> The other day I was talking to a colleague, a bright guy who obviously works in the technology and media industries, but isn’t on the technical side. He’s what I’d call a moderately informed tech consumer, and I was showing him my new iPad. His response to me was shocking: He said that he had been interested in buying an iPad, but needed to read PDF files, and since Apple only supported its own formats, he couldn’t buy one. The “moderately informed” consumer is greatly outnumbered by the “completely uninformed” consumer, who doesn’t know or care what a PDF is, let alone know whether or not an iPad can read one.

I think tech writers, even really good ones like Jason Snell, forget that nerds like us are still very much in the minority, and we overestimate the general public’s awareness of all this flak about App Store rejections, “closed” vs “open”, etc. People watch iPad commercials, and they go out to a store to buy one. Their man interaction and learning experience prior to purchasing is via an Apple rep at the store. There is no equivalent “Android” rep to sway the purchase away from Apple (since Google has no retail presence), so there’s little chance of Apple losing a sale there. They don’t read tech blogs; they just buy apps. Even if you told them that a few developers (literally a handful out of thousands) had their apps rejected by Apple, they wouldn’t care, unless they really, really wanted that app, and there was no other app just like it.

When Apple is dumb enough to reject a Lady GaGa app, then they will be in trouble. Until then, it’s in Apple’s best interest to keep the store tightly controlled. That control has attracted far more developers than it has repulsed, because it offers a much better chance of profit and low levels of piracy than anything else out there.

Everyone talks about the “open” Android approach being superior in geek circles, but from a business standpoint, “open” has no advantage. I’m always going to make more money in a walled garden. And money is what brings developers.

I agree with John Gruber on this issue; Apple would be better off fighting the “closed” argument by promoting HTML5 and web apps better, which they seem to be doing lately.

> The print magazine business was one of the early industries to say the Internet was a fad. They continue to be in denial despite the fact that the big ad agencies are shifting more and more of their budgets online. > > The iPad does exactly what the print magazine publishers need it to. It puts their old-fashioned, irrelevant about to be completely disintermediated companies back in the game. Only from the looks of it, the people running the print media business are just plainly too stupid to realize it. You’re never going to get executives, the very people who don’t actually produce anything, to save the Print industry. The only way periodicals can survive in the digital world is to scale down and sell direct to the consumer at a lower price, something that would require the firing of all the top-paid executives.

Single authors can publish their work and make a reasonable living on the Internet. But not if 80% of their take is financing some suit’s yacht.

Don’t expect the execs to go down with the ship. Quite the contrary; they are bringing the ship down with them.

If you want a revolution, you’re going to have to get the writers and editors to toss the execs overboard and start taking the helm. The industry is top heavy to the extreme. Always has been.

It’s been a slow process, but the music industry is finally in the middle of this transition. Musicians are starting to find ways to finance their own careers without paying for others. Perhaps the publishing industry will move in that direction as well, but not in the near term.

> While AT&T asserts that its high-end 2GB cap will only impact the heaviest users, the fact is that today’s heavy user is tomorrow’s average user,” Free Press policy counsel M. Chris Riley said in a statement. “Internet overcharging schemes like the one AT&T proposes will discourage innovative new uses and stifle healthy growth in the mobile broadband economy. It is price gouging for AT&T to charge the low-end users $15 per 200MB, and to charge $20 for tethering capability even if no additional capacity is used. This pricing system is clearly divorced from the actual underlying cost of service. This is the issue for me. From the looks of it, I actually stand to save some money in the short term. Looking at my average data usage, I’m most certainly safe with the 2GB plan, and can almost fit under the 200MB plan. And I’m a pretty heavy iPhone user. I have my email set to push, I’m constantly using apps, browsing, etc.

(I guess it helps to live in San Francisco, where I can’t get signal most places, anyway.)

So with the new plans, I will save $10 a month ($5 each for me and my girlfriend’s iPhone) at least. I could change my usage habits a bit and save myself $30 a month with the DataPlus plan, though I’m not sure I want to start counting kilobytes just yet.

But the real issue is that quote above. I may use just just over 200 MB now, but how much data will I use next year? New iPhones are going to have new features, features that are likely to drive me to want to use the Internet more. The iPhone that will likely be announced next Monday will have a front-facing video camera. How much data is a video chat going to eat?

It’s clear that AT&T has network issues. I don’t necessarily have a problem with charging the 2% of really heavy users more money. After all, they are helping to bring down the speed for the rest of us. But I always worry whenever a giant company like AT&T makes a change that appears to save consumers money at first. Tiered pricing is almost always a ploy to make more money, not help customers.

If the limit on the 2GB plan gets raised to 3GB, or 4GB, etc. as the needs of the average user evolve, I’ll be pleasantly surprised. For now, I remain skeptical.

And, as everyone seems to be suggesting today, the Tethering pricing is a complete ripoff. If you’re not giving me more data, I shouldn’t be paying more, period. At least now we know why AT&T hasn’t offered Tethering up until now. They didn’t know what to do about unlimited data. Removing unlimited as an option was the only way to keep their network from completely crumbling, I guess.

Which is why Tethering is only an option if you switch to one of these new plans. And for those of you planning on keeping your unlimited plan, have fun with that iPhone 3Gs for the rest of your life. Because you won’t be able to upgrade phones without changing to a non-unlimited plan, either.

> Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs shared a secret with his audience at a technology conference outside Los Angeles Tuesday: The idea for the iPad came before the iPhone. Those of us who follow Apple as closely as I do wouldn’t consider this a secret. It’s fairly obvious, once you start using the iPad, that much of the iPhone OS was designed with the bigger form factor of the iPad in mind. Or, at the very least, most of the essential components of the user experience are not tied to a specific form factor. That’s what makes the iPhone OS so malleable.

Before I had ever used an iPad, I wouldn’t have guessed just how right for a tablet the iPhone OS is. But now that I’ve seen it in action, I think with a few refinements it will become far more powerful and game-changing than we even now realize.

I haven’t used Android enough to make a value judgement on this, but I suspect that since Android was originally conceived as a Windows Mobile OS killer and not a foundation for a whole new paradigm in portable computing, Google is going to have a rougher time making that transition from phone to tablet. They are just now adding true multi-touch input capabilities, years after the initial release. Which means multi-touch will always be an add-on for Android, whereas it’s the foundation of iPhone OS.

Clearly, Microsoft’s notion that you can slap Windows on a tablet, give users a pen, and change the world was a complete failure. Scaling down a giant beast proved to be unwise. I’m not so sure scaling UP Android will necessarily work better. But I think there’s at least a better chance of that working in the long term.