Thank you Steve Jobs
This may be the first time I have ever felt sad for a corporation because they lost one of their leaders. But this is different; it is personal. Steve Jobs passed away today, October 6, 2011. I feel like I lost a life long friend because I have. Steve and I started our relationship in 1979. You see we were about the same age, a year apart. He was building computers and I was ing them. OK, we were eons apart but I felt the connection. I bought an Apple II because … I was never sure but I knew I needed one. It was cool. It was the future. It had 64Kb of RAM, an external floppy disc drive and I had to a cheap black and white monitor separately. There were no programs, um I mean apps, and I had to write my own if I wanted to see anything. So using BASIC, I wrote my own version of Quicken. I was an Electrical Engineering student at the University of Memphis and word spread to the local newspaper, the Memphis Commercial Appeal. A reporter came to my house to interview me about this strange thing I had bought. I waxed on and on about it would change the world, the impact it would have on people. The reporter just looked at me. But you see, I believed. I believed in Steve and Woz. I went to work for HP and Apple became the enemy. Actually, Apple was ignored. With 1% marketshare, it was a non factor in the personal computer world so like billions of others, I became immersed in the Windows world. But I always read, watched and wanted Apple. Steve got my heart. He captured my imagination like no other company. 30 years later, I retired from HP and began to transform our home from a Windows shop to an Apple one. Not because Windows and PCs were bad, Apple was just better. Today we have 9 Apple products from iPads to iPhone to iMac to iEverything. Yup; hook, line and sinker. The cool aid tastes good. I once interviewed at Apple. I had returned from 5 years with HP in Europe and was trying to reintegrate into the US scene. Apple had a position back in Europe, where we loved to live and I applied. It was for a position two levels below Steve. It only took a few minutes to see that I would be personally directed by Steve even though I would not report to him. Every question I asked or point I raised was referred to Steve. It was clear who ran Apple to this applicant. I didn’t get the job but my admiration soared. A hands-on CEO who cared about everything … everything. Today, I write this on an Apple product. I read about Steve’s passing on an Apple product. Sitting here in Europe on my way to an Alzheimer’s conference, I see a lot of Apple products. Henry Ford changed the way people moved, Steve Jobs changed the world. I will miss you Steve but you were smart enough to make sure I won’t miss Apple.
A Month with a Mac
It has been about a month since we replaced our Windows PCs with iMacs so I thought a quick report was in order. I am glad to report – all is fine. As I posted on November 19, we replaced an HP and Dell PC running Windows XP with two iMacs. The installation and data transfers were simple. And the learning curve fast. We both have standard configurations with 4 MB and are pleasantly surprised at the speed. Alan’s World I also do a ton of surfing and email but a fair amount of managing digital images and music. For these task, I love my 27” iMac, especially the ability to have multiple windows open and accessible. But I go beyond some standard tasks with content for my websites. As I mentioned in the first post, for $79, I d the Windows emulator, Parallels, that allows me to run all my previous Windows apps on my iMac. Overall, I have been pleasantly surprised with this app. I regularly run Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Quicken via Parallels. Interestingly, these apps runs at least twice as fast as on my old PC. My only gripe was a caps lock issue but in an update last week, this has been fixed by Parallels. Also, I am not thrilled how the fonts are displayed but it is manageable. Anyway, I saved almost $1000 by spending $79 and not ing new Mac versions of these apps. But, over time, I will. Behind the Screens On the system admin side of things, the network is invisible, the backups to the Time Capsule are automatic and OS updates happen almost without notice. This last item was bit of a surprise in how many updates Apple suggests – very similar to Windows but without the hassle and time. My only real complaint thus far is learning the cursor functions of page up/down, backspace, delete, etc. I quickly learned the red, yellow, green window buttons but Apple seems overly complicated on managing the cursor and text. Another app that needs improvement is Apple’s email. It is too simple when compared to Outlook. The simplistic signature feature is annoying as is the spell checker. It seems to take one more step than on Windows to do some simple tasks. While on the subject of apps, I downloaded Picasa as my image management tool and forgot iPhoto altogether. However, many Apple apps are integrated with iPhoto making me wish iPhoto was my primary photo app; but I can’t live with it’s issues. However, the Preview app that comes will iMacs is surprisingly powerful with it’s re-size, crop, annotation features. It almost replaces Photoshop for most simple image manipulation. Looking Back, Going Forward OK, with my gripes aside, we love our new iMacs and will never go back to Windows and those boring boxes from HP, Dell and others. As for support, I don’t know; I haven’t used it. And that is a good thing. As I said, I will pay a premium for excellence in design and engineering. There is a reason Apple market share has double in PCs recently – they are simply better. Climb On! Alan
