Category: Apple

Last night after dinner with the kids in Emeryville, we stopped by the Apple store to look at the iPads. I’ve been sort of bitter with the Apple store after a bad experience at one in Walnut Creek and hadn’t been back to one since, so I’d yet to actually touch an iPad and last night was my first time. I wrote a post a few months back on why I wasn’t so hot on the device, but actually got to hold one last night for the first time there at the store.

I only got to play with one for about five minutes because the store was closing and we were ushered out by Apple employees (the “good news” is that they are opening back up tomorrow, they told us). All of the kids and my wife got to play with one as well though, albeit briefly.

Touching one didn’t actually do much for me. I found typing on the onscreen keyboard crowded. It seemed like it would be lot more difficult for me to type on the device. I’d say after holding one I’m probably even less likely to buy one than I was before. My main reasons for not buying one would be:

1. I dont’ want to pay for another 3G account with AT&T whose super slow 3G network I’ve grown to detest. Who would win in a race between a turtle and AT&T’s 3G network? Well at least the turtle would show up to the race.

2. As a photographer, the device seems ill equipped for my photography needs. I like that I can transfer photos off my 64GB Sandisk CF card using a firewire 800 reader super fast like to my Mac Book Pro. Without a firewire 800 connection this is problematic. Also the unit doesn’t have very much storage or a powerful enough processor to run something like Adobe Lightroom. (Yes, I know that this is not what these devices are for, but photography’s a big part of my life personally speaking so it’s how I personally think, and I think a bit different than others sometimes).

3. I don’t like that I can’t get flash internet pages on the thing. I feel like I should be able to get the *entire* internet on any device I own and not be a causality in a personal pissing match between Apple and Adobe.

4. I read an article over the weekend that alleged Apple had rejected an app request for a political candidate. While I might be able to sort of look the other way as Apple censors porn on the device (not really, but just saying), reading that they’d actually censored an app over what felt like politics to me felt especially wrong. Yesterday’s TWIT episode was a good one. Cory Doctorow and Robert Scoble were on with Leo Laporte and censorship of the Apple app store was brought up on the show. Talking about the need to have apps approved by Apple individually, Cory made the statement that “”human evaluation of ‘stuff’ doesn’t scale very well.”

5. When I played with the iPad it sort of kept doing that back and forth thing between vertical and horizontal rotating of my screen that my iPhone does. It’s not that I don’t want that functionality, it’s just that I don’t want that to happen as much when I don’t mean it to happen. Not sure that makes any sense or that there is any way that Apple could design a device to do this less, but that’s just a feeling.

6. I didn’t like that it didn’t have a DVD player in it. Especially since I wouldn’t likely buy 3G service with one, I’d want to be able to watch my Netflix movies on it when I wasn’t connected to the internet and lot of my Netflix content still comes on DVD.

7. With entry level units priced at $499, I could get a full fledged MacBook for only $500 more. Seems like a better value to me and that I’d get a lot more than I do with the iPad.

8. If I bought one the kids would probably fight over it. My son Jack might also drop it from his bunk bed and break it (he dropped a laptop from his top bunk once). As it stands now they use computers mostly that are desktop units that can’t be taken into the bunk bed to drop, either that or they use our iPhones.

9. This is just a feeling, but it feels to me like Apple is innovating less. I haven’t been very impressed with the things I’ve read about the new upcoming version of the iPhone (and will probably be moving over to Android when my AT&T contract is up in July, and oh, AT&T, raising your early termination fees on your phones over the weekend doesn’t help people want to buy a new iPhone).

10. A better version of this will come out later (maybe by Apple, maybe by somebody else).

11. I don’t like seeing charges for apps show up in my emailbox that the kids buy. I don’t really think that they *need* them and the charges feel like they add up. Here was the first email that I woke up to this morning: iTunes receipt: “Item Number Description Unit Price 1 150 Awesome Sound Effects with Timer, v1.9, Seller: george hubka (4+) Write a Review Report a Problem $0.99” If we had an iPad I’m sure I’d only get more of these sorts of emails. Last night my daughter Holly asked me if she could download apps on my iPhone as long as they were free. I told her sure.

