Evidently I do because YOU WON’T TURN IT ON!

First, Siri on an Apple TV is possible, maybe likely, but it’s not going to be the only interface. It can’t be. As Neven Mrgan pointed out, how would you flip to a new channel if Siri goes down? What about gaming? You can’t game with your voice — “QUICK! RUN AWAY, ME!”

So here’s what I imagine:

• It’ll be pricey, as with any Apple device, but it’ll be competitive on the high-end. Probably about $1,499 if I had to make my guess.
• It’ll use the traditional Apple Remote. I think they, and everyone else, really likes that. It may get modified or become smarter to do things like increasing the volume, but;
• The real remote comes on your iPhone or iPad. You can use it without, sure, but the magic happens on those devices. Now many have pointed out that you can’t easily control one screen by looking at another. Hand someone an iPad and the first thing they do is look at the iPad screen and not the TV. The current Apple Remote App is fine, but it requires a sort of disjointed brain behavior that’s hard to wrap your mind around. BUT, Apple doesn’t have to do that anymore. They introduced iPad mirroring, didn’t they? You just display whatever’s on the TV on to your iPad. When you’re done, you just put the iPad down and enjoy your show.
• I don’t think Apple’s TV will play nice with the cable providers. It’ll use the Internet-only, which is terrifying, since that’s still the cable company (if that’s not a monopoly, it’s about to be…I bet Apple can and will fight tooth and nail on that front if it comes to pass that Comcast starts throttling data or selectively blocking channels.).
• Since it’ll be Internet-only, I imagine a device that lets me pick shows completely on-demand, a la carte. Want Mad Men? That’ll be 99 cents for an episode or you can buy a season-pass for $9.99. In addition, Apple will no doubt become a subscription handler, allowing you to pay $19.99 a month or about $240 a year on an “all you can watch” model, like Netflix, so you can get TV and some movies. Movies not part of the subscription plan can still be rented for $1.99 or .99 cents. They may well do away with the TV episode subscriptions all together in favor of this.
• I have to assume the folks at Apple see Netflix floundering wildly. I have to suspect Eddie Cue wants to eat them for breakfast, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they terminate their Netflix deals and go straight into their own business of selling those monthly subscriptions for access. Or, more likely, a yearly subscription so you can pay it once and forget it. Seems less like “a bill” when you do that. They’ve done that with MobileMe and now iTunes Match, so that would be consistent.
• Sports packages have to get thrown in if Apple can pull it off, otherwise it’s not useful for a lot of people.
• I bet HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, etc. can’t wait. This fits with the model they’ve been touting for years.

Apple’s devices are all about content, so there’s no reason why we have to keep falling all over ourselves trying to figure out what amazing new input method they’re going to think up. I bet it’s mostly remote control, with a little voice-control if you want to use it, just like your iPhone.

It’ll be a really pretty device, maybe with a few neat things like built-in WiFi and Bluetooth (for iPhone controllers for games?) and iCloud access. But the really good parts come from easy software and access to all the best content.

I’ve debated getting the iPhone 4s in my mind and I’ve reached this conclusion based on nothing: There was to be a 4s and an iPhone 5 this year. Life happened, and Apple couldn’t do it. So we have a 4s with a Beta version of Siri and the delayed launch.

I suspect Apple will re-align back to a summer release next year with the iPhone 5. I think it’ll be vastly different in purpose and design and be the last device Apple releases that has a lot of Steve’s input.

I still stand by that. I went into the Apple Store at Keystone Crossing Tuesday morning after Apple opened up their “Reserve an iPhone” feature Monday night. I reserved a 16 GB, black, iPhone 4S on AT&T’s network. I’m still in a contract with AT&T, though I wouldn’t have switched anyway (I actually don’t have that much trouble with AT&T here in Indy). As a result, I paid $440 for the upgrade. However, I sold my iPhone 4 for just under $10. In total, I paid a $50 “upgrade fee”, so to speak. I’ll no doubt do the same when the iPhone 5 comes out. It never occurred to me that the old phone still had value, as the iPhone 4 has retained its value much, much better than prior iPhones. Or so it seems.

