Are we witnessing the death of the Mac? Yes. At least, in the sense of what we know computers to be vs. what they are becoming. The future of computing belongs to powerful, handheld, closed devices that anyone can use. From Mac360:

Let’s face it. Computers as we know them, and have known them, for the past 30 years, are overly complex beasts; electronic behemoths which require too much effort for increasingly little gain. A Mac is not a toaster. It has become a bewildering array of digital devices, all of which demand learning curve time and maintenance, and like a closet, the Mac becomes a collecting place of everything from music to movies to email. All that capability comes at a price. Macs are no longer easy to use. They need to be replaced. Who else but Apple could replace the Mac. The bad news is that many won’t like what is happening to computing. The good news is that it’s already happened (or, rather, happening now).

If only Nixon could go to China, then only Apple could replace the Mac.

From The New Yorker, George Packer’s Neither Luddite Nor Biltonite wonders if Twitter (and blogging and multi-tasking, emailing, browsing et al) could be murdering book reading.

Just about everyone I know complains about the same thing when they’re being honest—including, maybe especially, people whose business is reading and writing. They mourn the loss of books and the loss of time for books. It’s no less true of me, which is why I’m trying to place a few limits on the flood of information that I allow into my head.

I find myself doing the same thing—trying to limit what crosses my eyes, evaluate the worth, and respond accordingly.

The other day I had to reshelve two dozen books that my son had wantonly pulled down, most of them volumes from college days. I thumbed idly through a few urgently underlined pages of Kierkegaard’s “Concluding Unscientific Postscript,” a book that electrified me during my junior year, and began to experience something like the sensation middle-aged men have at the start of softball season, when they try sprinting to first base after a winter off. What a ridiculous effort it took! There’s no way for readers to be online, surfing, e-mailing, posting, tweeting, reading tweets, and soon enough doing the thing that will come after Twitter, without paying a high price in available time, attention span, reading comprehension, and experience of the immediately surrounding world. The Internet and the devices it’s spawned are systematically changing our intellectual activities with breathtaking speed, and more profoundly than over the past seven centuries combined. It shouldn’t be an act of heresy to ask about the trade-offs that come with this revolution.

Excellent reading of an accurate observation. It’s less than 1,000 words yet seems like a book. He’s right.

MacDailyNews Take:

Jobs sent not his iPad into the world to condemn the computer; but that the computer through iPad might be saved.

It’s not even on sale yet, but the iPad has become everything to everybody. To the geeks the iPad is a big yawn. To the fan boys the iPad is better than antibiotics. To the medical profession the iPad may prove to be a double barreled savior. Doctors can use the iPad in their practice, and the iPad may promote bad posture, leading to poor health, leading to more visits to the doctor.

Dr. David Rempel in TechNewsDaily. The iPad…

...creates a wonderful opportunity in terms of mobility and ease of interaction… [it] poses a similar type of musculoskeletal problems as the laptop. Working on a laptop for long periods of time puts a heavy load on a user’s neck and upper back, causing fatigue and pain. Large U.S.-based companies that shifted their workforce away from desktops to laptops to increase productivity found their workers suffered from more neck and back problems.

In other words, the iPad is bad for your posture.

Charlie Rose featured the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, and The New York Time’s David Carr for 23 minutes of iPad discussion. The money quote came from David Carr on how Amazon’s Kindle compares to Apple’s iPad:

It looked like something the Mennonites made 150 years ago.

Priceless.

Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch on Open Access to Content and Applications: A Translation.

Some have been surprised at the lack of inclusion of Flash Player on a recent magical device.

Apple is out to screw us. Surprised?

Flash has been incredibly successful in its adoption, with over 85% of the top web sites containing Flash content and Flash running on over 98% of computers on the Web.

Don’t tell anyone that Flash usage is dropping all over the place.

We are now on the verge of delivering Flash Player 10.1 for smartphones with all but one of the top manufacturers.

If everyone follows Apple’s lead, we’re screwed.

