In 2005, I matriculated to Middlebury College. When I did, I took with me what I thought was sleek, sophisticated machine well-suited to my growing needs as a writer, musician, and student. The PowerBook G4 was, in theory, my dream machine. And yet, looking back on it, it is the one Mac I’ve ever owned that I can honestly say disappointed me. It ran hot. It ran slow. And within six months of purchase, it was made obsolete. I had jumped on board this train just before it derailed, just before Steve Jobs announced that the Mac platform would switch to Intel processors and abandon the old PowerPC chipset that had been the heart of Apple products for more than a decade. Suddenly, my sleek new machine was a dinosaur.

That’s not to say it wasn’t serviceable. I did a lot of great work on my PowerBook. I wrote my first radio scripts and had my first exposure to serious sound editing – Dad insisted on installing Pro Tools before I left for school. It also let me make my first real foray into computer gaming. I had grown up a Nintendo fan, but I installed StarCraft on my PowerBook during my freshman year, and spent many nights bonding with friends through our computers. (For the record, I play Protoss.)

But the whole experience was clunky, and in retrospect, un-Apple-like. I had a standalone iSight Camera that I used a few times to video chat with my parents, but it was so clumsy and miserable to set up that I rarely took it out of the box. The trackpad, small and unresponsive, was so bad that I resorted to using the single-button wireless mouse – itself a less-than-satisfying product. The only consolation was that the PowerBook was still a superior machine to the Windows-based that (increasingly few of) my classmates were carrying around. That’s a small comfort.

It was, in retrospect, a disappointing computer. Yet the experience of owning my one disappointing Apple computer taught me a very Apple-like lesson. I had made the upgrade because of a perceived need. I was going off to college, therefore I NEEDED more power, more storage, more everything. More, more, more. It didn’t matter that my iBook was doing its job exceedingly well, and would have continued doing so. I just had to upgrade, because, well, look how much better the specs were! It was foolish, but in doing it, I got a much better picture of what my needs actually were. And when I upgraded next, I did it right.

The result was the longest-lived computer I’ve ever owned.

My first iBook was also my first laptop, and the first computer that I could call my own. It was an iBook G4. For posterity’s sake, I wish I had spent more time learning about the machine. I couldn’t tell you what the processor speed was or how big the hard drive was or how much RAM it had or anything technical at all. I was too busy using it to pay attention to trivial details. It was fast, it was fun, and it did what I needed it to do.

I can’t emphasize how much this machine changed my life. My first iBook meant my first iTunes library. I remember when I finished ripping my CD collection (about 100 discs). I was just thrilled that I could carry that much music with me anytime I went on a trip. Fast-forward to today and I have more than 100 GBs of music sitting on an external hard drive, along with 200 GBs of video and god knows what else. But at the time, digitizing 100 CDs was a stunning technological achievement to my young mind.

The iBook G4 also introduced me to the defining digital device of the past decade: the iPod. Most people seem to have had an iPod before they had a Mac, but the halo effect worked in reverse for me. Once I got all of that music onto my laptop, I just HAD to have something smaller to carry around with me. So after scrimping and saving for months, I headed down to CompUSA (there’s that dinosaur again!) and got myself a 20 GB iPod – the first generation to include a Click Wheel. It blew my mind. Since then, I’ve owned five other iPods, including two more Classic models, two Shuffles, and one Nano (which I’m currently wearing on my wrist), but the love affair started with that bulky 20 GB model that redefined how I listened to music. Goodbye, CD player.

I did the typical things with my iBook. I surfed the web (on Safari, no less), I got email, I did homework. And I wrote. Oh, how I wrote. My prose was sloppy and unsophisticated, but I cranked out everything that I could. I wrote the stories that won my high school’s literary magazine contest two years in a row on that machine. I wrote my first stage play and my first radio play on that machine. I wrote short films, I wrote blog posts, and I built the first version of StefanClaypool.com on that machine. And as I did all of this, my relationship with my computer changed. Rather than just being some device I used to do work, it became an extension and enabler of my creative impulses. It gave me the canvas that I needed to grow artistically. It stopped being an amazing feat of technology, and became exactly what I needed it to be: a partner in a continuing creative enterprise.

My iBook G4 changed my life. It made me rethink longstanding assumptions about technology, redefined my work and recreational habits, and gave me a powerful tool to channel my creative impulses. In the end, though, you have to move on, and I did when I passed the machine on, first to my mother and then to my grandmother, who continues to use it to this day. I loved that iBook, but college was looming. My needs had changed.

