On last Thursday afternoon I flew in from San Diego, landing at the DFW airport about 3:30 pm. I did not drive in to the office. I had already worked about 60 hours by that point last week and was badly in need of some personal time. So instead I drove to the Knox Street Apple store and checked to see if any phones were in stock. I had been checking iPhone availability morning and night for nearly two weeks and by Wednesday it had finally looked like the drought was over. This was my first chance to try getting one.
Of course they were out, having exhausted their stock earlier in the day. So I asked one of the store employees about what time of day they were running out. Lunchtime. When do the lines start to form up outside the store? About 7:30 am. Roger. See you in the morning. And home I went, sleeping like a stone for about 11 hours.
The next morning I woke up in time to get breakfast, get showered and get to the Apple store by 7:30 on the nose. At that point my bad Apple days finally started drawing to a close. Although the line was already halfway around the block by 7:30, I still managed to buy my phone and leave the store by 9:15. I headed into the office and managed to restrain myself from fiddling with it all day, and then even into the night. After work H came over to visit and finish watching Kingdom of Heaven on my Apple TV. That worked out much better than last time since it was fully downloaded. What’s more, I had also been able to download an episode of The Tudors – one of her favorite shows – but we have not gotten around to watching that just yet.
Saturday morning it became all about the iPhone. Before I even left the apartment to run my day’s errands I had downloaded about six new applications (most free, some not) and begun using them. My music, podcasts and a couple of photo albums were also synched up and ready to go. I couldn’t keep my hands off of it for the rest of the day. This thing is how every phone should be. It is a delight to use. For a moment set aside all of the browsing, email and fancy applications – just the core phone features are tremendous. The call quality, tight integration of contacts, dialing, SMS and voicemail are simply hard to beat. I’ve owned quite a few smart phones going all of the way back to the original PocketPC phone from T-Mobile and pretty much every Blackberry they’ve ever made. As a phone, this thing crushes all of them. And then there are the other applications.
The iPod features are fantastic, the email is great and the web browsing is by far the best I’ve ever seen on any mobile device. Some of the third party applications on the App Store are also genuinely useful in a way that software could not have been useful before the iPhone came along. I’m telling you folks, this thing is crack with a touch screen. In fact, maybe all Apple products are crack. By the time mid-afternoon had hit on Saturday, I was back in the Apple store. That’s right – I went back to buy another fix, I mean another piece of gear.
It was a Time Capsule. I’d been resisting the temptation for months out of buyer’s remorse because the darned thing launched shortly after I had bought my Airport Extreme for the apartment. But I really did need the functionality. I had zero backups of my MacBook here in Dallas, which has become my primary machine. You know the drill – every bit of music, pictures, financial records, email, personal documents – everything was on this machine with absolutely no backups. Crazy talk. Something had to be done, and although certainly there were much cheaper solutions than buying a Time Capsule, the spell cast over me by the iPhone eliminated all inhibitions. Setup back at the apartment took minutes, and since then I’ve lived in backup bliss knowing that my MacBook could die an untimely death at any second and I’d pretty much lose nothing.
But even then I wasn’t done. I loaded up on more Podcasts and bought two episodes of Penn & Teller’s Bulls***! show on my AppleTV. Pretty much every speck of entertainment for me this past weekend came in some way or other from the Mother Ship in Cupertino.
What has happened to me?
Despite my disappointment in how badly Apple’s product launches went a couple of weeks ago, and despite the fact that Mobile Me still doesn’t work, I once again find myself a delighted Apple user. In fact, I’m “all in” at this point. There’s no core product they make that I don’t own. I’ve got one of their desktops, one of their laptops, all three kinds of wireless access points, their phone and their TV set top box. And I want more. I lust after a MacBook Air, and I can barely restrain myself from splurging on one.
Despite their spectacular failure with Mobile Me last month and their ham handed response to their own problems, on balance this is a company that is still knocking it out of the park when it comes to developing amazing products. By comparison, their ability to deliver great Internet-based software services is positively Stone Age, but it sounds like they are at least going to try to make that better.
Maybe I’m so entralled with Apple products because this “digital lifestyle” thing is something that I’ve wanted for years. Having an integrated experience between my computer, my television and my phone was something that I tried doing with Microsoft products shortly after the launch of Windows XP. I had an XP machine at home, an X-Box and a Windows Mobile phone. I imagined that it would be straightforward – or at least possible – to unify that ecosystem of devices in such a way that my music would be playable everywhere at home and my personal email, contacts and calendar on my PC and phone would easily be synchronized with each other and the web based service that my PC connected to. Boy was I wrong.
There was no way to leverage my XBox to play my music library from my PC, look at my photos, etc. It was good for Halo and that was about it. My PocketPC phone could synchronize contacts and calendars with my PC well enough, but it was perfectly useless as an entertainment device. Showing pictures even was clunky, playing music was a joke. Oh – and it was a TERRIBLE phone. Dropped calls, lousy coverage, lots of lockups and reboots. Even a few “restore to factory state” episodes. An expensive waste. Meanwhile, my new Windows XP desktop slowed to a crawl when I tried to synchronize my contacts, email and calendar with my MSN account. The piece of software they provided for that purpose – the Outlook MSN Connector – was the all-time worst piece of junk I have ever installed on a computer. It crashed constantly, jacked up my contacts and calendar and basically rendered my machine unusable. I tried getting it to work off and on for about two years and finally gave up.
Six years later what I wanted is now (mostly) in place. Seamless integration of my music, pictures, and video across my TV, PC and phone is now a reality. Ironicially, the one place where Apple has badly stumbled is the same place where Microsoft utterly failed years ago – seamless synchronization of email, contacts and calendar info between my PC, phone and the web. That said, I fully expect that Apple will straighten this out and deliver on what they promised before too long. Indeed, the “leaked” email from Steve Jobs yesterday seems to assert that they will do just that by the end of this year.
I believe that Apple will keep delighting me and siphoning off my savings account. I have come to accept it. At least at some level, I’m… I’m a fan boy…. There. I said it.
