TSA can't believe MacBook Air is a real laptop, causes owner to miss flight

Filed under: Laptops The TSA has been known to take issue with products designed in Cupertino before, but for one particular traveler, it was Apple's thinnest laptop ever that caused the latest holdup. Upon tossing his ultra-sleek slab of aluminum underneath the scanner, security managed to find enough peculiarities to remove it from the flow, pull it aside and wrangle up the owner for some questions. Apparently, the TSA employee manning the line was flabbergasted by the "lack of a drive"...

Filed under: Laptops The TSA has been known to take issue with products designed in Cupertino before, but for one particular traveler, it was Apple's thinnest laptop ever that caused the latest holdup. Upon tossing his ultra-sleek slab of aluminum underneath the scanner, security managed to find enough peculiarities to remove it from the flow, pull it aside and wrangle up the owner for some questions. Apparently, the TSA employee manning the line was flabbergasted by the "lack of a drive" and the complete absence of "ports on the back," and while hordes of co-workers swarmed to investigate, the user's flight took off on schedule. Thankfully, said owner was finally allowed to pass through after some more in-the-know colleagues explained in painfully simple terms what an SSD was, but the poor jet-setter most definitely paid the price for trying to slip some of the latest and greatest under the sharp eyes of the TSA (and cutting it close on time, of course).[Image courtesy of ABC] Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

  • ★ BlackBerry vs. iPhone

    1: Wherein Neither ‘RIM’ Nor ‘BlackBerry’ Are Even Mentioned, but Rather the Stage Is Set for Showing Why They Might Be Seriously Screwed Along the lines of can’t-really-be-answered-but-gosh-they’re-fun-to-ponder questions like, say, “Who’d win in a fight, Batman or Spider-Man?” or “Star Destroyer vs. U.S.S. Enterprise?”,1 here’s one regarding the iPhone: What historical Mac is a current iPhone most analogous to, spec-wise? I.e, complete this sentence: “An iPhone is like having a tiny ____ in your pocket?” Now of course the comparison can’t be precise. Different software, different use cases, different purposes. But there’s no denying that an iPhone is a computer. And unless you’re really young, it’s faster — a lot faster — than the computers you owned not so long ago. So, seriously, stop here for a moment and think about it. My first answer, pulled simply from recollection of how fast machines felt to use, was the original iMac. But that machine — announced 10 years ago this week — had a 233 MHz G3 and, by default, a paltry 32 MB of RAM. Apple has never officially released the CPU specs of the iPhone, but Craig Hockenberry poked around with undocumented system APIs which indicated the iPhone’s CPU runs at 400 MHz with a bus speed of 100 MHz, and that there’s 128 MB of RAM. As we all recall from the PowerPC era, MHz is not a precise metric for comparing the performance of CPUs across different architectures; I wouldn’t be surprised in the least to find out that a 400 MHz PowerPC G3 is a faster chip than the 400 MHz ARMwhatever that’s in the iPhone, if only because of the power constraints. But, still, it’s something. So, my answer to the question: the original “Pismo” G3 PowerBook. The numbers match up pretty closely: 400 MHz CPU, 100 MHz bus speed, 64 MB of RAM. (The higher-end Pismo had a 500 MHz CPU and 128 MB of RAM.) Even storage sizes are similar: hard drive options for the Pismo were 6, 12, or 18 GB. Another possible answer: the original blue-and-white Power Mac G3 — again, 400 MHz CPU, 100 MHz bus speed, 64-128 MB of RAM, and 6-12 GB hard drives. Think about that — in just nine years, the specs that then described Apple’s top-of-the-line desktop computer now describe their phone. One thing that makes this comparison hard is that there’s not much software in common. You can’t use most of the real-world tasks commonly used for ballpark benchmarking, like, say, Photoshop image processing or ripping MP3s from AIFFs, because the iPhone doesn’t do them. But there is one processor intensive task we can compare: web page rendering. In the early days of the web, it took a while for even moderately large web pages to render in a browser, even when you were loading them from HTML files right on your hard drive. If you were to plop yourself down in front of one of these vintage 1999-2000 Macs for an afternoon of web browsing, even with a decent Ethernet connection to the Internet you’d find the experience pretty damn slow by current standards. For all the incessant chatter about the demand for and purported certainty of 3G wireless networking in the next generation of iPhone hardware, the truth is that current iPhones are held back, web-surfing-wise, by more than just the speed of EDGE (which admittedly, is indeed pretty slow). Recall this video pitting a 3G Nokia E61i against an iPhone on EDGE — total rendering time was more or less the same, and in a few cases, the iPhone came out ahead. You can see that browsing speed — which is what matters — depends on more than just networking speed simply by comparing how long it takes to render a web page on the iPhone using Wi-Fi: a lot longer than it takes to load the same page in using Safari on a Mac. For example, it takes about two or three seconds for Safari to load the Daring Fireball home page on my new MacBook Pro. Using the same Wi-Fi network, it takes my iPhone about 15 seconds. (Using EDGE, it takes about 60 seconds to completely load, although you can start reading much sooner than that.) Point being that even if 3G wireless networking were as fast as Wi-Fi — which it’s not — browsing on an iPhone would still be pretty slow compared to browsing on a modern desktop or laptop. If you frequently use Wi-Fi on your iPhone, a faster processor in the next-generation hardware would make a bigger difference to the overall experience than faster phone-carrier networking. And so here’s the point I’m driving at. If a 2007 iPhone is loosely equivalent in terms of computing power to a 2000 PowerBook or 1999 Power Mac, that puts the spread at around seven or eight years. Extrapolate forward, and it’s therefore not at all unreasonable to think that a 2014 iPhone will pack the computing power of today’s MacBook Pro. Or, nearer term, that an iPhone introduced two years from now might pack the punch of a 2003 Aluminum PowerBook G4 — quite a difference from the Pismo. Even if your estimate of the iPhone’s equivalent-horsepower Mac is further back in time than mine, there’s no denying that Moore’s Law applies to handhelds, too. Eventually there will be a computer that fits in your pocket that is more powerful than today’s Mac Pros. But the path from here to there is riddled with difficult engineering problems — heat dissipation, battery life, and OS integration chief among them. There is marketing. There most certainly is design. But at the core of this market — by which I mean the market for handheld multitasking web-surfing networked-everywhere “phones” which are really computers — is engineering. Apple is the best handheld computer engineering company in the world today, hands down. They’re also the best handheld computer user experience design company. And they’re not sharing. 2: Why RIM Is Screwed When the iPhone was announced, I saw Apple as staking out ground far afield from the territory RIM occupies with the BlackBerry. Last year, I didn’t see Apple implementing Exchange support in the iPhone OS, and clearly that was, well, completely wrong. The “enterprise” features Apple has announced for the imminent 2.0 release of the iPhone OS — remote wipe, push email, automatic calendar and contact synching — pretty much encompass every single feature that’s been held up as a reason the iPhone wouldn’t sell to enterprise users. It remains to be seen how well these new iPhone features will actually work, but if the answer is “as well as promised”, and if the iPhone’s Mail app is improved in ways targeting people who receive a high number of messages, it’s hard to see a single software advantage in the BlackBerry’s favor. Which leaves hardware, which leaves the keyboard. Two Sundays ago, the New York Times ran a lengthy business-section piece by Brad Stone, titled “BlackBerry’s Quest: Fend Off the iPhone”. Regarding the upcoming BlackBerry 9000, the focus turned to the keyboard: Photographs of the device, leaked to gadget news sites, also indicate that the new BlackBerry will have elegant curves suggestive of the iPhone. It will also have a physical keyboard like previous R.I.M. devices, as opposed to the glass touch screen found on the iPhone. There’s a reason that R.I.M. is averse to the iPhone’s glass pad. “I couldn’t type on it and I still can’t type on it, and a lot of my friends can’t type on it,â€? says Mike Lazaridis, R.I.M.’s co-chief executive and technological visionary. “It’s hard to type on a piece of glass.â€? Mr. Lazaridis thinks that e-mail-dependent BlackBerry owners demand the reliability and tactile feedback of a keyboard. But, despite his critique of the iPhone, he does not dismiss the possibility that R.I.M. may itself one day sell a touch-screen phone, aimed specifically at consumers without the e-mail demands of BlackBerry’s core users. Translation: “We’ll emphasize the physical keyboard as a differentiating factor as long as it seems to work, at which point we’ll try a touch-screen keyboard too.” The only other angle RIM seems to be hanging its hat on is “security”: RIM is also betting on security, which hinges on the fact that its handsets and e-mail systems are relatively impervious to hackers. Mr. Lazaridis predicts that corporations will not give iPhones to their workers because they have already proved vulnerable to hackers eager to pry iPhones off AT&T’s system and make them work on other wireless networks. “It’s not that simple for an I.T. manager to give up security,â€? he said. The idea that iPhone carrier unlocking is a “security problem” is a conflation between what an attacker can do to your phone, against your will and/or unbeknownst to you, versus what a phone’s owner can do to their own phone. It’s not like these “hackers” are attacking happy AT&T-subscribed iPhone owners and switching them over to Sprint against their will. To understand why Apple is making a concerted effort to appeal to BlackBerry users, consider an analogy to the board game Risk. RIM has a large army (read: users), but they’re all massed together in one spot on the map. They care about email, they care about exactly the sort of enterprise features Apple has announced for the iPhone, and they are known to be willing to pay several hundred dollars for a handset. A lucrative target that can be attacked all at once. And the BlackBerry is weakest where the iPhone is strongest: web browsing, music, and video. Compare and contrast with, say, a software platform like Windows Mobile, or a hardware maker like Nokia — their users are spread across a wide variety of phones and platforms. It was far easier to turn the iPhone into something almost every BlackBerry customer might at least consider than it would have been to make a lineup of iPhones that appeal to every Nokia customer. RIM doesn’t really have any lock-in other than user habits. The BlackBerry gimmick is that it works with the email system your company bought from Microsoft. Replace a BlackBerry with an iPhone (2.0) and the messages, contacts, and calendar events that sync over the network will be the same ones on the BlackBerry you just tossed into a desk drawer. In broad terms, BlackBerrys are optimized first for email; the iPhone for the web. What’s more important, an email client or a web browser? For most people, and perhaps even most current BlackBerry users, the answer is clearly the web. Many people in fact read their email entirely through the web. Unless you’re Richard Stallman, you probably don’t read the web through your email client. The iPhone would be a credible, useful device with just two apps: Phone and Safari. But it doesn’t just have those two apps. It has a slew, and they’re all better on the iPhone than the BlackBerry and the difference with regard to anything other than email is only going to get more stark once the iTunes App Store opens its doors. If nothing else, consider games, games, and games. As I wrote when the iPhone’s upcoming enterprise features were announced, the iPhone can do more BlackBerry-ish things than the BlackBerry can do iPhone-ish things. Apple doesn’t wait for someone else to knock one of their hit products off its throne or slowly run it into the ground (cf. the Motorola Razr) — they do it themselves. For six years pundits have been declaring that competitors would “soon” catch up to the iPod, but the iPod has never been a static target — over the same six years Apple has released significant new iPods every year. There are no signs that RIM has the engineering chops on either side of the ball — hardware or software — to compete with where the iPhone is now, let alone where it’s going to be. We know that Apple has an OS that can scale to take advantage of faster (and multi-core) processors, because OS X is doing that already. If a two-years-away 2010 iPhone might be like having a 2003 PowerBook G4 in your pocket, for RIM’s sake a 2010 BlackBerry had better be something more than a BlackBerry with a brighter screen. Correct answers: Batman, Star Destroyer. ↩

