TheMacAdvocate

Like a bloated lion, Microsoft waits for other, more innovative companies to launch products before waddling to market, bellowing the entire saunter from their shaded tree about how awesome their product is going to be. The idea being that competition would be discouraged from mobilizing and people who still hadn’t made a purchase decision would be frozen, waiting for M$’s entry. Sometimes they’d make it to market; most of the time they didn’t. Back in the days of Longhorn, an OS that was slated to succeed XP and was heavily promoted with fanciful technologies yet somehow never made it to market, this trick worked pretty well. It essentially killed innovation in the computer and consumer electronics spaces, but what the fuck, it made Microsoft money – or it least prevented it from flowing to its competition.

Nowadays, everyone in tech is wise to Microsoft’s vaporware bait-and-ditch tactics. Yet incredibly, the company continues to juice markets with nothing backing up their claims to enter them besides a “concept animation”. If there’s anything in the market that smells a little like innovation, you can bet Redmond will announce their better, more powerful version coming soon, soon, soon! Commenters in Gizmodo and Engadget spring their collective wood, actually expecting a product to be released in their lifetime. Think Charlie Brown, Lucy and a football.

As a public service to the community, TMA has decided to keep track of some of Microsoft’s “coming soon” technologies that, although are still very early in development, hasn’t stopped the company from showing off celebrity demos and producing very detailed animations of how their “products” will work. I call this service “Operation Vaporwatch”. Let’s start with Microsoft’s latest gaming vapor…

Project Natal

Jun 1, 2009: In a move no doubt intended to staunch the arterial bleeding inflicted by Nintendo’s Wii on the XBox 360, Microsoft unveils a super-advanced motion-sensing set top device with the code name Project Natal (as in Nepal, not dreidel). The device is announced with no ship date and no price, but plenty of fanfare. Its demo videos and celebrity endorsements are the talk of the 2009 E3. In a follow-up confirmation from Ballmer himself, Natal is to be released before the end of 2010. You read that right: 18 months from the product’s announcement. Try to think of a product in the tech space – any tech product – that gets announced a year and a half before its scheduled release. TMA immediately calls horse

Jun 3, 2009: In what TMA will later refer to as part of “the Wonka Factory Tour”, during which Gizmodo editors are walked through Microsoft’s product development centers in exchange for fair and balanced reporting, Mark Wilson and Matt Buchanan are treated to exclusive access to Natal’s 3D Breakout and Burnout Revenge demos. A “small PC and camera that simulates the final Natal rig” are used. One would assume the PC will not come with Natal when it does ship. No specs of said PC are divulged. Also missing is any photo or video of the actual gameplay experience – something that might actually mark the performance of the PC-enhanced units or – you know – build an actual buzz. Regardless, both editors rave about “immersiveness”. The resulting unbiased review is titled “Testing Project Natal: We Touched the Intangible”.

June 2009 – Jan 2010: Redmond is overrun by crickets. Payload delivered.

Jan 7, 2010: According to a statement from Alex Kipman, Natal’s chief developer, Natal still exists and the add-on will consume a meager 15% of the XBox 360′s processing power, or in laymen’s terms 40 dB.

Feb 23, 2010: MTV clocks the lag between body movements and the corresponding on-screen output at 1/10 second. FPS games from 1995 point and laugh.

Lets take a look at some of the wisdom injected into Mr. Thurrott’s impressions:

“The power plug is the bigger, uglier old-style plug, not the new small, square one you get with iPhone.

It’s because the iPad draws more charge. For that 10+ hour battery. Dickhead.

The box it comes in is oddly thick, given Apple’s penchant for thinness. Most of the box is just air, and that part is below the device. Weird.”

It’s the exact same thin: air ratio as the iPhone 3GS packaging. Dickhead.

Fucking gems, Paul. If you read the bottle, it’ll tell you not to try and double up the dose you missed.

After the devastating critique of Apple’s power brick heft and packaging weirdness, he concludes that “Anyone who believes this thing is a game changer is a tool. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way it is.”

Don’t apologize, Paul. To people who know tech, your first impression is pretty much the same as the 2nd, 3rd, 56th and last impression people have of you. In the pantheon of “people who get paid to write shit about tech”, you’re a caricacture – on a good day. You’re a shill for fail. At least you could be like Lyons and throw a laugh in once in a while.