Moving to a Mac
Update: A Month with A Mac can be found here. Am I trendy or smart? Probably a bit of both but using Apple computers is not new to me. You see, I bought an Apple II in 1977 when I was a junior in College getting my EE Degree. As I was being was interviewed by my local newspaper, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, as an oddity for owning a computer; the reporter asked me all the normal questions but never really understood why I needed a “personal computer”. How times have changed! Upon taking a job with HP, I had no choice but to use Windows based PC for the next 30 years at work and thus it followed to use them at home as well. However with early retirement, never ending Window updates and crashes and impossible upgrades to the next version; it was time to come home. Last year I bought a MacBook to replace my Windows Notebook and the Apple Time Capsule with Apple TV combo to serve as a music server and wireless router. They have worked flawlessly. So after a never-ending series of blue screens on my 3 year-old Dell, the always running noisy fan on the 4 year-old HP and Microsoft’s byzantine upgrade process from XP to Windows 7 it was time to upgrade the PCs. I ordered a 21.5” and 27” iMac from the online store and they arrived a few days later. Each one was packed in a single box complete with a carrying handle. In less than 3 minutes they were unpacked, on the desk and the old PCs relegated to the basement for migration purposes. The Hardware Elegant, stunning, beautiful and it simply works. I have always admired excellent industrial design and these new iMacs are superior examples – full stop. No ugly grey bay on the floor, clumsy monitor stand and important to me – no tangle of wires. And it is eerily quiet. When I first saw the tiny keyboard, I thought that this would be a problem – no keypad, no dedicated hot keys for apps, etc. But as I type this post, it is a work of art. Simple, functional, stylish – just what I need nothing more, nothing less. And then the mouse. After years of several mice with multiple keys, wheels, shapes and sizes; the new “magic mouse” looked like a Miss Universe contestant after all the work – slick with just the right amount of curves. It moves easily, clicks soundly and has the gestures of a trackpad – another winner from Apple. Snow Leopard OS X Apple is known for outstanding software and this operating system meets that standard – stable, invisible and simply works. While I keep thinking I need to invoke cntrl-alt-del to look at some kind of system activity – I don’t. The Leopard found my other iMacs, PowerBook, iPhones, Apple TV, Time Capsule and even the Windows PCs. It took a tiny bit of direction but overall I had five computers, two iPhones, server and router all talking within a hour – something I never accomplished with Windows Home Networking. And it is now backing everything up hourly – invisible to me. What about the data? This was a huge concern for me. Hello, my name is Alan and I am a data pack rat. My Outlook file is 1.5GB ( yeah I keep everything) with thousands of emails and attachments. Over 30,000 digital pictures at 94GB, a few videos at 2GB and 3000 songs in lossless at 108GB. There is more but you get the idea. I bought a utility from Little Machines, O2M, for $10 that automatically converted all my Outlook messages, contacts and appointments Apple’s mbox format. Next, I copied them all to the new iMac via the network and well, mission accomplished. The data transfer was complete within the couple of hours it took to physically move the bits. Could not have been easier. And the Apps So far, this was too easy. And after 30 years in hi-tech I knew the bear was in the trees sizing me up. I had used iTunes for years so this was not a worry. I had become an Outlook expert over the years but of some concern were my apps to manage my pictures and website. You Have Mail So it was with a nervous twitch, I started Apple’s email program – “mail” (branding geniuses at Apple) and imported my decade of emails. They were all there, albeit not in the same hierarchical folder structure I had, but there nonetheless. Contacts and appointments moved to their new homes effortlessly. Connecting my POP mailboxes was drop-dead simple. I was back online just in time! Cue the Music iTunes was up next. I copied my iTunes folder from my MacBook to my new iMac – iTunes found it and I was in business. My iPhone didn’t like that I was on a new computer and required me to download my apps again from the iTunes store just to prove I was legal – how dare they? But that took a few minutes. I did lose my music on my iPhone and have to figure a way to down sample them from lossless to smaller file sizes to get most of my songs on my 14GB iPhone but this is a small concern as I already transferred my favorite playlist. My iPhone was ready to go. Lights, Action, Camera Next was iPhoto and the bear emerged. OK, so maybe this is a case of old dogs learning new tricks but I have been using Picasa for years to organize my photo collection. It imports from my digital cameras easily, has excellent basic editing capability,uploads to sharing sites and I understand how it organizes the image library – iPhoto did some of this. But most disturbing was that I was missing pictures during the import and iPhoto insisted on creating what it called “events” thus breaking up my albums.