I’ve made no secret of my overwhelming enthusiasm for the iPhone, and have sung its glories here and elsewhere many times. That doesn’t mean that I never get irritated with the device. I do. And, by far, my most frequent annoyance is with Safari — especially when using it with the EDGE network.

The problem starts with the obvious: The EDGE network can be impossibly slow. Its speed appears to vary from moment to moment, as a function of the current signal strength as well as more mysterious factors that you can neither predict nor control. Its speed range varies from barely tolerable to virtually useless. And the greatest negative impact of these slow speeds occurs when using Safari. There are times when it can take several minutes for a Web page to load; assuming it ever completely loads.

But the problems with Safari on the iPhone extend beyond just the overall slow speed. What often happens is that, after tapping to load a Web page, your hopes are initially raised. You see the progress bar advance (indicating that more and more of the page’s elements have loaded) to as much as 80% completion in a relatively short time. Then it all just grinds to a halt. There is no more movement for an indefinite number of minutes.

Even this might be tolerable if, in fact, 80% of the Web page was now loaded and accessible. It might turn out that all you need from the page is within that 80%. However, more likely, your Safari screen will be blank. Absolutely nothing appears until after the bar moves past this 80% barrier. As a result, there are many times when I have given up entirely — until I can get to a Wi-Fi connection.

If you do wait long enough for the Web page to appear, your troubles may still not be over. Suppose there is a link on the page that you want to check out, but you also want to be able to return to the page you are now viewing. For example, suppose after you load the New York Times’ home page, you want to click a link to read an editorial; but you also expect to return to the home page to scan the remaining article listings.

On your Mac, you would do this by opening up the editorial in a separate window or tab. Unfortunately, the iPhone’s version of Safari does not support any variation of this capability. The best you can do is go to the editorial and then tap the Back arrow to return to the previous page. Ideally, this page should at least load faster than it did initially, because Safari had cached its contents. Don’t count on it. Safari does do caching, but it is very ineffective in my experience. Typically, I have to wait almost as long for the page to reload as I did in the first place. Once again, I often wind up just giving up on Safari until I can get to a Wi-Fi connection.

What can be done to improve the situation? Four things, none of which should be a surprise by this point: (1) Improve Safari’s caching of Web pages; (2) Improve Safari’s ability to display partially loaded pages; (3) Add a tab (or similar) function to Safari; and most-of-all (4) offer a faster network than EDGE.

Happily, the faster network is all-but-certain to arrive with the new iPhones (apparently expected to ship any day now!). These new iPhones are widely reported to support the much-faster-than-EDGE 3G network. As to the Safari-specific upgrades, it’s not as promising. The version of Safari included with the latest builds of the iPhone 2.0 SDK appears very much the same as the current version. Of course, Apple could be holding back a revamped version until the public release. I certainly hope so.

Consumer Reports finally gets it right!

Consumer Reports may not be the most influential voice in determining which computers are most preferred by the buying public. But it matters. Each year, for the past who knows how many years, the magazine has dutifully provided its assessment of the best and worst in computers. And almost from the get-go, its overall assessment of the Mac has been negative.

At best, the magazine viewed buying a Mac as an oddball decision, only advised for those willing to swim against the tide and venture beyond Microsoft’s ubiquitous Windows universe. At worst, it downgraded and dismissed the Mac as being too expensive, too underpowered, and generally just too weird to be taken seriously. It never seemed to understand that the Mac OS was substantially different from (and, in the view of many, significantly superior to) Windows. It couldn’t see beyond the superficial similarities of the Mac and Windows desktop interfaces. And since Windows PCs ran much more software than a Mac (even if most of the software was crap), why get a Mac? This was the essence of the magazine’s logic.

I would regularly feel my blood pressure rise as I read these reports. “They just don’t get it,” I would wail. “They’re not taking into consideration how much extra stuff comes built-in to a Mac. They’re picking a low-end Mac to compare against a high-end Windows machine.” And on and on. I despaired of ever seeing Consumer Reports giving the Mac a fair shake.

Yet, over the past couple of years, the seemingly impossible has happened. Consumer Reports’ attitude has turned around. It’s been awkward and a bit slow, much like an ocean liner attempting a tight turn in a harbor. But it has happened.

Some may argue that the attitude shift is more due to improvements in the Mac than to a change in Consumer Reports’ perception. Or they may point to the ever-growing importance of the Internet, which has in turn minimized any software advantage of the PC. Plus, the Mac can now run Windows. Others might suggest that the shift simply reflects the increased status and popularity of the Mac, in this post-iPod world.

Perhaps. Or perhaps, after all these years, Consumer Reports at last gets it. Whatever. The completion of the pro-Mac attitude shift is readily apparent in the magazine’s current (June 2008) issue. Here are the ratings highlights:

The 15″ MacBook Pro was the highest rated 15″ workhorse laptop.