12. The little company (well not really) that used to tell people to “think differently” doesn’t quite feel like the same company these days. I remember the first time I saw the Apple “Rip, Mix, Burn” billboard back in the olden days. That somehow felt good. Apple telling me to sort of bypass Hollywood and make my own CDs. These days it feels like Steve Jobs has become “the man.” I was turned off by his “freedom from porn” comment (even if I felt it was bogus for the journalist who quoted that statement of his in a private email to do so).

Now that said, I’m just one member of my family, and the rest of the family had a completely different opinion than I did.

My nine year old son Jackson was especially *thrilled* with it. It’s like a *huge* iPad dad, he said. I “sooooooooo want one.” He spent the entire car ride home trying to get me to buy him one. Then he started strategizing about whether it was too much or not to ask his grandmother for it for Christmas (I told him it was) when he realized that I wasn’t going to cave in and buy one.

Playing (some game that he said that I don’t remember) on an iPad would be “awesome” apparently. I told Jack that it seemed a bit expensive for a device that couldn’t even play DVDs and that you for only $500 more you could get a full fledged MacBook that was a full computer, and he said, yeah, but dad, $500 more is a *lot* of money, my wife chimed in that $1,000 was way too much to pay for a laptop.

I mentioned that I didn’t like the keyboard and my wife said that she definitely did and then proceeded to complain about the sound that my typing makes in bed on my MacBook Pro at night. It’s so grating she said, it’s even worse than when you chew ice. The keyboard on the iPad would be so much quieter, she added.

So there you have it, an updated post on why I still haven’t purchased an iPad. I don’t plan on buying one anytime soon… but, the natives are definitely getting restless and my wife seeing her friend reading a book on one at my son’s baseball game on Saturday certainly doesn’t make things any easier for me.

Over on Twitter Alberto Lopez asked me why I’ve been quiet about the iPad so far. Of course, everyone and their mother has been yammering about nothing but the iPad for the past few months so I’m sure my thoughts on the thing haven’t been missed.

But I thought I’d add yet another voice to the millions that are talking about the device thus far. I can’t really review the unit of course. I don’t have one. I can’t gloat about it like Walt Mossberg or David Pogue as I’ve never even touched one, but these are my initial thoughts from someone who *hasn’t* bought one yet.

1. I take my MacBook Pro with me everywhere I go 24/7 and best I can tell it can do anything that an iPad can do and more. Why carry around yet another device when my MacBook Pro already does everything for me that the iPad can?

2. One of the reasons that I bring my MacBook Pro with me everywhere is that I can process photos during downtime. I process photos every day on BART for example. I’m not sure that I can use Lightroom on the iPad or that it would be as easy as my MacBook Pro. Also the limited storage on the iPad would not make it a good tool for editing super large 21 megapixel RAW files that I use my MacBook Pro for.

3. AT&T’s 3G network is crappy in the San Francisco Bay Area, plus I’m not eager to shell out another $30 a month when I’ve already got 3G on my iPhone.

4. My experience with Apple products is that the initial release is usually followed by better releases and it may be worth waiting to see what comes out next. I’ve also heard lots of reports that the initial product has a lot of bugs.

5. Even though I’ve literally spent the night in front of an Apple store before for a product launch and have waited in lines at their stores many times before, recently I’ve been pissed off at how Apple treats their customers in their stores.

While I used to view going to an Apple store as a positive experience, lately it has felt like a very negative experience for me. I blogged about this a few weeks back. I thought about going to the Apple store to look at one, but worried that I’d probably need to have an appointment to be allowed to even set foot in the store to look at the box of one and then chided and insulted by a snippy Apple store clerk about not having an appointment to grace their presence.

6. I’ve also been rethinking my overall view of Apple in the past few months. My iPhone’s contract is up in July and I’m thinking about switching to a Google phone product. Google feels more open to me than Apple. It also feels to me that Google authentically cares more about their customers and users than Apple does as well.

7. It doesn’t have USB ports. I also carry a 1TB Seagate FreeAgent Go (which ROCKS!) and could be a perfect solution to the storage problem with the iPad for me, but since the iPad has no USB ports, there would be no way of connecting this drive to it. This drive is actually not that much bigger than my iphone or a pack of cards and is USB powered. Shame not to be able to use an ideal storage device like this with the iPad.

Also I frequently use my FireWire 800 high speed card reader (another product with totally rocks) to transfer my photos from my CF cards to my MacBook Pro. This reader would be worthless on an iPad and I can see no easy way of getting my photos off my CF cards and onto the iPad while out shooting in the field (Not that I could fit many of my RAW photos on the device anyways given it’s tiny storage).

