Everyone else is talking about it, so why not me?

There are two categories of reactions to Apple products: emotional and rational. Most technology companies don’t evoke much of an emotional reaction, and when they do, I suspect it’s more often negative than otherwise. But Apple’s got the kavorka. You can look at the spec sheets and form a reasoned opinion of their machines, but before you do that, you have to get through the visceral response.

My gut reaction to the new iMac was mild disappointment. Don’t get me wrong–in the grand scheme of things, I like it. But the fact that so many people did such a good job of predicting what the new machine would look like suggests a lack of inspiration at Apple. The new design is clean, uses almost no desk space, and probably will prove to have a host of merits once people start getting them on their desks. But it doesn’t wow me the way its “iLuxo” predecessor did: that machine, although the base did look a little clunky, had an innovative, unexpected design. Another surprising disappointment about the new iMac is that it is plainly a step backwards in terms of ergonomics: the iLuxo’s screen could be moved in three degrees of freedom; the new, in one (two if you put it on a lazy susan). This may have been a cost-cutting move (those swingarms must have been expensive). Apple may have discovered that most people didn’t really take advantage of all that adjustability, and chose to invest in other features. I wonder.

I’d been planning on making my next Mac a powerbook, but I could see using this iMac instead. Which brings me to my other point: the rational side. It’s interesting looking at the tradeoffs Apple made in speccing this machine, to reach a price point and/or to avoid cannibalizing sales from other machines. In many ways, the iMac seems to be best compared to the 17″ Powerbook in terms of value for money. They both have the same screen, which accounts for a disproportionate amount of their price. Here’s a quick comparison of some major features for the base 17″ iMac and the 17″ Powerbook (the better spec shown in bold):

Updating the iMac to add Bluetooth, Wifi, and a Superdrive gets it up to about $1600, still a lot less than the powerbook. Apple is charging a huge premium for portability (which is kind of weird, because the iBook is a pretty good deal) and a few geeky features. The G5 chip itself probably could command a premium for its performance benefit, but in reality is cheaper than the G4 (though the supporting circuitry may not be). This suggests to me that Apple’s pricing on the 17″ Powerbook is out of line.

Some time ago, I wrote an essay on music storage options (mostly on how bad they are).

We’re at a point today where even a big music library–say, 1,000 CDs–can be easily archived on a single hard drive using high-quality MP3s–say, 192 Kbps encoding. Some people claim this encoding rate is indistinguishable from CDs; others claim it’s barely adequate for listening. Whatever. It sounds good to me. In any case, at this rate, one hour of music is encoded as about 83 MB, meaning that 1,000 CDs (which are usually somewhat under an hour) will fit onto the 160 GB hard drives that are now available (as bare mechanisms) for under $100, with plenty of room to spare.

Purists will argue that lossy encoding is a bad compromise. We don’t need to use lossy encoding–a lossless format called Shorten has been around for years, and Apple’s iTunes now comes with something called “Apple Lossless Encoding.” These can shrink a CD’s data down to a little less than half its original size, meaning about 250 MB for one hour of music. The fact that ALE is built into iTunes means you have a nice interface for dealing with these tracks (as opposed to the more arcane software required to deal with Shorten files), making lossless encoding a practical option. I have no idea if there are converters that recode ALE as Shorten to avoid lock-in.

Anyhow, at that rate, it would take three 160-GB hard drives (and some kind of enclosure) to store a 1,000-CD music collection, but assuming Moore’s Law holds, in a few years, we’ll be back at the $100 mark.

Smaller MP3s still have their uses, though: If you have an in-car MP3 player that reads MP3 CDs, you’ll still need to recode your lossless files to MP3 in order to take advantage of it. If you have a portable MP3 player for jogging, likewise (though if you splash out on an iPod, you won’t need to bother).

Liebniz and Newton invented the calculus at roughly the same time.

Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray both invented the telephone at the same time, and filed with the patent office a few hours apart.

While it takes smart and insightful people to make these things happen, inventions are also the product of their time, and of other trends that are more or less well-known. Often the invention is a matter of recombining existing technologies in a novel way.

Apple’s recent demo of Tiger got a lot of people thinking “gosh, Dashboard looks an awful lot like Konfabulator. Apple must have ripped off those Konfabulator guys.”

