Rich Mintz  

(Photo: Apple Store, with Google’s NYC headquarters at right)

I’m at the Apple Store Genius Bar on 14th Street this morning, because at some point in the past week I dropped my iPhone on its back and the back glass splinter-shattered. It’s safety glass, so it held, but it’s ugly and has been shedding tiny glass bits.

I did a little research, and it turns out that Apple will now replace the back glass panel for $29 plus tax, no questions asked. (Rumored on the Internets, confirmed by my personal Genius.) Getting presumably inferior aftermarket parts to do it yourself (including the star-shaped screwdriver) costs $20-40 and then you have to, you know, do it yourself. So this is a fair deal.

It’s an especially fair deal on Saturday morning. I logged in late last night and had my pick of Saturday morning Genius Bar appointments; showed up here on time and was immediately served; the thing was done 8 minutes later. As I tweeted, it’s so civilized in here on a Saturday morning I half expect to be served wine and cheese by a tuxedoed caterwaiter.

On the way in, locking up my motorcycle outside, I got stopped twice to talk about the bike, by a young Harley-rider dude from Pennsylvania (which he pronounced “pee-ay” with the accent to go along with it) and by a well-dressed European tourist in his 20s who had just got off a group-tour minibus (Meatpacking, y’know).

Then I got home and learned that the city has already corrected the misleading no-parking signs on John Street that resulted in this parking ticket which I successfully challenged. So it’s now explicitly clear that weekend parking is permitted on that block (and I helped). That’s a type of bureaucratic efficiency I can get behind!

We just bought a new MacBook Pro and are in the process of transferring data from the old computer to the new one.

When you first turn on the new computer, you set a few configuration items (like US English keyboard) and then are asked for your network information — we entered our wireless password and it connected. We then used Setup Assistant to try to transfer data from the new computer to the old, and ran into some problems.

We bought a Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter for the new computer, and our intention was to connect the computers directly (since the old MacBook Pro has an internal Ethernet port) for transfer. Allegedly Macs can form an ad-hoc network if you connect them directly, without the need for a crossover cable. We set the two computers up on the kitchen table, and tried it. But we couldn’t get the two computers to see each other, and none of my basic “is it plugged in? should we reboot it?” tricks made any difference.

So we hauled the computers across the room, set them up again on a bookcase, and hard-connected them via Ethernet to the Linksys wireless router. The two ports lit up on the front of the router, so we knew that both Ethernet ports were active, and the computers were able to see each other in Setup/Migration Assistant. So far so good.

But once the transfer began, we saw an estimated transfer time that started at 50 hours and steadily climbed toward 80 hours. This was not good! A look at the Linksys router confirmed that the Ethernet-active light on the new computer was no longer lit. So what I inferred is that the old computer was uploading files via Ethernet, but that they were being routed out to the new computer via wireless!

So we cancelled the transfer, restarted the new computer, and initiated the setup process again. I was going to remove the wireless password to force the new computer to use its Ethernet connection. But unfortunately, if the computer you’re setting up has Internet access, you aren’t prompted about it! (I could have done something tricky, like changing the wireless password for the network, but I didn’t think of that in the moment.) So we went straight into Setup Assistant and hoped. The Ethernet-active light was lit when we started the transfer — but then it went out and we started seeing incredibly long transfer times again.

And so yet again we cancelled the transfer and restarted the new computer. At this point we gave up on Ethernet, moved the new computer back to the kitchen table, and connected the Time Machine backup disk to the new computer, which is currently transferring a more or less identical set of files with a far more reasonable estimated transfer time of 1 hour 15 minutes.

If I’m guessing correctly what happened — that on the new computer, the slow wireless network connection was overriding the fast Ethernet network connection — then this is a problem in the way things come set up from the factory. Presumably an order of precedence (perhaps a configurable one) is built into the OS — the default behavior should be to prefer the faster connection, no?

I haven’t had a chance to play with the iBooks Author app yet, but if it’s anything like what it seems to be, it’s a big step in the direction of democratized content distribution. And I say that knowing full well that Apple takes a big piece (don’t know how much) of any money you make selling your new creations in the iBookstore.

The first generation of democratized publishing came with Gutenberg. The second generation, though, didn’t come until the 20th century, when technologies like the mimeograph (and, later, the photocopier, and even later, the first-generation Macintosh) achieved wide circulation.

Now we’re in a third generation, when the Internet makes it possible for anyone to disseminate information and opinions electronically — and technologies like iBooks Author, which enable anyone to package up information into a physical or quasi-physical product, may usher in a fourth generation.

It’s important not to underestimate the emotional power of that ability to package the information you’re disseminating. Writers want to publish their books not just because they want to make money, but because they want to be associated with (to give birth to) a discrete, finished object. That impulse is so strong that I think being empowered to package up an iBook is a qualitatively different experience than simply putting up a bunch of web pages, and that would be true even if you could only give away your iBooks for free.

