On Thursday, Apr 12, I ordered an item from Adafruit Industries, one of my go to places for electronics. To present some perspective, I live in Oregon, so the package is going to have to get all the way across the United States to get to me.

My first order weighed in at 0.64 lbs, and I chose to go with the recommended shipper, UPS. Figuring that I didn’t want to spend too much on shipping, I went with UPS Ground and was told it would be 3-7 days. The package shipped out on the 13th.

The following week, I realized there were a few other things I wanted, and my inner lazy scientist decided to try a little experiment. According to UPS, My package would be arriving on Friday, Apr 20th.

I placed another order, this time on Apr 16th. I gave this one to USPS Priority Mail. The package was 1.34 lbs. This one took a few days to actually get shipped, And went out on Apr 18th.
My experiment was relatively simple: Who’s the quicker shipper in the same relative time/cost frame?

Here are the results:

Now, granted that the second package was 3/4 of a lbs heavier than the first, so the price was $3 more. Using Adafruit’s cart shipping estimator, if I’d done order #1 through the USPS, it would have cost me ~$8.05 for Priority mail.

If I had more cash to spend I would do some more thorough experimenting. My conclusion is pretty simple: The United States Postal Service offers a really really dang good deal. Moreso, UPS has an incentive to not get the package where it’s going as quickly. The USPS is going to your house 6 days a week. UPS or FedEx are only going to show up if they already have your money. USPS gets the package to you faster because they already have a lot of mail going your direction anyway. They’re not going to go out of their way to get the package to you faster, but they’re spending the money on the plane, the processing, and the truck already. UPS on the other hand wants you to know that your package could have arrive in  3 days instead of 7, or 2, or 1. They can make it happen, for a price.

UPS and FedEx are decent services, but if you can wait a couple of days USPS is where it’s at.

Contrary to popular belief, the Postal service is not subsidized with federal tax dollars. Your mileage may vary, but if I’m footing the bill I think I might be sending a few more things through USPS.

Or possibly:

iPhone detractor: “Apple fanboys are so thick-headed. They always talk about how awesome the iPhone is, but [Android|Palm|WinMo] has been doing since version x.x and it has feature y…(ad nauseum)”

Yes. I know that whatever platform you use/prefer has had feature X and now the iPhone is getting it. Despite what you think, most of us already know that the iPhone isn’t the first to have feature X. Go out right now (out, not on the internet) and find an iPhone user who thinks that multi-tasking is a new, unique feature to the iPhone. I bet you can’t do it. If you can, I’m willing to bet that the person you’re talking to has very limited experience with any kind of smartphone. On the surface, it may seem like you’re trying to be helpful saying “This feature has been around for a while on my platform, you should see what it’s like, I think it’s great.” Or if I want to paint you in a more pessimistic light, you’re saying “Your phone isn’t so great, my phone already does this, watch me do my multi-tasking dance of triumph! Sucker!”

I wish you were genuinely trying to share your preference with me. I might take the time to look at it with you and maybe you could persuede me. I wish you were gloating, because then I could ignore you. But you’re not doing either of those things. What you’re really saying is “I’m mad because in spite of my platform having cool features, your iPhone keeps getting the spotlight. It’s not fair!”

You try to hide it behind psuedo-logical arguments, and blaming my supposed “fan-boyism” (fanboy has really become the beating stick of the anti-apple folk), but when it comes down to it, you’re just unhappy because you’re not getting your way. I don’t blame you. If I cared about sports, and my favorite team lost a game, I’d be upset too. When it comes down to it though, the iPhone isn’t amazing because it only does stuff that no-one has ever done before. We know that Multi-tasking, and app organizational folders are not new ideas. The iPhone is amazing because it blends things together very well. Android is an impressive operating system, WebOS is cool, I haven’t spent a single second interacting with Windows Mobile 7 but I’m sure it’s cool too. The one thing I’ve seen that they lack is the cohesivness and smooth experience that makes up the iPhone. The experience comes largely because Apple holds the cards on all sides of the equation. It hurts Apple in a lot of ways, like the app-store approval process, but if you look at the industry you’ll see that virtuall everyone else is trying to replicate Apple’s pattern. Apple certainly wasn’t the first to build an app store or make a touch-screen phone, but think back to before the iPhone. Do you remember going to an app-store like interface? How about using a touch-screen phone? What were the all-in-one smart phones like then? What are they like now?