I’ve thought about buying an iPad for the house just to have around for others in my family to use. The cost is relatively inexpensive for a computing device and it’s largest appeal to me so far is probably that you can watch Netflix “Watch Now” programming on it.

But then I think that if I got one for the house the kids would end up fighting over it. The kids would probably drop it and break it (my son sent my old laptop off the top of his bunk bed and broke the display). And we already have a Wii, XBox 360, Mac Mini and Dell Media Center PC connected to monitors that can do Netflix “Watch Now” right now. Do we really need a portable device too?

So I may not be Apple’s ideal customer, and despite the hype and how sexy and cool the thing appears to be, it just doesn’t feel practical to buy one right now. Plus I can’t get the image of it as one of those calculators with super large buttons that old people use out of my head. Don’t get me wrong. I’m tempted. And if I actually tried one I might break down and buy one anyways, but thus far I’ve yet to jump on the iPad bandwagon with the rest of the cool kids. Not that they need my money anyways though as it seems that these things are doing a pretty good job of selling themselves. 🙂

For the past 3 years or so I’ve become something of an Apple fanboy. It started with making a switch about 3 years ago from being a 15 year PC user to my first MacBook Pro as my primary computer.

Then I drank the kool-aid and waited in line overnight at the Palo Alto store for the very first iPhone (that was fun). Then I bought the second iPhone right away.

Then I waited in line again for over 6 hours to buy the third iPhone 3GS. Then I bought a new MacBook Pro spending over $3,000. Then I bought my daughter an iPod mini. Then I bought a Mac Mini for the kitchen at home. Etc. etc. You get the idea.

All along the way Apple products have slowly been replacing competitor’s products in my house and in my life.

One of the things that I’ve always liked about Apple is that they have physical stores where when things go wrong I can go deal with them.

Back in the olden days I bought a Dell PC once. It had problems and I literally had to pack the thing all up, deal with the hassle of shipping it, send it back to Texas, had to wait for a few weeks and finally got my fixed PC back. So a big appeal to me with Apple products is that they have stores where I can go to deal with issues if they pop up (and issues *always* pop up with technology).

But lately I’ve been feeling like the service that you get at the Apple stores is complete crap and that they treat their customers (many loyal users who spend thousands of dollars per year with them) very poorly.

A few examples.

1. A few months back my MacBook Pro wouldn’t boot. I was bummed. I use this computer every day. I hate not having it. It was 6pm or so on a Friday night. I drove down to the Emeryville Apple store. I got there and the store asked me the dreaded question of whether or not I had an appointment or not. I said no and so they said no dice. I said I could wait, 30 minutes, an hour 2 hours, 5 hours. No luck. They simply refused to see me.

They were willing to make me an appointment for later that night at the San Francisco store, so I took that and had to drive across a traffic infested Bay Bridge, pay to park at Union Square, etc. in order to get over there.

Once I was there and got to see a guy, he tried to boot up my computer and no luck. He tried 3 or 4 different things and then sort of gave up. He hooked something up to my Mac and said my hard drive was dead. I told him that everything was working flawlessly before and I was surprised that this would be the problem etc. etc. But rather than really digging into it and trying more things he simply dismissed it as hard drive failure.

Of course Apple didn’t have the hard drive and so they’d need to order it (on a Mac less than a year old). I’d have to make another appointment to bring it back once the hard drive came in etc. etc.

To make a long story short, while waiting to get the hard drive in at the Apple store, I was able to work on it more at home myself and finally got it back operational, reinstalled the system software and got my Mac back.

I’ve been using this same hard drive for the past few months with zero problems. I felt like I was told that my problem was a hard drive failure because it was the fastest easiest way to deal with me, even if it meant I’d possibly lose data and be inconvenienced with the repair.

2. A few weeks back I decided that I needed a car battery charger for my iPhone. So I stopped off at the Apple store at Walnut Creek. It was 9:45 a.m. and super cold outside. The front door to the store was unlocked. There were people back at the genius bar working with customers. And there were about 10 Apple store employees just standing around with their hands in their pockets.

I was greeted by a woman at the door who again asked me if I had an appointment. I said, no that I just wanted to quickly purchase a cigarette lighter power adapter for my iPhone. She told me that they couldn’t sell me one until 10a.m.

