Apple Briefs

In what might be the earliest back-to-school promotion ever, Apple is now offering students a free iPod Touch and (as usual) a free printer with the purchase of a computer between now and September 15. Technically you could choose to get a free iPod Nano instead of the iPod Touch. But with the iTunes Application Store just around the corner, the size advantage of the Nano is becoming overwhelmed by the feature list of the Touch. For anyone still in school, this is a great opportunity to load up on Macs before you graduate and have to pay “grown-up prices.” (Ok, you’re limited to one desktop and one laptop at the student price per academic year, but that still means two iPod Touches and two printers!) It’s too bad that I no longer get the student discount. Maybe we could petition Apple to allow attorney CLE classes to qualify?

A couple of weeks ago MacWorld made a comparison between Microsoft Office and Apple iWorks, aptly titled The Office Suite Smackdown. Ben Stevens at The Mac Lawyer made a post last week highlighting the conclusion of the MacWorld review of Word and Pages. I thought this was a good time to weigh in with my software choices. I use Word, Pages, and one other application depending on the situation.

Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word will be the king for quite some time because people just can’t let go of the Word document format. I have tried using other programs to open Word documents, and they get 95% of it right. But that’s just not good enough. So I use Microsoft Word whenever I think I might have to share original documents with someone else (mostly for work). Word also does a handful of things really well – like labels, envelopes, and mail-merges – where it doesn’t matter too much which program is used. If I could avoid owning Microsoft Word entirely, I would gladly do so. But, as long as I have to pay for Word, I might as well use it for the few things it is really good at.

Apple Pages

One thing Microsoft Word is not very good at is page layout. Microsoft Publisher seems to be the low-end tool of choice on Windows. Mac users aren’t missing anything, though, because Apple Pages (part of iWork) is a truly great program. I have Adobe InDesign CS3, and I rarely need to use it. A good designer can create really professional-looking brochures, newsletters, and other layouts using Pages. There are two modes in Pages: Word Processing and Page Layout. I never use Word Processing mode. For simple drafting, all I need is an efficient interface and good style functionality. Word and Nisus are just better than Pages for that. But neither of them can stand up to Pages in page layout.

Nisus Writer Pro

Nisus Writer Express got me through law school. I used Word v.X for the first semester, but two freak occurrences made me give it up. First, not long before my exams I noticed that the outline for a significant portion of my class notes had merged to a single level. Hierarchy in an outline carries a lot of meaning, and mine had disappeared. I am sure I accidentally pressed some disastrous key combination that caused a cascade effect. But that kind of thing shouldn’t really be possible in any sensible program. Second, I was in the middle of my Contracts exam (my first law school exam) and I got an Out of Memory error when I went to save. I had plenty of RAM. The hard disk drive wasn’t close to being full. But there this error was staring me in the face. Luckily I was able to save the situation by copying, closing Word, re-opening Word, and pasting. Still, it had me scared enough to look for alternatives.

That alternative was Nisus Writer Express. It doesn’t do everything Word does. But the features it has are intuitive and easy to use. Nisus Writer Pro adds a few missing features (like table of contents), but it still doesn’t have everything I want in a word processor. Word 2004 is much better than Word v.X, but by the time of its release I was squarely hooked on Nisus Writer Express. So I still use Word for the few things that I described above, but I try to use Nisus for most of my other document drafting.

The MacWorld San Francisco keynote speech was today, and, as expected, Steve Jobs introduced a new Mac sub-notebook called the MacBook Air. I won’t go into all the details of the MacBook Air because you can learn everything you need to know at the Apple website and the Apple Store. Instead, I just want to share a few impressions and surprises:

