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Use a finger or use your whole hand: this is the basic difference between Apple and Microsoft. I bet Steve Jobs excelled at finger painting in kindergarten and that Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s current CEO, and Bill Gates, Microsoft’s founder, did not. This is why Apple succeeds with the iPod, iPhone and iPad, and is an also-ran in the keyboard and pointer device world.

After thirty years of working with personal computing devices, I conclude that Microsoft understands hands. Apple does not. Steve Jobs and Apple understand fingers. Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates and Microsoft do not. I believe this explains many of the differences in their consumer product offerings and why Apple is succeeding in the mobile world, while Microsoft is foundering in handheld devices.

Keyboards and pointing devices—mice, trackballs, touchpads and styluses—are known as Human Input Devices (HID) in the computer world. They have been necessary adjuncts to computers since the beginning of the digital computer. They require one or two hands to operate properly. Imagine using your desktop or laptop computer without a keyboard and pointing device. If you can you would have an iPad, a tablet computer that eschews these traditional HIDs for the finger.

Microsoft and its hardware partners, particularly Logitech and Kensington make many good keyboards and mice. Some are great. Apple does not make great input devices. Apple keyboards and mice go from okay to awful. None are great. They recently eliminated the number pad from the iMac standard keyboard. I suppose having those extra keys was too confusing for iMac owners. Apple’s long string of mouse design failures is well documented. They avoid having extra buttons on their mice. Their mice don’t fit your hand as well as the competitors. This gibes with Apple’s form-before-function designs. I wonder if it isn’t because Steve Jobs has problems using more than one finger at a time.

A reverse issue occurs with Microsoft. Microsoft’s tablet offerings predate the iPad by several years. They never succeeded like the iPad, which has already sold more than 2 million units worldwide. I doubt that Microsoft’s hardware partners have sold as many tablet devices over the years as the iPad has in two months. The reasons for this are many but a major reason is that they required a pointing device other than your finger. Even if the device allowed for finger-input many of the controls, e.g. menus or hyperlinks, required precision that a finger is not capable of performing. Microsoft’s solution was to add a stylus to the tablet rather than change the user interface (UI) and retool the operating system to work with fingers. Apple was masterful in recognizing this and adopting a non-desktop UI for its iPods, the iPod touch, iPhones and iPads. Most of the time, a single finger is all you need.

Typing on an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad is doable but not desirable. The UI is not designed for hands. It is designed for one or two fingers. You can attach a Bluetooth keyboard to an iPad. However, you quickly realize that the inability to use a pointing device, other than your finger, reduces functionality to the point that it may not work as you want. It is hard to exactly select text or other objects, copy it, delete it, move it, or alter it with only your finger. A mouse would come in handy.

Who would have thought that kindergarten skills would play such a significant part in 21^st century technology? Not me.

On a related matter, I haven’t divined why Google gets cloud computing, while Microsoft fumbles and Apple fails. If you have any thoughts on this please let me know.

WordWeb Pro defines dido as “a ludicrous or grotesque act done for fun and amusement.”

Gizmodo is a gadget-oriented technology blog. Last week they published information, including photos, of a prototype next generation iPhone. Gizmodo said they paid someone $5,000 to get it. That person said they found it at the Gourmet Haus Staudt, a Silicon Valley bar, where Gray Powell, an Apple engineer, inadvertently lost it while celebrating his 27^th birthday on March 18. Gizmodo contacted Apple that they had it, but not before disassembling it and publishing photos of its inside.

Many tech bloggers and journalists have offered their opinions about the brouhaha created by this story. Most are disdainful of Gizmodo and Nick Denton the head of Gawker Media, Gizmodo’s parent. They refer to him as if he were a four letter word.

Apple’s journalist fans
Apple loves the attention it gets from the press and bloggers. It has perfected a cult of fan-journalists and control of the press, while remaining secretive about what it does. That overwhelming cult of secrecy is the underlying cause of this story.

Journalists and bloggers have furthered Apple’s PR machine’s success by avoiding their responsibilities to report. Journalists like the New York Time’s David Pogue, The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg and The Chicago Sun-Time’s Andy Ihnatko regularly sign Apple non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) in order to get access to pre-release versions of Apple hardware and software. They are careful not to be too critical of Apple lest Steve Jobs blacklist them from future information. This is not reporting. It is kowtowing to Jobs and Apple. It should not be acceptable to them, their newspapers or the public. But it is.