  • Microsoft's Mojave Attempts to Wet Vista's Desert

    Daniel Eran Dilger Nearly two years after Windows Vista was finally released, Microsoft has remained unable to shake off its reputation as being slow, incompatible with existing hardware and software, and generally a poor and overpriced product that nobody wants. Microsoft is now trying to reverse Vista's bad reputation by insisting that the software's problems are not technical but rather just the fault of ignorant customers duped in part by Apple's “Get a Mac” campaign. What's Vista's real problems, and will Microsoft's “Mojave Experiment” help solve them? Blame Apple! Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has joined Windows Enthusiast pundits in theorizing that Vista's image problems are primarily the result of Apple's advertisements that regularly poke fun at the problems in Vista. The company has now taken aim at shooting at the messenger with a $300 million ad campaign. In July, Brad Brooks, Microsoft's VP of Windows Vista consumer marketing, addressed the company's business partners at its Worldwide Partner Conference, saying, “We've got a pretty noisy competitor out there. You know it. I know it. It's caused some impact. We're going to start countering it. They tell us it's the iWay or the highway. We think that's a sad message.” Another sad message Brooks had to deliver was that Vista's problems aren't really the fault of Apple. “We broke a lot of things,” Brooks admitted. “We know that, and we know it caused you a lot of pain. It got customers thinking, hey, is Windows Vista a generation we want to get invested in?” Vista: Pay it Forward! Brooks also noted that “Windows Vista is an investment in the long term. When you make the investment into Windows Vista, it's going to pay it forward into the operating system we call Windows 7.” Pay it forward? Is Windows 7 going to be a free upgrade to Windows Vista users, in the same way Apple is expected to offer the next Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard release to existing users of 10.5 Leopard? That's highly unlikely, as Microsoft can't sustain its egregious profits collected through the Windows monopoly by giving away updates for free. Windows Vista raised the price of Windows, putting a new definition on the phrase “pay it forward.” Myths of Snow Leopard 7: Free?! Microsoft Admits Windows Vista Mistakes, Criticizes Apple Ads - InformationWeek Reality Impairment at Microsoft Talking out one's ass appears to be a job requirement for all Microsoft executives, starting at the top. A serious case of reality impairment has resulted in the paradox of the company both admitting that Vista is flawed and “broke a lot of things,” while at the same time maintaining that Vista's reputation is entirely the fault of stupid customers and a comically unflattering portrayal by its competitor. In the “Mojave Experiment,” Microsoft plans to dispel the notion that Windows Vista is problematic and incompatible by publishing a series of videotaped interviews with users who arrived with negative impressions of Vista and left excited about the new operating system. This was achieved by presenting the users with a demonstration of “Mojave,” a new operating system that Microsoft later revealed to be Vista, much to the surprise of the interviewed users who'd heard so many bad things about it. However, the Mojave Experiment is so full of false information and saccharine gloss that it couldn't possibly appeal to anyone smart enough to turn on a PC. Even setting aside the fact that the ad experiment basically seeks to blame users for being dumb, the attempt by Microsoft to paint over Vista's problems is transparent and flawed, for a number of reasons. What's wrong with Mojave. Microsoft can't seem to decide whether it wants to admit that Vista has problems or not, and its waffling back and forth just makes the company look increasingly disingenuous. Is Vista a poorly launched, flawed product that the company is working to fix as quickly as possible, or is it awesome and wildly successful and just the victim of bad press? Microsoft tries to tell both stories at once, which is purely dishonest. In contrast, Apple said from the start last year that its Apple TV product was a “hobby” attempting to break into a difficult market. Critics lambasted it for not immediately taking over the market like the iPod had or iPhone later did. Apple's more recent problems in launching MobileMe were quickly noted by the company along with the intent to address complaints about it rapidly. Microsoft isn't alone in being able to stumble, but its complete lack of candor makes it hard to understand if the company realizes that it even has problems to solve. With Vista, Microsoft has issued a flurry of giddy press releases claiming widespread adoption based on the number of licenses sold and naming it “the fastest selling operating system in Microsoft history,” ignoring the fact that Windows sales are increasing simply because they are tied to PC sales. Microsoft has no competition in the PC operating system market due to its monopoly position, so it could release Windows Wet Toast and still sell it faster than XP and ME and 98 Special Edition and every other version of Windows in the past that was tied to an increasingly younger and smaller hardware market. Vista Sales to Non-Users. Many of Vista's “sales” were free vouchers distributed with PCs sold in the holiday season prior to its launch. Even more than a year and a half later, PC makers continue to put Windows XP on their systems, even those sold with a Vista license, while corporate users almost always remove the default Vista to install an earlier version of Windows. There's also a busy third party industry developing around removing Vista for consumers. In late July APCMag cited Jane Bradburn, a manager for commercial notebook sales at HP, as saying, “From the 30th of June, we have no longer been able to ship a PC with a XP license. However, what we have been able to do with Microsoft is ship PCs with a Vista Business licence but with XP pre-loaded. That is still the majority of business computers we are selling today.” The arrangement is supposed to end by January 2009, but HP is trying to extend the deadline because customers simply don't want Vista installed. EWeek also noted that between April 2007 and May 2008, its survey of business users indicated that Vista climbed from 2% to 5%, but that Windows XP jumped from 74% to 83%, three times the adoption of Vista. That growth came from migration from older versions of Windows. Even in its wildest projections, EWeek says Vista will only reach 28% adoption in businesses by the end of 2010. CNET reported that a Jully 2008 survey by systems management appliance company KASE found that 60% of companies surveyed have no plans to deploy Windows Vista, a ten percent increase in disinterest from late 2007. A full 42% were actively exploring Vista alternatives, and 11% had already made the switch to Mac OS X or Linux. Microsoft is simply lying about the level of Vista excitement, and it's gotten too obvious for the company to continue to do so. XP still killing Vista in sales volume: HP 60 percent skipping Vista, so Ballmer looks to Apple | The Open Road The Truth Is… oh Look a Distraction! At the same time, Microsoft notes on its Vista website “we know a few of you were disappointed by your early encounter. Printers didn't work. Games felt sluggish. You told us—loudly at times—that the latest Windows wasn't always living up to your high expectations for a Microsoft product.” That's some brutal honesty for a company with a knack for spinning wild fantasies about fictitious product enthusiasm for a product never actually put to use in many cases. At the same time however, in trying to refute away Vista's real problems, Microsoft uses a variety of tactics that just return to blind fantasyland. Microsoft is a Marketing Company, not a Tech Company. The company plays its Mojave Experiment hand on a new website, incidentally designed using Adobe Flash rather than the company's own Silverlight. Despite the site's oddly designed, usability-impared interface, it's still possible to pull out lots of details from the experiment that say as much about Microsoft's crafty, misleading marketing as they do about its technical problems, underling the simple fact that Microsoft is first and foremost a marketing company that flogs third rate technology products. Mojave took 140 people and asked them to score Windows Vista. The average response was 4.4. After demonstrating Vista SP2 under the name “Mojave,” respondents ranked Vista at 8.5, a stunning improvement. But what were they ranking? Microsoft notes that “many said they would have rated it higher, but wanted more time to use it themselves.” That sounds good at first blush, but it really indicates that the responses were biased by hyped up enthusiasm rather than facts, and that participants realized it, reserving their final judgement until they could actually see more. The “Mojave Experiment” What does Mojave Prove? Mojave tries to represent that Vista's bad reputation is the fault of ignorant consumers who have heard bad things that aren't true about Vista, and have made up their mind without getting the facts. At the same time however, Microsoft also publicly admits that Vista “broke a lot of things” and that specifically, “Printers didn't work. Games felt sluggish.” Did Mojave clear up mistaken notions for participants, or did it just erect smoke and mirrors in a carefully controlled demonstration that skirted around Vista's real problems, including those Microsoft admits? That's a question that answers itself. Mojave didn't send uses home with Vista in a Mojave package and then ask them how well it worked with their existing peripherals and games, or how fast it was in comparison to their existing PC software. This is Not the Droid You're Running Vista On. Instead, Microsoft sat them down in front of a HP Pavillion DV 2000 with 2GB of RAM. That's what HP called its “entertainment powerhouse” laptop, although HP only shipped it with 1GB RAM. Microsoft maxed out the RAM for the purposes of the test, making the laptop a bit more expensive than its usual street price of around $1050. According to Windows enthusiast Joe Wilcox, PC laptops actually cost $700, “half as much” as Apple's laptops. At least that's the Average Selling Price for consumer retail PC laptops according to NPD's Stephen Baker, compared to Apple's $1500 ASP. Wilcox insisted that his spin on NPD's figures couldn't possibly be biased because he wrote his article on a MacBook Air running Leopard. However, his $2,700 laptop did help drive up Apple's stellar ASP for its laptops well above the entry price for Mac Books, discounting his theory that revolved around the assumption that every Mac buyer pays the average price of all the laptops Apple sells. Wilcox and Microsoft are both disingenuously dancing on both ends of the truth. Many consumers are actually buying cheap laptops at Target that can't run Vista ideally, while Microsoft demonstrates its Vista on a considerably better equipped system in the Mojave Experiment to suggest that Vista doesn't have the performance problems that users have heard about from the majority of their peers who bought cheap PCs and are seeing Vista run particularly sluggishly on them. Should You Pay Twice as Much for a Mac? I Did! You Get What You Pay For. The fact that Apple sells more high end laptops to pro users at retail, and that it does not sell anything in the range of the cheap junk being hawked at big box retailers like Wilcox' Target both result in Mac laptops fetching a higher ASP. That fact also means that Mac buyers will be happier with their purchase and have a more favorable impression of Mac OS X because they're running it on a better system. That's all obvious stuff. However, selling people cheap laptops that don't work well, and then demonstrating a fake “new operating system” that appears to work well when running on a faster machine full of RAM is simply a dishonest bait and switch scam. Wilcox does nearly admit that PC makers are already stretching their credibility as they attempt to sell cheap boxes based on price alone, citing Baker as saying, “We aren't seeing any particularly substantive moves down in price on the Windows side, either in desktops or notebooks.” PCs can't get cheaper because they're already unprofitable and consumers are already disgusted with their performance when running the increased overhead of Vista. Wilcox also sets up a tilted comparison between a Dell PC desktop with integrated graphics and an iMac with dedicated graphics and claims a price advantage for Dell, although noting that, while “Dell offers more for less than the iMac,” “that 'more' also means Windows Vista, which won't satisfy some shoppers.” Why Aren't Shoppers Satisfied with Vista? Like Microsoft, Wilcox and his Windows Enthusiast pundit friends can't seem to decide if Vista has any real problems or if it's all just an unfair taint suggested by Apple's Get a Mac ads. However, while Apple has taken shots at Vista's incompatibility with printers and other hardware and its scarce updates that have been few and far between over the last year and a half of its being on the market, Apple also notes in its Get a Mac ads that Macs can run Vista, and can run it faster than PCs. So Apple isn't inventing and publishing false reports on Vista, it's merely advertising its Mac hardware as superior to PCs. The Vista flaws Apple's ads have referenced are flaws Microsoft itself has admitted to its partners, so the Get a Mac umbrage frequently voiced by Windows Enthusiasts is both hypocritical and ridiculous. However, in the Mojave Experiment, Microsoft downplayed those well-known faults by only carefully demonstrating certain features on a high end machine, and without actually exposing Mojave/Vista users to 'a lot of things Vista broke,' 'printers that didn't work', or 'games that felt sluggish.' It Can't Even Print. In response to complaints that Vista doesn't work well with existing PC hardware, Microsoft's Mojave website says that “the Windows Vista Compatibility Center lists compatibility status for over 9,000 products (5,500 devices and 3,500 software programs).” It even notes 2,000 printers, 200 scanners, and 500 cameras specifically. That sounds good until you realize that Apple ships support for over 3,100 printers in Mac OS X Leopard, a product that is targeted primarily toward education and consumers and which is not expected by users to run on any old hardware that might be in use by PC users. Vista is supposed to run on 95% of the world's PCs, and yet it doesn't even match the printer drivers that ship with Leopard, a number which does not include all of the third party drivers available for the Mac. Oh, but there's more. Not only did Microsoft dance around the truth to feed its Mojave Experiment participants a carefully controlled stream of garbage, but it also inadvertently revealed more serious problems related to Vista, which I'll consider in the following article. Did you like this article? Let me know. Comment here, in the Forum, or email me with your ideas. Like reading RoughlyDrafted? 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  • Microsoft Ads Winning Over More Consumers than Apple’s

