For the last couple of days I’ve been trying to install some new software on the Ubuntu Linux machine that my kids use in their playroom. Being able to get a real computer for the kids for about $75 (about half of which was spent on the monitor; the box itself is a castoff desktop from the college that I bought for $10) and run all the software they could possibly want to use at their age for free has been great. But having to deal with the technical side of Linux and the usability issues in software reminds me of why I no longer use Linux in my daily life.

Back in 2001, when I started my new job at my current institution, I took the plunge and installed Red Hat Linux on my school computer rather than Windows. I had a colleague at my former work who was a Linux zealot and I figured I would take the transition period to my new job to switch operating systems. At the time, one of the driving reasons for doing so was the simple realization that, although I used computers all the time in my work and at home, I really didn’t understand how computers work. I figured running Linux would allow me a chance to learn, as well as expose me to some very good open-source software.

My experience with Linux satisfied both of those objectives very nicely. I learned about what an operating system actually is, how it works, what can make it fail, how software works when designed to work with a certain operating system, and more. As for software, there are a lot of good applications out there, and I still miss Kile for doing editing.

But Linux wore me out. I was running it on a Toshiba laptop, and all too frequently, the basic functions that I needed from the computer would simply not work — or stop working as soon as I performed a kernel upgrade. Wifi was a huge problem, as was printing. I was constantly having to go in, tweak all kinds of technical settings, fail at those, then spend an hour surfing Linux discussion boards for a solution, trying a few that often screwed the system up worse than it already was, and then maybe after a couple of hours of this, the system would work as it was supposed to. Or maybe not.

Eventually I realized that I was losing so much productivity during the work day, having to surf the internet and try stuff out just to get the damned printer to work, that I was losing time to spend with my wife, and later my kid. The final straw came one afternoon when I had to stay at work an extra hour because the computer wouldn’t shut off. Why am I wasting all this time trying to get a computer to work? Is it just geek hubris, trying to prove to the world that I can do my job without having to pay for my OS or software? Well, how much value have I lost in trying to attain to that?

Soon after, in 2006, I switched to a Macbook Pro and never looked back. Yes, it’s proprietary. No, the stuff on there (not most of it) is neither free nor open-source. I am paying money for stuff and there’s a good possibility I am locking myself in to a certain make of software from which I cannot extricate myself if I had to. And I’m loving it. Why? Because it all just works.

More recently, when I was setting the kids’ Linux box up, I had to practically move heaven and earth to get Flash to work in the Firefox browser. Almost all of what the kids do with the computer is go to the internet and play Flash-based games. Without Flash, the computer basically serves as a footrest. I did manage finally to get Flash working on the browser, but I cannot explain how I did it and certainly could not do it again if I had to — not without another two hours of looking around the internet for other people’s workarounds.

I understand that with Linux, I am working with a free, open-source OS — and OS’s are complicated, delicate things that have to handle all kinds of hardware on systems where the hardware is not designed to work together. And moreover, I understand that Flash is a commercial product and you cannot just stick it on a free, open-source OS. I get it. But it’s dumb. Flash is everywhere, like it or not, and by golly it ought to simply work on a browser without my having to mess with it while my 5-year old is hanging over my shoulder saying “Daddy, when’s the computer going to be fixed?” for the umpteenth time. Understand? It’s for the children!

Another example: When I download a game for the kids, and it successfully installs, why doesn’t it automatically show up in the Games menu? Why should I have to figure out how to add things to the menu, and then when I read the instructions the icon for the game isn’t there to add it? And why does this happen with some games and not others? (True story.)

So to sum up, I like the idea of Linux. I like using Linux — when it works. I managed to make it work for me in my job as a professor for five years. But ultimately the problem is that Linux has a long way to go to simply work in all the situations where I need it to, and every time I use Linux I am reminded of why I switched. Until the “just works” factor improves with Linux — and to be fair, with Ubuntu, Linux has made some giant steps in the usability direction —  I remain your faithful Mac fanboy, using all the OS power of Unix underneath a shiny, happy, Steve-Jobs-saturated veneer of OS X goodness.

…I got one.

