Weekend support - friends and family

I spent an interesting weekend giving support to my friends with Windows. It is not for the love of it you understand, but one of the boat anchors I carry around having worked for Microsoft years ago is that some people think that I am an authority on Windows. It caused me to come to an Occams Razor conclusion in two parts.

Firstly, Windows continues to be *way* too complex for people at home. It does not meet the use cases and capabilities of the end users concerned. For exmple many people refuse to acceptany need to know anything whatsoever about their systems and therefore blunder along until the inevitable data loss disaster. At the very least they run often run systems that are woefully poorly installed by the originak equipment manufacturers (OEMS) and poorly updated, optimised, and protected.

Secondly, the world has changed. Windows 7 computers from OEM’s at the ‘Tesco’ level now have 4GB of memory and 64 bit Windows preloaded. In a stroke this move to 64bit Windows 7 obsoletes the Vista and XP 32bit world. Soon everyone will put their old laptops out to landfill and go all sparkly x64. Why? It is always the same reason - device drivers. As we move forward it is a short matter of time before x64 only starts to be the norm.

What does this all mean?

Well I suppose we should buy Microsoft stock. The last lot of woefully bad home laptops and desktops which shipped with 32 bit Vista but weren’t really up to the job are fast approaching oblivion. The early adopters of XP in the home are running creaky crapola that is for the scrapheap. The nuclear option is easiest for home users. Buy a new one rather than figure out what could be optimised.

A case study of many Windows computers and complex options

My friend has four PC’s at home. A work based desktop running XP Pro. He is under pressure to get his personal iTunes and stuff off it. So the family also have three laptops. The three laptops are all different. One is an XP model bought for the student doing his GCSE’s the Christmas Vista came out. It struggles with graphics, and a smallish slow 30GB disk. The second is a Toshiba running Windows Vista, but it was not really designed for Windows Vista. The Vista capable program was rather re-engineered to make it compatible at the sticker level. It has 2GB of RAM but it really is slow in everything it tries to achieve. So slow as to be almost unusable in my opinion.

My friend announced that they he had learned the secrets of Windows and defragmented the disk - as if this was the magic cure all of all known issues with Windows Vista.

The trouble with this laptop is as follows:

• It has a 5400 rpm drive which is a slug
• It has insufficient FSB and IO for Vista
• It has insufficient memory for Windows Vista and all the loaded apps
• It has insufficient graphics capability for speed in Vista.
• It runs Windows Vista pre SP1 which is slow, annoying, and difficult to use.

The third laptop my friend announced proudly was dual core - so it he assumed it had two drives. I explained it was a Core2 Duo with two processor cores on one piece of Silicon. It is a good computer though - it is a newish Toshiba model with 4GB of RAM and a 500GB drive. It has snappy if not great performance and is pre-loaded with Windows 7 64bit. They had bought it to take over from the Vista one - which was only 14 months old.

Do you see a pattern here. More computers arrive, but the old ones do not go, they hang around. Now they have 4 computers each with different operating systems (The desktop runs Windows XP Pro, Laptops run Windows XP Home, Vista and 7)

And herein lies the problem.

My friend runs a business on ebay using the Vista computer. The computer has a 180GB drive which has 90GB free on a second partition, and 90GB used on the boot partition. I explained that Windows was pre-installed poorly or because of some hardware necessity onto two partitions and talked over the options.

Note. First we backed up the computer. It had two years data on it, and had never been backed up. We did this using the Windows Vista backup tool. I dont like backups that do not back up *everything* including apps, system state and structure, but it was the only tool we had avaliable.

Here were the options as I saw them.

1. Go into Control Panel, Switch to Classic View, Choose Administrative Tools, Choose Computer Management, Access the Disk Management tool, Delete the second partition, extend the first partition to the whole disk. My friend should not need to understand all this - and does not. Anyway we tried this and it failed. Windows Vista was not playing ball. I recreated the second partition.
2. Back up the partitions on the hard disk to an external disk using a tool like Acronis True Image 2010, then rebuild the computer with a hard disk partition that spanned the whole disk. Perhaps not surpisingly my friend did not understand why this was so complicated, and did not know why it was potentially so invasive and risky.
3. Move iTunes data to the empty drive. Far from ideal, this freed up just 20GB of space on the boot drive which means the problem goes away until another day when the ebay data and photogtraphs fill up the disk again. We settled for this.

