all micro contact rss

MacBook Air: The Concept Car of Notebook Computers

> I think it is reasonable to assume that the majority of Mac users will never use their Mac to the degree that they need the added processing power of the MacBook Pro. I would also guess that most Mac users carry their Macs places than they bother to desire to crack the case open. So for most Mac users wouldn’t the Air make more sense than the 13″ MacBook Pro? > > All of this to say: the 13” MacBook Air is no secondary computer any more than the 13” MacBook Pro is.[8](http://brooksreview.net/2010/10/mba-fits#footnote_7_3265 "I will address the iPad Pro / 11” MacBook Air thoughts later.")
via [brooksreview.net](http://brooksreview.net/2010/10/mba-fits/)
Lots of people making this argument. [Andy Ihnatko](http://ihnatko.com/2010/10/27/macbook-air-steady-on/ "Ihnatko.com") and many others are also making counter arguments.

But I don’t think the story here is whether or not the new MacBook Air is a worthy “primary” computer right now. I think the Air, like many Apple products, is more interesting in what it represents than what it actually is.

What the Air represents, of course, is the future. It’s sort of the concept car of Apple’s Portable Mac Lineup, giving us hints of what we can expect to see in the entire line in the coming years. In Apple’s perfect world, it would already be the replacement for the entire portable Macintosh lineup. But since that isn’t possible yet (too many tradeoffs, still too expensive), it remains in a transitional state, going from expensive niche computer, to slightly more reasonable computer for a slightly larger market with this iteration.

People aren’t going to have to choose between an Air and a MacBook Pro for very much longer, though, because the next MacBook Pros will end up adopting many of the Air’s features, and then some more, and so on, until eventually they will become just a line of Airs in increasing sizes.

In other words, these two lines of notebooks are going to merge over the next few years. There won’t be 11″ and 13″ Airs, and then a 13″ Macbook, and then 13″, 15″ and 17″ MacBook Pros. It might take a few more upgrade cycles, but eventually we’ll just have 11″-17″ MacBook Pros.

That isn’t the reality today, but believe me, it will happen. It’s just going to take some time to get the pricing down to earth.

Take a look at what makes the Air unique in the lineup, and you’ll quickly see that there isn’t anything the Air has that wouldn’t be a good idea in all of Apple’s notebooks. Flash storage is superior to a spinning hard drive. Instant on is obviously something everyone wants. Bigger and better battery life. Thinner footprint and lighter weight—who wouldn’t want those, even in a 17″ notebook?

Think about the Air features that have already made their way to the MacBook Pro: Unibody construction was a feature of the Air first. So was the integrated, unswappable battery.

Flash storage is still too expensive to match current hard drives, but it won’t be long before it gets close enough.

The Mac App store will further decay the need for an optical drive.

I expect the $999 plastic Macbook to die first. Probably not right away, but within a year or two. Apple is clearly moving away from plastic bodies in all of its products, and as mentioned in the above article, most people with modest needs (i.e. most people) can get by with less storage.

The Air isn’t quite cheap enough to kill the MacBook today, but Apple will drive that price down even further over the next year. When the middle of the road 13″ Air is $1099 and has 4 GB of RAM, I’d say the MacBook is toast.

Meanwhile, the Pros will all get thinner and lighter next year. Hard drives won’t go away as an option quite yet, but Flash storage alternatives will get cheaper, encouraging more users to go that route.

I guess my point is that right now, it doesn’t really matter if people buy an Air or a MacBook. I suspect a decent number of people will go to each option. The new Air will certainly appeal to more people than the old one, and the MacBook will continue to appeal to those for whom the Air isn’t yet a perfect match for their needs.

Like the iPod Classic, the MacBook and the 13″ MacBook Pros will hang around for a while, but will likely not get much attention from Apple moving forward. And then they will be quietly taken out to pasture when the Airs are ready to grab what remains of that niche market.

The question then, of course, will be whether or not Apple decides to keep a “concept” line of notebooks for other features we can’t yet imagine. I think it’s an interesting way to innovate without risking alienating the current user base.

On the iPad Mute/Orientation Lock controversy

When it comes right down to it, I hold my iPad in far more bizarre positions than I hold my iPhone. Sometimes it’s flat on my lap, sometimes it’s held over my head as I read in bed. In every one of those situations, it’s become second-nature to me to flip that orientation lock switch to avoid the dreaded iPad Screen Dance that every iPad owner has encountered. Given the frequency with which iPad owners benefit from orientation-locking, quicker access to the feature is better, and the hardware switch is far faster than the double-tap, swipe, tap software approach. To be honest, I almost never lock my iPhone’s orientation because I find locking it (and unlocking it again) annoying.