So I said ok, I’ll wait then. To which the woman replied, I’m not going to be able to let you wait in the store (even though there were plenty of other customers with “appointments” I guess already in the store and the front doors were unlocked).

Now it was really cold outside that morning and to make matters worse I had two little girls (my daughters) age 5 and 7 with me. So this Apple employee literally boots me out of the store and so there I am sitting on the cold concrete outside the store for 15 minutes with two little girs who are complaining about being cold. Because the Apple employees (all sitting around doing nothing) can’t take 2 minutes to sell me a simple accessory and to make matters worse, won’t even let me wait in the warm store with a heater on and instead put a dad and his two little girls outside in the cold on the sidewalk.

By the way Apple, that photo up above is of one of my little girls, one of the little girls that you made sit outside in the cold in Walnut Creek on the sidewalk using your iPhone.

3. The headphones on my iPhone went out. This is the 3Gs iPhone that I bought less than a year ago (it hasn’t been out a year yet) and is still under warranty. So yesterday I went up to the Apple store on Union Square and waited in line to see a cashier and explained my problem and asked if I could swap them out for a working pair. The cashier said they couldn’t help me. That I could only swap my headphones out with an appointment from the genius bar (WTF?).

So I went upstairs and of course there were no appointments. I was also told again that I couldn’t wait that there was nobody period to see me. That I would need to make an appointment. To do a 2 minute swap out of my headphones I asked incredulously? Yes, I was told. I explained that I was leaving today (which I am) for a trip to Miami and had really hoped to be able to listen to my iPhone.

So the person suggested that I buy a new pair of headphones. Come back and return them within 14 days, make an appointment to have my headphones replaced under warranty, and go that route. Which sounded just stupid to me (all for a 2 minute procedure) so I complained one last time and the person at the genius bar had another person take me back downstairs to the same cashier line I’d been it at the very beginning and swap out my headphones for me (which I really appreciated, but it probably shouldn’t have taken 40 minutes to get this done).

So these are my three of my four most recent experiences at the Apple store. The fourth one was a no brainer. I wanted to buy a MacMini. They sold that to me in about 5 minutes all lickety split like no trouble indeed there. Sure were happy to take my money.

I’ll probably continue buying Apple’s overpriced hyped products because I love them and they make great products (or maybe I won’t). Am I a sucker? Maybe. But I sure wish they didn’t treat their customers like such crap. Maybe it’s stupid of me to feel like after spending thousands of dollars every year with a company that I ought to get treated a little bit better, but I do feel that way.

And I sure wish Apple would require their employees to go through Nordstrom’s customer service training or something. Because while they may get away with treating me like crap for now because they have great products, eventually somebody else will have a better product and the way I’ve been treated will make it that much easier to switch.

I’ll tell you one thing though. I sure as hell didn’t pre-order an iPad. At least that makes me feel a little better.

Well I’ve been hiding a secret for the past two weeks. It’s something that I’ve felt conflicted and unsure of, something that I’ve felt ashamed of and proud of at the same time. Something that I’ve been trying to sort out before I actually wrote about it. Most people will probably say, “yeah, big deal.” But for me it kind of is a big deal. I haven’t told very many people. I showed Robert Scoble last week but have been kind of hiding it otherwise.

A little over two weeks ago I walked into the Apple store in Palo Alto and bought myself a new MacBook Pro. Yes, the new sexy Intel dual core MacBook Pro. And I went home and after not using a Mac for over 15 years, put my Dell PC notebook literally in the bookshelf and have been using this new Mac as my primary computer for the past 2 weeks.

And what do I have to say about the experience after two weeks? My God! This is f***ing amazing! For the past 15 years I’ve pretty much been a diehard Microsoft PC guy. I’ve mocked the religious zealotry of the cult of Macintosh. I’ve derided the senseless brainwashing that Steve Jobs seems so elegant at.

And then I just did it, I went out and bought one. Maybe it’s a self destructive bent that I’ve got. Maybe it’s the need to explore something new. The move made me think about marriage. Was I simply trading in my trusty old wife of 15 years for the sleek slender new 19 year old model? Was I somehow doing this as a fashion statement? But the answer was no.

I was very frustrated with my Dell PC for a number of reasons. When I would edit photos on it and then upload them the color would be all wrong. I couldn’t disable tap to click. I tried to buy an EVDO card for it and it wouldn’t work. (I tried three EVDO cards actually and had to return them all).