    Apple’s fantastically effective “Get a Mac” commercials have entertained us for years now, and they just get better and better. Microsoft has been slow to respond, and when it did start to hit back, it first did so with the amusing-but-confusing Seinfeld commercials. Then the “I’m a PC” campaign started, and today we’re seeing ads claiming 4-year-olds are color-correcting their digital images. Yeeee-eah, OK, a touch unlikely but, what the heck, I’m feeling generous; I’ll let it slide. By far the most effective commercials recently have featured Microsoft’s “Laptop Hunters,” normal folks who desperately need a new laptop,  and so are charged with the task of going out into the big wide world (which would be Best Buy and the Apple Store, it seems) and finding a machine that meets their needs. The hook? If they find one for under a specific sum, Microsoft will buy it for them. My fellow TAB writers have covered some of the issues raised by (and in) these ads. Tom Reestman has looked at the wonderful omissions and deflections from the truth they contain (check them out here and here and here) while Charles Moore recently asked whether Apple’s high laptop prices are sustainable in today’s economic climate. Now, according to a report by BrandIndex and covered in some detail over on AdAge.com, Microsoft’s laptop hunter commercials are starting to pay off. For the first time this year, the perception of value for money that 18- to 34-year-olds have of Apple’s laptops has dropped, while Microsoft has gained ground. Which is to say, younger consumers are starting to believe that Apple’s MacBook products are poor value for money when compared with Windows-based laptops. This graph from BrandIndex illustrates the shift. (The brown line is Apple hardware, the blue line Windows-based hardware.) Ouch. Of particular note is the time period of this perception-shift. As recently as mid-April, Apple’s perception scores were riding high — a lot higher than those for Microsoft, in fact. And then, around the beginning of May — boom! The scores became inverted, and suddenly Microsoft is well ahead. Ted Marzilli, global managing director for BrandIndex, suggests the change is driven by economic conditions. Put simply, younger people have less money to spend and so choose cheaper alternatives to Apple’s unashamedly expensive hardware. “Apple did a great job of putting Microsoft on the defensive,” Marzilli told AdAge.com. “It made them look old, stodgy, complicated to use and unhip. But Microsoft has started to hit back, and younger folks are more cost- or value-focused.” Unhip? Who says that any more? It's not even actually a word. Anyway, what about older customers? Aren’t they looking to save money, too? According to BrandIndex, the scores between Apple and Microsoft in the 35- to 49-year-old demographic are virtually identical. So we can conclude that: Older consumers have more money to spend even in the middle of a recession, and/or Older consumers aren’t the slightest bit impressed by the Laptop Hunter commercials. But can we be sure that it’s Microsoft’s latest ad campaign that has caused such a dramatic shift in the younger market? Marzilli thinks so. “It would be very unusual for Microsoft's score to be increasing this much and Apple's to be decreasing without some sort of event driving that, like a major campaign that's particularly successful,” he toldAdAge.com. Certainly, then, it appears that Microsoft's advertising is playing a central role in this little drama. However, in the background, Apple is definitely playing a supporting role, whether it wants to or not. A Simple Matter of Mathematics You see, if we assume the younger demographic polled by BrandIndex (a good proportion, say, the 18- to 24-year-olds) are mostly college students with very limited incomes, it becomes painfully clear that in this area, at least, Apple is missing a trick. The cheapest MacBook is just too costly for most young people to afford. Even the nominal decrease in price the entry-level MacBook enjoyed late last year — down to an “affordable” (Jobs’ own word) $999 from $1,099 — simply wasn’t a steep enough drop. Five hundred or six hundred dollars will buy a Windows-based machine that is more than adequate for carrying out the basics of personal computing. The usual suspects — email, text-editing, web browsing, and simple media-management — are all covered with the software baked in to most versions of Windows. Sure, it won’t be a sleek anodized-aluminum beauty. It’ll weigh about a ton, offer paltry battery life and, after six months of daily use, be about as nimble and quick as continental drift. But it’s still half the price of an entry-level MacBook, and if the buyer isn’t already tuned in to the advantages (both real or perceived) of owning an Apple computer, the decision is going to be very easily made; $1,000 on a shiny Mac or five hundred bucks on a respectable laptop? The former costs an awful lot of money. The latter leaves plenty of green for added software, peripherals and, of great importance to these young 'uns, extracurricular activities. No one needs an ad campaign from Microsoft to work out the economic returns in making that decision, but it certainly appears to be helping.