This created a stir on Mac sites, with some claiming it’s a ripoff, some suggesting that the gracious thing for Apple to do would at least be to compensate the Konfab people for pulling the rug out from underneath them, and others pointing out that in fact, there was plenty of prior art to Konfabulator. John Gruber, astute as usual, pointed out that Apple in fact is not ripping off much of anything.

What do all these things do? They give you a simple way to script mini-applications–both Dashboard and Konfab use Javascript–and a method for skinning them. Konfabulator uses a somewhat unfriendly XML format; Dashboard uses straight HTML/CSS, but the two are pretty similar.

Here’s the thing: neither one is even a little bit original. Mozilla uses this idea already: it has a markup language called XUL for painting the browser’s “chrome,” and Microsoft is working on it’s own version of this, XAML. These use javascript to build application interfaces and javascript to handle user interactions. Gosh, that sounds familiar. In fact, when MS announced XAML, there was some hand-wringing a while back over how it was ripping off XUL.

Ideas like skinning, making scripting more accessible to more people, using standard markup languages to generate interfaces, etc, are ideas whose times have all come in the computing world. Lightbulbs lit up over lot of people’s heads, and they combined these ideas in similar ways. Konfabulator clearly beat Dashboard to market (though I find the product all-but unusable), but it is original only in the sense that its creators had the idea on their own (if in fact that is so), not in the sense that its creators are the only ones to have the idea.

Friday night, I got together with some of my blogger friends for dinner at the Mongolian BBQ downtown. Don had just ported from Sprint to T-mobile and gotten the same phone as me, partly at least on my recommendation.

While we’re sitting there, I get a call from someone claiming that someone else had just called him from my number. It was a bad connection, so I didn’t hear everything he said, but it was very odd. Then it happens again. And again. Five times in about twenty minutes. Don is wondering if I’ve given him a bum steer.

About an hour later, I get another call. The caller ID shows as “unknown.” It turns out to be a Sprint operator, who asks for me (for a change). She explains that Sprint had just given out my old number (which was, and is, still my number) to a new subscriber, and that she was taking care of the problem.

Clearly, another bump on the road to seamless number portability.

I wrote before that we’d see interesting things come of these matchbox-sized hard drives, now that they’ve got pretty serious storage capacity. And now we have. Apple doesn’t call it the iPodlet, though.

At the risk of sounding churlish, I’m a bit disappointed in how big it is. It’s the size of a business card. OK, that’s churlish. But I really thought they could get a microdrive-based iPod down to about half that size.

Later: There’s been a shitload of virtual ink spilled over this thing. My thoughts:

The iPod mini is probably using the Hitachi 4 GB Microdrive. Hitachi also makes 1 GB and 2 GB units. I am guessing that after Apple fleeces the early adopters, they’ll contemplate bringing out downmarket versions for a little less. Either that or the Microdrive capacities will ratchet up, and the 4 GB model will itself become the downmarket version. People condemn the mini for its capacity, but seem to forget that the original iPod had only 5 GB capacity.

People bitch about the price. Considering that a bare 4 GB Microdrive retails for about $500, I think it’s a steal.

People bitch about the capacity. I suppose that if I wanted to use my iPod as my primary storage for MP3s, I would too. But that’s what my desktop computer’s hard drive is for–I wouldn’t need to have all my music on my iPod, and Apple has done a lot of work to make it easy to move MP3s between the computer and iPod, to generate random playlists, and generally to keep the iPod full of whatever music you want. There are two limiting factors on how much music you can play on any portable player: the memory capacity (coupled with your tolerance for listening to the same thing repeatedly, I suppose) and the battery capacity. It’s a happy non-coincidence that the same device you use to charge the iPod is what you use to transfer music to it. Having 100 hours of music on a portable player is redundant if you’ve got 8 hours of playtime with the battery. I might want more than 8 hours of music so that I don’t need to pre-select exactly what I will want to hear, but I don’t think I’d need 12.5x more to satisfy my desire for variety. I get about 48 hours of music into 4 GB–or 36 hours plus my entire home directory, and I rip my music at a higher bitrate than the iTunes default. music time: battery time ratio of at least 3:1 and as much as 5:1 sounds about right.

People suggest that it’s foolish to buy a 4 GB unit when one can buy a 15 GB unit that’s $50 more. If I were getting an iPod, I’d get the mini. I don’t need a 15 GB player. I do need portability, and the original design of the iPod, clever though it is, just isn’t as small as I’d want.

