental barrier. But it is still tied back to a funding source, a payment source like Visa. There is still a relationship with a Visa or MasterCard, it just may not be presented with a piece of plastic. BI: I still think there's a sense of magic when you walk into a place say "I want that" and you can pay for it without using anything at all. Totally frictionless.KR: We think it is magical to walk in and be treated like a VIP and just walk in and have someone treat you like a VIP where you walk in. They greet you by name, and say "would you like your normal?" And we're the only company that can do that using your name, your photo, your real world identity, and a little bit of technology that ensures the whole system works really well. That's what forges authentic loyalty — I go back to bars and restaurants that recognize me and treat me well, not because they offer me some discount. BI: Do you think there's any purpose for like NFC or any sort of short range wireless technology, where you can use a phone or other device in place of a credit card?KR: There could be some technology that we invent that other people invent that would be amazing, but NFC is certainly not that. NFC is a technology in search of a value proposition as I've said probably two years ago. It doesn't help merchants and it doesn't help buyers. The only people it helps as far as I can tell are people who want to have cocktail party chatter in the financial services world that makes their jobs feel cool. BI: Or phone makers that want you to buy a new phone every two years? KR: But actually the consumers don't like using it, so I don't think it drives purchases as a phone. There's absolutely nothing better about taking a phone and kind of waving it around than pulling out a credit card and swiping it. It's actually more complicated because usually the phone is locked behind a password and there may be a separate password for your NFC app and. It's much better to be using your credit card. Merchants hate NFC. They don't want new, fancy, complicated, expensive, systems to read that. Plus it's actually post-purchase, unlike Square. When I walk in, we can have a conversation as I am approaching the counter and placing my order, and before I have actually checked out you can say "you know what goes well with that Diet Coke Cherry Zero? French fries. Would you like to order fries?" And a lot of people will say yes and I have not closed that transaction because you haven't checked me out yet. It's sort of like what Amazon does with recommended books once you have started a cart. We are allowing that Amazon experience in the real world across all merchants which has never been done before. BI: What kind of information does a merchant get about me when I walk in?KR: [With the Pay With Square app], when you have favorited a merchant, there is a geographic trigger — there are actually two. Within a certain proximity it alerts them on the register that so and so has walked into your store. Then when you're within 10 meters, you're ready to check out, so you authenticate the face, name, click, checkout. If you want more information about that person, it will show you their last visit and their visit frequency, as well as in the future what the most likely orders are.BI: So you are building that kind of Amazon recommendation engine, where people who buy french fries also like cherry Cokes.KR: Absolutely, recommended items are basically suggestions. McDonald's has perfected this. They know to offer fries. I am using that as a common phrase, I am using that as an example. I don't order coffee, so for example if I was ordering a sandwich for lunch, asking me if I want coffee is just going to infuriate me. If you said "would you like a Diet Coke with that?" I am like addicted, I am ready, I'm wired for it. Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »See Also:PayPal Just Fired A HUGE Broadside At SquareIf This Rumor Is True, Then PayPal Is About To Take Aim At SquareSquare Is Reinventing The Cash Register With Its New App

Apple's 2013 13-Inch MacBook Air Sweetens The Deal For One Of The Best Available Computers

The MacBook Air was the only new Apple hardware to be announced and launched at WWDC this year (besides the new AirPort Extreme), and while it isn’t a big change from the previous version, it packs some crucial improvements that really cater to the Air’s existing strengths. The 2013 Air is really Apple pushing the envelope with its ultraportable, and that has helped make one of the best computers in the world even better.

Apple hasn’t changed the MacBook Air’s physical design since its last major update a few years ago, but the sleek, aluminum chassis isn’t showing its age. Sure, thinner computers have emerged (though the Air is still thinner at its tapered end) but the fact that PC form factors are really only just now catching up speaks volumes to the quality of the Air’s industrial design.

Apart from overall good looks, the Air has a tremendous leg up on most computers in terms of size, weight and portability. If you haven’t yet used one for any sustained period of time, you’ll be absolutely blown away. Going from the 13-inch MacBook Pro to the 13-inch Air is like leaving the past behind and joining the future; big leaps in computing design are seldom so observable, and so noticeable in terms of your daily usage.

A concern with many who aren’t familiar with the Air is that the thin and light chassis won’t be durable, but having used both the 11- and 13-inch as my daily working computer for months at a time, while jumping from desks to various remote working locations, I can attest to those fears being unsubstantiated. The Air may not feel quite as rock solid as the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro, for instance, but it isn’t fragile by any means.

Apple has improved the Air in key areas with this redesign, and that’s where it makes sense to focus, based on the understanding that the previous version was already one of our favourite computers. Apple has focused on changes that should have the biggest impact, like the new Intel Haswell processors, the much speedier flash storage, a near doubling of battery life, and networking speeds that embrace 802.11ac, a tech on the verge of becoming conspicuous in consumer goods.

Of these changes, the one with the greatest impact for the average user will be the new, all-day battery life afforded by the 12-hour capacity built-in pack (on the 13-inch Air; the 11-inch also gets a boost, but should afford you 9 hours, not 12). Apple is also testing battery life under more demanding conditions now, which suggests that if people go to extreme measures to conserve juice they might be able to get past that 12 hour mark. And indeed, I was able to eke out around 13 hours at least once, with screen brightness dialed down and other battery drains like Bluetooth disabled.

