TheMacAdvocate

There’s a few different profiles for Windoz apologists, but one common trait in their writing that’s hilariously easy to spot is what I like to call the “yes, but”. “Apple product x is great, but there’s a few things that make this similar product running Windows CE better for you”

Mike Elgan is a veteran FUDster. We know this because he writes for Computerworld. Roughly Drafted Magazine’s Daniel Eran Dilger awarded Elgan the prestigeous Zoon Award for “…his disingenuous, desperately sensationalist, and outrageously disgusting (Apple) misinformation campaign.”

Elgan’s take on the “yes, but” appeared in Macworld, of all places (note TMA’s prescient observation about lousy guest pieces). Entitled Why iPad Owners Need a Kindle Too, Elgan shares a number of compelling reasons why owners of a device that does 10 times what a Kindle does – still needs a Kindle. And by compelling, I mean puzzling. I don’t link to retards, but Mike’s “reasons” group nicely into themes, which make rebutting them easy.

Why I Don’t Take My iPad to the Beach (1. Reading in the Sun, 2. Overheating, 3. Security)

If you’re at the beach reading an eBook and you’re not under an umbrella, you’re a moron. If you’re at the beach reading an eBook, you’re probably still a moron.

Availability (6. Book Availability, 7. Magazine Availability)

6. There’s a Kindle app, so all of Amazon’s shitty dead-media replicants are all available on the iPad.

7. Reading black-and-white copy of old-fart cracker magazines like The New England Journal of Medicine and Foreign Affairs on your Kindle < reading magazines for people under 80 in color. The legitimate beef he could have mentioned – the retarded magazine app price points – is not mentioned. This is also classic apologist: leaving a legitimate Apple knock on the table when there’s a far less credible, but sensational point to be made.

Issues that Exist Only in Mike Elgan’s Bizarro Universe (4. Reading before Sleep, 5. Battery Life, 8. Weight, 11. Multitasking)

4. “…reading on a Kindle will probably help you sleep better.” I really can’t do it much better. Ladies and gentlemen: Mike Elgan.

5. My single-purpose device’s 2 weeks of charge beat your color, multi-purpose device’s 12 hours! As an aside, you don’t get 2 weeks of continuous use from a Kindle, but you do get 12 hours continuous use from an iPad.

8. You know people are reaching in their advocacy when they’re citing their devices 10 oz. weight advantage. It also assumes you’re using it exclusively as a reader, which I hope to god you’re not.

11. Macworld is one of those the 3 websites on the planet that doesn’t allow the cut-and-paste of their content. I’d give them props if this were to discourage people from easily dismantling their contributors’ embarrassing articles, but I actually think it has something to do with “Intellectual Property”. So to give readers the full flavor of Elgan’s logic, I’m going to have to quote #11 manually:

There are a surprising number of situations where two devices are better than one. If you’re a writer of any kind, it’s nice to have source material on the Kindle as you write on the iPad. If you’re watching TV on the iPad, you can also skim a newspaper on the Kindle. If you’re a fan (sports, movies – whatever), it’s great to watch something on TV (World Series, Oscars, Lifetime dramas, etc.) and look up trivia and facts on Wikipedia or the Internet in general or in your own book collection with the Kindle – without interrupting the show.

So…buy a Kindle if you don’t know how to use cut and paste on the iPad or must always have 2 simultaneous channels of data plugged into your head. “OMG – THIS REMAKE OF BURNING BED WAS MADE FOR CONNIE SELLECA! WHAT WAS THAT SUPERHERO SHOW THAT SHE WAS IN?!!”

Mike Elgan is a Sociopath (9. Multiple Users, 10. Peace)

You need a Kindle because you’ll be relentlessly hounded to share or speak about your cool device with others. I guess Apple should forget re-upping sold-out supplies of the iPad in the tri-State area; Mike just brought the wood, yo!

Non-Features FTW (12. Auto-reader, 13. Mobile broadband)

12. “I’ll just plug my Kindle into the speaker system and let the computer voice read to me and my 14 cats”. OK, I made up the part about the cats. I think.

13. You mean I don’t have to pay to check my email, watch YouTube clips, stream music from my house…wait…you mean I can only use Whispersync to buy shit?

By the end of the article, I had an epiphany. I think don’t think Mike is advocating buying 2 devices, although you’d think that by reading the title of the article. These aren’t reasons to buy a Kindle when you already have an iPad; they’re justification for keeping a Kindle once you have an iPad.

So I guess this article is actually taken from Mike’s prep for the conversation he had with his wife about buying an iPad. Glad to see it worked out for him.

There’s a million reasons, really: enhancements to your computing experience and bullshit you don’t have to put up with. One of the biggest checks in the latter column is Conflicker.

From theatlantic.com, an awesome article on the most prolific and tenacious Windows worm ever created. Despite the efforts of some of the world’s smartest coders, botnet experts and cryptographers:

As of this writing, 17 months after it appeared and about a year after the April 1 (2009) update, Conficker has created a stable botnet. It consists of anywhere from hundreds of thousands of computers to 12 million. No one knows for sure anymore, because with peer-to-peer communications, the worm no longer needs to check in with an outside command center, which is how the good guys kept count. Joffe estimates that with the four distinct strains (yet another one appeared on April 8, 2009), 6.5 million computers are probably infected.