The Dell had this habit that I hated. It would go to sleep and then I’d open the lid to use it and press the power button to activate it. Nothing would happen. A full minute would go by, still nothing. So I’d think that maybe it didn’t know that I pushed the power button and would push it again. Then it would come on only to immediately begin shutting itself down because I’d pressed the power button twice. There would be no way to stop it and so I’d have to wait until it fully rebooted to start using it. Applications would hang. It wouldn’t work on my network right. It would tell me that I had a wifi signal but wouldn’t connect without a reboot. I was constantly needing to install drivers and uninstall drivers. So many things.

And all along the way it was my 18 year old tech mentor Kristopher Tate, who kept saying, dude, just get a Mac. Just get a Mac. They just work.

And so I did. And I have to say that he’s right. It just works. It took about 48 hours of getting used to but once my little introductory awkward phase was over it just works so much better. It springs to life immediately when I open it. The new EVDO card I got works perfectly. It’s fast. The picture quality is very accurate. I can easily work in both Bridge and Photoshop at the same time on it while still having Firefox and Thunderbird and Skype and iTunes and jUploadr all open at the same time.

I did have a few hiccups along the way. It wasn’t easy to get it to work with my Windows network at home, but having Kristopher around as tech support has been a fantastic safety net. Every time I need to figure out how to do something he shows me. He helped me transfer all my old email from my old Dell notebook, settings and bookmarks, etc. over.

And then there’s the design of the thing. I never in a million years would have thought that the design of a laptop would ever matter to me at all. It’s not about the aesthetics of a machine. It’s what it does for you right? Well, maybe. But this machine is damn sexy. I love the way that the keyboard is lit at night so that I can work in the dark. I love that glassy screen. There is something about the feel of the polished aluminum as I hold, no caress, the thing in my hands. It types perfectly. I love how I can use two fingers on the touch pad to move my screen down. I love how it has a hidden built in microphone and a small little video camera in the screen so that I can do video phone stuff through Skype super easily. I love how the little power supply has a magnet built into it and just kind of plugs itself in. And yes, I even love that glowing little Apple logo on the back of the case that I’ve scoffed at in the past at the various conferences and tech meetups that I’ve gone to.

I used a Mac back in college and used them exclusively from 1985 or so until 1991. My past memories of the Mac are of the Mac Plus and the SE/30. With my first Mac I literally had to swap floppy discs back and forth out of the drive between the OS disc and the application disc because it had no hard drive. And then I went to work for a bank in 1991 and the Mac was definitely gonski there. I did ask for a Mac and they just laughed.

I figured that since I had to use a PC at work, I’d better use one at home too in order to best master the beast. And it has been a beast for me. As tech saavy as I like to think of myself as I’ve had so many problems with my PCs over the years. If using a PC is being outside working digging ditches all day long in the hot sun, using my new Mac is like hanging out at the spa.

I’m not really giving up on my PCs yet. I still do have four of them at home and two at work. But I imagine that I’ll be spending 85% or more of my computing time on this slender sexy new MacBook Pro in the future. I was going to buy a new CableCARD capable Vista machine in January but I’ll probably hold off on that a bit. I may still end up buying one but will probably do it later if I do. We’ll see.

Call me a convert. Call me a traitor. Call me a heretic. Or call me a fanboy. Welcome me to the club or say it ain’t so Joe, but all I can say is that Kristopher is right. It just works. And it feels so great while it does that. It’s the best I’ve felt about using a computer in a long, long time.

Update: Thanks all for the comments and thanks to the diggers who dugg this story to digg’s front page and to Apple Computer for putting it on apple.com. A week later I’m still totally digging my Mac. Even more than ever. Here’s one other thing that I absolutely *love*. I love how no matter where you type on a Mac it spell checks everything for you. If I’m posting on my blog, if I’m leaving a comment on someone else’s blog, if I’m writing an email, if I’m doing anything with text it just constantly spell checks. And it doesn’t do it in a distracting way. No pop ups or spell checks or menus, etc. Just a thin red line under the word that is unknown and a simple right click to add the word to your personal dictionary or fix the spelling. That really rocks.

By the way, the Mac in the photo above is not mine. That’s just one that I took a photo of at the Web 2.2 party last month at Fluid. But it does show how very cool they do look.