(via macworld.com)

It’s pointless to complain about this, because Apple has obviously made up its mind, and as we well know, once that happens almost nothing will change it back. But I have to agree with many of the complainers that changing the orientation lock on the iPad to a mute switch, just for the sake of being consistent with the iPhone, is a bad idea.

The above paragraph expresses perfectly why I feel this way. The tablet form factor requires an easy way to lock orientation while the phone form factor simply doesn’t.

I never think about the orientation of my iPhone. I pretty much keep it locked in portrait 95% of the time, switching it off on the rare occasion when I actually want to use my phone sideways. The iPhone doesn’t want to be a landscape device, except when you are playing games. And most games auto-lock you into landscape, anyway.

On the iPad, I most often want to use it in Landscape, the opposite of the phone. Landscape layouts of apps tend to give you more power for fewer taps, and it’s far more comfortable for me to hold and type in Landscape. However, I can’t just lock the iPad and forget it as easily as I do on the iPhone, because some tasks, such as reading iBooks, do work better in portrait. So I do go back and forth several times a day. This leads to issues with the screen rotating unintentionally, as mentioned above. Especially because the iPad rotates even on the home screen, unlike the iPhone.

At the same time, I almost NEVER need a mute switch on my iPad. Mostly because my iPad doesn’t make noise, anyway. I turn my email and push notification sounds off, because I already receive audio notifications on my phone. And, as the linked article above points out, holding the volume down button for a second mutes the thing, anyway. (It’s worth noting that this doesn’t work when the device is screen locked, as it does with the physical switch, so it’s not quite as convenient as the switch.)

This is why Apple chose to make that switch on the iPad an orientation lock in the first place. It was the functionality more people were likely to want more often. I’m sure that wasn’t a haphazard decision; Apple doesn’t do anything on a whim.

The iPhone is my noise maker device, and I have it with me more often in places where muting is required. So that mute switch is welcome.

I’m sure some would rather have the mute switch than the orientation lock; I’m sure many of us would love to have both. But anyone who knows Apple knows that 1) Apple always wants FEWER physical buttons, not more and 2) Apple does not like hardware buttons to do different things based on user preference. They want anyone with an iPad to know how to use anyone else’s iPad.

I understand that argument, and it has served Apple well in the past. But this time, it seems like they’re making things consistent just for its own sake. And they are changing a behavior about which, as far as I can tell, no one was complaining.

Like I said, there’s almost no way that Apple will change its mind on this one. And there’s almost no way we’ll ever get any sort of preference setting to make it do what we want. So crying about it really won’t help. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t wrong on this one.

I’d say it’s more likely they’ll get rid of the switch on future devices altogether, like on the iPod touch. Then maybe come up with some more clever gesture to switch off the sound and lock the orientation, even when the device is sleeping. Until then, we’ll just have to deal with this change. It’s not the end of the world, by any means. But it’s certainly not ideal.

Expedia and Travelocity are worried about Google: I wonder why?

> Google would certainly love to present fare recommendations when searchers look for airline tickets, rather than simply directing them to another site. Companies like Expedia worry that the acquisition could lead Google to present a matrix of actual fares on its search results page, above all of the other sites that sell tickets. At that point, the key question becomes: which sites will Google’s results link to, and what (if anything) will be the cost of those links? > > To make its case that the Google/ITA deal is anticompetitive, FairSearch dredges up some old remarks made by Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page in a paper from their Stanford days.  > > “We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers,” the two men wrote while in graduate school. Other, similar quotes are included, all with clear implication that it is Google which now has the incentive to game its search results in subtle ways that will benefit the company.
via [arstechnica.com](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/10/expedia-travelocity-say-google-has-crossed-the-creepy-line.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss)
Google is slowly becoming the antithesis of its original Mission Statement. With no effective competition, the profit motive has trumped the consumer’s desire for useful information.

The innovation and inspiration laid out thoughtfully in those old Stanford papers is long gone.

And it’s beginning to show, even in simple search results. Remember when the first few results were almost always exactly what you were looking for? That’s why everyone switched to Google in the first place. That “I’m feeling Lucky” button, demonstrated an incredible confidence in the quality of the product; Google knew what you wanted, and was going to take you right there as quickly as possible.

I don’t know about you, but I’m finding myself on page two and three of Google search results, hunting around for what I wanted, much more often than I was a few years ago. Forget about feeling lucky; now I’m just feeling hopeful.