Interesting side-note, I asked why they still divided up the inventory by carriers. The boxes the phones come in are differentiated only by a cryptic UPC code on the label. If it’s a world-phone, it’s all the same phone in there. They were out of Sprint phones, in all variety, but the Verizon phones were ready to go except the low-end models. The rep said it was just as a way of managing inventory internally. That seems wholly un-Apple, to do something for their sake at the expense of the customers. Those poor Sprint people who went in and had to walk out empty handed past all the perfectly-identical-and-Spring-compatible Verizon phones.

Anyway, back to the phone. Reading about the new phone online, it seems that everyone is heaping praise on it. I don’t know that it’s worth what everyone’s saying.

Speed and Performance

Assuming the “S” in “iPhone 4S” still stands for “speed”, the new iPhone is a hair faster. But not by enough that I’m blown away by it. I’ve used this phone very heavily since the moment I bought it and on the occasions that I’ve used Safari and Maps, they did load faster, but only today did I say to myself, “That used to load slower.” The mix of the new antenna system and iOS 5’s improvements together make it a faster device. But it’s not as dramatic as what it was to go from an iPhone 3G to a 3GS.

Battery Life

The battery is now crap. My iPhone 4 went to hell the moment I installed iOS 5. I used to be able to go days, usually three, without ever caring where my next charge was going to come from. After iOS 5, my iPhone 4 needed it every night. It was losing 7-10% of it’s charge in a one to two hour period. Overnight it would drop 15%. Before iOS 5 it would barely budge. The culprit is obvious: reminders with geo fences. If you have a reminder setup to tell you something when you leave or arrive somewhere, the GPS comes on and stays on.

I assumed the iPhone 4S would alleviate this issue. Or that maybe my installation was botched during the upgrade on the iPhone 4 — no one else seems to have complained about the battery. But the iPhone 4S is no different. From the moment I took it out of the Apple Store and drove around doing some errands, checking email, using Siri and checking traffic and texts, it was down 34%. It’s mind boggling to me, actually. I’m now back to the days when I owned my iPhone 3G — always be prepared to plug this thing in wherever you are.

Setup and Activation

I bought the iPhone 4 around 10 am on Tuesday morning. The rep at the Apple Store, who was super cool and nice and picked up on my ability to actually know what I’m doing, asked if I’d humor him and do the setup with him. I explained at one point, “I have an iCloud backup, by the way.” He had never seen an iPhone restore from iCloud, as other customers weren’t privy to have done that yet, I guess. So I said I would and we had a learning experience.

It took 7 or 8 minutes for the iPhone to boot from the moment I opened it up. It restored over Apple’s WiFi, which may have slowed it down some (it’s heavily strained most of the time) and it downloaded my settings, app and folder lists, prior texts, contacts, calendars, bookmarks and other “small” settings.

During that time, the rep told me that they were offering Apple Care for $99 on new iPhone sales. Drop your phone and pay $50, no matter what you did to it, and they’ll replace it. Turns out, one guy bought Apple Care for his new iPhone 4S, walked out of the store, around the corner and someone else bumped into him. It knocked his phone to the ground and shattered. The other guy apologized immensely and the now phoneless-iPhone-owner said, “No bother, just pay me $50.” The other guy did, he picked up his shattered phone, turned around and went in for his new iPhone. All within two minutes of walking out the door. The Apple reps were floored, no pun intended.

Afterwards, the iPhone came up and was ready to use for what was immediately available on initial download. It set on immediately to re-download my Apps, then my music and then my photos. In that order.

I couldn’t wait around for it download 14GB of data at the store, but it was clear it was ready and hard at work downloading everything. The process kept all of my folders and icon layouts precisely where they were on my old iPhone. I could make calls, send messages and re-download my emails once I launched Mail. One downside, though, is that since iCloud doesn’t do encrypted backups, I had to re-enter my password for all five email accounts (and their outgoing server passwords), iCloud, iMessage, FaceTime, iTunes and Home Sharing.

I walked away and as soon as I hit 3G, it stopped the download. It was mid-install on a Chess app and when I got home, it picked right up once I re-entered my WiFi password for my home network.

You do, however, have to plug it in and pair it with your computer to do nightly WiFi syncing. It is true you can use it without a computer, but most people are going to use it with iTunes on their Mac or PC and will want it to sync, I’d assume. So an entirely cable-free setup is still not 110% possible.