This includes Google’s Android, RIM’s Blackberry, Nokia, Palm Pre and many others across form factors… Flash in the browser provides a competitive advantage to these devices because it will enable their customers to browse the whole Web.

Of course, most mobile device users browse the web using an iPhone and Safari, but still…

Some point to HTML as eventually supplanting the need for Flash, particularly with the more recent developments coming in HTML with version 5.

Gawd I hope not. Can’t we all just get along?

So, what about Flash running on Apple devices?... We are ready to enable Flash in the browser on these devices if and when Apple chooses to allow that for its users, but to date we have not had the required cooperation from Apple to make this happen.

Why won’t Steve return my calls? I leave a message every day. Are we sure that’s the right phone number? Hello?

Our mission at Adobe is to revolutionize how people engage with ideas and information, and we focus daily on how to best empower designers and developers to express themselves most fully and creatively. To have the greatest creative control combined with the most productive tools and broadest ability to deploy their content and applications.

Blah, blah, blah, blah (are they buying this yet?)... Blah, blah, blah, blah, (are they still paying attention?)... Blah, blah, blah…

We strongly believe the Web should remain an open environment with consistent access to content and applications regardless of your viewing device.

By open environment, we mean use Flash instead of anything else.

If Apple designed a coffee mug, what would it look like? Presenting, the iMug from Savage Chickens.

I’d buy one.

Who do you believe? AT&T? Or, SlingMedia? Ars reports that AT&T approved a version of the Sling Media player for the iPhone to run on AT&T’s 3G network:

“Sling Media was willing to work with us to revise the app to make it more bandwidth sensitive,” AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega said in a statement. “They made important changes to more efficiently use 3G network bandwidth and conserve wireless spectrum so that we were able to support the app on our 3G mobile broadband network.”

Sounds like a nice little relationship you’ve got going there, Ralph. What does Sling Media’s John Santoro say?

“We didn’t change anything,” Sling Media’s John Santoro told Ars. “AT&T never discussed any specific requirements with us.”

It’s so difficult to know who to believe these days.

What’s the one thing in common with all early adopters? They get screwed when the second generation device hits the streets. More features, fewer bugs, lower price tag. Ernie Varitimos in Apple Investor walks through all his early adopter Apple purchases, starting with the Apple IIe, the Lisa, a 128k Mac, all the way down to the iPhone. Now, the iPad cometh—without a camera.

Look, I know that early adopters nearly always get screwed, it’s the hazards of our obsession. But at some point, you’ve got to wonder if the company you love is calculating just how much they can screw you before you cry foul. Unfortunately, it looks like some Apple loonians are willing to be screwed over and over again. I think I’ll wait for the camera version this time.

Sigh. I’m torn between jumping in with both feet, or maintaining some discipline and waiting for the camera version of the iPad.

One of the main problems with many technology writers is that they don’t understand the technology they write about. Hit whore extraordinaire Nick Farrell of the Inquirer:

IF YOU BELIEVE Apple’s marketing then you would think that the expensive fruity machines are more secure than PCs.

Nick doesn’t get out much. Apple seldom says anything about Mac security and only points out the facts about Windows security. Did I mention that 99.99 percent of all exploited vulnerabilities occur on Windows PCs? Nick and the hacks at the Inquirer didn’t know that.

After all, most of the viruses out there are designed for the PC and Apple users hardly suffer from the problem.

Nick, that’s true. I wonder why?

But this line of reasoning does not influence corporate IT managers who, were it true, would be trying to stave off hackers by installing shedloads of Apple gear. However that’s not the case. Most tell us that even if Apple gear was half the price it’s just security by obscurity. A determined hacker who wanted to get into corporate systems would be though it like a knife through butter.

Amusing, but totally false. Just like the old security by obscurity myth, perpetuated by clueless writers who don’t know anything about facts, but love to stir up fear, uncertainty, and doubt to get more visitors to their web sites. Just like anti-virus software makers stir up fear, uncertainty, and doubt to get more customers.