…is running Civilization V, a monster that my MacBook Pro could barely handle.  (In fact, it couldn’t handle it at all until I upgraded the graphics PRAM or the Johnson rod or something, I forget what I did.)

And I am proud to report that the Air KICKS ASS.  Civ V loads faster and more confidently than on the Pro, the intro video is skippable sooner, and the game itself pops right up, none of the redraw strain that I felt on the Pro.

I’m going to modify what I said in this post and say that after a few days of normal use, this MacBook Air feels faster than my 17″ MacBook Pro.  Even for playing SimCity 4 under Windows XP Professional under VMWare Fusion 3, it feels faster.

(The real test: whether it can run Civilization V at all, let alone fast.  We’ll see.)

So I took the plunge, and put down my 7-pound 17-inch MacBook Pro in favor of a new 3-pound MacBook Air. My initial thoughts:

Damn, that thing’s small, in the best sense. I went for the larger 13-inch model, but even so — I keep finding myself checking my bag to make sure it’s still in there. (This iPad may actually be heavier.). And as an object of industrial design, it’s gorgeous. Screen resolution is excellent — I am aware of the reduced real estate, but I’m not bothered. I did, however, pop out and buy a SuperDrive — I may not use it often, but I realized that it pissed me off not to have a drive the moment I first wanted to install software that required one,

it is a little slower than the MacBook Pro, but not significantly in ordinary use. I bought the upgraded processor and memory. The only place where I may see a noticeable degradation is in running games, and in running apps under Windows under VMWare Fusion. Windows runs, but it’s slow. (I installed it on a tiny partition; i may bump up the disk space and reinstall and see if that helps.). For what I normally keep running at once (Chrome, Word, Excel, Pages, Tweetdeck, Preview, Grab), it feels perfectly normal.

I like the expanded trackpad options, which I’m still exploring. I especially like “swipe to bring up the running applications picker” — it may be only 5% faster than Apple-Tab, but given that I do it about a thousand times a day or more, those savings add up.

I’m vastly more likely to pick it up casually and put it on my lap than I was the old machine, which felt like a chore to heft and open up. I don’t find myself crabby about getting “officey” when I use it at home. This makes it an excellent bridge between the iPad (which is tedious for data entry) and an office machine.

So far, aside from the impaired gaming power (not my highest priority), I’ve been happy. And I LOVE having three pounds less weight to be schlepping around. More news as it develops.

Most of the buzz this year is all about the device (iPad, Galaxy Tab, Android, netbook, MacBook Air) and how it’s used (Facebook, Twitter, “liking,” “poking,” etc.). But I think the infrastructure story — the Cloud story — is more meaningful.

I’m not talking about the business story (how companies, including mine, are gradually moving their data storage and management offsite, and outsourcing their application provision). I’m talking about the individual story: how, for more and more people, access to the data they use in their personal and professional lives has become not only a platform-agnostic affair, but a device-independent one.

Consider:

• Almost all the information I need to use to conduct my life now lives “on the Internet.” That includes not just email, contacts, and appointments; I’m also talking about documents I produce and share professionally, reference material, entertainment content, etc.
• The few exceptions (e.g., the photos I took last week, which are sitting on the hard drive of my laptop) are, more often than not, a matter of me not taking advantage of existing channels to the Cloud, rather than such channels not existing.
• Google knows everybody. At some point about two years ago — and note that this is after I started my current job — I stopped keeping people’s contact information, because I realized that every new person I met who was 70 or younger could be found on the Internet if I remembered their name. Technically, if I meet them through work, I may not even remember their name, because most people I meet professionally can be found again online with a smart Google search using a few snippets of descriptive information (employer, job title, etc.)
• Google knows everything. By analogy to the preceding: I no longer keep factual or business information around because I “might need it later.” The nature of research has largely changed: now it’s a matter of asking the body of Internet de facto public record for what I need, rather than consulting a formal compilation (directory, etc.) and/or (re-)finding information that I (personally) squirreled away in the past.

I now live in a world in which I can potentially reach for almost any computing device that happens to be at hand (whether it belongs to me or not) and conduct almost any information transaction that I wish. In my daily life I use an iPhone, an iPad, and a MacBook largely interchangeably, choosing one over another based mostly on convenience in the moment and on form factor, rather than on suitability. Sure, at the margins, one device will be “better” than the others for certain transactions or in certain settings; but in the main, they all do most of the same things acceptably well.

And this is the beginning of the transformation, not its end state.