  • August 2007 Zoon Awards for Technical Ignorance and Incompetence

    Daniel Eran DilgerIn an effort to recognize the spectacular efforts of individuals and organizations promoting the regression of human achievement in the field of technology, a series of nominations await your vote to determine the recipients of August 2007 Zoon Awards.Meet the Zoons.Segregated by color, the various Zoons highlight the world's absolute worst in small minded ignorance, paid to say propagandism, and blind devotion to products without merit.The Pink Zoon is awarded for a spectacular effort in fear-based propagation of uncertainty and doubt, or efforts to infect headlines with false information with the primary goal of preventing innovation, competition, and the emergence of new ideas, or simply to make a quick profit.
The White Zoon is awarded for the blinding glare of a shiny blank brain, particularly when such ignorance is presented with authoritarian emphasis by an individual or news source operating well outside its abilities. This award may also be assigned to a company or organization in recognition of epic failure.
The Brown Zoon is awarded for squirting extraordinary amounts of intentionally noxious misinformation, whether dredged from an impacted recollection of twenty years ago, sucked from the trusty bucket of canned responses, or simply invented as needed to create an intolerable outburst of stink.These should not be considered as first, second and third placements, as each tie for an equal standing in the Zoon Hall of Shame. It is also possible to award multiple parties for the same award, either as shared participants or, in the case of an unclear majority vote, tied nominations.Meet the Zoon Nominees.As one might imagine, determining the most fitting recipient might be difficult given the wide range of potential candidates standing in line. Here's a brief background on the nominations for August.Troy Wolverton, San Jose Mercury News.A writer for the Street and most recently, the San Jose Mercury News, Wolverton always manages to dig up an unattractive headline for any news related to Apple. A series of articles documented his negative spin and inaccurate reporting, particularly when the subject related to Apple.Wolverton promised me and other readers that he would answer the questions related about his shoddy journalism record, then cowardly ran away. He also wrote emails to RDM readers assuring them that he was only ever honest and unbiased, and that RoughlyDrafted should be read with great suspicion.[10 FAS: 8 - San Jose Mercury News’ False Apple Scandal][Troy Wolverton Documents Faux Apple Shareholder Outrage]Wolverton is nominated for a White and Brown Zoon.Neil Cavuto, Fox News.While actually based on reports from the end of July, I wrote about Cavuto in August, qualifying his nomination for arrogantly complaining about how Apple purportedly over promised iPhone shipments it then failed to deliver. In reality, Apple didn't indicate any sales goals for its first weekend. Cavuto also confused AT&T authorization numbers with Apple's sales figures. Fox News subsequently corrected his comments to suggest that he hadn't made the error, but still failed cover up the core problem that Cavuto's entire rant been a specious bit of ignorant rambling delivered--rather hypocritically--with far too much arrogance than the subject required.Cavuto is nominated for a Pink and White Zoon.[10 FAS: 9 - Troy Wolverton, Neil Cavuto, and the Apple Stock Scandal]Jim Cramer, Scott Moritz and Brett Arends, the Street.After documenting how he would spin false information to manipulate the market as a hedge fund manager, Cramer praised his apprentice Moritz for publishing a string of articles dredging up or simply inventing false information about the iPhone with the intent to knock value from Apple and suggest that Apple's phone was not competitive, not selling as expected, and that Apple's deal with AT&T was an unprecedented deal earning unconscionable profits. Arends is thrown in for good measure after delivering similar work directly from the mouths of Street-savvy Verizon shill, Roger Entner of IAG Research.Cramer, Moritz, and Arends are nominated for a White and Brown Zoon.[More on Scott Moritz and the Jim Cramer Street Misinformation Engine][The Street's Flaccid Campaign Against the iPhone][Unraveling Anti-Apple Panic: the iPhone Launch Success]George Ou, ZDNet, CNET.Nominated in August primarily for his article misrepresenting typography technology and falsely portraying Mac OS X as incompetent in the area of text rendering, Ou deserves extra reason to earn your Zoon vote for failing to admit that he falsified his report, and instead attacking those who pointed out his error.[Tech: Zoon for George Ou]After posting the article detailing why he was wrong and establishing a pattern of his consistently inaccurate and tilted writing, someone who appeared to be Ou emailed me to say:“If you're gonna do a hit piece, at least do it accurately... I'm not going to get uptight about a little man like you chewing on my feet and I'm not even going to bother cursing at you for writing a blatant hit piece on me. It's not worth my time.â€?Assuming that the author was unlikely to actually be Ou, I did a search on the email and found an online comment from the same address mentioning being a former ballet dancer. To determine if the author was Ou or just simply a joker trying to get a response, I wrote back, “Hi George, What was inaccurate in my article? Are you really a ballet dancer?â€?Ou tu?In reply, Ou wrote, “I was a professional Ballet dancer up till 2000 and I still try to perform now and then,â€? but didn’t note anything that was incorrect in the article. When I asked for the correction again, I got two emails, one insisting that, “The 'FreeBSD community' is essentially Sam Leffler. Sam pretty much wrote all that wireless code. Sam is an employee (contractor) of Atheros. Atheros is involved in that FreeBSD code.â€?The second said, “You don't even understand the fact that the same Atheros ‘team’ led by Sam Leffler that wrote Apple's wireless drivers is the same team that wrote the open source MadWiFi drivers for Linux and FreeBSD. The same wireless drivers Apple said there was no problem on had to be patched three times a month later. And here you are slandering me because I defended two researchers against a billion dollar corporation.“When you smear my photograph and slap a "SHILL" on top of it, that is slanderous and insulting. You're accusing me of taking payola which is a crime and only a ‘little man’ would slander someone like that. It's one thing to disagree with me or not like a certain piece I wrote, but smearing someone's photo with accusations of shill is nothing but the act of a coward. Unprofessional? There's nothing unprofessional about calling trash like you little and I'd say that to your face.â€?Pearls Thrown.How could a professional writer fail to understand his subject matter, fail to grasp basic logic, and then be so arrogant about it on top? I wrote, “George, I don't have to prove that people from FreeBSD did not contribute to Apple's driver. I never stated that, and it has no relevance to statements I made. You had to prove that Atheros did not deliver the driver, and that it came directly from FreeBSD without Atheros' involvement. That was the question, and your misunderstanding of the architecture of Mac OS X helped you to confuse the situation.“The truth is that Atheros contracted with an expert to port some of the FreeBSD code for use in its driver for Mac OS X, which only shares significant similarities with FreeBSD in its userland environment. Atheros had to deliver unique work for Apple to offer a working driver for Mac OS X, and paid a contractor to complete that work.“You maintained that Atheros simply wasn't involved at all, and that Mac OS X's driver just came from the FreeBSD repository. That was wrong. Your explanation of why this was the case was also wrong. It is clear you still do not understand the situation entirely. That's why you shouldn't be writing about it as if you are an expert, simply because someone told you something that sounded believable off the record. You don't understand the issues involved, but operate under the assumption that everything you think up as a plausible idea is also the truth. It isn't.“Slander, as noted in my article, is spoken. Libel is written. Just FYI. Also, a shill doesn't necessarily need to be paid, so calling you a shill isn't ‘accusing you of payola.’ Also, payola really only is illegal in broadcasting. There are plenty of people who are paid to say things, and nobody is arresting them. The company you work for largely serves advertisers; that isn't illegal, or all of CNET would be shipped off to jail.“There is nothing cowardly about pointing out that you are a shill and then documenting your attempts to spread misinformation in efforts to make Vista look good and Apple look bad. There is something very cowardly about fuming that you've been outed, and rather than apologizing and correcting your error, and then maintaining that you're simply better that others so your misinformation campaigns don't matter.“I don't have a little man complex, so repeating that doesn't really bother me. It does make it clear that you have some size issues in addition to your general lack of professionalism and technical incompetence.â€?To which Ou elegantly replied, “Go find yourself a bathhouse in the city where you belong. You have no business writing.â€? Using the same address, Ou responded to several other online sites defending himself and ignoring the errors of his article. How does Ou have a job? Ou is nominated for a Pink, White, and Brown Zoon, and his winning will also earn a Zoon for ZDNet and its CNET parent.Windows Genuine Advantage, Microsoft.After choosing a delightfully ironic name for its software DRM system, Microsoft then bungled its validation system for users worldwide. The hundreds of millions of PCs running Windows XP and Windows Vista phone home to Microsoft at regular intervals, but the company set up the system with a single point of failure. An inevitable failure prevented the company from maintaining resilience to downtime--something the company highly touts as an Enterprise feature of Windows Server--but it also highlighted the problem of validating software in general using a system that assumes guilt when there is any question in reaching the validation server. Windows users who tried to verify their genuine software had software features remotely turned off because of the WGA problems.[Tech: WGA the Dog]WGA is nominated for a White Zoon.Oliver Rist, InfoWorld, IDG.Suggested by reader Robert de Bie, Rist yesterday wrote an article titled “Does Mac OS X suck? Apple's desktop platform has impressive technical chops, but it falls short from a business perspective.â€?Never mind the sophisticated and professional headline, the real question is, did Rist back up his headline, or simply cower in a bed of second hand fear, uncertainty and doubt? No need to guess, really; this is InfoWorld, a rag primarily useful for its ads. No competent IT manager wastes much time reading the ramblings of such stuffshirt columnists.Rist brings up the idea that Mac OS X is really just Unix with some frosting, making it easy to coo about, but not really ready for real business. Unfortunately, Rist offers no basis for anything that he says. In fact, his headline and (forgone) conclusion don't even match what he writes in between. Under the subject of networking, Rist says, “OS X has an excellent networking client, both wired and wireless — due in large part to FreeBSD rather than anything coming out of Cupertino.â€? But wait, does FreeBSD write the Mac’s Apple File Protocol? Does it maintain Samba for Windows networking? Wrong on both counts. By spouting the dittohead myth that Mac OS X is just FreeBSD with an Apple logo, Rist has already established that he knows nothing about the subject he's pretending to be an expert in. He then says nothing else about networking, granting that Mac OS X has no real issues.Security Absurdity. On the subject of security, he says “It's a pretty secure system. Yes, ever since OS X has become more popular, attacks and breaches on the platform have become more numerous. And, yes, those numbers are high enough that if I were managing a portfolio of MacBooks I'd be installing anti-virus on them.â€? Rist linked his comment to another IDG article reporting on a Mac OS X worm threatened by the anonymous "InfoSec Sellout," which turned out to be a fraud. That's the extent of the acceleration in Mac OS X “attacks and breeches,â€? a crank call? There are yet no viruses for Mac OS X, and all the malware that exists is proof of concept ideas hatched in a lab. Strike two for Rist in trying to write about security issues. Even so, he concedes, “once the personal firewall is up and the AV installed, I'd fully expect to see far, far fewer security-related problems from my Mac clients than my Windows clients.â€?[10 FAS: 10 - Apple’s Mac and iPhone Security Crisis.]Many Words, Little Point.On the subject of reliability, Rist beats up Artie MacStrawman for insisting that Mac OS X apps never crash. He then provides some recollected figures for estimating how many times he has noticed a Mac app crash compared to Vista crashes. He passes by saying, “Apple's probably less crash-prone overall.â€?On the subject of software compatibility, Rist says Apple “treats third-party developers like the proverbial redheaded stepchild, which results in significantly fewer third-party software options for Apple users than Windows users,â€? then follows up with the genius, “When it comes to mission-critical, vertical-type business software, Windows clients far outnumber Apple clients. If they didn't, Macs would be populating a much larger number of corporate desktops.â€?How does this guy get work writing? By the end of page one, Rist had said nothing at all. On page two, Rist really gets going. He starts off referring to "Apple jihaders," as if he has a fundamentalist shock radio show rather than a column designed to inform IT managers. Rist says people don't want to retrain employees to use Macs, and then suggests that retraining users for the significantly different Vista would not be an issue. He gives the Mac a “grudgingâ€? pass again and moves to hardware. [Paul Thurrott's Merciless Attack on Artie MacStrawman]Mac OS X’s Hardware Features.He says that Gateway has more USB ports and a finger print scanner in the same form factor for less cost, without outlining his comments with any factual basis. He then complains that his MacBook suffered a hard drive failure after four months. “That's a pretty short time frame for serious hardware failure,â€? Rist wrote. It's odd that hardware issues are being outlined in an article about “why Mac OS X sucks,â€? but someone writing to an audience of experienced IT users should be aware that computing hardware--particularly hard drives--is most likely to fail in its first few months. Past that break in period, most hard drives typically have a relatively stable three year life span, after which problems become statistically more likely to occur. It's called the bathtub lifespan curve, because like the contour of a tub, it starts high, then drops low for a long stretch, then begins to rise again. Clearly, Rist doesn't know what he's talking about at all, even when complaining about consumer Mac hardware in the context of Mac OS X as a business operating system.Dude, You’re Being a Shill.After "passing" all of his categories, Rist then fails Mac OS X in “business orientation.â€? There are good and justified reasons for faulting Apple in the IT arena, but Rist doesn't mention a single one. Instead, he prattles on about Apple's consumer ads, and how they portray the typical Mac user with a “SOHO, I'm-cooler-than-you, coffee house image.â€? For all the dittoheads who like to repeat this idea, I'd like to remind you all that Dell's memorable mascot was a smirky pothead who couldn't finish sentences beyond, “Dude, you're gettin’ a Dell! (excited thumbs up).â€? That had no impact on Dell's Enterprise sales, because serious enterprise users don't make their decisions based on watching prime time TV and deciding whether they like the advertisements targeted at families. So please shut up about the Justin Long and John Hodgman Get a Mac ads. Enterprise Worthy Dell Pothead Vs. the Too Good for You Coffee Drinking Mac.Highly Unqualified.Rist is a “senior senior contributing editorâ€? at InfoWorld. With this sort of incompetence and ignorance, it makes one wonder what kind of single celled organisms must pass for junior editors at IDC and its various ComputerWorld, PC World, and InfoWorld properties.While writing “a column devoted to running Microsoft technologies in medium and large enterprise environments,â€? Rist only notes experience in running a small Microsoft-oriented software business and writing for rags like Computer Shopper. That qualifies him as a Microsoft shill, but not as a columnist offering advice about ‘medium and large enterprise’ IT environments.Rist is nominated for Pink, White and Brown Zoons.Microsoft’s Pseudo-Philanthropy in New Orleans.Bob Emery notes that Microsoft is offering free software for hurricane-hit businesses in the devastated New Orleans area. However, in order to qualify, users have to sign up for a three year plan, of which Microsoft only covers the first year. A local paper noted “For the typical small business of 50 employees and 25 personal computers licensing Microsoft Windows Vista and the Office 2007 suite of programs, the free year can result in savings of as much as $12,050.â€?Of course, what that really means is that recovering small businesses will actually have to shell out $24,100 just for software licenses, in addition to buying computers capable of running Vista. One might think that a company earning $50 billion in revenues might be able to offer more than an advertisement to struggling businesses, particularly since software costs Microsoft nothing to deliver.[Microsoft gives free software to hurricane-hit businesses - New Orleans CityBusiness]Votes toward Microsoft's headline friendly, fake philanthropy will help the company earn its White Zoon for its WGA fiasco.Vote in the Forum and add your comments.Official awardees: Pink : George Ou, ZDNet, CNETWhite : Windows Genuine Advantage, MicrosoftBrown : George Ou, ZDNet, CNETWhat do you think? I really like to hear from readers. Comment in the Forum or email me with your ideas. Like reading RoughlyDrafted? Share articles with your friends, link from your blog, and subscribe to my podcast! Submit to Reddit or Slashdot, or consider making a small donation supporting this site. Thanks!

  • Waterfield Designs: Cases for Apple Purists

    Like some of you, I’m quite the “Apple purist.” I’m not a fan of fancy cases that junk up my Macs. I don’t like skins for my iPods and those plastic snap cases for my laptop. We all know that Apple designs beautiful products, so we might as well show them off! Balancing protection and beauty, the stylish and functional cases from Waterfield Designs are some of the highest-quality cases I have ever used. Originally starting with one case design in the late 90s, Waterfield now boasts a collection of more than 50 uniquely designed cases for portables, iPhones, iPods and even some unique items, such as the iPod Hi-Fi. Though Waterfield Designs does not sell its products in retail stores, it has still managed to garner quite a following from Apple users around the world. The personal attention and customer service from the company is second to none. In the past five years, I have owned around eight Waterfield bags (for various equipment). Out of all of them, I only had an issue with one particular sleevecase. Being that it was a few years old, the velcro was no longer as “clingy” as it once was. One simple email to the company resulted in a wonderful email that said, “Hey, no worries! Just send it on in with a note that says ‘Please fix my case in a hurry! I’m going to miss it!’” I mailed my case in, Waterfield replaced what needed to be replaced and priority mailed it back to me. Now how's that for customer service? Not only that, but every time I buy a product from them, inside is a handwritten “Thank you” note from Gary, the founder. Smart Case for iPod touch & iPod classic The big secret to Waterfield Designs is that its success is completely customer-driven. With not selling products in retail stores, I am constantly amazed when I see more and more people with these unique cases and every owner is literally beaming about their purchase. Much like Apple, Waterfield sweats the small things. For example, the inside of most of Waterfield's bags are gold, simply because that makes it easier to see the contents! Latches to access the cases, including the signature aluminum aircraft buckle, are designed for one-hand access. Many of you have probably already realized that buying a case for a laptop can be a pricey endeavor. With the customization options available on most cases from Waterfield, you’re not buying things you’re not going to use (like excess shoulder straps). Beyond accessories, even certain elements of some cases are customizable. For example, I keep my MacBook Pro in a standard sleevecase when I travel most places. Unlike traditional sleevecases like you would find with Incase, Waterfield gives customers the option to have their case open vertically instead of horizontally. Simple as it may seem, this means I can charge my MacBook Pro while it stays inside. Travel Cases for iPod Speakers Waterfield Designs also shines in its product selection, with cases for more unique items as well, such as the Apple Keyboard, Mac mini, SLR cameras, the Amazon Kindle and more. The best part is, all of these cases are custom designed to fit these products, so it’s not like you’re buying a stylish bag and just hoping your PSP may fit inside it. Before you march off to the Apple Store for another case, give Waterfield Designs a look. It is definitely worth the time. If any of you are current Waterfield customers, please leave comments and let me know which bag or bags you’ve purchased and your thoughts on them. The advertising Waterfield Designs gets comes directly from its customers so don’t just take my word for it; let’s hear what everyone else has to say.