The 17″ MacBook Pro was the highest rated 17″ workhorse laptop.

The MacBook Air models were the second and third highest rated slim-and-light laptops (only slightly trailing the Sony VAIO). Even the MacBook made the list here.

Moving on to desktop Macs, the 20″ iMac was the top-rated all-in-one budget computer. Actually, it was in a category by itself here; there was no second place.

The 24″ iMac placed a strong third in the all-in-one workhorse computer category.

In the magazine’s separate Quick Picks listings (which consider value and tech support, in addition to test results and features):

The 15″ MacBook Pro was included in the “Best for features and performance” list.

The 17″ MacBook Pro was cited as a “Best desktop replacement.”

The MacBook Air was a Quick Pick in the “Best lightweight laptops” category.

The 20″ iMac was (no surprise) the lone Quick Pick for “Best inexpensive all-in-one.”

The 24″ iMac was cited as “Best for features and performance.”

In a separate assessment of companies’ technical support, Apple was far and away the winner. It received the highest ratings by a wide margin, both for laptops and desktop computers. Apple outpaced the second-best rated company by 17 points for laptops and 25 points for desktops!

The only place where Macs didn’t score was in the component desktop computer category. The Mac Pro is Apple’s entry here, but it didn’t even show up in the magazine’s listings. The high price of the Mac Pro was probably a factor in the magazine’s decision. With one exception, the rated computers in this category were $1300 or less, often much less. However, the one exception was the “high end” Dell XPS 420, listed for $2975. This is certainly in the same price bracket as a Mac Pro, which leaves me a bit uncertain as to why a Mac Pro was not included.

Apple’s Cinema Displays were similarly not included in the article on monitors. Once again, I suspect price was the primary reason. The most expensive rated monitor was $500; the least-expensive Cinema Display (20″) is $600.

Still, why quibble? Taken as a whole, Consumer Reports gives the Mac line-up a super solid endorsement. If you want a laptop, you want a Mac. If you want an all-in-one desktop computer, you want a Mac. If you’re concerned about technical support, you want a Mac. That’s just what I’ve been saying all these years. Now Consumer Reports is saying it too.

As is evident by what you are now viewing, I write blog entries. I also occasionally post reader comments to articles on other sites. Every so often, I wonder how many people actually read this stuff. Not my blog in particular (actually, I can get stats on this from the TMO staff). But blogs in general, especially the smaller more obscure ones. And, most especially, reader comments — at any site.

Now I know that reader comments on some sites, such as Amazon and the New York Times, get viewed numerous times. But that is probably more the exception than the rule. Case in point: I hoofed it over to Entertainment Weekly’s Lost site the other day. This section of the EW site is dedicated to the Lost TV show (which is having a spectacular season, by the way). After reading Jeff Jensen’s latest recap, I was prompted to post a comment, actually a question I wanted to raise (if you are a regular viewer of Lost, you know there are many many questions that can be raised).

Shortly after posting my question, I checked back to see if anyone had perhaps offered an answer. No such luck. However, this was at least partly due to the fact that readers were adding comments at such a rapid pace, my posting fell off the initial comments page within minutes. Even worse, when I checked back at the article page a few days later, I found that there were now 52 pages of comments. Because of the irritating way that EW’s site works, you have to click through each page to get to the next one. I estimated that my question was on about page 42. I gave up clicking long before getting there. Given this arrangement, I’d be surprised if more than a dozen people ever even read my question.

And this is at a popular site like Entertainment Weekly.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are all the blogs that are, at best, read by a few hundred people each day. Many are read by no more than a few hundred people each year! If you visit one of these sites and happen to leave a reader comment, there’s a high probability that the only people who will ever read it are you and (hopefully) the blog author. You are basically talking to yourself.

Yet the blogs and reader comments continue to accumulate like an ever-enlarging avalanche. This mass of information can easily leave you feeling overwhelmed. As the author of an iPhone book, I spend a good deal of time checking the Web each day for significant new information about the device. Given that the iPhone is less than one year old, I am still surprised by how much Web content is out there on this subject. Not just articles on technology and general news sites, but entire Web sites devoted only to the iPhone. Just for fun, I entered “iPhone Blog” as a search term in Google. There were over 300,000 hits! Granted, not all of these were for different blogs, but a lot of them were. Want to learn about Apple’s “iPhone SDK roadmap”? Enter that term in Google and you’ll get over 31,000 hits! You could spend the next month just reading all that was written on this subtopic, and still not read it all. Of course, by that time, you’d be hopelessly behind on all the other news that occurred during the month.

