I have 27 GB of Phish music, all legal, that would take 10 straight days to play through. This is moderate, as Phish collections go. They’re by far my favorite and most-listened-to band, and I’m not the only one: they’ve had a massive and devoted fanbase for most of my lifetime.
But Phish is surprisingly inaccessible to casual music listeners, so a lot of people who would otherwise like Phish either have never heard their music or have an inaccurate preconceived judgment about it.
I can’t blame them. Most people reading this, upon hearing about a band that sounds interesting, would go to iTunes and preview some of the band’s top singles or albums, maybe buying a few if they sound good. But this doesn’t work well for this band, or any band like it.
Phish is a jam band, and jam bands excel at live shows. Much of a jam band’s appeal is the improvisational, extended jams in and around their songs that often vary significantly between performances. But the studio albums only contain a single, well-polished, usually shortened version of each song that loses the variety, the energy, and much of the personality of the live performances.
And jam-band songs evolve over time. Usually, the studio-album version of a song (if it exists) is an early version, before a lot of its live performances. 1994’s studio version of “Down With Disease”, for example, is much shorter, slower, and more bland than the modern version.
If you’ve only ever heard a jam band’s studio albums, you’re missing out on the majority of their music, talent, and appeal.
So play this video (switch it to 720p for better sound quality), turn up the volume, and read on to see if this might be for you.
Why you might like Phish
If many of these are true, there’s a good chance you’ll like Phish:
You love music, you listen to a lot of music, and you feel noticeably happy and energized whenever you get into a new album or band.
You love musical complexity, and you’re not crazy about the lack of it in today’s pop music.
You consider most modern pop music “overproduced”.
You don’t easily tire of the songs you love and hear often.
You’re a sucker for a good electric-guitar solo. Your favorite part of one of your favorite rock songs is the quick little guitar riff toward the end, and you wish it was longer.
You prefer to buy and listen to full albums rather than singles. (Bonus points if you rarely use shuffle, preferring to listen to songs in album order.)
You need a lot of music to fill long periods, such as listening in headphones while working at a computer all day.
Why you might not like Phish
It’s not for everyone. You probably won’t like Phish if any of these are true:
You don’t like long songs, or songs with repetitive elements that build up over a long time. The well-known songs are often at least 8 minutes, and a typical show is nearly 3 hours.
You won’t tolerate flaws such as misplayed notes or missed lyrics. These are live, improvisational recordings where the fans expect a lot of variety, so mistakes are inevitable, and you’ll hear them in every show.
You care a lot about meaningful lyrics. If most Phish lyrics are meaningful, the meaning is way over my head.
You want your music to help you feel angry or angsty. Sorry, you won’t find anybody raging against the machine or mourning a failed relationship around here. Phish usually makes people feel energized and happy (which is why so many college kids smoke pot at the concerts). And the band shows none of the rockstar “screw you” ego: they get on stage, share the spotlight among the four members, play like crazy, have a lot of fun, and humbly thank the fans for our support.
You want your music to be available in the iTunes Store, possibly because you’re heavily invested in the Ping social network (someone must be, right?). While some live Phish is available in the iTunes Store, most of the shows aren’t, and they’re always cheaper and available sooner on LivePhish.
If these don’t concern you, you’re lucky, because being a Phish fan is pretty great.
Why it’s awesome to be a Phish fan
If this music resonates with you in the right way, you’re likely to get really into it, and all other music will seem simplistic and shallow for a long time. It’s like discovering great black coffee or a fine wine for the first time, after only ever having mass-produced mediocrity: whoah, there’s a lot going on there.
And if you end up loving it, you’re really in luck.
There’s a huge library of live show recordings, and most of them are sufficiently distinctive that there’s value in listening to a lot of them. This applies to individual songs, too: every time the band plays one of your favorites, it’s likely to be different enough from the others that you’ll enjoy it and appreciate the differences. (Once you’re a true geek, you’ll even rank your preferred performances of your favorite songs.)
You can download official, high-quality, legal, DRM-free MP3 recordings of every concert within hours after it ends from LivePhish.
You can play an “album” (a show) and not need to touch your music for hours. No skipping around, no strange back-to-back songs from shuffle. This is why I listen while I’m working: I can play hours of music I know I’ll like without getting distracted by bad track selections every three minutes.
Being a Phish fan is nothing like being a fan of traditional rock bands. I love the Foo Fighters, but in the last five years, they’ve only released two albums, with a combined length of less than two hours. I don’t think there’s much reason to see them in concert more than once (although this live play-through of their new album is great for the impressive display of stamina), and their studio albums really are the best representation of their music. I can be an active Foo Fighters fan for about one week per year, because there’s just not enough new stuff to keep me engaged more often, but Phish is cranking out many hours of new material every few months.
How to be a Phish fan
Telling a potential fan to skip the studio albums and listen to a band’s live shows isn’t very helpful. It’s easy to follow up on a recommendation for a traditional band’s newest album, but a touring jam band can produce many live shows each year, and they all look very similar.
Every fan will have a different idea of which one you should listen to first. My pick is December 30, 2010 at Madison Square Garden: it’s a great show that I think gives a representative overview of Phish’s style.1
So if you think you might like Phish, give it a try. Buy the entire show in MP3 format. It’s not a big risk at $9.95.
Then put on headphones, turn the volume up to at least medium, and listen all the way through while you’re doing whatever you usually do when listening to music. Then, ideally, play it again.
Even if you passed my guidelines above, you still might not like it. That’s fine. At least you tried, and now you can accurately say that you don’t like Phish when people like me try to tell you how great it is.
But you might like it.
And you might really like it.
In which case, you might have a hard time listening to anything else for a while.
Phish’s 33-show summer tour starts tomorrow night and runs through Labor Day weekend. I’ve preordered the entire thing.
Generally, I like the newest shows best. Many Phish purists will tell you that their performances from the ’90s are the best, but they’ve really come a long way since then, in my opinion for the better, and they’re almost a different band today. The sound quality is also much better for recent shows, especially starting with 2010’s.
If you’re looking to get more shows, my favorites tend to be toward the end of tours, since they make fewer mistakes and tend to really rock out in the jams.
Generally, two-day shows have more energy — they pull out some obscure songs in the three-day shows that are sometimes great but often dull. But I imagine every Phish fan, including future-you, will have a different opinion on this.
And if you get the rest of the 2010 New Year’s show at Madison Square Garden, which was pretty great, it’s worth seeing why Meatstick was 18 minutes long. ↩︎
The right laptop to get is the one that will be able to serve most of your needs, most of the time, with the fewest compromises on factors that matter to you.
One of the core tenets of happy computing is to have a holistic view of your overall intended usage that can help you distinguish between “needs” and simply “nice to haves”.
The iPod Classic still exists for people who “need” to bring their entire music collections with them everywhere. (Some people really need that, but most Classic buyers simply “need” it.) They can do that, but it comes with huge tradeoffs, most notably an outdated, limited design with an often-sluggish interface that misses out on the much more broad usefulness of the iPod Touch. And many Classic buyers would actually be much happier with a 32 GB Touch if they were willing to budge on their all-music-all-the-time “need”.
Many people have a similar issue identifying their true needs when choosing cars. They often choose based on remote “what-if” scenarios that they’ll almost never need — e.g. “I might need to haul furniture in here someday” — and get a big, unwieldy, expensive vehicle that grossly mismatches the way they actually use it the vast majority of the time. Or they go in the other direction and get an impractical, limited car like a two-seater — “I’ll just only ever have one person with me” — and then need to buy a second car because they so frequently exceed the limits of that one.1
Almost everyone can point to a handful of situations in which a given Apple laptop is impossible, impractical, or frustrating to use for a particular task. Some popular examples:
The lack of GPUs on the Airs and 13” MacBook Pro makes them run games and some pro media-processing apps very poorly, if they can run them at all.
The Air’s CPU is uncomfortably slow for heavy media processing.
None of them except the 11” Air can reliably be used on an airplane tray table if the person in front of you reclines their seat.
The Air’s lack of Firewire makes many media-production scenarios difficult or impossible. Some such scenarios even require ExpressCard, which is now only available on the 17” MacBook Pro.
