Luke On Tech

It all started a few months ago when I started using Twitter again – a habit I had managed to clear myself of. I found that increasingly I wanted to be connected to people. I found that for the first time I was in a position where after an hour long commute I needed to check my email to make sure I was going to the right meeting, that the venue hadn’t changed, or the agenda. In short I needed access to information and a lot of it.

January of last year I got an N95 as my mobile handset – a bunch of people did. And how smug and superior we felt to most people to be walking round with a phone that could connect over 3G, take stunning photos, tell you where you were and let you video-call someone. Even when the iPhone came out we poured scorn and mocked. And then… And then bad things started happening. This snazzy phone started dropping calls a little too often. It started crashing when trying to retrieve email. Suddenly the 5mb per month data allowance felt restrictively limiting. And don’t even get me started on the web browsing experience.

And so we come inevitably back to the iPhone. A device that I spent a long post mocking on this site when it was first unveiled in the UK. A device that I’m now holding in my hand writing this post on…

In my defence, it has matured significantly on the past 18 months since it was first announced. The glaring deficiencies – the lack of both 3G and GPS – have both been addressed. Battery life still seems problematic but no worse than my twelve month old Nokia which admittedly had a hard life. The new version of the OS has been announced and will remedy a lot of the concerns with Bluetooth. The majority of the major sticking points have now been fixed and we’re finally able to talk about the iphone being a serious device. So I waited until my Nokia was really getting to me and then I gave in. I’ve had my iPhone for not quite a week and it’s already changing the way I interact with the world – I’m sat here in bed typing this for a start, and I’ll be able to save it, review it and publish it, all without going near an actual computer. I’ve interrupted typing this to check my email and Twitter twice and before I go to sleep I’ll probably read the news headlines. I’m able to get the information I want whenever I want it delivered right into my hand.

Don’t get me wrong – I stand by everything I said 18 months ago, but I didn’t take onto account Apple’s track record for releasing a crappy version of something and improving it. Or maybe I just drank the kool-aid finally…

In the past couple of days, there has been a lot of hype surrounding the forthcoming “Wolfram Alpha”, a search engine aimed at providing the answers to questions by computation rather than the existing approach to search in which potentially relevant resources are found and suggested as a good place to look for answers. It sounds incredibly promising, and the media have been quick to seize on it, but can it possibly deliver what it claims? I really don’t think so, and I’m going to take a few minutes right now and explain why.

First let me establish my credentials in the field – as many of you know I’m a research student in AI. I’ve studied AI now for 8 years, and been an enthusiast for closer to 15. Right now I’m working with one of the finest AI Planning research groups in the world, and although my work isn’t anything like that calibre, I’d like to think that I’ve learnt a bit about the state of the art based on the problems my colleagues are attempting to tackle. Although our work doesn’t directly relate to the overarching concept of “computing” answers to factual questions, it is most definitely related since both areas are concerned with modelling and reasoning about data, and inference – which is to say deriving new facts based on the presence of other facts. In short, I know a thing or two about what I’m about to talk about. More importantly, the media types that are involved in reporting on this kind of thing have nothing like that kind of background, so its hardly surprising that they are buying into the PR surrounding this product.