Of course, the reality is that you don’t read all of this stuff, even on the subjects that interest you.

The amount of information on the Web that no one ever reads is staggering to contemplate. Granted that much of it is repetitive or unimportant, but you can’t know that for sure until you check it out. Trying to stay well informed on a given topic, such as the iPhone, can be difficult. Trying to stay well-informed in general is nearly impossible. There are days that I don’t even read all the headlines in my news reader, never mind actually reading all the articles that sound worthwhile.

Admittedly, the information explosion problem has been with us for quite awhile.

You can walk into the Library of Congress, or almost any large library, and stand in awe at the mass of books, realizing that even if you started reading at that moment and never stopped until the day you died, you’d hardly make a dent in the total content.

Similarly, you could pick up a copy of any Sunday New York Times, and realize that it would take at least until Wednesday before you managed to read even most of what was there.

The problem has long been with us. It’s just that the scale is now so much greater.

While I appreciate the democratization of information that the Web has given us, I have some nostalgia for the smaller scale of the not too distant past. It was also a bit comforting to know that, before an article made its way to the public, it had been edited for style and accuracy as well as for the general value of its content.

It’s two sides of the same coin. On one side is the overwhelming amount of information. On the other side is how much of it never gets read. We wind up knowing an increasingly smaller percentage of information on fewer and fewer topics — and spend an increasing amount of time talking only to ourselves.

Oh well. I guess I am as guilty a contributor as anyone — writing a blog entry about how many blogs entries there are. The irony is not lost on me. Perhaps you’d care to leave a comment?

As you probably know, the mission of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization is to provide their $200 XO laptop computers to children in the developing world.

Back in December, I participated in OLPC’s “Give One Get One” promotion. The deal was that I donate one XO laptop and get to buy one for myself. [The deal is no longer offered; you can still donate an XO, but you can’t get one for yourself.]

I finally received my laptop about a month ago. I have been playing with it, when I have had the time, ever since.

From a hardware perspective, the XO is amazing. It would be a bargain at twice the price. The XO is small, lightweight and runs on a very power-efficient battery. Helping to keep battery use and weight to a minimum, it has neither an optical drive nor a hard drive. Similar to the super-expensive version of the MacBook Air, it uses a flash drive for data storage, although only a 1GB capacity.

The XO comes with a built-in camera, microphone, a slot for an SD memory card, and a color screen. You can even pivot the screen so that it closes with the display facing up (allowing you to use the XO as a tablet or ebook reader). The XO promises to get even better in the future, without requiring a hardware upgrade. As one example, its trackpad is designed to work with a stylus, although the software support for doing so is not yet there.

The XO especially shines as a network device, easily allowing you to find and connect either to nearby Wi-Fi networks or directly to other XO users via a “mesh” network. The only glitch here was that the XO’s ability to detect a network could be quite finicky. It failed to find my AirPort Extreme in the same room as the XO, while picking up my neighbor’s similar device across the street.

The XO’s water-resisitant keyboard is designed to withstand almost any abuse. However, the keys are too small and cramped together for my pudgy fingers and the cursor response to trackpad movement is often jerky. There is no way I could ever use an XO for any serious typing. But, as I sometimes need to remind myself, I am not the target demographic for this laptop.

While the XO’s hardware, despite my few complaints, is unquestionably impressive — the software is a different story. The XO uses a Linux OS overlaid with a graphical user interface, designed for the XO, called Sugar. In judging the software, it was very difficult to ignore my experience as a Mac user. There’s no getting around the fact that Mac OS X is a far superior OS to Sugar. Most of the software that runs on a Mac is similarly better, both in terms of its ease of use and its range of features, than what comes on the XO.

Still, even trying to put my Mac experience aside, I found the XO’s interface to be clumsy and often hard to navigate. As to the specific programs, a few (such as the Web browser) worked pretty much as expected. But others (such as some of the games and the music software) took a good while before I could discern exactly how they worked. I suppose you could argue that young kids would figure these out faster than me; I’m not so sure.

In any case, don’t expect any documentation to come to your aid. The laptop comes with none. To learn about the XO, you have to go online — which can be an obstacle if you can’t figure out how to get online or have no Wi-Fi access at the moment. Even if you do access the help site, you still won’t find details on most of the XO’s software.

I also have to question the decision to include advanced applications, such as Terminal and Analyze, right along side of the child-oriented software. There is no way for a kid to distinguish what is or is not appropriate for them to be using.

Most frustrating, I could find no equivalent of any sort of Finder utility. There was no option to easily see a listing of the files on the drive — or to copy, move, or delete items.

The conclusion of a review by Jon Fingas pretty much echoes my overall reaction to the XO’s software:

“The Sugar interface does a good job of simplifying computers in general for the educational world, even if doesn’t always mask the Linux software underneath as well as it should and is likely to require more help than should be the case in rural areas.

