The Digital Analyst

Although I have always vehemently disagreed, some have called me a Mac Fanboy in the past.  I resent this label because I think it represents a very immature, biased and unbalanced perspective on consumer electronics.  I’m not saying all Mac Fanboys are like that, but c’mon… we’ve all been in an Apple store when one of the customer service reps goes on a tirade about how bad Microsoft and Windows are, blah blah blah.  They couldn’t find a nice word to say about Steve Ballmer if their life depended on it.  I like to think that I approach my decision-making a little more balanced than that.  If you look at my desk though, it’s a sea of Apple… (once upon a time, an iPad) iPods, an iPhone 3Gs, Airport Extreme and my dear PowerBook.  I got my PowerBook when I was a Sophomore in college 5 years ago.  When you’ve had a machine for that long, you form a special bond with it.  It’s seen me through a study abroad, college graduation, 3 cross-country moves, love and heart break, joy and disappointment.  It survived a lot of life experiences that I didn’t always think I’d make it out of.  The only big thing I’ve owned longer was my second car (8 years).

THAT SAID, I wasn’t always happy with my PowerBook because I got the last model before they started using Intel chips, so I couldn’t upgrade to the newest OS.  I was content with my Tiger, but slowly the Internet left my computer in the dust.  The first major frustration I had with my PowerBook was that it was too old to sync with my iPad (RIP), but the kicker was when I was no longer able to watch streaming video of any quality without it going haywire.  The battery also died, so it had to be plugged in all the time, and there was a major kernel issue where it would shut down without warning and only turn on when it felt like it (I swear…. I tried all sorts of voodoo, witchcraft, karma, prayer and incense, but no key combination, trouble-shooting guide or mac fanboy had a solution for me).  This morning, I decided enough is enough!  I need to buy a new computer.

I had been shopping around and weighing options for a couple months anyway, debating whether I’d get a MacBook Pro or pick up an iMac and use a iPad for mobile computing.  I’d had a laptop since I went to college, but the more I thought about what I needed from a computer, portability wasn’t high on the list.  I had reasoned that I could save the money on a MacBook Pro (my customized version cost about $2,350 before taxes… 15″ high-res antiglare screen, 2.53 GHz Core i5, upgraded 7200rpm hard drive with MSFT Office), and just get an iMac ($1400… 21.5″ screen, 3.06 GHz, trackpad + magic mouse with MSFT Office).  My rational for making my home computer immobile was that I used my iPhone for any personal mobile computing needs and that I could use a laptop from work when I needed it.

Well, speaking of that work laptop, I have it set up right next to my poor old broken PowerBook and after a YouTube video wouldn’t load 2 nights ago, I decided to switch over and use the work laptop more regularly.  It’s nothing special… just a Dell Lattitude E5500, but it gets the job done and while writing a couple emails this morning, it dawned on me that there wasn’t ANY reason for me to buy a Mac over a PC.  So I went out and after a couple hours at two Best Buys, I picked up a Samsung Q430 laptop for $799 ($850 after MS Office).  I put a lot of thought into what my specific needs from a computer were and decided I just didn’t need to spend the money on a Mac.  I’m going to avoid comparing specs and weighing processor speeds against screen resolutions.  Here are the major reasons I switched back to a PC:

7 Reasons I Bought a PC Instead of a Mac

1.) PRICE – After measuring the space on my desk and reading an article about unemployed people my age, I decided I couldn’t go with an iMac to save money because I would eventually need a laptop and a desktop is too limited.  I’d have to buy a netbook or laptop to compliment it eventually anyway, so once that decision was made, I was left staring at a $2350 laptop, wondering whether it was actually worth that much money.  Considering the quality of laptops Sony and Samsung were producing, I simply couldn’t justify buying a laptop 3X more expensive when the only discernable difference performance wise for me would be a 9 hour battery life vs. a 4 hour battery life.