The battery is truly remarkable. In standby mode, I haven’t yet even begun to scratch the surface of how long it can last after a week of usage. It really sips power when managing background tasks, and that should improve even further under OS X 10.9 Mavericks, which adds even more battery-conserving features to Apple’s desktop OS. The Air still ships with Mountain Lion, but you can bet Apple’s engineers were working on the upcoming OS X release when they were developing the new Air hardware.

Even without the extreme measures, this is a computer that you can forget is unplugged without fear of running into dire problems. If you’ve got a charge in the morning, and provided you aren’t doing anything too demanding that’s burning CPU cycles, you should have enough to get you through a reasonable mobile workday. Which is to say, we’re nearly at the point most people really badly want to be in terms of their MacBook’s battery life (short of limitless, endlessly clean and cool energy).

And the other upgrades help as well; the MacBook Air I reviewed was the 13-inch base model version, which retails for $1,099, but it come with double the internal storage standard vs. the 2012 model (128GB vs. 64GB), and Apple says that its new type of flash is a better performer, beating the previous generation’s storage performance speed by up to 45 percent. Certainly in testing the Air near-instantly recovered from sleep, and side-by-side with my top-end 2011 model, was snappier with nearly every task – likely also helped by the next-generation Intel Haswell processor.

Some nice new features on the MacBook Air that add to the computer in small ways are the addition of dual mics, which greatly improves call quality for things like FaceTime when you aren’t using headphones, and the new Intel HD Graphics 5000, which gives you around a 25 percent bump in performance over the Intel HD 4000 graphics chipset used in previous generations.

The other big new step-up in terms of features is the 802.11ac Wi-Fi networking card, which is complemented by the new AirPort Extreme router that offers the same. It’s a technology that’s becoming more and more commonly available on other routers, too, so it’s a very nice-to-have feature on the new Air, even if you can’t take advantage of it just yet. Still, in my brief tests with LAN performance over 802.11ac, I found that transfer times for files between computer and network-attached storage on the new router were just about halved vs. 802.11n speeds, though still lagged far behind wired Ethernet transfer times of course.

The new MacBook Air isn’t a dramatic change, but it is a very good one. I’ve fallen in love with Apple’s Retina displays, so if I have one complaint about the computer it’s that there’s no ultra-high resolution display, but incorporating that kind of screen in this generation would’ve likely meant trading a big chunk of that new battery life away, and also increasing the price tag by around $400-500. For those who value the portability, flexibility and economy of the Air above all, the 2013 edition definitely hits all the right notes.

More MacBook Maintenance Malarky: examining the arguments that none of it matters

Last week I wrote a rather, shall we say, "robustly worded" post discussing the lack of upgradability in the new MacBook Pro with Retina display (MBPwRD). This contentious post turned into one of my highest-traffic articles for TUAW ever, and certainly my highest-commented one (possibly helped a bit by Livefyre being the best comment system we've ever had). I am grateful to everyone who took the time to write one of the 192 (and counting) comments on my original post, even the ones who voted for "Gaywood is an idiot!" in my tongue-in-cheek poll. Many of you disagreed with me, and in so doing, raised a number of counter-arguments again and again; I want to dig a little deeper into those counter-arguments in this post and explore some of the issues I hadn't fully thought through when I wrote my first one.

Since my post there has been a wave of great articles around the web exploring the same topic: some decrying the MBPwRD, others asking what the fuss is about. Kyle Wiens (co-founder of iFixit), writing for Wired, boldly dismissed the MBPwRD as "Unfixable, Unhackable, Untenable" and OWC asked "was the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display originally a MacBook Air?" Many people, like John Gruber, dismissed these posts because both iFixit and OWC have a financial stake in repairable Macs, leading to an undeniable conflict of interest. Personally, I felt both posts were written from the heart, rather than the wallet, but I urge you to read them and judge for yourself.

Felix Salmon for Reuters picked up on my post and responded, calling the MBPwRD "Apple's strategy of built-in obsolescence." He said:

[This] means that the Apple ecosystem has just closed in much further - while on every previous Pro machine consumers could fiddle around quite a lot, this one is a completely inaccessible box. It's about as far as you can get from the Apple 1, which came as a kit. The control-freakery which started in the operating system and then moved into software is now very much built into the hardware as well.

Matthew Yglesias for Slate dismissed Salmon's argument, however, and defended Apple's alleged price protectionism as part of its "relentless war against commoditization and the total collapse of profits." Meanwhile, Christina Warren, formerly of this parish, kept it really simple: "Screw Upgrades: The New MacBook Pro IS the Future." Garrett Murray shrugged and said "It's just progress, folks," and Andre Torrez waxed philosophical: "I give up... Being cynical about any new bit of technology that doesn't fit into my view of how stuff should work has been a dragging anchor in my life."

Counterbalance

Before we dive into the detailed arguments, I'd like to say some conciliatory things that should probably have been in my original post.

Yes, the MacBook Pro with Retina display has some rather unusual choices: soldered RAM integrated onto the logic board, a proprietary SSD, extensive use of near-permanent glue in the battery assembly and the screen housing. All of these impair repairs and prohibit upgrades, it's true. But each one of these is also totally defendable from an engineering standpoint, if we imagine that Apple's brief to its engineers as "make the thinnest, lightest desktop replacement laptop you can without compromising battery life" -- which is a noble goal, for sure.

The oddball, tiny, bare-board SSD saves considerable space over a standard 2.5" unit. Leaving the optical drive out entirely saves even more space. Even the soldered RAM and the glued battery saves space, because there's no need for housing and slots and reinforcing struts and other gubbins. It might not save that much -- but look at the iFixit teardown again; there's barely a cubic millimetre to spare in there. Apple made every scrap count.