My solution, if it were me, would be to use the replacement laptop - blow the disk data onto an external disk, and restore it to the new Windows 7 laptop and toss the Vista one away. Failing that reinstall it from scratch with Windows 7 (or perhaps even Windows XP SP3) across one volume that spanned the whole disk.

My friends cant see the point of this, and instead opt to keep the laptops as they are on XP, Vista and Windows 7.

Then they asked me to help them sort out why only some of their computers could print properly to their HP network printer. I explained that they needed potentially quite different drivers for each computer. But they are all Windows they cried. Yes, but XP Home, Pro, Vista 32bit and Windows 7 64bit no doubt have large differences.

My solution if it were me, would be to have only one operating system. I know through years of experience that this is a better place to be. I would not like to think of the number of hours wasted messing about with this stuff or all the aspects of their computing environment that could be so much better were they to take a little more time to think about their home network and computing environment.

This is why I have a Mac based home network at home. We all run the same OS, because I have a family pack which means it is easy for us all to stay on the same release. We all use the same Mac OS X Server, where we all back up using Time Machine and I keep periodic clones of our operating systems and all our data is mirrored for safety. If a mac needs replacing to it can be used in target disk mode which means that copying, fixing, updating and cloning it to a new Mac is easy.

But of course Macs are more expensive, as my brother in law told me yesterday afternoon when he popped by, explaining that he has bought a Toshiba with 64bit Windows 7 installed on it. He was wondering whether any of his applications would work on it - particularly Office XP or whether he should ‘downgrade’ to 32 bit windows which was also in the box. My answer which more or less equated to “who cares - if you didn’t know this why did you buy it” but which I sort of grumpily modified to “leave it on x64 as it has the longest shelf life” - did not go down all that well, but then he hadn’t had my experience on Saturday with my friends mishmash of computing.

Given that my friend has bought a new laptop every 12-14 months for the last four years while we have kept the same my Apple Macbook and Macbook Pro for home it seems to me that my friend and my brother in law better watch their total cost of ownership.

Mac OS X is not perfect, but it is certainly easier to manage, especially in a default family setting with a Time Capsule backup / wireless router. I never ever have to think about whether anything works or deal with the complex partition issues. Of course Mac OS X has complexity especially on the Server variant and it can get to a whole stratospheric level of UNIX difficultness and geekery.

Send the old junk to the landfill.

Out of the box, Mac OS X is better suited to family life than Windows because it is designed at heart to be easier for end users without a computing background to keep on the latest release because it is simpler to clone copy and update. All of which may change now Windows 7 x64 has arrived. But not until all the old laptops and desktops go to the landfill. And they won't - that is the problem.

The past

Think back to Windows ‘At Work’ and Windows CE. Perhaps they are finally dead. Microsoft learns. Sometimes it takes a very long time but it learns. And it acts. The company never talks negatively about existing products, but never let that lull you into the false sense of security that underestimates the power to compete that they have.

We have seen this before with a litany of products. And now it is the turn of Windows Mobile which preposterously grew into two different operating systems one for one handed use and the other for PDA class devices. Guess what - this was the worlds biggest kludge. But it continues. 'Windows Phone 7 Series' leaves room for 'Windows PDA 7 Series' and 'Windows Tablet 7 Series' rotten nomenclature for sure. But at least we now have something new - Windows Phone 7 Series. Mobile wouldn’t be complete without the word ‘series’ in it now would it Nokia?

The future

Windows Mobile has been rethought into a new mobile experience that brings your people, photos, music, and video together. Microsoft make a virtue of the idea that bringing together web content, applications and services into a single view is a good idea, without any sense of irony or indication that this might have been a good idea ten years ago.

Windows Phone 7 Series Start Screen

The home screen, or Start, on Windows Phone 7 Series can be customised with “live tiles” that show the latest updates from the Web. They promise real time updates of the stuff that is important to you right on this Start Screen. And in a not towards the importance of phones at the centre of social media, allow you to post your status once and update all. The post form looked a bit clunky too. But the Live friend updates from social media sites like Facebook and Windows Live looked interesting. No mention of micro blogging sites like Twitter.

There is a slick intro demo on the web here: -

In a nod to the past the features promise your most recent contacts at your fingertips. (Information at your fingertips was once Microsoft’s strapline). It certainly looked iPhone quick to find the people you are looking for, and et integration of people at the centre of the system in what Microsoft call the ‘People Hub’ is welcome. This means calls, messages and status updates are all equals - actions you do to people of groups. People at the centre means recent, all, and what’s new are about people. This people centred focus, if it permeates the entire device, is a step ahead of the iPhone in ease of use.