  • 10 Father’s Day Apps for Your #1 Dad

    With Father's Day just around the corner (Sunday, to be exact), we here at TheAppleBlog thought what better gift to get that special father in your life than a thoughtful yet handy iPhone or iPod touch application. Feeling the cash crunch around this particular time? Not to worry, most of the applications mentioned here are free or just a couple bucks. A nice print out of your gift tucked or wrapped nicely in a festive Father’s Day envelope will more than likely communicate your genuine appreciation for your dad. So since all dads are obviously not the same, breeze through our list and find our top picks for your kind of dad. The Stay at Home Dad iHandy Level (Free) For the Stay at Home Handy Dad — utility belts and their attachments are so passĂŠ! Consider surprising your Stay at Home Dad this Father’s Day with gadgets that reside in his iPhone. iHandy Level is a free application brought to you by iHandySoft Inc. This stunning application exploits the iPhone’s Accelerometer and Proximity sensor to bring your Stay at Home Handy Dad a truly unique handy-man experience. From balancing and centering picture frames on the wall, to leveling a floor tile — this is definitely one unique application that no handy-dad should be without! If you’re feeling extra generous this Father’s Day, you may consider the iHandy Carpenter which includes five handy-man tools in one for the ridiculous price of $1.99! iHandy Carpenter Notable Features iHandy Level Plumb Bob – the easy method of verifying the verticality of walls Surface Level – the best tool to level any flat surface Steel protractor – okay so it’s not made of steel, but it sure is pretty as such and measures angles beautifully Steel Ruler – again, not real steel – but smarter and more compact than any steel ruler you may have come across and it actually measures a few times longer than the iPhone too Allrecipes.com Dinner Spinner (Free) If your Stay at Home Dad isn’t particularly the handy-man type, but perhaps more of the kitchen connoisseur, the Allrecipes.com Dinner Spinner app may be something more of his taste. He can swipe away at the Spinner sorting by Dish Type, Ingredients, and Prep/Cook time to view recipe matches of his choice — or, if he’s feeling “saucy,” he could simply tap the ‘Spin Categories‘ function for a totally impromptu pick. One thing is for sure, the recipe of choice will definitely be one to delight since all recipes are based on ratings and reviews of millions of home cooks. To top it off, each recipe comes complete with it’s own Nutritional Information chart to keep a Stay at Home Dad’s family happy and healthy. Notable Features Choose by Dish Type from Appetizers through to Dessert (cocktails included) Choose by Ingredient Choose by desired Prep/Cook time A light shake will present random recipe ideas The Sports Fan Dad ESPN ScoreCenter (Free) Forget about losing your Sports Fan Dad’s attention to the TV, that’s a worry of the past. A glance is all it will take to get the latest scores, results and stats of his favorite sports team — all from a one-tap access interface. With the recent release of iPhone and iPod touch 3.0 Software update, the new ESPN ScoreCenter will also feature push notifications. Results are available for: Football/Soccer Baseball (MLB) American Football (NFL) Basketball (NBA) Ice Hockey (NHL) NCAA College Football, Basketball NASCAE, Formula 1, Indycar Golf Tennis Cricket & Rugby are both coming soon Sports Radio (99 cents) Is your Sports Fan Dad a Multinational Sports Fan Dad? Place the world of sports radio into the palm of his hand with a single app for the iPhone and iPod touch. Not only can your dad tune in to over 6,400 sports radio stations around the world; but with the newly added Facebook and Twitter integration, he can keep his friends in the know as well. Notable Features Includes users favorite MP3 iTunes stations Pick from favorites or recently played stations Includes Public Radio streams and over 2,100 MP3 stations from Europe, Australia, and Canada Dynamic directory for adding new directories and stations without application updates,
email links to a station stream to friends using iPhone or iPod touch Mail application,
Radio for iPhone supports MP3 and AAC stream formats and then some The Athletic Dad Yoga STRETCH (99 cents) Now don’t let the womanly image fool you; these days Yoga is a very acceptable manly athletic activity (and I’m not saying so just because I do it — cough). Having the mind in tune with the body through Yoga has proven many benefits, especially for me. These include lowering blood pressure, weight normalization, and an increase to energy and endurance levels. This progressive app displays traditional Yoga poses at individual intervals and comes complete with a personal Yoga Instructor that walks its students through a successful session. Since the application is designed exclusively for the iPhone and iPod touch, your Athletic Dad can strike his pose in his office or from the comfort of his own hiding place. Notable Features Consists of traditional yoga poses sequencing with a Vinyasa flow Designed to improve strength, balance, posture and flexibility A personal Yoga instructor walking each through a full Session including audio commentary, images and music iFitness ($1.99) If your Athletic Dad doesn’t happen to be the posing, flexing type, iFitness may just be what he needs for an all around healthy, accurate and comprehensive workout. Forget about breaking the bank to get your dad a Personal Trainer for Father’s Day — a single solution has been developed just for the tech (and financially) savvy individual and it’s available on none other than the iPhone and iPod touch. Notable Features Over 110 beautifully illustrated exercises with accompanying text Favorites option to create your own custom routine Preset routines that our experts have made for reaching different goals Exercises organized by the muscles they target The Business Dad TravelTracker with TripIt ($7.99) With just one tap you can download all of your trip information into TravelTracker. Not only will it download each of the your critical trip details, such as flights, hotel reservations, and car rentals, but it also goes the extra mile to fetch the pertinent details of your trip, such as your meetings, activities, notes and yes — even your restaurant reservations. Yum! Does your airport lack sufficient mobile coverage and/or is not yet equipped with free Wi-Fi? Never fear! TravelTracker with TripIt works sufficiently off-line just as beautifully as it does online. Oh, and if you're still trying to figure out what exactly TripIt is, check out this amazing free add-on: tripit.com. TravelTracker is your all-in-one virtual travel assistant and companion. It stores all vital information for your trip and displays it in a convenient optimized itinerary screen that allows you to record all of the key aspects you need before, during and after your trip. This is every Business Dad's winner. Notable Features One touch flight status Customizable packing lists Records all details of your travel expenses Record-keeping of all of your frequent traveler award programs Airplane database with link to seating charts Email your itinerary and expenses to contacts Download current weather conditions & forecasts for your chosen airport Download current exchange rates to determine your trip total in your own currency Currency (Free) These days, with business deals flowing like water across oceans, the Internet has sky-rocketed business transactions into oblivion and the only way for your Business Dad to keep up with the world’s currencies is through a single intuitive application such as Currency. Currency provides the latest conversions in every exchange language (18 languages to be exact) and in every currency (which total 90 currencies for over 100 countries). Notable Features 18 exchange languages Up-to-date exchange rate information for over 90 currencies and 100 countries Common currencies: Dollar, Pound, Yen, Peso, Dinar, Yuan, Baht, Dirham, Real, Kuna, Riyal, Lira plus many others The Single Dad Urban Spoon (Free) No Single Dad will ever be without ideas of where to take the kids (or a hot date) for the best eats in town! With similar functionality as Allrecipes.com Dinner Spinner, the shake of the iPhone or iPod touch will jolt Urban Spoon into emulating the function of a classic slot machine to present a random restaurant pick in the vicinity. Another shake will simply pull up another selection — and just keep on shaking until satisfied. Arm getting tired yet? Just set a lock on any of the three criteria items (Neighborhood, Cuisine, Price) to narrow the selection. Notable Features Use GPS to find a restaurant nearest you Filter by Neighborhood, Cuisine and Price Search and browse local restaurant and check out their reviews See a list of all nearby restaurants Compare restaurant picks with your friends NYTimes App (Free) For the Single Dads (or really any dad) who are always on the go, they’ll never miss a beat (or an important news update) from the newly polished NYTimes App. No longer is this news application painfully sluggish as its version 1.0 predecessor. In fact, NYTimes App zips across the wire to download up-to-the-minute news in a flash and even works just as feverishly off-line or in airplane mode (just as long as the app has downloaded the articles previously, which is still quite instant). Notable Features Gorgeous and sophisticated interface Access to the latest articles and photos of the day Customizable toolbar with favorite sections of NYTimes.com Read anywhere – After a quick sync, articles and photos are available offline

  • MacBook Air hinge defect not covered by Apple's warranty?

    Our rocky history with the MacBook Air Rev. A has been well documented, and while Apple would very much like us to forget all about it and plop down another $1,800 for the much-improved Rev. B, not everybody has that sort of birthday money to throw around. Reports of cracked hinges on the laptop are nothing new, but we always assumed Apple would eventually 'fess up to the problem and comp those repairs. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be the case, and we just got another report of a hapless MacBook Air owner who has a broken hinge that Apple says will cost $800 to repair, despite the fact the laptop is under warranty. Our own MacBook Air Rev. A had the exact same problem -- the hinge becomes loose over time, then suddenly catches and cracks from normal use, it's not from undue stress -- and Apple did the repair for free, but only after we escalated the issue to a manager, who let us know how very nice of them that was. From reading various reports, that seems the exception to Apple's repair policy, which lists this sort of damage as "accidental," and we're wondering how widespread this issue may be. If you or a loved one has been affected, hit up the poll below and pour out your heart in comments. If you're unscathed or MBA-free, feel free to show very little compassion to your fellow man. Wiggle hinge and broken hinge video is after the break. [Thanks, Alex, and sorry for your loss! Photo courtesy of LanDung2008] View Poll Read - Apple Discussions forum thread Read - MacRumors forum thread Read - Crashzone's link roundupContinue reading MacBook Air hinge defect not covered by Apple's warranty?Filed under: LaptopsMacBook Air hinge defect not covered by Apple's warranty? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 26 Feb 2009 15:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink | Email this | Comments