People bitch about the design. That’s a matter of taste, and de gustibus, non disputandum est. I admit to being a little disappointed in the dimensions, and unthrilled by the styling myself. But I still look forward to playing with one.

Still later Now I read about Toshiba’s 0.85″ drive. Obviously Apple wouldn’t have had time to engineer the new mini around this, but it suggests we could see even smaller iPods, or that the mini in its current form will get a capacity boost sooner rather than later.

Also interesting is GarageBand. I watched The Keynote, and Jobs made a couple of wry references to file-sharing. In the back of my mind, I mused that with GarageBand, he might be taking the ultimate end-run around the MPAA. Surely this has nothing to do with Apple’s decision to develop and market this program. Surely not.

But it’s fun to contemplate.

As if getting a new (and amazingly gadgety) cellphone weren’t enough, I just upgraded to OS X 10.3. So far so good: despite doing a wipe-and-install, with manual restoration of preferences, things have gone pretty smoothly (the one unaccountable and annoying problem is the complete loss of my NetNewsWire Lite subscription list).

This is a big upgrade: Apple was modest in adding .1 to the version number (as they were with 10.2). My mac is much more responsive now, the interface, for the most part, has been subtly improved, and there are a lot of obvious new “bullet-point” features that really are useful. It’s encouraging to see that Apple has not been resting on its laurels after the success of the 10.2 release–that was a pretty good OS, and they could have gotten away with tweaks for this one, but it’s clear that either they had a lot of stuff in the pipeline already that couldn’t be vetted in time for 10.2, or they still see OS X as an unfinished work (which is true of all software). It’s also interesting to see how much headroom is apparently left for system optimizations, and I wonder what we’re in for when they eventually release XI.

I have some beefs–I’m not sold on the metallic Finder, or the sidebar (which is resizable, but the resizing apparently doesn’t take, and which can’t be manipulated from the keyboard like other columns, as far as I can tell). And so on. But it’s good.

More on the saga of phone switching.

Two days ago, I received my Belkin Bluetooth dongle. Plugged it in and my Mac instantly recognized it.

Yesterday, I got the Sony Ericsson (I always forget whether to double the C or the S) T610 and Jabra headset. Reactions:

• The phone has very nice industrial design. The buttons are small, but spaced so that I haven’t really had any fat-finger problems, and I really appreciate that they’re laid out as a keypad, not in the amorphous formations Nokia has favored of late. The joystick doesn’t always respond predictably to the “push in” action but is a nice idea. Screen is ok. Color screens on cellphones create more problems than they solve, but it does look pretty. Some have complained that it washes out badly in sunlight–this is a little bit of a problem, but tolerable. The phone’s overall size is a little taller than my old phone when folded, but as slim as the old phone when unfolded.
• This is my first candybar phone. The previous one was a flip phone, and the one before that was a sort of hybrid that was a candybar–or rather brick–shape with a flap over the keys (this remains my favorite phone shape). This is the first phone I’ve had where I need to worry about accidental key activation–it’s already been making calls without me realizing it. This can be prevented using the key lock feature, but another problem cannot be: touching a key activates the screen; if the keys are constantly being pressed, the screen is always on, and with a color phone, that means the battery gets run down very quickly. The key lock should really be a dedicated slider, rather than a combination of regular keypresses. Time to get some kind of holster. One odd quirk is that the numeric keys can get hooked under the faceplate–when this happens, the soft keys and joystick stop working. Very frustrating and mystifying until I noticed the wayward key.
• I was surprised that this phone doesn’t auto-discover the time.
• As you can see, the camera on the phone takes amazingly shitty pictures. And that picture was taken in “high-quality” mode.
  
• Bluetooth is a hoot. I love it. It’s a little fussy getting two devices to recognize one another, but from a security standpoint, that’s as it should be. Moving all my contacts from my address book on my Mac to the phone proceeded smoothly–everything is properly tagged, though I would have preferred that the “company” field be ignored. I suppose there must be a way to hack that… Apart from contacts, files can be moved back and forth between phone and computer via a little file browser. This is OK, but really, the phone should appear on my desktop like just another device. Using the Salling Clicker is great fun, in an incredibly nerdy way.
• After following these very helpful instructions, I succeeded in connecting my Mac to the Internet via the phone. Slow, but usable. This is pretty nifty. Some bandwidth tests: I found a bandwidth-testing WAP page that works in the phone’s WAP browser: a pathetic 1.43 Kbps. (I have actually owned 300-baud and 2400-bps modems. Funny how these things come around.) Using the phone as a modem, and loading the 2wire bandwidth page, I get a more respectable 31.4 Kbps. By way of comparison, that page shows my DSL connection as yielding 1596.2 Kbps. Incidentally, this is much higher than DSL’s nominal 384 Kbps, but roughly in line with similar tests. The more informative Speakeasy tests show the following
  