The photo gallery and album is nice enough. All in one place. Everything in its place and easy to instantly share with your favourite people and social networks. (Notice the technology blur - no mention of MMS or any such nasty term).

In music terms Windows Phone amalgamates radio, web and personal (Zune) music. I guess that means that Zune will finally come to Europe after languishing only in North America for years.

WiFi sync is back - after working then not working in previous releases of Windows Mobile.

Xbox LIVE goes mobile too. Why play with yourself when you can play with your friends? Remains to be seen how far this integration goes.

Search is Bing obviously. One button to get information, maps and directions from the web.

A phone designed to keep your life in motion say Microsoft - so many visual cues from others here and this I guess a reference to Research In Motion makers of the Blackberry.

Watch the more detailed but still slick demo here:-

Demo points

1. Start Screen, Live, active, vibrant
2. Music, Zune, Video, Podcast, Radio
3. Visual history mixed radio station and music and video
4. New items, again visual
5. Visual recent list
6. All list with compact view
7. What’s new view
8. Visual cue when you select a person from the list, opens the profile, and allows interaction by calling, texting
9. What’s new again, tiled UI with disclosure of text message
10. Quick float through Xbox LIVE status, but no details

I spend a lot of time talking about user experience in software applications with my clients and their customers. It is becoming more and more the case that an engaging user experience that really is a critical success factor for any software publisher. Today, software applications have to work on multiple platforms with the same sense of purpose and achieving the same kinds of tasks, or at least the variation of the task that is appropriate for the device being used. It is just is not as simple anymore as writing a Windows Forms application and delivering it to a desktop. The world Todays most effective applications are built for cross platform deployment, be it by the web as simple web applications, or using a framework to allow their deployment on a variety of platforms. Examples of such frameworks are Adobe Air, and to a lesser extent Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and to a narrower extent WPF, and then there is always Java. Some platforms like Mac OS X have unique idiosyncrasies like WebKit to deal with, and indeed different rules for different classes of devices. Yet other platforms have proprietary and unique requirements which may have to be dealt with. One thing that consistently comes up in these discussions is prototyping. People like to see and touch the application you have in mind for them. Getting early feedback can only help with end-user adoption of the software because you are able to iron out and address any wrinkles in the software workflow that you might have reasonably thought were fine but on real use turn out to be inappropriate. Consequently, it is a great idea to test your proposed user experience and workflows even before a line of code is written. Catch-22? No, not really. There are a number of tools that you might choose to help. In this article I am going to compare two of them - Microsoft Expression 3 and EaSynth ForeUI 2.

System Requirements

These are very different requirements. They imply a very different design point. Not surprisingly you get very different results.

Expression Blend 3 has a tough learning curve. You have to watch the tutorials to make any sense of it. The tool is very technical and has powerful options, but it is overwhelming at first. Once you get into it however, you can build nice wireframe applications using a theme like design called a Sketchflow. The advantage of Sketchflow according to Microsoft is that they can avoid the production look of the application without the feeling that it is too late to change it - resulting in better workflows and better applications. The guiding principle is that you should be showing user experiences early and getting feedback before bolting in the application logic. An advantage of Expression Blend is that you can save and open your projects right in Visual Studio to add the application logic. In theory it is possible to round trip from Expression to Visual Studio and back so that user experience designers can change look and feel without breaking code. In practise I found this hard to achieve without a lot of time spend making sure I had exactly the right components of Microsoft’s Application Lifecycle Management toolset installed and working in perfect harmony. This is not as easy as it should be.

ForeUI is easy to start with, but actually it too has a learning curve and I found myself watching tutorials for it before I could get productive. It is less complex initially. Lets compare Expression’s top ten features according to Microsoft with Fore UI.

Comparing Expression Blend 3 with ForeUI 2

Yes, these tools are different. Expression Blend is designed to be used in a development environment in a corporation with designers and developers working on projects. Fore UI is designed to be used by designers building simulations and writing documentation of requirements for developers. Fore UI however, is easy to use, and get great results with. It is certainly worth checking it out especially if you, like me, outsource your development and need to give your development team good mock up screens and working models which can serve as the design for your software.

Sketchflow versus Fore UI theme switching.