2.) MICROSOFT OFFICE 2010 – This was an area where Microsoft just flat-out beat Mac.  Fanboys will defend iWork until they’re blue in the face, but Keynote just simply isn’t on the same level as PowerPoint.  Microsoft really nailed the user-interface when they redesigned the Office suite.  I’ve stayed late at the office many nights because I had a PowerPoint presentation I needed to edit and I knew it would be a million times easier and quicker to just do it on my PC at work than try to work in Keynote or even the Mac Office suite.  Anyone who’s worked with the Mac Office applications know they’re designed nothing like the PC experience, which I found very frustrating.  Most of the functionality is in the Mac version as far as I can tell, but it really made me appreciate how well organized PowerPoint is on the PC.  If I bought a Mac, I’d have to run Parallels so I could use Microsoft Office within Windows (additional costs not incorporated into the already crazy price tag…. see reason #1).

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The new Office 2011 suite for Mac looks like a significant upgrade over the older versions, so I’ll have to walk back some of my criticism on the Mac office experience.  The old Office suite really did affect my Mac experience so much that I thought it was all a plan at Microsoft to get consumers to switch back to Windows.  Obviously, that didn’t seem sane enough to write in the first version of this post, but that’s how frustrating the old Office apps were on a Mac.

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3.) APPS – This was probably the straw that broke this camel’s back (aside from reason #1).  Getting a new MacBook Pro meant I’d get all of the iLife applications, which I was pretty excited about.  The new Mac OS applications are great, but I don’t see as much value in native computer apps anymore.  When I really look at my day-to-day life, I use Google for email, contacts, calendar and to-do’s,in addition to storing/organizing files.  I still have to use Excel, PowerPoint and Word, but those are basically the only non-web based programs I run regularly besides iTunes and TweetDeck.  When I thought about all of those programs, most of the PC apps were either on par or head and shoulder above their counterparts on a Mac.  I was excited about getting iPhoto for a while, but realized I don’t take many pictures, and when I do take them, I upload them to Facebook immediately.  I wanted to use Flickr or Picasa, but neither site really stuck with me for some reason.  Now that Facebook has begun seriously upgrading their Photos app, my next major personal project will be to upload every single picture I own to Facebook albums.  Similarly, I’ll just upload my videos to YouTube and save anything else in folders on my external hard drive.

4.) PRICE – Did I mention I saved over $1,400?

5.) WINDOWS 7 – You have to give credit where credit is due, and Windows 7 is a quality operating system.  Microsoft was able to correct many of the annoyances of Vista (thank God I’ve barely seen any pop-ups since setting this bad boy up).  It’s clean.  It’s well-organized.  It’s not as pretty as Snow Leopard, but it’s not the ugly step-child either.  I spend most of my time looking at tabs in Chrome anyway, so the aesthetics of it all aren’t too important to me in the end.  I just need it to work.

6.)  VIRUSES – Many people cite this as the main reason they switch from a PC to a Mac, but over the past couple years, I haven’t gotten a single virus on any PC I’ve used because I always have some sort of baseline virus protection and I’m not an idiot.  If I don’t know who sent me an email, I’m certainly not going to open the attachment.  You can avoid most viruses with simple common sense.  Make sure you’re downloading from secure websites, read the comments on Torrent files if you choose to risk it, and set up a little protection from mal-ware.  It’s not that difficult.  Macs might not have as many vulnerabilities to viruses, but they do exist and as Mac’s share of the market increases, they’re turning into a bigger and bigger target for malicious programmers.

7.) PRICE – Just in case you missed points 1 and 4, $2,350 minus $950 is $1,400.  I just paid for a vacation to Costa Rica that I’ve been planning for over a year!  I just really couldn’t find any justification in spending an extra $1,400 for a MacBook Pro.  It felt like buying a BMW when the new Honda Accords look pretty snazzy and still get you from point A to point B.  Sure, BMW’s are beautiful, well built machines.  I have nothing against BMW.  I hope to one day own one even, but I couldn’t justify buying one right now and I couldn’t justify buying a Mac either.

I’m still a big fan of Apple, but right now, their computer products just aren’t as differentiated as the rest of their product lines.  The iPod, iPhone and iPad all have rivals on the market, but I don’t think any other devices are on the same level (Android is close, but the variance of quality in their apps are holding them back).