The Camera

The camera is better, no surprise there. It takes better photos and the next phone will take even better photos. Nothing more to say about that.

Siri

This is interesting. I can’t wait for Siri to get smarter and get ported to OS X.

I immediately tried using Siri when I got in the car at the Apple Store. However, it’s not enabled by default. I was a little confused and even checked the box to make sure I did, in fact, get an iPhone 4S. Siri is disabled with a setting toggle by default, probably because it sends data to Apple and they’re protecting people’s privacy. Frankly, I imagine a lot of people do what I did and wonder what they’re doing wrong. For such a highly touted feature, I’d imagine it would be better to enable it by default and display an alert on its first use that reads, “Using Siri may record your location and other data for use by Apple. You can disable Siri in System Settings.”

However, once I got it up and running, it does work about as well as you’ve seen and heard. It’s able to dictate messages and read texts, but seemingly only if they’ve just popped in. It doesn’t like reading anything else, like web pages, notes, emails, etc. Which was a bummer; I would love to have Siri read my emails to me in the car so I could reply hands-free. Think of how productive I could be! As an ardent inbox-zero person, that would be welcome. Saying, “Check my mail” will prompt Siri to throw in your messages. Saying, “Read the first message” results in Siri saying, “Sorry, Justin, I can’t read emails to you.”

As an aside, I find it creepy when it refers to me by my first name. No one does that to me and when Siri does it, it’s weird.

It’s able to dictate texts well, though. I tried it and had a success rate somewhere around 75% or 80%. Siri likes for you to be close by, with the radio off and talking directly to it. You can also dictate messages into Mail once you’ve hit the little microphone icon (which really throws off the speed of your typing when the symbols and numbers gets moved by the new button). Just be sure you know precisely what you want to say and how. Stuttering or getting hung up on a word is a real pain. You can’t easily un-edit the dictated message, either. You also have to speak punctuation or risk run-ons. So, “Hi Steve exclamation point I hope you’re doing well today period.” Results in “Hi Steve! I hope you’re doing well today.”

One particularly maddening experience happened to me today. Just sitting at my desk, I received an email from the Marion County library telling me that my library card would expire soon and I needed to visit a branch to show my ID and renew it.

Me: “Remind me when I’m at the library to renew my library card.”

Siri: “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean by, “at the library.”

Whaaat? I mean, “when I’m at the library.” Substituting “Irvington Branch library” had Siri popping up directions to the Irvington, New Jersey library.

Saying “Marion County Public Library” or “Indianapolis Public Library” or the full “Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library” did not register with Siri. All I wanted was a reminder that when I get to the library, remind me to update my damn card. I even looked up the library’s address and said, “When I get near 2656 East Washington Street, Indianapolis, Indiana, remind me to renew my library card.” It just replied, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean.”

Turns out, Siri can’t do that. It only knows “Home” and “Work”, based off your contacts list, I’m guessing. I don’t want it to remind me to do that when I leave the house because the next time I leave the house might be to go in the complete opposite direction. I may not get near the library again for weeks.

How frustrating that it can’t handle, “When I go to Wal-Mart, remind me to pick up cat food.” I fully expected it to be able to figure out where my nearest Wal-Mart is and act accordingly. It does not. Even more irritating is that you can’t even manually set a reminder with such details.

However, as much as I’ve poo-pooed it here, it is wonderful when it does work. I’ve set all kinds of reminders so far and they’ve worked well. It does, however, drain the battery.

I set 16 reminders on the first day, all things I probably would have scrambled to write down on a Post-It or, more likely, email myself about in the past.

It’s handy, “Tell So-and-So, xyz” is a handy feature, too. I can say, “Tell Zach I’ll be there in a minute.” And it works great, based on the fact “Zach” exists in my contacts list and it promptly sends a text message. Maybe someday it can automatically figure out short names, like “Bill” for “William”, on the fly.

Other features I’ve discovered came when I was driving to Castleton the other night. I said, “Show me the traffic” and Siri replied, “Here is the current traffic in Indianapolis” and up popped a Google Map.