As a private purchase, however, the XO is not much more than a curiosity or a child’s first notebook. Once you venture beyond the surface, it becomes evident that the XO’s ease of use is only surface-deep: to be as useful in a conventional sense as a Mac or Windows PC, an owner either needs to have tangible knowledge of Linux text commands or else to wait for a far more elaborate file management system, neither of which are very probable given the audience.”

In the end, paraphrasing a familiar quote, I admire the XO not always for how well it does what it does, but for the fact that it does it at all. Especially for $200. If this computer were to be sold in the U.S. (presumably for more than $200) as a competitor to low-cost Macs and PCs, I wouldn’t recommend it. But for the children in its intended market, most of whom will have had no prior access to any computer, the XO will seem almost miraculous. And that, after all, is the whole point.

[P.S. If you are interested in reading other reviews of the XO, check out the articles by David Pogue and Joe Barr.]

I am currently in the market to replace my 32″ Sony LCD television with a larger (37″ or 40″) model. I like Sony and my preference is to stay with the brand. Looking over Sony’s 2008 line-up, I had pretty much decided on a 37″ model (KDL-37XBR6), when I made a disturbing discovery: the television did not have a CableCARD slot.

The Sony I now own does have a CableCARD slot, and I have a CableCARD in it. I had assumed that Sony’s high-end televisions would maintain this CableCARD capability. Not so.

The CableCARD allows me to get all of Comcast’s stations without having to pay for or make room for a set-top box. True, I can’t access the online program guide or use On Demand, but that’s an okay tradeoff, as this is not my primary TV anyway. For me, not being able to transfer my CableCARD to a new television is a significant negative.

Perhaps I could find a CableCARD slot in a different Sony model? Nope. A closer look at Sony’s 2008 line-up reveals that not one of the models have the needed slot. I called Sony to inquire why this was so. Not surprisingly, the low-level person I spoke to had no official explanation — other than to suggest that it may have been dropped to save costs, as so few people were using it.

Of course, more people might be using the slot if the cable companies offered more than grudging support for the option. It is no secret that cable companies would much prefer that you use a set-top box, and typically don’t even tell you that a CableCARD is an option, unless you specifically ask about it.

There had been talk of a CableCARD 2.0 technology coming soon, that would allow CableCARDs to work with all cable features, including On Demand — but that now seems dead in the water. The CableCARD option in televisions, rather than expanding, appears to be vanishing.

But here’s the kicker: CableCARDs are not really disappearing. To the contrary, the Federal Communications Commission’s Separable Security mandate actually requires that CableCARDs be used in all new cable set-top boxes. They’re similarly used in TiVo Series 3 boxes.

CableCARDs are thus doing just fine; it’s only CableCARD slots in televisions (which would eliminate the need for a set-top box) that are vanishing. This works out well for Comcast, but leaves viewers as the losers. I can’t help but wonder if television manufacturers have capitulated to cable companies here in their decision to drop CableCARD slots from their televisions. It certainly smells like some sort of conspiracy to me.

In the end, it may not matter much. Even the cable companies are predicting a future that will see the end of all set-top boxes. But that’s still years off. In the meantime, it appears that I will be forced to get a set-top box with my new TV. Too bad.

Today is a sad day for for the world of Mac journalism.

Stan Flack, one of the “founding fathers” of all Mac Web sites, died of complications from a pre-existing illness. Former co-workers, Dennis Sellers and Jim Dalrymple have already offered their thoughts, with more I am sure to follow. Here are mine.

My memories of Stan date back to when I was first starting MacFixIt. He and Dave Moser were at the helm of MacCentral. The word blog hadn’t been invented yet — but that’s what we were all doing. MacCentral was perhaps the first Mac Web site to seek out a broader audience beyond Mac technophiles. MacCentral placed a greater emphasis on design, seeking to appear more like a Web magazine than a blog. Its articles were generally written in a language that even a Mac newbie could understand. The formula worked. MacCentral went on to become one of the most popular (actually, I believe it became the most popular) Mac site on the Web.

It was a rough-and-tumble time for all of us in those early days of Web sites. The future was uncertain, the potential for making money was unclear. As a result, there was an understandable degree of competition among the dozen or so Mac sites. For some, this led to a lack of co-operation and even unfriendliness toward the other sites. Not so with Stan. At least in my interactions with him, he was always ready to be helpful, always supportive of what I was trying to do, and always generous with his advice and any other assistance he could provide.

We met at Macworld Expos on several occasions. Even the first time we got together, he treated me as if I was an old friend, inviting me to join him for drinks or dinner — and insisting on picking up the tab. My conversations with Stan became one of the special treats of attending Macworld Expo.