I’ve spent the day setting up and “breaking in” my new Samsung laptop, and so far I couldn’t be happier with my purchase.  I wrote this post with it and the more I type, the more I fall in love with it.  I couldn’t believe how many mid-size laptops tried to cram a full number pad onto the keyboard.  It pushed everything off center, throwing off the spacing and how you look at the screen.  I was not a fan at all.  Some companies still design really poor laptops (I’m looking at you Dell, HP, Toshiba and Gateway… I trust those brands about as far as I can throw them), but Samsung and Sony both design beautiful machines that are reliable and perform well.  What more can you really ask for (aside from a $1,400 rebate)?

I’m curious though.  I hear about people switching from PC to Mac all the time, but I haven’t heard as many instances where people switch back to a PC after having a Mac.  It’s time to speak up!  Why did you switch back?  Do you regret it or miss anything about having a Mac?  Please post your experiences and thoughts to the comments section.

A tragedy occurred on Thursday.  As I was flying back from NYC from my second business trip ever (first one was the previous week… yay new professional adventures!), I made one of the most stupid mistakes I’ve ever made with something I own/love.  I left my iPad in the magazine pocket of my plane seat.  I did not realize this until about 6 hours later and have come to grips with the fact that I will likely never retrieve my baby.  I went through different ideas of tracking IP addresses connecting to my email account wirelessly on it (the email accounts should update automatically if it’s connected to a wifi router), but while I KNOW it is possible to locate my iPad by identifying the IP address connecting to it, law enforcement is basically stuck in the pager-era, so this sounds like a fool’s mission.  If anyone has any ideas on how to find locate my iPad (no, I don’t have MobileME), I’m all ears.

I’m really torn up over it because of the apps I had on there… I can’t watch Netflix as easily in my bed before I go to sleep.  I’m stuck on my high score in Fruit Ninja (greatest game EVER), giving my co-workers an opportunity to beat my rather impressive, if I do say so myself, high score.  Even worse, I’m halfway through the book Linchpins by Seth Godin and I do not want to have to buy it again to finish the book (same with Blink by Malcolm Gladwell).  My Powerbook was too old to sync with my iPad, so neither were backed up (major frustration… I’m definitely in the market for a new computer, so you can expect a post on that to explain my decision-making process once I’ve made up my mind).  I’m going to investigate whether I can get those ebooks somehow.  I figure Apple has a record of me purchasing it through my iTunes account, so I should be able to get access to it on another computer.

The most interesting part of this experience though has been the realization of the role the iPad played in my life.  If it’s true that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, I wish the iPad gave me more to miss.  I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s purely a luxury device in my life and not something I can justify purchasing again only a month and a half after my first purchase.  Basically, I can live without it.  This is slightly depressing in hindsight, but also depressing in foresight because I know I’ll eventually buy another one…. I’m debating whether I’ll wait for just the price to drop or if I’ll have the patience to wait for the second generation.  Right now, I’m thinking I’ll wait for the second generation.  By then the apps will have evolved into iPad-worthy experiences (which I can’t currently claim… it’s a nascent marketplace though, so the sky’s the limit on innovation within the space), the price should drop and they should have integrated the front-facing camera for video chat on it.  I feel like the only reason the first version of the iPad didn’t have it is because they wanted to wait to release it with the iPhone 4.  From a business perspective, I completely understand the roll-out plan, but from an early adopter consumer perspective, I expect more from Apple and I know the camera is a really easy feature to integrate.  I digress though…