It’s important to distinguish which of these types of needs, for you, are really “needs” or are just “I might want to do that someday, although realistically I probably won’t want to do it regularly within the lifespan of this laptop.” For instance, my current laptop needs are mostly satisfied by an Air because I have a Mac Pro at home for anything computationally intensive, and I know that the Air is mostly for lightweight tasks like email, web browsing, and writing. (But I hate having multiple systems, because sync sucks.)
Most people put far too much consideration on size and weight. There are situations in which this matters, such as the tray-table example, but evaluate your own situation before deciding based on that: How often do you travel on planes, how much time during the flight would you realistically be working on your laptop, and how bad would it be if you couldn’t?
Consider how “portable” you really need your laptop to be. Are you going to be carrying it significant distances every day? Or is it going to be sitting on one or two desks most of the time?
The laptops have huge differences in footprints and thicknesses. If you truly have a size restriction, that’s generally pretty inflexible. But it’s also rare.
Weight is another matter, since most people don’t carry the bare laptop — they carry it in a bag with other items. Consider how you carry it: how heavy is the bag? (Pack the bag normally and weigh it. You’ll be surprised how heavy it is.2) I once found that my everyday backpack was about 15 pounds, so whether I chose the 13” Air (3.0 lbs.) or the 15” matte MacBook Pro (5.2 lbs.) didn’t really matter. And when I started carrying a lighter bag with almost nothing in it, I found that I couldn’t really tell the difference between the 15” and the Air, since the entire bag weighed very little compared to the old one regardless of which laptop was in it.
Carry weight can be reduced with a conscious effort. Do you really need to bring the power brick back and forth every day, or can you just buy a second power adapter and keep it at work? Do you really need to carry that large paper notebook all the time, or would a smaller one suit your needs?
Perceived weight reductions are also powerful. Do you currently use a messenger bag or briefcase? (That’s probably horrible for your back if it weighs more than a few pounds.) Are you willing to try a backpack? Nice ones do exist, and if you’re carrying your laptop in one, you almost definitely won’t notice small weight differences.
Realistic evaluation like this can lead you to conclude that you don’t need a big, fast laptop because you don’t need its power, and you’d be happier overall with an ultralight like the 11” Air. Or it can make you realize that the larger3 laptops like the 15” aren’t that much less portable in your life, and you need their advantages often enough that the smaller ones would frustrate you.
I’ve been able to evaluate my needs (and “needs”) over time and decide that my next computer setup probably shouldn’t be a Mac Pro and an Air. I’d be served better most of the time by a decked-out 15” MacBook Pro. (Alex Payne was right.) And if an airplane passenger reclines the seat in front of me far enough that I can’t open the laptop’s lid fully, I’ll just use my iPad.
Sorry for the car analogy. For whatever it’s worth, I disagree with Ben’s classification, because I don’t think it’s possible to span a good car analogy across laptops and desktops. Sticking within the realm of laptops, I’d say the 11” Air is the Mazda Miata, the 13” Air is the Mini Cooper, the 13” Pro is the Audi A3, the 15” is the BMW 3-series, the 17” is the X5, and the 13” plastibook is the Nissan Cube.
(Most of those being luxury or premium models isn’t an accident.) ↩︎
Want to be even more sad about your bag’s total weight? Weigh it empty. Most bags, themselves, are much heavier than they need to be. ↩︎
We Mac geeks often forget how well-off we are. Ask a PC user how thin and light their high-specced 15” laptop is. The 15” MacBook Pro is thin and light relative to most laptops in use today. ↩︎
When you tell people what you do for a living, do you use the same language that they would use if they were describing it to someone else?
Discrepancies usually arise if your title is too specific or technical for most people to know or remember what it is, and you haven’t given a simple enough version for people outside of your field to understand. But often, it’s because your job title is a euphemism.
Sometimes, this is because the job isn’t very desirable, even if it’s a respectable and honest job. “Waste manager” and “sanitation engineer” sound better than “garbage man”.
But it could also be that your job is less important, less respected, or less ethical than you’d like to think. For instance, someone might say they’re in “direct marketing”, but most people would explain that as “junk mail” or “telemarketing”.
When people ask me what I do, I say, “I make an iPhone app.” They understand immediately, and explain it to others as, “He makes an iPhone app.” I never forget how fortunate I am that I can be proud of what I do.
If you had to explain your job the way other people do, would you be ashamed of what you do, or would you be proud?
If you can’t be proud of your real job title, maybe it’s time for a change.
I recently moved all of my domains away from GoDaddy, because they’re terrible.1
After soliciting registrar recommendations on Twitter, it seemed like the most-liked registrars were Namecheap, Hover, and Gandi, in descending order.
Whenever you solicit product or service recommendations, you need to put the results in context: most people are going to recommend what they use, so choices with a lot of recommendations might just be the most popular, not necessarily the best. It’s more significant when a responder has actually used multiple choices and recommends one over the others.
But most people haven’t used more than one or two domain registrars, because of the answer this question by David Bressler:
Why do you think it’s so hard to be a good registrar?
Because there’s very little incentive to be.
The reason GoDaddy is so successful is because they’re usually the cheapest. And for geeks like us who host elsewhere and don’t need a lot of support, domain registrars don’t need to do very much — it’s a commodity business, so for most of us, we’ll go wherever’s cheapest.
After that initial sale, we’re strongly locked in:
Most domains are set up once and then forgotten. We rarely need to interact with the registrar after the sale, so if there’s anything we don’t like about them, we’re only forced to deal with it (and only reminded that we might want to switch someday) a few times per year.
If we want to buy a new domain, it’s easiest to buy it at the registrar that we already use for our other domains.
There’s almost never a driving reason to switch away from a registrar with any urgency or timeliness. Most domains happily auto-renew every year, auto-billing their associated credit cards, without any trouble or changes.
The process of transferring out is complex, most of us have never done it so it’s intimidating, and it can cause an hours-long DNS outage if it’s not done perfectly.
You can only transfer a domain once every 60 days, so even if you move somewhere and hate it immediately, you can’t do anything about it for two months, after which you’ll probably decide that you’ll deal with it “someday” and just let it keep auto-renewing.
So even if you aren’t crazy about your registrar, the lock-in effects are so strong that you’re very unlikely to ever switch away: it’s just easier to keep letting your domains auto-renew every year. This creates very little incentive for registrars to provide great service or invest much in their control panels and other after-purchase costs.
Since most buyers choose whatever’s cheapest and rarely reconsider their choice, GoDaddy wins most of the time, and they have no reason to treat their customers any better.
The biggest question I get asked when I mention that I’ve left GoDaddy is: For who?
From the recommendations for Namecheap, Hover, and Gandi, I chose Gandi because I wanted everything under one roof, and they were the only one of the three who could register my one .FM domain and also sold SSL certificates.
The transfers were fine… except I had a huge DNS outage on Marco.org because its DNS was hosted by GoDaddy, and Gandi wouldn’t prepopulate its DNS servers with its info before it arrived. Their support staff took two days to answer that question. And I broke my “all under one roof” requirement the other day by buying Instapaper’s SSL certificate from RapidSSL because my Gandi SSL certificate — which was supposed to be free with the transfer, but wasn’t, and I got tired of waiting and just paid for a standalone order — still hasn’t been issued after 6 days. (I emailed them this morning and asked them to just cancel the order at this point. No response yet.) And their web control panel, despite being a lot better than GoDaddy’s, isn’t great — it’s simply adequate, with common operations still requiring too many clicks and still showing a lot of little bugs and update lag. (I don’t know yet if any registrar has a great control panel.)
Over the years, with my own domains and various consulting clients’, I’ve used Register, GoDaddy, PairNIC, and Gandi. I wouldn’t really recommend any of them, but Gandi seems the least bad among them.
But next time I buy a new domain name, I’m buying it at Hover. And if it goes well, I’ll probably move all of my domains there. Someday.
The elephant wasn’t the reason I moved away, but it was the final push that inspired me to leave them after years of wanting to.
Oh, and you can’t delete a GoDaddy account. (Really makes you want to sign up, right?) But you can cancel all of your purchased products in it, remove all of your payment information, and change all required contact fields (email, mailing address, phone, etc.) to fake values. ↩︎
informal derogatory:a term used to describe people who bought a product that competes with the one you bought, which is probably more popular than your choice, for reasons that you wish to discredit or diminish because you’re secretly afraid or upset that you made the wrong choice.