I’m usually not in line for 1st gen Apple products. It’s not that I don’t think they’ll be great; it’s that after having the desktop, laptop, smartphone and set top box categories covered, I just don’t feel the need to line up for products that don’t fill an obvious void.

I came around on the iPad roughly 2 weeks before SJ’s presentation, when it became obvious to me that a tablet computer from Apple was going to be a big deal. I followed some developers’ blogs and heard the cool stuff they were planning for the device. Then I saw Jobs’ presentation. The device’s implications for how we consume content was going to be big.

The pre-launch reviews on Thursday from the Pogue/Ihnatko/Mossberg Apple trinity were as swoon-tastic, as you’d expect. Apple also expanded their review unit program to a couple of other publications, with a couple of surprises. Bob Levitus (Houston Chronicle) and Stephen Fry (Time Magazine) got “Lifetime Appreciation” units (I assume Stephen got his before Time announced their iPad magazine pricing). Ed Baig from USA Today got the generic newspaper unit; Xeni Jardin from Boing Boing repped the edgy, hip publication. Tim Gideon from PC Magazine got one, a move I like to call “Smell the Glove, Bitches”. Some dude from theroot.com also got one. I can only assume some kind of Wonka lottery was held and he won.

So like several other mortal Apple bloggers, I bit the bullet and pre-ordered in mid-March. UPS taunted me up until the morning of April 3rd, showing my unit in China when I went to bed on the 2nd. But in the wee hours, my iPad made its way through Customs at EWR. Brown came through for me, as I imagine it did for Ballmer and Bezos when they read the reviews.

Dateline: 10:09 AM: Fistpump

Hello World! I own your face!

There’s about 10,000 other blogs who will rattle off the specs of the iPad, so I’m not going to go through the effort of copying and pasting someone else’s work. I’m going to assume you’re up on the device and likely lost if you happen to be reading my blog.

Here’s some of the things that surprised me about the device:

1. The keyboard. I hope to explode some freetard’s head by saying this: I can type 90% as fast on the iPad’s on-screen keyboard as I can on my MacBook or on an Apple wireless keyboard. I suspect some of this is because the keyboards are spaced similarly. What I do know is that the biggest obstacle for me – and a lot of people – to have the iPad serve as a laptop replacement is the quality of the keyboard.

2. Native Apps. There’s a few apps that showcase the iPad’s potential. Because I’m kind of a science nerd, I downloaded The Elements (it’s huge; be patient). Suffice it to say, if I had this app in 1988, I would have aced Chemistry. The intro song alone is worth the price of the app. It also showcases how absolutely stunning the iPad’s IPS screen is. Netflix was good enough to get me to reactivate my cancelled account. It is liquid awesome.

2b. Non-native apps. In the “slight frustration” column, 30 of the apps I had on my iPhone would not transfer to my iPad because they were not Universal (which in this case means runs on the iPhone/iPod Touch and the iPad). I had assumed that all apps would run in “1x” or “iPhone-sized” mode right out of the box on the iPad. Not so. Out of the ones on my iPhone 3GS (approximately 1 metric shitton of apps), 1Password Pro, Facebook and 2Do are the ones that currently work for me.

–UPDATE 4/8: What I previously attributed to an issue with apps transitioning from the iPhone to the iPad was actually caused by Pogoplug. Long story short: having your iTunes Library (where your synced apps are) reside on a Pogoplug-connected drive is asking for trouble. If anyone knows a way to consistently make this work, I would love to hear about it in comments. Anyway: mea culpa. All apps I have downloaded from the app store or have since synced from my iTunes library (since i moved it locally) have successfully run in “1x/2x” mode.–

I assume a flood of apps will be updated in the next 48 hours to run on the iPad. Some developers may use this as an opportunity to optimize the program for the iPad’s additional real estate and possibly add features. It will be up to individual developers to decide if, when they make their apps compatible, they will charge anything additional for additional functionality.

3. The battery. I didn’t bother to charge the device before whaling on it, because I do not possess one ounce of restraint. The battery showed 92% pre-whaling. Starting at 10:30am, I commenced downloading a couple pages of apps (which I would argue chew through battery faster than video), and basically ran through every downloaded  or transferred app I could shove onto it. It’s 8pm now, and it’s still showing a 35% charge. I’m not going to say I ran this thing bumper-to-bumper running video the whole time, and the device did slip into sleep a few times, but for my use case, the battery performance was well into “holy shit”.