After realizing that I didn’t need an iPad in my life, I began considering which devices were truly essential for me anymore.  The first one that I KNOW I couldn’t live without is my iPhone.  I rely on it way too heavily.  It’s my primary device for interfacing with email, social networks, web search, communicating with people, organizing my life… the list goes on.  It’s been integrated into so many parts of my life that if I lost my iPhone tomorrow, I don’t think I could make it more than 2-3 days before buying a replacement.  This was a shocking revelation to me because I couldn’t put my home computer in the same category.  It certainly meets a different set of needs, but in the end, I found it didn’t meet any crucial needs that my iPhone couldn’t accomplish within a short period of time.  There’s no replacement for saving all of my old files, navigating pictures, or full-on web browsing, but the more I thought about it, the less these features mattered.  Almost all of my pictures are uploaded directly to Facebook or Twitter from my phone and I’ve started using Google Docs to save Word, Excel and PowerPoint files.  I have all of my historic files backed up on an external hard drive, so even if I lost my laptop, I’d still have the files that really mattered.  The fact is, if I lost my laptop or spilled water on it or whatever other tragedies I can imagine, I wouldn’t need to replace it within a week to continue functioning on any level that mattered.  It would certainly be inconvenient not to have access to a full web browser, but that’s the main thing I use my computer for anyway and the Safari web browser on my iPhone meets nearly all of my essential browsing needs.  My situation would be different if I relied on my home PC for work, but I try my best to finish work in the office, on the Windows-based PC my employer provides me, and keep work-related tasks separate from home.  Work-life separation is very important to me, which is part of my explanation/excuse for not updating this blog more frequently.

So I’ve found that the only truly indispensable  gadget in my life is my iPhone.  Although I’m not glad that I went through the agony of losing my newest toy, I have learned an important lesson about what truly is essential in my life.  If I were more willing to consider a ‘disconnected’ lifestyle as an option, my iPhone wouldn’t even qualify anymore, but let’s not get crazy here.

Which devices in your life are truly indispensable?  If you lost a device, what true impact would it have on your life beyond simple convenience?  These are important questions because the relationships we form with technology can have a profound impact on our daily lives.

What came first – the chicken or the egg?  Rhetorical and slightly annoying, but I think the question addresses a concept that is too often overlooked when analyzing our adoption of digital media.  Thinking about the devices through which we experience media can help us better understand our relationship with that media and the direction that media industries are heading.

First, let’s take a look at the evolution of the music experience.  The 20th century was dominated by the album and the record companies optimized the production and profit they could extract from that media experience, whether it was from vinyl records, cassette tapes or CDs.  These types of physical media enabled musicians to sell collections of their music, which was considerably easier and generated more revenue than selling each song individually.

When people began transferring their music collections onto their computers and eventually their MP3 players, the organization and experience of music changed forever.  The computer enabled you to collect and instantly play music across a number of albums on a single device.  Creating playlists also changes the musical media experience and helped us become accustomed to listening to songs individually instead of in the experience of an album.  Radio also has this effect on our interest in single tracks, but organizing playlists on the computer is a more personal and conscious behavior than passively listening to a radio station that might or might not play a song you enjoy.

By all accounts, the music industry has largely failed to recognize these shifts in consumption preferences and are clinging to old business models that will never produce the same results because even if every file-sharer began purchasing all of their music digitally, they’d likely purchase individual songs, which is not as valuable as someone who purchases a $18 CD.  The good news, in my opinion, is that the music industry does have a chance to regroup and adapt to the new marketplace because I do not foresee another major shift in consumption habits for quite some time.  I think the music industry’s revenues can slowly climb back if they begin embracing multiple digital monetization strategies, but I have very strong doubts they will ever climb back to their once lofty perch.

The music industry was forced through the growing pains of digitization faster than any other entertainment media because the software for building digital music collections on PCs was developed very early on.  Playing them on MP3 players, lead by the earliest iPods, became a very easy behavior for the public to embrace because they were already used to interfacing with portable tape and CD players.

File-sharing has had such a strong impact on the music industry because of their inability to adapt their distribution and profit models to new consumption habits.  Napster, Kazaa, Limewire and later BitTorrent were the only ways for early adopters to fill their MP3 players easily with music they didn’t have on CD and this eventually conditioned a culture that devalues the price of digital media.  Why pay $18 for a CD when you can borrow it from another willing party on a permanent basis?  Copyright infringement does not resonate with the common person and file-sharing can quickly turn into a Robin Hood kind of situation with pirates stealing from the mighty entertainment industry to give to the poor students and young adults who can’t afford to buy their entertainment.

I see hope for the long-form video industries though because TV shows and movies have not yet been optimized for mass digital consumption.  I say that because the TV is one of the most uniquely important devices in our lives.  As a technology, we have become very comfortable with the TV and with time our expectations surrounding the experience a TV delivers has increased dramatically.  The same early adopters and digital media enthusiasts driving digital media adoption are also the primary customers for HDTVs, Blu-ray players and home theater surround sound systems, and there is no way a digital rip or even the paid download of a movie will compare to the experience on their 60″ 1080p LED-LCD with 7.1 Surround Sound.