Google, please set a price — any price — that you determine is necessary to keep anyone’s account running smoothly at all times. I’ll gladly pay it. I don’t care if it’s $100 a year or $1,000 a year. It would be worth it.
People often talk about the desire to pay for Twitter either for better uptime or for more features, but the situation with Gmail is much more serious. Unlike Twitter, I conduct basically all my business through Gmail. I simply need it to work for me at all times. And I’m happy to pay for that to be the case.
I’ve seen many similar pleas recently whenever any popular, free web service has problems: “Please, let us pay you so there won’t be any problems!”
But it’s an impossible dream. If a web service is popular enough that you hear about it when it has downtime or major issues, it’s probably a large, very complex system. 100% uptime is effectively impossible. There are far too many moving parts that fail, resources that run out, boundaries that get crossed, and bugs that make themselves known at inconvenient times.
The operators of such services jump through hoops behind the scenes to make sure that bugs don’t get shipped, failures are routed around, and expansions happen behind the scenes without bothering the users. But nobody’s perfect, nobody has infinite resources, and nobody can predict every problem before it happens.
That said, there’s never any guarantee that a service that has been good in the past will always be good in the future. Siegler’s (and TechCrunch’s) problem isn’t that Gmail has been unreliable (which really isn’t new), but that there’s no good alternative once you’ve invested heavily in it — either by giving out a @gmail.com email address, depending on features that other providers don’t support, or growing accustomed to (and dependent on) the Gmail web interface.
For something as important as email, I’ve never trusted everything to a proprietary provider. My email address has never ended in someone else’s domain name, and has never been hosted in any way that would preclude me from easily switching to another provider.
Since 2007, I’ve used FastMail, a paid IMAP host, for my @marco.org email addresses (with the $40/year “Enhanced” personal plan). Rather than using its (unsophisticated) web interface, I use Apple’s Mail app.
FastMail’s uptime has been incredibly good — I don’t remember the last time I saw any downtime, but I’m sure that the total downtime I’ve ever seen from them has been less than an hour. But if it ever starts to suck, it’s just IMAP, and I own the domain, so I can switch to any other IMAP host easily (or self-host it, which I don’t recommend, but it’s always an option).1
All of my messages are downloaded by Mail and stored as files locally, so if a data-loss disaster were to happen at FastMail (which can happen to any service, even Google’s), I can recover my email from my personal backups.
You must own any data that’s irreplaceable to you.
By relying on a hosted service with no direct alternatives or difficult outbound migrations, you’re giving up a level of control that you shouldn’t for something as important as your business email.
Gmail does have IMAP, but it’s extremely unreliable and buggy. After years of fighting with it, we recently moved my wife’s email from Gmail to her own domain and FastMail, and we’ll never look back. ↩︎
Twitter’s official iPhone app, formerly Loren Brichter’s Tweetie and an otherwise awesome client, got a lot of negative reactions from the recent addition of the Quick Bar, a mandatory trending-topics banner on top of the tweet list. A lot of people really hate it, calling it the “dickbar” and often abandoning the Twitter app entirely because of it.
Its initial implementation as a floating overlay over anything you were doing in the app was far worse. Now, it’s just at the top of the main timeline, and it scrolls with the list. But it’s still offensive to most people who hated its debut, because making it scroll with the list didn’t solve the problem of it being there and being mandatory.
The reason Twitter added the Quick Bar was, presumably, to be able to feature ads, which show the “Promoted” badge:
If it only ever showed ads like this, I don’t think the response would be so negative. The bigger problem is that it’s showing a random “trending” topic or hash-tag most of the time. Here are a few of the topics I’ve seen in the last 24 hours:
LovatoAndGomez
ChrisBrownFAMEAlbum
Gus Johnson
#100factsaboutme
Wolverines
Cingular
GSM
#michigan
It’s a news ticker limited to one-word items, lacking any context, broadcasting mostly topics that I don’t understand, recognize, or care about. It’s nonsensical. At worst, it can offend. At best, it will confuse.
If Twitter wants to run an ad at the top of the scrollview, Twiterrific-style, I’m all for it. It’s your platform. Monetize away. But the problem with the trend bar implementation is that I’m being subjected to what I find to be the poor taste of millions of mouth-breathing buffoons in my own timeline.
What’s worse is that it’s shown in a context — my Twitter timeline — that otherwise contains only content that I’ve (indirectly) chosen to put there. (I’ve chosen who to follow based on what I want to see in my timeline.) I’m not interested in sports or celebrities or middle-school survey trends, so I don’t follow people who overwhelm my timeline with those unwanted topics.
But now, my timeline looks like this:
Content that I’ve chosen to follow, and… Michigan. I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean. Presumably, there’s some bit of news happening that’s relevant to the state of Michigan, and Twitter wants users to tap on this disembodied word for a reason that’s not made clear to us.
So I tapped on it.
When presented with this screen — which was important enough for Twitter to be worth alienating vast numbers of influential users with the mandatory Quick Bar — what am I supposed to do?
I see, from top to bottom: intentional spam, unintentional spam, and a random person’s frivolous, meaningless tweet about sports that I don’t care about. (I scrolled down and it only got worse.) I guess Michigan is a trending topic because something important happened with a Michigan sports team.
What am I supposed to do with this information?
Am I supposed to tweet about it? If so, why doesn’t the interface encourage that? Even if I hit the (effectively invisible) New Tweet button from this screen, my tweet isn’t prepopulated with “#michigan”, so whatever I say in response won’t be included here.
Am I supposed to save this search, which the interface does encourage, so I can see this topic again in a few days or weeks or months, when it’s presumably no longer coherent or useful? (Ignoring, for the moment, that it’s neither coherent nor useful now.)
Am I supposed to read these tweets? If so, why haven’t stronger anti-spam methods or human filtering mechanisms been employed to keep the stream somewhat readable? As-is, it’s a huge and easily exploited spam target, and it shows.
We don’t know Twitter’s true reason for adding the Quick Bar. Presumably, it’s part of a longer-term strategy. But today, from here, it looks like an extremely poorly thought-out feature, released initially with an extremely poor implementation, with seemingly no benefits to users.
This is so jarring to us because it’s so unlike the Twitter that we’ve known to date. Twitter’s product direction is usually incredibly good and well-thought-out, and their implementation is usually careful and thoughtful.
And in the context of this app, most of which was carefully and thoughtfully constructed by Loren Brichter before Twitter bought it from him, we’re accustomed to Brichter’s even higher standards, which won Tweetie an Apple Design Award in 2009. (I suspect he had little to no authority in the Quick Bar’s existence, design, or placement, and it’s probably killing him inside.)
The Quick Bar isn’t offensive because we don’t want Twitter making money with ads, or because we object to changes in the interface.
It’s offensive because it’s deeply bad, showing complete disregard for quality, product design, and user respect, and we’ve come to expect a lot more from Twitter.
In the last decade, Apple introduced their first line of notebooks that didn’t have dial-up modems built in, because dial-up modems were on their way out and most people didn’t need them anymore. But for the few that still did, they offered a little USB modem to ease the transition:
Three years ago, Apple introduced the MacBook Air, their first notebook that abandoned the optical drive, because optical drives were (and still are) on their way out. But they also sold this USB optical drive to ease the transition:
One year ago, Apple introduced the iPad, their first “computer”, sort of, that didn’t have a keyboard. But since keyboards are required for a lot of productivity tasks, they also made it compatible with Bluetooth keyboards and released the Keyboard Dock:
Apple went out of their way to convince the world that the iPad was a legitimate productivity device:
Most of us tried to rationalize the iPad’s purchase by telling ourselves that it could often replace a laptop. The productivity apps and the Keyboard Dock support that view: that the iPad is a new kind of computer that might replace your traditional computer, and therefore, it’s rational to spend over $500 for one.
But I don’t think that’s what happened in practice.
The iPad isn’t really a great “office productivity” device, in the traditional PC sense. It can be used that way in some cases, but it’s rarely the best tool for the job.