As I paw the iPad more, I’ll be sharing my observations/frustrations/snarky commentary with my tens of readers.

This is what TMA gets when he fusses around with Verizon phones (aside from better 3G service in NYC):

Those are the two “Clock” apps in the HTC Eris and the iPhone, respectively. Aside from the passing similarity between the 2 Timer tabs themselves, the 4 tabs across the bottom, World Clock, Alarm Clock, Stopwatch and Timer, use the same text and almost identical icons. Wow.

Now I realize the freetard chuckleheads want to scream about how the patent system sucks because such nebulous things like “naming a World Clock” and “sliding Hours and Minutes placeholders” get undeserved protection and that the winner is always the person with the biggest patent portfolio and litigious crappy blah, blah….

/BOOM

Excuse me while I reassemble my head.

As I was saying, kudos to the Obvious Brigade and their comments about the patent system. The shittiness of the system itself belies a pretty important point. Someone – probably a team of someones – spent months developing a way to represent 4 important things you might want to do with time on the iPhone. They came up with the names, the icons and the functional elements of each individual tab – in short, they put more work into it than anything you’ve ever worked on.  Android 1.5 comes along and says “that’s pretty cool” and absconds to a degree that’s almost comical: 4 almost identical icons in the same order, with the same names. Nevermind that the timer tab’s dialer-alert sound-start top/bottom orientation is a straight-up rip-off of the iPhone’s.

There are a lot of things short of this comparison that would make innovation more competitive and less litigious.  This exceeds that point.  This is theft, plain and simple.

I had attributed a lot of the negative press around “Apple vs. Google” as just a way for hacks to drum up page hits (which it still is) and perhaps a little bit of the Jobster pissing on the fence posts of along his property line, however poorly the USPTO lets him define it. When I see stuff like this, which is not one of the documented claims against HTC, I can understand why Apple is dropping napalm too.

This Time It’s Personal
Steve Jobs was not leading Apple when the company lost the infamous “Look and Feel” lawsuit waged against Microsoft. Based on the existence of an ill-advised licensing agreement struck by then-CEO John Sculley, the courts ostensibly  gift-wrapped the Macintosh UI for Microsoft to pillage. When you listen to Jobs talk about the loss, he absolutely seethes. All of the marketing about Apple’s role as the innovator that Microsoft copies stems from something that was entirely out of Steve’s control.  It was much worse than if Jobs himself had lost the Mac’s GUI. But he didn’t. The person he personally recruited to put a Mac in every household – the person who ultimately betrayed him gave it away. This theft may not be all there is to Apple’s assault, but it’s definitely present. Consider the phalanx of patents cited, the unannounced nature of the attack (according to HTC) and Jobs’ own words about the lawsuit: they all suggest some of this came from a place that wanted to avenge a loss – and prevent another. To some, the “belligerent-feeling” nature of the suit is enough to detract from its virtue. It feels “evil“, “bullying” or “unnecessary“. The core of this sentiment, made by some of the smarter people on the tubes, is that this kind of whack-a-moling inhibits innovation, which leads me to my next point.

Apple is not Microsoft
Apple is not motivated by market share, earnings per share or number of markets entered. Apple’s motivation begins and ends with the design of excellent user experiences. The perception that Apple will get to a place in the industry where it stops innovating, sits on its cash cows and perpetuates its existence by bludgeoning more dextrous upstarts with its patent portfolio is simply never going to happen, at least not while Jobs is alive. Jobs relentlessly whips the crop at Apple, pushing innovation like WiFi, Firewire and DisplayPort to the point where comfortable technologies like floppy disks, serial connections and removable media drives are phased out with pundit (and occasionally fanboy)-wrankling regularity. Apple outpaces any other computer or consumer electronics maker in terms of version hustle. Anyone who believes that Apple is capable of laying off the gas at the expense of bleeding-edge innovation does not know the company.

Here’s a hint: you leave it on the doorstep, light it on fire and ring the doorbell.

Dragon Dictation is perhaps one of the coolest apps on the iPhone. For those not familiar, Dictation is an app that displays a single “record” button when launched. You then speak into your iPhone, and your audio is transformed into text, with some startlingly impressive accuracy. Unfortunately for many users and Dragon, the program uses AT&T’s network to transmit speech to Dragon’s servers to perform the transcription. If you’re in one of those “minor” markets like New York City or San Francisco, guess what happens about 1 out of every 4 times you finish dictating your Oscar acceptance speech?