Lets take a step back though. There are basically two main components to this work as far as I can see. Firstly there is the notion that a question asked in natural language in a text input field on a website can be translated into some form of “formula” to which there a definite answer can be computed. Natural Language Processing is a hard problem in and of itself, and the ability to get a computer to recognise the functional-equivalence of “The cat sat on the mat” and “The mat is the location at which the cat was sat” (possibly not great examples) is something that, as far as I’m aware, does not exist yet. The distinction between meaning and structure is something that is so poorly represented currently that even having cracked this issue alone and being able to distil sentences down to formulaic representations ought to be cause for a seriously spectacular pizza party – however NLP is not really my area so I don’t want to get too into this bit. By far the most interesting part of WA to me is the concept of computing an answer based on resources on the web. Right now in the Planning community we operate broadly by representing a problem using a formal semantics that captures the essence of what we are working with, and then reasoning using this model of the problem to understand how changes can be made and how we can achieve what we need – the point of the work is to allow computers to work out automatically what needs to happen in order to satisfy objectives, and its technology that is already in use in many places, from the Mars Rover to scheduling train maintenance. The biggest issue we have in our field is that modelling problems is non-trivial, and attempts to do it automatically have fallen far short of what is necessary, so to suggest that the factual content of resources can somehow be modelled, the key aspects derived into a formal semantics that could be used for reasoning is really quite specious – that such a system could be used to compute the answer to any factual question with any sort of accuracy seems beyond the realm of current possibility. Typically knowledge is represented through the use of an Ontology, which more or less is a formalism that dictates how information will be modelled, with the idea that by standardising the format, information can be more readily found and reasoned about, and using an approach based on this it isn’t hard to see how (still assuming a question can be distilled into its ontological roots) such a system can be used, but the significant challenge in this method would be in creating a knowledge base conformant with the ontology automatically, without losing quality – to segregate the worthwhile resources from nonsense. Google does this through its Page Rank mechanic, but in order for WA to produce a definitive answer to a question, it needs some form of truth-sense to determine the validity of things in order to do this. This is the main point of my argument – that based on information available, there is no way of producing definitive answers to questions. You can maybe answer questions with a certain level of confidence, but actual certainty is beyond our capabilities while still remaining reliant on such a massive, noisy dataset. Moreover, attempts to produce certainty in results by their nature restrict the realm of potential questions to strictly those that have black and white answers on the internet, and in this day and age there are still, for example, many many web pages dedicated to the notion that the moon is made of cheese. Does that mean then that WA will not be able to answer “Is the moon made of cheese?”, and that being the case, what use is a system that can’t determine such a trivial fallacy – how can it be expected to answer questions with more subtle issues. The obvious approach to overcome this weakness is to restrict the computation to a set of facts that are known, thus limiting the WA to being able to answer with certainty just a small subset of questions. In AI we call search engines built around this approach “Expert Systems” and we’ve had them for many many years. Which leaves WA with either very very sophisticated technology far in advance of anything in use currently, or built on technology that is relatively uninteresting due to it being largely well understood.

Stephen Wolfram, the physicist behind WA attempts to allay sceptics : “I wasn’t at all sure it was going to work. But I’m happy to say that with a mixture of many clever algorithms and heuristics, lots of linguistic discovery and linguistic curation, and what probably amount to some serious theoretical breakthroughs, we’re actually managing to make it work.”. Of course, the guy who is the public face for the project and has his name on it is bound to say something along these lines, but it is interesting to note that this isn’t the first time that the validity of his claims has been called into question – in 2002 Wolfram publish “A New Kind of Science” detailing a branch of mathematics research called Cellular Automata. I won’t bore you with the details of what they are or how they work, the very very quick version is that you have a grid of cells, and each one can be in one of many states, but for the sake of simplicity call it “on” or “off”. At any time point t, it is possible to work out which cells are on and which are off using a predetermined set of rules as to what makes a cell on or off, based on which cells are on and off at time point t-1. The point is that even using a simple set of rules, very complex behaviours can be produced, and this can be seen in Conway’s Game of Life, which obeys four simple rules and can produce some amazingly intricate behaviours. Wolfram’s book was an investigation into this field, a summary of research he had undertaken previously and a speculation into the relevance of Cellular Automata for more broad underpinnings of the natural world, or put another way, that the behaviour we observe and actions we perform are created by the same kind of simple rule set expressing a complex pattern of interaction. Unfortunately for Wolfram, it might have been the first time such notions had been expressed in quite so mainstream a setting, but it certainly wasn’t the first time they’d ever been thought of. The book received criticism for over-emphasising the importance of Wolfram’s own work, of being misleading, and there were allegations that portions of work had been duplicated without any attribution – grave sins in the scientific community.