Regardless of how you feel about Apple, they still make one heck of a device, and they’ve changed the face of the mobile industry. Because of that, you can bet I’m going to be excited about cool features being added to my favorite phone.

See, back in November SparkFun Electronics, a hobby electronics store, decided that they wanted to do something special. They decided to have a “Free Day” where they would give every customer up to $100 of product on their site. This spread like wildfire on the tubes, and when the day finally arrived there was far more traffic than Sparkfun could handle. I want to say that there was far more traffic than *anyone* could handle. The result could be categorized as a disaster. Many people could not load the page at all, many couldn’t log in, and even if they were at the logged in point, checking out was just as bad.

Lots of people are angry. They put in a lot of effort and ended up with about 2 hours of not getting free stuff. I’m not too tolerant of people who are whining because they feel entitled to the SFE free stuff. My expectation is that many people who got things will be reselling them at worst, or at best the items will end up in a drawer waiting for a project that will never happen. I’ve heard rumors and whispers (okay, comment posts) that FreeDay was going way farther than expected, ending up on frugal shopping and coupon websites. The result (I imagine) is that there were a lot of people looking to get free stuff, not understanding what SparkFun Electronics was, or what they sold. By the time they got to the site, they were just compounding the problem.

So now, on ebay there will be a few dozen more Arduinos up for sale. I think this is a good thing…”What?!?!” you say? Well, economics is an interesting thing, even on eBay. See, if you have a dozen Arduinos suddenly hit eBay, the supply has suddenly increased. Market forces work their magic and for a bit, Arduinos on eBay will be cheaper. Maybe $15 instead of $30. A quick glance at eBay shows that Arduinos are already selling cheaper there than from SparkFun, or anyone else.I think the thing that really gets me is the number of people who feel that they should have gotten something, but didn’t. I’m sure I’ve felt a sense of entitlement where it didn’t belong, but I also like to think that I’ve grown out of that. Many people have not.

Am I thrilled about Free Day? I’m thrilled about the idea. That a company would say “Hey, we’ve had a great year, let’s give back to our customers, and have some fun with it.” was brilliant. I think it’s that kind of thinking that will allow businesses to function exceptionally well in the 21st century. Do I think it went well? Obviously not for me, but I’m not relying on free items to forward my projects. When I have the funds, I’ll buy the things I need. I hope next time they’ll do it a bit differently so the traffic isn’t as bad, and I get a chance at something. It went well for a lot of people, and it generated some press for SparkFun (though it may not all be good press.)

In the end I think that maybe the lesson to be learned here is that there’s still no such thing as free. Many people ‘paid’ the price of waiting online for two or three hours only to get nothing. I don’t think SparkFun could have anticipated the traffic they’d get. Initially I didn’t even predict the kind of hailstorm that “Free” brings on the internet. I hope SparkFun finds the future to be just as bright. I don’t think this will turn out to be more negative than positive. I hope if they do anything like this again, it’ll work out to be a little smoother, offering something for everyone.

The trouble (and what I’m saying is not new) is that DRM does it’s job quite poorly. DRM is supposed to prevent intellectual property piracy. Unfortunately DRM doesn’t prevent piracy. The people who are truely interested in pirating whatever it is that’s locked up are the same people who happen to have the time and the resources to eliminate the barriers in their way. The CSS protection on a DVD won’t stop the guy producing 100,000 copies of that DVD and selling them. What DRM does is prevent a causual user from doing what he or she likes. It’ll probably stop your Mom from copying that DVD onto a video tape so the kids can watch Toy Story while visiting Grandma (but really, even Grandma has a DVD player at this point, cmon!)