The Mac ships with more exploitable vulnerabilities already on a system when it is delivered. Further, Eric Johanson, a security researcher pointed out that the Mac OS X has far more published vulnerabilities per user than Windows.

Spreading falsehoods seems to be a Inquirer personality trait. If Mac OS X has all those exploited vulnerabilities, then why doesn’t someone use them? Oh, it’s that age old Inquirer problem with facts, right? Vulnerabilities do not exploited make. Since there are no facts to back up the Inquirer’s typically outlandish rubbish, what about plain old slurs?

The cappuccino company’s mindset, however, while reinforcing the myth of indestructibility of OS X, means that Apple users will be exposed much longer than Microsoft. A hacker can go to the web and find a list of vulnerabilities which are months old and be secure in the knowledge that they are less likely to be patched.

Nick never disappoints. Apple, the $180-billion cappuccino company with the hottest technology stock and products and with more money in the bank than Microsoft is a fruity, cappuccino company. What will it take to satisfy the Inquirer’s cravings for legitimacy as a readable rag?

One enterprising malware writer to pen an interesting bit of code that installs itself on a Mac, sniffs address books for friends with other Macs and works out the way to distribute itself to them too. It is not a huge technology challenge and when it is designed then Macs will fall over all over the world.

Funny. We’ve heard that same story for nearly 10 years.

For whatever the reason, malware writers don’t have much success against Mac OS X. It must be that the 120-million OS X users are not an attractive target. Or, maybe malware writers prefer Windows because it’s so much easier. Or, maybe malware writers don’t want the notoriety and fame associated with becoming the first to reall knock down Apple.

Uh huh. Right.

Goodbye Nick. Goodbye Inquirer. You’re not wearing any clothes and all the world can see your limp journalistic credentials. It’s not a pretty sight.

Last week I watched the video of Steve Jobs’ iPad presentation. He looked healthier. After that, my attention was focused on the iPad. Frank Cioffi in MDN:

It’s interesting that very few journalists or bloggers noticed that Apple’s CEO appeared much healthier at last week’s iPad announcement. It was clear, at least to me, that he’s gained some weight. Not a lot, but noticeable.

Welcome back, Steve. A little Haagen-Dazs is good for the soul.

Sir Patrick Stewart—Captain Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek TNG, and Charles Xavier of X-Men movies—loves his iPhone. iPhone savior video:

I just handed someone my beautiful iPhone, which is never out of my hand, and that I do everything with, and has become an extension of who I am.

But he doesn’t like Twitter.

If you follow Mac history you will enjoy a blast from the past in 20 Years of Adobe Photoshop from WebDesignerDepot. Photoshop started as the creation of brothers Thomas and Glen Knoll:

Thomas Knoll was a PHD student studying Engineering at the University of Michigan. His brother was working at Industrial Light and Magic. Thomas Knoll wrote a subroutine for a program to translate monochrome images on his monitor to grayscale. The successful subroutine led Knoll to create more and very soon he had a number of processes for achieving photographic effects on digital images. After his brother John saw what Thomas was doing, he recommended that Thomas turn what he was doing into a full-featured image editor.

That image editor became a full-fledged product in 1988. ImagePro.

They called on Supermac and Aldus, but were turned away at both, a move that Aldus would come to seriously regret. Shortly after, the Knoll brothers struck gold when they won over Adobe management with their product, and formed a licensing partnership with Adobe that was to launch their software and Adobe into the stratosphere. In February of 1990, Adobe Photoshop 1.0 was released.

The rest is history.

Here’s a blast from the past. Clifford Stoll in Newsweek from February 1995:

The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

What’s frightening about Stoll’s perspective is that he’s both spot on and totally wrong at the same time. He assumes that the internet’s shortcomings, mostly still here, will prevent wide spread adoption.

Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them—one’s a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn’t work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question.

For those of us who entered adulthood as internet users, we must agree and disagree with Stoll. I agree that the internet is a vast wasteland and communication is not as personal as face to face. Obviously, I disagree with the implied premise that the internet won’t catch on.

What’s missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who’d prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where—in the holy names of Education and Progress—important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.