If this was a guy claiming to have built a spaceship that could travel faster than light, he’d be dismissed as a crank instantly – and yet crucially, the advances that are being claimed rely on just that kind of jump in technology, but they seem so much more plausible – possibly because so few people understand the way search engines work already. It would be awe inspiring if the claims weren’t being made by a known plagiarist and someone who has in the past made great efforts to overstate his contribution to a field, but given whose mouth they are coming from, and the kinds and number of breakthroughs required to actually make it work as advertised, I’m highly sceptical. I hope it works, I really do. The repercussions for the whole of industry, academia and, not to put too fine a point on it, the world, would be incredible. Now that Wolfram is back in the spotlight, it is hard not to think back to his moments of former ignobility and wonder whether the WA will live up to the hype he is creating around it.

For those coming late to the party, this is a long post in response to Zara posting a Wired article ( http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free ), which I comented on scornfully and was then challeneged to write a critique of. This is the result :

OK, the main problem with this article is that it insists on treating every transaction within the world as a stand-alone unit, when in fact the whole point of economics is to look at the world as a single complex interacting system. It presents no real conclusions and discourses at length on things that are fairly apparent but refuses to actually substantiate its arm-waving literary and historical leanings with thought-out examples. Does the author really believe that Yahoo’s storage is unlimited? If so I believe he is quite deluded. Yahoo have come to the conclusion that their “average” storage allocation was at a level that most people would find more than adequate, and the spare from the average user could accommodate the power users. I’ve heard no bad things about Yahoo, but if we look at the use of the term “unlimited” in other areas, lets say ISPs, I think we can all acknowledge that there is nothing unlimited about them despite their claims, and the same is true in any situation where there ultimately have to be limits imposed at the provider level. Unlimited is increasingly code for “unlimited provided you don’t exceed secret limits we wont publish”, making its use in the tech sector typically more of a marketing con than an economic turning point, and for an analyst to use it unqualified is bordering on criminal. I don’t think anyone would suggest that if every Yahoo user suddenly decided to send each other 100TB of data, Yahoo would have a problem and unlimited email storage would quickly stop being. Thus the author’s proposition that “that’s ‘unlimited’ as in ‘infinite’” is a complete fallacy, making conclusions drawn using this as a prime example misleading.

Again, staying with the Yahoo section on the second page, and to a lesser extent the myspace artists mentioned on the first page, although cross-subsidisation is mentioned, it isn’t made explicitly clear that all of the examples used are examples of cross-subsidisation. Increasingly artists have found that the principal source of their revenue was concert tickets and merchandising, not least because in order to produce a mainstream product they invariably had to sign to a major record label thus making a pitifully small profit per album sold. By making their albums available freely or cheaply, they do not lose much in the way of revenue, but they do still encourage customers to attend concerts and purchase merchandise – the prime example of cross-subsidisation. In the case of Yahoo, the more people who use the service, the more users Yahoo has for their ad server, and the wider the potential user-base for other Yahoo products. Yahoo itself as a company is reasonably uninteresting, having lost the search engine war a long time ago, and not doing anything else especially unique; and yet Microsoft valued it at $42,000,000,000 just last month in a take-over offer. Obviously a range of factors are at work here, but since MS has alternatives to most, if not all, Yahoo services, there is something more fundamental at work behind Yahoo’s strategy than this article implies. Ultimately businesses need to make money. If they do not, they might as well not be in business. Therefore a company that offers its products for free has to be making money elsewhere, a point that is largely glossed over before being introduced brusquely in the business model overview.

Finally, to return to the most important point that this article glosses over – that every economic exchange happens within, and affects, an economic system. In the final page, the author suggests a world in which electricity would be free. What he fails to take account of is the ramifications this would have on the remainder of the system – how prices elsewhere would be affected, how the market would change and how ultimately, balance would be restored. Again and again, treating each example as a micro-system you can prove your point, but each example has a wider context to be placed in which brings in more factors – to come back to Yahoo, services such a GMail and Hotmail were also competing for users, and the decision to make Yahoo Mail an “unlimited” service needs to be put in that context to fully understand the rationale behind such a decision, rather than to portray it as one motivated purely by the falling costs of storage.