  	GPRS	DSL
  Up	9 Kbps	214 Kbps
  Down	26 Kbps	1200 Kbps

• The phone’s voice dialing works just well enough to be frustrating.
• Sound quality seems OK. I can’t really comment on reception: there’s a T-mobile tower within rock-throwing distance of my home, so I always get 4 bars here, but at Gwen’s, I rarely get even two bars, as her neighborhood is poorly served by T-mobile (you hear that, guys?).
• My speech coming through the Jabra headset sounds poor, but incoming sound is fine. The headset doesn’t feel very secure on my head, and apparently will not pair with my Mac, but it works. The phone comes with a wired headset that’s also OK.
• The phone has a huge array of bells and whistles–both literally and figuratively. There are scads of annoying ringtones, and if you don’t like those, you can import more, or even compose them on a little in-phone music sequencer. No kidding: it has a four-track display (drums, guitar, keyboard, horns) with 32 canned snippets for each; you lay down one snippet per measure for each, and keep building up measures until you’ve got a song. I’m pretty sure Moby has traded in his studio for this phone.
• Apart from that, this phone is complicated enough that you really need the manual. I couldn’t figure out how to put the phone into vibrate mode without navigating through four layers of menus until I found out I had to set one setting and then I could hold down the C key whenever I wanted to go into vibrate mode. The phone is also set up to encourage you to use its Internet connectivity more than you might expect–it has a dedicated Internet button on the side, and several menu options put Internet-based content higher up than content inside the phone. This strikes me as a bit cheesy, but I can live with it.
• One interesting feature for managing the complexity of this phone is a feature called “profiles” (there’s a similar feature on the Mac called “Location,” which would obviously be a problematic name if applied to a mobile phone). Profiles are a group of settings for use in different situations–at home, in your car, walking around, at the office, etc. Switching profiles changes a bunch of profiles all at once. Good idea, poor execution. How?
  • The phone comes with several canned profiles; to change one, you select the profile as your working profile, and then edit everything. This makes it harder to reuse your existing settings and modify them–much better would be an option to save the current settings as new profile.
  • Although many features can be subsumed under a profile, there are some that cannot–for example, the key lock, which is handy when out and about, but useless at home.
  • Profile switching is mostly a manual affair. The phone does come with a headset, and it automatically switches to a handsfree profile when the headset is plugged in (but apparently not with the Bluetooth headset), so clearly there’s some ability to switch automatically. This approach should be extended: I’d like the phone to go into “at home” mode when it is within reach of my computer (as discoverable through Bluetooth), or perhaps when plugged in. This idea could be taken a step further by placing (or discovering) “bluetooth buttons” at other locations one regularly visits, so I could have one in my car, one at my coffee shop, etc. A bluetooth button needn’t be more than a transponder that identifies itself with a name and perhaps a GPS position.

My old number has not been ported to the new phone yet, but I have initiated the process. I wound up speaking with four different operators yesterday, each of whom told me I needed to talk to a different department (except for the last one), and each of whom encouraged me to bring my phone and an old Sprint bill in to a local T-mobile office in person (including the last one, but I insisted on doing it over the phone, so she relented). By the way, “port” seems to be the magic word–anyone who is transferring service from one carrier to another will save a couple minutes by using that word rather than “transfer,” etc. But the new phone does work, and is providing me with much amusement.

So, what would make the phone better? Better reception. A camera that’s actually worth using. A memory-card slot. Perhaps an MP3 player (though that would probably be politically unpopular at Sony). A slider to control key-locking, and making ring volume and silent ring part of the volume controls (why they are not is a mystery). The UI could do with a few tweaks.

I’ll update this entry as news develops.

Simson Garfinkel writes about bitrot saying, in so many words, it won’t be that big of a problem. Jeremy Hedley warns, Cassandra-like, that for invidivuals, it might be pretty bad indeed.

I side with Garfinkel.

