An Apple-produced television set is still in the rumour-mill, but the concept still mystifies us. Media outlets are proposing that Apple will do with the television industry what they did with the computer, music, and cell-phone industries. But TV isn’t the same beast, because of much of what TV is is not the hardware, or even the software, but the content distribution. That is to say, what brings value to your television beyond its size and image quality is what you have connected to your TV: a DVD or Blu-ray player, a gaming console, or simply your cable tuner. All of these accessories make use of content from different distribution methods, be it optical media, digital streaming, or something else.

Apple influenced computers by re-engineering the hardware and software; they made computers simpler.¹ They didn’t invent a better internet. And they backed content distribution formats that already existed, favoring those with longer expected lifespans (first optical discs, now digital streaming) versus those that were on their way out (first floppies, now Blu-ray). People bought Macs because they were easier to learn, were more stable, and abstracted a lot of the things Average Joe hates about computers (blue screens of death, configuration issues, et al).

Apple repeated the process with the music industry by making a better mp3 player, and then pushing a distribution method that already existed (digital downloads), albeit in a pay-for-content form. People bought iPods because they had better interfaces than the competition, generally greater storage capacities, all wrapped in a robust package that interfaced nicely with Apple software.

When Apple took on the cell phone market, they took on hardware that, like PCs earlier, were built on a myriad of shaky hardware platforms, with non-intuitive software interfaces, and with limited downloadable apps available through expensive, extremely proprietary outlets. People bought iPhones because the price was right, and because the iPhone easily leveraged the market Apple built with the iPod.

With tablets, Apple further abstracted the things Average Joe hates about PCs, providing the iPhone’s intuitive UI in a larger format for better web browsing and general computer use. Arguably, they made the tablet space, which is somewhat of a first for Apple.²

But televisions aren’t tablets. While Apple may have thrown around the idea of taking on carriers directly with the release of the iPhone, they ultimately signed a deal with AT&T to use existing infrastructure. Now surely, in the television space, Apple is better positioned to take on the carriers, because Apple already has a distribution platform they’ve successfully used since the iPod was born. But unlike each area Apple tackled before, televisions aren’t inherently broken. You can argue that TVs should be easier to set up, what with channel scanning, picture calibration, input configuration, DVR setup, etc. But these are problems with accessories, particularly those utilizing legacy inputs. If Apple sold a TV that dismissed legacy devices entirely (as Apple once shirked floppies and Blu-ray), would consumers buy the device? Would enough consumers buy the device to make entering this market worthwhile?

The Apple TV of today (the iOS-running media box) is a perfect test of this market, and it’s not clear just how profitable it’s been for Apple. The Apple TV is great because it’s instant-on, and it’s not hard to see how embedding this device into a conventional TV may make sense, just as some TVs sold today already offer some internet services like Pandora, Netflix, etc. But if you can buy an Apple TV today for $100, why would anyone replace their entire television to the tune of $2000+ just to have a fully-integrated solution? For such a solution to be elegant, it would likely reserve only HDMI inputs, and no matter how Apple wanted to go about it, setup would remain tedious without lots of hardware being integrated off the bat (like an audio solution).

Sure, we can envision a sleek, Apple-branded television that comes with surround-sound speakers, complete with an audio configuration wizard to optimize sound. It would indeed be an elegant solution, but at what price? People don’t replace their TVs as often as they do their computers and mobile devices. If anything, most people wait until they actually have the space for a big-screen TV, their TV dies, or a major new display technology is unveiled.³ So sure, we can envision such an object, but not outside Apple’s research lab.

For a consumer product, Apple would be better off working with TV manufacturers to create “Apple TV-ready” televisions, where a designated HDMI port would always be the default when turning a TV on, such that the first thing a user sees is the Apple TV. With some fancy integration, attached Apple TVs could control access to other input ports to access attached consoles and legacy hardware, so in effect, an Apple TV “brain” would ensure a perfect user experience. With no Apple TV attached, however, the television would simply revert back to the “generic” menus most TVs have today.