Incidentally, on the fourth page the author suddenly announces that micropayments have failed, without substantiation. Interestingly enough, many companies currently turn a tidy profit from the whole area of micropayments. Cell phone ringtones are paid as micropayments. Itunes songs are sold as micropayments. To a lesser extent, every major console manufacturer offers micropayments for their downloadable content. Linden Labs, the creators of Second Life, have based a whole interface between their virtual economy and the real one via micropayments. It would appear that in no way is the concept of the micropayment dead except in this article where it suits the author’s purposes to declare it such.

Finally, and most telling of all, we come to the constant naive belief that this concept of cross-subsidisation and freely available products online is somehow a new invention. As with most things in this latest technology bubble, the rediscovery of a system has led to it being abducted wholesale and claimed as a child of the current age. The concept of freely available services, even in the tech sector, is an old one. When id Software released Quake in 1996 they did so using the “Shareware” model, in which the user got a demonstration version of the product and could for a fee unlock the full version, which was included in the package being distributed. Countless others were released as “Freeware” or “Donationware”, costing absolutely nothing for the full version, a trend which continues to this day. Typically though, this was because the developers needed a task accomplished and released the application in case someone else needed the same task doing, or as often wanted to be associated with the project to build a user-base or reputation for future endeavours, again highlighting the constant return to the concept of cross-subsidisation.

Overall this article is long winded, littered with literary and historical references that serve little purpose but to inflate the author’s ego and restates obvious and established business models as though somehow unique to the current climate in the tech sector. The examples chosen are poor and poorly explained, and skewed in such a way as to prove the author’s point regardless of actual relevance. But what do you expect from the clown who wrote an entire book explaining the long tail phenomenon like he had just cracked world peace.

P.S. You don’t want me on your peer review board – thats all I’m saying.

So its 18th September 2007, and the Apple press event down in London is in full swing. I’m reading the Engadget liveblog and I’m laughing my balls off. Because as much as I’m a total fanboy for Apple, I’m also a complete tool who loves to see people make tremendously hideous mistakes. And this is one. A BIG one.

OK so lets review what we’ve had announced today. November 9th is the iPhone shipping date in the UK – cool that isn’t far away. They’ve partenered with wifi provider The Cloud to bring free wi-fi access to your iPhone from any of the more than 7,000 Cloud-based hotspots – also pretty cool, it will certainly save on the phone bills.

And that is pretty much where the cool ends. The iPhone we are getting is still the same lumbering hunk of crap that is in the US – maybe you can get away with releasing old technology in a shiny box with a pretty interface there, handsets in the US are not overly advanced. We on the other hand are used to 3G services, we’re coming to expect GPS, good cameras, bluetooth and all these other things that, guess what, the iPhone doesn’t do.

And here’s a little nugget of information for you. There is currently the CEO of O2 on stage with Mr Jobs orgasming about how amazing the iPhone is in comparison to anything else they have seen before. I think Matthew Key, the guy in question needs to take a long hard look at his current catalogue of phones. Because the XDA series have this hunk of junk beat into a cocked hat. And they cost about £100 with a contract (and the phone I’m looking at if Apple don’t get their shit together soon – the Nokia N95 – is going to set me back about £50 with the contract I’m on – oh and hey it has 3G in it that one)

Speaking of price, I’ve saved the best bit til last. With a contract, O2 will let you have an iPhone for the low low price of £269.

What. Where. They. Thinking?

Update: Look I can’t make this as funny as the Q&A session going on right now. Head on over to the Engadget coverage to literaly laugh out loud at these poor deluded people.

XKCD said it best.

Between romance and my MSc Thesis, this site has been orphaned a little bit. I’m hoping to change that soon. I haven’t forgotten you!

Last time around, you received your new Mac and switched it on for the first time, and I left you on something of a cliffhanger where OS X had just started up properly and you were now ready to roll. Its time to talk about making your machine into a usable tool.

