Dan Weinman called attention to a clause in the iBooks EULA which prohibits creators from selling anything they generate with iBooks Author anywhere but Apple’s iBookstore (they can give the books away wherever they’d like).  This has made a lot of people upset, and brought some people to Apple’s defense.  Apple’s defenders argue that it is perfectly reasonable that their Apple’s free software not be used to make a competitor money.

That may be true, but it is hard to see this as anything but a small and petty move on Apple’s part.

My perspective is this: without this restriction in place, how likely is it that someone would use iBook Author to produce an ebook for commercial sale and NOT offer it through iBookstore, considering:

1. Apple makes the best device for viewing such publications
2. Apple sells more of them than everyone who makes anything remotely similar, combined
3. Apple offers the best ecommerce options for selling them?

Further, and for the same reasons, how likely is it that the sales through that alternate channel would be anything but a drop in the bucket compared to what flowed through iBookstore?

If, at some future date, Apple no longer makes the best device for viewing such content and/or, has serious competition for market share of iPad-class devices, and/or doesn’t have the best commerce system, then creators will have plenty of incentive to recreate their publications in order to get around this restriction anyway.

In the end, I think the ill-feelings this restriction creates is more costly than any additional value it might help Apple capture.

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I installed iOS 5 and updated Pages, Keynote and Numbers when they gained iCloud support.  I had all my existing documents copied to iCloud.  I don’t think I’ve used any of the apps since last weekend.

When I started Numbers today, all the documents there quickly disappeared, leaving only the Getting Started document.  This evening, when I started Pages, and then Keynote, the same damn thing happened.  I checked on iCloud from my laptop and none of the documents are there either.

I tried looking for information on how to contact support and felt like I’d been dropped into a maze.  WTF, Apple, this is crap.  Complete and utter crap.

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Needless to say, I think they are myopic. Apple wins customers because of the overall experience. These days, with Apple, it’s not just how the parts come together into an exceptionally well made device. It’s not even about the combination of software and hardware. Its the retail and support experience, and now, with iOS 5, iCloud, and Siri, its going to be about how it all ties together across your devices, and even out into 3rd party websites.

iOS 5 and iCloud are going to be a major platform for future innovation. I think they are downplaying it after their miss-steps launching MobileMe, but with iOS 5 + iCloud + Lion, Apple has the foundations for pervasive computing. You’ll soon be able to close up your MacBook in the middle of editing a Keynote presentation. Review it on your iPhone while you are waiting for your flight and revise it on your iPad without really even thinking about syncing, or copying the file.

These complaints remind me of the whining about what was missing from the original iPhone. Yeah, it wasn’t 3g and lacked MMS, video recording, copy/paste, installable applications and who knows what else. On the other hand it was pretty awesome in a way that no other phone could touch, and Apple had a obvious list of improvements to make.

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I’ve dismissed most of the criticisms leveled against the Apple iPad as clueless.  The few I’ve been sympathetic to are things that can and likely will be fixed with a software update.  There is, however, one thing that’s been bothering me, the iPad only has 256MB of RAM, like the iPhone 3 Gs.

Until I got my own iPad, the 256MB RAM limit was just an academic annoyance, but it quickly became clear that it was a chintzy move on Apple’s part. Mobile Safari on the iPad only lets you open 8 different “tabs” at once, but it often struggles to keep even a fraction of that number loaded.  Often if I switch between tabs, it ends up having to reload the pages, which is slow.  It’s even worse if I switch to another app and then back, then it often has to reload all the pages.

I put some of this down to the fact that it was the first release of iOS for the iPad, and assumed it would be improved any day by a software update (which has yet to materialize).  A software update could only go so far though, since the larger screen size on the iPad would likely drive up memory requirements.  And, of course, the eagerly awaited update of iOS 4 for the iPad would bring multitasking for third party apps, which would drive up memory requirements even more.

Well, now I learn that the iPhone 4 is confirmed to have 512MB of RAM, twice whats in the iPad (even though it has a smaller screen resolution).  This comes less than three months after shipping the first iPad, and less than two months after shipping the iPad WiFi-3G model I have.   I know that things move pretty fast in the tech industry, which is why I didn’t get bent out of shape when apple cut the price of the original iPhone by $200 only a few months after launch, but this really pisses me off.

The poor experience “multitasking” with Apple’s own apps on the iPad is the really my only big complaint with the device, and now its pretty clear that it’s likely that annoyance is going to extend to 3rd party apps when iOS 4 makes it to the iPad this fall.

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For it to work, your streaming source needs to support streaming of MP3 or AAC audio over http like our local NPR station, KUOW. Then you just click the link to start the stream, which starts a player in a browser tab, then you just go ahead and open a new tab and continue with your browsing, or switch to another app. This isn’t an earthshaking feature, but it should come in handy.

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Let’s get one thing out of the way right up front. There is just no damn way to profitably sell a device that matches the price, performance and portability of the iPad that also runs existing Mac apps. This will change in the future, but it’s just not something that can happen this year.

There are many reasons for this, but it really starts with the fact that modern Macs use Intel CPUs and Intel CPUs just aren’t as power efficient for a given level of performance as the ARM CPU in the iPad, iPhone and other mobile devices. So, an iPad that runs existing Mac apps would have to have an Intel CPU, and so would have shorter battery-life, which hurts portability. This could be compensated for with a larger battery, but a larger battery would be heavier, which hurts portability and add expense which would already be higher, because intel CPUs cost more than ARM CPUs.

So on the hardware side, price and weight are two strikes against an iPad that runs Mac apps, but that is only half the problem. The bigger problem is software. Mac apps are built to be run on fairly powerful computers that are capable of multitasking and which people use a mouse and keyboard to interact with. There are a few implications of this.

First, there is a good chance that existing OS X apps, designed to run on powerful hardware, would be both slow and power hungry on an iPad becuase acceptable performance and efficiency on a iMac or MacBook could be completely unacceptable on an iPad. This is on top of the inherent power-efficiency disadvantages of compatible hardware.

An even biggher problem is that the user interface would be ill-suited to the iPad. There are no apps for the Mac designed for the type of interaction the iPad supports. On the otherhand, there are hundreds of thousands of iPhone apps that will run on the iPad. They were designed for touch interaction, so their UIs are more likely to translate to the iPad, which is in many ways an iPhone with a larger screen, than UIs designed for mouse and keyboard interaction. Perhaps less obvious, but at least as important, developers of iPhone apps are likely to be futher down the learning curve for multitouch UIs than developers of “desktop” Mac applications, so they will likely be able to release versions of their apps that take advantage of the possibilies of the larger screen on the iPad than Mac developers.

Further, all of those apps were designed for a device that is even more constrained interms of power consumtion and performance than the iPad. If anything they should run better on the iPad the the iPhone.

I understand why people would like the iPad to run OS X apps. People conflate running Mac OS X applications with “openness” that we don’t get when iPhone and iPad apps all have to go through the iTunes App Store approval process. But let’s face it, an iPad than ran Mac apps would come into this world some combination of slower, more expensive, less portable (in terms of both weight and battery life) and with far fewer good quality multitouch apps.  I don’t think anyone really wants that, so rather than asking for it, lets focus narrowly on the real issue because while it may be unlikely that Apple opens the iPad to apps distributed through channels other than the App Store, at least it possible.  An iPad that ships in 60 days runs Mac apps and doesn’t suck is pretty much impossible.

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