The investigators see no immediate chance or even any effective way to kill it.

Basically, no one knows how many computers are infected, they have no idea how to kill or even quarantine it and have no clue what the worm’s creator(s) ultimate intent is.

Obviously, Macs are unaffected. Sleep tight, Wintards.

So Adobe spent some bucks to bring its complaints about Apple’s no-Flash policy to the masses. All the big tech sites such as Ars and Engadget have been running it and the Times has a full-page ad devoted to it. I have invested a slightly more modest sum, and limited myself to a single channel, for my response:

I’m enjoying v.2 of the iPhone gold rush as much as the next guy, but some of you developers are a bit too enthusiastic. The following are not good candidates for iPad apps:

• Specialty calculators: “Hey, how much should we tip this waiter?” “Lemme whip out my 9.7 inches and find out”
• Magazines at $5 a pop: Seriously – you people in print media are starting to look less like a group with your heads in your asses and more like an industry that has an assisted-suicide deathwish. I can get paper copies of your rags for half the price. I’m not saying it needs to be free, but the content and the price need to bear some relationship. Snap out of it.
• Too much network-dependence: If I need to pull my content down with every opening of your app, you failed. The majority of iPad owners have Wi-Fi devices; even if 3G users become a majority, most of them won’t be of the unlimited bandwidth variety. Trust me: iPad owners will gladly trade disk space for the ability to use your app offline.

Adobe must not respect the anti-trust regulators in this country. According to the New York Post, the same company that bragged of their proprietary multimedia platform: “over 85% of the top web sites contain(ing) Flash content and Flash is running on over 98% of computers on the Web” is crying to federal regulators about Apple’s recent decision to ban cross-compilers from creating iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad apps. Nevermind that Apple doesn’t have anywhere near that kind of stranglehold on the smartphone market – or the app store market. I guess it does have a monopoly on the non-shitty smartphone market, but that’s kind of subjective.

So why would a company that brags about having a virtual monopoly on multimedia content creation on the web call attention to a company that doesn’t fit any rational definition of monopolistic conduct?

Oh. That would explain a lot.

It took the original iPhone and the Droid 74 days. It took the iPhone 3G 3 days and the 3G(s) a weekend. The Nexus One hasn’t even seen it yet. It’s the magic number of one million. According to Apple, the iPad has gotten there in just shy of a month.

There’s a couple reasons why this is a big deal. First, this is a device with a very limited release. Although it’s not explicit in the announcement, the timing of it suggests that the majority of the devices sold were WiFi-only (3G iPads shipped starting at the end of April).  The iPad is also currently only available in the U.S., further limiting the number of potential sales. Secondly, the iPad is not a subsidized device like the iPhone 3G and 3G(s) was/is. People are shelling out a minimum of $500 for one. To sell a million of these devices is pretty amazing.

Of course, if you ask stolen property purchaser tech blog Gizmodo to assess the milestone, they’re a little more conservative with their praise:

“Not bad for a giant iPhone. The question, really, is how well it’s still selling next month, now that all of the early adopters and Apple nerds have theirs.”

Yes – that’s the real question. How many more millions of units will you sell next month, or the month after that, or whenever your “disappointing sales” can provide us with the link-bait we require to make money?  WHEN WILL YOUR SUCCESS FLAG?!

When I started Vaporwatch, I half-believed that Microsoft would actually release one of the breakthrough products it was “developing”. After all, the trick of announcing a product whose sole purpose was to deflate enthusiasm for competitors’ real products was just becoming too obvious and well-worn – even for Microsoft.

Well, now that Apple’s iPad has sold more than a million units in less than a month in only one country, M$ has decided to make me look like a genius by “leaking” to Gizmodo that it was time for Courier to give up the ghost.

"I wanna show you something - it's my shocked face."

I have to give them credit: Classic Redmond would have dragged the charade on for another year before burying it. Guess they figured spending another half a million on a “concept video” that had zero impact on Apple’s real product in the same space was wasteful. It’s not like Microsoft is any stranger to setting money on fire.  Aside from losing billions every quarter trying to push consumer electronics that no one wants, they periodically burn haybales of capital on some of the worst advertising in the business. Using that criteria, axing Courier qualifies as one of the most sensible marketing decisions Microsoft has made in the last decade.

So while the comment sections of Gizmodo are aghast with shock and mourn the premature death of a device that no doubt would have changed the face of mobile computing – even though it never had a corresponding presence in the physical universe – the sane among us knew there was a better chance of being mauled by a polar bear and a regular bear in the same day than of the Courier seeing the light of day.

I’d like to join the rest of the tech community in wishing Jason Chen of Gizmodo a safe trip. Prior to your departure, I’d recommend you familiarize yourself with the language and local customs of your destination. The first 2 seasons of “Oz” would be a good start. I’m glad to see you already displaying mastery of the local currency:

"Ummm...could I interest you in...being my....bitch?"