There are two things your need to know about before we proceed. The first is the Dock. You can see the Dock at the bottom of your screen (default) or elsewhere if you have moved it. What does the Dock do? If you are familiar with the Windows taskbar, then you’re about halfway there. The Dock shows the icons of the applications you have open (also note, that unlike Windows, we are talking about applications not windows) so you can click the icon to swap to that application. But it is also your quicklaunch menu as well. Quicklaunch is maybe something you aren’t familiar with on Windows – it isn’t enabled by default, but I’ve found it to be the single most valuable aspect of the Windows interface. Quicklaunch sits in your taskbar somewhere (I have mine set so that is occupies a second row on the taskbar, and the tasks go to the top row, but that is personal preference), and provides quick and easy access to the shortcuts you need to launch your most frequently used applications. The Dock on OS X provides the same thing, so what you are left with is a list of icons for applications you want quick access to, which also doubles as a list of which applications are currently running (by providing a small arrow underneath the applications). If an application isn’t in the Dock as a quicklaunch style item, it appears at the right hand side of the list while it is running and disappears when you close it. There are two ways (that I know of anyhow) to add items to your dock. The first is to grab the application’s icon from the Applications folder (more on this later) and drag it to the dock – rather than move it, OS X understands that you want to create a Dock shortcut to this item. The second way is if the application is running, click and drag the icon that is in the dock to a position further to the left. This seems to be a spirit crushingly boring paragraph, but familiarity with the Dock is really essential to getting comfortable with OS X.

Another thing that is essential to getting comfortable with OS X is understanding the way it handles programs. I won’t go into as much detail here since a lot of people’s eyes glaze over when you start talking about PATH variables and whatnot. Put simply, if it is a program, it should live in the Applications folder. Think of this like Windows’ Program Files, only more sophisticated. OS X combines all the files for a program, and the executable for the program into one nice neat icon, which is generally what is stored in the Applications folder (sometimes it is stored in its own sub-folder, but I’m not a particular fan of that since it looks ugly). If you really want to get into the nitty-gritty you can right-click (or control click, or however else you bring up the context menu) and click for the package contents to see the files it contains, but for 99% of people, that isn’t necessary.

OK, so now you know where you want to put a shortcut application to programs (or folders even) that you use a lot. And you also know where OS X is keeping your programs. The first thing to do with your brand new Mac is to take a look at what programs have come preloaded. Its an unfortunate truth that even Apple preloads crap onto their systems before sending them to you. For instance, you will probably find that you have a trial version of MS Office. Now a trial version is little use to anyone, and now that there are decent Open Source alternatives, there is no reason to give MS the satisfaction of buying or even trying their product. So the first thing I’d suggest is removing that. Ah, but how do you uninstall things under OS X? Easy, just drag it into the trash bin that is shown in the dock. And poof, its gone. There are maybe a couple of other things you can afford to lose from your Applications folder, but if you aren’t sure about something, leave it alone. So continuing the theme, lets go install an Office substitute that is free. My choice here is called NeoOffice, which is an OS X version of the Open Office suite (there are technical reasons why it is called something different, but they aren’t massively important). You can get the latest NeoOffice from here. If you aren’t sure whether you want PPC or Intel, the chances are that if you bought your Mac during the last 6 months or so, you want Intel, so whenever you get that choice, go for the Intel. This is going to download a DMG file – a Disk Image. Once you have it down, double click it, and it will appear in your finder window as a new hard drive. Sometimes it might automatically bring up a window with instructions. What these will usually tell you to do is to grab the program file, and drag it into your Applications folder. Now unmount the DMG file from your system by clicking the eject button next to its name in the Finder, or dragging its icon on the desktop to the trashcan, which should also change to be the eject button. Once it is ejected, you can move the DMG file to the trash since you don’t need it anymore.  Now lets say you want to set NeoOffice up so you can launch it quickly. Go to your Applications folder, find the NeoOffice icon, and drag it to your Dock. Note that it didn’t move, but that icon is now in your Dock too. Clicking it launches NeoOffice, and then using the menubar at the top of your screen you can choose to start or open a new document.

You’ve just uninstalled a program, then downloaded and installed a new program, and set it up so you can access it from the Dock. You’ve taken your first steps on the road to becoming a Mac Power-User. Next time around I’ll be covering some tips and tricks you maybe didn’t know about OS X that will make Switching just that little bit easier.