I never liked the Keyboard Dock (or using a Bluetooth keyboard with the iPad). It looked like a temporary hack, like the USB dial-up modem: a bridge from the old to the new until people didn’t need it anymore. And it was clunky: not only was its protruding shape awkward and difficult to pack in thin bags, but using a keyboard at all in iOS was (and remains) half-baked: users needed to constantly reach up and touch the screen in use. If you need a physical keyboard very often with the iPad, you’re probably better served using a laptop, especially now that the 11” MacBook Air exists.
It seems that Apple has discontinued the Keyboard Dock with the launch of the iPad 2, which confirms that they saw it as a temporary hack, too. And rather than issue a huge update to the iWork productivity apps, they branched out into different uses with iMovie and Garage Band, and beefed up the graphics processor more than any other upgrade to strongly benefit games.
I don’t think this was their plan from the start — I think Apple didn’t know any better than we did, a year ago, whether the iPad was going to end up as a productivity device in practice. They probably thought, like we did, that it would replace laptops a lot more often.
But, as often happens in technology, the iPad hasn’t “killed” the laptop at all — it has simply added a new role for itself. And that role doesn’t include office productivity for most of us.
Apple is now adapting to the market’s actual use by retreating somewhat from office productivity and pushing strongly into new territory — casual media creation — to see if that gets a stronger uptake in practice. I think it will be a lot more interesting than office productivity, but there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done in iOS to make it practical (especially regarding file transfers with computers).
Like Photo Booth on the Mac (and now also the iPad), casual iPad users will have fun playing around with GarageBand for a while. Maybe even iMovie once or twice.
I still don’t think Apple has found the sweet spot for the iPad’s usage: the ideal role it fills in personal computing. And I don’t think we, as developers or iPad owners, have found it, either. But I know that sweet spot exists, and for a computer category that has only existed for one year, we’re rushing towards it remarkably quickly.
This is why the iPad is truly exciting: we can see that it has great potential, and while we don’t quite know its nature yet, we’re pretty sure that it’s huge.
I wasn’t always a fan of Apple’s requirement that all App Store submissions be reviewed by a fairly opaque process before release, which often led to confusing or unfair rejections.
But over the last year, I’ve grown to appreciate app review and the immense staff it must take to operate at its scale. We usually only see inflammatory blog posts and news articles about app review’s failures, while almost nobody ever mention its benefits. So I’m going to start.
First and foremost, the review process has created a level of consumer confidence and risk-taking that has enabled the entire iOS app market to be far bigger and healthier than anyone expected. Average people — the same people who have been yelled at for decades for clicking on the wrong button on the wrong incomprehensible dialog box and messing up their computers — can (and do) confidently buy large quantities of inexpensive apps impulsively, without having to worry that any of them will “break” their iPhones or iPads, rip them off, destroy their data, or require them to embarrassingly visit the corporate IT department, the Geek Squad, or their computer-savvy relatives (us) for help. Part of this is due to the highly sandboxed architecture enforced by the OS, but a big part is the app review process.
For software makers and trademark owners, Apple’s review process significantly cuts down on name squatters, illegal clones, piracy apps, legally risky apps (for better and for worse), and trademark infringers.1
The result of these processes is that Apple can more easily let us use their payment system without scaring their lawyers, devaluing their store’s image, or incurring high fraud and chargeback fees from their payment processors. Being in their storefront and billing system gives a lot of people an extremely easy way to pay us.
So we have a huge number of potential customers who are very comfortable installing a lot of apps and can buy ours by simply entering a password. Without app review, that market would be very different.2
Yes, they occasionally make mistakes. But these are humans — humans that, as far as I can tell, work their asses off to keep up with the massive volume of app submissions. (They seem to work a lot of overtime, too. As far as I can tell, they’re all in California, yet I’ve had apps approved late at night and on weekends regularly.)
Think of what that job must be like: plowing through an endless barrage of mostly terrible app submissions, many of which are unsuitable for the Store3, trying to evaluate people’s work against a very long list of often-subjective criteria, with the ever-present threat that an inconsistent or wrong decision might result in a shitstorm of bad press. Oh, and they only get a few minutes to decide on each app.
(And think of the email they must get.)
Despite all of that, app review gets better over time. As they’ve needed to handle ever-growing volumes of app submissions, average review times have stabilized and have actually started to get faster.
The occasional app-review mistake, in either execution or policy-making, is understandable and unavoidable. And I’d say that all of the benefits make the occasional pitfalls completely worthwhile.
App Review team: Thank you, and keep up the good work.
It’s not perfect, but compare any problematic search to the same search on the Android or Chrome storefronts and see how much Apple is keeping out. ↩︎
Fortunately, you can see for yourself what it would be like by looking at a competing platform’s app marketplace. It’s not pretty, and it’s not nearly as profitable. I think I’ll stay over here. ↩︎
Think of the crappiest iPhone app you ever saw that made it into the store. Now imagine what they must reject. ↩︎
I get these questions frequently. Keep in mind that I only “got started” programming once, and that was a very long time ago during which I was primarily thinking about which girls I liked (since I was 13 years old). But here’s how I think it works, especially for adults coming to programming for the first time:
The best way to get started is to rethink the question to be more pragmatic:
What do you want to make first?
Be specific. The answer isn’t “iPhone apps” or “websites”. An iPhone app or a website to do what, exactly?
If you don’t have a specific idea that you’re motivated to create, you’ll have a very hard time getting started and plowing through the hard parts. And there will certainly be hard parts: you’ll get frustrated, go to Google, find some guidance, bang against it for a while, then finally get it working and experience immense satisfaction for as long as you can go before hitting the next wall of frustration. Fortunately, as you get more experienced, you’ll hit those walls less frequently.
If you have a specific idea, the goal of achieving it and the incremental progress along the way will motivate you to keep going. If you don’t, every little frustration will be an excuse to give up.
Once you have that specific idea, the other questions become much easier to answer:
Which language should I learn first? The most platform-native, modern, commonly used language for the kind of thing you want to make. If it’s an iOS or Mac app, use Objective-C. If it’s a web app, use Python with the Django framework, or Ruby with the Rails framework. If it’s a Windows app, use C#.
No language is “too hard” for first-timers. Programming is naturally complex and unforgiving, and that’s going to be intimidating at first. You’ll face the same challenges as a new programmer in any language.
How should I get started? Search Google for a basic tutorial or find an entry-level book on how to make the kind of thing you want to make in your chosen language. Do a few tutorial projects, learn how to modify them to get a bit more comfortable with the language, then start your own project and deal with each wall as you hit it.
If you find that you truly enjoy programming, you’re very lucky: it’s a highly fulfilling hobby and can become a lucrative career if you want it to be.
Even the gadget blogs have a hard time feigning enthusiasm for this week’s hot Android phone because they still haven’t taken the shrinkwrap off of last week’s.
Wait, the stream of high-quality, constantly improving hardware with options to fit different desires is a problem for Android?
Yes, it is, for a few major reasons.
Most people don’t read gadget blogs or even know what Android is. They generally hear about individual phones, without distinguishing much based on operating system. (They don’t know what those are, either.)
The highest-profile Android launch that seemed to meaningfully reach the masses was the Motorola Droid, primarily because it was boosted by a massive Verizon television and in-store ad campaign.
But since then, very few non-geeks know about individual Android handsets. They change so frequently, and are so numerous, that there’s never much of an opportunity for a meaningful buzz to generate around any of them. Nobody’s lining up to buy them. CNN’s not covering their launches. Consumer Reports isn’t vigorously testing their antennas. The Daily Show isn’t making jokes about them. So the mass market doesn’t really respond to individual devices. Even if Uncle Joe brings his fancy Android Something to Thanksgiving and your mother is impressed by it and wants to buy one, by the time her contract expires in two months and she goes to the Verizon store, it’s gone.
The incessant glut of Android phones creates other problems in practice, too:
Accessory markets never fully develop. People really like cases for their phones, and if the iPhone has 300 cases for it including that gummy pink one they really like, and the Samsung Whocares XL only has a few drab OEM plastic things available, a nontrivial portion of the market will choose the iPhone on that reason alone.
There’s also more practical concerns: batteries, docks, speakers, and other useful accessories are usually phone-specific, and if the manufacturer (and the market) will only care about your phone for three months until the next minor revision comes out, your options will be very limited, both in the store and when you’re traveling and forgot something.
There are so many variations in screen size, screen type, physical size, hardware sensors, hardware buttons, and computational performance between devices that developers, including Google itself, have a very hard time making great software for the platform.