The story left off with me giving up trying to justify spending $399 for the 32 GB model, even though I’d saved up for it. Cheapness is in my DNA, and I’ve never been able to spend money on anything without feeling like I should have stuck it in a savings account instead. But, one day, my wife comes home and informs me that the daughter of one of her co-workers works at the Apple Store in Indy and gets a 15% “friends and family” discount. After trading a few emails, the deal was set up, and a few days later I had my grubby hands all over it (you see just how grubby your hands really are with this thing) with $60 knocked off the price. So, you see? It pays to wait.

I’ve been using it basically nonstop for a week now, and here are my overall impressions:

• It’s incredibly thin and light, yet it also feels very sturdy, and despite having an all-shiny-aluminum back I haven’t seen any big scratches on it yet.
• The screen is just unreal. Such crispness and clarity.
• Wifi speed is quite decent, and the Safari browsing experience is just fine even on sites that show up in very tiny font.
• The built-in apps are hit and miss. Besides Safari, I’ve really liked using the Mail app (although our stupid MS Exchange server at school can’t be accessed off-campus except through a web page…), and the Maps app is absolutely killer. The Calendar app will be really useful once I figure out how to get my iCal calendars to sync with it. The YouTube app just seems really slow. Weather is OK. Calculator is cute. Stocks, Notes, Contacts, and Clock are unnecessary.
• As a straight-up music player, the whole informatics/human-computer interface aspect of the Touch is amazing. What I mean is that it’s not so much the high fidelity of the sound reproduction that blows me away but the ability to quickly browse and access songs and videos. Not a square millimeter of screen space is wasted; everything is logically laid out and easy to use. This was the same kind of feeling I had when I first used a second-generation iPod with a click wheel.
• Videos are a real treat to watch on this, and it’s been lots of fun exploring what video podcast content is available out there.
• I’ve downloaded some free apps: IM+ for instant messaging, a WordPress app for blogging (haven’t tried using it yet), Pandora (where has that been all my life?), Facebook, WeatherBug. I’ve downloaded a few more that I immediately deleted because it was crap. There seems to be a lot of good free stuff out there and a whole lot of good paid stuff and about an equal amount of crap (free and paid). I’m hopeful that the app selection will keep growing and growing so that although the crap-to-noncrap ratio might stay constant, the amount of non-crap will increase.
• I also paid $20 for the iPhone/iPod Touch version of OmniFocus, the “desktop” version of which I use religiously for GTD on the Macbook Pro. I’m still getting used to it; the main advantage is that I can synchronize tasks to and from the Macbook using MobileMe (we still have 4 months left on the subscription we got for Christmas last year). But it’s nice — rather than carting around a stack of 3×5 cards or a Moleskine for on-the-go task collection, I can just use the iPod.
• I’ve gotten surprisingly good at using the little pop-up thumb keyboard that you get whenever you have to enter text.
• The battery charges a lot faster than my old iPod (about 60-75 minutes from 0% to 100%). And if you leave the wifi off, it seems to get a lot better battery life too. But if you use the wifi, the battery life drains out fast. Not surprising.

I could go on, and I probably will, but here’s something that sums up how much of an impact this little device is having on me. I had to go to an ATM to get some cash, and when it prompted me to enter “OK”, I started tapping the screen. It took me 10 seconds or so to remember that I had to push a button instead. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d tried to pinch and zoom on the ATM screen. So I’m very glad to have waited until I was capable of getting exactly what I wanted, and comfortable in getting it.

So at the end of the comment thread on my iPod lust decision process about whether or not to buy a new iPod touch, I concluded somewhat glumly that I had probably better wait until the gap between what I’d saved up and what the 32 GB model costs is made up somehow. I am happy to announce the gap has been closed, and then some, thanks to the dude that comes around every now and then to buy back textbooks. He just happened to drop in this afternoon, and I freakin’ unloaded, to the tune of three dozen books sold back. (My shelves are happy too.)

In case you’re unfamiliar with this process, there are people who make a living off of coming by professors’ offices and purchasing unused books for cash (at a rate far less than their retail value)  and then selling them to the open market. Ever wonder where those used books in the college bookstore come from? Some of them come from students, but a lot of them come from the buy-back people.

