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In short, the Wi-fi only, 32 GB model. I strongly considered the 16 GB version, but since we’re not certain how big apps will be or just how many one can install, I wanted to give myself a little breathing room. I don’t see putting music on it and any movies I watch will probably be streamed. eBooks are famously small—can’t wait to start unloading physical books as frankly my house is overloaded with them—so I think 32 GB will be initially perfect.

Now I say “initially” for a reason. I’m already sold on getting the iPad mark 2. That’s the iPad I’m more likely to spend heavily on, though I think the 3G option remains speculative. At this moment I don’t see the iPad as a device that travels. Maybe I’m wrong about the whole thing but I’m really picturing the iPad sitting bedside.

I’m sure to post more on the topic on or shortly after the iPad’s April 3 delivery date.

Tags: Apple, iPad

Having just concluded three days of Macworld SF 2010 after taking part in various user conferences and walking the show floor, I remain somewhat skeptical of Macworld SF 2011.

No user conference I attended was even close to room capacity, with numbers ranging from 17 to 35 attendees in rooms that by my estimate hold around 160. You could’ve shot a cannonball through these things and not hit anyone or anything. (The content was wildly variable as well: My first day conferences were mediocre at best, while the second day’s were quite good and in one case excellent.) While access to the presenter has its benefits for attendees, one has to wonder if the conferences were at all worthwhile financially for the organizers given these numbers.

My experience on the Expo floor was similar, though I will note that several of the vendors I spoke with were ecstatic about the numbers they were seeing. I don’t know if this had to do with managed expectations on the part of show organizers or simply the limited space and number of vendors—less than half of last year’s—making for a constant stream of visitors. The overall attendance figure bandied about for this year was 28,000 which compares poorly with last year’s 90,000. It certainly felt like a much smaller show this year, taking up a section of Moscone North whereas last year’s show took both North and the larger South facility. Still, if the vendors are happy, presumably there will be more of them next year which should bode well despite my experience and my misgivings.

Organizers have optimistically set January 25-29, 2011 as the dates for next year’s show. I’m not going to prejudge anything—although I was sure willing to after the lousy first day this year—and say that I’m not going next or that Macworld won’t survive. But I am taking a wait-and-see attitude. My attendance depends greatly on what the Apple Consultants Network does, because their meetings are the main reason I go. (In fact the ACN business meeting down the street from Moscone was the only official Apple presence in the area.) Other attendees, who lack that specific draw, are likely to be hard-pressed unless Macworld signs up a lot more vendors. I hope that they do.

A few thoughts:

• It’ll be hit, OK? When the iPod first came out everybody—me included— thought, “It’s just another MP3 player. It’ll never be a big thing.” Apple improved the product until they’d sold 250 million, which does seem like a big thing after all. With the iPhone—and this is a better comparison since there are more feature similarities—Apple had a hit from day one but kept improving the product, particularly via the software, to the point that my original iPhone was a significantly better device two years after I’d purchased it. The iPad will undoubtedly be the same: Good at the start, great two years from now. (I don’t think it will take two years to get to “great.”)

• As others have noted, the $499 iPad kills the $489 Kindle DX dead, dead, dead. Especially when you can run the Kindle app on the iPad and have much of the same functionality—I suspect Amazon doesn’t care so long as they’re selling you books—the Kindle DX does not compare well. Other dedicated eReaders and most of the nascent market of underpowered netbooks are also in trouble.

• Apple’s iBooks Store will take some time to get off the ground, but if they do it well, it could revolutionize publishing as pundits have said. So far we’ve not seen anything that makes me say it will, but if Apple sells 4-5 million of these in the first year, I’m guessing a lot of publishers will jump on board, particularly as traditional publishing continues to decline.

I remain hopeful that the iPad will allow me to finally create an eBook collection that allows me to dump many of my real world books. It’s not that I don’t like books (quite the opposite), but ownership has a psychological cost (care, maintenance, storage, etc.) by which I would prefer to be unburdened. If I had no books in my home, I would have an incredible amount of free space to use in other ways. So, as content continues to be divorced from media, the question readers begin to face is this: Do you love books (and other printed materials like magazines) or do you love reading? Because they’re no longer necessarily the same thing.

If it’s the former, then your world will change a bit because ultimately I think print-on-demand will be the predominant publishing mechanism within the next few years. You will also have to reconcile yourself to the notion that most bookstores will not survive this economic transition any more than the record stores did or video rental chains are. Though tax-payer supported, libraries face a similarly interesting future.