I'm not sure the space saving alone is that significant a step forward. Sure, the MBPwRD looks great because it's a quarter-inch thinner than the standard one, but if we're all honest with ourselves isn't that more about aesthetics than practicalities? It's not like the standard-issue MBP, at less than an inch, was exactly unwieldy to start with. It's not like the Air, which is thin enough to put itself in an entire different product category. Put it this way: when have you ever said to yourself "if only this laptop was a quarter of an inch thinner, then I could fit everything I wanted into this bag"?

But the weight... Ah! Having now played with a MBPwRD, and felt the heft of it (under the watchful eye of the Apple Store staff), I must concede that the loss of a half-kilogram (one pound) of mass is a really useful upgrade. I imagine it'd be more comfortable used in your lap (although maybe the heat it can put out might be off-putting). I'm certain your shoulder would thank you for choosing an MBPwRD after a particularly fraught cross-terminal dash to make a connecting flight. I undersold this point in my first post. Mea culpa.

Plus the screen absolutely rocks my world. I'm not remotely tempted to buy one -- like Marco Arment, I'm going through a period in my computing life where I am uninterested in desktop replacement laptops. I have a 27" iMac, an iPad 3, and a very-much-secondary-computer 2009-era MacBook Pro and I'm perfectly happy with that combination for the time being. However, a brief spell in the Apple Store gawping at a Retina display did make me really, really want a HiDPI iMac.

Oh, finally, one last thing: the MBPwRD has a standard HDMI port right there on the side of it, no awkward dongle needed or anything. Can we all take a moment to say a silent prayer of thanks for this sudden outbreak of common sense?

OK, let's move on.

The Tinkerer's Curse

There is a school of thought that says you don't truly own a thing if you can't take it apart, change some of the bits, then put it back together again. This is particularly prevalent amongst computer nerds, because not so very long ago, these abilities were absolute prerequisites to owning any sort of computer at all.

I am exactly such a person, and this is how I feel about computers, as well as lots of other stuff. It makes me uneasy about the sealed-up buttoned-down MBPwRD, and somewhat less uneasy about the MacBook Air and the iPad -- the latter devices being considerably cheaper, I'm more accepting that they might have a shorter lifespan because I can't retrofit some upgrade that I didn't know I'd need. This mentality has driven me to try custom firmwares on ADSL routers and televisions; to experiment with jailbreaking my iOS devices; to do my own car maintenance; to cure my own corned beef; to shun jarred marinara sauce in favor of making my own.

Sometimes, this sort of thing saves me time or money. More often it doesn't, and that's fine because deep down I'm doing it for fun, not profit. I wrote my earlier post from the gut and off the cuff, and it was largely driven by this sentiment.

Many of you don't share these concerns. Nor should you! I accept that I'm unusual in this regard. I cannot reasonably expect my feelings on this matter to sway many folk. My imp of the perverse wants to ask one question though: if you guys are all so dead set against tinkering, why do our jailbreaking posts get so much traffic?

So, now that I've come clean about my biases, I'd like to address the specific counter-arguments that were repeatedly levelled at my last post.

"This is just progress."

Possibly the most common response. "It's newer and better, this is what the world looks like, get used to it. Apple made it this way because this was the best way to make it. Go away and stop bothering me with your conspiracy theories, you nutcase."

On the one hand, I can see this. As I noted above, this is absolutely an extraordinarily powerful laptop for its size and weight, and Apple couldn't have managed that without making it this way. On the other hand... As Macworld senior contributor Glenn Fleishman put it, 'Glue and pentalobe screws and unnecessary solder are not "tradeoffs that go into product development".'

Put it this way. Let's give Apple the benefit of the doubt and suppose the managers simply told the engineers: "go make the best damn laptop you can." The engineers came back and said "we did that, but there's one thing -- the users can't change the RAM or the drives any more. They'll have to pay us for our premium-rate BTO models instead." I think you'd be very naive indeed to imagine the managers did anything other than give a wide grin and say "that's quite alright, boys. Win/win!"

"I don't care about fiddling with upgrades."

"Pro doesn't mean upgradeable," many people said, "it means powerful. I'm a pro, and I don't want to think about upgrading my computer; I just want to get things done with it."

This is a perfectly valid line of reasoning, to my mind. I'm a software engineer by day, with 20 years experience of bending computer software to my will; when I think "pro" I think of my profession, and the demands we place on hardware -- that we can adapt it to new software, for example. But of course there's legions of professionals -- photographers, video editors, designers, artists, musicians, writers, and on and on -- for whom a Mac is merely a tool. A vital one, but still just a tool, to be used until it wears out and then discarded.

Still, though. My 2009 MacBook Pro has had two drive replacements (from the stock 320 GB to 500 GB when my Aperture library grew too large, and then to a 64 GB SSD), a RAM upgrade (to compensate for Lion's memory hunger), and a replacement battery (the old one simply wore out). Without those changes, I'd probably have given up on it; as it is, it's still rocking along.

None of this was in any way difficult to fit. It's a bit of a dirty secret in the PC industry that anyone with the ability to manage IKEA flatpack furniture or a middling compexity LEGO model can manage most computer modification. Plus, the upgrades bought several years into the computer's life were significantly cheaper years later than if I'd bought them up front, which is an important point that's been overlooked in much of this debate. Like most people, I'm always happy to not spend any more money than I have to.

There's also the cost of some of Apple's BTO upgrade options. When I bought my iMac in January 2012, it came with 4 GB of RAM. Upgrading to 8 GB cost £160 ($251) and to 16 GB cost £480 ($754). Instead, I kept the 4 GB it came with, and bought an additional 8 GB from Crucial for £35 ($55). In the last round of product launches, Apple halved those prices... so it's now charging a mere $250 premium to do a laughably easy task for you. If that doesn't strike you as egregious, you must earn a lot more money than I do.

