Mountains Made Low

Being the Apple geek that I am, I bought a third iPod—this time an iPod Touch. But here’s the funny part. I like my Nanos for the “traditional” iPod functions—audio (both of ’em) and video (my 3rd gen Nano). In fact, they function so well in these regards that: a) I never seriously considered a 4th gen Nano (afraid, in part, that its motion sensitivity would react badly to the gym); and b) I don’t (and may not ever) have any a/v content on my iTouch.

In short, I’m having trouble convincing myself that the iTouch is not a handheld computer. I’m not treating it like an iPod; I’m treating it like it’s some sort of scifi device. I’ve got the Facebook app (better than the Blackberry one), a Twitter app (TwitterFon, also better than TwitterBerry), an AIM app (which works over WiFi of course, and doesn’t burn through SMS texts like the AIM app for the Blackberry). Also, the Kindle App, which I know would drive some people mad reading a book on a 3½” screen and flipping pages every 20-30 seconds, but I’m kind of liking it (this is how I read UR—and I’ve got Stephanie Meyer’s non-Twilight book on tap there next).

But there has been one minor disappointment. The Web browser (Safari Mobile) isn’t as powerful as I’d like. By which I mean it doesn’t allow editing of Google Documents—you can view them, and there is an app (from Google) that lets you edit a Google spreadsheet, but for text docs and presentations, I’m currently SOL in terms of editing them. And that was part of what I wanted—the ability to edit Google (text) docs on the iTouch. I’m sure that they’re working on this and will have an app ready sometime soon (the one to edit the spreadsheets is a month old). But I wonder how soon.

I hope very, so that I can try my iTouch-only experiment in teaching. But, I suppose, we’ll see.

What do you do with your computer? I mean, seriously, what do you spend most of your time doing with your machine? Surfing the Web? Reading and writing email? Writing text-heavy documents? Making PowerPoint(-style) slideshows?

I’ll admit that much of what I do falls into these categories. But I do all of these things, on a daily basis on a MacBook Pro.

But the question that I was faced with today, reading an article on “Netbook” computers in the most recent issue of WIRED magazine (March 2009), is this: How much of our computers’ processing power do we generally need, or do we use on a regular basis?

I’ll grant you, I’m not always a typical user. I do some photo editing, and some video editing, and some multimedia authoring. Some. But these, in all honesty, aren’t among even my usual daily tasks. For the most part, I read and write emails, surf the Web, and write text-heavy documents for both on- and off-line use. When I’m doing the first list, I’m really glad for my MacBook. When I’m doing the second list, I still like the MacBook, but I don’t so much need it. In fact, except for the text editing, I find that I can do most of what I do in the course of the day on my Blackberry—and with the data package, I can do those things from just about anywhere.

The author of the article in WIRED indicated that he had written his article on a netbook. (Netbooks, typically, could be considered “stripped down” notebook computers—they generally have a single-core processor, at about 1.5 GHz; 512 MB to 1 GB ram; 4 GB of solid-state internal storage, like a flash drive; a 9″ display; a tiny keyboard; no optical drives; and 802.11b/g WiFi. They typically run a Linux OS, and make heavy use of other open-source software, like Firefox and OpenOffice. They also typically retail for at or under $300.) He said that he realized that much of what he does can be done within netbook specs and/or done on the Web. The article in question was composed in Google Documents, online. His essential argument seemed to be that much of what we do on our computers these days does not require local processing power—we can use the distributed processing (and storage) power of the Web to do this work. Quite apart from the initial marketing ideas of: a) children, b) the elderly, and c) the rising middle classes of the developing world, it seems that, to some extent, netbooks have found a market among actual, honest to God power users—those who are willing to give up Flash, iMovie, and iDVD, at any rate.

I say “power users” because, let’s face it: I’m not going to try to get my parents to use Google documents. They need the one-click attachment-opening convenience of having M$Office right there on their machines.

But this gets more interesting, because Macworld magazine also has a brief feature on netbooks in the most recent issue (April 2009). It was a one-page, editorial-format deal asking whether Apple is likely to get into the netbook market (as Dell has already done).

The short answer is no (for any number of reasons, all of which the anti-Apple PC crowd will clearly take as further evidence that Apple and its devoted consumers are consummate computer snobs—and, yep, most of us like Starbucks coffee, too).

But the Macworld feature, almost tongue-in-cheek, raised a really good question. Given the Web-capable (and -driven), low-processing-power, solid-state memory, no-optical-drive, tiny screen, inconvenient keyboard set-up of commercially available netbooks, has Apple not already entered the market?

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the iPod Touch. For $299 (the same price as the Dell Inspiron Mini9 netbook), you can get a 16 GB iPod Touch. In a quick comparison, the iTouch has about 1/3 the clock speed of the Dell (532 MHz v. 1.6 GHz), four times the flash memory (16 GB v. 4 GB), the same connectivity (802.11b/g), a smaller screen at lower resolution (3.5″ – 320×480px v. 8.9″ – 1024×600px), and an onscreen keyboard as opposed to a separate (yet still small) QWERTY on the Dell (both still better than my Blackberry’s multi-tap QWERTY, though).

While I haven’t done any testing (yet?), I’ve gotta believe that Google Documents (word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations) will run in the iTouch’s Safari browser, and when it comes time to give the big presentation (or print the final document), any computer with an Internet connection will give you access.

So can we expect a 9″ netbook from Apple for $300? Almost certainly not. But has Apple entered the the portable, lightweight computing market for the power user? Almost certainly. I’m thinking I might like to test this theory (and if it’s possible to use the iPhone/iTouch Kindle app to get books from Amazon without actually buying a Kindle, I might just begin conducting those tests soon).