OK, so this wasn’t actually my Mac - I was visiting the office of one of my parents. But this was one of my earliest experiences with a Mac, and I remember enjoying it a great deal. I think I probably mostly used the Paint function, which appealed to my sensibilities at the time. I was also into BASIC programming for a while around the same time, creating short programs…

At any rate, it had been quite a while since I’d used a Mac since I purchased a little-used Mac Mini a couple of years ago and then a MacBook a few months ago…

So, I stood in line with about 100 other people outside my local AT&T store just under a week ago, in order to be one of the first to get my hands on the 3G iPhone. It was hot, and we were lined up down the side of the building in which the AT&T store is housed, which had a bright white wall, nicely reflecting all that heat back onto the waiting hordes, causing a nice sunburn and considerable discomfort. But, in the end, I got one, and almost the model I wanted - they ran out of black 16GB models just before I got inside, so I got a white one instead.

So was it all worth it? Well, as one man standing behind me in the line (possibly a Rabbi - in the center of the picture below) said:

You have to do something insane once in your life!

And that was more or less my opinion too - I don’t often stand in line for these things, but once in a while you want to be part of something like this. I sat out the first round - no 3G, stuck on a Verizon contract, don’t buy version 1 of anything and so on - but wasn’t going to do the same this time around.

I love the device. It’s a fantastic experience, and certainly the most fun I’ve ever had with a new phone. To date, I’ve downloaded and installed 23 applications, requiring four home screens altogether on the device (I have a separate one for web clips). I did have activation problems on the first day, along with everyone else, although they were relatively minor and solved by the evening.

I’ve read a lot of articles denigrating the iPhone in pretty strong terms over the past few days - two examples. The thing that strikes me about these articles is that they seem to assume that the iPhone is taking over the world. The Lifehacker article is titled, “Why You’re Better Off Avoiding the iPhone” and the other suggested the iPhone is going to kill the Internet.

Let’s tone that done a bit, shall we? For starters, Apple sold a total of 1 million phones in the first weekend and has since been largely sold out. Compare that with Nokia, which sells more devices than that every single day of the year, and you are quickly reminded that Apple does not dominate the mobile device market (or even the smartphone segment). Secondly, no-one is being forced to buy an iPhone - you have a choice about buying it as you do with every other device out there - and as a consumer you will weigh the pros and cons as you would with every other device. If you don’t like the relatively “closed” ecosystem and approach to applications, you don’t have to buy the phone. But, if you want the design, interface, web browsing, ease of use and so on and think the closed application environment is a small price to pay, then you’ll want to buy it anyway.

The most alarmist and hostile stuff I’ve read comes from the Free Software Foundation, which seems to have a definition of “free” which is much narrower than most people’s would be. But again, it seems to somehow assume that Apple has some kind of monopoly and that everyone is somehow tied into the Apple model whether they want to be or not. The Apple DRM approach in particular has come in for a lot of criticism, which is funny since it’s done at the behest of the record companies rather than any particular agenda Apple has. In order to secure for itself a strong position in online music sales, it acceded to the requests of the record companies to provide adequate copyright protection for their music. As the record companies have become more enlightened in their approach, Apple has begun releasing music in non-protected formats. But again, you have a choice - Amazon, Rhapsody, Napster and plenty of others offer alternative models for purchasing digital music online, and files bought from all those companies will play on iPods and iPhones.

Overall, I think Apple is adding a lot more to the mobile industry than it is taking away, and on a personal level I love the device and especially the ease of use of the device itself and the process of adding applications and media to it. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea - the FSF recommends the Free Runner, which strikes me as being an utterly uninspired (and uninspiring) device. But whatever floats your boat - and that’s the real point here: you have a choice. Stop moaning about the way Apple does things, and find a company that does things the way you like, and buy their stuff instead.

I experienced two quite different sides of Apple today - the Steve Jobs keynote, and a personal experience with my troublesome MacBook.

The keynote was everything you would expect it to be - well choreographed, lots of big announcements, the best left for last and so on. Even despite all the rumors, there were still some surprises in there, and the crowd seemed genuinely appreciative of the new applications which were demoed, even though those demos did seem to go on a bit long. The iPhone 3G is, like its predecessor, a phenomenal device, and when I hear people say it doesn’t do anything differently or better than other phones out there, I just find myself wondering if they’ve ever actually seen one up close and played with it. The thing is in a league of its own for me, in terms of design, user interface, browsing experience, email, applications and so on. The only things preventing me from getting one previously were speed, price, and the sense that a better version would probably turn up soon. Come 11 July, I’ll be first in line at my local AT&T store.

On the other hand, my personal experience with Apple over the last few months has been wretched. My hard drive failed a few weeks ago, and the process of getting it fixed was tedious to say the least. I had to make an appointment for technical support at my local store, they determined the hard drive had failed, but wanted to charge me to copy my files off it. So I declined, did it myself back at home, but then had to make another appointment to take it back in. Picked it up a few days later only to discover when I got home that they had forgotten to install iLife on it. Took it back again, etc. Finally got it home, reinstalled everything, moved images, music etc. back onto it, finally had everything back the way I like it, and then today had the same early symptoms as last time pop up again. The thing no longer starts under Mac OS X, only Vista.