Like pretty much everyone who has been using a computer for more than 15 minutes, I’ve lost data. The problem of bitrot is one that is pretty widely recognized by now, even if we’re not sure exactly how best to guard against it. This awareness in itself is probably going to help minimize the problem: we may look back on the period from, say, the fifties to the nineties as an anomoly when we didn’t routinely plan on making data available to our future selves.

Bitrot is a three-layered problem:

The physical layer

If you can’t read a floppy, or whatever physical medium you’re using, you are sunk. This really breaks down into a couple sub-layers: the media itself has degraded (all media has a lifespan before it starts losing data; for some, like floppies, it’s pretty short); or the drive requires a connector and/or software drivers you can’t use with any known device.

The data layer

Fine, so by some chance your floppy is still good, but back in 1993 you were using MS Works 2 to store your business data, and there aren’t any programs that can read those files.

The cultural layer

This ties in with the data layer–some formats will almost certainly be well supported in the future, at least to the extent that format translators will exist to convert Ye Olde Data Phyle into the sleek and modern DataFile 3000. This comes down to how popular a format is/was, and whether it is clearly and publicly specified. The file format used by Word 2000, for example, is not publicly specified but is so widely used that a number of programmers have done pretty good jobs of reverse-engineering it. The PDF and RTF formats are publicly specified and very widely used. But MS Works 2? Nope.

So what can we do to avoid the heartbreak of bitrot in our own lives? A few things.

Back up

This should be obvious. My own backup strategy is to back up my home folder to an external hard drive daily, and to a magneto-optical disk (estimated to have 50-year data integrity) weekly.

Save files in publicly specified formats

As I wrote to a friend recently, “every time I save a file in Word format, I’m afraid I’m doing something that will come back to haunt me.” From now on, I’m saving my work as RTF. Plain text would be better, but RTF strikes a balance between preserving formatting and universality.

Move forward

This does not mean jumping on the bleeding edge and buying every gadget that comes along. It means recognizing when a physical or data format is on the way out, finding a safe successor, and moving to that. As long as you’ve got data you can read on a hard drive that works with your computer, and a backup you can read somewhere else, you should be in the clear indefinitely. Eventually we will see net-based storage that is convenient and affordable (we’re not quite there yet), and at that point, we won’t have any excuse for failures at the physical layer.

When the iPod was new, it was a breakthrough product. It wasn’t the first MP3 player, nor the first MP3 player based on a hard drive, but it managed to find a sweet spot in terms of storage capacity and physical size that no previous product did. This was mostly because of its 1.8″ hard-drive mechanism, which only became available at about the same time as the iPod itself, and partly because of some good industrial design by Apple.

The first iPods had 5 GB of capacity–probably nowhere near enough to contain the entire collection of a music buff, but probably enough for 50-100 CDs-worth of music. Plenty for a road trip.

Today the smallest iPod is 10 GB, and the largest is 40 GB. I’ve got over 500 CDs, and I could fit my entire collection on a 40-GB iPod with plenty of room to spare. This makes the iPod something fundamentally different: When I can put all my music, all my digital pictures (about 500 MB), and my entire home directory (about 1 GB, including everything I’ve written on my computer for the past 13 years, and a lot of old e-mail), the iPod can be a primary repository for all my personal stuff, rather than a very capacious place to carry around music and maybe some other files temporarily. Can be, but perhaps shouldn’t be–the whole idea behind the iPod is that it is more portable than other hard-drive MP3 players. Meaning you’ll carry it around. Meaning you might lose it, or at least leave it lying around where someone could copy personal data off it (and thanks to that firewire port, it wouldn’t take long). Encryption would be one obvious step to take.

But just as the iPod has graduated to being something else, something else could graduate to be the iPod. Microdrives–tiny 1″ hard drives–maxed out at 340 MB when they were introduced. Just like all other hard drives, though, they store a lot more now, and they’re available in 4 GB and even larger today–the original iPod’s territory, but a lot smaller. The difference between 1″ and 1.8″ may not sound like much, but it’s the difference between a matchbox and half a sandwich.

A microdrive-based MP3 player might be wearable as a chunky wristwatch. Or be embedded into a set of headphones. Or hung around the neck as a high-tech pendant. I’d be more interested in a gadget that can effectively disappear than one I need to consciously carry around. I’m looking forward to seeing interesting things happen with these 1″ mechanisms.