Best of luck, Jason!

The Courier

As buzz was building to a crescendo about the Apple tablet that will eventually become the iPad, other me-too tablet announcements begin to trickle in. Not willing to let a superior product out of the gates before performing the trick they made famous, Microsoft begins “leaking” concept videos of a stylus-driven, dual-screen touchscreen tablet. You see, M$ has more than one vaporware tactic. Sometimes they’ll make a big announcement at a consumer electronics show a year and a half before their real product is slated to ship. Sometimes their corporate security periodically disintegrates, “revealing” products to eager tech sites like Engadget and Gizmodo, who unwittingly post their “scoops” while Microsoft laughs at the continued gullibility of tech media.

At companies that make real products, a leak like Courier would set off a nuclear device in the boardroom. Letting competition know the form factor, features or technology present in your forthcoming devices is a recipe for disaster. Fortunately for Microsoft, when these “leaks” hit the tech landscape, they usually don’t represent a design worth copying, don’t reveal any technical details about the product, and are immediately recognized by potential competitors for what they are. Much like the Wizard of Oz, the awesomeness of the apparition belies the nothingness of the reality.  So here’s what we “know” about the Courier:

September, 2009: Microsoft “leaks” an animated concept video of a tablet device known as Courier to Engadget. Despite the “concept” not having specs, price, OS, or release date (wouldn’t want to kill the enthusiasm with all that), the incredibly detailed animation, spanning 1:55, inspires commenter cries of “Microsoft is back!”, which I took as an incomplete blurt that ends something like “…to creating representations for which no actual product is intended”, since that is clearly their strength.

November 2009: A video detailing the Courier’s user interface is “leaked” to Gizmodo (hey, the wealth must be shared), because the more detailed the non-product, the more effective the “stopping power”. Engadget uses the curious term “advanced proof of concept”, which is usually reserved for products that “can be built” as opposed to those that “can be drawn”. Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn’t seem to realize that no one buys their particular shovelful of bullshit anymore – except commenters on tech websites. A “Highest Ranked” comment on Engadget reads: “This isn’t a laptop without a keyboard, it’s a new device designed from the ground up to be controlled with a pen and multitouch gestures.” That one cost TMA a mouthful of coffee and almost a wireless keyboard. Engadget follows up with Steve Ballmer and pointedly asks about the device. His response, according to Engadget, is that “he swears he hasn’t actually seen it, but that it sounds like it’s something someone should make”.  Readers are left to decide for themselves whether the CEO of the company can really be so out of touch with its groundbreaking products or if the comment was just a really retarded attempt at coyness.

March 2010: Another Courier video is “leaked” to Engadget, showing how the device’s…animation…has evolved. Amazingly, even though 6 months have passed since the previous animation (which one might assume would go into the development of an actual product), the same absolute lack of details remain.

April 2010: Apple releases the iPad to extremely positive reviews. Despite being released on a Saturday, sales figures for the weekend top those of the original iPhone, indicating once again that in a market where people exchange money for actual products, Apple reigns supreme.

1. That it allows free app developers to make money, which allows free apps to have richer content.

2. …that’s all I got.

No smart person can argue against “paying” for a free app through advertising – even for the worst quality app. I agree with people having to pay for an app with either with their wallet or with their attention, but not both.

Although it’s popular to characterize the app market as “a race to the bottom”, the App Store is still a free market. Pricing decisions, in the end, are made by the developers themselves. If a shop chooses volume over per unit revenues, that’s on them, just like in any other free market.  If the majority of developers were losing money in the App Store, there wouldn’t be 170K apps there. Apps that aren’t making money are either poor in quality or are not priced in a way that allows them to recoup the investment in them. Neither of these things are the consumers’ or the market’s fault. Any perceived “downward price pressure” present in the App Store economy does not justify iAds.

People thinking that Apple themselves will be adding prohibitive criteria of “too much advertising” as part of the app approval process are deluded, especially with the slew of new variables for notification Apple introduced as part of 4.0′s multitasking feature. It’s the market’s job to reward the $4.99 app developer who tastefully integrates advertising and punish $4.99 app developer who slathers ads all over the app.

My point is that there’s already a revenue model in place for paid apps: it’s based solely on the quality of the app plotted against its price. When Steve said “mobile ads suck”, my thought response was “isn’t that why you developed the alternative revenue model of paying for an app?”.

I think that’s what Steve meant when he said “It’s all about helping our developers make money through advertising so they can keep their free apps free.” If that’s the extent of iAd implementation, there is nothing but win. I personally didn’t get the impression from the presentation yesterday that iAds were limited to free apps.

If developers of paid apps use iAds, it drops a layer into the user experience that benefits only one party in the developer-consumer relationship. I have yet to see a model of advertising overlaid onto an already-purchased product that adds any value for the user; the very best models are successful if they don’t piss them off. If iAd implementation is not restricted to free apps, I don’t see anything in it for consumers, but a lot of opportunity to degrade the paid-app experience.