1. As rumored, the MacBook Air has an optional external optical drive. What surprised me was the price – $99 – which is very competitive with everything else on the market.
2. The Big surprise regarding the optical drive was Remote Disk, which allows the MacBook Air to share the optical drive of another Mac or PC on the same network. I think we should expect to see few sales of the external optical drive because the MacBook Air seems like a much better second computer than a primary personal computer.
3. The multi-touch trackpad was a nice feature. Rumors had suggested some kind of multi-touch capability on a new Apple product, but people weren’t sure whether the rumors were linked to the sub-notebook or some other product being developed. I don’t see much need for the extra multi-touch features. I already use two-finger scrolling on my MacBook Pro. Rotating and zooming makes sense on an iPhone, but how often do people need to do that on their computer?
4. The MacBook Air ships with 2GB of RAM and isn’t upgradable. It’s nice to see Apple ship a laptop with a reasonable amount of RAM, but design considerations probably drove the decision more than generosity (if you can call “not price gouging” on RAM upgrades generous).
5. According to Steve, the MacBook Air gets 5 hours of battery life. If this is true and unaffected by the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field (see, e.g., Wikipedia), I’ll be pretty excited. I regularly got 2+ hours out of my 12″ PowerMac with the wireless on. Getting 5 hours of wireless use without adding ugly external batteries (I am looking at You, Michael Dell) is quite an accomplishment.
6. There was some concern over the fact that the battery was not user-replaceable. However, many sites are now reporting that Apple will replace the battery for $129 (parts & labor included in the price). That’s a tidy sum, but paying $129 every 1-2 years to keep your laptop going is a small price to pay for the size and convenience of the MacBook Air.
7. Finally, we come to the price. I was hoping the MacBook Air would come in a little cheaper (in the $1600-1700 range). Having watched the keynote, though, I can understand the price point. A lot of engineering went into the MacBook Air, and, judging from the reaction of the crowd, I think Apple will have no trouble selling many, many MacBook Airs at $1799.



8. The big shock came from seeing the price of the 1.8GHz model with the SSD drive. One of the benefits of SSD drives is their superior reliability. If that’s the only benefit, I don’t think many people will find the price justifiable. I look forward to seeing battery life and performance tests for the new drives. Hopefully Bare Feats will get their hands on one soon.
9. I am confused about Apple’s choice to list two models. Both the 1.8GHz processor and the SSD drive are upgrades on the base MacBook Air. They could just as easily have had a single model and make everything an upgrade of that model, like they did with the Mac Pro.

I look forward to the day I can visit our local Apple Store and see the MacBook Air in person. If they’re shipping in two weeks, that day can’t be too far off …. can it?

Rumors of a sub-notebook computer from Apple have been floating around the Internet for quite a while. Last month, rumors indicated that Apple was going to announce the sub-notebook at Macworld, which takes place next week. Recently, a new twist to the rumor has appeared. Like many other sub-notebook manufacturers, Apple will apparently be offering an external optical drive for the Mac sub-notebook. The one thing the rumors haven’t made clear is whether the external drive will be an option or come standard. That ambiguity, combined with my own personal interest in the outcome, makes that a great first Apple Briefs poll question.

I am considering getting a smaller notebook than my current MacBook Pro. I have wondered myself a few times if I am better off getting a MacBook instead of the new sub-notebook (MacBook Mini?). Previously, I was drawn to the pro laptops from Apple because the graphics chips and keyboards were vastly superior to those in the consumer models. Now, however, the keyboards are mostly comparable (I love my new iMac keyboard, which was seems based on the work done for the MacBook). The graphics chip in the sub-notebook is also likely to be closer to that in the MacBook due to heat and power-consumption issues.

Ultimately, I think I am not likely to want an optical drive in a sub-notebook. If I was going to use it frequently, I would probably just get a MacBook. However, I don’t think I would want to use it frequently. In that case, it would be spending most of its days in a drawer in my office. Undoubtedly, whenever I wanted to use it, the optical drive would still be in that drawer in my office – safe, but unusable. But, that’s just what I think. Let everyone know what you think by voting in the poll!

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Rumor has it that Apple will be introducing a sub-notebook at Macworld San Francisco in January. The new device will supposedly be ultra-thin (on account of not having an optical drive) and sport a flash memory drive. Flash memory is more expensive than a traditional hard disk drive, but it is faster and uses less power (spinning a disk 600 times per second uses a lot of power). The best news is that the entry price point will apparently be about $1500. Still, I imagine that a fully-loaded model will still run at least $2000, if not more.

I am eagerly awaiting the opportunity to buy a new sub-notebook. I currently use a 15″ MacBook Pro. Before that, though, I had a 12″ PowerBook (which, I have on good authority, will bend when you drop it from a height of four feet onto a wood floor). After using a 12″ PB, I barely consider my MB Pro a “portable.” I can technically take it places, but it always feels like I am carrying luggage with me. I barely noticed my 12″ PB. I also have a very sleek backpack from my 12″ PB days that I hope will be big enough for the new sub-notebook. I normally try to avoid first-generation Apple hardware, but I think I might make an exception in this case.