The manufacturers and carriers have very little incentive to maintain the software on devices that are still relatively new and under contract, because they want everyone buying the newest ones instead. We’re already seeing carriers and some manufacturers refusing to release new Android versions to handsets that were launched as recently as 6 months ago, even though most users bought them with 2-year contracts.
People hate choosing between similar things. The more choice we have at the time of purchase, the more stress we feel making the choice, and the less satisfied we feel afterward because we’re worried that we made the wrong choice.
The entire Android device market seems to be made specifically for gadget blogs and early adopters.
But for the mass market, the constant flood of Android devices is indeed a problem.
Not just Android
This effect isn’t limited to Android. One of the main reasons why Windows Phone 7 had a relatively underwhelming launch is that there was no single “Windows phone” to gather buzz, press, extensive reviews, and customer affinity.
Instead, we were greeted with a bevy of hardware choices that we neither asked for nor wanted. Rather than committing to one device — taking a stand and saying, “This is what we think is best, and we’ll support it for the next two years” — Microsoft punted, leaving the manufacturers to give us too many fragmented choices that will likely face many of the same issues we see in the Android market.
People whose opinions I respect have all been echoing the same sentiment — Google, the once essential tool, is somehow losing its edge. The spammers, scrapers, and SEO’ed-to-the-hilt content farms are winning.
I’ve been frustrated as well by Google’s apparent defeat by spam. It’s not a sudden issue — it’s been gradually worsening for a few years.
When I ask Google for something, it’s usually from these types of queries:
Address bar: Where is this specific page that I know exists but I don’t know its URL? Examples:
usps hold mail form
google closure compiler
Reference: What is the answer to this specific, unambiguous question? Examples:
2010 ira contribution limit
hotmail iPhone setup
Guide: Where is some good information on a specific topic? Examples:
electrical outlet wiring
glass kettle safe on gas stove
Product research: What are some opinions, recommendations, reviews, or even general information for a certain kind of product or need, even a specific one?
large sensor compact camera
garage door opener review
westchester duct cleaning
Over the years, the impact of spam — mostly affiliate marketing and auto-generated splogs — has decimated the usefulness of the “product research” category. It’s impossible to do any meaningful product research with Google.
But recently, spam has taken over the “guide” query results, and even many “reference” queries. It wouldn’t surprise me if spam even started defeating the “address bar” queries — Google’s ranking algorithms recently have had a lot of trouble detecting the canonical source of duplicated content.
In other words, it’s now nearly impossible to find good results for many commonly asked types of queries.
Part of what exacerbates this is the apparent explosion recently of cheap-“content” sites that try to answer every search query ever asked. Like affiliate-marketing spam, much of it seems to be generated by humans (technically — I wouldn’t classify them as such), but it’s functionally useless: sites like About.com, eHow, and countless clones with .info domain names that promise to address every niche question and informational topic, but whose content lacks all quality and substance.
Google was designed to play the role of a passive observer of the internet: web content was created for people, not specific Google queries, and Google would look around, take inventory of what was available, and give it to people who asked. Google’s general, big-picture algorithms probably haven’t changed much since the days when this was relatively accurate.
But that’s no longer what web content looks like. Now, massive amounts of technically-not-spam sites are generated by penny-hungry affiliate marketers and sleazy web “content” startups to target long-tail Google queries en masse, scraping content from others or paying low-wage workers to churn out formulaic, minimally nutritious pages to answer them.
Searching Google is now like asking a question in a crowded flea market of hungry, desperate, sleazy salesmen who all claim to have the answer to every question you ask.
“Hey, anyone know how to wire an outlet?”
“Did you say ‘how to wire an outlet’?”
“I can help you with how to wire an outlet!”
“Here is info on how to wire an outlet!”
“Bargain prices on how to wire an outlet!”
“Guide to wiring outlets in New York, right here!”
And none of them actually know a damn thing about what you’re asking, of course — they’re just offering meaningless, valueless words that seem to form sentences until you actually try to make use of them.
They call this “content”. But it’s not, really — it’s filler. And by a more common-sense definition, it’s spam. But Google either doesn’t think so, or is so overwhelmed by its volume that it has seemingly stopped trying to keep it under control. (I’m betting on the former.)
One solution may be for Google to radically change their algorithms and policies for web search to de-emphasize phrase-matching and more strongly prioritize inbound links and credibility. And, in what’s probably a huge departure for them, have human employees use their opinions of site quality to manually adjust the relevance of domains.
But I doubt we’ll see real progress. Instead, I expect Google’s unwillingness to address this issue to create a critical-mass demand — and hopefully, then, a supply — of good content, reference information, and product recommendations.
Much of this will be (or currently is) solved the old-fashioned way: personal recommendations and trusted authorities. But these can’t cover the breadth of available information that web searchers need. I don’t know what will, or when, but it’s desperately needed.
There’s an iPad market, and the iPad could be classified as a tablet, from a hardware-centric viewpoint. But the market for non-iPad tablets is about as big today as it was before the iPad, which isn’t nothing, but it’s close enough to nothing that Apple doesn’t need to worry about it.
How many people do you know who wanted or received an iPad for Christmas?
Alright, same question, but this time, for the Samsung Galaxy Tab or any other tablet that’s not the iPad. (Kindles are not tablets. The new Nook Color might be. You can count it if you’re arguing with me.)
Now, from both groups, exclude those who know what RSS is, because we don’t represent the bulk of the market. How big is that second group now?
Before the iPad, tablets were a tough sell:
Very little software is designed for tablet use. Usually, touch- or stylus-input compatibility is bolted onto traditional computer OSes and applications, resulting in inconsistent and usually poor usability.
Productivity apps are difficult on tablets because they lack physical keyboards, and substitutes (on-screen keyboards or handwriting recognition) are far less efficient for many common tasks.
Tablets usually cost as much as low-end laptops, but are far less functional in the hands of most users.
Their size is too large for constant carrying, so you won’t always have your tablet with you — and in most situations in which you’d be able to practically bring a tablet with you, you could also bring a small laptop.
This applies whether it’s a 7-inch or a 10-inch form factor. The recent debate about 7-inch tablets is misguided: neither one will always be in your pocket, and neither one is a full-featured laptop. They’re in the same category of practicality and portability. They’re two different approaches to the same problem, with nearly all of the same benefits and drawbacks.
Tablets’ limitations prevent many people from replacing laptops with them, so they’re just an additional expense and yet another gadget to maintain and keep charged.
The lack of graceful software is the most fatal problem: bad software’s limitations, frustrations, poor designs, and bugs hinder or prevent the delight and attraction that make people start rationalizing away the other problems because they just want this cool new thing. And that’s critical: without that inexplicable desire that people get when they pick one up and play with it for a minute, people will start asking rational questions like “Do I really need this for anything?” and “Will I actually bring this anywhere?” that kill the mass-market demand for unnecessary $500 gadgets pretty quickly.
Apple could solve the software problem exceptionally well, putting them in a strong position to release the first mass-market tablet that had a chance of being successful. So they did. And they ignored the other tablet problems, for the most part: they did what they could to minimize them where possible, but they’re all still very good reasons for many people not to buy iPads. Fortunately, there are millions of other people swayed by the appeal of this low-needs, tactile, and downright fun computer because of its incredibly good software.
But no other device maker today can solve the software problem as well as Apple did.
Most of them are hardware companies relying on someone else — Google or Microsoft — for the majority (or the entirety) of the software.
Neither Google nor Microsoft will ever be able to tailor their software to other manufacturers’ specific (and varied) hardware devices as well as Apple can (and does) with theirs.
And, like they’ve done so far with Android, the hardware manufacturers will continue to attempt to make their own user-facing applications and front-end interfaces, but these usually suck. (Other people may describe “suck” with kinder, apologist adjectives like “getting better” and “not bad”.)
These manufacturers aren’t software companies: they’re hardware companies that write software out of necessity. Apple is a software company that makes hardware out of necessity. The software side of a modern computing platform is far more difficult and expensive to create and maintain than the hardware. Anyone can cobble together the same processors, DRAM, flash, and radios as Apple, put them into a plastic case, and run a commodity OS on them with slight front-end customizations. But not everyone can create an entire software platform.