On the other hand, for those who love reading and can part with printed matter, the future has never looked more bright. Virtually any book you want to read is immediately accessible. You can search text, set bookmarks, annotate the text and more. When you think of the trees and the carbon footprint of shipping, the environmental savings alone might make this compelling for some people.

• There’s a looming unease for some tech consultants like me with both the iPhone and the iPad in that these are products which radically simplify the traditional computing experience. Do I provide tech support for the iPhone? Sure, and I’ll provide it for the iPad, too, but they’re both closed-architecture devices which require a lot less end-user assistance. I’ve had very few iPhone calls. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, but it is part of a longer term sea change that I have to be aware of as an Apple consultant because if Apple really does make most computing tasks easy enough—and using a computer really is far from easy despite the best efforts of programmers and designers—then my business model is not sustainable.

• I already have at least one client for whom the iPad is perfect. They’re upgrading from an aged and declining iMac G3 and were looking at a MacBook Pro 15″ as their main machine since they like to travel every week or so to their second home at the coast. Instead, we’re now looking at the 21.5″ iMac and a 16 GB iPad with 3G, an interesting alternative for a couple whose primarily (and almost exclusive) uses are word processing, email and web surfing.

• I was ready to purchase an iPad while reading the live-blogs of the keynote presentation. Initially, I thought I would get the most expensive ($829) iPad with 64 GB and 3G, but I’m reconsidering since it’s a first generation device and I’m not sure I need 64 GB. It’s not like I’m going to carry my music collection on it (unlike my iPhone where I would jump at a 64 GB model). Will I store movies on it or can I stream them? Other than those items, I’m not sure there’s a need for 64 GB. So I’m already backing off my original thinking.

I do think the 3G is important and the ability to prepay 3G month-to-month without a contract is awesome. For many people, the occasional 3G connection is all that’s needed, and $15 a month is an affordable price. For me, though, I wonder when it is that I would use the iPad for 3G. If I’m on a trip I’ll be using my laptop via wi-fi or my iPhone’s 3G. Will I even take the iPad out of the house? I’m not convinced I will. Surely I want the option, though, so I can’t see myself not getting a 3G model.

• Most of the negative reviews I’ve read focus on the iPad’s shortcomings, mainly no multitasking, no camera, no Adobe Flash support.

If Apple can figure out a way to give the user multitasking without killing battery life, they’ll do it. It’s worth remembering that the Palm Pre said, “Yes, multitask away dear friends!” and watched the complaints roll in after the phone very quickly slowed to a crawl. If Apple can’t offer a great user experience, they won’t even if you said you’d like it otherwise. (Despite the above, I’ve played briefly with a Palm Pre and love much of its Apple-like design.)

I agree about the camera in the sense that I think it would have opened up a lot of possibilities for the iPad, but I hardly consider its absence show-stopping. I think we’ll see a camera in the 2nd or 3rd generation iPad.

Finally, let me heartily applaud the lack of Adobe Flash support. While Flash allows for neat user interactivity, it’s insecure, unstable, and proprietary. It’s also a memory- and energy-hog. I use the free Click to Flash plug-in to block Flash when I’m running Safari on my Mac and you should see how much faster the pages load (not to mention how nice it is to not have video adverts in my face). Trust me on the Flash thing: It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

If you do much listening to music via iTunes, SRS makes a really cool and relatively inexpensive plug-in called iWow Premium that radically improves the sound. There’s a free 14-day trial, and trust me, you will be amazed at the sonic difference.

To paraphrase John Lennon:

Sweet Rosetta fat she thought she was a cleaner, but she was a frying pan.

When Apple made the switch from PowerPC chips to Intel chips several years ago they had the solve a daunting problem: PowerPC code doesn’t run on Intel chips. They devised an ingenious emulator called Rosetta to work behind the scenes and translate everything on the fly. Running PowerPC code on your Intel Mac is a touch slower because of this emulation layer, but it sure beats not running it at all.

Unfortunately, Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) not only dropped Rosetta as a default install, it also introduced a horrific bug, still present as of 10.6.1. With the bug, text input into a PowerPC application causes Rosetta to barf hard, resulting in a brief blue-screen followed by the log in window. In other words, your account gets totally taken down along with all applications you running. Documents or files which were open but unsaved are lost.