A few years later, he sold MacCentral to Mac Publishing (the owners of Macworld). Again, he was leading the pack. He was perhaps the first and still only one of a few Web site owners to pull off such a deal. When I began my negotiations to sell MacFixIt, Stan once again was there to answer my questions and provide helpful advice.

After he left MacCentral (and went on to start MacMinute), I lost contact with him — although I occasionally heard from others about what he was doing. I had no idea that he was so ill. It was a shock to learn of his death today. As a friend and colleague, I will miss him. As one of the pioneers in Mac journalism, we will all miss him.

It is truly a sad day today.

The corporate and conservative Comcast has never been a friend of Internet neutrality. The free-wheeling BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol that rose to prominence in the wake of Napster’s demise, has never been held up as a bastion of ethical use of the Internet. So you should not be surprised to hear that Comcast has been making it difficult for its subscribers to download files from BitTorrent sites.

Comcast shifts gears

Last week, as reported in the New York Times, Comcast announced a change in its strategy for dealing with BitTorrent. It would now “take a more equitable approach toward managing the ever-expanding flow of Web traffic.” In particular, “instead of interfering with specific online applications” (aka BitTorrent), “it will manage traffic by slowing the Internet speeds of its most bandwidth-hogging users when traffic is busiest.”

In other words, instead of a “censorship” of a specific site, Comcast will instead go after individual users whom Comcast views as abusing the network.

While both of Comcast’s solutions have come under fire by some proponents of network neutrality (a principle that I strongly support), Comcast’s new approach seems preferable to me. At the very least, it moves away from the slippery slope of multiple tiers of Web sites, each with different speed limits — a concept that could destroy the democratic nature of the Web, making it almost impossible for smaller startup sites to get the traction they need to grow.

But why, you may ask, should Comcast do anything punitive at all? Why shouldn’t Comcast instead attempt to increase its bandwidth to handle the load, if necessary? Good questions. While I would welcome such a bandwidth boost as the most “neutral” solution, I believe some defensive management by Comcast is acceptable here. The rationale in a nutshell is this:

BitTorrent’s primary activity is illegal. Although there are certainly legitimate uses for BitTorrent, its primary use (as far as I can tell) is to illegally download commercial movies and television shows. Indeed, one of the most popular BitTorrent sites — Pirate’s Bay (its name alone pretty much gives away its function) — has been described as “famous for their blatant disregard for intellectual property rights.” Another site, TorrentSpy, recently closed down because the “legal climate in the USA for copyright, privacy of search requests, and links to torrent files in search results is simply too hostile.”

BitTorrent’s downloads can be a giant bandwidth hog. It typically takes a minimum of 4 to 5 hours to download a movie; it can often take 12 hours or more. If many users on the same network are doing this at the same time, you can imagine the negative effect such lengthy sustained activity can have on a network. This is especially an issue on cable networks, where a subscriber’s Internet speed declines as the number of active users on their local node increases. This means that if your neighbors are busy downloading movies, your Internet connection can slow down even though you are not engaging in any questionable activity.

Given this, it is at least understandable that Comcast would want to take some action other than spending the money needed to allow full-speed unlimited BitTorrent downloads for everyone. In the long run, I expect bandwidth to increase to the point that this will no longer be a relevant issue. But we are not there yet.

I give BitTorrent a whirl

Until recently, I had never downloaded a movie from a BitTorrent site. The questionable legality of doing so was the primary inhibition. But it also didn’t seem worth the bother. I knew that the quality of such downloads could be quite inferior. In some cases, files were based on recordings taken with a camcorder at a movie theater where the film was showing. If you wanted a DVD-like experience (which I did), you weren’t going to get it here. Even so, I wanted to download a movie or two as a test case, just so I could better understand how it all worked. However, I found it almost impossible to complete a successful download. This was likely partly due to Comcast’s afore-mentioned constraints, but also — as I later learned — from not having created the needed firewall settings. In any case, I gave up trying.

As background for this blog posting, I decided to try again. This time I was successful — and I was impressed with the results.

Using the Torrentz Web site, I searched for The Bourne Ultimatum. Many copies of the film showed up. The site offers numerous aids to help you decide which copy to prefer, including user comments about the general quality of the file (”great download,” “almost DVD quality”). After selecting one copy — and a server from which to get it — I downloaded a torrent file for the film. The next step is to shift to a torrent-compatible application, load the torrent file and (at last) initiate the download. Then you wait. The speed of a download remains highly variable (and is affected by what download server you select as well as whether or not you have files that you share with others). For The Bourne Ultimatum, it took me about 5 hours (which is considered to be a quick download).