The newspapers and journalists accept this state-of-affairs because they value readers and viewers over integrity. They are in bed with Apple. They are prostituting journalism and do not admit it to us or themselves. They rationalize their behavior. They are happy to avoid their own ethics when it suits their profit motives. So why should they disparage Nick Denton and Gizmodo for doing the same things they do, which is to report what is likely to grab viewers instead of adhering to journalistic truth?

Who is right?
This is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Ihnatko and others are no better than Denton and Gizmodo. I bet they secretly wish they could have broken the story but that would have ended their cozy relationship with Apple. Thus for them, it is better to be critical of Gizmodo and Denton and to deflect questions about their journalistic chops by castigating Gizmodo for “illegal” actions. Who besides Apple and California law enforcement cares at this juncture? I don’t. I bet most of you don’t either. I wanted to see the prototype and learn what is new and different.

Gizmodo’s story was fun and amusing. It was grotesque in exposing what news organizations will do in order to satisfy our craving for information and gossip.

I am glad that Gizmodo published this. It was informative. I enjoyed reading about the next generation iPhone. I bet Ihnatko and Mossberg did too. It is what the press should do but often avoids doing because of conflicts-of-interest.

Herein I predict the future.

A friend recently asked, “Should he buy the AppleCare extended warranty for his new iPad?” I am generally opposed to spending money for extended warranties. I decided that it would be better to do an analysis this time rather than give a knee-jerk response.

I started by going to the basement and finding my copy of Robert Schlaifer’s seminal tome Analysis of Decisions Under Uncertainty. This was my textbook from a course at Harvard, many years ago. I needed to brush up on this stuff as I had not done a formal analysis in quite some time.

This type of analysis works fine for many things besides an iPad extended warranty. In essence you look at the possible outcomes and build a decision tree. You assess the individual outcome’s monetary cost or benefit and assign probabilities to the outcomes to determine an expected value for each outcome. You then choose the branch of the tree with the best expected value.

The facts:

1. 16GB WiFi-only iPad costs $499.
2. AppleCare costs $99.
3. AppleCare extends 1 year warranty by another year.
4. AppleCare extends Apple support from 90 days by 640 days (~1¾ years).
5. Probability of repair within 2 years of purchase is unknown.
6. Cost of repair for item 5 above is also unknown but no more than $499.

Let us discount the extended support as having zero value. After all, there are Google, Twitter and Facebook to help us out. And remember that by the 1 year anniversary of the iPad launch there will likely be both price reductions and newer, improved models. Let us further assume that lost use of the iPad is not catastrophic the way losing the use of a cellphone or a main computer is. Finally, we assume the probability of repair within 2 years of purchase is 5% and the cost of that repair would be $200.

There are 2 branches, either buy AppleCare or not and thus there are 4 possible outcomes. Either you purchase AppleCare or you do not and either the iPad needs repair within the second year of AppleCare window or it does not. Remember you have a 1 year warranty without AppleCare.

Outcomes

1. No AppleCare and no repair, cost is zero.

2. No AppleCare and repair, cost is $200.

3. AppleCare and no repair, cost is $99.

4. AppleCare and repair, cost is $99.

We yield a simplified expected cost of repair of $10 ($200 x .05) for branch 1 (outcome 1 and 2), the self-insurance branches. The expected cost for the second branch, buying AppleCare is $99, a fixed cost. In this case AppleCare is a bad buy because it costs us $89 more than it is worth.

Testing these assumptions to see where breakeven occurs is a good idea. If the repair cost $498 the expected value without AppleCare is $24.90, still a bad buy. If the probability of repair skyrockets to 50% and the cost of repair is $198, we break even. If the probability of repair exceeds 50% (or even nears it) the original decision to buy an iPad is flawed. If you buy one of the more expensive models, the most expensive costs $829, AppleCare is a better insurance value because repair costs can now exceed $500, but still questionable.

My response to the original question is skip AppleCare. Buy an iPad accessory instead or, better yet, I will be happy to accept a gift of some of what I just saved you!

File extensions are important and useful. These are the characters that follow the final period in the file name. They are usually 3 or 4 characters long. They tell an operating system whether or not a file is an application, like Excel.exe, or the file’s associated application. The EXE extension tells Windows that the file is a program. The Mac parallel is APP. Microsoft Word documents use extensions like DOC, DOCX, or DOT. This informs the computer that they are opened with Word.