Digital TV shows and movies are primarily consumed on computers and portable video devices like the iPod Touch, so in order for the TV and film industries to protect their revenue, they need accomplish three things:

1.)  The TV and movie studios need extract as much sell-through and rental revenue as they can from the portable media experiences.  The emergence of portable video consumption could end up giving the video industry the same kind of boost that the music industry experienced when tape players and CD players made it easy for us to listen to our music whenever we wanted.  This boost should not be nearly as big though because the length of a song lends itself to a ‘snacking’ type of media consumption.  The closest parallel to this kind of video experience is YouTube and streaming video, which has been steadily growing in recent years.  YouTube-style video snacking does not do it for everyone though.  There is certainly still an audience for people who want a deeper mobile media experience.  Catching up on a TV show you missed while on the bus or renting a movie to watch on a 3 hour business flight are just two examples of this opportunity.  Luckily, the industry has been developing the mobile video experience and we have legal options now with iTunes, Amazon and other digital distributors.  The iPad will play an interesting role in expanding the reach of mobile video, but that’s another post for another day.

2.)  The long-form video industry must discover a compromise for teens and young adults who cannot afford media priced for their parents to buy.  One thing people high up in the media industry do not always realize is that $20 to someone over 35 with a steady salary, savings and stability is not the same as $20 to a teen working on the weekends, students on financial aid or young adults who either cannot find a job after graduation or are saddled with so much debt that they pretend ramen noodles is a delicious alternative to a meal.  Young adults do not want to steal, but they also recognize that the experience they download from BitTorrent is not the same as the one on their TV or played through a Blu-ray player and they aren’t interested in paying the big screen price for a small screen experience.  Ignoring this audience could condition the same attitudes toward Movie and TV show ownership that the music industry fostered, creating a culture of free that is unsustainable in the long-term.  Almost more importantly, young people are the media industry’s most voracious, loyal fan base.  The sway they have in the market is too great for studios to treat them like criminals.

3.)  The third thing the long-form video industry needs to  accomplish is protecting their content on the TV.  This is one area where the industry is leading the way.  Although the effect of DVRs on TV consumption and advertising effectiveness is still up for debate, I think there is strong enough evidence to claim that it has lead us to consume an even greater amount of TV than we previously had since we can watch shows at times that are more convenient to us.  In turn, this makes it easier for us to become more loyal to a particularly show because it removes many excuses for missing an episode.

Aside from DVRs though, it is fairly difficult to re-create the experience of watching a show on your TV if you don’t in some way pay for the experience.  There are some of us who are savvy enough to hook our TVs up to a computer where we can stream TV shows for free, but no matter how optimized your system is, this cannot recreate the full TV experience because of buffering, video quality and simple audio outputs.  Free downloads from file-sharing applications played through the TV are much closer to the real deal, but require a deeper level of commitment to the process of acquiring said media.  Trying to consume digital movies on your TV is a very similar experience, except streaming options are limited and usually extremely poor quality.

Media extender boxes like the Netflix Roku player, Apple TV, web-enabled Blu-ray players/HDTVs, and gaming console platforms like Xbox LIVE and PlayStation Network have begun delivering digital TV and movies to our TV sets, but all of those technologies are examples of the entertainment industry responding to consumer needs with technology that safely allows them to transition their business models on their terms.  Adoption and usage of these devices might start off slowly, but they should see acceptance in the market place as the rest of the technology in our livings rooms catch up and normalize into our media experience.  If the entertainment industry can retain control over our TV sets, they should be able to weather this digital transition and find new ways to monetize their products that eluded the music industry for years.  That is, until a technology comes out that displaces or disrupts the dominance of the TV screen in our media consumption, but that will be a mighty throne to topple.

As always, your comments and feedback are encouraged.  The topic I’ve touched upon here is extremely complicated and no single blog post could do it justice, so feel free to play devil’s advocate or expound on a point in the comments below.

