Finally a quality netbook.

My experience with laptop computers has not been a happy one. All three of my iBooks failed shortly after the warranty period ended and the best I used, an MSI Wind netbook hacked to run OS X, broke its screen hinges after two years of hard use. While the keyboard in the Wind could have been a bit larger that netbook was excellent value for money, especially once Windows was removed. Mercifully, the iPad came to market at just that time so the netbook went off to the recyclers and the iPad became my sole portable computing device, if you exclude the iPhone from that definition.

Well, that’s about to change. The rumor mill called the release of the new MacBook Air dead right, predicting both sizes – 11.6″ and 13.3″ – and my price point of $1,000 was right, so I ordered the 11.6″ base specification model for $999 yesterday and expect it here early next week.

The new MacBook Air.

Let’s be clear about one thing. If your Mac laptop serves as your primary computer, maybe connected to a larger display at work or your TV at home, the Air is not the right choice. While the Air supports external displays, it’s slow by comparison, has little internal storage and, until I use it for a while, is probably a good deal more fragile than the MacBook Pro.

On the other hand, if you want a capable road machine which can do light Photoshop and Lightroom work on your photos, the Air may be just the thing. The 11.6″ model I have on order runs a 1.4gHz Intel Core2Duo CPU which should equal the performance of the overclocked 2.0 gHz Intel Atom in the MSI Wind, which was just fine with Lightroom. Now while the smaller Air does not come with an SD card slot – there’s no room for one – a small card reader will do, plugged into one of the two USB sockets. And if the 64gB Flash storage, in lieu of an energy sapping conventional disk drive, proves too small, an external self powered USB HDD will do the trick. Finally, the screen aspect ratio is widescreen which works well with movies.

What is most significant about the Air, however, is what it lacks. Not just weight, where the 11.6″ model comes in at just 2.2 lbs (the iPad is 1.5); Apple has deleted the DVD drive from the machine and followed up by announcing the App Store for the Mac whereby all future software purchases will be optionally made over the air from those vendors who join the Store. And as you already watch movies streamed from any number of sources it’s safe to say that the DVD drive, and the DVD it reads or writes to, are both effectively dead. The machine also lacks the traditional power sapping spinning hard disk drive, replacing it with flash memory and “instant-on” functionality, once you have booted it, that is, with 30 day standby time with the lid closed. That’s a feature in the iPad which I never want to lose.

The iPad? Well, until someone (Adobe – are you awake?) comes along with photo processing software engineered for the touchscreen, there’s only amateur-hour apps out there for the photographer. The iPad is a gorgeous device for viewing pictures but it’s not there yet for processing. How hard can it be to add a touch overlay to a great app like Lightroom. for heaven’s sake?

Part II appears here.

Disclosure: Long AAPL stock and call options.

Needed: A proper UI.

With Apple stock opening over $300 per share for the first time this morning and Apple Computer poised to report its first quarter with sales in excess of $20bn on October 18, 2pm PDT, fans of the stock are asking “What’s next?”

Well, Apple mobile devices (iPhone, Touch, iPod, iPad) now account for a stunning 60% of revenues and growing. They were zero four years ago. The iPad will sell anything between 25 and 50 million units next year, generating $26 billion or more in revenues and some $8.25 in EPS and adding maybe $80 to the stock price. With competitors all over the place with multiple operating systems and few developers writing applications for any but iOS, the iPad has a solid 3-5 year lead on the competition, just like the original iPhone. Cannibalization of traditional computer sales is mainly hurting PCs and netbooks, as MacBook sales continue growing. The newest iPhone is selling like hot cakes, global distribution grows apace and the iPod refuses to die , morphing into the Touch. So it’s not like there isn’t a lot of gas left in the tank for existing products to continue to sell nicely for a while.

Many commentators think Apple should try to get serious about home entertainment with an Apple television but I doubt that will work. The problem with an integrated TV/computer is that you have one part with a ten year life, the LCD display, and another with a 2 year life, the computer hardware. So the consumer will be confronted with the issue of recycling a perfectly fine LCD display just because the computer part is obsolete. That does not solve. Plus dealing with multiple TV and movie studios to get distribution rights to their content is a Sisyphean task.

But how about an Apple camera?

The Apple Quicktake 200 – 1997

Apple marketed three Quicktake models in the 1990s, each 640×480 pixels (0.3 megapixels!) priced at $600-750. They were not successful, the first two being a rebranded Kodak made by Chinon in Japan, serial makers of contract garbage then and now; the last, shown above, was made by Fuji. Steve Jobs rightly discontinued this “me too” product shortly after his return to Apple.

Rebranding is not a formula for success. It’s merely a formula for low sales and even lower margins.

Apple has been using optics in its computers for a long time. There was the excellent 2003 iSight webcam which clipped to your iMac which I happily used for years with my iMac G4 and G5; after that iMacs and MacBooks came with built-in webcams, none quite as sharp as the original clip on which now sells for a small fortune in the used market.

Apple iSight webcam.

The iSight had autofocus and exposure and a fast, sharp lens.

Finally, Apple has made huge strides in cell phone camera design, with the 5mp variant in the latest iPhone4 eschewing pixels for image quality and adding automated HDR in the process. I am still on the iPhone 3G so cannot comment on the quality firsthand, but user reports suggest it’s excellent for that format.

And if anyone knows User Interface design, it’s most certainly not the goons at Microsoft.

So Apple could make a crackerjack separate camera in a sector replete with poor design and near total absence of correct thinking about user interface design. Panasonic and Olympus are among the worst here, with endless menus cluelessly named. What is called for is a simple mechanical analog interface for a few of the most commonly used functions and a voice activated or touchscreen approach for everything else which is rarely used. The Panasonic G2 makes a stab at touch controls, but it does nothing to change the poor menu structure of the G1.

Lenses? Hardly an issue. Any of Schneider, Fuji, Cosina, Sony and many others will be more than pleased to come up with a cool design for what is now the world’s second largest company, just behind ExxonMobil. CPU? The customized ARM A4 used in the iPad will blow anything else out there out of the water.

Disclosure: Long AAPL and AAPL call options.

Buy what works and forget the name.

I recall an elderly American relative once remarking “Grandpa Francis, he was always a Dodge man.”

Seems that old Frank only ever bought cars from Chrysler’s Dodge division, but quite why this was remains a mystery. I always suspected he got lucky in the back of one. There was no question, it seems, of comparison shopping or of buying the best vehicle for the money. It was Dodge or nothing, which meant it was Dodge every two years given the 1950s middle class belief in changing cars ever so frequently. And while every Dodge bore fealty in its nameplate to the Dodge brothers who gave it life, it always seemed to me that ‘Dodge’ was an especially peculiar name for a car. Still, I suppose there are people who revel in the last name of Schmuck or Fink or Twit. Why, there’s even an English Member of Parliament named ‘Balls’, which has to be the first honest description I have heard of a politician. OK, second. ‘Member’ is pretty accurate also.

And I must confess that you could fairly accuse me of like shortsightedness. For some three decades, flirtations on the side (the English have a ‘Bit on the side’; I had a Rollei) coming and going, I was pretty much a Leica man. It’s not that there really were any alternatives. The Contax was long gone, and Nikon and Canon no longer made their excellent rangefinder bodies. So while I would argue that I was a rangefinder man, rather than an SLR type, the reality is that Leica was the only game in town, though I have a suspicion that had there been others I would still have been a Leica man as it’s hard to think of anyone surpassing the quality of the body and optics.

And while the M body’s screw mount predecessors were true ergonomic nightmares, some of the worst designed (if best made) machines of the past century, the M got it dead right and was far ahead of anything else in the rangefinder world, remaining so until digital came along. Now, to all intents and purposes, the Leica interchangeable lens M body is a rich collector’s toy with very limited functionality. And any day now it will be completely obsoleted by exciting designs like the Fuji FX100 and maybe a viewfinder equipped GF2 body from Panasonic. Who on earth saw the Fuji coming? Which means there may be something even more exciting on the drawing boards of Foxconn in China (no, not the US TV network, though that would be an accurate description).

Rich man’s toy. Or, if you prefer, a ‘Bit on the side’.

Nor is it any longer an issue of affordability for me. Sure, a keyboard click or two and the M9 will be on my doorstep tomorrow with a bunch of lenses but simply being able to afford one is no reason to actually buy it. On that basis I would never fly commercial either. Any issue of affordability, for all but the profligate, cannot be divorced from considerations of value, and it’s the value part of the equation which likely means that I will never own another Leica, having abandoned the marque some 4 years ago. The thought of carrying around $10-15,000 of gear for the occasional snap is one which causes deep revulsion in my soul and will continue to do so even when I surpass Gates and Rockefeller in net worth ….

No, brands are meaningless and brand loyalty is impossible to understand, though doubtless much loved by the manufacturer. I would like nothing more, for example, than a computer tablet from someone other than Apple to put some competitive heat under Steve Jobs & Co. and allow me to watch Flash animation, much used in the business world for charts and diagrams. Should it come along and if it offers decent application support, I’m there and the iPad is on Craigslist.

The Nikon SP – the closest to real competition for the Leica M,
but not close enough.

One final thought. With technological change accelerating it’s foolish to regard any camera as a keeper. It’s just a piece of characterless gear, soon to become recyclable junk when something better inevitably comes along. And that’s a good thing as it makes the modern camera a tool rather than a collectible object.