This is, quite frankly, the worst Mac OS X bug I’ve seen in years, and one of the reasons I always recommend that people wait for the “.2″ release of any Mac OS X upgrade—in this case, Mac OS X 10.6.2. For those who’ve already upgraded or who purchased a new Mac with Snow Leopard already installed, stay away from PowerPC applications requiring text input until this gets fixed. (You can do a Get Info on files to see if they are PowerPC or not.)

I bought a 2.26 8-core Xeon Mac Pro recently. I intend to use it for music and video production, two tasks for which it is well-suited. I call it “Big Iron” since that’s what it is: A huge chunk of metal that takes over the whole side of my desk. It’s also also about 4-5 times faster than any computer I’ve ever owned.

Actually, I should amend that. It’s 2x times faster on 32-bit applications, and it’s 4-5 times faster on 64-bit applications. Which are 64-bit? You can run System Profiler to find out, but my usual test involves just launching the app. If it runs significantly faster than I’ve ever seen it before, it’s 64-bit. As more apps become 64-bit and as they are rejiggered to take advantage of multiple cores, Big Iron will run things even more efficiently.

The internals of the machine are a remarkable piece of engineering. The RAM, four hard drive bays and optical drive bays are all easily accessible. RAM has been easy to install on the Mac towers for some time. The hard drives have been moderately difficult and optical drives generally a bit of pain. It’s notable that Apple’s now made it so simple. These are absolutely do-it-yourself projects even if your mechanical talent extends no further than turning a screwdriver.

I’ve had a couple of software compatibility issues, but nothing show-stopping. Truth be told, I’m not sure if the issue is the Mac Pro or, more likely in my view, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard with which it shipped. Either way, it’s been nothing I’ve really had to worry about. All my main applications have been working fine.

For anyone considering a Mac Pro, I can give it a hearty endorsement with the sole caveat that for 95 percent of the people out there an iMac is a better, plenty fast, more cost-effective choice. But if you have the need for top-end speed, this baby is a beast.

Nothing to do with Windows, but Seinfeld’s schtick is pleasant and Bill Gates comes off well. Of course, Vista is still crap.

I’ve updated Davison Online’s blog software to WordPress 2.6. It’s a spiffy upgrade that includes the ability to use a WordPress iPhone/iPod Touch application for blogging.

Should you expect more frequent updates as a result? Yes. This post, for example, was written and uploaded via my iPhone. (Oh magic telephone, is there anything you can’t do?)

[Cut-and-paste comes to mind. -Ed.]

Anyone interested in their own WordPress blog should know that I offer hosting packages with WordPress and a raft of other features beginning at $60 a year. Contact me for details.

A good one albeit thoroughly exhausting. I had training sessions and meetings every day, leaving only today to really get around on the Expo floor in anything approaching a casual manner. Still, I’d have to call the whole experience a wild success personally.

I’ve got a lot of business ideas to ponder and I made a number of terrific business contacts. Only next year I might need to get a hotel room in San Francisco. All the walking downtown and to and from Caltrain really wiped me out.

Having played with Apple’s new Macbook Air, I think they’ve got another winner. It probably won’t be a huge success because it’s a little too stripped down for most people, but it’s going to be ideal for some folks and you simply cannot believe how thin they’ve made this thing. Honestly, my 15″ MacBook Pro looks like a complete fatty in comparison. Once again, Apple’s accomplished an engineering marvel, and I can’t wait to see some of the innovations move across their product line.

As a Baptist minister, Mike Huckabee is a perfect Republican candidate for Iowa where 4 in 10 voters are evangelical Christians. His surge into the polling lead there is remarkable–tripling his numbers since the summer–but Iowa is no bell weather state. It far more conservative than either of the coasts and although a Huckabee win will cause voters to take another look at him, don’t be surprised if the non-evangelical crowd don’t care for a lot of what they see.

Huckabee is personable, to be sure, but he’s a creationist (meaning to me that he’s anti-science), he thinks God is responsible for his rise in the polls, and his political history is not without its share of problems (unlike say, Romney, who has a solid history of success).

Still, the party Karl Rove created is a Christianist one, and Huckabee fits the bill better than anyone else in the field at present. The biggest loser from Huckabee’s rise is undoubtedly Romney, who has outspent him 20 to 1 in Iowa, and despite a decent speech apparently can’t convince Iowa christians to vote for a Mormon.

I don’t think Huckabee’s candidacy has legs, but unless something dramatic changes, Iowa is his.