"I don't know how to repair my laptop, so I don't care about repairability."

The main problem I see with this line of reasoning is that the MacBook Pro with Retina display isn't just harder for you to fix; it's harder for anyone to fix, including independent specialists you may be used to using. Sure, you can always pop into an Apple Store... unless you can't. Some people live hours and hours away from their nearest store; some people live in countries where there are no official stores at all, just a handful of authorized service centers.

With the older Unibody MacBooks (which offer above-average repairability), you could go to Apple, or you could save a good chunk of change going to an independent shop, or you could save even more buying the parts yourself and asking any expert you know to do the work for a case of beer. There was a big market, and markets create competition and keep everyone honest. The smaller that market shrinks, the more Apple can charge what it wants for aftermarket work. That's not in anyone's interests, except Apple's.

Think I'm being alarmist? My MacBook is powered by an aftermarket battery, purchased for less than a third of Apple's price. How many of you would snicker at someone who paid $19 for an official Apple cable, when far cheaper alternatives exist and work just as well? It's the same principle, just for parts on the inside of your computer.

Or how about this: this week, Macworld's Lex Friedman suffered a MacBook/glass of water intersection incident that destroyed the hard drive. Apple quoted him $180 to replace the 500 GB hard disk, generously saying there would be "no labor fee." That's a $100 premium over a $70-80 off-the-shelf part that can be safely fitted in minutes by a total amateur armed with nothing more exotic than a screwdriver. In the end, Lex spent slightly more than Apple wanted and bought an OEM SSD instead, which he successfully fitted himself. In the process, he's significantly upgraded his system. If Apple can charge that sort of fee today, what would it charge if no-one had the choice to go elsewhere?

However, I must concede an important point: it seems likely the MBPwRD won't break very often. It's true that RAM and SSD can fail, yes; but neither thing happens particularly often, and certainly a well-designed SSD should be far more reliable than the spinning mechanics of a HDD. About half the RAM problems I've seen have been due to thermal creep loosening the memory in its slot, requiring it to be removed and replaced ("re-seated", in tech jargon); clearly Apple's soldered-on RAM is immune to this. The new MacBook also represents Apple's final solution to the lousy reliability track record of the SuperDrive.

There's that glued-in battery, of course. It's one of Apple's fancy new ones, but it's still not going to last forever. "1000 full charge and discharge cycles before it reaches 80 percent of its original capacity" and "a lifespan of up to 5 years" (emphasis mine) is what Apple promises you. This battery tech is too new to know if Apple's marketing claims are accurate or not, so it must remain something of an unknown quantity for now.

"I only keep my computers for two years, so it doesn't matter to me."

A valid answer, but perhaps a little short-sighted I think, unless you literally throw the machine away when you're done with it. In my experience, Macs have always enjoyed a rather longer lifespan than PCs; whether through reselling or hand-me-downs or simply clinging to life, I think you'll find far, far more five year old Macs in use today than you would PCs of a similar vintage. Indeed, I know more than one person who has rationalized the higher purchase price of a Mac by saying "it's OK, it'll still fetch a good price on eBay in three years." I think compromised repairability risks eroding this part of the Mac value proposition, by making it more likely that a middle-aged Mac would suffer a failure that rendered it beyond economic repair.

"Apple has always been this way."

I don't agree with this one at all. Apple shipped the first tool-less tower chassis I'd ever seen, in the form of the PowerMac G3 Blue & White; to this day, the Mac Pro has an elegant, flexible design that invites modifications and add-ons. The latest Mac mini design is the most internally-friendly Apple has ever shipped, with simple user access to the hard drives and RAM. All the Unibody MacBooks have been easy to work on too, supporting users who wanted to change drives and memory. The more consumer-ish Macs -- the iMac, the MBA -- have tended to be rather more sealed-up, but the "Pro" models have definitely not.

"I have AppleCare, so repairability doesn't matter to me."

It's certainly true that if you don't mind the expense ($349 for a MBPwRD, as much as 16% of the purchase price) AppleCare provides a fantastic service. I've always been very, very well taken care of when I've had to avail myself of the facility. Still, I (predictably) have two objections to this argument.

Firstly, AppleCare doesn't last forever. It's two years on a Mac, on top of the year you get for free. As I mentioned earlier, my 2009 MacBook Pro is still marching along. Had I bought AppleCare for it, it would have expired by now, but I'll get a year or so more use out of it as a secondary machine before recycling it as a test box for beta OS X versions, or a OS X Server box, or something of that ilk. If I'm spending $3,000+ on a top-of-the-line MacBook Pro today, I'd like to hope it'll still be of some use in three or four years, even if it's no longer my main computer.

Secondly, did I miss a memo somewhere that we all decided that extended warranties were a good deal now? We all scoff when Best Buy tries to sell us warranties on TVs, right? Why is AppleCare any different? Whenever I bring this up, I am rebuffed by dozens of anecdotes of great experiences with AppleCare -- and in the spirit of full disclosure, I have to admit that I have some myself. AppleCare has replaced my iPad once, my iPhone twice, and paid for two repairs on my wife's MacBook.

But ponder for a moment what AppleCare covers. It's not accidental damage (except for the newfangled AppleCare+, which isn't available in the UK anyway). It only pays for instances where a device stops working in the second or third year of ownership. Shouldn't we be taking it for granted that Apple devices that haven't been accidentally damaged be capable of lasting three years without suffering random failures? Should we really be boasting that Apple sells us insurance for this? If Apple Care is such a great deal, doesn't that mean Apple products break too often?

