A few thoughts about Apple’s iPad

One day after the iPad was introduced, reactions in the tech world have been mixed, so I watched Apple’s announcement to see for myself.

There are quite a few features the iPad lacks: multitasking, a camera, Adobe Flash support, HDMI video output, USB ports, an SD slot, and so on. But remember that at first, the iPhone didn’t 3G or native apps for a whole year. And who would have thought you could successfully sell a smartphone without copy and paste for two years? I bet the iPad is starting out the same way — start off with just enough features to get people hooked, figure out what’s really necessary, and then add on.

If you paid attention to Steve Jobs’ pitch, he may have talked about features and specs, but he really emphasized the experience of using the iPad. “The Internet in your hands,” he said over and over again. Hey, it may look like just a giant iPhone, but once you actually try it out, you’ll be hooked. He’s trying to appeal to your emotional, sensual side — which helps explain why a lot of left-brained geeks weren’t buying his spiel.

A few other random thoughts:

  • I found it quite interesting to see what were essentially full-screen iPhone menus being used as pop-up menus or sidebars in iPad applications. If Apple designs its SDK well, it may not be too difficult to create one application that works on both the iPhone and the iPad.
  • The home screens look anemic on such a large screen. The icons look too small, and the spacing too large. I’m surprised Apple didn’t put more design work into this.
  • For input, I didn’t believe the rumor that the iPad would require you to learn a complex set of gestures, but I was hoping for something more interesting than a virtual keyboard (hello, ShapeWriter). I’m curious to try it out and see how well it works. While the iPhone keyboard isn’t perfect, it works better than I expected on such a small screen. And at least you can use a Bluetooth keyboard with it.
  • The biggest surprise for me was how aggressive the pricing is, $500 to $830.

I’d love to get my hands on an iPad, try it out, and see whether it’s as “magical” as Jobs claims. But even if it is, I won’t buy one yet. I never buy the first generation of a gadget, and in the case of the iPhone, it was a good idea. Let’s see what the iPad 2 is like.

Memory price drops

As I was cleaning out my papers, I came across some old receipts for various tech gadgets. While I’m used to high-tech stuff getting cheaper and cheaper, I still find it stunning how quickly prices have fallen for certain items:

Item Purchase date Purchase price Current price Annual depreciation rate Annual overall inflation rate (CPI)
1 GB USB flash drive Dec 16, 2005 $69.99 $7.99 −43.8% +2.4%
2 GB SD Flash card Nov 24, 2006 $84.98 $9.99 −57.6% +2.4%
Canon PowerShot 7.1 megapixel camera Nov 23, 2006 $361.49 $179.99
(8.0 MP)		 −24.4% +2.4%

My new Mac

Well I did it: I’ve bought a 13″ MacBook. Its size and portability won me over. So far, it’s been pretty smooth: I had no problems setting up my mail accounts in Mail, and it connected to my home wireless network effortlessly. On the other hand, I had to search the web to find out what the Mac equivalents of the Home and End keys were.

This is a big deal for me. The last time I switched computer platforms was in 1985, from a Commodore 64 to an IBM PC XT clone. I’ve used Windows since version 3.0 in 1990, and not surprisingly, I’ve built up a huge set of habits that I’m probably not even aware of. (For example, did you know you can double-click the icon in the upper-left-hand corner of a window to close it?)

The next step for me is to get acquainted with a whole new set of programs. For now, I’ve decided to use iWork ’09 for my office suite, which can import and export Microsoft Office files. For those tricky files that iWork can’t handle, I’ll install Windows Vista and Office 2007 in another partition, and then run them inside Parallels Desktop.

For photos, iPhoto would be fine, except I’ve built up years of metadata inside Adobe Photoshop Elements on Windows, which iPhoto can’t read. So I’m getting Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, which can import Photoshop Elements metadata and runs on both Windows and Mac. Lightroom isn’t cheap, but luckily I’ve accumulated enough reward points to pay for it.

By the way, I’m still looking for a (cheap) image editor for the Mac, as well as blogging software, so I appreciate any suggestions.

There is one Mac app I look forward to using: Delicious Library (no relation to the social bookmarking site Delicious). It lets you catalog your book and media collection, but instead of typing in all the data by hand, it uses the camera in your Mac as a barcode reader, and then automatically retrieves that data over the net. I’ve known about this app for years, and I look forward to actually being able to use it.

Eventually, I’ll get around to doing what I said I’d do on my new Mac: create iPhone apps.

Comparing MacBooks

[Photo of 13" MacBook] I am seriously considering getting a Mac, because I want to do something that Macs can do and PCs can’t: write iPhone apps. I’ve narrowed the possibilities down to two models: the 13″ MacBook or the 15″ MacBook Pro. The 15″ is 22% heavier (4.5 vs 5.5 lbs) but it also has 27% more pixels (1280×800 vs 1440×900). So it really comes down which I value more: portability or screen real estate.

To make a really informed opinion, I need to go to an Apple Store and play around with them myself, but meanwhile, does anyone have any thoughts on this?

Palm pulls one off

Palm PreToday Palm announced its new smartphone, the Pre, and just as importantly, its long-awaited new software platform, WebOS. Reading the Engadget live blog on the announcement and watching videos on Gizmodo, I am quite impressed by what I saw. Not only is the hardware slick, the software is too. Wall Street liked it as well: on a day when the Dow Jones fell 0.31%, Palm’s stock shot up 35%.

And in a master stroke, native apps for WebOS are written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, the same technologies used to create web sites. This dramatically lowers the barrier to entry, and makes it much more likely that developers will create webOS apps, something Palm desparately needs.

Alas, I have already switched from Palm to the iPhone, and at this point I don’t think I’ll be going back. But the smartphone market is still growing, and I’m rooting for Palm to make a comeback, if only to give the iPhone some much needed competition. Will it be enough? I’m not sure, but I am sure that if Palm hadn’t done everything it showed today, it would have been doomed.

Chinese ‘classical poem’ was brothel ad

A respected research institute wanted Chinese classical texts to adorn its journal, something beautiful and elegant, to illustrate a special report on China. Instead, it got a racy flyer extolling the lusty details of stripping housewives in a brothel.

Thanks to Alex for this link.

Raise the gas tax NOW

Now that oil has fallen to half of what it was in the summer, we should the gas tax should be raised now, while gas is still cheap. The federal gas tax was last raised in 1993, and California’s state gas tax was last raised in 1994. In California, we would need to raise gas taxes by 18 cents per gallon just to keep up with inflation. It should probably be hiked a lot more. And with a higher tax, the price at the pump would not swing around so much; gas prices in Europe showed much less volatility than here.

I’m not the only one advocating this: