moraltechieJust another Moral Fibre Magazine weblog

For the last month my iPad has changed my computing patterns quite a bit – my Macbook Pro has been staying at home on most trips, which I did not really believe would happen. However, not all is great with the iPad. While Apple might sketch a very rosy picture, there is a few shortcomings which I believe should not have been there in the first place. 

 1)      Multitasking
This is my major hangup with the iPad – in fact I think its pretty silly of Apple to release the iPad without it. While everyone was clamouring for multitasking on the iPhone, I have to say that I realised later that it wasn’t something that I used all that much. Sure, its nice to have, but it was not really such a big deal (except maybe for navigation apps). But on the iPad it’s a necessity. Having to exit out of an app to go copy something from another app is getting old mighty quick.

2)      Improved Notifications
Apple’s current notification method is pretty sucky. The whole idea where my notifications are static on screen is tired. Android’s implementation is much more slick – the pull down tray from the top of the screen is much better. On a device like the iPad where a multitude of apps might be wanting to notify me, a proper notification scheme is needed. All that screen real estate and all I get is little popups and badges on icons?

3)      Folders
One of the greatest parts of the iPad is the big bright screen – it is still better than just about any tablet PC on the market today. On the iPhone the cramped screen creates a necessity where screen icons need to be easy to touch, and therefore a typical user can browse through many pages of icons. On the iPad it gives the impression of an unfinished product – we need folders so that we arrange the icons. Frankly, this should have arrived on the iPad.

4)      A revised Universal App policy
So far the apps available for the iPad has slowly improved, with most of the apps focussing on rewriting of existing iPhone apps, with next to no additional functionality. The worst part is that some developers have the odacity to simply slap “HD” at the end of the title, and asking double the price. I am pretty sure that a large percentage of the iPad user base is iPhone users as well – therefore people who would prefer to have universal apps that run on both platforms, but most importantly, carry a one time cost. Now many apps have done the right thing and made their apps universal, but I believe Apple should insist apps be made universal if they do not improve on the iPhone version. A good example is Beejive. I paid $10 for it on iPhone, now I have to pay $10 for the iPad version? Please.

5)      An improved App Store interface
Currently the iPad Appstore is not really logically arranged. Instead of following the tried and tested iPhone formula where top selling apps bubble to the top. On the iPad it takes a few clicks to see the top selling apps of a certain category. Small thing, but irritating nonetheless.

6)      Wireless Sync
I was never one of those people that did not like iTunes – I liked its organization of my music library and its reasonably simple, no drills interface. But over time it has become quite a pig – while the interface has remained quite similar, Apple had to make it compatible with its ever increasing range of iDevices, and the result is its current overweight self. Even the name iTunes is misnomer – its not like playing music is the only thing it does. iHub might be more apt, with it becoming the center of your digital entertainment. But problem number one is that devices like the iPad need iTunes just to activate. And then it needs to be plugged into iTunes just to do a music sync. With the iPad’s large battery and fast wireless N networking, why cant it do it without a cable? The iPad should move away from relying on your computer just to switch on.

7)      Printing
At present this is non-existant on the iPad. If you want to print something with the iPad, you need to send the file to a computer, and print it from there. Again, the iPad relies on your computer. This should be built into iPad, and I am sure Apple can figure out a way to handle the mess of printer drivers. In fact, if there is one area of computing that I think most people agree is still terrible, its printers. Im not asking for iPrinter, the driver and setup method must be universally refreshed. (Getting off the point here, I know.)

8)      A file structure
Now I know many people will say that this goes against the very simplicity that makes the iPhone/iPad successful. But at present, iTunes’s file syncing is a very poorly implemented solution. At the very least, Apple should allow me to sync file structures and folders between my PC and the iPad. Why must I manually choose which files I want to send to my iPad? I have enough space on there – let me sync them all please. Also, the current API of opening a file in another app is a welcome change, but more apps need to use it.

9)      Improved iPhone app rendering
At present iPhone apps on the iPad look very bad. If Apple can make older low res iPhone apps render next to perfectly on the iPhone’s retina display, surely they can make the same effort on the iPad. Especially with the app updates now all addressing the Retina display, images, buttons and text should all look better on the iPad’s display as well right?

10)   More transparency on Software Updates
First off, I know Apple and “transparency” cannot really be mentioned in the same sentence. But with the iPad, Apple has a responsibility to improve on all these aspects, and quickly. The iPad should have arrived with iOS4 out of the box – and the current “Fall 2010” timeline is not really specific.

You will notice that most of my issues can be fixed with a software update – that because I believe the iPad hardware is pretty close to perfect. Sure, it can stand to lose a few grams, and it might be better with a SD card reader built in, but all in all I think the form factor is pretty perfect.

Not that its all bad news – I honestly believe that these “slimmed down” computers are the way forward, and that our general computing pattern will change in the future. I am on the fence whether people will prefer smartphones or tablet devices, but my first instinct tells me that smartphones will win the battle, but the iPad might be prefered by many people who don’t want to tinker with small touch screens.

What I do agree with however is Steve Jobs’s analogy of how our computing patterns might follow the way we use cars. Instead of everyone driving trucks (lets just call them big, tough vehicles), people have started shifting towards smaller, more focussed vehicles like cars. The typical user does not do any computationally intensive tasks on their computers anymore – our usage of computers have shifted towards web-browsing based scenarios completely. The upcoming release of Google’s Chrome OS is typical of this – why use a full operating system when our usage is primarily concerned with web platforms?

And that is why the iPad is doing so well at the moment – we have changed our entire computing pattern, and the iPad is the ideal machine for that. Now bring on the competition please. HP – I am looking at you.

Just about any techie would tell you that the slowest part in a modern computer is still the harddrive. In fact, 90% of the time you wait for your computer is because that little needle is busy reading sectors from a very fast spinning disk (not counting waiting for Seacom delays…). True, hard drives have become very quick over the years, but the other components in a computer has just progressed at exponentially faster pace.

Its for this very reason why you might have the latest Core i7 machine with large amounts of RAM, but still can go make a cup of coffee in the time it takes to boot up. Luckily solid state storage has come along – this does away with the moving platter inside a hard drive and instead replaces it with chips that do away with access times (the average time the needle takes to find that little bit of data) and also makes the drive silent and uses less electricity. Sounds like a terrific solution, except for price. Whereas a 500GB 7200rpm hard disk drive costs R800 today, a similiar size SSD costs around R15000. No, that is not a typo. So people who wanted the speed of SSD were forced to buy smaller capacities – 64GB currently goes for about R1800 for a decent Corsair SSD.

And this exactly what makes the Seagate Momentus XT so special. Seagate refers to it as a “hybrid hard drive”. The XT has a 500GB traditional HDD merged with a fast 4GB SSD chip. Now 4GB might not sound like much, but you do not have to manually choose which files to drop on this SSD portion. As you use the drive, it keeps track of what files are used often, and stores these files in the SSD. These typically include files that are used by the OS often, your most used apps, etc. The Momentus XT is not only a laptop drive – in fact, it will beat most standard desktop hard drives as well. In many benchmarks it beats the WD 10,000 rpm Velociraptor drives… Its also operating system independent, so you can go ahead and use it with Windows, Mac or even Linux. The adaptive memory just keeps on doing its thing.

Now you might think 4GB SSD is not enough – but here is some of the changes I noticed using this drive. Just for some background – I installed this drive into a late 2009 Apple Macbook Pro 13inch, with a Core 2 Duo 2.53GHz processor and 4GB of RAM. It used to have a Seagate Momentus 7200.3 320GB 7200rpm drive installed, which was pretty quick already. Here is the boot times of a full Mac OS X install. Take note this not a clean fresh install, but instead a install that is made from time machine restore for both the old and new drives. In fact, I havent reinstalled or reformatted my machine in more than 2 years. Time Machine just does such a good job of that, another thing where I really do believe Mac is still better than Windows. This install is full of apps I run often, but also small utility apps that I like to use every now and then. All in all a pretty representitive Mac install. You can expect the same performance improvements on Windows as well.
Both the old and new image is defragmented and then left for about 10 minutes so that the adaptive memory does its thing.

These speeds are carried over to shutdown speeds as well. Again, once the adaptive memory gets used to the shutdown procedure, speed increases as well. Very impressive.

So how does it affect everyday apps? Just everyday apps like Firefox load in half the time (and this does not include timing from cached apps in memory, this is after reboots). Larger apps like Photoshop get even better performance. iTunes gets zippier as well. Here is some timings I did with the drive. iTunes load time for a 60GB library. (Take note this is timed after a reboot every time).

Here is the startup times for Photoshop. This is a standard install without any plugins. Again, this is a startup after a boot every time.

I did not time everything, but here are some things that improve as well:

• You know that little wait while you type into the Spotlight search box? Thats gone.
• Virtual Machines are faster as well. I know an average VM is much larger than 4GB, but over times these do become faster. I guess that adaptive memory looks for files within the VMs as well.
• Everything is snappier. The stuff you do most often on the computer just happens so much faster. Makes me only wish for the day when SSDs will be cheaper.

I did notice that the drive is a little more noisy than the previous drive, but I can only hear it it if I put my ear right against my laptop. Other than that I did not find any other negatives when using the drive on a day to day basis.
Just a tip to Mac users who would like to install one – do not use  a tool like SuperDuper, rather do a Time Machine backup, and then restore the image during the install process of Mac OSX. For some reason the drive doesnt cooperate with those image cloning tools. This goes the same to Windows users, do not use DriveImage XML. Do a reinstall, I know its quite a process, but the performance boost is well worth it.
The best part of the Momentus XT is that it costs only slightly more than a standard 7200rpm notebook drive. I payed R1200 for the 500GB model. And the performance in real life use is much faster. While it wont quite reach the speed of a fast SSD, it is a fraction of the price. And that makes it a very good deal. So you might want to know if it makes more sense to rather spend your money on a full on SSD or even more RAM. Suppose you have a machine with a normal 250GB 5400rpm drive and 2GB of RAM. Here is a pretty handy chart to put hybrid hard drives into perspective:

So if you want large capacity plus fast performance, it seems like a hybrid hard drive might be the ideal middle ground before SSDs become affordable. I am willing to bet that Seagate will spread this hybrid technology to its other hard drives as well. I think the sweetspot will be a desktop drive with 8GB or 16GB of SSD memory. Hopefully in a few years we will laugh at this as SSD have finally become comparable in price with hard drives… Bring on the speed.

The Seagate Momentus XT reached South African shores last week, its currently only at suppliers, but should reach stores soon.