File extensions are hidden by default on new computers. I guess the smart people at Apple and Microsoft think these important bits of information will confuse a computer user like you. I disagree. They inform us about our files. Since computers have hundreds of thousands or millions of files this extra information helps us navigate.

So how do you show extensions?

Apple OS X Finder

1. Open a Finder window.
2. Click on the Finder —> Preferences… on the menu bar.
3. The Finder Preferences dialog should open.
4. Select the Advanced tab.
5. Check the checkbox Show all filename extensions.
6. Close the dialog window.

Windows Explorer (XP)

1. Open a Windows Explorer window such as My Documents.
2. Click on the menu items Tools —> Folder Options…
3. The Folder Options dialog should open.
4. Select the View tab.
5. Uncheck the Hide extensions for known file types checkbox.
6. Click the OK button to close the dialog.

Windows Explorer (Windows 7 and Vista)

1. Open a Windows Explorer window such as Documents.
2. Click on the menu items Organize —> Folder and Search Options…
3. The Folder Options dialog should open.
4. Select the View tab.
5. Uncheck the Hide extensions for known file types checkbox.
6. Click the OK button to close the dialog.

The Lifehacker survey results, as of now:

The total cost of a usable version will likely exceed $1,000

The Apple iPad is more sizzle than steak, based upon what I read and see on the Internet.

Do I want one? Yes, to play with for a few hours.

Do I want to own one? Probably not.

Should you buy one? Not yet. Not this year. Wait for the 3rd generation before buying one of these. It will likely have big improvements and hardware additions, like a camera, over the announced first generation models.

The cost of ownership is much higher than it seems. The total cost of a usable version will likely exceed $1,000, and probably $2,000 with the cost of a data plan. The $499 model has only 16GB of memory, which is insufficient in today’s media file and data intensive world. The 64GB model is $699 but you want the Wi-Fi + 3G model, which costs $829. A data plan from AT&T Wireless is extra. AppleCare prices were not announced. I expect the extended warranty to run at least $200. You need to buy a case. You need extra charging cables and perhaps an external battery, which cost $80-$100 for the iPhone. You may want one of the iPad Keyboard Docks (price unknown).

The apps we will want are not yet written and app pricing is unknown.

The bezel, the black area around the screen, is huge and makes the device look clunky to my eye.

The lack of a built-in stand or a camera makes this thing seem half-baked.

Based upon my experience with other battery-powered devices, the touted 10 hour battery life is probably over-stated. The question is, "By how much?" Book readers like the Kindle can go 2 weeks or more on a single charge. The battery life at 10 hours max, means we will be charging iPads all the time. Also, battery life for all devices declines over time. Since the iPad battery is hard to replace, Apple intends these devices to be disposable.

Why do we want this? What does it add to our technological life that is not as well or better served by other devices?

Caution is advised. Let someone else be the beta tester for Apple.

Oh dear I received the following message from Apple.

I won’t be renewing. MobileMe is not worth $10 per year, much less $100. IMO, Apple’s cloud efforts are many years behind the cloud leaders Google and Amazon. They also trail Microsoft by several years. Microsoft is doing a good job of catching up to Google but still has a long way to go.

Many people I know believe Apple makes the best computers and related hardware. They are surprised when I challenge their opinion. I think they formed these opinions based upon three sets of Apple products—iMacs, MacBook Pros, and iPhone/iPod Touch/iPod models. My opinion is based upon the complete Apple product line that incorporates products such as the Mac Pro, Xserve, Mac Mini, Apple TV, MacBook Air, AirPort hardware, storage products, and keyboard and mouse offerings.

I am agnostic when it comes to technology. I try to assess what I see and use on its face value. I am rarely swayed by flashy or shiny things. I try to judge on ease-of-use, how well the technology does what it purports to do, and the cost/value ratio.

Below are some quick thoughts that I hope amplify my position:

The iMac is the best all-in-one computer. There are Windows alternatives. None are as compelling.

MacBook Pros are very nice notebook computers. There are few comparable offerings in the Windows world. But there are many good Windows notebooks, often providing a better cost/value ratio than a MacBook Pro. This impression is due to Windows 7. Windows 7 changes the balance for the client operating system user interface/user experience (UI/UX), away from Apple’s OS X Leopard/Snow Leopard, to Microsoft. This happened once before when Microsoft released Windows 95 and leapfrogged the Apple UI/UX of the day.