Think we’re wrong? Drop us a tweet and explain what would compel you to shell out big money to replace your existing HDTV.⁴

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Searching for a good iPad stand solution that incorporates a keyboard has proven difficult. We settled on the InCase Origami because it’s a somewhat sleek solution that keeps Apple’s bluetooth keyboard protected, and when unfolded offers a convenient stand for the iPad that works in both landscape and portrait modes. The chief downside to this solution is that this setup works incredibly well on a flat surface, but is less useful when used on a lap.¹ That’s because the way the Origami works, the full weight of the iPad below its center, and that means there’s a slight balancing issue when on a surface with a central gap.

While we intially dismissed the WINGStand, we later opted to fund the project at Kickstarter after we realized that it might be a more elegant solution. The WINGstand is a two-part solution, where you slide two clips onto Apple’s bluetooth keyboard. If the clips sit towards the center of the keyboard and iPad, it obviously wouldn’t work on a lap because of the gap between your legs. But if the clips are positioned near the iPad’s corners in landscape mode, then the iPad’s weight is distributed across both legs. Portrait mode still presents a problem in this configuration, but works beatifully on a flat surface.

So for true mobile warriors who find it necessary to type on a physical keyboard resting on your lap, consider the WINGstand as an alternate solution. You’ll lose out on the keyboard protection that the Origami offers, but this shouldn’t be a big deal depending on your briefcase setup.²

As an aside, we’ll mention that the WINGstand project at Kickstarter was a wonderful experience. The timeliness of updates was great, and once shipments went out, funders were given a free WINGstand for their support. The WINGstand comes in two colours, though we didn’t realize that only the black version was “eco-friendly”. While we ordered the white, we got a black one for free, and it turns out that we like it better (even though we have a white iPad).

The WINGstand works with the Apple SmartCover, and will likely work with other thin cases/covers as well, though we tend to let the SmartCover hang over the WINGstand slot instead of keeping it against the iPad in the slot. This provides a greater angle between the iPad screen and keyboard, which we find more useful than the iPad standing straighter with the SmartCover tucked in. Granted, the WINGstand can be rotated around the battery compartment of the Apple bluetooth keyboard to alter the viewing angle of the iPad, but we like to have additional points of contact with the surface we have the iPad and keyboard on.³ Mind you, if you’re not using the WINGstand with a keyboard for some reason, the viewing angle of the iPad is not adjustable, as the clip needs the keyboard for this function.

About the only thing we’d like to see a future version of the WINGstand have is rubber feet. Each clip is currently made out of a single piece of plastic, and for production purposes, that means the cost is kept down. However, on a very smooth surface when the WINGstand is not positioned all the way “down” where it has maximum contact with the surface, the setup has a tendency to want to slide. Rubberized feet would fix this.

For most people, the real trade-off between the Origami and WINGstand is keyboard protection vs ability to adjust viewing angle. Setting the Origami up may be a couple seconds quicker than sliding the WINGstand onto your keyboard, but it’s a negligible difference in time.

For us, the WINGstand will likely replace the InCase Origami for our mobile needs. The Origami may act as a reserve, so we have a place to keep our iPad at our desk when we need to pull the physical keyboard out and don’t want to fiddle with the WINGstand, but unless we anticipate needing the Origami’s keyboard protection when traveling, the WINGstand seems like it offers a more covenient mobile footprint for traveling light.

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The talk of late is Apple’s further foray into the television industry, pushing beyond the Apple TV into a full-fledged televisions. And the question, of course, is how Apple will do it, and the only certain thing everyone agrees on is that Apple will revolutionize television by completely revamping it, instead of iterative improvement ala DVRs. Logically, this means that live streaming of television may be off the table, and we consider that a good thing, because as this post’s title suggests, flicking through channels in search of something good is dumb.

Chris Martucci sides with those who like channel surfing:

Being in direct control is not always desirable. It’s why we still use services such as StumbleUpon and Pandora. I don’t want to always choose the song I want to listen to. Sometimes, I want to be at the mercy of chance. There’s nothing wrong with that.

