Apple Store, Please Stop Using UPS

UPS is probably a great service for b2b deliveries. But UPS blows when it comes to servicing consumer deliveries. I'm disappointed that Apple.com doesn't use Puraltor or Canada Post for all it's home deliveries. Here's why:

I receive many parcels by post. But I'm not home during the day. That's usually okay. I get home, find the notice and head off to the local post office or the local Puralator pick up. I don't have any complaints about making these jaunts to pick up parcels. It's part of the process. However, Apple.com often uses UPS, and, UPS doesn't have a pick up location in my city. So now, I'm left to choose one of several bad options:
1) take a day off work for each delivery, so I can be there to sign for them.
2) waive signing, so they can leave my new compy on the porch, unattended.
3) drive approximately 65km through cross-town traffic for each delivery.

The moral of the story is this: DON'T BUY HARDWARE FROM APPLE.COM if you're not going to be home to meet the delivery guy.

My Snow Leopard Wish List

One thing I like about being a Mac user is the surprises you get. With Windows, anything that will be forthcoming in a future release is known well in advance and generally available in beta. But with Mac, the future is always a black box. Oh sure, there's been some talk about what's to come in Snow Leopard - better performance & smaller footprint - but I think there's more in this black box than we've been told. To compete with Win 7, I'm predicting that Snow Leopard will address a few of the current OSX shortcomings. Here's what I'm hoping to find in the Snow Leopard release:

1. Better font rendering. I want my Mac fonts to be just as readible as my windows fonts, so I think there has to be some improvements to the fonts themselves, or maybe to the antialiasing engine.
   
2. Better Chrome. I'm getting really sick of the gray brushed aluminum that surrounds every application window. (If you can suggest a 3rd party app for this, please do.)
   
3. Improved Spotlight. Please, please, please add meta tags to the search. I've had this in windows for about two years.
   
4. Ditch dock. I really find Dock to be a stupid application. It's obnoxious looking and really doesn't seem very purposeful. Let's chase this circus outta town. Have a look at the Win 7 taskbar and build something similar.

Okay, I'm a Mac convert, but...

Alright, after several months of having both a win 7 and a mac machine side by side, I'm a Mac convert. My windows machine is the blazingly fast X61 tablet with 3 gig of ram, whereas my Mac machine is a lowly little mini mac with only 1 gig of ram. Yet, for some reason, the Mac machine seems to start faster, wake up faster, install apps faster, runs quieter and deals with plugging and unplugging of USB peripherals more elegantly than the PC does.

There are still many things I don't like about the Mac. For long bouts with spreadsheets or word documents, I find the PC better because it displays fonts more crisply than the mac does (on the same monitor and same resolution.) Of course, whenever a tablet would help, I reach for the x61. (Considering how few tablets there are in the world, Win 7 has ridiculously rich support for pens.) But most of the time, I'm heading to the machine for a short duration, or I am doing something that involves jacking in a USB something or another, and in those instances, the Mac is best.

Great article in ITWorld comparing the Mac and Win 7 UIs.

And another thing...

One more area where win > mac: Google maps. On Windows Firefox, you can right click on the map to create new destinations or change a route's start point. I dunno how that's done in macland, but after 10 minutes of looking for it, I just switched to my x61 and was done.

Speaking of Apple's Secrecy...

Is it really just a coincidence that the world's most secretive consumer electronics company is also the company that just drove an employee to suicide over a lost prototype? Oh sure, the young man didn't work directly for Apple, only indirectly. Oh sure, it happened in China where employee protection isn't a priority. But I'm guessing that Apple will be changing their vendor relations policies as a result of this incident.

Chrome

My dream of a Google operating system has been announced. I thought it was too much to hope for. I thought Google grew up too late to bother with an OS at this point. With everything moving into the clouds, who would start a new OS today?

When Andriod came along, I thought, well, there's one avenue to compete with MS and Apple that could expand into a desktop OS. Then, when the Chrome browser came out, I thought it might be the Google alternative to developing an OS. So, I was quite surprised to learn that Chrome is the stepping stone towards a complete desktop OS.

I love the idea of a Google OS for several reasons:

1. COMPUTING POWER: Let's face it, unless you are working at CERN or Pixar, the vast majority of computational power that you are consuming today is happening on Google processors. It doesn't matter whether you are accessing your university's library or kicking back and watching Jacko's head on fire, the vast majority of the high-value math that is going on to bring you what you want is coming from Google. So, it might make sense that the people doing most of the process have a greater say in how the process components are fitting together.
2. GREAT APPS: While not every Google Labs graduate knocks it out of the park, the batting average at Google is extremely high. Google Earth, Google Maps, Picasa, Google Desktop Search - these are all category killers. Remember MapQuest? Remember Adobe Photo Album? These applications were quite dominant and Google shoveled dirt on them. And it wasn't power that brought them to the fore, it was simply that they were better applications. Google Earth is practically miraculous considering the volume of data and processing that it must require, yet it runs more smoothly than iTunes.
3. OPEN AND INNOVATIVE. Apple is the undisputed king of innovation when it comes to user experience, but its legendary secrecy kinda creeps me out. I have a hard time believing that it can be sustainable once Jobs leaves. Linux is the undisputed king of open, but I've never seen a single innovation come from Open Source. It's great at replicating, terrible at innovating. And MS spent the last 20 years trying to hold and fortify whatever area of computing it considered a chokepoint. It's worked well for investors, but it's a very unpleasant starting point. Google is the only one that seems to optimize for all. It's very open, very innovative and it always seems to find business models that optimize value for all.

I'm looking forward to the Chrome OS.