But there’s an ethical dilemma. A lot of the books I am selling back are review copies which were sent to me, gratis, by the publisher. This practice of sending out free books all the time is a major contributor to skyrocketing textbook prices. I’m having some guilt pangs about taking the money I get from selling books, which I received for free but for which students have to pay exorbitant amounts, to buy an iPod. On the one hand, I feel like I am profiting from students’ misfortune. On the other hand, by selling books back to the book-buying dude, who will then sell them at a cut rate to campus bookstores, I am providing a robust supply of lower-cost pre-owned books to students who would otherwise have to pay a lot more for the new versions. And let’s face it, I really want that iPod.

Am I overthinking this?

Apple today announced the newest iteration of the iPod nano and some changes to the iPod touch, among other things. This has been an eagerly-awaited day for me, since I took the honorarium from my April gig at Benedictine University and salted away most of it to get an iPod touch once the updates came out. But I must admit that I was really hoping that the 32GB model would be under $300; I was $100 off. So I turn to the blogosphere to help me decide how to blow my stash.

Constraints and preferences: I have $232.50 saved up. I have 12 GB of music (just music, no video) in iTunes and I would like to carry all of it with me plus some video. I would like — really like — to have mobile access to wifi in a handheld device. I currently have a 20GB photo iPod (second generation? third generation? something like that). And coming up with a whole lot of extra money — OK, well, really any amount of extra money — right now is doable but difficult to justify in the family budget.

Do I:

1. Go for the 16GB iPod touch at $299, which is pretty close to what I have saved, and just deal with having 4 GB less space on the device than I currently have?
2. Somehow (!) come up with $150 and go for the 32 GB iPod touch?
3. Forget the iPod touch and go out and get one of the new nanos, which at $199 I can buy right now with no extra funding required and still have some left over — and muddle through without the mobile wifi?
4. Do nothing and just wait around for the next round of upgrades?

Go ahead, spend my money for me!

My interest in the new iPhone has never reached critical mass, but after finding out that I can get 15% off AT&T cell phone plans through my work, I started thinking again. The basic family plan, after discount, would be $100 per month, which is more than what we’re paying now ($60/month) but possibly worth it if the iPhone is as great as some say. But my interest tanked again when I saw the coverage map near my house:

The finger on the map is roughly where I live. The orange color indicates “good” coverage, which according to AT&T means that it “should be sufficient for on-street or in-the-open coverage, most in-vehicle coverage and possibly some in-building coverage”. If I stray over to the other side of our subdivision into the yellow, it’s only “moderate”. Most of where I live and work is no better than “good”.

Sorry: But if I’m going to drop $300 on the phone and $1200 per year on the service, I want a little better than being able to maybe-sort-of use the iPhone inside my house and only a relative degree of certainty I can use it at all, even standing out in the front yard.

It reinforces my conception that iPhones are for city folks and people who travel a lot, who make up a large and vocal portion of the pro-iPhone blogosphere and who don’t have to worry about whether they’ve got cell phone tower coverage in the first place. As for the rest of us, well, I don’t think the network is ready for us yet.

Or am I missing some important point here?

Dear Steve Jobs,

I appreciate your noticing that the iPhone is prohibitively expensive for most some people. Cutting the price to $199 for the basic model is a good step. But: When the phone/data plan for the iPhone still starts at a minimum of $60 per month, cutting the price doesn’t make the thing more affordable. You’re talking about a reduction of $200 or so to a one-time startup price, but keeping the cost of ownership unchanged. Whereas, if the good people at AT&T would cut the price of the plan, you could likely keep the price unchanged and it would be a lot more affordable.

But then again, you are a genius and a rock star all at the same time, so why am I telling you this? Instead, please assert your reality-distortion field on your pals at AT&T to get them to play ball with normal people who like technology but can absolutely live without it if the price is too high. Which it is.

Affordability is a lot more than the price on the sticker of the gizmo. That is all.

Last week, my wife had to reboot our Mac mini, and she got… the blinking file folder icon. For the uninitiated, the blinking file folder is the OS X equivalent of the blue screen of death. I spent an evening trying all the tricks on Apple’s support pages and trying to get it to boot from the OS X install disc, but no dice. 