OK campers, I know that a lot of you have been desperate for the next installment, but unfortunately finals at university conspired to delay it. I’m now done with finals, so here we go. So far this series, I’ve laid out some reasons you might want to get a Mac, and I’ve talked about how you might go about getting one from Mr Jobs. Now its time to talk about your first day as a Switcher.

That moment that your delivery guy shows up with a big box for you to sign for is special. Savour it. Take photos, perhaps even take a photo of the delivery guy holding the box (provided he looks like he won’t kick your ass for even suggesting it). Its an experience you want to savour because its probably going to mark a whole new chapter in your IT life. For the uninitiated, this kind of outpouring of emotion is commonly referred to as “Unboxing”, where you celebrate the receipt of the box, and the removal of the item from the box. This is not to be confused with Amazon’s Unbox service which is totally different. My MacBook unboxing experience is documented over on my Flickr page, and was a very exciting time for me.  It was also over very quickly.

The thing about the Mac that is refreshing when you get the box is that its simple. Heres a box, open the box, there is your machine, there is a power cable, here is a neat little box with DVDs and quickstart guides in it. Contrast this with what you get when you buy say a Dell or HP machine (the two suppliers I have first had experience of – I would assume that they are all as bad). There you get 15 different pieces of paper, you get CDs for AOL, Pipex, Tiscali and anyone else you can think of. The cables are bound together with those nasty wire twisty things (the poor man’s cable tie), whereas Apple send you neat little polythene bags of cables, one per cable. Its a much neater experience, and it is kind of how it should be – I just paid a lot of money for this device, I don’t want to be bombarded with crap as a result.

Obviously the first thing you do is plug in your machine, and turn it on. I had read elsewhere that there is a widget you ought to run first from one of the DVDs that is a dead-pixel checker (for the life of me I can’t remember its name). This is probably a good thing to do – there is nothing worse than a dead or stuck pixel on your screen – I have one on one of my other TFTs, and one on my DS, and both bug me. But I’m impatient, so I dived right into getting into OS X, and a month later, I still haven’t bothered running the check – although at this point, I know there aren’t any since I’ve used it for so much fullscreen video, I would have noticed. So with that either done, or ignored, you are presented with the OS X setup screen. If you’ve installed Windows previously, this is fairly familiar – it wants to know stuff like what country you are in, what keyboard layout you want to use and it tries to auto-detect  your network settings. Its fairly standard stuff, but the interface is the thing that should capture your attention at this point. Its really really clean. Its presented as a window style form at the top of the screen, square in shape. When you move to the next screen of the form though, you realise that it isn’t a square, its a cube – it rotates the cube to show the next set of options. It seems like a minor thing, but it blew me away – this is what a user interface should be like, its not just important to show the options and then switch them for the new ones, but how you switch them. Under Windows (under 99% of applications going really) the transition between screens like this is instantaneous, giving the illusion of actual interaction, whether that be turning a cube round to show a new face, or turning a “page”, or even sliding form out of the way to reveal the form below – this is an important thing that I didn’t even realise was missing from the user experience until I sat down with OS X – that being said though, this setup process is the only place I experienced it, although I’m sure it is being used elsewhere too. One other thing to note about the setup process that is pretty important is to make sure you are looking decent, hair brushed and whatnot, since if your Mac comes with an iSight camera, it is going to want to take your picture to associate with the user account that you will be creating (I had to leave the machine at this point to make myself a little bit more presentable).

This is a pretty swift process all in and it won’t be long before you are up and running on your new shiny OS X machine. Next time around I’ll be trying to remember my first steps on OS X to share with you, and picking up some important details that maybe you don’t know about.

I’m right in the middle of my finals for uni right now, which is meaning I’m quite pressed for time right now. This week’s Mac-centric post is going to centre on the Apple online Store – not the iTunes store, but the hardware store. I’ve had a really positive experience using it in the past, and I wanted to share some thoughts about the way it is laid out, how you can work out what it is you want, and how Apple could maybe improve it. I also wanted to highlight some of the problems I noticed whilst ordering my MacBook that could save you some time waiting for your order to arrive. So without further ado, here is the second of my “Switching to Mac” articles. Enjoy.