But channel surfing isn’t just leaving things up to chance, because the next station you’re about to tune into is the one right next to the one you’re already on in numerical order. If you scroll up in the channel list, you’re always seeing the same sequence of channels flash by. If you scroll down it’s still the same sequence, only in reverse. And chances are, you may very well miss out on something good because you stop on something good enough only a few channels away. And half the time, you’re just bypassing commercials anyway, so you’re wasting an enormous amount of time scrolling through crap because you apparently have nothing better to do.

Making the television a device where you watch what you demand is far more efficient. It’s the “every channel is an app” philosophy wherein you request exactly the show you want, only to have it stream accordingly. Ideally, there wouldn’t be any commercials, and you won’t get sidetracked with mediocre shows unless you specifically request them. And that model doesn’t remove the concept of “chance”, because discovery of shows you don’t request is still possible: either you can discover new shows with a recommendation engine ala Pandora¹, else you can select a “true” random function that will start playing anything from the Apple television library. Either option serves Martucci’s need to stumble across new programming, but it removes much of the inefficiency of how channel surfers do it today.

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With the release of iOS 5, we had a chance to try out the upgrade on several devices belonging to us and family. The process, unfortunately, was rather inconsistent across devices, with some going smoother than others:

1. iPad 2 w/3G, 64GB: This was the first device we opted to upgrade. We did a sync first, then started the update. Everything seemed to go fine until the “restoring apps” window appeared to freeze about two-thirds of the way through. The screen on the iPad itself seemed to suggest that it was done, and we continued with the setup there. With the restoring apps status bar still not moving, we unplugged the device and had to force-quit iTunes. The device worked fine, but was indeed missing some apps. Some pictures were still present on the device. When we launched iBooks, all our eBooks seemed present, but they then deleted themselves after the device “phoned home”. The next time we connected the iPad to the computer, it did re-sync all apps, and the status bar actually moved.

2. iPhone 4, 32 GB: Didn’t do a last sync before updating, and the same thing happened with this device as with our iPad 2. Only this time, most of the apps were missing. When we installed a few of them from the on-device AppStore, we found that the data for the apps was still present on the iPhone, so we didn’t need to set every app up again. The same iBooks problem as with the iPad 2 appeared on this device, too. A second re-sync fixed the problem as it did with the iPad.

3. iPad 2, 32 GB: This device had very little stuff on it. Upgrade went perfectly smooth.

4. iPhone 4, 16 GB: This device also had very little stuff on it. Upgrade went smooth as well.

5. iPad w/3G, 16GB: Another smooth upgrade.

6. iPhone 3GS, 16 GB: Upgrade seemed to go fine, but then on restoring the last backup, we received the -34 error.¹ A quick web search suggested that this error was due to the device being almost full before the update, and because the down-convert mp3s to 128 kbps was checked in the sync settings, iTunes defaulted to trying to sync the full-size mp3s back to the updated device instead of down-converting them again. When the dialogue box popped up to try the restore again, we had to cancel out and do a manual re-sync. That worked.

One would expect these types of issues to have been resolved by Apple before the iOS 5 release. Whoever is behind the iTunes and iOS testing process, however, seems to be less serious about hammering out bugs than in other Apple products. After all, the iOS upgrade process has not been without error in the past, and this is a pretty significant update. At the very least, we’d expect there to be more system feedback on what iTunes is doing at any given time. For instance, instead of “restoring apps”, we’d prefer some indication of what app is being restored, and maybe even a count of how many apps have been restored so far, versus how many are left. Some window of where we stand in the process, and what’s left, would also be nice.

It also doesn’t help that the post-update things-to-do is not very intuitive.Our family was quick to note how they would have never known what steps to take after the update, which boiled down to getting their Mobile Me accounts upgraded to iCloud, and ensuring that syncing and the iTunes store were set up properly. To make most use out of iCloud, all of the options like Photo Stream need to be turned on, but they’re not all on by default. Further, the iCloud backup option wasn’t on by default either, nor was the ability to sync with iTunes wirelessly.². Owners who started using Mobile Me after using iTunes may also have two accounts, so they need to configure their devices with their Mobile Me/iCloud accounts, and then manually switch their AppStore username even if it was correctly configured before the update already.³

Fortunately, iOS 5 is a nice update, so the struggles are ultimately worth it. Still, it’s surprising that there are as many hiccups out there as people are reporting, especially this late in the game.