The movie file was in the .mp4 format, which meant that I could directly import it into iTunes and transfer it to my Apple TV. (Most BitTorrent files appear to be in .avi format, which requires a conversion before you can move it to an Apple TV.) Once it was transferred, I began watching the movie on my 32″ LCD television. The quality was surprisingly good. It was comparable to what I see with movies downloaded from the iTunes Store. I next tried burning the movie to a DVD and playing it on my 55″ HD television. This too worked, but the lesser quality of the movie file, as compared to a DVD, was now easy to see. Still, I imagine many people would find it more than acceptable. Especially for free.

It was a somewhat convoluted and time-consuming route to a final destination, certainly more so than simply buying a DVD or renting a movie from iTunes. And the quality of the final results were by no means guaranteed. Added to this is the question of its legality. All in all, I don’t see this taking off with the general public as widely as music file sharing. At least not yet. Still, Hollywood has good reason to be afraid here. It wouldn’t take much for this market to explode, decimating DVD sales the way that music file-sharing did to sales of CDs.

On the positive front, iTunes has now surpassed Walmart as the #1 music retailer in the U.S. This means, that despite the availability of illegal music downloading, the market for legal downloading is strong and continues to grow. This can work for movies as well. That’s why Hollywood should move — even more aggressively than they already are — to make their movies available on the Internet, at a reasonable price. Because, for better or worse, and despite the efforts of Comcast and others, movie file-sharing isn’t going away.

Addendum: A word to the wise: the MPAA takes action

Someone I know informed me that his Internet connection mysteriously stopped working the other day. He called Time Warner Cable (his ISP) to find out what happened. They told him that his modem had been “quarantined” because the MPAA had notified Time Warner about his BitTorrent downloading of movies. Time Warner removed the quarantine immediately after the phone conversation. However, they warned him that, if they continued to receive notifications from the MPAA, his Internet access would be suspended for an unspecified length of time and eventually permanently blocked. Exactly how the MPAA became aware of and identified the source of the download activity is not certain. However, I have heard that the MPAA may masquerade as a source on BitTorrent sites so as to obtain the IP addresses of people who attempt to download movies.

Last week, I read Dan Frake’s intriguing column describing his re-evaluation of the MacBook Air. Essentially, after extended time using an Air while on vacation, Dan found that he did not miss the Air’s lack of traditional features nearly as much as he had anticipated.

This reminded me of a question I have been thinking about ever since the MacBook Air was released: What is the future of the optical drive?

The Air’s “missing” optical drive has often been subject to the same sort of criticism leveled against the original iMac’s lack of a floppy disk drive. The iMac did have a built-in optical drive, but it was not a CD-writer, so there was no way to save data to a CD. The lack of a floppy disk drive was thus not a trivial matter. Yet, over the next few years, not only did the iMac survive sans a floppy drive, it thrived. At the same time, the floppy disk drive was dropped from all computers from all vendors, relegating it to the dustbin of computer history.

Could the same thing happen to the optical drive? Not right away. But I believe it will happen, and sooner than you might think.

For the moment, Apple offers two solutions to compensate for the Air’s MIA optical drive:

The first is to buy an external optical drive, such as the one Apple now sells. This works fine for when you are at your base location, but does not fit well with the intended portability of the MacBook Air.

The second is for the Air to share a drive from another Mac via the new Remote Disc option. This works reasonably well, including for accessing an unbootable Air from an Install DVD — as long as you have a second Mac available. But it is not a total substitute. For example, you can’t use a shared drive to play movies. And it is no solution at all if you don’t have a second Mac or are on the road where no Mac is available.

What about the third option: Doing without an optical drive at all? Before this is truly viable, we’ll need two incremental advances in current technology:

1. Much faster Internet speeds. In one sweep, a significant speed boost could eliminate as much as 90% of the need for an optical drive. When you can transfer gigabytes of data in the time it now takes to move megabytes, it will be practical to use the Web to do just about anything you now do with an optical drive: play music, watch movies, purchase software, or backup your drive. Even at today’s slower speeds, we are already doing much of this. With much faster speeds (which are predicted for a not too distant future), it will not only be possible but preferable. I’ve already discussed this, as it relates to movies, in a previous blog entry.

2. Very cheap flash and card media storage. I see matters moving in two directions at once here.

First, to substitute for bootable discs, we’ll shift to bootable flash drives. [Note: In an upcoming column, I’ll have more to say about how these work.] The cost of these drives continues to drop — often dramatically. You can now purchase a 512MB drive for as little as $.05! That’s like free. A 4GB drive can be had for around $20. In a related “sign of the times,” after Sony discovered a firmware problem with the model of their LCD television that I owned, they sent me (and all other owners) a flash drive to update the TV’s firmware!