  • Comparing Apples & Volvos: User Maintenance Forgotten

    Apple computers have frequently been compared to Volvo automobiles, more due to the perceived political and ideological leanings of a prominent cohort of their respective users (ie: urban liberals) rather than commonality of design and engineering philosophy. Indeed, while Apple has tended to be a design trendsetter, hanging out on the bleeding edge of the avant garde, Volvo's design has typically been conservative, even stolid and deliberately boxy. Don't get me wrong. I've been an admirer of Volvo cars since I first got up close to a 122s at a fall exhibition in New Brunswick back in 1963. Over the years I came to admire the ruggedness and performance of the old Volvo 122s and 544s especially, including ones that were raced on weekends in sports car club events. There was of course the Volvo P1800 sports coupe, and the derivative ES 1800 sportswagon had some Apple-esque pizzazz, but they were largely designed by Italy's Carrozzeria Pietro Frua and initially built for Volvo by England's Jensen Motors. Contemporarily, I think the ES 1800-inspired Volvo C30 is cool, and the forthcoming Volvo XC60 T6 crossover is going to be a choice piece of iron, with a spectacular interior done in white with blue instruments, Light Nordic Oak, and brushed aluminum accents that looks like Apple's Jonathan Ive could have conceived it. However, there's another Volvo-Apple similarity I don't find at all congenial — namely a predilection of both firms to discourage user maintenance and tinkering, taking a superciliously paternalistic stance that any messing about inside their products is better left to “trained experts.” Examples from Apple are the difficult-to-open-and-service iPods, iPhones, and Mac minis, and the not intended to be user-replaceable batteries in the MacBook Air and new 17″ MacBook Pro (although I'm confident there will be ways). Volvo revealed a similar bent several years back with a not-for-production design exercise called the 'YCC' or 'Your Concept Car,' designed by a team made up of 80 percent women to work on a car expressly for women. The YCC team reportedly surveyed some 400 female colleagues about what was perceived to be missing from cars and found three-quarters of the answers were the same. So what did these women want? Well, high on the wish list was no easy access to the engine compartment, with that area of the vehicle enclosed in a single large section, meant to be opened only by Volvo mechanics, with the internals to be worked on with dedicated tools. When the YCC required servicing, it would automatically send a wireless message to a local service station, which would contact the owner to schedule an appointment. This may sound attractive to some folks' way of thinking, but is of course anathema to a lifelong car-tinkerer and do-it-yourselfer like me, and I hasten to emphasize that it's not just a guy thing, as my hotrodder daughter, who drives a Ford Crown Vic Police Interceptor and is rebuilding her 1968 440 CID V8 powered Imperial convertible hands-on, would tell you in no uncertain terms. She can swing a wrench and operate a MIG welder with the best of them. It may be deceptively comforting to at least theoretically not have to worry about tedious technical details of automotive maintenance, but what happens when your YCC Volvo conks-out on a highway in the middle of the night and there are no Volvo mechanics with special tools around to get you going again? On the other hand, not all the Volvo YCC ideas were lame. I like anything modular, and seat cushions attached with magnets that can be removed to be cleaned or replaced sound great, although not necessarily for the cited purpose of swapping colors and textures to match fashion outfits, occasions, or even the weather. Analogically speaking, Apple's keep-it-simple, trust us with the details, send-it-in-for-service product philosophy has much in common with the “Lady Volvo” concept, although Apple does tend to blow both ways a bit. For example, the easy-to-get-at access to RAM and the hard drive in all MacBooks and the latest MacBook Pros are excellent examples of the way it should be, but batteries that require the machine to go in the shop for replacements swing hard in the other direction, very much analogous to the YCC's semi-sealed engine hood. Even the respectively touted rationales — lengthy oil change and other maintenance intervals for the car and 3x longer service life for the new 17″ MacBook Pro battery — are cut from the same conceptual cloth, and both have the same conceptual flaw: things rarely go as well in real world experience as they do in theory. My preference in cars or computers is to make everything as easily accessible, take-apartable, and repairable as possible, not just for “trained technicians” but for anyone modestly handy with standard tools. Unhappily, that doesn't seem to be the direction either Apple or Volvo want to go. Pity.        Green your IT. Save Money. Save the Planet ť Register at $295 / $495 regular ť Hear Microsoft, IBM, Dell and Cisco execs at GigaOM's Green:Net.

  • Ten Big New Features in Mac OS X Snow Leopard

    Daniel Eran Dilger Apple is marketing the idea of there being “no new featuresâ€? for Snow Leopard and instead promising an overall improvement in how Mac OS X works under the hood, thanks to a diligent code optimization and refactoring cycle discussed in the previous article. At the same time, there are plenty of significant new features coming in Snow Leopard to look forward to. Here are ten big new features (plus a few minor ones) that you probably haven't heard much about from anywhere else, including my previous articles on the subject that already described QuickTime X, Grand Central, and OpenCL. WWDC 2008: New in Mac OS X Snow Leopard Snow Leopard Server Takes on Exchange, SharePoint Pulling Invisible New Features into Snow Leopard. Apple's increasing collaborations with the open source community have pulled back the veil of secrecy on several new but mostly invisible enhancements that will be showing up in Snow Leopard. One relates to LLVM, the Low Level Virtual Machine compiler architecture project originally founded at the University of Illinois. Apple began contributing to LLVM development in 2005, and started using it Leopard to expand support for OpenGL hardware features. Lower-end Macs that lack the silicon to interpret that specialize graphics code can now do it in software. LLVM is also working its way into Apple's Xcode IDE, initially as a highly efficient optimizer and code generator that works as a bolt-on upgrade to components of GCC, but eventually as a complete compiler replacement. That project, known as Clang, was opened up last year. LLVM compiler technology not only makes developers more productive, but also results in code that runs significantly faster on the same hardware. Apple's other open secret: the LLVM Complier The LLVM Compiler Infrastructure Project Another openly hidden secret in Mac OS X is CUPS, the Common Unix Printing System. Beginning with Jaguar in 2002, Apple adopted and licensed CUPS from its developer as Mac OS X's printing engine. It then purchased the project outright. CUPS is also the de facto printing system for Linux distros and is available for BSD and other commercial Unix systems. That means Apple owns the project that develops the printing architecture for Linux. That's not an issue because Apple has established a reputation in open source as a strong contributor and open sharer. According to a review of bug fixes and improvements in CUPS software, 24% of the enhancements came from Apple while 76% came from free and open source software contributors working with Linux, OpenSolaris, and other projects. Of course, 100% of both sides benefited from that sharing. CUPS collaboration has resulted in high quality code and the advancement of new features. CUPS 1.4, the version sources say Snow Leopard will use, adds performance enhancements and a variety of security improvements that use sandboxing to prevent malware attacks on the printing system from being able to read sensitive documents that may be in use by printers. Common UNIX Printing System A third significant new feature originating from an open source project in Snow Leopard is ZFS support, portions of which come from the OpenSolaris project (along with Sun's DTrace technology, which Apple uses in its Instruments performance profiling tool). Leopard debuted read-only ZFS features, but Snow Leopard and Snow Leopard Server will provide both read and write support for Sun's new 128-bit file system. ZFS was designed to provide “simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability.â€? ZFS hype during the development of Leopard helped the new file system reach buzzword status as news of the three letter acronym swept through blogs and the tech media. It is frequently described as being the imminent replacement for the Mac's native HFS+. However, the benefits of ZFS including as storage pooling, data redundancy, automatic error correction, dynamic volume expansion, and snapshots all apply primarily to servers and higher-end workstation users who deal with multiple disk drives. ZFS isn't going to replace HFS+ outright in Snow Leopard, and has limited relevance today to desktop and laptop users, particularly those who never move beyond the single disk drive installed in their system. More Predictions for WWDC 2007: Solaris, Google, Surround Apple - Mac OS X Leopard - Developer Tools - Instruments Symbiotic: What Apple Does for Open Source Apple's Open Source Assault Pushing Visible New Features in Snow Leopard. Apple's extensive work in developing push support for Exchange Server on the iPhone will also be included in Snow Leopard's Mail, Address Book, and iCal. Push support in those client side apps are also being used to power MobileMe's push messaging subscription service and Snow Leopard Server's push messaging services. Apple will be offering both in parallel as alternatives to Exchange, thanks to smart planning on the part of Apple's engineers to develop an interoperable push architecture in Mac OS X and on the iPhone. There is also a fourth application of push that has developed alongside push messaging: Apple's new Push Notification Service. PNS allows iPhone and iPod touch users to set up server side notification alerts that don't require mobile applications to stay running in the background just to update users of the external events they track. Along with Bonjour discovery, PNS will keep iPhones wirelessly connected in all sorts of sophisticated ways that third party developers can imagine in their applications. Whether Apple will integrate a listener for the same PNS system into the desktop side of Mac OS X remains to be seen, but it would allow a single, unified interface for alerting client users of new events. I proposed a system wide, Growl-style notification system in the Leopard Wish List published back in 2005. Snow Leopard Server Takes on Exchange, SharePoint Apple’s Mobile Me Takes On Exchange, Mobile Mesh With the strong push into push messaging, Apple will make mobile devices even more tightly integrated with its desktop products. Leopard delivered Back To My Mac as a novel way to use Wide Area Bonjour's dynamic service registration as a mechanism for sharing resources served from home to any location without configuring static naming services for address lookups. Because any software can register itself with .Mac/MobileMe, this opens the door to third party developers with the vision to exploit the potential of these enabling technologies. A Global Upgrade for Bonjour: AirPort, iPhone, Leopard, .Mac Ten Big Predictions for Apple in 2008 Among the technologies profiled earlier in Myth 3 that have been trickling from the iPhone into Mac OS X, there's at least one idea I proposed for the iPhone that will be in Snow Leopard's Safari: self contained web apps. The new feature will allow users to run web applications as a local app in its own window, essentially making the web platform into a native-looking app that can run outside of Safari. I proposed a similar feature as a possibility for the iPhone prior to the announcement of the Cocoa Touch SDK: web apps packaged up into a set of files that could be run on the device as a Dashboard widget-like standalone app, even when off the network. Why Apple hasn't pursued such an obvious strategy is a little hard to figure out, but it seems they've got the ball rolling on the desktop. That ball will be rolling even faster thanks to SquirrelFish, a new JavaScript interpreter that will make Safari and any other WebKit-based browsers, standalone self contained apps, and Dashboard widgets all a lot faster. Apple's MobileMe, Yahoo's Flickr, and Google various web apps will all gain new speed thanks to faster JavaScript execution. SquirrelFish will also raise the bar in performance and efficiency in the Rich Internet Applications sector in general, giving Flash, Silverlight, and Java a faster, simpler, and more openly interoperable runtime to compete against. RoughlyDrafted: Leopard Wish List: 2005 How Open will the iPhone Get? Surfin’ Safari Âť Announcing SquirrelFish Microsoft's Application Features in Mac OS X, System Wide. Microsoft's business model of tacking on features hasn't been a total wash. The company's desperate efforts to invent novel marketing features for every new release of Windows and Office have pioneered a number of ideas that have later found their way into Mac OS X. One example is the idea of Fast User Switching, which Apple added to Panther. Windows XP pioneered the trick, but built it upon the kluge that is Terminal Services. Microsoft also helped originate the basis of Ajax web apps by inventing XMLHttpRequest in order to make its Outlook Web Access 2000 web app work decently within Internet Explorer. Today, standards-based web apps are eating a hole into Microsoft's monopoly on the proprietary desktop platform, and tools such as SproutCore and resulting products such as MobileMe are poised to tear down interoperability barriers and level the playing field. Microsoft may now regret having opened Pandora's Box in terms of standards-based web applications, but its efforts to seal the web back up with the proprietary Silverlight plugin, which turns web apps into .NET programs, will now be next to impossible. Another example of a Microsoft innovation are the fancy text features in Word, such as red underlining to highlight spelling mistakes and the green squiggle for grammar errors. Word also features a variety of word auto correction, smart dash insertion, and text replacement features (such as typing TM to get the ™ character). The former have already become system-wide features in Mac OS X, while sources indicate that the latter text processing features will find their way into Snow Leopard, and therefore every application that runs on it. RoughlyDrafted: Remote Display part 3: Terminal Server Cocoa for Windows + Flash Killer = SproutCore Super Size Me. On top of injecting Word features into its OS for the use of every application, Apple will also expand the use of its own Data Detectors, a technology it invented in the mid 90s for identifying useful bits of text and making it actionable. Leopard introduced Data Detectors in Mail as a way to extract contacts and events for use in Address Book and iCal, but Snow Leopard will expose Data Detectors everywhere it draws text. Sources also indicate Snow Leopard will expand upon Font Book to provide full Auto Activation of any fonts requested by any application, using Spotlight to track them down. Snow Leopard is also suggested to have a new set of frameworks specifically for working with multitouch trackpad gestures, patterned after those introduced with the MacBook Air. Speaking of the ultra-thin Air, sometimes less is more. However, the high cost and relatively low capacity of Solid State Drives like the $1000, 64 GB SSD option offered for the Air means that one Microsoft feature Snow Leopard could do without is bloat. As one reader noted, “Currently, Leopard requires 9 GB of available disk space for installation and iLife requires an additional 3 GB. This means that a product such as the [SSD] MacBook Air comes with the hard drive 20% full.â€? How the MacBook Air stacks up against other ultra-light notebooks Leopard Predictions for WWDC 2006 WWDC 2007: An Inside Perspective From the Halfway Point Think Small. Snow Leopard aims below the bloat to accommodate the coming wave of SSD-based systems. In the latest build, sources say Apple's own apps are losing weigh dramatically across the board. The apps in the Utilities folder all drop from 468 MB to 111.6 MB, for example. Other apps are similarly svelte, as the graph below indicates. Is this the product of just code optimization and shared resources? One factor likely relates to work on Resolution Independence, which substitutes bitmapped raster graphics (which define every pixel) with smaller vector graphics files (which draw GUI elements and controls by recipe). Vector graphics can be scaled to any size while retaining a high quality appearance, while bitmapped graphics can quickly look blocky when scaled up. Adding larger bitmapped versions can solve that problem, but at the cost of consuming more disk space. Apple earlier told developers it would be providing a library of shared, high quality vector graphics they could use instead of each packaging their own bitmapped art into every app. The dramatic size reductions in these apps must also involve more efficient Localization. For example, Mac OS X Leopard's Mail currently weighs in at over 285 MB, but the majority of its bulk comes from 18 language localizations inside the application bundle that consume 276 MB. The actual Universal Binary code is only a few megabytes and even its associated graphics and other resources only amount to 2.8 MB. Why does Apple default to dumping support for 18 or more languages in every app without providing any simple, centralized way to get rid of the unnecessary ones? Perhaps that question is answered in Snow Leopard, where Mail is reportedly just 91 MB. That's too big to simply to be an English-only, stripped down version for developers, but still far smaller than than Leopard's. Across the board, it appears Snow Leopard apps are about a third as large as their Leopard equivalents. And so while Snow Leopard paradoxically gains more useful features through code improvements and under-the-hood retooling rather than from a Microsoft-style new feature focus that aims to deliver “wowâ€? with flashy marketing gimmicks, the system is also getting smaller and tighter. There must also be some other subtraction, right? Will Snow Leopard scrape away the old Carbon API? That's the next myth. WWDC 2008: New in Mac OS X Snow Leopard WWDC 2008: Is Mac OS X 10.6 the Death of Carbon? I really like to hear from readers. Comment in the Forum or email me with your ideas. Like reading RoughlyDrafted? Share articles with your friends, link from your blog, and subscribe to my podcast! Submit to Reddit or Slashdot, or consider making a small donation supporting this site. Thanks! Technorati Tags: Apple, Development, Mac, Software