It’s not just a matter of interface design. Apple has built an entire ecosystem to support and enrich the iPad for both customers and developers. To be competitive, a newcomer to the tablet software market needs to replicate or sidestep the need for nearly all of Apple’s major efforts, including synchronization of media and data with Windows PCs and Macs, integration with popular web services, an integrated payment system that customers will actually use at a reasonable rate, a well-stocked music and video storefront, plenty of high-quality third-party apps and fun games, a sophisticated SDK and development environment, widespread retail availability and customer support, and an assortment of good first- and third-party accessories to fulfill common needs (cases, chargers, docks, screen protectors, extended batteries) and give the device new uses (tripods, speakers, styluses, input and output adapters, wall and car mounts).
Because when normal people — not gadget bloggers and geeks like us — need to consider an alternative to the iPad, they’re not just thinking of Apple’s lack of “openness” (as Google so vaguely and poorly defines it in relation to Android) or the iPad’s lack of some individual hardware feature. Buying an alternative means giving up Apple’s entire ecosystem. That’s worth it to some buyers, but it’s incredibly impractical for many.
A successful mass-market iPad competitor needs to be so good that people will ignore all of that, buy it in large quantities, and let it develop its own entire ecosystem.
But when the device-of-the-moment is so short-lived that accessory markets never develop, and the hardware fragmentation and shoddy craftsmanship prevents the software from ever getting good, and developers need to suffer through immature tools to release apps that then don’t make much money, that’s unlikely to happen.
We got FiOS installed today. There was a convincing bundle with land-line phone service, and since both Verizon and AT&T have spotty coverage in the area, we took the option.
But we needed an actual phone to plug into the wall during the installation.
So, over Thanksgiving, my mother generously gave me her rotary phone from Brooklyn in the 1970s, which has been in full-time use for over 30 years:
It’s a Western Electric Model 500. It still works flawlessly and has required no maintenance or repair at all except for a replacement cord every decade or so. (It even still has their old 212 phone number typed on the card in the dial hub.)
It rings satisfyingly and substantially, since there are actually two little bells in there that get struck with a little hammer, 10 times per second each, elegantly alternating with the 20 Hz AC ring current’s cycles.
These phones were owned by Bell and leased to customers (my parents presumably stole this one when they moved out of Brooklyn). This meant that the incentives were the opposite of today’s: Bell was encouraged to build the sturdiest, most reliable phones possible, because if anything went wrong, Bell had to send technicians out for repairs at their expense. Today’s awful plastic phones are lucky to last a day past their one-year warranties.
The FiOS technician didn’t even flinch when I pointed to this rotary phone, older than both of us, sitting on the floor in an empty room of an empty house, and said that it was the only phone we owned.
And I can report, for anyone curious, that rotary dialing works perfectly well on FiOS digital phone lines.
Some people buy too many shoes or collectible figurines. I buy headphones.
I currently have four pairs: two full-sized pairs for home and office use, and two portable pairs for riding the train and walking.
From left to right:
Beyerdynamic DT-880, very “open” headphones which let a lot of sound in and out, sound amazing, and are very comfortable. But their sound is so audible (and annoying) to others nearby that I can only recommend them for situations in which no other people will be in the same room. (previously)
Sennheiser HD 280 Pro, closed headphones that I would choose without hesitation if I could only own one pair of headphones and needed them mostly at home or work (especially work). (previously)
Bowers & Wilkins (B&W) P5, portable “luxury” headphones, and the only ones I own with the iPhone-compatible volume-clicker/microphone thing in the cable. (It’s identical to the Apple clicker, but black. Must’ve licensed it from Apple.) UPDATE:Found a fatal flaw.
Sennheiser PX 200-II, my lightest and smallest set and the only reasonably foldable ones, but they don’t sound particularly great and have a fatally annoying volume-knob module in the middle of the cable, and its clothing clip has already broken off. (previously)
I just got the B&W P5 at Apple’s Black Friday sale (for $72 off) to replace the PX 200-II, but when we were in a very quiet room later that night, Tiff could hear my music a bit too clearly from a few feet away.
I was worried that my music may be annoyingly audible to nearby train passengers — after all, one reason to buy closed headphones is to avoid that — and I really don’t want to be That Guy.
So when I got home, I devised a test to compare all of my headphones and see if the P5 leaked too much sound for social comfort. But I don’t have an SPL meter, so I improvised:1
Obviously, the open DT 880 leaks far more sound than the closed models, which wasn’t a surprise.
The other results are pretty good news for the P5: surprisingly, the big 280 Pro that I thought was completely sealed from the outside world leaked just as much sound as the P5 and the PX 200-II, which isn’t much but is audible in very quiet rooms or at very close range.
And none of the closed headphones were as quiet at close range as I thought. Sorry for all of the Phish, Topherchris.
This wasn’t 100% scientific: in addition to whatever nitpicky details I’m not thinking of, since they all take different amounts of current to yield the same output volume, I had to estimate consistent volume levels across all of the headphones. ↩︎
A common fallacy is assuming that any new platform in an exciting market — recently, smartphones and tablet computers — will be flooded with developers as soon as it’s released, as if developers are just waiting outside the gates, hungrily waiting to storm in.
In two recent cases, that’s exactly what happened: the iPhone and the iPad. (And probably the Mac App Store next.) So important people, including the tech press, consumers, and many hardware manufacturers themselves, assume that every new hardware platform will be greeted with the same rush of high-quality software.
Steve Jobs knows this is wrong, even though his company is the beneficiary of the best cases of the supposed effect. As he said, in the recent earnings call:
You’re looking at it wrong. You’re looking at it as a hardware person in a fragmented world. You’re looking at it as a hardware manufacturer that doesn’t really know much about software, who doesn’t think about an integrated product but assumes the software will somehow take care of itself. And you’re sitting around saying, well, how can we make this cheaper? Well, we can put a smaller screen on it, and a slower processor, and less memory, and you assume that the software will somehow just come alive on this product that you’re dreaming up, but it won’t. … Most [developers] will not follow you.
The problem is that hardware manufacturers and tech journalists assume that the hardware just needs to exist, and developers will flock to it because it’s possible to write software for it. But that’s not why we’re making iPhone and iPad software, yet those are the basis for the theory.
We’re making iPhone software primarily for three reasons:
Dogfooding: We use iPhones ourselves.
Installed base: A ton of other people already have iPhones.
Profitability: There’s potentially a lot of money in iPhone apps.
Of course, the last two are related: it’s hard to have one without the other, but subtle implementation or demographic differences can make a huge installed base yield relatively low profitability.1
Without dogfooding, we aren’t motivated to make our software with craftsmanship and pride.
Without an installed base, too few people will be able to buy our software for it to be worth generalizing and releasing.
Without profitability, we can’t afford to make and support it.
For most platforms, all three conditions need to be met for a significant number of developers to justify writing software for them.2
This worked so well for the iPhone because we already had iPhones for a year before we could make apps for them. Thousands of developers already owned and loved their iPhones: they were so good that we all bought them without having any apps at all. And on day one of the App Store, there were already 6 million iPhones in the world. (Three days later, there were 7 million.) And the app-buying process couldn’t be easier: it was, and remains, the easiest purchasing process in the entire software industry. Dogfooding, installed base, and profitability were all very strong.
The iPad was trickier: it started with an installed base of zero. But the product was so good and so compelling that we all knew that it would sell like crazy from day one. And it was so good that we all got iPads, too, solving the dogfooding issue. And since it retained the same easy purchasing process as the iPhone App Store, and we knew it would have a big installed base shortly, the profitability was promising as well. So a bunch of us made great iPad apps.
Now, consider this fall’s tablet computers. Can you say with confidence that any of them will address these three needs well enough, and for enough developers, to ensure a steady supply of quality software?
I can’t.
For instance, both BlackBerry and Android have huge installed bases, but their marketplaces and payment procedures significantly reduce the profitability of maintaining good apps on their platforms. ↩︎
At least one condition being extremely powerful can justify shortcomings in the others. For instance, a lot of developers who don’t particularly care for Windows make Windows software anyway because of its huge installed base. And some developers make software for far less popular devices because they own them and want the software for themselves (like my Kindle support) despite the low likely profitability. But for the most part, a platform needs all three conditions to be strong. ↩︎
Apple’s recently announced App Store for the Mac is a Really Big Deal™, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment. But a lot of existing Mac developers have pointed out major issues or unknowns that need to be addressed:
Will App Store apps be required to be sold exclusively in the App Store? (My guess: No.)