I don’t like DRM. I bought this movie to watch it. I bought this Music to listen to it. I bought this game to play it. I didn’t buy it so you could tell me when, where, or how to watch, play, or listen. The dedicated advocates hold to their word. Until Apple stopped selling DRM-laced mp4s, they didn’t shop on iTunes. Until they could buy that eBook with no lockdown, there was no sale. I’m not as good as they. My computer is full of DRM locked materials. In part this is because I feel a moral and ethical obligation to buy my media. I don’t have a problem with buying media. The industry I think has this expectation that no one wants to pay for things. I admit that there is a set of people that just want to get all of their media for free. Most people I think are willing to pay for their media, but only on acceptable terms. That is to say “I can watch what I want, when I want, where I want.”

So I but my media because I think it’s the right thing to do, but I don’t like that I get locked down by one method or another. An XKCD comic explians the inevitable problem you face when you purchase DRM-laden material:

There’s not really a way around it. In fact, the Recording industry (or rather, one of their lawyers) came out and said that users shouldn’t expect to be able to access DRM-protected material forever. I don’t think it’s an unfair statement. Formats are subject to the realities of time and progress. If you’ve got an 8-track collection that you’re still clinging to, your options for new equipment are limited. Conversley, if you have such equipment, the medium has also slowed and dropped off out of production.

The trouble here is that the change in technology availability isn’t a matter of market forces, but is an arbitrary decision made by a company who no longer wants to support a particular choice they made. Market forces almost universally mark shifts gradually. In one particular case WalMart announced they were going to shut down their DRM servers, rendering purchases made even a week before worthless. The backlash was so strong that WalMart kept their support servers up for another year.

The greater issue at hand is obvious. If a company can arbitrarily decide when (and where) a piece of media can be played, then they have market control by threat (rather than by natural market forces). In part this is why Apple has had such a strong market with the iPod. People don’t want to lose their music and so remain connected with the iPod environment. Such power breaks the normal market forces and creates a large barrier of entry for other market players. I’d like to think that the iPod’s continued market dominance is due to other factors like product superiority and familiarity, but it can’t be denied that lock-in is a factor.

So I’m stuck in the middle here. On the one hand I want to be a good market citizen and encourage growth. On the other hand, I don’t want to be stuck with anybody (even Apple, whom as mentioned before I am quite attached to.) The XKCD option sometimes seems like the most logical. You’re a criminal either way, so you might as well be on your own terms.

Though I had long argued that Apple never would, they made a smart phone… and it was glorious. Besides the occasional hiccup (MMS, Copy & Paste,etc) the iPhone was a dream. At the initial release, it wasn’t an option for me. My wife and had decided to go with Tmobile because they offered a deal that made it more practical for us. Free calling to any 5 numbers.

Smarter people than me figured out that Tmobile and AT&T are really just cousins when it comes to network technology. The iPhone was promptly hacked and come Christmas 2007, I was happily using an iPhone. A year later, we got one for my wife.

I read today about how AT&T is finally about to offer a similar program to Tmobile and Verizon’s options, and so I thought I’d check it out. There are a few things I want that my current iPhone doesn’t have: GPS being chief among them. I’ve heard some bad things about AT&T, but I admit every now and then I hear the iPhone’s siren call, or at least, the iPhone-3Gs-legit-network-supported-phone siren call.

I did the math. This is what I can back with…

The thing that gets me is the plan cost vs number of minutes. Between my wife, her sister, and myself on our 700 minute plan, we rarely go over. This is because we have the “favorites” that allow us to make calls without using minutes. While the $10 difference with AT&T is not a big deal, we end up with more minutes than we could ever hope to use. We just don’t call around that much… The result is that we get a plan for that has a feature we won’t EVER use. Or rather, we use it, and we end up with an absurd amount of remaining minutes.

Because we’ve been good customers, we pay Tmobile around $115. It’s a good deal.  I’m pretty willing to move to the $160/month with AT&T, until the details start to creep out… the details being that MMS isn’t included, and in the family plan it’s $30 for unlimited messaging. There’s no middle ground. And tethering is possible, but not yet… and they’re likely to charge extra for it. And the 700 minute difference makes the “free-to-call-to-numbers” irrelevant. Given that we bump up the rate on our tmobile plan for full 3G access, and noting that Tmobile doesn’t offer visual voicemail (something that is cool, but not a dealbreaker)

This is according to my calculations trying to make the most balanced comparison of what I would have vs. what AT&T offers. It does not include taxes or fees. $30/month difference.  The other difference is the phone subsidy. $299.99/32GB iPhone vs ~$850/32GB iPhone.