Best part is having 5 bars

About that package – I hear brown paper dipped in candle wax lights especially easily.

/cue Debussey, Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune

HTC, upstart mobile phone maker saunters along a beautiful forest path, oblivious to the exquisitely-crafted “No Trespassing” signs. Sun is streaming through the trees as the company approaches a glittering spring. They stoop and drink deeply, savoring the delicious, refreshing water.

/cue shotgun pump

“Say…you got a purty mouth…”

In our last installment, I talked about some players in the consumer electronics industry that were left sucking seawater in the wake of the latest launch by the USS Cupertino. Not everyone in business is hating life, however. Let’s see who stands to gain the most from the introduction of the iPad.

AT&T
Sigh. Multiple choice question. You own a beleaguered wireless network. You’ve gone on record a few times bitching about Apple’s smash hit devices as being the root cause of your shittiness. What do you do?

A. Offer a modest apology to your consumers for spawning stupidity that carries the message “you use too much bandwidth, so you’re creating your own problems” and get to work fixing your shit.

B. Restructure your rate plans to punish evil content hogs while allowing people who use less to pay less.

C. Serve as the exclusive carrier for Apple’s next smash hit device, whose millions of additional customers using a device that’s even MORE data-intensive will further constipate your already piss-poor network.

Congratulations, dickheads.

B&M Book Publishers
For all of those that thought they were going to get $9.99 eBooks on a device that actually did more than read books, sorry. Apple’s eBooks are going to cost more, news of which obviously resulted in a deafening bitch chorus from people who thought they knew the exact value of electronic versions of books and. thought that publishers were happy with the current Amazon pricing.

Apple has zero obligation to preserve anyone’s pricing model, so people blathering on about “defending the consumer” should go out and bang a woodchipper. Apple did, however, have a very good reason to do what it took to line up publishers prior to the iPad’s announcement. This requires them to charge more for eBooks. I would contend that it’s because Apple has far less leverage than Amazon and publishers were pissed about the deal they were forced into by Amazon in order to get into the eBook business. Gizmodo’s Matt Buchanan thinks Apple did this purposely to screw over Amazon with publishers. I’m sure Apple didn’t mind that Macmillan started the avalanche of publishers willing to take Amazon to the woodshed shortly after eBook prices for the iPad were announced, but to assume that the prices were purposely meant to put heat on Amazon is…well…actually pretty consistent with what I’ve come to expect of that shitshow.
The market will decide what people are willing to pay for an eBook. It all comes down to price x units, people. Neither variable means more than the total.

Print Media

Apple knee-capped music sharing sites by offering a viable pay alternative. Print media, which is on a similar path to irrelevance, is losing to free alternatives loaded with eye spam and shoddy content. Everyone who values good journalism is losing out as a result. If Apple can make create a way for newspapers and periodicals to showcase their content, they may be able to create a pay-per issue and/or subscription model that actually works. Whether the Times realizes it or not, this is their best chance for survival.

You

If you listen to some of the more prominent asshat tech blogs whoring themselves out for hits, you may think that Apple’s newest device is intended solely to line Cupertino’s pockets and lock people into the iTunes ecosystem. Apple’s business model is to lock in customers by providing the best computer and consumer electronics experiences – period.  The real winners with any major Apple release are consumers who benefit from devices that make it easier to access and enjoy their content, surf the web and do their jobs.  It’s really that simple, folks.

And by “well”, I mean profitably. All of M$’s profitable business unit products go back over 10 years.

After over a year of analyst frothing, Apple announced the next step in its transformation of consumer electronics devices. The 2 predictable results of Apple’s announcement – the immediate sell-off of Apple stock and the collective feigned disinterest of Windoz apologists across the country – belies the truth. This is a device that will change the way people will interact with content. So you can click through to dumbasses like Thurrott or Dvorak as they lather themselves up over missing non-features like no buttons for games or no stylus, or you can take the word of someone who claims to know 1% as much, but is much more frequently right. Future’s here people.

So as many denial-riddled pundits yawn at SJ’s claim that “this is the most important thing I’ve ever worked on” (which would include the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone, to name a few), several other businesses are making messes in their shorts – and not the euphoric kind of mess. So now that the iPad’s here, who wins and who loses? Here’s Part 1 of a quick round-up, starting with the losers.