The iPod Touch is in a category by itself. I have seen no other device that does as much as the Touch, does what it does as well as the Touch, or is priced as favorably.

The iPhone was in a category by itself but that is rapidly changing. The Motorola Droid offers many features that the iPhone does not and is quickly adding apps and functionality that leapfrog the iPhone/iTunes App store ecosystem. Peter Ha of Time Magazine recently named the Droid the best gadget for 2009. There are other new or soon-to-be-released smartphones that challenge the iPhone’s hegemony.

The Mac Pro is a beautiful tower computer. It is extravagantly over-priced. There are many Windows alternatives that provide comparable hardware at a fraction of the cost. The primary reason I see to buy the Mac Pro over a comparable Windows tower is because you want to use Final Cut Studio, Apple’s $1,000 video editing program, to edit lots of video recordings.

Xserve is an expensive, not-so-special, pizza-box-shaped server. Linux, Unix, and Windows servers generally provide better functionality and features at much lower cost.

The Mac Mini is useful but monitor, keyboard and mouse are extra. It is not always the best-in-breed for media center devices and it makes a mediocre desktop computer. (I suggest buying an iMac if you need a Mac desktop computer.)  Window nettop boxes are coming to market soon that challenge the Mac Mini. We need to wait until January 2010 to assess what is best-in-breed in this form factor.

The Mac Mini has a younger, smaller sibling, the Apple TV. TiVo is far superior as an easy-to-use media device. Xbox and the SONY PlayStation PS3 provide media center functionality and add game playing and an optical drive (Blu-ray for the PS3), both of which are missing from Apple TV. Roku, Vudu and Popcorn provide lower-cost media center functionality. The Roku box, which I will be reviewing next week, costs much less, provides a simpler interface and is easier to use than an Apple TV.

I often recommend Apple computers and other Apple hardware to my clients because the device(s) best meet the clients’ needs. I often recommend non-Apple products because they better meet that client’s needs. As I said above, I’m agnostic.

I could go on surveying Apple’s remaining hardware, such as Airport networking devices, keyboards and mice but I won’t. My point is that Apple makes some good hardware, in some instances such as the iPod Touch or the iMac the best, but not always the best and often not very good, like the MacBook Air or Apple TV.

Many people I know believe Apple makes the best computers and related hardware. They are surprised when I challenge their opinion. I think they formed these opinions based upon three sets of Apple products—iMacs, MacBook Pros, and iPhone/iPod Touch/iPod models. My opinion is based upon the complete Apple product line that incorporates products such as the Mac Pro, Xserve, Mac Mini, Apple TV, MacBook Air, AirPort hardware, storage products, and keyboard and mouse offerings.

I am agnostic when it comes to technology. I try to assess what I see and use on its face value. I am rarely swayed by flashy or shiny things. I try to judge on ease-of-use, how well the technology does what it purports to do, and the cost/value ratio.

Below are some quick thoughts that I hope amplify my position:

The iMac is the best all-in-one computer. There are Windows alternatives. None are as compelling.

MacBook Pros are very nice notebook computers. There are few comparable offerings in the Windows world. But there are many good Windows notebooks, often providing a better cost/value ratio than a MacBook Pro. This impression is due to Windows 7. Windows 7 changes the balance for the client operating system user interface/user experience (UI/UX), away from Apple’s OS X Leopard/Snow Leopard, to Microsoft. This happened once before when Microsoft released Windows 95 and leapfrogged the Apple UI/UX of the day.

The iPod Touch is in a category by itself. I have seen no other device that does as much as the Touch, does what it does as well as the Touch, or is priced as favorably.

The iPhone was in a category by itself but that is rapidly changing. The Motorola Droid offers many features that the iPhone does not and is quickly adding apps and functionality that leapfrog the iPhone/iTunes App store ecosystem. Peter Ha of Time Magazine recently named the Droid the best gadget for 2009. There are other new or soon-to-be-released smartphones that challenge the iPhone’s hegemony.

The Mac Pro is a beautiful tower computer. It is extravagantly over-priced. There are many Windows alternatives that provide comparable hardware at a fraction of the cost. The primary reason I see to buy the Mac Pro over a comparable Windows tower is because you want to use Final Cut Studio, Apple’s $1,000 video editing program, to edit lots of video recordings.