When it comes to ordering Macs, there is a pretty limited selection at first, which is good. Its not like many other companies, running multiple product lines without much explanation. For instance, I can go to look at the Sony Vaio website, and I have to choose between the “AR series”, the “C series”, the “BX series”, the “FE series”, the “G series”, the “N series”, the “UX series”, the “SZ series” and the “TX series”. Did you get that? Me neither. The taglines don’t help either: The TX Series is “A class of its own”, the C is “Inspired by life. Designed for you”. OK, it sounds good, but it isn’t the most informative. Contrast this with the Apple approach to marketing: Laptops: “Macbook (starting from £749)” or “MacBook Pro (starting from £1349)”. Desktops: “Mac Mini (from £399)”, “iMac (from £679)” or “Mac Pro (from £1699)”. Upfront, the names give you a rough idea of what you are looking at (except perhaps iMac), and you get to see a price point, so you know what sort of cost. For the average user, this seems ideal. They don’t necessarily know what they want, or understand all the jargon, but they have a rough idea of what they want to do with it, and how much they can afford. Then for each of the product lines, you get taken to a little page talking about that product and you can then pick and customise a model. Model choices come in essentially 3 flavours, there’s a basic one that costs least but is probably lacking one important thing for a power user, or is slightly under-spec. Then there is the decent version, that has a nice middle of the road price point and is highly functional. And finally, there is the premium version, with widgets you probably don’t need but might get tempted by if you have the cash to splash. Its all very simple, very intuitive. However, and here is where I’m going to prove that I haven’t gone all fanboy on you guys, that’s about where the good news ends. If you want to customise your machine, say put a bigger hard drive on it, forget about getting it within a week – the little widget tells you up front that it will be 3 days before they even ship your machine to you. OK, fine for something requiring extensive customisation, but I wanted to add a cable to my order, because my MacBook uses non-standard connectors to the monitor, and I needed a converter. And was told, in all seriousness that that would add an additional two days to the time to ship my order, just to put a cable into the box – in fact I don’t really know how they did it, the estimated delivery date with the cable was actually a week later than without, so its more like an additional 7 days they were allowing. That to me seems ridiculous. Equally ridiculous is that I didn’t see an option to change my shipping method. That to me is unforgivable. I’ve been in situations where the standard shipping isn’t good enough – I need it right now, overnight it to me I don’t care how much it costs. Equally, there is often a need to get it on a Saturday and pay a premium for that, and that’s an option that is becoming more and more prevalent. But there was none of that, and that seems stupid since Apple is such a giant corporation – if they wanted to do it, they could easily. I suspect that some of the reason they don’t is that they figure that people who need that kind of immediacy will visit one of their retail stores – that’s fine and all, but currently the nearest Apple Store to me is something like 300 miles away (until the Glasgow store opens this summer). I guess I could always go to a reseller, but that’s not an ideal solution for anyone, since I still have to travel, and I assume Apple sell to resellers at a marked down price so that resellers can actually have a viable business.

Anyhow, I’ve been drooling and plotting my Mac purchase for quite a while, so I had worked out exactly what I wanted, but the layout of the whole experience made it pretty simplistic to navigate, find what I wanted without being particularly blinded by specifications, and then tweak it (or not) as required. In total, the experience really couldn’t be made any easier, although I still haven’t gotten over the insane delivery times quoted. That said, their estimate was bang on, and the courier arrived exactly with the time frame they suggested – although they gave themselves a three day window, so it isn’t that big an accomplishment. I ordered on Friday, and received the laptop on Wednesday – they didn’t actually process my order until lunchtime on Tuesday. I can’t help but think that there isn’t much reason why I couldn’t have received it Monday or even Saturday since they apparently did ship it overnight, but it was the day after they announced the Leopard delay, so I’m willing to concede that they were probably super-busy with people like me ordering as soon as they heard about the delay.