Let’s do the numbers (cue Marketplace music):

Here’s the initial cost of two sold-on-the-open-market Black iPhone 3Gs’

$1900

Since we’re paying $599.99 either way (The subsidized cost on AT&T), we can remove it from the equation, leaving us with:

$1300.02

Okay, now there’s a $30/month difference contractually. $30 * 24 months = $720.00

$580.02

We can also skip the activation fees -$62.00

$518.00

I think that’s probably all I can shave off of the price. Since I’m probably sticking with Tmobile for a while, I can probably subsidize myself over the next 24 months (esp because I’m not paying that extra $30)

$518.02 / 24  =$21/month

$149.88+ $21 = $170.88

A bit more than $9 difference, when all is said and done. The biggest difference between the two is that I have to have about $2000 up front. The other problems, some listed above are as follows:

a) Little-to-no support, though tmobile usually offers some help if you call.
b) No Visual Voicemail

The point of this whole exercise is to recognize that AT&T  pretty much screws it’s customers, and there is an alternative. Part of me says “Hey, capitalism! If an iPhone is worth more to me than my money, then I should get it.” Another part of me says “Hey, if I’m smart enough to work this out, and I’m not using deception or coercion, no harm, no foul.”

If I do follow through with this, one thing I can expect is a better network situation than a lot of iPhone users. A quick look at the web will show you that AT&T has major problems with their network, and with delivering the features that they’re supposed to be. One hope that I have is that at the end of AT&T and Apple’s exclusivity deal, Tmobile will start to carry the iPhone.  Assuming the data rates will be the same as the Android, it all looks like a better deal.

Now that the world’s economy has fallen apart and the Auto industry has fallen to pieces, things have started to change a little bit. The market finally began to push hard and Automakers found themselves with an awful lot of SUVs that nobody wanted. The government bought American auto-makers (more or less anyway), and somewhere along the line automakers have finally abandoned the absurd idea that a hydrogen based fuel-economy was ever really going to happen.

A couple of EVs have made headlines in the last couple of weeks, and that makes me happy. Nissan announced the LEAF. So far the only thing I don’t like about it is it’s name. 100 Miles to a charge, four doors, it looks like a car, and it’s expected to come in at a reasonable price (hopefully about $25,000.)

The Nissan LEAF (No, it's not an acronym)

This is really the EV that I’ve been waiting for. Tesla came out with their roadster a while back, but let’s not kid ourselves… $100K? They’ve sold plenty of them, but the only people who can afford them have them now I think. Tesla’s model S, while a little more practical, still unfortunately falls in the $50K range. About $25k more than I want to, or could hope to spend. The LEAF represents the first practical EV. My greatest hope is that they are actually willing to sell it, rather than just lease. (Take note guys… the EV1 was a complete failure because you couldn’t buy it.)

The original, meaner Volt

Then there’s GM. Chevy has been touting a concept for a few years now called the Volt. Up until a couple of months ago, it looked like a mean sports coup. More recently, it’s started to look like sleek sedan. The Volt is actually not a true EV. It’s an extended range EV, meaning that it has an onboard gas engine that will allow it to make longer trips. This is a similar design to the Toyota Prius Hybrids, except that the Volt uses it’s battery power exclusively as long as it can. They estimate currently that it’ll run for about 40 miles before needing to start the gas engine.

A Kinder, Gentler Volt

You may have seen in the last few weeks a commercial with a green background, a 110 Volt outlet, and the numbers 230-8-11. The internet has been mildly buzzing about, trying to figure out what it is. It turns out it was an announcement for today (8-11) that GM’s been preparing for. They announced that the fuel economy of the Volt is judged to be 230 Miles-Per-Gallon. Pretty exciting, though somewhat misleading. The math assumes that you include your first 40 gasless-miles as part of the calculation.