In the context of all this, it’s important to note that I didn’t really have to do anything special to make all this happen. I just lived my life, making choices (e.g., following or not following my employer’s recommendations, buying or not buying devices, signing up or not signing up for online services) as they were presented to me in the course of my ordinary affairs. Sure, I work for a technology company, and I’m an early-ish adopter; but I don’t live on the bleeding edge, and don’t have time to waste on unproven technologies or tactics. I don’t try something new until I’ve seen evidence, from others, that it works. And all this stuff works more or less as advertised.

John Scalzi’s post last week about living in the future (not to mention Scott Adams’ reminder last December that we’re all cyborgs now, now that we’re carrying our exobrains around in our pockets) has got me thinking about the same thing. I joke about wanting the Internet in my head, but if you get a drink or two in me, I’ll confess that I’m pretty damn impressed with the stuff we’ve got already.

The latest entry in the “hey, when did all this stuff happen?” sweepstakes is Voice Control on the iPhone 4. Press and hold the home button for a minute, and your personal digital assistant waits for your command. “Play artist Alison Krauss,” you can command. Or, “What song is this?” Or, “Call Martha Jones.” And it actually works!

Yes, I got an iPhone 4 this week (somehow all the queues and secret lists and 24-hour windows are now yesterday’s news; I walked into the Upper West Side Apple Store and had one in 15 minutes). And yes, I’m amazed — FaceTime and the super-sharp screen and the two cameras and all that stuff, it really is remarkable. Video, with editing right on the device! Multitasking! I can listen to Sirius XM radio while converting between ounces and grams! (And it comes with a free iPod Touch, in the form of my defunct iPhone 3G, which still works perfectly well via wireless and continues to do everything it ever did, except make phone calls — which I don’t do much of anymore anyway, and neither do you, but I digress.)

But the innovations are turning up fast and furious these days. Take Dragon Dictation, which is available for iPhone and iPod Touch and iPad and BlackBerry, and soon for your toaster and electric toothbrush. I like the idea of voice-to-text, but I type fast and accurately, even on small devices, so the value hasn’t been evident. But Dragon’s accuracy is now so good that, for certain situations in certain circumstances, I could imagine choosing to use it. Look at these two passages I dictated last night (in the first, I was just riffing, in the second I was reading from this story on The Awl about freelancing, which you should read anyway):

Once upon a time there was an angry dragon. The dragon was very, very angry.
One day, the dragon was walking down the street, and he came upon the lion. Lyon, he said, what say you?
John, said the lion, I am very happy to see you.
And thus ends the lesson.
***
But the sword of Damocles isn’t what’s most toxic to the freelance experience. What’s worse is that, in order to be a freelancer for very long, you have to think of yourself in certain ways. You know what they say about beautiful people? That every pretty girl or gorgeous man is someone’s ask, was too much hassle for someone.

This is raw and unedited. Everything came through as I intended. The punctuation. The paragraph breaks. It got “thus.” It got “freelancer.” It got “Damocles”! The only problems were “Lyon” for “Lion” in the first passage, and “ask” for “ex” in the second. That is a level of accuracy I can live with.

Or try SoundHound. Nevermind holding it up to the radio speakers to identify a song; that’s kid stuff. It identified Nessun dorma from my humming. And I’m no Pavarotti. This isn’t beyond incredible?

(And we’re nowhere near the bleeding edge. Have you heard of Google Goggles?)

Think of the last cellphone you had. Not the first one — just the last one. (Or, if you were an early iPhone adopter, the one before that.) The one I had was a Nokia e62, running Symbian — which, as I’ve noted elsewhere, I detested every moment my fingers were on it. It did hardly anything except make phone calls, download my email, and make me wait while it swapped data in and out of RAM. Put it next to the iPhone 4, and it’s like setting down a lawnmower next to an Audi TT Coupe. If not for the fact that both of them make phone calls (something which fewer and fewer of us bother to do), they might as well be the products of parallel UI evolution on distant planets. And I carried that thing around in my pocket all day, every day, in 2007! I think I have mayonnaise that’s older than that.

So, if on some day in the distant future, when you are an old, old man, a little child asks you when the past ended and the future began, you can tell them with confidence that it was yesterday, August 2, 2010, when Rich Mintz got his iPhone 4. Or something like that.

Thanks, Apple Store, for turning the repair around so quickly. But did you have to accidentally slash on purpose forget to put the Civilization IV disc back in the drive?

Are you in league with another of the Great Powers to overcome our civilization, take over our cities, and win the space race?

We have a MacBook Pro that (based on our research at home) is apparently suffering from the Nvidia graphics card defect described here. (More from Apple here.) The Apple Store diagnosed the problem tonight, took the computer with a promise of return in 5 days — then called a couple hours later and said it would be ready tomorrow, no charge. Nice!

I think the machine is out of AppleCare at this point, not to mention out of warranty, so I’m particularly impressed. When those people are good, they’re good.