I understand that public companies need to grow, expand, make geometrically increasing amounts of money, etc. But there’s never an excuse for not putting the customer’s needs first. Selling the top slots in a search result to the highest bidder, even when those links are unlikely to be in the users’ best interests, is what Google’s competitors were doing when Google swooped in and killed them all.

So who is going to swoop in and kill Google?

The Mac App Store: Impending DOOM!

> Given that, why the concern over how Apple handles the Mac App Store? Can’t developers just choose whether or not to go through the store? Of course. But the risk here—and make no mistake, it’s a risk for both developers and users because of the impact it will have on software diversity—is that if the Mac App Store becomes popular enough, users may eventually expect, mistakenly or not, that it’s the only place they can get (or at least want to get) Mac software. If the App Store becomes the de facto method for getting new programs, we could end up in a situation where developers feel forced to write software that meets Mac App Store guidelines. And if that happens, and if those guidelines don’t change dramatically, we’ll all lose.
via [macworld.com](http://www.macworld.com/article/155120/2010/10/mac_app_store_devil_in_the_details.html?lsrc=rss_main)
IF the app store becomes popular enough. That’s the key point. If developers can’t get their software into the store because Apple is so restrictive, then the store will essentially be empty, and no one will shop there.

The issue here is that everyone ASSUMES that the Mac App Store will become a hit, no matter what Apple does with it. They also assume that the Mac App Store will absolutely become the ONLY way to get software on a Mac eventually. I disagree. I think Apple will have to approach this store a bit differently than the iOS store if it wants to get enough developers in to make the store worthwhile. And while I think Apple would love for the Mac App Store to be the only game in town, that’s by no means going to happen if Apple blocks some of the most useful software available on the Mac today.

At the same time, many developers are going to be forced to move towards Cocoa, forced to stop using crappy installers that put files all over the place, forced to adhere to interface guidelines, forced to stop using copy protection that hurts innocent buyers—this is all a good thing. They will also be getting a huge influx of competition from iOS developers who turn their sights towards the Mac. Evolve or die. And that’s great for the users.

Ultimately, I think there’s a very decent chance that there will be movement on both sides, with Apple loosening up the guidelines over time, and developers tightening up their bad coding habits and being forced to find more innovative ways to accomplish what they want to accomplish.

And Apple will get what it really wants, which is to kill Java, Flash, Carbon—all the old legacy dead weight holding it back from moving OS X forward even faster. Jobs wants control, like he always does. You can disagree with whether or not that’s a good thing, but time will tell if it leads to better things.

Google TV gets shut out by the major networks: Big surprise

> If you were hoping to use your new [Google TV device](http://www.pcworld.com/article/207643/sony_debuts_hdtvs_with_google_tv_baked_in.html) to stream full episodes of shows such as NBC’s *The Office*, CBS’ *$h*! My Dad Says*, and ABC’s *Modern Family*, you may be out of luck. The three major U.S. television networks—ABC, CBS and NBC—are reportedly blocking full episode video streaming from their Websites to Google TV devices. The three networks now join [Hulu as holdouts](http://www.pcworld.com/article/207182/google_tv_gets_hulu_snub_revue_cant_deliver_full_web.html) for providing content to Google’s new set-top box. News Corp’s Fox and Viacom are not currently blocking access to Google TV, although Fox says it may still do so, according to [The Wall Street Journal](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303339504575566572021412854.html) .
via [macworld.com](http://www.macworld.com/article/155099/2010/10/googletv.html?lsrc=rss_main)
Anyone who is surprised by this isn’t paying attention. As I’ve said about a million times, the problem is with CONTENT availability. And the studios aren’t about to give it to Google any more than they were willing to give it to Apple, Amazon, Netflix, etc.

The Cable companies have way too much to lose. And the Cable companies are making the networks way too much money in advertising. Real advertising. Not crappy web ads that go for a few pennies.

Until the tech companies can make the studios enough money to fund huge budget sci-fi shows, the Cable companies aren’t going anywhere. Very simple.

So Google TV, as predicted, becomes another overpriced box sucking up power and getting you limited content. But least your remote has 45,000 buttons now.

Now, the last time the Powers That Be whined about Google trying to create a revolution (Remember the Nexus One?), Google ended up caving to their (carrier’s) whims. It’ll be interesting if Google can come up with something that will appease the TV studios, like maybe charging a ridiculously high price for episodes, or some other form of forced commercial content that makes the whole experience unbearable.