Silicon Shecky

I’ve gone off a bit about Apple here and there. I flat out hate the iPhone and (max)iPad. I feel they are overrated pieces of equipment. There is much more to my dislike of Apple than just that.

Back in the 80′s Apple computers were all the rage. You had the Apple II series, then the Macintosh came out. Pricing was similar to PC prices. You got bang for the buck. Then Apple went and got rid of Steve Jobs, and it went downhill. In the mean time Jobs continued on and refined his business acumen to become the CEO he is for Apple now.

While all that happened, PCs came down in price. Microsoft was the evil empire, and Apple was a nice alternative, if not a little out of most peoples price ranges. Microsoft helped Apple avoid going out of business by investing in Apple. Then the iPod came out, and all bets were off.

Now I will disclaimer this by saying flat out, I have no affiliation with any company I mention in this piece. I don’t get pre-release items to review outside of my company’s Action Pack subscription, which the company pays for.

Now that that is over with, lets continue. The iPod was a much needed item in the marketplace. It combined with iTunes worked so well initially. The iPod still does work well. iTunes became something else. A cash cow. Proprietary file formats that would not play on non-iPod mp3 players. Digital Rights Management that would lock the song into one machine. The worst was (and still is) trying to port your bought music collection to a new PC. Still people flock to it (I use eMusic and Amazon).

Then came the iPhone, and initially, I thought it was a decent idea. I still think its a good idea, but poorly implemented. It is overly restrictive, you can only put on there Apple approved apps, and it is on a network that cannot handle the data flow. The iPad is nothing more than the iPhone in larger format. Same OS, same restrictions.

Now comes the new Apple developer rules. To put in in simple terms, you cannot write something in a non-Apple approved language, and cross compile it to run natively on the iPhone and iPad. this hurts for websites especially because of Adobe Flash, which is not nor will be supported on the iPhone or iPad. How do you get away with not supporting one of the most popular web systems out there and say that you offer the best experience? Personally if I was a developer, I would just cut Apple out. Write for the Android phones, which you can set to load non-marketplace apps. The Android OS is nice, robust and can do anything that the iPhone can. Plus it will give you control back over what you do, and show Apple that it is not the be all end all.

Speaking of Apple being the be all end all, it seems that unless you kiss Jobs rear, and only write good reviews and hype, otherwise you don’t get early access to Apple stuff. If that isn’t blackmail and a way to force good reviews to get more sales early on, then I don’t know what is. Heck it sounds to me like it should be illegal, because the bad reviews seem to get buried, so the consumer is fed incomplete information.

Don’t get me wrong, the Mac is a nice machine, and one day maybe I can afford one. while its nowhere near as secure as Apple touts, it is a machine that does just work. Unfortunately, it is too darn expensive for me right now. The bang for the buck isn’t there.

Apple is heading down a major slippery slope right now. Using lawsuits to try and stifle competition, locking out developers, lying to the public, I swear I’ve heard of these things before. Oh yeah, it was the same stuff Microsoft was doing right before it got hit with an Anti-Trust lawsuit.

Windows 7, overall I love it. It works on my laptop like a champ. No real issues, nor any odd things occurring. My desktop on the other hand, seems to have some really odd issues with it.

I’ve written about the problems I’ve had with homegroup working properly, and those issues are still there. Yet I am beginning to believe they are just a symptom of some other problem with my desktop and Windows 7.

Let me start by saying that my desktop is an Athalon 4200+ with 4 GB of Ram and a 320 GB SATA drive. Yes, its around 4 years old now, so its not the best machine out on the market. Still it works and at a high level for the most part.

The machine needed to be wiped and reloaded last year. Too much crap, too many things tested and removed, it was running like a dog. I wanted a clean registry, a system that didn’t have a bunch of crap on it, and of course to use Windows 7.

Now, 5 months later, I’m seeing weird activity. Out of nowhere I won’t be able to save things to either my local or external hard drive. Everything will be fine and then I go to save something and get a permission error. So I reboot the machine to get it to work again. Then there is the homegroup issue, which I am convinced is due to the Desktop. My laptop running Windows 7 Ultimate (which is what the desktop is running), has 4 GB of Ram and a Centrino 2 Processor, and has no issues with writing to drives at all.

So we come to the troubleshooting, which right now consists of a lot of research, and looking at logs. Is it a problem with the AMD processor not integrating with Windows 7 nicely, or is it a problem with Windows 7 itself. That is the question I will try to answer, and take all of you along with me for the ride.

Apple has announced the long rumored iPad. Will the iPad bring about a new age of tablet PC growth or not is the real question. I say no.

It will bring about a series of wars with the eBook readers. Looking at the specs and what the iPad does, I can’t call it a tablet PC. You load software from the app store like the iPhone. You can’t just go out and buy software for it. There is no CD/DVD drive. Heck even the developer kit is included as part of the new iPhone developer kit. How is this a tablet PC instead of an overgrown iPod touch (there is no phone or camera on the iPad also) with eBook capabilities?

Microsoft has been trying to crack the whole tablet PC area for years. They have come a long way, but its still not perfect. The plus side is that if you get a tablet from a vendor like Lenovo, its a laptop with a special screen than can rotate into a position on top of the keyboard so you have a tablet. You get the best of both worlds, even though the OS is still shaky (I have not seen the tablet features of Windows 7 to make a comparison with).

Lets look at the other issue with the iPad. The versions with cellular capabilities are partnered with AT&T. We all know about the overtaxed network due to the iPod. Not only that but most of AT&T’s coverage areas are still 2G compared to 3G. If the iPad takes off as a gadget, and that is what I look at it as, AT&T is going to have more problems.

The iPad’s price could be its downfall in the near term. With the way the economy is, I can’t see why someone would choose this over a lower end laptop in the same price range.