Xserve is an expensive, not-so-special, pizza-box-shaped server. Linux, Unix, and Windows servers generally provide better functionality and features at much lower cost.

The Mac Mini is useful but keyboard and mouse are extra. Window nettop boxes are coming to market soon that challenge the Mac Mini. We need to wait until January 2010 to assess what is best-in-breed in this form factor.

The Mac Mini has a younger, smaller sibling, the Apple TV. It is not always the best-in-breed for media center devices and it makes a mediocre desktop computer. (I suggest buying an iMac if you need a Mac desktop computer.) TiVo is far superior as an easy-to-use media device. Xbox and the SONY PlayStation PS3 provide media center functionality and add game playing and an optical drive (Blu-ray for the PS3), both of which are missing from Apple TV. Roku, Vudu and Popcorn provide lower-cost media center functionality. The Roku box, which I will be reviewing next week, costs much less, provides a simpler interface and is easier to use than an Apple TV.

I often recommend Apple computers and other Apple hardware to my clients because the device(s) best meet the clients’ needs. I often recommend non-Apple products because they better meet that client’s needs. As I said above, I’m agnostic.

I could go on surveying Apple’s remaining hardware, such as Airport networking devices, keyboards and mice but I won’t. My point is that Apple makes some good hardware, in some instances such as the iPod Touch or the iMac the best, but not always the best and often not very good, like the MacBook Air or Apple TV.

We were having a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat. Our guests mentioned that the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in NYC had a great Tim Burton show. They remarked on his wonderful drawings and figures. I mentioned that Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas was one of my favorite movies. They said they had never seen it. I volunteered that I had the DVD and we could watch it after dinner.

I searched for the DVD while everyone else ate dessert. I could not find it. I checked the spreadsheet that I used to maintain my catalog when I bought optical media—CDs and DVDs. It turned out that although we had owned the VHS tape of The Nightmare Before Christmas, I never bought the DVD version. I had confused the soundtrack CD, which I have, with the DVD.

I thought, “No problem. We will rent it from Amazon Video on Demand and I will play it for the family and guests on the home theater PC (HTPC) hooked up to the home theater system.” Unfortunately, The Nightmare Before Christmas is a Disney title and not available either to rent or buy as a download from Amazon.

My next step was to start iTunes on my main computer and see if the iTunes Store had it. The iTunes store does not rent movies. They sell them. The Nightmare Before Christmas was available for $14.99 plus tax. I thought it’s a holiday. We have guests. Why not?

Why not is because I forgot what a torture it is using iTunes and the iTunes store. I turned on the HTPC and started iTunes. As always, there was a newer version of iTunes that they wanted me to download. I had version 7 installed but iTunes 9.02 or something like that is the current version. So I thought why not update?

Why not is because it took me 20 minutes to download the 90MB file. Why not is because it took another 20 minutes to install iTunes and all the attendant crap software that Apple shoves down the Internet pipes with it. I was reasonably patient.

So after 40 minutes I finally got to launch iTunes. But lo, I couldn’t order the movie yet because iTunes had to update the iTunes library first! That took another 15 minutes. After that it wanted to update the album artwork. I had enough (I thought) and cancelled that activity, because I could.

So now iTunes was running. I went to the iTunes store and searched for the “nightmare before” and found music and the movie. I went to purchase the movie.

I could not. iTunes was not authorized on this computer and I had reached my 5 computer iTunes authorization limit. Damn Apple! I turned on my 15” Apple MacBook Pro and deauthorized it. I then went back to the HTPC and authorized it.

Now I was ready to purchase the movie. NOT! The American Express card number registered with the iTunes store was out-of-date. So I had to go get my card and update the information.

Finally, I was downloading the movie and I thought, “We’ll be watching this soon.” I was wrong. It took Apple 35 minutes to download a 898MB file. Unlike Amazon, Apple requires that the whole file be downloaded before you can begin watching and their servers run at a small fraction of the speed of Amazon’s. Amazon would have been done in a third of the time or less.

So over 2 hours later and after a lot of technology induced anger and frustration we finally got to watch The Nightmare Before Christmas. Of course Apple had just treated me to their technological version of a nightmare before Christmas.

So I am sending a big bah humbug to Apple and hoping Santa puts coal in Steve Job’s Christmas stocking.