The online Apple Store is definitely well put together, and honestly, I would suggest that anyone wanting to get a Mac use it. You are going to get as good a deal as a local reseller will give you I’d guess, and at the end of the day, there is no real benefit to dealing locally with regard building a rapport or getting deals on servicing, except perhaps in fairly specific circumstances.

So as I might have mentioned, my intention was to write the inaugural post for LukeOnTech about my experience switching to the Mac. Unfortunately, having sat down to write it, its a monster, and is way larger than would ever make sense for a single post. So instead, I’m thinking now that it will become a series of posts over a period of time, so, here is the first one, which is going to focus on why I chose to get a new laptop, and why that laptop had to be a Mac.

For Christmas 2005, I got a shiny new Dell laptop. For the people who want the numbers, its an Inspiron 6000, it has a 1.86ghz Centrino, 1gig of RAM and an ATI X300 graphics card. As far as 18month old laptops go, it certainly doesn’t suck that hard on paper. In the real world however, its not that great. Firstly, and most importantly it weighs around 3.4kg, which certainly isn’t that bad, but its not an inconsiderable amount either – it certainly isn’t the kind of gadget that you can carry around just in case you want it. Another major factor in its suckage is the graphics card. Now the X300 is not a particularly bad card for a laptop, even today, but the problem I found was that ATI released revision after revision of their Catalyst driver suite. Dell didn’t. And because of the way the card has been integrated into the mainboard and display, you need for the manufacturer to supply them – even trying to force the issue using the ATI reference set, and the result is a hollow laugh and a dialogue box explaining that you don’t have any compatible hardware, and that you should have read their website more carefully. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t be that big a deal, but ATI have been tweaking things, and increasingly game manufacturers expect you to have drivers that are more current than September ‘05 (when Dell last released them), and the games bitch and moan if you don’t have the drivers, and run really poorly if you carry on anyhow. Thirdly, after 18 months of almost constant use, its getting very tired and bits are starting to break. Last month I had to get the hinge replaced on it because it had snapped from a combination of constant opening and closing and a really really bad design from any sort of engineering point of view – £90. A few days later, I was informed that my battery was nearing the end of its usable life, and although it would continue to work, don’t expect to get good usage from it (it had dropped from around 2.5hrs to more like 50 minutes), the cost to replace? Another £100. The keys on the keyboard have been wearing smooth for a while, and there are to palm impressions where I wrest my hands whilst typing. Then, after I started experiencing really poor performance in some games that had previously worked fine, I investigated the processor a bit to find that the intelligently speed-stepped system designed to conserve power wasn’t allowing me to get speed over about 1.4Ghz at a very maximum, wasting nearly 500Mhz of my processor. It was time for a new machine.

For a while now, I’ve been fancying Mac. It all started when I started using iTunes properly for purchasing, podcasts and organising my music. It probably helps that I have an iPod too. As you might know, I’ve been involved in producing two different podcast projects as well, and all the time I was hearing about GarageBand and how great it was for recording the necessary audio. The switch to Intel processors meant I understood the speed of the systems I was looking at and could actually make a comparison – it also meant that in a pinch, I could swap to Windows via Parallels or BootCamp to do whatever I needed to do. Finally, they’re nice looking. Black plastic looking laptops look horrible. My Dell was grey and white, and was certainly better than anything I’d had previously from an aesthetic point of view, but it wasn’t a Mac, it wasn’t ultra-shiny, it wasn’t pure white, and it just didn’t look good. Also, Macs had been getting rave reviews from the people I knew who had switched (from both Windows and Linux), so all in all, it seemed like a sensible choice.

So that’s why I wanted to Switch. I was going to run a couple of sections together, but just talking about what motivated me to do it ran on for so long that I’ll leave it there for this post. The next post in the series is going to talk about my experience ordering my MacBook, so there’s going to be some talk about what was good, what was bad, and how Apple could improve their setup no end. It is largely written already, but I want to cover some other things as well, rather than make this just about Macs, so expect that next week some time.