On top of that, I have to say that GM dropped the ball a bit on this… if you google 230-8-11, or a variant thereof, you don’t end up on a specific GM website. Although you get news items this morning, the first thing you should see is the official Volt website, or at the very least, a 230-8-11 website… Unfortunately, neither are anywhere to be seen in this search.

So I’m excited. Automakers are making EVs. I’m still a little hestitant. I’m waiting for the opportunity to acutally buy one of these vehicles. When it comes, you can bet I’ll be first in line… well, for the LEAF anyway.

My dad asked me a few months ago about e-Book readers. He had a stroke a few years ago and doesn’t have great control of his left hand. Books can be a bit difficult for him. I whole-heartedly recommended the Kindle because I thought it was amazing. It still is to some degree, but Last Friday the Kindle book fiasco happened. You’ve probably heard the story: Amazon found out that one of the books they were selling wasn’t properly licensed, so they yanked it from the store and from every single Kindle. It’s an invasion of privacy, personal space, and property.

Suffice it to say, It would take a bit of a miracle for me to buy a Kindle. Amazon’s CEO, JEff Bezos, issued an apology, but I echo the comments in response to that. It’s great that you recognize it was a mistake, but what are you going to do about it? Where’s the guarantee that you’re not going to play reading police again?

Yesterday, My wife and I went down to the Mall to the Sony store (Which is called Sony Style for reasons I cannot fathom) to check out their eReader. It’s a 2008 device, compared to the Kindle 2 which is just a few months old, and it has a few shortcomings. The reading library available to it is significantly smaller than Amazon’s and there’s no wireless option… at all. Sure, I can’t go out and buy books wirelessly, but also no one can come in and take books wirelessly. There’s also no annotation options. If I want to make notes about books, I’m going to have to do it on paper.

Still, I kind of want one. I like the technology, and I doubt I’m going to give the Kindle another shot. Still, I think we’re on the eve of a bigger tech war than it seems right now. Several days back, Barnes & Noble announced a deal with a company called Plastic Logic, to sell books in connection to that device. Plastic Logic expects to release their reader towards the end of this year, or early next year. I also expect Sony to update their reader pretty soon, or they’re going to start looking like their standing still. Hykel said she might buy me a reader for Christmas. If I get enough fun money before then, I might buy one myself…

I’m hoping that Amazon’s fumble, and the introduction of Plastic Logic’s device will spur Sony to update their reader to new heights. If there’s one thing I like, it’s competition. Competition drives products to be better, and benefits the consumer.

Right now, we’re in sort of a strange limbo when it comes to computers. Many many years ago, computers were not like they are today (duh, you say.) The most common computers were terminals, and they were basically screens, keyboards, and a bit of electronics that connected you to a machine somewhere deep in the bowels of your company or university. I never really had to use one of those. The benefit of these machines was that they were cheap. You bought one computer, and a bunch of dumb terminals.

Sometime in the 70′s, hobbyists began to build computers at home. Industry saw this, and started making computers too. Home computers… really the kind you’re reading this on right now. This new kind of computer was a computer that had all it’s processing power under the hood. You did all of your work and saved it locally (to a floppy disk or a hard disk), and your computer never really talked to another computer.

That lasted for several years, and then the Internet really began to be popular with people. The web showed up and provided information in easily accessible ways. Today, because of browser advances and some really smart people, our computers live in a sort of limbo. We store data locally, but a lot (if not all) of our computer’s purpose is to talk to other computers over the web. It’s a neat kind of marriage between the terminal and the desktop computer. We listen to music, watch movies, share videos, edit documents, get books, buy stuff, sell stuff… the list goes on. We do a lot on our computers, but we do even more with the internet and the web.

More recently, we’ve seen a neat little kind of computer emerge at a very low price point: The Netbook. Netbooks are little laptops that don’t have a lot of muscle behind them. They’re designed for internet access, where they don’t need power… just a browser. They’re great little computers. Great enough that I even have one.