This is a guest post written by Brenton Lyle, Senior Gaming Consultant at Interpret LLC.  To give some context, Brenton gave me permission to publish an email he wrote to my office in response to an article sent to our listserv: Who will buy the iPad? I thought the points he made were strong, well articulated and pretty funny, so it would have been a waste if it just ended up in my Outlook Deleted Items.

I think it’s important to look past the day-one reaction of the tech-savvy internet commenter crowd; they’ve proven historically to be impossible to please without creating a product that’s doomed to failure (I imagine a quad-core, Linux-based, open-source tablet with seventeen USB outs and three HDMIs, all for $32 (or $2000), might have had a chance of avoiding the ire of the self-declared gadget elite).

The iPad may succeed or fail, but I think it’s important to know what it is Apple is actually trying to accomplish (conceptually, that is; shareholder value is the literal goal, of course). Jobs decided that room exists for a gadget with a new set of uses – uses you don’t yet realize that you’ll enjoy. If they’re right, this will go next to “Put Arm & Hammer in your fridge” as another famous example of expanding your market by introducing new consumption habits. Do you browse the internet on your couch, or check your email while eating cereal? You don’t, yet*, but Apple is hoping you’ll enjoy doing it.

Jobs said in his presentation that they’re filling the space between phones and laptops. That is actually a simplification of what they’re attempting (it was too obtuse to describe on stage during the introduction). They’ve identified an entirely new type of web-connected, technology-enabled media consumption, that is neither mobile, nor full laptop computing. The whole thing gets confused, however, when one (correctly) points out that a number of devices are already capable of doing these things. The obvious comparisons that spring most readily to mind are the iPhone and netbooks, but the key to the iPad is the fact that these devices were never intended for this type of “casual computing”, nor are they particularly well suited for it, the same way that your daily-driver car can roam the open plains and explore dirt trails, but isn’t exactly optimized for the task.**

This is illustrated below:

The space between mobile and laptop computing

The famous “Blue Ocean Strategy” article (I believe Kim Mauborgne wrote it) said (paraphrasing) that you’re more likely to succeed if you figure out how to sidestep your competitors, rather than beating them in yesterday’s marketplace. Nintendo demonstrated this so soundly with the Wii—woefully underpowered, laughable graphics, and a wildly unconventional and untested control scheme—that Sony executives still cry themselves to sleep 35% of the time. Apple is attempting the same thing with the iPad: cater to an entirely new type of computer use with a device that isn’t a phone, or a computer, or any combination of the two.

People are getting hung up on the fact that, with regard to technical specifications, it is by definition (and parts vendors) a combination of the two: capacitive touchscreen (mobile), A4 processor (computer), icon-based homescreen UI (mobile), etc. But attacking the iPad because of its specifications is like lambasting the Wii because it lacked the 8-cell processor of the Playstation 3: you’ve missed the point.

* If you said “yes”, you’re likely among the netbook hyper-minority, probably hate the iPad, and have likely already written a few comments online about it. You are not actually the market for this device, and I have it on good authority that Steve Jobs hopes you spill cereal on your netbook.

** If you drive an off-road SUV in Los Angeles, we cannot guarantee that people aren’t laughing at you in the Whole Foods parking lot.

Brenton can be contacted directly at brenton.lyle@interpretllc.com.

Steve Jobs introduces newest member of the iFam

It’s time to welcome a new member to our digital family of gadgets.  Apple’s iPad is like the middle child, stuck between the iPhone and MacBook wondering what it’s place is in this wild and crazy mobile computing world.  The iPad isn’t the first tablet computer, but the hype and momentum behind it make it sound like Steve Jobs sucessfully redesigned the wheel.  While I’ve seen many apple fanboys disappointed that the iPad is essentially a jumbo iPod Touch with 3G, this OS is precisely why I believe it will succeed where so many other tablets have failed in the past and find a place in our lives.

The reason tablets have not succeeded in the past is because they always tried to force a square block into the round hole where their operating system should have been.  One of our biggest problems when venturing into uncharted digital space is that we try to force what’s in front of us into a frame of something familiar to us.  Early tablets tried their best to be an alternative to laptops with an operating system you were already familiar with on the PCs around your home and work, but the interface is so unique on a tablet that they never quite lived up to expectations.

