Today I officially announced this at work, and I am very excited to share it with all of you. As of next week I will no longer be working in the SharePoint and Office Business Intelligence space. I’ll be joining the team at Microsoft that makes wonderful products for Apple platforms.
Those of you that know me well will probably find this to be of little surprise, but it’s a very welcome change and something I am very excited about.
I can’t quite say what I’ll be working on yet, but for the Mac faithful readers of my blog, stay tuned and I’ll divulge more as it’s appropriate to do so.
This weekend I embarked on Major Suckage. I had outgrown the OS drive on my laptop again, and decided that it was much safer to reinstall my entire system from scratch rather than just clone my hard drive for the 3rd time.
I ordered a 750GB 7200rpm drive from Other World Computing and when I got home from work Friday I began the process. I immediately realized a huge problem with OS X Lion as an upgrade.
I had to install Snow Leopard, download 3GB of updates to get it up to App Store compatibility, then immediately upgrade it to Lion.
That’s right, my goal was a clean start and before I installed my first application, it was already upgraded. Grrrr.
I get it was only $30, but I was really missing the disc and only on principle. I am sure the upgrade went smoothly and all is well, but I’d rather not start a new computer build with outdated stuff potentially scattered on a brand new drive.
This laptop is used for music and video production and by the time I got everything back to status quo I had spent 20 hours and reduced a 750GB hard drive to 370GB without a single bit of my own data on it. Yikes.
I am ok with delivering the upgrade through the app store, but there needs to be some way to go to Apple.com and download a burnable or thumb bootable ISO you can use to install from scratch. Asking a user to recover from a hard drive failure or data swap by having to install, update then upgrade is more hassle than it should be. Agree?
Today it occurred to me, Google has taken a play directly from the Microsoft playbook. These days there is a prize fight being fought between Google and Apple for the heart and mind of smart phone users. Apple has a head start, but that doesn’t historically mean a whole lot.
A Brief History Lesson
Back in 1984, Apple released the Macintosh computer. There had been home computers before, but the Macintosh was the first computer that anyone could just sit down and use. Before the Macintosh, computers were obtuse, they required knowledge of arcane commands and were accessed in a, and I am being nice here, less than approachable interface.
Apple came back from Xerox after seeing the mouse and graphical user interface and in perfect Steve Jobs form set out on perfecting it and making it as sexy as possible.
The problem that Apple has never managed to solve is that sexy is expensive. In 1990, 6 years after Apple had released the Macintosh with great success, Microsoft released Windows 3.0. Windows 3.0 was the first version of Windows that had a true graphical windowed environment and it was the first version of Windows that truly caught on with PC makers.
You can practically thank Windows 3.0 for the birth of several major computer manufacturers, namely Gateway, or Gateway 2000 if you are old enough to remember them then.
What Windows 3.0 managed to do was put a computer in your home, with roughly the same capabilities as a Macintosh, but at almost half of the price. Computers were still very expensive then compared to today. A Macintosh went for about $2,495 and a PC with Windows could be had for less than $1,500.
Isn’t This Article About Phones?
Oh yea, that’s right. So what does this have to do with phones? The Apple pundits will tell you “Price doesn’t mean much, you can get an iPhone on contract for $200 and they are selling light hot cakes. That’s true, but there is quite a long tail on that user acceptance curve and the real wealth of users are not yet holding smart phones.
As of 2010, ComScore says 45.5 million people in the United States own smartphones. The mobile phone market is comprised of 234 million subscribers. That’s just in the United States! That means all of the smartphone OS’s, and Palm, Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM are the biggies, are fighting for less than 20% of the available market. Are these numbers starting to sound familiar?
Today that means 80% of the market aren’t willing to pay for either the phone or the data plan. Google is already trying to figure out ways to subsidize the data plan with advertising, and you can already get Google Android based phones free on contract. This year Best Buy had an Android phone free with contract for every major carrier.
That means we aren’t too far from free Android phones with cheaper data plans. Once Apple has soaked up all of the tech savvy people with expendable income, Google or Microsoft (I hope!) can walk in and just sweep all the remaining people into customers. If you think this sounds crazy, it’s happened before.
It’s like déjà vu over here if you ask me. A “good enough” competitor, prices that attract the consumer at large, and a willingness to let anyone build on their platform to build devices that fit whatever the user wants.
I don’t know about you, but if I was Apple, I’d be looking in the rearview mirror. And in case you think the iPad is any different, read this article again and replace iPhone with iPad in your mind.
This week I traded an iMac I wasn’t using for a 13.3″ Macbook. I already have a 17″ Macbook Pro, but to be honest given the price and size, I just never take it with me anywhere. I have a pretty strict “don’t use my work laptop for personal stuff” mentality. Previously I had purchased a 13″ HP laptop I used when I wanted to be super mobile, but that laptop took a header off my nightstand one night and ceased to be.
I hadn’t bother to replace it until two events conspired in the last two weeks. I had failed at finding a useful place for the iMac in either my office or my studio, and I found a guy on Craigslist looking to trade a Macbook for an iMac. I didn’t take his deal, but it sparked my interested and I pursued and found a deal that worked for me.
The result is a 13.3″ White Unibody Macbook. It has a 2.26Ghz Core 2 Duo Processor, 4GB of RAM, 250GB HD, webcam, all the usual Mac trimmings. It also has a nice tidy form factor that can fit in my laptop bag with my work computer when I need to.
So far I am loving the computer. I am not as constrained by the 1280×800 resolution as I thought I might be, but I can thank Spaces for that. The multiple desktop feature built into OS X is my lifeline when I am not on a multiple monitor desktop.
The machine itself seems to run a little hot, but I’ve been using Apple laptops for awhile and that’s not exactly unusual. The performance is fantastic. I have installed Office 2011, Photoshop CS4, Final Cut Express, Pro Tools Essentials and tons of other smaller apps on it. They all run speedy and other than being a little small on the screen real estate forefront, it’s nice.
This computer is definitely more comfortable for casual use than the 17″, but I do really miss the backlit keys.
Next on the list is setting up Boot Camp on it and installing Windows 7. I’ll use this machine for blogging and there just is no blogging without Windows Live Writer in my opinion.
The battery has been awesome so far. I have been using it for hours and with about 1/3 of the battery remaining it’s still several hours.
I am hard pressed in casual use to notice a performance difference between the two laptops honestly. I am sure during some video compressing or heavy photoshop use I’d notice the 8GB of ram and the faster processor, but for day to day, this machine should be plenty for most people.
Check out Saitara Software’s site for AC-7 Pro, and of course download it for yourself from iTunes.
Additional information for the nerds:
Footage captured with a Kodak Zi8 camera, audio captured with a Rode Video Mic, edited in Final Cut Express. Ass kicking intro riff played and recorded by me.