So today the Mrs. and I took a trip up to the Apple Store to get a Mac Genius opinion. The verdict was what I suspected: the hard drive is dead. Fortunately we don’t keep a lot of critical data on the hard drive (the iPod has all our iTunes stuff, and our photos and movies are on an external drive) so the data loss is not catastrophic. We could possibly replace the hard drive, but we’d be looking at spending $400+ on parts and labor to fix a computer that’s four years old and was showing its age. So we’re declaring the Mac mini deceased. 

It looks like we’ll be replacing it with the low-end current model of iMac. We’d get another Mac mini, but after seeing the iMac’s gorgeous monitor up-close, both my wife and I suddenly couldn’t deal with the 8-year old CRT we were using as the mini’s monitor. Just the 20 inch size for us — after spending all my time on a 17-inch laptop monitor I kind of got lost in all the space on a 24-inch monitor. 

While at the Apple Store, we got a good look at the Macbook Air. It’s not the machine for me — I need more stuff on my laptop than the MBA has — but it is certainly very impressive and visually striking. It is so light, you’d almost think it was not a real computer at all but just a prop. 

And the Apple Store itself is something of a marvel. While so many mall stores are foundering and depressingly empty, there were at least 100-150 people in the Apple Store and they were all buying stuff. (Well, we weren’t.) It was crowded, loud, and active — more like an exclusive club on a Saturday night than a mall store on a Saturday afternoon. I think Apple, as a company, is in pretty good shape these days if this is the pace of their business. 

After saying that Apple needed to add more storage to the iPod Touch before they could count on me buying one, they have obliged. Unfortunately the prices haven’t changed, and the 16 GB (which would just barely be big enough for me) is still $399. The new 32 GB model is $499.  Look: $500 is way too much for a music player, sorry, no matter how much stuff it does.

Now all Apple has to do is make the 32 GB model $399 and the 16 GB one $299, and we’re in business. or better ye, make the 32 GB model $299. Or maybe $29.

Information design guru Edward Tufte has posted his analysis of the iPhone’s user interface, which includes this video which you simply must see. If that video doesn’t make you want to run out and venerate buy an iPhone, there’s something wrong with you.

He’s generally very positive about the UI, although he points out some “cartoony” elements here and there (really thick buttons, wasted space in the Weather app, etc.) that I don’t think I would have ever been bothered by until I heard what he had to say.

Some interesting comments in the article about the Weather app, too. I get the feeling there are tons of developers out there (some of whom are likely among the commenters) raring to go once the iPhone opens up to third party apps.

It’s not just Wilkes University that is contemplating an institution-wide switch from Windows machines to OS X machines running both OS’s under Boot Camp.

At Princeton University, 31 percent of students’ computers connected to the campus network in fall 2006 were Macs, compared with 10 percent in 2003-4. Similar gains have been reported across the country. In fall 2006, 20 percent of freshmen at the University of Virginia owned Macs, compared with 3 percent four years earlier. At Dartmouth College, which has historically had strong Apple support, the numbers are even higher, with 55 percent of freshmen last semester reportedly using Macs. [...]

n 2006, two colleges separately took the unusual step of switching to Mac lab environments with the dual-boot option: Wilkes University, in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., and Bemidji State University, in Bemidji, Minn. Both began purchasing iMacs to gradually replace their existing PCs over a several-year upgrade cycle, and some other state institutions in Minnesota are following suit. Already, other colleges across the country have begun contacting the IT directors behind the shift as they consider whether going Mac-only makes sense for them as well.

The article also points out that Penn State has been thinking about this as well, but “any talk of switching to a single platform is off the table” because of the sheer size of the university and the multiplicity of computing needs among students and faculty there. That seems right; the whole point is not to lock oneself into any particular format but rather to invest in the technology that is going to work the best for the longest amount of time for minimal cost. Which is a pretty good argument against being a “Microsoft campus”.

I’ve noticed an uptick in new Mac users around my college as well, including our president. And the parents of a lot of the prospective students I’ve met this year have said they’ll be buying their kids Macs once they get to college. And the IT people are laughing less and less when I mention us doing an institutional switch…