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Microsoft recently sent out a heads-up to the masses that XBox Live will undergo another update later this year, adding some new multimedia capabilities like integration with certain cable television channels, as well as the long-ago-announced-but-never-realized IPTV integration.¹ There’s even Kinect support, so XBox owners can speak commands to switch what they’re viewing. Not only does this further direct us to what the future will be like, but it also prompting the question of, “Why can’t Apple do this?”

That is to say, the Apple TV is a much cheaper set-top solution than the XBox. (Of course it is, as it’s not a traditional gaming console.) But the features Microsoft is advertising with the new XBox dashboard upgrade is straight up the territory that Apple has fought for with the Apple TV, and it’s not hard to see how Apple may respond.

Why wouldn’t Apple be vying for similar contracts that Microsoft has snatched up for the XBox? Players like HBO, Bravo, the UFC, and others are clearly good to have on your team, and while Apple is still pushing content via iTunes, there are several others like real-time streaming pay-per-view that Apple could go after. But it’s not just content that Apple can try to match, it’s also cost and functionality.

Take Siri, for example, which is premiering on the iPhone 4S. Whether or not it comes to the next-gen Apple TV, there’s already solid integration between Apple devices, so it’s not hard to imagine that Apple might leverage Siri on the iPhone to control the Apple TV. From browsing the iTunes catalogue for TV shows and movies, to playback control, Siri looks like it could become an integral part of the future television experience. And Siri becoming a foundation for future control methods doesn’t need to stop there, considering how third-parties could leverage the technology.

We already have games utilizing AirPlay to stream video and audio to the AppleTV. Add in a third element, voice commands, and suddenly games can become even more complex and immersive. The XBox can do the same, of course, but whereas the Kinect remains an almost novelty purchase, Siri is part of the new iPhone experience, which means it won’t be too long before every iPhone Apple sells will offer the virtual assistant built in.

Siri’s real future is how third-party developers can integrate Siri functionality in their apps. It’s already great for Apple’s included apps, but it becomes ever more cool when we can create new tasks in OmniFocus using voice commands, or new notes in SimpleNote, than relying on first-party apps. Especially if we can use Siri to manipulate these apps along with AirPlay, giving us a big-screen picture to control with our voice.

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The iPhone 4 is indeed a great phone, and Shawn Blanc summarizes how he uses the phone quite nicely over at his blog. In contrast, here’s our take.

Unlike Shawn, we were a gadget-junky for phones for much longer. We started on the original Sprint cell phone back when they only had a single model, then moved to a much smaller model before switching from Sprint to T-Mobile. On our new provider, we picked up a Sony Ericsson T610, which we kept for quite awhile before getting a Sidekick 3. Our last phone on T-Mobile was the original iPhone, which we used until the 3GS was released, prompting our move to AT&T. After the release of the iPhone 4, we upgraded again. Since at least 2004, we’ve also carried a Nextel and a several models of Blackberry phones for work, so we’re certainly well acquainted with what’s out there.¹

We’ll echo Shawn’s comment about the iPhone 4 being our best phone to date. To be fair, it’s not the phone we used the most², or even the smartphone we used the most.³ But it’s the most feature-rich phone, and not just on paper. That is to say, it has the most features that we use:

• We also carry the iPhone 4 case-free for the most part. Typically, we slide it into a microcloth baggy, but we stopped using Apple’s bumper awhile ago. We dropped the phone a couple times, and there’s a small dent in one order, but otherwise the phone has proven its durability. Cases and bumpers really take away from the phone’s aesthetics, and the size is too perfect to alter with a clunky enclosure. By far, this is the most beautiful mobile device has ever shipped, and if the renderings of the iPhone 5 out there are accurate, we think the iPhone 4 will hold onto this title for another year.