If so, how different would another “edition” of the app need to be for Apple to consider it a separate app and permissible to be sold elsewhere? (The vagary of this is why I guessed “No” to exclusivity.)
If not, will a publisher be allowed to charge a different prices in other places? Could they, for instance, charge 20% less on their websites so they’d attract savvy buyers to get it directly and still make more money since Apple’s taking 30%? (My guess: Yes.)
The prohibition on private API usage will keep a lot of popular Mac apps out of the Store. Are they serious about that? (My guess: Yes.)
Will there be any good way for developers to get customer lists from App Store buyers? (My guess: No.)
Will there be any good ways to “crossgrade” buyers from the retail edition of an app to the App Store edition without making them pay again in full? (My guess: No.)
Will time-limited trials be permitted? (My guess: No.)
Will upgrade pricing for new versions be implemented? (My guess: No.)
Will refunds be any easier? (My guess: No.)
Since almost all of these are likely to be inconvenient at best (and often dealbreakers) for current Mac developers, it’s easy to miss the likely intention and likely effects of this.
The likely intention
I’m guessing this is what Apple has in mind. If not, this is at least what I think is likely to happen:
Actually, the scale’s off.
This is the much more likely outcome:
…for a few reasons.
Apps as entertainment
In high school, my friends and I went to the movie theater almost every weekend, usually not even knowing what was playing, and decided how to spend our $5-10 when we got there. We knew it would buy us a few hours of entertainment, and we knew that most of the movies would be mediocre, a few would be horrible, and a few would be great. The predictability and low cost of these outings gave us a reliable way to be entertained on a regular basis.
One of the reasons the iOS App Store is so successful is that app-buying has become a form of casual, routine entertainment for iPhone and iPad owners. We gladly go and browse the App Store even when we don’t “need” anything at the moment, with the intention of going and spending a few bucks on whatever’s new that looks good.
This requires a few conditions to be ideal, all of which are true on the iOS App Store:
There must be a large number of new apps being regularly added, and they must be easy to find and browse.
Apps must be low-risk. That means:
Inexpensive.
Trustworthy that they won’t do anything creepy or destructive.
Easy and quick to purchase and install.
Easy and quick to delete.
Enough apps should be good that people will remember the good ones and forget the bad.
Today, on the Mac, almost none of these are true. And if the Mac App Store is only populated by a subset of today’s Mac software, a few key points (such as “Inexpensive”) still won’t be true. This is why I believe that the Mac App Store will be dominated by (and become known for) apps that don’t exist on the Mac today.
Appeal to iOS developers
Much of what made the App Store so compelling to developers will begin to apply to Mac software with the Mac App Store:
Most Mac owners will be encouraged from prominent places on their Macs to buy apps. The potential audience is huge, and will be much easier to reach.
Payment processing will be much simpler.
Software websites won’t need nearly as much functionality.
Two of the most common support issues for desktop software vendors — installation support and serial-number issues — will almost completely disappear.
So I expect a lot of iOS developers to start making Mac apps, especially individuals and very small teams.
And these are the average selling prices I expect for non-free software:
In other words, a lot like iPad-app pricing, but shifted slightly higher. And even considering the lower prices than current Mac software, and Apple’s 30% cut, the value in exposure will overcome those for most good apps, and developers will be able to make a lot of money.
What about today’s Mac developers?
They’ll be fine.
Today’s market for Mac software isn’t going anywhere. People will continue to find (or not find) traditional apps in the traditional ways, and will continue to buy (or not buy) them in retail stores and from the vendors’ websites at about the same rates. In fact, as the Mac’s marketshare grows, this market will continue to grow with it.
But a huge new market is about to open next door. And yes, it’ll probably be dominated by Angry Birds and other inexpensive, often trivial apps. When this happens, a lot of traditional Mac developers are going to look down on it. But those with a bit of free time to develop their own inexpensive, often trivial apps might have a different viewpoint entirely when they see their sales numbers.
As both a Mac user and an iOS developer, I’m incredibly excited for the potential of this market.
In those days, it was really easy to see where consumer technology was going. You could just look at the nerds and know that’s what you’d probably look like in 2-5 years.
[…]
But then something strange happened. Lots of people switched to Apple laptops. But the nerds didn’t move on. My nerdiest programmer friends use the same computer as my wife.
[…]
So my question is, why haven’t the nerds moved on? Where are all the alpha geeks and what are they doing? I look around and I don’t see them anywhere.
It’s a great question.
Part of my own transition was what I called grown-up computing five years ago, after a year of “adult” life:
Grown-up computing is, put simply, the way I use computers and my attitude toward them now that I’m out of college and settling into the 9-to-5 world. It differs greatly from “young computing”.
[…]
The last thing I want to do is figure out why some program isn’t working or reinstall my operating system. I see these as zero-gain activities: generally, I learn nothing new, I don’t enjoy myself, I’m not being entertained or enriched, and my effort only results in maintaining the status quo.
I’d rather get a computer that didn’t require any maintenance and simply allowed me to do productive work. I’d like to have something to show for all of my clicking and typing instead of simply making information balloons go away. I’d rather write an article for this site than type my serial number again. I’d rather search the internet for interesting or entertaining information to read instead of looking for the solution to an obscure problem for which I only have a useless generic error message. I just want things to work.
It’s likely that most geeks that Ben and I know are in or near our age group, and are probably “computing adults” in a similar sense: they’d rather use computers and related technology to accomplish a goal greater than just messing around with their computers.
But what if this effect, on a larger and less age-specific scale, is the bigger trend that Ben’s seeing?
What if most geeks today really are just buying Macs instead of building their own overclocked Windows PCs from Newegg parts?
What if PC gaming really is on a decline because only a very small slice of the population is willing to pay $500 for a giant, hot, loud video card and endure the Great PC Gaming Pain-in-the-Ass Trifecta of drivers, patches, and copy protection, leaving almost every gamer to just stick with game consoles for a fraction of the cost and hassle?
And what if a big slice of even the most hardcore geeks have abandoned their netbooks for iPads because they just work so much better most of the time?
Even geeks (like us) have their limits of reasonability. At some point, we often decide that what we’ve been doing or what we think we should enjoy just isn’t worthwhile.
Ever build a carputer? (Yeah, that’s a computer in your car.) I attempted it when I was 18: it was a bunch of old PC parts inside a Dremeled-out Rubbermaid tub with a gamepad next to my parking brake to control Winamp so I could play MP3s. It was ridiculous. I had to wait until my carputer booted Windows 98 before it could play music. Even I couldn’t take this thing seriously. It lasted about 3 days until I drove over a speed bump and the CPU fell out of the slot. I scrapped it and just bought an MP3-CD player (the second one ever released) instead.
More recently, I even stopped using my geeky pfSense router when I moved to this apartment because I wanted 802.11n support and WDS, and the AirPort Extreme Base Station was just easier than trying to wedge those things into my geeky alternative. And it happens that the AirPort Extreme is actually much nicer, because it Just Works™ with new crazy things like WDS and UPnP and Xbox Live and MobileMe, and I never need to think about it.
Aging technologies fall out of favor even among geeks. Even excellent programmers avoid writing assembly code because they know that it’s almost never worth doing. Nobody’s using those Linux phones (did they ever?). PC self-builders rarely mess with Creative’s dumb sound cards anymore because every motherboard’s onboard sound has been good enough since 2001. I don’t think anyone really uses water-cooling anymore, and I bet the [H]ard|OCP Forums peaked in popularity a while ago.
We may just be past the era in which many geeks were interested in messing around with their computer’s (or phone’s) hardware or software internals.
And as many major technologies and platforms become dominant, we stop tinkering at those levels. We’re all happily using Ethernet and TCP/IP instead of trying to invent new protocols at those layers. Nobody’s writing a PC OS from scratch in this decade. Nobody’s even writing their own web search engine anymore. It wouldn’t surprise me if we’ve seen the last new social-network giant for the next decade.
What if we’re also settled on the current handful dominant OSes, mobile platforms, and hardware manufacturers?