Oh, and finally, AppleCare doesn't cover accidental damage, and accidents happen.

"It doesn't matter because it's going to sell in huge numbers."

Cannot argue with this one. If I was an Apple shareholder (I'm not), I'd be extremely pleased with the MBPwRD, which appears certain to be a runaway success and pile even more money onto the mountain of bills Apple has tucked away in Cupertino. People vote with their wallets; they voted for the MacBook Air and they're voting for the MBPwRD.

But don't forget -- McDonalds, Justin Bieber, and Windows all sell in huge numbers too. It doesn't make them laudable, tasteful, or, fundamentally, any sort of good idea.

Popularity suggests the retina MacBook Pro is good, for sure -- but it doesn't mean it's flawless. People don't buy the perfect thing, because the perfect thing doesn't exist; they buy the best thing they can, but there's always room for improvement. It doesn't mean we shouldn't stop to examine the pros and cons of the new MacBook from all angles.

"It's just like with cars."

"Cars changed just like this. They stopped being user serviceable and everyone got used to it. Get with the program, Grandpa."

This was an extremely common reply. I also feel it was one of the weaker responses, on numerous levels.

One: practically everyone I know has a story about a dealer franchise ripping someone off in some dubious manner, having used the trust people have in the brand to convince people they need to pay over the odds for basic maintenance or repairs. I don't see anything to celebrate about Apple moving closer to this model.

Two: actually, what happened to cars was that most of the oily bits stopped requiring user maintenance. That's not the same thing. I've set points gaps (rotor gap, to you Americans) and greased nipples and tuned carburetors, and that stuff went away because it stopped being necessary, not because the car manufacturers hid it away behind proprietary screws and glued-on panels. The process for maintaining stuff that still has to be changed regularly -- tyres, brakes, oil, filters, batteries -- hasn't changed much in decades. In contrast, there's nothing about the MBPwRD's innards that makes it any less likely to break or be accidentally damaged than other laptops. It's not magically proof against spilled liquids or electromigration.

Three: the government doesn't keep releasing new roads that make different demands of your car, but that's exactly what happens with computers. As I've already mentioned, I found after upgrading to Lion that my MacBook was struggling with 4 GB of RAM. Unless you think the MBPwRD is literally the fastest computer that will ever exist, the metaphor is fatally flawed.

"I can't upgrade my 50" TV to an 80" model either."

This one is just silly. No-one's complaining about being unable to upgrade their television's size because that's not physically possible. Making computers with upgradable RAM or replaceable drives is physically possible. Citation: almost every computer ever made.

"Apple does say the RAM isn't replaceable!"

In my original post I whined that Apple doesn't tell people that the RAM is soldered. Several commenters pointed out I was wrong, but it took me a while to work out why.

It doesn't say it on the landing page or the tech specs page or the store page. Where it does say it is on the BTO specification page, but only if you click the "Learn more" link next to the Memory section. That's... not exactly obvious, in my opinion.

Similarly, when I was in the Apple Store looking at the MBPwRDs, I overheard two customers ask two different sales representatives about the soldered RAM issue -- "so, I can't upgrade the memory later, right?" Neither rep understood the question, and neither of them could answer it.

I'm still not convinced Apple is doing enough to come clean with people here, or to train its frontline staff. I can forgive this on the Air, but this is a "MacBook Pro", and every MacBook Pro since the line launched in 2006 has had replaceable RAM. It would be perfectly understandable for users to simply assume this one is the same, and feel let down when they discover their mistake too late.

The twist is that being more upfront with shoppers could only encourage upsell to the 16 GB option, making more money for Apple in the process. So I'm sure this is an oversight, rather than due to any sinister motives.

TL;DR

On the Internet, it often seems that everything must be compressed to a one-bit image: black or white, triumph or catastrophe, the very best or the absolute worst. It is my position that the MacBook Pro with Retina Display, like almost everything once you think about it hard enough, is neither. It's an extremely nice laptop with a first-of-its-kind screen and a reparability downside that ranks somewhere between "utterly irrelevant" and "a bit worrying", depending on your prejudices and desires.

Almost 4,200 words later, do I expect any of you to have changed your mind about this? Well, probably not. Confirmation bias is a funny old thing. But if I have made you think twice about the complexities here -- even if I've just convinced you there are complexities where before you saw none -- then please let me know in the comments. If I'm really lucky, someone buying a MBPwRD will be able to make a more informed decision after reading this -- about the laptop itself, or about the BTO options they should be selecting. That's really all I want to happen.More MacBook Maintenance Malarky: examining the arguments that none of it matters originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 19 Jun 2012 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments

This is not our review of the new iPad

There are lots of reviews of the new iPad. Lots and lots. My review? In deeply abbreviated form, here it is: The screen is amazing. You must see it before you make up your mind. It's pretty much every superlative people have thrown at it, aside from the glare and brightness all of these suffer from in direct sunlight. Everything else is nearly the same as the iPad 2, save slightly more weight and thickness, but if you're going from an iPad 1 to the new one (as I did), you won't be bothered a bit -- you're still saving weight and thickness over the first-gen.

Charging takes forever; it's a big mother of a battery in there, capacity-wise. 4G is flipping awesome, I watch my bandwidth like I used to count my minutes on AOL. The graphics are insane in terms of fluidity; Infinity Blade 2 wasn't as detailed as a PS3, but the polygons and texturing in such a small device are getting close fast. Battery life is great in my limited usage so far. Fingerprint magnet, as always.

I don't care for the more recessed power button versus the topmost button on the iPad 1. The camera is just like my 4S: gorgeous stills and video, and that makes photo and video apps fun to use, unlike my 4S. FaceTime on this screen is really some Jetsons-age business (but that's not new). Everything is zippy, and I feel like using gestures more often. I'm guessing the additional RAM is why apps aren't crashing left and right.

If you have a first generation iPad, update. If you have an iPad 2, you're probably fine unless you feel you need the better screen or 4G. I chose the Verizon 32 GB model because I wanted plenty of room for apps and I wanted to use it as a hotspot. Still the best tablet available at any price. Five stars. Rather than add another thousand words to the review pile, let's spend some time looking at why the iPad matters and where Apple may be going with it. I suggest Apple is working towards the invisible computer, towards a seamless integration of technology and humanity, and the iPad is one of the last abstractions of technology between man and computer. Think of it as a battery-powered window to the future... The Magic of Faking Reality The haptic screen rumor that hit the wires just before the new iPad was unveiled was just the sort of crazy tidbit that kicks things up to the next level in the preamble to any major Apple announcement. But it made sense because it's an evolutionary step towards the goal of "invisible" computers -- or, computers which aren't called computers at all.

Why did we want to believe the haptic rumor? When I look back, it seems ridiculously gimmicky -- for now. But a lot of crazy things are bandied about before an iPad announcement. The one we all knew had to be true was the Retina display screen, and it not only makes a big difference, it does an incredible job (as Apple nearly always does) of transitioning us from the less-than-real to the I-can't-believe-it's-not-real. That's why the first iPad was called "magical" and that's why this iPad is just called iPad, while Tim Cook said Apple is revolutionizing the category it created. It's also why the transition to Retina on the iPad works so well. And again, the iPad is just one slab of metal and glass between us and pervasive technology. Something that has surprised me is how good even very old apps look on the new iPad. Apple has made some stunning technology transitions. From classic Mac OS to OS X, from PowerPC to Intel chips, from beige boxes to leading the way in design -- so it's no real surprise that the transition from one resolution to another would be handled well. iOS developers also have the example of the iPhone 4's Retina transition to work from. But I was struck by the display, and I think it speaks to the future where Apple will continue to work towards duplicating reality as much as possible. Speaking of reality, as I said before, sometimes Apple uses familiar design cues, and sometimes it reinvents them. Take the "no home button" weirdness that swirled around Apple's invitation. Add to this the Apple TV iteration and people wound up declaring a voice-enabled iPad HDTV Apple Docking Coffee Table was on the way.

Here's my point: Apple called the new iPad just "iPad" for a reason: it is everything, and it is nothing. If you were nonplussed by the design, or even "let down" that it was slightly heavier or thicker, you were missing the point. You really missed the point if you think the Retina display was a disappointment. Apple will sell a ton of these for the same reason samurai warriors went to a very few guys for their swords -- because they did it exactly right. The iPad continues a relentless pursuit towards the creation of the perfect tablet, the tabula rasa, or even the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. Either way, in the end the technology disappears. The iPad is the invisible computer, or at least a step on the way. Apple likes to use skeuomorphic, "realistically rendered" design for apps like GarageBand and your contacts, notes and calendar. Not everyone enjoys this look (some really hate it) because the apps are, like Siri, merely an abstracted simulation of reality -- and a leaky abstraction at that. Where the apps abandon real world models (iMovie or iPhoto as examples) they help make complex tasks simple by making interfaces work for the user. Haptics will happen on Apple devices, but only when the technology creates a seamless experience, from buttons to sliders to knobs or feathers. I wrote this entire analysis/slash review on the new iPad, but I'm reminded of the old 40-column text word processor I used on my Apple II. You knew that was a computer. Despite using a Bluetooth keyboard, this new iPad feels so much less like a "computer" and more like a "word machine" or even just a quiet, brilliant typewriter.

Does the Retina Display help? Yes it does, quite a bit. On the iPad 1, I could still see pixels, which reminded me of that old phosphorescent monitor. The new iPad merely presents the letters. I'm using Byword to write, so all I see are words and a word count. It's lovely. It no longer feels appropriate to compare this to a "computer," it's more like an appliance -- which was the point all along.

A Computer for the Rest of Us There's a spot in Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs where, just before the Macintosh launched, Steve pulls out a prototype of a laptop using a folio, and shows it to the Mac team. "This is the computer we'll be making some day," he tells them. Of course the MacBook Air is basically what that turned out to be, but if you look at someone using a small folio case with keyboard and an iPad... That sure seems aligned with Steve's vision.

More than that, the iPad's interface, "pictures under glass" that it may be, is such a powerful illusion that the original was called "magical" but I would say the new iPad is truly magical. Interfaces look real. We wanted to believe in haptics because it makes sense to take the illusion further. As an aspiring magician myself, the struggle is to perfect an illusion in a way that what you are saying you are doing is exactly what you appear to be doing (even if it isn't).

In the case of an iPad, turning a knob in GarageBand is a somewhat less than satisfactory experience versus doing the same thing in real life. There's no click, no force feedback in your fingers, etc. Simulating this on as elegant a machine as an iPad, as of today, would be clunky. So I'm glad they didn't go gimmicky. But the tech will advance, and we'll keep seeing ever more magical things. These advances will be iterations, logical and relentless and wonderful. That's the type of company and culture that exists at Apple, despite the issues people write about (us included). If people talk about the spark being gone from Apple, I would suggest that while it may have lost its greatest showman, his genius lives on in the form of the ethos and passion behind every Apple product. The climbing stock price and sales numbers are good evidence of this.