Expression Blend Sketchflow

Sketchflow is undoubtedly powerful. An application drawn using Sketchflow can be directly loaded into Visual Studio and have code added. Ostensibly this saves time and ensures the designers wishes are implemented in code.

Reviewing applications with end users using Sketchflow provides the opportunity for feedback unconstrained by the feeling that the application user interface is etched in stone.

To be honest I found it to be over complex. I dont really honestly care enough about the round tripping to make it worthwhile. Instead I found this to be overhead that got in the way of me producing great results.

Each time I wanted to do something complex in Expression Blend my skill with the software was not sufficient to make it happen. It took me a long long time to build a prototype.

Fore UI themes

Fore UI themes are easy to use. You simply choose a theme from the status bar and the objects you have used are redrawn using that theme. This simplicity hides a lot of power. I like being able to see what my app would look like on Windows 7, XP, Mac OS X and hand drawn for my documentation. These three screen shots were taken of the same application with just a theme change. I liked this a lot!

It took me seconds to build a screen mockup of what I wanted from the built in library of objects. I then set about adding functionality to show the application workflow and found that it was very easy from the properties editor to access and adjust everything. For me, this was much easier than the Visual Studio like properties editor in Expression Blend - I was just more productive because I was comprehending more.

Interactive Prototyping

Both Expression and ForeUI help you build interactive prototypes. Expression is harder to use here because you have to get into it as far as understanding the relationships between pages and the commands for navigation via the outline. ForeUI is easier here - the master page model is easy to understand, and the hierarchy of pages is more straightforward. Expression is more powerful but I think for me it misses the point. I need a lower learning curve and quick productivity - Fore UI gives that to me.

Export

ForeUI export to DHTML is its best kept secret. You can then load the resulting code into your favourite tool and edit it. All the workflows became JavaSCRIPT and the exported DHTML can be run in your browser. This is pretty neat. So far I have not used ForeUI right through to building a product but this is the obvious next step and the product is evolving quickly so I hope the export part gets better and better in future releases.

Expression, because it produces projects that are compatible with Visual Studio, has great capabilities for the use of the code in real projects. For Visual Studio users is may be a better choice.

Conclusion

For me, a product manager who needs to quickly mock up screens for documentation, and to test out ideas for software products Fore UI is the almost perfect entry level tool. I like that it runs most everywhere - even in your browser as a Java applet. It means I can share my concepts with Mac and PC and Linux users alike and nobody is out of the loop. It also means I can show a Mac audience a Mac UI and a Windows Audience a Windows UI - these things sometimes matter and it is nice to avoid the issue. I will continue to use Fore UI and let you know how it goes.

One more thing...

Steve Jobs did not say ‘Oh, There is one more thing’ yesterday at Yerba Buena but this phrase is as familiar to the Apple audience as ‘I’ll be back’ is to Arnold Schwarzenegger movie buffs. Yerba Buena is where I launched an Oracle Collaboration Suite years ago which spectacularly failed to meet sufficient market requirements to be successful. People are wondering if the iPad is going to do well or do badly, and I think in order to answer the question you first have to ask a few qualifying questions. Do well -

• Against what competitor?
• In what market segment?
• At what price point?
• In what geography?
• Against what product plan and roadmap?

The trouble is, we do not have all of those things from Apples product requirements documentation. And therefore the picture is murky. The twitterverse is moaning today that the device does not somehow meet their lofty goals. If you load up your favourite twitter aggregator you’ll find by searching #iPad that there are muted sometimes disappointed reviews not helped by the early ‘leaks’ that turned out to be flawed high jinks by reasonably serious sources who turned out to be self publicists.

Twitterers are describing all the features and items they wished the device had which did not get demonstrated. It is precisely for this reason that I applaud the product management team at Apple who have I think created (for a second time, after the iPhone Edge) a perfect market entry product for a newly defined market segment of their own creation.

Competing with Apple magic?

So what are Apple competing with? In revealing some of the goals behind the iPad Steve Jobs talked about his competitors being mobile device companies, and especially Nokia, Samsung and Sony. His slide had the Apple logo smugly on top of all these others. It must be fun to be able to stand on ones competitors like that. Steve talked about these companies deliberately of course. They have slipped and fallen, accepting the mediocrity in product design and execution which causes product recalls due to buggy incomplete software, rotten batteries, poor functionality and user experiences born from interpretation of the spec rather than thought about the real person using the device.