  • ★ Observations, Complaints, Quibbles, and Suggestions Regarding the Safari 4 Public Beta Released One Week Ago, Roughly in Order of Importance

    Performance The Safari 4 public beta is faster than Safari 3 and every other browser available for the Mac. (CNet’s Crave backs up Apple’s claim that Safari 4 is the fastest browser available for Windows as well.) One thing to keep in mind — and I’ll return to this distinction again — is that Safari, the browser application, and WebKit, the open source HTML/CSS/JavaScript rendering engine, are separate things. There are several web browsers that use WebKit, but not all WebKit-based browsers exhibit identical performance. Safari itself seems to be responsible for eking out some measure of the new performance gains — but, for the obvious reason that the rendering engine is responsible for the majority of the CPU-intensive work, WebKit is the source for most of the improvements. From its inception over 6 years ago, the WebKit team has adhered to an interesting policy regarding performance: The way to make a program faster is to never let it get slower. We have a zero-tolerance policy for performance regressions. If a patch lands that regresses performance according to our benchmarks, then the person responsible must either back the patch out of the tree or drop everything immediately and fix the regression. Common excuses people give when they regress performance are, “But the new way is cleaner!” or “The new way is more correct.” We don’t care. No performance regressions are allowed, regardless of the reason. There is no justification for regressing performance. None. This may sound like common sense, but anyone who’s ever worked on large software products will tell you that many teams, if not most, do not adhere to such a policy. The most common excuse is one that the WebKit policy doesn’t list: “We’ll fix the performance issues later.” The truth is that sometimes, later never comes. Safari started life in 2003 as a fast browser, at least by the then-low standards of Mac OS X web browsing, and it has gotten nothing but faster since. I fully expect other high-quality browsers like Firefox and Chrome to leapfrog ahead as they reach future milestones. What really matters isn’t whether Safari is the fastest web browser in the world, but simply that its performance, in actual use, is state-of-the-art. Prior to Safari, this just wasn’t true for any Mac web browser. The difference Safari and WebKit have wrought to web browsing (and HTML web view rendering system-wide) simply cannot be overstated. And so in a nut, the latest version of WebKit deserves nothing but accolades; but Safari 4? Well, we have some issues. Progress Even more so than the new style of tabs, Safari’s new progress indicator is the change I’m having the most trouble adjusting to. Every previous release of Safari, starting with the initial 1.0 public beta, displayed page load progress with a horizontal meter in the location field: Now, in the Safari 4 public beta, page load progress is indicated only by an subtle spinner at the far left of the location field: Most of what I wrote in my review of the original Safari 1.0 public beta in 2003 stands up remarkably well. But I was very wrong about the progress meter. I wrote: Progress Bar Behind Location Field Hideous. It looks like partially-selected text. Please scrap it. But I quickly grew accustomed to it, and soon grew to miss it when using other browsers. It was, I soon decided, a damn clever way to show progress in a way that was prominent while the page was actually loading, and without taking up any additional space on the screen after loading was complete. For sites that load quickly — and some sites do load nearly instantly in Safari 4, with a good network connection — it doesn’t make much difference. But not all web sites load quickly, and not all network connections are good. It’s not just that the new spinner is subtle, but that it is indeterminate — a simple spinner only indicates “not done yet”, with no indication as to how far along it is at the moment. This has nothing to do with WebKit’s rendering performance, just simple bandwidth and latency. A typical multi-megabyte PDF file might take a minute or more to load from a busy server or on a slow network, but the only feedback you get in the new Safari 4 is a small indeterminate spinner. Almost done? Not even close? You have no idea until the download is complete. It’s hard to see this as anything but a loss. So: Why? Safari’s designers aren’t talking, so we’re left to speculate. Estimating the progress of a page load is not an exact science — a determinate progress bar is at best an estimate. But Safari’s progress indicator seemed very accurate to me. At least it felt accurate, and that’s the entire point. Perhaps the idea is that Apple sees the modern browser as more than just a simple HTML document viewer — that it’s an entire software environment and runtime. But I still can’t see this as anything but a regression in the experience. A determinate progress meter has the psychological effect of making a wait seem shorter. That’s why the iWork suite shows a progress meter when you open documents. Yes, what you really want is for the web page to be finished loading, but in the mean time, it’s nice to know it’s a third of the way — no, now half, now two-thirds — done. The new progress spinner doesn’t make Safari slower, but it does make it feel slower. This time I really mean it: Please scrap it. The Tabs Safari’s new tab layout, placing the tabs directly in the window title bar, is a radical change. There’s no use addressing the specific details — good and bad — of this new arrangement, without first trying to figure out why Apple did this. Again, the designers are behind Apple’s wall of silence, so we’re left to speculate. Rule out the notion that Safari’s designers undertook this change lightly. This is a major change to an important feature that many users feel strongly about. My guess is that this is an attempt to bring tabbed browsing to the masses. The biggest and most important change is that the interface for the tabs is now far more prominent. In fact, previously, the entire interface for tabbed browsing was not visible in Safari by default — in a window with just one tab, Safari’s default settings were such that the tab bar was not shown. In Safari 4, there’s a prominent and unique “+” button that is always visible in the top right corner of every window (and the standard tic-tac button for toggling the display of the toolbar is gone).1 Because the interface to create new tabs is now obvious, I can only assume that the point of this redesign is to encourage more people to use, or at least try, tabbed browsing. But the problems with this new tab layout are significant. Conceptually, the basic idea is sound. Browser tabs are, effectively, a collection of separate browser windows grouped together in a single parent window. Safari’s new tab layout makes this a tab is like a sub-window metaphor more explicit. The anchor, the conceptual root, of a standard Mac OS window is the title bar, and in Safari 4, the tabs aren’t just in the title bar, they are the title bar. The placement atop all other window content is, yes, following the lead of Google Chrome. But Safari takes it one step further, and, I think, also one step too far. Chrome’s tab are still contained within a window title bar — they are obviously things contained within a window, rather than in Safari, where they’re more like multiple windows snapped together. Aesthetic comments aside (although by the standards of Windows software, I personally think Chrome looks good), the relationship between Chrome’s tabs and their parent window are more thoroughly thought-out than Safari 4’s. Safari 4’s tabs bring to mind the tab-style window title bars of the old BeOS. In Be’s system, title bars were only as wide as the name of the window, rather than stretching across the entire width of the window itself — reminiscent of the tabs on real-world folders. (Apple played with such an idea in 1980 while developing the graphical user interface for the Lisa and Mac.) Be’s windows could not be snapped together to create a single window containing multiple tabbed windows, but by holding down the Shift key, you could slide the title bar horizontally across the top of any window, the point of which was to allow you to manually arrange windows in a tabbed style. This movie demonstrates how it worked:2 Safari 4’s tabs are visually similar to the Be concept, except they are snapped together. But, conceptually and visually, Safari’s current implementation is a bit muddled. Tabs are their own thing, but when snapped together, the window as a whole is its own thing as well. But there’s now very little chrome (in the lowercase c sense) devoted the window as whole — pretty much just the triumvirate of buttons for closing / minimizing / zooming the window. Visually there’s no border between these buttons and the first (left-most) tab: Damien Molokai, in an overall defense of Safari’s new tabs, suggests simply adding a left border to the first tab and leaving some room to the right of the window controls, leaving a clear area intended for dragging the window itself: Molokai’s mockup is visually cleaner, but doesn’t go far enough to fix the conceptual mushiness. Sean Sperte suggests a more Chrome-like layout, leaving a border atop the window belonging to the parent window itself: That’s not perfect, but it’s clearly better than the actual tab bar design in the Safari 4 public beta. Consider: with the previous tab design, if you wanted to move a window you dragged the window, and if you wanted to move a tab, you dragged the tab. Now in Safari 4, if you want to move the window you drag a tab, and if you want to move a tab you drag the small grippy strip at the far right edge of a tab. This is more abstract, indirect, and worse. Chrome’s tab design suffers none of these problems. Yes, it saves 20 pixels of space to consolidate the title bar and tab bar into the same area. But design is always about trade-offs. Whitespace can serve a purpose. Take for example the margins in a book, which aid in readability and usability (by giving you a place to put your thumbs without obscuring the text). Safari 4’s tabs-in-the-title-bar arrangement is like a book with text set right to the very edge of the paper — it saves space at the expense of something useful. There’s also something unpleasant about the width of the tabs in Safari 4. In most other tabbed document UIs, including Safari’s old one, tabs don’t change their width or position dynamically until they need to shrink in order to fit an additional tab in the window — in a typical window, generally after the fifth or sixth tab. In Safari 4, the entire tab bar (which is to say most of the window title bar) is divided equally between all tabs. The old way, tabs only move and shrink a little, and only when you have many tabs in the window. The new way, tabs move and shrink a lot until you reach the point where there are many tabs in the window, making it harder to keep track of where a particular tab is. Consider a window with five tabs: the title of the second tab is on the left side of the title bar. Now close the third, fourth, and fifth tabs, leaving just the first two. The name of the second tab has moved all the way over to the right side of the title bar. When you do the same exercise in Safari 3 the second tab never moves. My guess is that space consolidation, combined with the desire to encourage tab use by typical users, is what drove this design. Most users only use what they see. They never saw tabs because there was no visual tab interface until after a second tab had been added to a window. And the tab bar was hidden when there was just one tab open because it looks like a lot of wasted space to have an entire tab bar containing just one tab, and if the tab bar isn’t shown by default in a new window, there’s no good place to put an obvious “+” button for creating new tabs, which button is necessary so that typical users see how to create new tabs. Hence the decision to combine the tab bar with the window title bar: always visible, no wasted space. But I think Safari’s designers over-thought the problem. It would have been better simply to turn on the “Always show tab bar” setting by default, add the new tab “+” button to the now-visible-by-default tab bar, and let users who are annoyed by the “wasted space” turn it off in Safari’s preferences. That’s pretty much how Panic’s Coda handles document tabs (except that Coda has no option to hide the tab bar, 20 pixels of space be damned): Tab Click-Through Click-through problems with Safari 4’s new tabs abound. You get it when you don’t want it: accidentally activating — or worse, closing — a tab when you simply wanted to bring a window forward. And you don’t get it when you do want it: for dragging a tab out of a background window and into another window. As a general rule you’re less likely to want click-through for clicking but more likely to want it for dragging — in Safari 4 you get the worst of both. Consider the common scenario where