Bluetooth

I went and bought a $70 Plantronics headset, as I was one of the six people in America that still used Apple’s original bluetooth headset. I hate it. I hate both, actually.

There’s a reason Apple doesn’t make their’s anymore. The battery lasts about 20 minutes — I’m not kidding.

This Plantronics thing tries to be too smart. Holding the button for one second versus two does two different things. They managed to build pairing, re-dial, answering and hanging up all into one button. Holding it to activate Siri is a work of art, I think. You have to hold it and listen to the annoyingly high-peached “BEEEEEEP” for just a second and a half, then let go and hope Siri picks up. I’ll probably take it back to Best Buy. I’m hoping someone will invent a more Siri-friendly headset.

Conclusion

In all, the iPhone 4S is nice. If you buy it, you’re buying it for Siri and not much else. Some might be swayed by the camera, but the star here is Siri.

If you struggle with a southern-Indiana twang like me sometimes, you have to put on your best radio announcer voice for it to work. I still slur “Yer” and “Tuh” for “Your and “To” on more occasions that I care to admit. Siri doesn’t seem to mind that, though, but anything thicker might confound her. I also wish I could change the voice to a male voice. Call me a flaming homosexual, but I don’t really want a woman inside my phone. I can imagine a lot of women might be slightly put-off by that, too. As if of course the woman has to be the “personal assistant”. Soon, I’m sure, Apple will give us options. I know they claim it’s a beta, but come on. Apple doesn’t do betas. I think this was, “We absolutely HAVE to ship a phone and we’re only 99.99999% satisfied with this as-is. So let’s call it “beta” to manage the expectations.

I don’t regret my purchase, though. Siri’s worth it.

The problem, evidently, was that the file permissions somewhere along the line got royally screwed. So much so I couldn’t even open my iPhoto library on my Air; I could read some files but not write (which prompted problems with Pages, Numbers and Keynote files trying to Auto Save).

I went to the Genius Bar and the Apple Genius, named Wayne, struck me as incredibly rude and unhelpful. He told me “I don’t know what you did, so I can’t help you.” At one point he said he “needed to move on”, so he told me to run Migration Assistant on a Mac I told him I didn’t even own anymore. Which is why I’m not opposed to naming his name here. Luckily, I figured out my problem.

I came home and did some more research. Using Terminal sudo commands didn’t work, using “Get Info” and applying them to all files on the external disk didn’t work and even selecting individual files didn’t work. The result was infuriating, even when I clicked “Ignore Permissions on this Disk”.

Turns out, there’s a utility I’m linking to here for the Googlers searching around for a way to repair disk permissions without Disk Utility, which doesn’t work on user files; just system files.

It’s called Permissions Reset, it’s Lion-compatible and is available for download here: http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/31741/permissions-reset

It works wonderfully where everything seems to have failed. I’d recommend having a backup of even the semi-locked files, then running this on a few files or folders first. If so, I went whole hog after testing and just ran it on the whole disk by dropping the icon into the utility. Then I set the “Owner” from “root” or “wheel” in some cases to “myuserid”.

Perfect.

I have sold my old 11″ and the iMac. I have my Time Machine backup set to backup the Air and Carbon Copy Cloner is backing up external files (music, photo, movie libraries) to the Time Machine backup, too.

So, the current setup looks like this:

1 Apple Cinema Display ($1,000)
1 13″ MacBook Air ($1,200)
1 1 TB external hard drive ($80)
1 1 TB external Time Machine backup drive ($80)

My prior setup was:

1 27″ iMac ($1,700)
1 11″ MacBook Air ($1,000)
1 1 TB external hard drive ($80)
1 1 TB external Time Machine backup drive ($80)

I’ve already reduced the valuation from $2,860 to $2,360. Since I can keep the Cinema Display for a good long while (they don’t exactly change much for years at a time), I stand to save some money on upgrade costs later on by swapping $1,200 Airs instead of $1,700 iMacs. It also reduces maintenance burdens and file synchronization (seriously, stop saying “DROP BOX!” I use Drop Box, it’s great, but it’s also almost full. I have a lot of files, ok?)

I can also get amazing portability and access to most all of my files with the Air.

In the near future, I intend to upgrade the Cinema Display to a Thunderbolt Display (I still have 12 days to return this display to Apple) and plug in a Thunderbolt-capable external hard drive to save most of my larger external files. I won’t even notice a slight bit of lag then on writing files.

Then the current 1 TB drive will serve as a backup and I’ll plug it into my Airport Extreme and then I’ll have my own homemade “cloud drive” with all my files, accessible from anywhere. Neat! I’m also giving BackBlaze a trial for cloud backup of my files, too. (I looked at Carbonite first, but it doesn’t backup files on external hard drives, where most of my files now live).

The Air is amazing. I have managed to get it fired up a time or two that the fans kicked on, but it’s a very quiet, quick machine. I turned to my iMac earlier to fire up Safari and gave up waiting on it to load. I managed to load, search and find what I needed on my Air faster than my iMac could boot Safari.

I’d recommend this setup to anyone who does light computing for sure, and would advise high-end geeks consider it, too.

My first observation was that they are not prepared to handle people like me. I walked in and spoke to an older associate, probably one of the oldest I’ve ever seen working there. I kinda preferred that, actually. I told him I wanted a Thunderbolt cable to plug from my Air to my iMac so I could just use the iMac’s display for a while with the Air. I knew the price and capabilities of the cable, the associate did not. He thought the cable was $29, I said it was $49, he checked and it was $49. I wanted reassurance that what I wanted to do was possible and he went to check with others to verify. Everyone seemed to think plugging the cables in would work. It did not.

My second trip to the Apple Store was to return that cable and for a Cinema Display. I wanted one of the new Thunderbolt Displays. The person I spoke with, whose name I don’t remember, I recall being very speedy and jittery. He kept shuffling around and bouncing all over the place and said, “Yep yep yep” a lot. I couldn’t tell if he was just like that or was trying to hurry me the hell up.

He went to the back of the store to check for a new display and came out with a big box. I handed him my credit card and he stopped to say, “Wait a minute…let me check something.” He turned and noticed the display was the prior generation, a non-Thunderbolt enabled display. He almost sold me the wrong product from what I asked for. This, of course, was after I stood there for 8 (!) minutes waiting for someone else just to bring it out of the back of the store. As much as Apple’s tried to make their stores efficient with payment and sales help, they fumble hard on that front.

So I left without buying the old display. But I wanted to try out my Air in an Air-only setup without my iMac. So I went back the next day to buy the old display with the knowledge and proclamation to the next associate that I would bring it back in 14 days and hope to get the new one. They were cool with that, and I was cool with that, too.

However, things took a downturn when I spoke to a young female associate about the display. She didn’t even know if the displays in the store were the old or new ones. When I asked, “So, I can just plug in my thunderbolt cable to the Mini Display port and the USB ports from the monitor to enable the three ports on the back, right?” She nodded slowly.

“Yeah, and the Thunderbolt cable will deliver power to the Air, too and enable the use of the USB ports on the back of the display.” She said. “Wait, why does the display have a USB plug and a power adapter then?”

I knew what the monitor needed. The old displays had three cables: one for power, one for USB and one for MiniDisplay. The new ones just use Thunderbolt for USB and display and they have a power adapter, too.

“Yeah.” She said. “Yeah? You mean that little ol’ MiniDisplay port brings power and connectivity to everything?” (It doesn’t.)

“Yeah, I don’t know much about these displays. Let me get someone else.” She quickly turned and returned with a cute little guy. I do remember his name because he made a good impression on me. He was knowledgable about the products, even if he did somewhat talk down to me (he explained what Engadget was to me as he looked up Thunderbolt specs. I know what Engadget is dude.)
So I bought the display and I have it sitting on my desk as we speak. I will try to upgrade it in the next week or so to the Thunderbolt display, hopefully as they get them in.

My last trip to the Apple Store was Friday night. I sold my 11” Air on eBay for a good price and went back to buy a 13” with better specs. I spoke to a guy who also made a good impression on me and I remember his name, too. He was my favorite of all the reps I’ve spoken to, as he was smart, pleasant, conversational and seemed like the kind of guy you’d want to share a beer with. He wasn’t overly hipster or punk or emo or whatever the kids are these days.