To succeed in competing here in a newly formed market segment in between smart phones and laptop computers, a new device from Apple had not only to be better at some specific tasks than an iPhone or a MacBook. iPad had to blow everybody away. iPad had to point out that netbooks were just a crappy sum of the cheapest parts running clunky old XP SP3 or stripped down Linux. iPad had to move away from the tired and rotten failures that every single tablet computer running a pen based operating system in recent times has exhibited from compromised gestures or stylus based writing to retaining a keyboard and being able to be ‘like a laptop’.

An Apple product is always different. This much we know. But although they are erased from the marketing memory we remember that Apple have had some turkeys in the past particularly in this space (remember the Newton and its eWorld?). iPad is different, and it is better. From the demo iPad is better at browsing, better at email, better at photos, better at video, better at music, better at games, and better at reading books than any near competitor device. It also runs iWork so it is got a decent chance at being better at being a netbook too. Better than N900, better than PSP, better than Dell Mini 5, better than anything.

The fact is that iPad has a unique advantage - one denied to Palm with their ‘Pre’. It syncs over USB with iTunes on a Mac or a PC. It behaves exactly like an iPhone Edge, iPhone 3G, or 3Gs, or an iPod Touch. Everything works. All Photos, Music, TV Shows, Contacts, Calendars, Bookmarks, Applications.

The EFF/Open Source brigade don’t like iPad DRM or the fact that the operating system is closed to terminal access and the like. No doubt geohot and his friends will find a way inside eventually and no doubt you’ll be able to find more fun things to do than Apple want but to criticise Apple for this is to miss the point. All those of you who want an operating system to do those things with have Mac OS X on the finest laptop, desktop and server hardware in the world. Knock yourselves out over there. Apple would love you to play. Join their programs and be part of fixing the kernel, or many of the open source components Apple rely upon. Rejoice in the fact that you can run vi, perl, csh, mailman, php, apache, mysql, etc etc etc and they are provided by and supported by Apple. But that is not what iPad is for. It is for work and play. For that set of tasks I am perfectly happy to trust Apple to deliver what I need. It is plenty good enough without my applying hacks to it. I know I am ceding some of my independence to do that, but you know what - the last three major hardware types I have bought, which are an Xserve, a MacBook Pro, and an iPhone are simply the best devices of their kind that I have ever had. Period. And I have had them all. You name it. So I think for Apple TV and iPad I am willing to trust Apple to give me what I need. And I am prepared to accept their conditions. And I am a tech geek - most consumers, the people Apple product management aim the device at - could not give a hoot about and do not understand or care about anything in this paragraph. That, is a mighty unique selling proposition to the market.

It truly does slot into my world, just as my somwhat clunky Apple TV does. I will put up with all the failings because it contains my content and I can re-sync it anytime I like if I lose it. My content happens to live on a MacBook Pro, but if I wanted to I could leave my content on a Windows PC. This kind of synchronised and symbiotic relationship has been tried before in many devices, notably the original Palm Pilot, and the Psion 3a and 5. But they did not have the richness of functionality to make it worthwhile in the way that the iPhone and iPad do.

Looking at the email client I notice that it has elements of the simplicity I love in mail.app on Mac OS X Leopard. This is no accident. Mail.app has had lots of user experience work, and went through something of a redesign a couple of releases or so ago on Mac OS X. It seems to me that the whole of Apple’s digital life strategy is being unfolded in a developing but wonderfully coherent product set that is emerging before our very eyes. Even Mac OS X Server plays iTunes - on an Xserve. Competitors must wonder where they have gone wrong with fits and starts in their strategies as they fail to comprehend the size of the task or the enormity and single (or at least like) minded nature of the vision and execution. Products like the Atom based netbooks look flimsy and Kindle moves from being a useful tool to a toy overnight. Sony’s book reader looks as anachronistic as the Clie Palm based PDA’s they produced. A whole generation of gadgets just became obsolete.

Spec and design

Of course, it has great design. What were we expecting? I have had an iPhone since UK D-day and have grown so used to the one button user experience that I forget how much that has freed me from the tyranny of the buttons on other devices. Have you ever tried to cut and paste on a Series 60 Symbian phone? For a one handed phone this is an IMPOSSIBLE task without using two hands AND it has a dedicated pencil button, which nobody but nobody know how to use! Have you ever had wifi issues on a Vaio - Windows thinks wifi is on, but shows an error and not until you push the clunky slider on the case and an LED lights up does it fire into life. These sorts of compromises would never be allowed by Apple. It is only natural that iPad should continue to force the design to be better by not allowing the engineering cop out of ‘we need a button to turn that on or off to be sure it works’.