you want to drag a file from a Finder window in the background into your current frontmost window (regardless what app you’re currently in). You can just click-and-drag on the file in the background Finder window and drag it — the background Finder window does not activate when you click in it to start a drag. With the Safari 4 public beta, that doesn’t work. Say you have a frontmost Safari window wherein you are collecting several related tabs. You see a tab in a background window that you want to move to the front one. But as soon as you click on the grippy strip to commence dragging the tab from the background window, that tab’s entire window is brought forward, and, if the two windows overlapped significantly, now obscures the previously frontmost window such that you can no longer see the intended destination of the drag. When you drag something out of a background window, the window should not pop forward. When you click (not drag) in the title bar area to bring a background Safari window forward, in addition to the window activating, whichever tab you clicked on activates as well. So the more tabs you have open in a window, the smaller the region is within the title bar where you can click to activate the window without changing that window’s current tab. In every other app in Mac OS X, you can click anywhere on a window title bar to bring that window forward without changing the context of the window. But, if you click and drag on a background tab in a background window in Safari 4, the window activates but the tab does not. Even worse, click-through is in effect for the close buttons on background tabs in background windows, even though these close buttons are only visible when the mouse is hovering over them. Twice in the past week I’ve accidentally closed a tab when trying to activate a background Safari window. My guess is that Apple chose to make background tabs’ close buttons and grippy strips only visible when the mouse is hovering over a tab to reduce the appearance of clutter. But hiding the controls doesn’t eliminate the actual clutter — a Safari 4 title bar containing five or six tabs is littered with dangerous spots on which to click or drag. Because of click-through, you must now be careful about where and how you click in the title bar of a background Safari window; that’s not the case for any other app on the Mac. Tab Colors One of the best things Apple introduced in Leopard was a consistent, single style for regular windows, with increased contrast between the frontmost window (dark) and background windows (light). Safari 4 uses the wrong colors both for active and inactive windows. The following table compares the top left corner of active (foreground) and inactive (background) windows in Safari 3 and 4 on Mac OS X 10.5.6. Safari 3 uses the system-standard colors for both states. Safari 4 is shown both with the leftmost tab active and inactive.3 The toolbar/title bar in a standard, frontmost Leopard window is a gray gradient that goes from 77% brightness at the top to 59% at the bottom; for background windows, the standard gradient goes from 91–81%. (100% would be pure white, 0% pure black.) Safari 4 displays four different title bar states, for active and inactive tabs in both foreground and background windows. In none of these four states does Safari 4 use the standard gradient colors. Safari 3 Safari 4, Active Tab Safari 4, Inactive Tab Foreground 77–59 88–69 73–61 Background 91–81 95–86 83–77 In the above table, colors are expressed as a range of two grayscale percentages, the first from the top of the window, the second from the bottom of the gradient. The usability advantage to Leopard’s consistent system-wide window colors is that it is easy to pick out the current frontmost window at a glance, regardless of the contents of the window, by glancing the at the title/toolbar areas at the top of your screen. All background windows are very light; the frontmost window is dark, so to find the active window just look for the dark one. Safari 4’s non-standard colors ruin this simplicity, particularly in two cases: A foreground window containing a single tab. A background window containing several tabs, and where the rightmost tab is the active one. The problem with #1 is that in an active Safari 4 window with just one tab, the color is nearly as bright as that of a standard background window, especially at the very top of the window — there should be a 14 percent difference in brightness but the difference is only 3 percent. The problem with #2 is that inactive tabs in a background Safari 4 window are nearly as dark as the active tab in the frontmost Safari 4 window — there’s only a 6 percent difference in brightness at the top of the window. In both cases there simply isn’t enough contrast. A significant Leopard usability improvement has been ignored for no benefit whatsoever. Other Things That Are Wrong With Safari 4’s Tabs Add to the aforementioned problems: In order to fit more text in each tab, Apple is drawing Safari 4 tab titles in a different font size and weight (11px Lucida Grande Bold) than the title bar text in every other window in the entire system (13px Lucida Grande Regular). This makes the title bar area look particularly strange when a window contains just one tab. Prior to Safari 4, you could Command-click the title of a window to get a pop-up menu showing a hierarchical path listing for the current URL. This feature is now gone. I can’t say it was that big of a deal, but it seems to me Apple could bring it back when you Command-click on a tab title. The triangular grippy strip that indicates the draggable region of a tab is a poor choice. It looks almost exactly like the standard drag-to-resize indicator in the bottom right corner of a window, but serves a completely different purpose. Things that look similar should behave similarly; things that behave differently should look different. In Safari 3 (and prior), you could drag a URL from any app and drop it into the empty space at the right side of the tab bar to create a new tab in that window displaying the contents of the dropped URL. It is very tricky to do this in the Safari 4 public beta. The obvious destination for such a drop is the “+” button in the top right corner, but that doesn’t work unless you hit just the right sliver — maybe 4 or 5 pixels horizontally between the “+” button and the rightmost tab. (You can drop a URL on Safari’s Dock icon to open it in a new tab, but only if you change Safari’s preference setting regarding how to “Open links from applications”.) I assume this is a bug in the public beta, and that the entire “+” button should work as a drop target. The Good News: Tab Dragging No Longer Modal In April last year, I documented Safari 3’s two different modes for moving tabs with drag-and-drop, which I called inter-window (moving a tab from one window to another) and intra-window (rearranging the order of tabs within one window). The mode was determined by the direction in which you initially began moving a tab. The problem was that once you entered a mode, you couldn’t switch to the other without stopping and starting over. Good news: Safari 4 no longer locks you into a dragging mode. Regardless which direction you start dragging, you can change directions and drag the tab wherever you want. Even better news: the locked-in dragging modes are also gone in Safari 4 even when you diddle the defaults preferences to revert to the old-style tabs underneath the toolbar. Cinematic Experience The first time you launch it, Safari 4 opens a browser window that displays a logo and animation, replete with sound, reminiscent of the startup screen for Apple TV. I find it oddly captivating. It’s an example of the “cinematic experience” that Apple has been pushing for at recent WWDCs — the idea being that the production value and feel of Mac software should be of similar caliber to that of popular TV shows and movies. What’s interesting about this splash screen technically is that it isn’t a QuickTime or Flash movie. It’s implemented entirely using HTML 5 and JavaScript. The new Top Sites feature — the most prominent feature on Apple’s “What’s new in Safari” page — is another example. From a practical standpoint it’s a neat idea, and pretty much identical to the “new tab page” feature Google introduced in Chrome — a visual matrix of your most-visited web sites, created and updated automatically based on your browsing history. But where Chrome’s presentation is a flat rectangle of thumbnails, Safari’s is a three-dimensional fan against a black background, complete with a glossy reflective foreground. Safari uses RSS to check for updated content on the pages in your Top Sites list; when there’s a change, it marks the page with a peeled-down corner and a star. It’s nice. One thing that’s not at all obvious, however, is how you can customize the top sites list. When you enter the edit mode, you can drag to rearrange, pin a site to a specific spot in the grid, and delete a site from the list. But when you delete a site, it’s replaced by another site chosen automatically based on your history. You can customize the listing, though — when in edit mode, just drag-and-drop a URL from another Safari window to the spot where you want it in the Top Sites grid. (Nerdier tip: the list of top sites is stored in a plist file at ~/Library/Safari/TopSites.plist; you can edit it by hand when Safari isn’t running.) The other visual-effects-powered feature is the addition of Cover Flow for your browsing history. I seldom use Cover Flow mode in iTunes and never in the Finder, but for web page history, it strikes me as downright useful — perfect for finding a page when you don’t remember the name or URL, but you do remember what it looked like. Improved Location Field and Google Search Auto-Completion Both the location field (a.k.a. address field) and Google search field feature much improved auto-completion. The biggest improvement to the location field auto-completion is that it feels way faster. Previously, if I typed fast enough, I could hit return intending to engage the default suggested completion, but in fact hit return before the completion menu had even appeared, in which case Safari would take whatever few characters I’d typed and tack “.com” at the end, loading the wrong web site. The completion menu now seems to appear instantaneously. It also looks better, with a clear separation between page titles and URLs, and separate sections for matches from your history and bookmarks. In Safari 3, the completion menu only showed URLs (no titles), and there was no separation between matches from your bookmarks and history. My only gripe is that it currently shows the history section above the bookmarks section — I’d prefer it the other way around. The Google search field now populates the suggestion menu as you type with results from Google’s Suggest feature. For me at least, the suggestions are remarkably, almost spookily, good. Note, though, that it doesn’t offer suggested results, but rather offers suggested terms to search for. If you choose a suggestion from the menu, you still go to a Google search results listing, not immediately to a destination page. That’s OK with me, but it’s not going to satisfy those of you who prefer input manager hacks like Inquisitor. Minor Observations The “Save as Web Application” feature in previous Safari 4 betas (which were available only to ADC developers) is gone. It was a command in the File menu that let you turn any web page into a site-specific browser — like Fluid, but built into Safari. No idea what happened to it. I enjoy Mobile Me’s automatic bookmark syncing between my Mac and iPhone versions of Safari. But I’d like to see history syncing, too. Imagine having location field auto-completion on your Mac work for sites which you visited using your iPhone. Zoom is now page zoom, not just text zoom — when you zoom in or out, the entire page, including layout and graphics, scales. But there’s an option in the View menu, off by default, to do text zoom only. SnapBack is now only available for search results — the orange SnapBack button in the location field and manual “Mark Page for SnapBack” features from Safari 3 are gone. The only remaining SnapBack feature is the “Search Results SnapBack” command in the History menu. I never used it, and I don’t know anyone who does, so I suspect this was a good feature to cut. I’m sure some people used it, but if you never remove lesser-used features, you can’t add new features without letting the overall complexity blow up. Yes, yes, there are command-line defaults preferences you can diddle to revert the tabs (and the progress bar) to the old style, but those may not be here for long, and they certainly won’t help the millions of users who have never even heard of Terminal, let alone launched it. ↩ My thanks to Chris Liscio for the movie. ↩ These screenshots also demonstrate how in Safari 3 the toolbar buttons are vertically centered between the close/minimize/zoom buttons and the bottom of the toolbar. In Safari 4 they are not, which I find visually unpleasing. ↩

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