• We disagree that the battery life is great. Maybe for stand-by use, but not if you’re actively using the phone. That’s not to say that the iPhone 4′s battery is worse than the competition, because we don’t believe that’s true but merely that the state of batteries in the modern mobile space simply isn’t that great. When we’re using the internet, or the GPS, for a couple hours, the battery life really takes a hit, so on days we’re traveling that the phone gets real use, it’s dead before the day ends. Thank god for car chargers. But Shawn is correct in saying that on a typical day, the iPhone doesn’t need a charge until we hit the sack,

• The camera is indeed great. It’s the only one we typically use, and we’re more likely to ignore our more expensive Lumix when we travel just because of how easy it is to snap pictures with the iPhone. Plus, we love our novelty photo apps like Hipstamatic. The iPhone camera is the perfect compromise of portability and quality, and if the iPhone 5′s camera is another major improvement, then that alone practically justifies an upgrade. Thanks in part to the flash, the iPhone 4 is the first phone that we religiously use as a camera. Before this, we didn’t bother much with phone cameras on account of the resulting picture quality.

• The retina display is indeed awesome. We notice it more often when we have a few minutes to spare somewhere and load up iBooks. Compared to reading on the iPad, the iPhone 4 reading experience is simply beautiful. We were so-so on the idea of upgrading our iPad 2 if the only major improvement was a retina display, but now we’re not so sure.

Will we upgrade to the iPhone 5? If money were no object, then certainly yes. But better camera aside, we’re not so sure just yet, because as great as the iPhone 4 is, a chunk of our iOS use has been taken up by the iPad, so whereas pre-iPad the iPhone received an enormous amount of use, a lot of the stuff we used our iPhone for in the past is no longer a function of our phone.

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Last November, when we talked about using the iPad almost exclusively since its debut, we touched on three things that we felt were still missing by the platform. The first was tethering to a computer for backups/updates, which sounds like it will be resolved come the release of iOS 5. The second, APIs, is an evolving issue that seems to be getting better over time, as there’s no shortage of great, innovative apps for iOS, and we’re not hearing nearly as much griping from developers as we did last year. The third issue pertains to accessing a Mac:

Screen-sharing: We mentioned how fantastic we find iTeleport, but why isn’t there a native solution to screen-sharing via an iPad? And, wouldn’t it be nice if we had a more powerful way to stream content from a server? We’re thinking something along the lines of OnLive, only connecting a video stream between you and a Mac you already own. While iOS 4.2 will allow us to stream audio and video from one iOS device to another on an app-specific level, being able to stream a Mac desktop to an iPad would be a fantastic ability to have.

There’s no indication that AirPlay will allow anything like this, which remains unfortunate. However, a third-party solution exists in the form of Splashtop Remote, an app we picked up some time ago but which never worked. However, over the weekend we found an update to the server component available, which runs on a Mac and allows the iPad client to connect to it. Since this update, we’ve managed to connect to our Mac without issue, and the result simply blows VNC out of the water.

We’ve expressed our love for iTeleport several times in the past, but it was ultimately unseated by Screens, a VNC client that John Gruber put us on to. Screens is a beautiful VNC client that allows you to hide the mouse cursor on your connected screen, and allows you to tap the screen where you want the mouse to click. It really made for a rather intuitive VNC experience, and became our go-to method for accessing our Mac Mini to sync with our iOS devices and access server apps that the Mac Mini is responsible for. The downside of these apps, however, is that VNC effectively draws screenshots on the iPad screen, and that means not always getting immediate visual indicators of what’s going on.

Splashtop remote, on the other hand, works just like we wanted screen sharing to work; like Onlive, Splashtop Remote streams the video of the server computer, which in this case is our Mac Mini’s desktop. So rather than our iPad getting a slow collection of screenshots, we’re getting 30 frames per second (FPS) of desktop video. This means that we could watch movies, or even play games, remotely via our iPad.¹

While the video was occasionally laggy, performance was good overall. The added bonus of the system streaming audio as well as video is great. While Splashtop Remote intends to support it in the future, it currently doesn’t work with applications utilizing 3D graphics in fullscreen mode, though they work fine when in windowed mode.²

Playing around with Splashtop Remote this weekend, it didn’t take long for us to move Screens off our iPad’s home screen altogether. We’ll still keep a VNC app on the iPad for when we’re in areas that have poor bandwidth and where streaming video doesn’t make sense, but for use at home, or even where we have good bandwidth, Splashtop Remote is now our go-to remote access app.

Before Splashtop Remote, we pretty much left the Mac Mini’s dock layout as-is, and accessed the hidden dock using Screens’ screen-pull mechanic that revealed the dock. We now have the dock showing at all times, and created a stack for our most-recently used apps. The interesting part of this is in how we interface with the Mac Mini’s desktop physically; because the video streaming is so good, and the resolution perfect for the iPad³, accessing our Mac Mini truly makes it feel like we’re running OS X on the iPad itself, serving as a good proxy for what the iPad experience would have been like had Apple managed to get a full-blown version of OS X on a tablet. Whether this would have technically been feasible (with the response typical of OS X running on our Mac Mini) is a matter we won’t address. What we will say is that while it’s nice to have OS X accessible from our iPad, the iOS interface is definitely better suited for a tablet; nerds may have flocked to an iPad running OS X without a second thought, but what makes the iPad the tour-de-force that it’s become is the fact that it’s not running a desktop OS.

While we though Microsoft was betting their money on the wrong horse before, after using OS X on the iPad via Splashtop Remote, we’re absolutely sure their bet is bad, now.

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Gary Arndt talks about using the iPad while traveling, and his review is perfectly reasonable until he mentions content creation.

[The iPad] is fine for sending out tweets, replying to email or updating Facebook. I have never written a blog post nor have I edited a photo taken on my SLR with the iPad. I could do it, but it just wasn’t designed as a tool for content creation.

There’s only one problem with Arndt’s take on this: it’s wrong. To argue that the iPad wasn’t designed for content creation because you don’t use it for such is ignoring a considerable number of iPad owners who do manage to successfully create content on the device, and ultimately speaks nothing of Apple’s intended use of the device; the fact that Apple has itself released content creation tools for the iPad (e.g. iMovie) tells us that the iPad was indeed designed as a tool for content creation.

Arndt seems a little confused, because he does mention doing some photo editing on his iPhone. And, while he complains about the virtual keyboard for longer written pieces, he states early on in his review that he doesn’t use an external keyboard. Well, why not? That would obviously address the issue of the virtual keyboard not being a good enough tool for sustained writing sessions.

Naturally, TUAW picked up the story and couldn’t help but chime in on the iPad hate, because apparently it’s trendy to dismiss the iPad as a long-term travel companion because the new MacBook Air is so damn sexy.

As Arndt points out, yes it’s great to be able to carry dozens of books with you on your travels, but what’s not great is the limited battery life your iPad is going to give you while reading (blame it on the LCD display, which is much more power-hungry than the e-ink screens of many dedicated ereaders). If you’re a huge reader, stick to a Kindle or my preferred choice, the paperback.

Only, bringing paperbacks on extended trips puts us right back in the situation Arndt used to find himself in (toting around media), instead of consolidating his media in one compact device. And we really have to wonder how much battery life you need in an eBook reader. Is the iPad’s 10+ hours of battery life in airplane mode insufficient for eBook reading? Who is traveling for that amount of time without access to electricity? For hardcore travelers, there are several backup batteries available that will allow you to do more than just read eBooks while on the go, and if you’re truly out in the country without access to the electric grid, there are solar chargers available that work wonderfully.

But yeah, Michael Grothaus back to the MacBook Air:

But the biggest reason I won’t be taking my iPad with me is because I do a lot of content creation on the road. I write books and for blogs and magazines. The level of writing I do makes the touchscreen keyboard on the iPad impractical — and the 11″ MacBook Air a godsend.

Again, use a fucking external keyboard. Thinking you’re a fancy-pants book and magazine writer has no bearing on your ability to write on the iPad, because there are several external keyboard options available to you. And when you don’t need it, the iPad’s smaller footprint kicks in and offers flexibility that your shiny new MacBook Air doesn’t. If you argued that you needed specific functionality in, say, Photoshop, or you needed to work in a CAD environment, you’d have a solid argument for needing a notebook, but you’re a writer, and there are plenty of solid writing apps for the iPad that people have used to, you know, write books.

Does anyone else think articles like this are just excuses for justifying a new MacBook Air purchase?