Google has taken this idea to the next level. They’re focusing some of their energy on making a new operating system. It will be primarily for netbooks initially, but I suspect they intend to expand out. The OS will be browser based, and is designed to be internet focused. Most of your interaction will be with the net. There are some expectations that we’ll all start storing our data online, and we’ll be connected all the time. Imagine the possibility of having all of your music, movies, documents, etc stored securely online, and being able to access them without a huge hard drive. Now couple that with doing all of your work online. Listening to music, watching movies, writing email, writing papers, etc. These are things we already do. To me it sounds pretty awesome. In some cases, I already do it by having a connection to my computer at home that I can open up when I need to access it.

There is one problem, and I think it’s going to hit us pretty hard. Telecom companies have gotten the hang of this internet thing. There was a time of prospering early on, when ISPs didn’t really follow what you were doing, and nobody really cared (unless you were doing something very dangerous.) But when data started to flow fast and hard, it made people sit up and take notice. P2P, and Video sharing created a lot of data going back and forth, and the problem has expanded as these technologies and others have grown and spread. Telecom companies realized that the amount of data moving was probably costing them more money than they wanted to spend. They’ve wanted to engage in tiering systems, and charge both ends of the connection, that is, when you access Google, they want to charge you and Google for the data you’re downloading. The trouble is, both you and Google already pay for your connection, but Google doesn’t necessarily pay your ISP when they transfer something. Your Telco wants them to.

The problem we face then is, what happens when the ISPs and the Telcos are between us and our data? One concern I face right now is my situation with Comcast, who is my ISP. Comcast limits me to 250GB of transfer a month. Generally speaking, this is way more than I think I could ever hope to use. The idea is that the only way I could use up that much bandwidth is if I’m transfering tons of data (read movies and music), and the only way I could hope to transfer that much data is if I’m pirating it, because what fool would transfer 250GB legitimately? As I don’t keep most of my data online, it’s not a problem, but if I did, it might become one. If you listened, and watched all of your media, and it all had to stream/download from a server, you might find yourself bumping up against that edge. Though compression is getting better, content is also getting heavier. If you pass that point, you might get a slap on the wrist, or you might get your service terminated.

I think this is really just going to an extension of the Net Neutrality issue. I look forward to seeing how it plays out, but I hope it doesn’t end up with the cards all being help by Time Warner and AT&T.

Oh, and the Google Chrome  Logo looks like it’s going to split and turn into an Autobot.

I don’t know if we’re still in the golden age of the paid blogger, but over the past 4 months I think I’ve realized something:

• It’s not as easy as I thought it would be
• It’s not as fun as I thought it would be
• It’s not necessarily what I want to do.

See, I started paying attention to blogs like TUAW and PaulStamatiou.com. They’re both great sites and they both report things in a way that’s fun to read. I wanted to do that, and it became clear that everyone else did too. What is my site offering that isn’t already available in a million other places on the web? My commentary isn’t incredibly different from any other Tech-Nerd Apple-fanboy online, so why would people be reading that? It turns out that people really aren’t. A skimming of my analytics data shows that people are mostly interested in the cool stuff that I’ve made. My DIY-NAS far outweighing anything else, but even the Atomic Cube and my Birthday Wishlist have gotten far more attention than any of the opinion pieces. I think this is probably because people are more interested in stuff that I’ve done than my opinions about the world. It makes sense too. Everybody’s got opinions, but not everyone does the cool stuff I do.

I think when I started this, I wanted a site like Paul’s. I would write reviews, guides, and opinion pieces about tech, and people would flock to me, and tell me how awesome I am. While I still hope for that last part (I think right now my only fan is Hykel), I think that running a website probably needs to first be an exercise in willingness. You probably shouldn’t run a website if it’s not rewarding to you. To me, for this site, that means more than money. I want to post because I want to show off cool stuff that I’ve done.

So I think I’m going to change direction a bit on the site here. I’m going to back away from opinion pieces, and stuff that’s already been covered a million times in a million places. Instead, I’m going to focus on me! Yeah, hopefully it won’t come off as a weird Me-Monster type thing, but then again, the website is AaronEiche.com

Anyway, Look for more Aaron-related content in the future.