Fortunately, there was a Mac for that.

I remember clearly the first time I used an Apple product.

I was probably fifteen years old. It was an iMac G4 – you know, the lamp. I had never seen anything like it. It was love at first sight.

I was living in Naperville. My dad was beginning to put time and energy into building his recording studio. Although we had always been a PC family, he decided that a Mac might be better suited for this endeavor. It was meant to be a music machine only – something to sit by the guitars and nothing more.

To this point, computer shopping had always meant going to CompUSA or some local retailer. Not for this. For the first time, we drove to the Apple Store. From the moment we entered it was obvious: this was a whole different world.

Dad made the purchase and set the machine up downstairs with the family PC. He would use it when he was recording, but for the most part we all stayed on the family’s PC. I can’t even remember what it was – some beige box running Windows 2000, but an HP? A Dell? Who knows. What I do remember is that I had never even considered that there was another philosophy of personal computing. To put it tritely, I wasn’t thinking different.

But there sat the iMac, the art machine, purchased for a specific function and never considered for anything else. I had no reason to think anything of it, but every time I walked downstairs, I looked at it for a little bit longer. It was beautiful and new and I didn’t know how to use it. How could an adolescent resist?

I finally decided to try it out. I didn’t really understand what was going on, but I realized that it was different from every other computer I’d ever used. Every time I went online, I’d use the Mac a little longer. Soon I wouldn’t even look at that ugly beige box.

One day dad found me on the iMac. I don’t know what I was doing – probably burning a CD or looking at something online. “Why are you using that?” he said. Without thinking, I knew the answer: “The Mac is a superior computing environment,” I said. I never looked back.

The family starting thinking differently about what we were looking for in our computers. And for Christmas 2003, we took the plunge: iBooks for all.

Image courtesy of This Is My Next

I’m two weeks into my studies at the Johnson School at Cornell after just over two years away from academia. One of the things that’s struck me about the way education has changed in that short period is the speed with which iPads have integrated into the classroom. When I was a college student, there was no such thing as an iPad. Now it seems that everyone has one – in fact, I’d wager that there are more iPads than Macs in the Johnson Class of 2013, and it’s not hard to see why. The iPad offers the opportunity to dramatically improve a student’s ability to manage his academic life, and I can’t count the number of times since my arrival that I’ve wished I could have had one at Middlebury.

Calvetica, Evernote, and Todo are indispensable elements of my grad school routine, but the one app that I don’t think I could do without is one of which I had not heard even a week ago: Kno. More than any other app, Kno is redefining how I function as a student, and hats off to them for it.

Kno is ostensibly a digital textbook retailer and reader. Its catalog is both broad and deep – every book I’ll require for the next semester is available for rental and purchase, and at substantially discounted prices, lower than the college bookstore’s and even Amazon’s. Used copies might run cheaper on Chegg, but are both heavy and contain annotations from another student. Kno, by contrast, weighs only as much as the iPad, and takes up practically no space in a crowded book bag.

Where Kno really shines is in course planning. A simple drag-and-drop interface enables me to create a customized curriculum, containing not only my texts, but also any additional readings such as PDFs I import. As long as digital copies of class materials are available (almost a given in this day and age), Kno completely replaces both my textbooks and binders.

Best of all, Kno knows notes. (That’s the worst sentence I’ve ever written.) What does that mean? It means that anything I highlight in any text, or any graph I tag as important, or anything I choose to bookmark is automatically copied into a digital notebook contained within the app. It’s amazingly simple and saves significant time highlighting and copying notes. Brilliant.

Kno is fantastic technology, and what I mean by that is it simplifies the tasks I need to do to such an extent that it almost doesn’t register. The results is that I can stop worrying about the things that don’t matter in the process of being a student and get down to what’s important: learning. Highly recommended to anyone going into a classroom. Check it out.

Chrome OS is not dead yet. In fact, Google today announced the launch of two “Chromebooks,” one by Samsung and the other by Acer. The machines, which take design cues from the 11″ MacBook Air, appear to be inexpensive, capable devices that will function as well as an OS based on the generally reliable Chrome browser can. The fact that Google has worked so hard to get these devices to the market, when logic suggests that shifting resources to Android might be more prudent, indicates that senior management believes in the concept underlying the product. However, I can’t help but wonder if even in its finished state, the Chrome OS is simply entering the world too late to make a substantial impact.