You Say You Want a Resolution I sort of chuckle when Tim Cook says that the iPhone and iPad's success has startled them. That's true, of course, because the transformation of consumer electronics has been sweeping. Going to CES for just a couple of years has shown me how rapidly the uptake in "pictures under glass" has become. I mean, before the iPhone, look at what Engadget was excited about at CES back in 2005! So yes, the adoption rate of touchscreen devices by consumers has been shocking. How fortuitous that Apple dropped "computer" from the company name before the iPad! Let's revisit the Pepper Pad from that dark CES many years ago. Can you imagine normal people using that as we use iPads? Of course not. It reeks of computer. It declares, "I am for people who may be inclined to read manuals, and I require a learning curve and many settings."

Now, there's something to be said for not catering to the lowest common denominator if you want to make beautiful things. I have been guilty of thinking some people are just too dumb to be allowed to use an iPhone, for example. But when Apple dropped "computer" from its title, it was prescient for so many reasons. The company has allowed itself to become transformed by a revolution we all knew was coming; the integration of technology into our society, not as a compartmentalized, specialized job track or skill set, but a pervasive use of technology to augment our minds and bodies to do amazing things. The iPad, remember, is made to disappear.

Some might say that our better and better machines are like the wings of Icarus, but I like Steve's description of "bicycles for the mind." And once you step out of the "computer" paradigm, anything is possible. We're starting the post-PC era not just because we have new ways of synchronizing, hosting or sharing our data. We're starting the post-PC era because "personal computers" no longer necessarily need to be traditional "computers" -- they merely need to be personal. Cloud aside: On my new iPad I'm experimenting with a hybrid cloud approach. I don't yet use iTunes Match (hundreds of mashups won't match anything), so I'm only using my 13" MacBook Air for iTunes music sync. Everything else is via iCloud or WiFi sync (apps, mostly). The biggest pain point thus far has just been waiting to download apps on my miserable Internet connection at home (my ISP is AT&T). I am careful not to download dozens of large apps on Verizon's 4G because it'll blow through that data cap in a hurry. So far it's worked well, however, as I avoid many of the weird and annoying iTunes sync issues I have had with numerous other iDevices going all the way back to my monochrome iPods.

Resolutionary The iPad, especially the new iPad, with a screen that will make you believe anything is real within its borders, is Apple's next step towards the future, where devices merely work to assist us, and specialized knowledge is only needed in the field where one works. In other words, the tools get out of the way.

We've seen patents for haptics, 3D, advanced image and motion sensing and lots of other great ideas. I think what we can expect going forward is a refining of the tools we use, and a natural evolution of the product lines. The Apple TV of the future, for example, will be revolutionary, perhaps, but not so much in raw technology as in implementation. The new iPad is not revolutionary so much in raw technology (the screen, made by Apple's phone rival Samsung, will soon be incorporated by others) as it is in implementation. From old apps holding up well to new apps looking incredible, Apple has moved the game further down the road without being beholden to the past or leaving its customers too far behind. Eventually the screen won't be the point because the screen will be everywhere. Apple doesn't have to build a car or a refrigerator. Manufacturers already have incentives to make their devices compatible, and they have. What I look forward to is a deepening of the ecosystem, perhaps even widening it a bit, and a continuing investment in materials science, software and hardware engineering, and more. Apple's influence goes beyond its own ecosystem, clearly impacting the consumer electronics industry, education, research, design, manufacturing and more. Look for more of that in the future as well. The iPad represents the future direction of technology, I believe, more so than any other Apple product available. It is the high-tech made simple, potent and distilled into a simple slab of metal and glass, designed to become the tool you need when you need it. If you're wondering what Apple will do next, just look at what it continues to do each year and add a little magic once in a while when it knocks our socks off with a real revolution.

The iPad may someday give way to wrist-based holographic "eyePads" or add scratch-and-sniff capabilities, but the philosophy behind it will remain. It's that philosophy that will continue to shape our lives by integrating so seamlessly with them.This is not our review of the new iPad originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 18 Mar 2012 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Kyle Kinkade speaks at MacTech on the power of AirPlay

Kyle Kinkade, you may remember, is one of the original developers of Tap Tap Revolution (one of the iPhone's biggest early hits), and was last seen working on Bartleby's Book of Buttons, a beautiful and interactive book for the iPad. This week at the MacTech IT and developers' conference here in Los Angeles, Kinkade took the stage to talk about AirPlay, a technology that he says has some major ramifications and consequences for both Apple and the entire interactive entertainment industry going forward. "By 2014," Kinkade said of AirPlay integration, and multiscreen interaction, "this will be a very common thing."

Kinkade began by showing off some examples of AirPlay integration, and how developers had learned to use the service so far. The core function of AirPlay is simply to send a video signal from your Apple device up to a larger screen, either out to a television or to your computer. Apps like Netflix and the TED talks app, for example, are simply kicking out video to the larger screen. But Kinkade also pointed out that AirPlay is being used more and more in other ways as well: Some games are using AirPlay to send a larger signal to then be controlled by the handheld device, and other apps (including Kinkade's own Bartleby book) are actually creating two different experiences, whether you're playing on just the smaller screen, or with the large screen also showing other context and information.