Adobe

When Apple made it clear that they had no interest porting Flash to the iPhone, many analysts shrugged it off as an anomaly. I mean: Flash is ubiquitous on the web and Apple always did weird shit like this. Besides, Adobe was working its plow improving a stripped down version of Flash that would sip battery power like a hummingbird and play super nice with mobile browsers. Just wait for the next version…or the next one. Anyway, even if Apple never adopted Flash and grabbed 50% of the smartphone market, it was only a small percentage of the entire mobile device market. There were still plenty of people to maintain Adobe’s Flash as the de facto runtime on the web, right?

Well the iPhone and now the iPad won’t support it. And Google doesn’t care much for it either. And now Firefox is switching off plug-ins by default for its RC3 Maemo mobile browser, in essence because Flash is a hog. HTML5 support is picking up. And up. Technorati everywhere are going on record as plainly stating that Flash is a dog and HTML5 is the wave of the future. Adobe’s response to the threat: Flash is everywhere. Sound familiar? Keep throwing up your Bang Bros. references to the ubiquity of Flash, guys. Jig’s up. Might not happen this year, but it’s happening: you’re fucked.

Amazon

Poor Jeff Bezos. After all that work getting the eInk technology to perfectly mirror a dead form of media interaction, Apple has to come out with a device that does 20 times as much and a ridiculously competitive price point. That whimpering you hear is no longer the effect Kindle is having on the eBook market; it’s now coming from the CEO’s office. First he’s going to get to see sales of his devices freeze (not that we ever knew how many they sold) and then he’ll get to see his margins – if there ever were any – crash through the floor.

But there’s hope! Amazon just acquired Touchco, a maker of multitouch panels, so a touch version of the Kindle is surely on its way. Because didn’t Apple get multitouch by acquiring Fingerworks? You just plug that shit right into your business model and – BAM! iPad competitor! Right? Right?

Guys, seriously: kick the clown shoes under the bed. A minor feature of one of Apple’s products just buried you.

The Windoz Ecosystem

Granted, no one expects Redmond to respond to the iPad with anything that anyone would rather use (except maybe Paul Thurrortt). But in typical Microsoft fashion, they’ll make a lot of noise about it and respond with something underwhelming. It won’t be the Courier, because the Courier is a bullshit cloud of vapor that smells exactly like Cairo, Longhorn, etc. The only people who’ve made money off the Courier are the people working for the design firm who did the rendering for this non-device. HP, who had the distinguished honor of having their tablet device fondled my Steve Ballmer’s sweaty mitts onstage at CES, is one known entry. Lenovo is another. M$ will respond not with some innovative take on slate computing, but with some bastardization of Windows 7. It will be a customized assemblage of some commodity PC giblets made to look like an iPad to a drunk 6 year old. Because M$ has been playing the me-too game with Apple for at least the last 15 years, and because the cash they spew into this space will have little – if any – return, M$ is clearly in the loser’s column, which should shock no one. Their unfortunate hardware partners, who really don’t have much of a choice, will be dragged right down with them.

Google

Google’s a loser on 2 fronts. First, as the always-brilliant Daniel Eran Dilger points out, the Google model of advertising is much more compelling on desktop and laptop devices (if you can use the word “compelling” to describe the experience of getting targeted ads dumped on your browsing experience). On devices like the iPhone, the probability of people clicking on an ad is much lower. People don’t want to rabbit-trail ads on mobile devices; they want access to the content they’re looking for. Apple’s iPad, while allowing for a greater surface to browse the web like a laptop, still sticks with the iPhone’s touch model, which one would think would continue to discourage ad clicks. More people using iPads to browse the web means fewer people using laptops and desktops. The value of Google to advertisers drops. Some content providers may even prefer to go to a subscription model instead of trying (and almost always failing – or producing content like 99% of the toiletries that dominate tech websites) to get advertising to support their online presences. Apple does subscription models pretty well. Less business for Google

The second front is Google’s suggestion that they’re going to compete with the iPad with a port of Chrome to a tablet device. Maybe Google will shop their tablet-ready versions of the OS to some device-makers before branding their own device, something I’m sure mobile device makers and carriers loved when they did it with Android and the Nexus One. Funny thing is: this business keeps falling for the “Lucy/Charlie Brown field goal” trick perfected by Microsoft. Google’s insistence on continuing to invest money in making inferior OS ports that compete with Apple products lands them smack in the middle of Failsberg.

Next up: the Winners