The thin factor and lightness do not bother me particularly. I am sure once I have one I will appreciate them. But it *is* thinner and lighter than any netbook and has a much better display and better touch capabilities becuase it does not have a design point of cost reduction and vanilla operating system. It has a special Apple silicon chip, and can contain from 16-64GB of Flash storage. I imagine 128 is achievable since it is in the MacBook Air now.

It has a special operating system too, a variant of the iPhone OS which is as we know, based upon Mac OS X in some form. There is nothing vanilla or ‘plug compatible’ or ‘slot compatibible’ about it. I am glad thats so. Onboard there is no shortage of equipment too. With Bluetooth 2.1 , wifi based upon 802.11n, several Accelerometers, a compasss, speaker, microphone and 30 pin connector like an iPod complete with battery life of 10 hours one month standby. I did not get whether there was a headphone adapter. It might not be needed with Bluetooth, but I’d still like one being from the walkman generation.

It runs iPhone apps , either unmodified, pixel for pixel in the centre, or full screen with a zoom of 2x - this appears to work especially well because of OpenGL. The mighty thing about this is that is indicates to me that Apple had this plan all along. To make it so that existing applications run unmodified without a performance penalty is a truly awesome goal. Symbian did not achieve it with their ‘binary break’ which arguably destroyed them, Microsoft did not achieve it from MS-DOS to Windows, or from Windows 95/98/Me to Windows NT/XP/Vista/7. Their solutions here are woeful to the last.

Think about it. This means that iPhone is part of a plan, a roadmap, a vision, where software, devices, and people work in harmony with the cloud which provides them with games, books, music, news, TV shows and the Internet.

iWork or I play

But wait, it also has iWork with an entirely new user interface designed to work on an iPad. The fact that the iPad has Pages, Numbers and Keynote - with all the major and previously ‘advanced’ features of the desktop version shows that this device has ambition. The advanced techniques like picture masking shown in the demo are quite hard to do on a desktop equipped with PowerPoint. Schiller also showed build capabilities and transitions including magic moves which are pretty advanced Keynote functionality.

Briefly we saw that iPad has a number of different soft keyboards. There was a Numeric keyboard, Time and Date Keyboard, Text Keyboard and I suppose there may be others.

iWork is a signpost for other application developers to tell them ‘come over here and make great applications for iPad’. The other part of the signpost was a hint or price point reminder that business applications should be $9.99.

Communication

All models have WiFi. 3G Cellular Wireless Data access is an extra cost option and then you can have a 250MB data plan for $14.99, or unlimited for $29.99. No Contract. Pre Pay. iPad 3G models are unlocked. Use new GSM micro SIMs which will ‘just work’. The iPad does not seem to have a phone call capability, or at least one was not demonstrated, but why not, and indeed if not Apple just opened up VOIP applications to use the 3G network rather than just be WiFi so Skype et all should be pleased. Skype on an iPhone abroad at a conference has already saved me thousands of dollars in call fees.

iPad UK Pricing

No UK pricing yet but US is $499 16GB, $599 32GB, $699 64GB, +$130 for 3G

iPad Accessories

Apple showed the most wonderful accessories. Minimalist. Beautifully designed. The Dock also doubles as a Picture Frame running iPhoto slideshows while charging. That is genius. It is not that it is the worlds most expensive picture frame, but that function follows form - the dock is charging it, it does something not just useful but beautiful.

The keyboard dock, charges and lets you work with the applications. I liked it. Instinctively it felt like the design was almost perfect. Cant wait to try it.

Even the case was minimalist. It serves the purpose of being a case of course but it is also a work stand and a watching movies stand. Brilliant, simple and pretty. Look at the cases from other manufacturers and you see utilitarian low cost afterthoughts.

Different category?

That is the difference between Apple and the rest. Do Apple have what it takes to establish a third category of products - an awesome product that fits between a smartphone and a laptop computer? You bet they do. I would buy one now if I had to drive 100 miles to get it. I will probably buy a wifi one on day 1 because I won’t be able to wait 30 days for a 3G one so I will end up with 2. I wonder if that is part of the marketing plan.