varunnangia.com

From an email I wrote today, names changed to protect the innocent:

So today two important computer related things happened.

First, I think I may have mentioned that a Windows desktop that exists for the sole purpose of being able to let [my flatmate] and I access the corporate VPN and let us telework had died randomly after trying to update some weeks ago. Not sure what happened – it asked to reboot after installing updates … and never came back up. So I booted it up and discovered that there was a built in system recovery feature and allowed it to wipe the drive and start over. It took its sweet while, but it came back up – and the first thing that happened was that the setup wizard crashed. If I had no knowledge of computers, I wouldn’t have known what to do – there was a giant white screen with a frozen “HP” logo. As it happened, I hit Ctrl+Alt+Del, terminated the process and went on my merry way. Which brings me to item the second: crapware. It took eleven reboots, two hung Symantec uninstaller, a hung HP uninstaller, a failed Microsoft “Works” removal tool and 4 hours of my time to get the machine to a state I would consider usable. I’m currently (6 hours into my adventure) trying to install service packs. It turns out that unlike any other operating system in the world, which would allow you to skip installing intermediate service packs and go to the latest release, Windows requires you to download, in order, SP1 (434MB) and SP2 (380MB). I’m waiting for those downloads to complete. If this is anything like the last time I installed SP1, that will mean an hour of my time and two reboots; if this is anything like the last time I installed SP2, that will mean 45 minutes and a reboot (possibly two). After that, I will need to install software to make the computer usable (Office, Office updates, Virus Scanner, Virus Scanner updates, iTunes, Picasa…) All told, I’m looking at maybe another 3 hours or work.

Second, today [my flatmate] bought a MacBook – one of those $800 Microcenter ones. She asked me to set it up. I started at 10.11pm to do so: setup (worked perfectly, by the way) – about 5 minutes; no crapware to remove, and it finished downloading the latest version of Mac OS X, and all the updates in a single go, installed them, rebooted once – about 17 minutes. Office installation took the longest time, because again, to get from Office 12.0.0 (which is what shipped) to Office 12.2.3 (the latest version), it downloaded 12.1.0, 12.2.0, 12.2.1, 12.2.3; time wasted to install Office: about 50 minutes. So it took twice the time to install Office than setting up and updating the computer. And, of course, the whole Mac installation took less than 1.5 hours – versus, six hours and counting on the PC.

In short, if you’re still using Windows, it’s because you value your time at $0. There’s no other explanation for why on EARTH it should take so long to get a computer to a working state. Truly, unbelievable.

Ugh.

The short take away: avoid Windows. Unless your time is worthless.

So two thoughts about iPad:

1. I hate Flash. With a tremendous passion. It is a bug-ridden, resource-hungry abomination that has encouraged bad design to proliferate around the web. That said, if you have a “wicked fast” processor, especially one that isn’t “wasting” cycles on things like managing the overhead of multitasking, there’s no excuse not to have Flash. By all means, leave it off by default – I know, I would – but the choice to not have Flash should be up to the user, not Apple.
2. The more I look at iPhone OS X, the more convinced I am that Apple’s perfect OS in Steve Jobs’ – or whomever is running the OS side of things – mind was System 7. If you’ve never had the … pleasure of running an OS that was not multitasking or multithreaded, you’ve not enjoyed the fun that we System 7 users had; a “favourite” memory that comes to mind is of waiting for minutes or hours for Word or Clarisworks to spool a print job. It was enough to push me to Windows and leave me firmly there until OS X 10.3 “Panther” came out.

In short, let’s say I have a budget of about $1000. I can get for $829 an iPad, with 1GHz ARM processor, 64GB of storage, a 9.7″ screen, a lot of nifty sensors, a 3G radio and the ability to run one task at a time. Or, for $999 – or $799, if you’re shopping at Microcenter these days – I could get a MacBook, with a 2.0GHz dual core x86 processor (remember here the law of x86 inevitability), a 13.3″ screen, 160GB of storage, a beautiful multi-touch trackpad, and the ability to run an absolutely arbitrary number of apps. Oh, and, let’s not forget, I could use Flash on sites where I didn’t have Flashblock running. To me this is a no-brainer: go for the MacBook. You’re trading off a 3G radio*, a bunch of sensors, some amount of portability and some 3 hours of runtime, for a lot more computing power, more storage and the ability to multitask. I’m sure there are people for whom the iPad makes sense. I’m not one of them.

*: Given that WAN is powered by AT&T, it’s highly debatable you actually have a 3G radio. The last conversation I had with an AT&T rep had this choice line from me: “I’ve lived in countries where the annual income is less than what you take home in a week, and they had better networks than you can dream of.”