If early tablets tried to force a full-on PC operating system without success, many will argue Apple is committing the same error in forcing their tablet to mimic their other portable devices with an iPhone OS.  My take on this argument is that the OS Apple designed for the iPhone and iPod Touch is actually better suited for a device the size of the iPad, especially when it comes to reading eBooks or other content online.  I’ll be upfront and say that my iPhone is probably the most essential device in my life and I feel lost without it sometimes.  I use it for reading email, news and other blogs, but the limitation of reading on a phone’s smaller screen means I’m constantly zooming in, switching to landscape and squinting to make things out on websites that aren’t optimized for mobile browsing.

One issue two co-workers and I got into a heated debate over yesterday is the role that the iPad will play in our gadget lineup.  They both were disappointed that the device was essentially a blown up iPod Touch and thought that the inability of users to multi-task on the iPad would severely limit its utility and reach in the market.  I think they fell into the trap I described earlier, hoping the iPad would be something it is not – a replacement for the netbook.  As Steve Jobs said in his keynote, “netbooks aren’t better at anything”.  The reason they aren’t better than anything is because they try to be everything to everyone.  They’re the early versions of the tablet PC with a smaller screen and tiny keyboard.  I’ll admit, those two changes make a big difference and I do think there is a place for the netbook as a mobile productivity platform for people who need to take their work with them, but they are not an apples-to-apples comparison because the iPad is not trying to replace the functionality of a laptop.

Apple understand it’s corner of the PC market is precisely that… the personal computer.  They make great computers for you to use at home.  They’re easy to use.  Plain and simple.  They’re also easy on the eyes and carry a level of sophistication missing from most Windows-based PCs.  However, unless you work in film editing or graphic design, Apple’s products are not designed for work-style productivity.  Their version of Microsoft Office, especially PowerPoint, is tough to navigate and I personally find them borderline unusable compared to the Office suite of apps for Windows.  I’d address iWork except that I don’t know anyone who actually uses it.  The iPad is also aware of its role in your personal computing life.  If you need to research online, review spreadsheets and work on a presentation, the iPad is not the device for you.  I would argue the netbook is too small to handle those tasks with any ounce of grace, but if you need to do mobile work, it’s the best solution because laptops are too big and expensive to easily carry around.  Bottom line, the iPad is NOT a netbook and it isn’t trying to be one.

I can’t speak for everyone, but I’ll try to give you a sense of the role I envision for the iPad in my life in order to expound on the features that I think will help it succeed.  First, my current setup at home is that I have an iPhone I carry around everywhere and a PowerBook that sits on my desk or is used in the living room to project movies.  This arrangement has worked for a while, but my laptop is on its last leg, so I’m currently considering the optimal device combination for my life.  After much debate, I believe I’m going to replace my PowerBook with a new iMac in my room.  I almost always leave the PowerBook sitting on my desk, so it’s essentially a desktop anyway at this point.  My iPhone covers almost all of my daily mobile computing needs, so I don’t feel a need to lug around a device that is very expensive to replace in a worst case scenario.  If my iMac sits on my desk and my iPhone goes with me when ever I leave my apartment, then the iPad is my everything in between device.  I’ll primarily use it in my apartment, although I will certainly take it on trips to read books or watch movies.  Like many tech-enthusiasts, I consume an inordinate amount of reading online, but I don’t always like doing it from my computer.  The iPad will untether that consumption, allowing me to read more easily in my living room and bed.  I spend so much time reading in front of a computer, it’s almost weird to think that I can read the same content while sitting in a big comfy chair or couch.  I’ve tried taking my laptop to the living room to read on my couch, but there’s never a good way to sit with it and it overheats my legs too quickly.  While just using the device to read and surf the net doesn’t sound like a lot, it’s probably the primary reason I use my computers at home.  I don’t think the iPad will replace most of my computer usage, but I do think it’ll transform the way I interact with social networks and think about the Internet.

What role, if any, do you see tablet computers playing in your life?  Where do you think a device like the iPad fits into your daily routine?