After all, with iPad having all but destroyed netbooks, the market Chrome OS was intended to dominate no longer exists. Individuals in the market for an inexpensive computer are now gravitating to tablets – specifically iPads. Consumers who are not won over by the iPad will look at both Android and Chrome OS, and choosing one will inevitably hurt the other. In essence, with the netbook market hurting, Google may be pitting its two OSes against one another. Maybe that doesn’t hurt the company in the grand scheme of things, but it doesn’t give me much confidence that Chromebooks are going to make it big.

So will it work? Personally, I think a Chromebook is a more compelling product than an Android tablet, but as an iPad user, I’ll be purchasing neither. I suspect that unless the Chromebook experience is so outlandishly good that it pulls users from not only iPad, but also from the dying Windows netbook market and elsewhere, it will ultimately end up a disappointment. What then? I suspect Google will do what it always does: sigh, kill the product, fold its most appealing features into something else (probably Android), and move on.

I don’t think that Chromebooks are going to be bad products. I just think that the Chrome OS, because of delays and unexpected shifts in the market, is simply a product that’s time has passed before it even began.

The acquisition was clearly defensive in nature. Facebook and Google were both sniffing around Skype, and with FaceTime and Google Voice threatening in the VOIP space, the bosses in Redmond thought they needed to get in the game before they got steamrolled on yet another growing market. We’ll learn eventually how long this deal was in the works, but I would guess from the amount that Microsoft overpaid, it wasn’t long.

That doesn’t mean that the necessary synergies for success don’t exist. Realistically, it’s hard to imagine Microsoft turning Skype into a money-making machine. But the value of the Skype brand and the technologies now under Redmond’s control could be huge if properly applied to Microsoft’s products. The acquisition offers Microsoft the opportunity to make its brand synonymous with video chat. It gives the company the chance to build Skype’s technologies into all of its mobile offerings and create the best Skype experience available across any platforms. Skype integration in the Kinect could be revolutionary for living room computing. It would be a huge boost for Windows Phone 7 to have complete Skype integration right out of the box, and could offer a compelling alternative to Apple’s FaceTime standard. And if Microsoft continues to maintain Skype on OS X and iOS, it gives the company a cross-platform presence that Apple can’t match. Although users aren’t going to begin paying for Skype in large numbers, the brand and technologies could be a huge asset in driving sales of other products.

Of course, for that to happen, Microsoft would have to possess the ability to manage products outside of Windows and Office – an ability its has never demonstrated (with the arguable exception of Xbox). It would have to understand the way that Skype could enhance products beyond the desktop, beyond Microsoft’s traditional customer base. It would have to understand the power of Skype’s brand as a marketing tool (and as anyone who has ever seen a Microsoft ad can tell you, marketing and Microsoft are not synonymous). And it would have to understand that its competitors are going to continue innovating in the VOIP space, and that it must now keep pace.

Microsoft has the opportunity to use this defensive transaction as an offensive weapon, but it has to understand the value of what it now holds and where it can be most effective in achieving growth in new markets. The acquisition of Skype can’t be judged as good or bad as this point, because while the cost was high, the possibilities are numerous. Unfortunately, Microsoft does not have a strong record of successfully leveraging its acquisitions to create new growth, and I am doubtful that they will buck the trend with Skype. If they do, great. If not, well, there’s always FaceTime.

Or iChat.

Or Google Voice.

Question: how is The New York Times intrinsically more valuable than the work of a well informed blogger? Answer: it’s not. It’s just more expensive. It’s an outdated business model destined for the scrap heap of history. Let them go, world. It’s time to move on.

This is not an iPad. Obviously. But don’t you just want to reach out and *tap*?

This is Lion.

Apple released its first developer preview of Mac OS X Lion today. Not being a developer, I haven’t used it, but I’ve been following the reaction closely. People seem impressed. But while Apple’s told us its intentions – bring the advancements made with iPad “Back to the Mac” – I think it’s worth considering what motivated Apple to make the design decisions it did.

Look at that screenshot again. In some ways, it almost looks clumsy, like a bad Photoshop. It doesn’t make sense. What’s the dock even doing there if your entire app library can be summoned with a simple multi-touch gesture? Why is there a folder in the dock when an entirely different folder metaphor is present in the overlay? What’s going on here?

What you’re seeing in Lion is the pivot point in the single biggest transition any computer company has attempted since Apple abandoned the command line-driven Apple II in favor of the MacIntosh.  It’s not the transition between OS X and iOS, or between the mouse-based and multi-touch interaction. It’s the transition between the Mac as a computer with roots in the PC past and the Mac as a tool and appliance, as simple to use your TV. Or your phone. It’s a transition of perception as much as function, and this is the moment when it actually happens.