I’d argue that, if that’s the case, we’re better off. That was an interesting time, but it’s time to move up the stack and mess around at higher levels.
I got a Kindle 3 for Instapaper testing. Impressions so far:
It is noticeably smaller and lighter than the Kindle 2, but it’s still the same size class. (The screen’s the same size, and it still has a keyboard, so there’s only so far they can go.) Most people who pick up a naked Kindle 3 for the first time may overestimate the difference because they’re accustomed to using the Kindle 2 in a case.
It’s so inexpensive ($140 for Wi-Fi only, $190 for Wi-Fi and 3G) that buying a $30+ case seems wasteful. And I loved getting a fancy case for my Kindle 2. (That’s still my favorite case for a gadget I’ve ever seen. It’s so immensely classy, and for the Kindle 2, necessary1.)
The form factor still encourages a case: the screen is still vulnerable to stabs and scratches from other items that share its bag, unless you’re dedicating a whole (hopefully snug) pocket to the Kindle, or you never plan to take it anywhere. But it’s also the first Kindle that I’ve been able to comfortably hold and operate without a case — mostly because of the rubberized back, replacing the Kindle 2’s smooth aluminum — so I think the ideal case would be one that isn’t clipped to it, possibly this, or maybe just a cheap plastic lid that could clip onto the front of it to protect the screen.
And cheap plastic wouldn’t be out of place. While it’s still a reasonably high-quality item, the Kindle 3 feels noticeably cheaper than the Kindle 2. It doesn’t feel quite right to spend $30 or more on a case for it.
Fortunately, you don’t need to:
A standard 6x10 bubble envelope — the size you’d use for shipping a DVD in a case — actually makes a decent low-budget Kindle 3 slipcase. And if your goal is to just throw it in a bag and have basic scratch protection until you remove it for use, it’s a pretty good solution.2
Ergonomics
In an apparent effort to make the Kindle 3 smaller and cheaper, some of the most important buttons have been moved around. One positive change is that there’s now a Previous Page button on both sides, not just the left like the Kindle 2.
But Home, Back, and Menu have been shoved awkwardly into the keyboard area on the bottom, which I’m having a hard time getting used to. It seems incredibly unintuitive:
The new directional pad (they call it a “5-way controller”… the up-down-left-right thing that was a joystick-like nub in the Kindle 2) is cramped. It’s difficult to hit the directional buttons with confidence because I’m afraid I’m going to inadvertently hit the center (select) button instead.
The power-switch slider has been made much easier to slide. That’s nice, but it has also been moved to the bottom, so it’s awkward to reach, and I keep accidentally hitting it with my hands or clothes.
The next/previous-page buttons, the most important and most frequently used controls on a Kindle, have been reduced to very narrow strips on the outer edge of the Kindle 3’s left and right margins. I’m finding these more awkward to hit than the Kindle 2’s big clicky switches, which rocked toward their inner edges, but this is probably because they’re very different, not necessarily that either design is better.
The reading screen
The screen has been significantly improved, and there are subtle layout differences:
I’ve adjusted the contrast to attempt to best represent how they look in real life. Pictured: Michael Lopp’s new book, Being Geek — recommended.
Note how the removal of the top bar and elimination of the margin below the progress indicator has added space for three more lines of text per page at this font size.
There’s a new font chooser as well: on most content, you can select between “regular”3, “condensed”, and “sans serif”:
I still prefer the “regular”. There’s also a line-height option, but the default (pictured) is the largest, and the two smaller settings decrease legibility too much for my taste.
Some Kindle-edition books, such as Coders at Work, force their entire text to be in the sans-serif font. (On the Kindle 2, too.) It’s irritating. I saw this setting and hoped it would be able to override that, but it doesn’t — whichever formatting attribute forces the font to sans-serif also disables the font-face and line-height preferences on the Kindle 3. (The pictured book has the same problem as all of O’Reilly’s Kindle editions that I’ve seen: it seems to force a <BR><BR>-style paragraph break instead of the Kindle norm: book-style, tab-indented paragraphs. This also can’t be overridden by customers. I doubt that anyone important at O’Reilly is a Kindle user.)
As advertised, page-turning on the Kindle 3 is faster… sort of. The actual black-flash effect of the e-ink seems to be about the same speed as on the Kindle 2, but the delay between when you hit the next-page button and when the flash begins has been reduced to nearly zero. This is more likely due to a faster CPU in the Kindle 3 rather than an e-ink advance. Regardless, it feels faster, it’s more satisfying, and it reduces the learning curve.
The web browser
Every Kindle has shipped with a web browser, and their free cellular access makes this pretty appealing to geeks like me. The Kindle 3’s new WebKit-based browser is a huge improvement from the Kindle 2’s:
It’s still not useful enough for most people to do what they typically want to do in a web browser, but it’s functional and fast enough now that I’m glad I went with the Wi-Fi + 3G model in case I ever need to pull an xkcd. (“Functional” and “fast” are both relative to the previous Kindle browsers, which doesn’t say much. A first-generation, EDGE-only iPhone in Vermont would be more useful for web browsing than a Kindle 3.)
But, for those who haven’t used a Kindle browser, let me be clear: while this is a huge improvement over the previous Kindle browsers, you do not want to use this unless absolutely necessary.
The e-ink screen is meant to page-flip content, not scroll through it. And this isn’t a touch screen4. The result is that you need to move the virtual mouse-pointer cursor through the web page with the tiny 5-way controller. And e-ink’s refresh speed forces a small delay on every graphical change, so moving through pages is sluggish, clunky, and error-prone.
The browser is under the “Experimental” menu for good reasons. It’s a fun toy to see on the first day you get your Kindle, but you’ll quickly forget that it’s there and will probably never use it again.
The big picture
With the Kindle 3, Amazon has made most of the hardware and software better, technically. But they made a lot of the ergonomics worse. Maybe it’s because I haven’t had enough time to get used to it yet, but I can’t help but wish for the Kindle 3’s internals with the Kindle 2 button layout.
For Kindle 2 owners, the upgrade to the Kindle 3 probably isn’t worth it. But if you want to upgrade anyway, you probably won’t be disappointed.
I don’t know how many Kindle users actually use the speakers or headphone jack, but I’d guess it’s not many. And I bet a lot of Kindle users would love a smaller version without the QWERTY keyboard that would just require book purchases to be done elsewhere, or with a slow on-screen keyboard navigated by the 5-way controller. Yet the Kindle 3, despite the corners Amazon had to cut in build quality and ergonomics to get costs down, retains all of this rarely used hardware.
But the hardware isn’t the headliner for this revision. A big nitpicky hardware review (like… this) is missing the point:
Because if my support emails about Kindle 3 support are any indication, Amazon is selling a lot of these. And at that price, it’s no wonder: $140 is barely more than many iPad cases. Amazon is clearly sending a message to the market:
“We’re not competing with the iPad. You can buy both if you want.”
The iPad can do a lot more, but people who claim that it’s “killing” the Kindle are clearly not Kindle owners. Buy an iPad if you want to browse the internet, play music or video, check your email, or launch flaming peas at zombies.
But when you want to settle down and read a book, the Kindle is a much better choice.
Cases for the Kindle 2 will not fit the Kindle 3. The clip-mounting holes on the Kindle 3 are spaced about a half-inch further apart. I hope there was a good engineering reason for this seemingly arbitrary change that, at worst, could be a cheap move to sell more cases to upgraders.
Update: Reader Robert M. emailed me with a good theory for this: “Amazon sells a Kindle 3 case with an extendable LED light. It gets its power from the Kindle via the metal latches. My guess is that Amazon’s old cases had an electrical path from latch to latch, and would short out the Kindle 3. (Seems like you could engineer around that, but doing so might add complexity to a device they’re trying to sell as cheaply as possible.)” ↩︎
As long as you don’t accidentally mail it somewhere. ↩︎
The standard Kindle font is still PMN Caecilia, which works incredibly well on the Kindle screen and which I’ve grown to love. ↩︎
Sony has released a few Readers with touch-screen e-ink displays. I haven’t seen one in person, but they’re usually panned in reviews because the touch-sensitive layer makes the screen more glossy and prone to glare. For now, at least, e-ink and touch-screens apparently can’t be combined well. ↩︎