In fact, said Kinkade, lots of AirPlay functionality is actually not just being shown on a bigger TV or a computer screen, but on a full 5.1 home theater system. Developers, he said, shouldn't just think of AirPlay as a fun gimmick to see iPhone graphics on the big screen, but they should start thinking about it as a larger experience, as an entire second app or maybe even as the primary function of all kinds of apps, from games to productivity apps to anything else. Devs should not only think about sound as they design, and "do more than mirror" information on both screens, but they should "consider multiple dual screen paradigms" as they code, realizing that users are going to be appreciating and even expecting functionality like this going forward.

For his own app, Kinkade says he's not yet seeing anywhere near a majority of users investing in AirPlay, but the numbers are growing, from about 5% of users a year ago, to more than 11% at the current time. Kinkade also said that as other "second screen" technologies get more and more popular (like Microsoft's Project Glass functionality, and Nintendo's Wii U game console), AirPlay will have a chance to really lead the industry. "When it's no longer nerdy to have a screen in your hands as you play a game," said Kinkade, then AirPlay will become hugely important.

And finally, Kinkade suggested that Apple was thinking along these lines already. "Apple's taking AirPlay pretty seriously," said Kinkade. "You just don't know it yet." The company has been adding more and more functionality to AirPlay already (including the mirroring function), and Kinkade says that when Apple does reveal its final plans for AirPlay, developers already familiar with how it works and how it can be used will have a distinct advantage. His talk was definitely convincing: AirPlay is already a very fascinating technology, and it's easy to see how Apple, developers, and eventually users will have lots of fun and useful ways to take advantage of it in the future.Kyle Kinkade speaks at MacTech on the power of AirPlay originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 20 Oct 2012 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink | Email this | Comments

Removing walls: how the iPad inspires new content creation

Yesterday, I spent some time debating about why keyboards and iPads didn't mix well. Many users find that iOS is not ideal for office tasks like writing and editing books, creating complex spreadsheets -- in fact, many typing-intense tasks are slower on the iPad or iPhone than on a conventional computer (aside from the fact that the best computer is the one you have with you).

iPad's design philosophy incurs some unavoidable compromises for many, despite successful word-centric apps like Apple's Pages, lean Markdown/research tools like Writing Kit, remote PC solutions like CloudOn or Onlive Desktop, or the revelations of mobile knowledge workers like Technologizer's Harry McCracken, who has made the leap to 80/20 iPad use on a daily basis. Adding a keyboard, in my opinion, simply transforms the iPad from a superior touch-based system to a less-capable typing-based one.

To complain about the iPad's relative weakness for office tasks, however, is to miss where the iPad excels: in enabling new and revolutionary creation efforts. Compare GarageBand on the Mac versus the same app on the iPad. The technology has advanced so much that we're at a point where we can now simplify things in new ways.

To stretch a metaphor, it's like moving from an electric guitar with all its amps and dials and hook-ups back to an acoustic system, where you can just strum it directly. With the iPad, it's just you and the strings, making music together. It's simple, it's direct, it's beautiful.

People are passionate about interacting with content creation tools on their iPad. From music to art, from photos to sculpture, the iPad offers a new creative language through touch.

iOS places far fewer conceptual "walls" between users and content. Babies and cats know how to touch -- they act intuitively and the device responds accordingly. That natural correspondence helps explain why the usability of these devices has exploded.

The Mac -- and all personal computers, to a greater or lesser degree -- presents layers of abstraction between users and the interface. Users have to learn to interact. Whether through a keyboard, or a mouse, or just by figuring out how to navigate a hierarchical menu system, nothing is necessarily intuitive. The iPad allows developers to strip abstractions away and create a physical reality that's just a tiny sliver of glass away from you.

Look at the beauty and variety of iOS software currently available on the App Store. Mac offerings, however worthy, just can't match this extent and assortment. So why didn't the Mac build things as beautiful? Why is iOS making this renaissance?

I'm of the opinion that moving to a true direct manipulation interface, where users touch their content, has created a more natural connection with that content. Abstraction and metaphor have fallen away before concrete physicality.

Instead of drawing on a Wacom tablet, or moving a mouse on its pad, or clicking on a keyboard, the iPad screen means developers can express creation tasks more imaginatively. Their interface vocabulary has become more tangible, solely due to the tablet hardware.

Add in the huge new customer base that's been drawn to an affordable tablet (compare and contrast with even the lowest-end Apple laptops) and Apple's commitment to human design considerations, and the developer base has a huge incentive to focus on creating luscious software that's a pleasure to interact with.

The types and scale of content creation continue to grow, with new apps debuting daily that continue to push the limits on the kinds and quality of data that can be built, manipulated, and finessed on the iPad.

None of them, however, seems to do the grinding job of writing out large quantities of text and meticulously editing them after. Even when you take voice dictation into account, a favorite new iPad feature for many of us, there's still plenty of work left to do on our old "general computing" machines, not the least of which is the development, debugging, and deployment of apps to new iPads.

While the iPad inspires new content creation, trying to fit it into doing old content creation workflows remains problematic. For me, and I speak only of myself, I've learned to leave the external keyboard at home.

When the iPad travels with me, it offers its compromise of usage: brilliant apps and fun games that work with its touch interface, but a much slowed-down toolchain for writing and a non-existent pathway for app development.

I often take advantage of it's mindmapping and sketching tools to lay out ideas, but my "real work" will happen back at the office. I don't think the South Park guys will be switching to iPads any time soon either. As wonderful as iPad content creation is, it's not the solution for everyone.

So what's your workflow? Are you using the iPad to create content for your job? Drop a note in the comments and let us know whether the iPad is your go-to for fun or for getting the job done.Removing walls: how the iPad inspires new content creation originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 29 Mar 2012 11:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments