Alex Stone

I like it. I was a little disappointed that there weren’t more apps that I wanted on day one, but I really dig how this thing works.

I’m really jazzed about the idea of having all of my app updates coming from one place instead of having to discover an update when I launch the app. Not a huge deal, but still pretty cool.

I didn’t get carried away with buying apps. Most of what I wanted (Things, Billings 3, MarsEdit, iLife ‘11, etc) I already owned. I did pick up The Incident and it’s just as fun on the desktop as it is on the iPad/iPhone.

It sucks that I’m hearing that apps I already own that happen to be in the App Store won’t be updatable through said App Store. I’m sure there will be a solution to that in the near future, but for now, it’s kind of a bummer.

I was also hoping for some MobileMe integration. For example, if I get on a different computer, will it be able to just pull down my downloads? If so, that could be a great feature.

I also picked up Twitter for Mac / Tweetie 2… like the rest of the Mac-owning world did, today.

All in all, I’m sure it will be a success for new and old Mac users, alike.

I’ve started a blog series on alexstone.me to get somewhat official with things, but this is more of a side-post.

I picked up an AppleTV yesterday and I’m currently running a little experiment to see just how realistic TV 2.0 is for a regular family.

This is phase one of that experiment. What I’ve done is emptied out an external hard drive and placed it on my Airport Extreme (Apple WIFI router. It has a USB port on it so you can plug in a printer or a hard drive).

Now that I have this massive amount of storage that I can access wirelessly from anywhere in the house, the next step is moving things over. I am currently migrating my entire iTunes library (music, movies, TV shows, apps, etc.) to the external drive. It’s literally 3 clicks and a lot of waiting. Nothing too major so far.

Hopefully, by the time I get up in the morning, everything will be moved over and I can start with Phase Two, which is converting all of my downloaded shows (currently in divx format) to an iTunes/AppleTV/iPad/iPhone/iPod friendly format.

The idea is that anyone in my family will be able to watch the shows in my iTunes library, via Home Share, on their own machines and that I can free up ~100GBs from my harddrive and just have all of this content stored on the network drive.

Right now, I’d really love to get my girlfriend an AppleTV, as she is planning on killing her cable this week. My only concern is figuring out how she would get my content at her house without me going over and putting it in her iTunes. Even then, what happens when she runs out of space on her laptop?

There should be a way to universally filter iPad news and media from the entire Internet for a while.

Every. single. year. the same Verizon iPhone rumors surface and it’s like no one recalls the same “verified rumors” from the previous year.

The only thing that makes me highly skeptical of any of the Verizon iPhone rumors, is that Verizon still runs on CDMA, meaning that a Verizon iPhone would be useless in a year or so when everyone finally switches to their LTE networks.

Not only that, but the current network would heavily degrade the iPhone’s user experience. Being able to talk and use server-centric apps is kind of a major selling point of the iPhone. I don’t think I’ve ever been on the phone and not been multi-tasking at the same time. Checking Facebook, posting to Twitter, or looking up movie times, restaurants, directions, flight schedules, Wikipedia entries, etc.

That’s not just me, either. I don’t know anyone who has an iPhone that doesn’t do the same thing when on a call, especially when calling a business or customer service line.

Finally, the other reason Apple is waiting for that LTE network is that unless Verizon has been upgrading their network in secret over the last few years, there’s no way they’ll be able to handle the load of Verizon users itching for an iPhone. AT&T has about 20k customers, probably about 70% of those users on iPhones all pulling roughly 1-5GB of mobile data every month per user. You think Verizon’s network is ready to handle that much data being pushed around.

AT&T wasn’t ready for the iPhone and has managed to step it up and roll out more hotspots and 3G towers over the last 3 years. Verizon has not. Granted, they’ve been hard at work getting ready to roll out LTE, but that’s not going to happen until next year and you won’t see it in your area until late-2011 or or 2012.

That being said, when Verizon rolls out their LTE network, then, and only then, would I put any weight behind a rumor of a Verizon iPhone.

UPDATE: I’m not saying a new iPhone isn’t coming out this year. That’s almost definitely happening, as Apple has released a new handset every single year about the same time, in addition to an iPhone OS update. I’m just saying that it’s not likely we’ll see a Verizon-enabled handset.

So, early today, an Apple employee was answering questions anonymously over on Reddit and had some fairly interesting stuff, taking in account that he worked for Apple, of course.

The company seems to be really excited about the iPad. I mean really excited. Also, he urged readers to read post-announcement hands-on reviews rather than random bloggers and I was surprised to read how much Engadget and even Gizmodo liked the thing.

I guess the only real problem with the iPad is that we just aren’t sure what roll it will play, just yet. I follow a lot of iPhone developers on Twitter and Tumblr and they all seem to be excited about the things they can do.

I’m not convinced I want an iPad, yet, but I’m starting to get the feeling that we may have all missed the point, entirely.

Granted, any one who’s not an idiot will tell you that a 10” screen is a much different computing experience than a 3” screen (hence why people own laptops in addition to smartphones).