The familiar features of OS X are present in Lion. The dock is still there, as are the Finder, Spotlight, window structure, and file system. Sure, they’ve been given cosmetic overhauls, but there’s every indication that if you wanted to, you could use a Lion-driven machine almost exactly as you use a Snow Leopard-driven one. None of the functionality seems to have been impaired or replaced.

But additional functionality has been overlaid on the traditional OS X interface. Pull with four fingers and you’ve got Launchpad. Swipe up with three and you’re in Mission Control. A simple command and you’re in full-screen mode, but you can swipe between apps and the desktop using a simple gesture. Editing a document? Same as always, only the system handles the saving for you. It goes on and on.

There doesn’t seem to be much of an intersection between these new ideas and the old OS X system. For a company that’s as feature-conscious as Apple, why add these at all? Of course the company wants to extend the metaphors that drive the popular iOS, thereby increasing the familiarity users have when switching between their mobile devices and their computer, but that’s hardly justification enough. Why would Apple add this new layer?

Simple: so that when it takes away the old layer, no one panics.

I don’t know how Apple decides what to call its OS releases. This will be the eight major release of OS X, and no one seems sure what will justify a leap to OS XI or OS 11 or whatever they call it. But functionally, if we perceive an OS as a metaphor that enables interaction between the end user and the underlying code (and really, to most people, that’s probably the best definition), then this will probably be the final release of OS X.

Whatever comes after Lion probably won’t have a dock. It probably won’t have a Finder, at least not as we know it. Spotlight will probably go away, replaced by something a bit simpler (an Alfred-like system would be a good place to start). Full-screen apps will receive an even greater emphasis, with most smaller apps like any sensible (non-TweetDeck) Twitter clients functioning as overlays or pop-ups. Sure, there’ll still be a desktop, and you’re not going to see pure iOS-style uni-tasking, but the focus will be on… well, on focus, rather than on stacking as many apps as you can on top of one another. And when you need to transition between apps, a simple multi-touch gesture will be enough. In essence, the next version of Mac OS, whatever it’s called, will be iOS-like in that it’s primary focus will be on removing the familiar metaphors of the computer experience and leaving something behind that is simple, intuitive, and wildly functional.

And that is a terrifying thought. Stripping away the entire metaphor upon which modern computing was based? That’s okay for handheld devices, but for THIS?! Of course there will be people who rebel when it happens; who think Apple’s gone too far. The critics can stick with whatever version of Windows Microsoft will be throwing out by then, but somehow I think that a lot of people will embrace the idea of a simpler computing experience, in the same way that a lot of people who were content with their Razors are now passionate iPhone users (including yours truly).

Think about it: a computer that doesn’t require you to root around in file systems or worry about saving, that doesn’t make you worry about where or how your files are installed, that just… works. Really just works. That gets out of the way and lets you do what you need to do. That’s the future. That’s where Apple’s going.

And Lion is the first step to that, the first real step into tomorrow’s computer, but its a dangerous one. It’s as radical a transition as we’ve seen in computing, because it doesn’t just mean changing the way computers look or act – it means changing how we see at them and use them. It’s a hard transition to make, and it’ll take a few more years, but in the end the vast majority of normal people – not hackers, not tech-heads, but normal people that want to use computers to get things done without worrying about how the machine works – will welcome it.

For this release, I think Apple’s comfortable mixing its metaphors, so that when it comes time to make the real leap, we’ll all be ready to go with them. And when that happens, it’ll look a little something like this.

[H]ow can anyone be surprised by this rejection? Readability’s business model is to charge a subscription fee, keep 30 percent, and pass 70 percent along to the writers/publishers of the articles being read by Readability users. Sound familiar?

Maybe I’m missing something, but these guys claiming to be surprised and disappointed by Apple’s insistence on a 30 percent cut of subscriptions when their own business model is to take a 30 percent cut of subscriptions strikes me as rich. And how can they claim that Readability isn’t “serving up content”? That’s exactly what Readability does. What they’re pissed about is that Apple has the stronger hand. Readability needs Apple to publish an app in the App Store. Apple doesn’t need Readability.

This goes back to what I wrote in my last post. Apple’s growth for more than ten years has been to gain leverage over its negotiating partners. Readability, while a small-scale operation, is one of those partners. Of course, this opens Apple to charges of “greed” and “meanness,” but while a few people may be unhappy that Readability isn’t available for iOS, I suspect most outside the tech blog bubble won’t care.