Second, for greater storage capability, we can shift to media cards, just like the ones now used in digital cameras. A Mac could access these cards via a USB card reader, which is a much more portable accessory than an optical drive (these could even be built-in to a MacBook Air down the road). Amazon already sells 4GB SD cards for as little as $19. Before too long, prices should drop down to about the cost of a DVD (at least a dual-layer DVD), making the cards a true competitive alternative.

For archival storage, media cards and flash drives may not be as durable as CDs and DVDs, but I believe they will be good enough that most users will be content to forgo an optical drive.

When all of these puzzle pieces fall into place, the optical drive will be ripe to join the floppy drive in the dustbin. This day is still at least a few years away, especially with the push to Blu-ray prolonging the life of optical discs. But the day is coming.

I have previously mentioned my admiration for Fujitsu’s document scanners. I was so impressed by the demonstrations I saw at Macworld Expo this past January, that I purchased a S510M scanner as soon as the Expo was over. I have not regretted it.

Although the S510M it is not a portable device, it is still quite compact. It certainly takes up less desk space than any flatbed scanner alternative.

From unpacking the ScanSnap to your first scan is just a matter of minutes. Once the one-time setup is complete, simply put a stack of paper into its feeder and press the Scan button. Then watch the magic. At a rate of up to 18 pages per minute, the pages fly through the scanner. It automatically scans both sides of a page (ignoring the back side if it is blank), effortlessly deals with different sizes of paper and even straightens out the image of sheets that fed through at an angle. When you’re done, one more click creates a PDF file of the entire stack of paper (or multiple stacks if you wish). There is no easier way to dispose of the collection of papers in your file cabinet, converting them instead to a series of PDF files—as you move towards a paperless office.

If you prefer, you can select to directly print your scans, rather than save them—converting your scanner to a photocopy machine.

A couple of weeks ago, Fujitsu started shipping their S300M scanner, a portable version of the S510M. I had the opportunity to test one out. While it is significantly smaller than the S510M, the S300M is not as portable as, say, a pen scanner. You’ll need a briefcase or backpack to carry this thing around. But (as I have covered elsewhere) pen scanners may be too portable to be practical.

Aside from size, there are only a few hardware differences between the two models. The portable can work directly from power supplied via your computer’s USB port, allowing you to use it with a laptop when there is no other power source available. The S300M is also significantly slower than the S510M, maxing out at 8 pages per minute.

While the S510M ships with a copy of Acrobat Professional, the S300M ships with Cardiris. The latter utility converts business cards to editable text, even importing the results directly into a program such as Mac OS X’s Address Book. When Cardiris works, it works spectacularly well. Unfortunately, I found that I needed to do additional cleanup at least 30% of the time, which seriously detracted from its convenience. For other OCR work, you’ll need to buy additional software for either scanner (although you may be able to get Readiris via a rebate, if you are willing to deal with the mail-in rebate game).

Beyond this, the S300M is every bit as magical as its larger sibling. Before you rush out and buy either model, however, there are a few caveats you should bear in mind:

Documents are fed through the scanner via a sheet feeder. This means that you cannot use the scanner for anything that is in a book or a magazine or whatever—unless you are willing to tear it out into single sheets.

Although the scanner can print color documents up to 600 dpi, it is not ideally suited for scanning photos. The quality will be less than from a good flatbed scanner.

These scanners aren’t cheap. The S300M retails for $295 (corrected price) while the S510M goes for $495.

If these caveats don’t rule out a ScanSnap for you, you owe it to yourself to try out one or both of these marvels. For me, they have turned the otherwise tedious task of scanning into something that is close to fun. I find myself trying to think of new things to scan, just so I can use the ScanSnap more often. If Apple made a document scanner, this is what it would look like. I can’t think of a much higher compliment than that.

I despise mail-in rebates. On the marketing irritation scale, mail-in rebates rank up there with infomercials for worthless products and telemarketers that consider the “do not call” list merely a suggestion.

I bring this up because I recently had to deal with two rebates for my Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M. To their credit, the Fujitsu rebates turned out to be less of a hassle than most. But they still had their share of problems.

The major problem with all mail-in rebates is that they are designed to have you fail. With an unethical deliberateness, rebate vendors make it both annoying and difficult to obtain the promised reward.

The most assuredly annoying aspect of redeeming a rebate is the waiting game. Unlike “in-store” coupons or “instant rebates,” you have (as implied by their name) to mail in something in order to qualify for the rebate. After making a purchase, you should probably wait a few days before doing anything (just to make sure you don’t want to return the item instead of claiming the rebate). At this point, you may take another few days before you get around to filling out the form, circling the item on the sales receipt, cutting out the UPC code from the box, giving thanks to Ra, and whatever other irritating tasks may be required. When you finally have it all done, and you’ve affixed the postage to the envelope and mailed it off, your real wait has just begun: you typically have to wait 8-12 weeks before you have any chance of seeing your rebate!