We talked shop a bit as I debated between a high powered 11” Air, a mid-powered 13” Air or a 13” MacBook Pro. Talking through it as I debated (trying to balance price and speed), he wasn’t afraid to talk specs with me and gathered pretty quickly I knew what I was doing. After I decided on buying a 13” Air, he told me, “I’m supposed to ask, but do you want Apple Care?” I said, “No. I don’t keep them long enough to warrant the expense.” He agreed and added, “Yeah, I don’t know why we sell it with the Airs, personally. They’re no moving parts in them besides the fans.” That was the first refreshingly honest thing I’ve ever heard any Apple associate say. Kudos to him. If someone from Apple is reading this and you’re feeling like your associate didn’t do this job: yes, he did. He understood his customer perfectly and still did his job like you asked. His remark may not fit the Apple PR guidelines, but I know better and he knew it.

I still love Apple products and much prefer the experience at an Apple store vs. other retailers. God forbid you ask questions at a Wal-Mart. I bought an iPod there once and the clerk made no hesitation at telling me “they are junk” and his no-name piece of crap Sony thing was “far superior”. That the “Apple fanboys are stupid,” this AS I’M BUYING AN iPOD!. This was two months ago.

Apple’s retail experience is good, but they’re clearly designed and trained to deal with the masses. If you know what you want or know anything about RAM or processor speeds, you’re beyond anything they’ve reasonably trained for. Luckily, I guess, most people aren’t like me.

I decided to see if I could live and work comfortably using my MacBook Air as my only and primary machine. I’m a web designer by trade and I’m continually using heavy apps like Fireworks, Photoshop and sometimes editing video in Final Cut Express. My workflow does not lend itself to the Air from a processor-perspective.

My current iMac is a 27” Core i5 with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB hard drive. My current MacBook Air is the base model 11” with 2GB of RAM and 64GB of hard drive space.

I’m making good use of an Apple Cinema Display and a 2TB external hard drive. The current Cinema Display I have is not Thunderbolt-capable, however. I’m trying this display out and if I like this kind of setup, I will upgrade to the Thunderbolt-enabled one. My current Air is thunderbolt-ready.

So far I’ve worked on the “new PC setup” stuff. Trying to copy my files and obscure codecs, preference files, licenses, etc. to the Air has been laborious to say the least. Trying to keep some things on the Air and some things on the external HD is cumbersome and requires me to shift my thinking to how I save and manage files.

At this point, the Air is humming along wonderfully. The RAM is almost always continually full, as I leave a lot of apps open at once (hey, I need ‘em, ok?). However, the Air’s SSD effectively gives this thing 30GB of RAM through the virtual page file (I have about 30GB of free space left). It’s just as fast as the RAM in a lot of ways. RAM is not the issue I’m coming up against.

So far, my issue is with hard drive space and speed. The external HD I have is USB-3 capable and does ok, but like external drives do, it shuts itself off after a while of inactivity and the process of spinning it back up often comes when I try to save a file or some other inopportune time. It takes a moment and brings the OS to a screeching halt until it can read whatever it’s trying to read on the disk.

This is where I’m assuming a Thunderbolt-enabled hard drive would work great, except none exist. So until I can get my hands on one, this appears to be the biggest slow-down of this setup.
My plan at this point is to get my hands on a Thunderbolt Cinema Display, a Thunderbolt hard drive, and probably try to upgrade the Air. A 13” with a 128 GB hard drive seems like the best option at this point. Although, the 64GB version would work great for anyone who does light computing work.

If you are busy and can’t take an incoming call on your iPhone, or you are already in a call and can’t take the second call, you can press a shortcut to send an SMS with a preset ‘I’ll call you back’ message to the person calling you.

Simply press Volume down + Sleep button while the phone rings (again, this can be done to an new incoming call or when you are already having a phone conversation and a second person is trying to reach you), then it will confirm the phone number, and just have to press send. The number is already in there, but the numeric keyboard comes up in order to change the recipient or make some modification to the number.

well it may be a cool application on itouch or ipad. but definitely not fun on a mac. the graphic is not good enough and u can even see the pixels. Anyways it doesnt worth 9.99 dollars at all!!!!

Double points for calling it an “iTouch” and complaining that he sees pixels while simultaneously demonstrating no understanding of third grade English.