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Instapaper’s developer, Marco Arment, seems sure that Instapaper has a future despite Apple’s sherlocking of the idea. At WWDS, Apple announced that all future versions of Safari would support a Reading List function in which people could “save” articles to read later, by grabbing the article’s text and presenting it in a streamlined fashion outside of the web site it was originally found on. Yeah, basically what Instapaper’s been doing for a while now. And an Apple offering means one less login and app to worry about, with the spit-and-polish Apple is known for. But maybe Arment is right in thinking that Instapaper still has a future. We don’t totally buy the argument that Instapaper will live on simply because a lot of people are already using Instapaper. Rather, Instapaper will live on because it offers features that Apple’s Reading List doesn’t offer for several revisions.

1. Offline Reading: One of Instapaper’s biggest selling points, even if it’s not advertised as such, is the fact that everything on your read-it-later list can be cached for offline access. That means people on-the-go who aren’t always connected to the internet can still catch up on the articles they’ve saved, and then synchronize the article’s read status once they’re next online. No word on whether Reading List will offer this feature.

2. Web Access: Reading List’s thus far been advertised as a way to keep cached articles available to all of Apple’s devices, so even if you mark an article to save on your iPhone, you can pick it up on your iPad or MacBook. That’s all well and good, but just as Mobile Me offers access to Apple services on computers that aren’t Apple devices, the strength of a service like Reading List is in it being always-accessible. Instapaper does this, thanks to a web site that users can login to in order to see what articles they’ve saved. Again, there’s no word yet on whether Reading List will offer a similar feature, though we seriously hope it does.

We like Instapaper, and use it fairly often for tagging blog posts and articles for later review. Despite this, we’d be lying if we said that we wouldn’t strongly consider replacing our Instapaper workflow with Apple’s Reading List. It all depends on how much functionality Apple decides to build into it early on.

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Not typically a fan of extended warranties, we do make an exception: AppleCare. And that’s because had we not invested in AppleCare in the past, we would have been royally screwed. This, contrary to the Apple-products-are-rock-solid belief that many, including Shawn Blanc, share:

For the record, I bought AppleCare once. It was for my first Mac; a 12-inch PowerBook. I never needed AppleCare for that Mac, nor have I needed AppleCare for any other Apple computer or device I’ve owned since then.

Shawn’s an Apple enthusiast, so we can assume he’s owned his fare share of Apple devices. Still, our own experience has made AppleCare invaluable, as we can’t even remember every time some Apple device needed this or that fixed/replaced. But, off the top of our head:

• Our iPod Mini needed replacement after the battery stopped, well, charging.
• The RAM in our 17″ Powerbook needed to be replaced after the computer stopped booting.
• The logic board in our 17″ Powerbook needed to be replaced after the screen developed random, horizontal lines.
• Our iPhone 3GS needed replacing after it stopped turning on.
• The RAM in out 17″ MacBook Pro needed to be replaced after the computer stopped booting.
• The logic board on our 17″ MacBook Pro needed to be replaced after the computer stopped booting.
• The battery on our 17″ MacBook Pro needed to be replaced after it exploded.¹
• Our TimeCapsule’s hard drive died and needed to be replaced.

It’s not even that we beat up on our hardware – we’re actually quite anal about our equipment staying in a pretty pristine condition. And again, this is just off the top of our head, as we’re fairly certain that we brought our 17″ monsters into a local Apple Store more than this in order to get stuff fixed. Between these problems and those our friends/family have encountered over the last several years, we consider AppleCare a pretty good deal, as we’re well ahead in what we otherwise would have paid on getting things fixed outside of the basic Apple warranty.

Mind you, this isn’t to say that Apple quality sucks (because we still consider Apple gear better than competing products), merely that any sufficiently complex technological device is bound to have problems. We’re just on the opposite end of the spectrum than Shawn, who has apparently been very lucky with his Apple gear.² We’ve had no problems with our more recent Apple purchases (Mac Mini, iPhone 4, iPad, and iPad 2), but three out of four are different beasts compared to traditional Apple computers. If anything, we’d recommend AppleCare for any traditional Apple computer purchase, but may be hesitant to recommend it for Apple mobile devices.

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