It’s kind of a funny thing for Apple to make announcements at a developer conference. They’ve been doing this for years, so I’m not saying that it’s out-of-the-ordinary. What I’m saying though is that making announcements targetted towards consumers at a conference for developers ends up giving you a kind of weird mix of information. If Apple were still doing MacWorld shows, or if this had been one of their “Special Media Events”, we would have gotten a simple run down of features, and a bunch of pretty pictures. At a developer conference, we instead get sprinkled in there notes about operating system, memory management, API access, and programming features that mean nothing to consumers.

Anyway, at WWDC, there were really 3 major portions here:

• iPhone
• MacBooks
• Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6)

They weren’t presented in that order, but I’m going to look at them in that order. My blog, my rules

iPhone

The iPhone’s been out for about 2 years now. It’s gone through one major hardware upgrade and a few major OS updates. The most recent announcement of software updates is to iPhone 3.0. Among the updates to the iPhone OS comes peer-2-peer communication over bluetooth (so you can communicate with other iPhones – such as in games), Tethering (over USB and WiFi), and the possibility of Flash (according to Apple this is up to Adobe). This is all good news. I’ve speculated with friends that the new openness is coming out of Apple’s need to compete with other next-gen phones that are coming out on the market. Market Competition for the Win!

More than the OS, is the release of new Hardware. Apple announced the iPhone 3Gs today. It still looks the same on the outside, but according to Apple, it’s all new on the inside. More memory, faster processor, more storage, a compass (A magnetic sensitive device makes it a real compass), and this on top of the already existing WiFi,Bluetooth,GPS, Capacitive multi-touch screen. I’m excited for the 3Gs. I’m a Tmobile user though, so hackers start your engines, and Aaron start your cash machine… $699 w/no contract.

MacBooks

Apple did a weird thing a couple of years ago. They made a portable device, reliant on power, with a battery that couldn’t be exchanged. For a phone, it was concerning, but not considered to be a big deal. Then, several months ago, Apple did it with a laptop. This gained considerable more attention. A laptop without a swappable battery is kind of like a stove with fixed pans. It works, sure, but if you want to be a little more flexible, it’s not going to work. Well, Apple did it again. They went a size smaller to the 15″ MacBook Pro and took away our battery swappability.

They’re faster and better and all that. It’s trading out it’s ExpressCard slot for an SD slot, which IMO is a big improvement. I’ve never heard of anyone using the ExpressCard slot. The battery in the beast is supposed to last for 1000 charge cycles and 7 hours or so for 5 years. I know there are lots of variables, but 1000/5 years = 200 cycles/year != 365 days. I know that most don’t completely discharge in a day, but 165 days is a pretty big gap. I’ll take Apple’s word on it, but I’ll bet it’ll be more like 3 years when people start complaining about battery issues. Prices dropped universally on the notebook line, so kudos there Apple.

Snow Leopard

Apple’s always announced OS X releases with “Including x new features” where x was equal to some very high number. It was a marketing technique, and many of those features weren’t features that everyday users would use. Additionally, in internet forums jokes would be exchaged about Apple having removed “the debug code” and that the OS felt “snappier”. This was bourne out of early users using the OS X beta, 10.1 and 10.2. However, this time around, it looks like Apple’s actually done it.

Mac OS X 10.6, Snow Leopard is not a standard OS release. From the info available on their website, Snow Leopard is a lot of time and energy put into optimizing the OS, and making it work better. Instead of making new features, Snow Leopard makes the old ones better. It is going to be a major update to the Finder, which has been in desperate need of updating for many years (it was a port from the old generation system-7 Finder, that’s 20 years…), updates to 64bit architecture, new version Quicktime, I’m looking forward to it. Best of all I think, this isn’t the regular update. It weighs in at a mere $29… $100 less than previous point one updates.

All-in-all, very good show. We usually don’t get so much new stuff at the WWDC, but I suspect this will be a trend as it’s easier to do than doing random special events. Apple did a good job here. I hope that we’ll get to see Jobs return soon and I hope that Apple will continue to change and grow in the spirit of competition.