During this waiting period, there is often no way to check on the status of your rebate. If you’re lucky, you may receive an email notification that your submission was received, which is not the same as approved. Alternatively, there may be a Web site where you can get similar feedback. But don’t count on any of this.

This, in turn, too often leads to the rebate denial “gotcha.” After months of waiting and wondering, a postcard at last arrives. Is it your rebate check? Nope. It’s a note informing you that your rebate has been rejected. The card may offer no further explanation. In many cases, there is not even a phone number to call. At best, you may be able to write a letter of inquiry.

If you are told what went wrong, there is often nothing you can do about it. The company may claim, for example, that the required UPC cut-out was not included, even though you know you sent it. It’s an argument you will lose. In one case, my rebate was declared ineligible because I had affixed an address label to the form, rather than writing my name and address by hand. Filling the form out by hand turned out to be a requirement. And, no, I would not be allowed to resubmit.

If your rebate doesn’t arrive after the 8–12 week period expires, and you haven’t received a denial, and you know of some way to contact the rebate vendor, and you still even remember that you submitted a rebate, then (and only then) can you inquire about the status of your submission. The odds of success are quite low now. More than likely, the vendor will claim to have no record of ever receiving your envelope—at which point you can kiss your rebate goodbye.

Given all of these obstacles and irritations, I avoid mail-in rebates like poison oak on a hike. That is, I never buy an item that I would not have purchased even without the rebate. If the potential rebate savings is what would tip the scale in favor of a purchase, I just say no. If I do buy an item under these rules, and there is an associated rebate, I may reluctantly submit it—if it seems worth the bother. Sometimes it is not. I have seen rebates for as little as $1.00. Given that it costs 41 cents in postage just to submit the rebate, I won’t even consider wasting my time here. If the submission failed for some reason, instead of saving 59 cents, I’d lose 41 cents. What a bargain!

All of this could be avoided, of course, if you could instantly redeem the rebate at the time of purchase. But that would defeat the main purpose of the rebate—which is to get you to fail. The concept falls into the same ball park as gift card breakage. As stated on this Web site: “Consumer Reports estimated that 19% of the people who received a gift card in 2005 never used it.” Even if you do use the card, it is common to never completely use it up (due to forgetfulness or the card getting lost). The unspent value is pure profit for the card vendor. Similarly, if you never bother to submit a rebate or if your rebate gets denied on some dubious technicality, the vendor pockets the money instead of you.

As to the specifics of my Fujitsu rebates, there were two separate items: one was for $50. The other was for free Readiris Pro and Cardiris software. The first obstacle to redeeming these rebates was discovering that they even existed. Several of the sellers (including Amazon.com), that I checked when searching the Web, did not list the rebates as available. I could have easily missed them. I am not sure if or how this works to Fujitsu’s advantage. Perhaps they figure that knowledgeable users will seek out the rebate, while the rest will be content to pay the full price. That is not compelling logic to me. But who knows.

Anyway, if you do check Fujitsu’s Web site, you won’t have too much trouble locating the rebates.

Both rebates have exactly the same terms—same basic requirements, same deadlines. Fujitsu could have made things easier by combining both rebates into one. But, as I have already stressed, making things easier is not the point of these rebates.

After dutifully gathering and mailing off the needed materials, I waited the required 8 week minimum. At this point, I was notified that one of my rebates was denied (the other was approved, and I have since received my $50 check). The reason for the denial: the serial number I gave was incorrect. Fortunately, I saved a photocopy of everything I sent (something I recommend doing whenever you submit a rebate). I checked and indeed the number was in error: I had entered the part number rather than the serial number. An easy mistake to make, but a mistake never-the-less.

To my surprise (bonus points to Fujitsu here), I was able to contact an actual person and get this corrected without too much aggravation. The bad news was that I now had to wait an additional 8-10 weeks before I would receive the software. When I asked why this delay was necessary, I was given some song-and-dance about how the rebate company (which is independent of Fujitsu) had to send the material back to Fujitsu for confirmation. You’d think these companies had never heard of computers or how databases could easily make a resubmission quick and painless.

As things now stand, I am still waiting for my free software. I expect I will receive it eventually. However, if the software was critical to my use of the scanner, I would be looking at a 5 month wait before I could get anything done. It would either be that, or buy the software and defeat the purpose of the rebate.

OK, compared to the mortgage crisis and the war in Iraq, this is not the most pressing issue on the political agenda. But I say let’s ban mail-in rebates. If vendors can’t bring themselves to offer an honest no-hassle method for offering a discount, let them offer nothing.