So I called technical support, since my local store had no technical support slots left today, and spent a total of 2 hours or more on the phone with various different people trying to convince them that simply repeating the process I went through last time wasn’t going to reassure me that this wasn’t going to happen again. Their standard policy is that they will fix a device 3 times before allowing you to receive a replacement, even if it’s a hard-drive failure as it has been twice now for me. It wasn’t until I had kept some poor customer service person on the phone for a good 45 minutes repeating over and over again that the solution she was proposing was unacceptable that she finally transferred me to someone with more clout who was willing to concede that giving me a new machine was the right thing to do.

The contrast between these two experiences - the real excitement associated with a new product launch from Apple, and the sheer frustration involved with being a customer when a product goes wrong - almost couldn’t be greater. Is this the same company? Yes. But does their customer service match the high expectations they create through their carefully choreographed keynotes, flawless demos and clever advertising at the expense of the hapless PC? I’m not so sure.

I bought a MacBook a week and a half ago and have been playing with it since with a view to making it my main work computer. Since we normally run Windows XP and Microsoft Office, this meant I needed to have some form of access to those Office applications. I already own a copy of Microsoft Office and have found that the Mac versions of the Office applications can be problematic in some cases, including the fact that Entourage is an imperfect substitute for Outlook, so I decided to go the route of adding a Windows OS to the MacBook instead. I read up about the two main virtualisation options - Fusion (from VMware) and Parallels, and eventually decided to go with Fusion, though by all accounts the two are pretty similar in terms of performance and functionality. I also purchased a copy of Vista Home Premium - I was going to have to buy some version of Windows anyway and I had been curious to try out Vista after all the criticism of it since its launch.

So I’ve now been running Windows Vista and Mac OS X Leopard side by side for a few days, and have a good way to compare the two. Vista’s performance has been impaired by the fact that I’ve been running it on a virtual machine instead of as a booting OS, so the “Aero” graphics features of Vista have been missing in action because Fusion doesn’t allow the Vista virtual machine full access to my graphics capabilities. In addition, I’ve had network connectivity issues and also a relatively recent problem with windows minimising and maximising at random while I’m working in them.These things aside, Vista hasn’t been that bad. The constant security nagging is easily my biggest beef (you click on an application or a component of Control Panel and are asked whether you want to continue, every time - didn’t I just say that’s what I wanted to do?), as well as being told periodically that I need permission (what permission? from whom? and how the heck do I get it?) to move a file from point A to point B on the hard drive, within the Windows environment.

These are serious flaws, and from what I can tell (see below) they’re not solvable, even outside the Fusion environment. There are some changes from XP and other previous editions in terms of naming (the word “My” is dropped from Documents, Videos, Music, Downloads etc.), structure (the Start Menu is now kept in place rather than expanding to the right as you drill down into the folder structure) and functionality (Vista has built-in Contacts, Calendar and Mail applications). So there’s the usual learning curve that you have with a new OS, but none of these things is either dramatically difficult to get to grips with or dramatically more useful than the old way of doing things. You get the sense that Microsoft has learned from Apple that new releases need new cool stuff, but they’ve tinkered at the edges with things that don’t really matter instead of really making the experience truly better.

The new Mac OS, on the other hand, feels like an incremental improvement, but a real one in certain ways, over Tiger. The search function is better, the whole Time Machine concept is a good one, although I don’t have a separate hard drive large enough to test it, the iLife applications are better than in the previous iteration, and overall it feels like the OS has moved forward in small but measurable ways. The whole option of running two operating systems on the same machine is, of course, a huge bonus too, and includes the built-in Boot Camp option of running either OS from bootup as well as the Fusion and Parallels paid-for virtualisation options.

Today, I installed Vista again, this time using Boot Camp. I had been frustrated with the limitations on Vista’s new features imposed by running it in the Fusion environment, but also by the nagging network connectivity and other problems I was experiencing. I now have the full functionality of Vista (Aero included) in the Boot Camp version, and will likely delete the original Fusion virtualisation and replace it with a virtualisation of the Boot Camp version (which will still be crippled but will work well enough for the most part when I don’t want to go Windows-only).

It’s been an interesting exercise in comparing and contrasting the Windows and Apple experiences. Apple really seems to have improved things, while Microsoft seems merely to have changed things, including in some cases for the worse, although mostly in an indifferent direction. However, the mere fact that I’m virtually forced still to use Windows and Microsoft applications because they are the standard at work is the biggest reason why Microsoft survives and thrives despite all this. It works well enough and, for now at least, it’s still dominant.

Apple has finally announced higher-storage versions of the iPhone and iPod Touch. Irritatingly, whereas some people were expecting them to allow the iPhone to catch up with the iPod Touch on the storage front, they simply maintained the 2x difference between the two (the new iPhone has 16GB, but the new Touch has 32GB). And of course still no sign of a 3G iPhone any time soon.

The storage and WWAN speed are the two biggest barriers to adoption for me personally, and combined with the high price (16GB for $500 plus a two-year contract) are still, I suspect, the biggest barriers to adoption for the iPhone in general. Add to that the carrier tie-in and anyone not on AT&T but in a two-year contract with another carrier is also unlikely to switch unless they have money to throw away. 30GB would just about cover me for storage since I’m a current 30GB iPod user.

One assumes this will just keep those “missing” iPhones sitting on stock room shelves for even longer, since few people are going to want to buy the lower-storage versions now - perhaps the price will come down to shift the inventory.

We also checked out the Mac Book Air in our local Apple store a few days ago - it is indeed impressive, and has that elusive cross-the-chasm charm that appeals to complete non-technophiles like my wife. But she was also able to quickly grasp its shortcomings when I explained the lack of optical drive, more than one USB port and so on. A niche product for sure, but an awfully good looking one.