Life On A Mac

Benjamin Brooks on why Comcast having a monopoly of high speed internet service is bad:

If Comcast decided that they wanted to charge $100 a month I would have to pay it. If they decided to throttle internet speed to 5 mbps, I would have no choice but to be OK with it.

This is the United States and even with all of our laws and controls I am somehow forced into only having one cable Internet provider.

That’s a bad monopoly, that’s something that we must change if we want to advance the adoption and speed of our Internet services to the masses. To move the U.S. and it’s millions of households into the future we mustn’t be at the mercy of one ISP per area.

I’m in the same situation living in the suburbs of Jackson, MS. Comcast is the only viable option for me. Thankfully, I have decent internet service. I’ve no real complaints (about their cable, yes, but not internet). That said, having options and competition would likely improve what Comcast offers in the realm of internet service.

In short, an RSS reader, a Twitter client, and a couple news apps are all I need to remain informed about the news. I no longer subscribe to any news magazines or newspapers, because my iPad always gets the stories first. It’s possible my iPad newsreading habits will change a bit once Apple formally releases iOS 5. Among its many other features, the next iteration of Apple’s mobile OS includes a few features geared toward iPad newsreaders. The most prominent of those is Newsstand, which will behave a bit like a super folder; it automatically downloads the latest issues of your iOS subscriptions, and displays the current covers for each on an iBooks-style shelf.

This mirrors much how I consume news, though I do subscribe still to the NYT. I dropped the WSJ and went to the free Washington Post. I much prefer the WSJ app but the Post pricing is far nicer. My news apps now include: NYT, NPR, BBC America and CNN. (I also read The New Yorker, but I consider that separately for whatever reason.)

From my personal blog, where I discuss how Apple is changing the way users approach file management:

If iCloud works as advertised, Apple will take a huge step in changing the paradigm of file management. Just as they created the “desktop” metaphor with the Mac, they have already started to change it with iOS.

What Apple has done here is to sit down and say: “what bugs me and ideally how should it work”, then they turned that into WWDC’s announcement. These changes don’t feel like bug fixes or feature upgrades, they feel like a rethinking of computing.

A look at the way things should have always been done, but weren’t for one reason or another. That starts with all devices (PCs, Macs, Phones, Tablets) being seen as equal — what it ends with I have no clue.

This is what is exciting to me. I’ve been thinking about how the new idea of your documents residing with the applications versus the documents residing within a file structure will work. It’s really not much different than what I do now. I’m working on a few tweaks to my workflow based on this principle. I’ll share shortly.

Of course, the true magic comes with Lion and iOS5, just as Ben writes:

I don’t know of a single other way to take a document I am working on with my iPad and jump to my Mac having the document up-to-date and the cursor in the same position without pressing an extra button — to me, that is magic. It’s magic because logically that is how everything should have always worked, but in reality it is how nothing works.

July and then this fall can’t get here quick enough.

Google’s services are free. iCloud is free, with the exception of iTunes Match. However, the age old debate concerning Google crops up here yet again — ads.

Google shows ads because it is the only way it makes money. Apple, however doesn’t have this issue. During the keynote, Steve Jobs said that they built iCloud as something that the people at Apple themselves wanted to use, and they didn’t want to look at ads.

I think it is pretty clear that Apple sees iCloud as an investment in its operating systems, even if iCloud — as its own entity — loses money.

Of course, ad-supported free service really isn’t free. Users are paying to use Google’s services with their personal information. That is something that a growing number of consumers are uncomfortable with, and with iCloud being a free service, I think this aspect of Google’s personality will become more apparent.

This is a great comparison of philosophies between Apple and Google and how they approach cloud computing. The entire piece holds a lot of truths.

But what I quoted really hits at the heart of where my mind is. I’ve been waiting for Apple to take the next step in integrating file sharing between my devices. It was one of two hold-ups from me finally leaving Google Apps. I might can get over the second hold-up, but I’ll wait to see iCloud and iOS5 email implementation first.

TUAW has the video of Steve Jobs’ presentation to the Cupertino City Council. This is a 21 minute video, but it’s fascinating. You can tell how important this is to Apple because Jobs himself went before the council.

And I love his answer to the councilwoman’s question of what building this new complex will do for Cupertino.

Well, as you know, we are the largest taxpayer in Cupertino. So we’d like to continue to stay here and pay taxes.

He then made a not-so-veiled threat to move Apple to Mountain View.

Love it.

We’ll have to wait until the fall to give iCloud a real workout. But iCloud looks like an example of something that Apple does best. They’re not the company that might be first with a product or feature. They’re not out to win a bar bet.

Their goal is to tell a story with their technology.

That’s a trademark that the best tech companies share. They don’t rush to be first, or just to have something in a given market. They work according to their timeline and toward their personal goals. There is a fine line between being late to the game and taking the right amount of time to get it right, but Apple walks that line with grace.

Marco Arment, developer of Instapaper, on what Safari’s Reading List will mean to his app:

If Reading List gets widely adopted and millions of people start saving pages for later reading, a portion of those people will be interested in upgrading to a dedicated, deluxe app and service to serve their needs better. And they’ll quickly find Instapaper in the App Store.

For the record, I can’t imagine switching from Instapaper. It’s a truly excellent app, and one of my most used on my iPad and iPhone. In fact, I tucked this article away in Instapaper earlier today so I could link to it tonight. And so I have.

I’m still digesting everything from reading the live blogs during the event, reading the coverage afterward and then watching this. This will be one keynote to remember. Apple has redefined computing with what they announced today.