Ishcabittle

subtitled: How Apple created massive incentive to stick to the iOS/iTunes ecosystem in ten easy features.

Well.  If you haven’t already (and this sort of thing interests you, you should, if not, stop reading now as this will bore you to death) go check out the video of today’s keynote. 

To say that today was a red letter day for Apple may be understating it.  Between previewing a new desktop OS, a new mobile OS, and a new cloud service, they surely had their plate full.  I caught myself saying, “This is huge.” several times during the keynote.  Some thoughts stuck out that I thought I would share.

Lion, OS X 10.7

• Mission Control - I use Spaces a great deal, and this looks much more fantastic.  Most users won’t get the most out of it, but those who use it will really use it.
• Autosave and Versions - These are features designed to make, “I lost my data!” calls easier on me, the consultant.
• Mail - If all they added was the improved search, I would be psyched.  The iOS-like interface may be a little much, but I’m sure we’ll get used to it.
• Price - The tradition of charging thirty bucks for a major OS update is solidifying with this second release, first with 10.6, now with 10.7.  When you have 30 billion dollars in the bank, you can afford to give your users a break.

iOS 5

• Notification Center - seemingly the combination of two jailbreak applications (MobileNotifier and Intelliscreen), this is what users have been clamoring for ever since iOS 2.0.  Ironically, the jailbreak application MobileNotifier (billed as “notifications done right” in Cydia) was largely untouched, with just a little polish added.  I’m interested to see how it works, but it looks better than Android’s notifications - let’s just hope it feels better as well.
• Twitter - integrated at the OS level, it makes system wide tweeting available.  Great if you are a twitter fiend, otherwise not that impressive until you consider single sign on.  The more applications that use your twitter credentials as a login (OpenFeint is even included among many others), the more applications you don’t have to log into.
• Safari - Reading List is the standout feature here, if only because it competes with the excellent Instapaper service and application.  He has more to say about it on his own blog.
• Reminders - Useful for someone like me in that I could set the reminder of what I need to do with a client to pop up when I reach their location.
• Camera - The CameraPlus guys must be pissed, but not as pissed as the Red-Pop guys.  Pressing a physical button to activate the shutter is going to make the iPhone camera that much more usable and legitimate.
• Wifi Sync - Finally, right?  This is nice for many reasons; delta updates, nightly backups while your asleep and the phone’s on the charger, and media sync are the obvious ones, but the biggest reason in my book is the Grandma Factor.  You can now give an iPad to someone who doesn’t own a computer and they can do everything they need to do from setup, backup, media, to updating the OS.
• iMessage - Look out BBM, AIM, and your carrier’s text messaging.  Blackberry lost their one edge, AIM looks like it is largely irrelevant (well, maybe just for iOS users, but especially if iMessage integrates with iChat) and everyone I would normally text is on an iPhone, why would I pay for unlimited messaging now?
• AirPlay Mirroring - this was a throwaway feature barely mentioned, but I can see this being very big for gaming on an AppleTV if they solve the lag problem.  Your iPad is the console and the controller, the HDTV is your display.
• Unmentioned - Emoji, dictionary system wide, alternate routes in Google Maps, sync Exchange tasks OTA, speak text selections, and arguably the biggest of the unmentioned, the iTunes Tone store and the ability to set sounds for email, voicemail, calendar, and text messaging.

iCloud

• MobileMe - iTools, .Mac, MobileMe, and now iCloud.  Each piece of software was a product that Apple tried to sustain, first for free, then for money, as a service that incentivized users to purchase Apple products. Each of the first three perished in their own way, succeeded by the one after.  iCloud takes over with more features and yet less actual storage (5GB).  I would argue, however, that iCloud incentivizes users much more than MobileMe ever could.  The core apps, Mail, Contacts, and Calendar now sync for free but that’s not even half of it, they are joined by a host of superior features.
• Purchase History - The biggest incentive to purchase in the iTunes Music Store, you can now review your purchase history in iTunes and download any past purchases.  This inspires confidence like nothing else - purchase once, play anywhere, no need to backup, we got it covered.  Previous to today, the onus to backup your iTunes purchases was on the client, with iTunes even reminding you periodically to backup.  Now, there is no need as all of your purchases are available to download at any time.
• iCloud Documents - I’m writing this post up in Notational Velocity, but I also edited it on the train ride home in Elements, thanks to DropBox syncing.  iCloud Documents solves that same problem in Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, both in iOS and in OS X.  I don’t think it is the DropBox killer people are making it out to be, but I do think that the iWork suite just got a great deal more valuable by integrating this technology.  There are some things that DropBox will still do better (namely public access, any file type, music/movie streaming, and more) but it is making me consider dropping my plain text note taking system for a rich text editor that syncs just as well.
• Photo Stream - With the advent of Airplay, you could snap a photo and then broadcast it to your AppleTV seconds later.  Photo Stream is going to make that look archaic by comparison, whereby you snap a photo and then it is available on your AppleTV, iPad, iPhoto Library, and any other associated device.  Your iPhoto Library gets your pictures from your vacation before you even arrive home - snap vacation shots, get your iPhone stolen, and still retain your pictures (maybe even get some of the thief).  It’s pretty amazing to thing that you will never need to open iPhoto or Image Capture and manually sync your photos ever again.
• iTunes Match - The competitor to Amazon Cloud Player and Google Music, but with a couple twists.  This is the only piece of software in the iCloud suite that you pay for, and the price is ridiculously cheap.  At $25.00/year, I am much more likely to buy this than I ever was to buy MobileMe, and I bought MobileMe for three years.  No uploading required, iTunes scans your library and if it is in the iTunes store, you can download it on any device.  There are a couple of ways I’m going to abuse this system: upgrade the 128Kbps MP3s that I encoded back in 2000 (or “appropriated” from Napster); remove everything from my laptop to keep it light, download the album I want to listen to at that moment, delete when I finish listening.  The first twist with iTunes Match is that I can’t do any of this with music that isn’t in the store, namely live shows, my own music, or the odd obscure band that wouldn’t be in iTunes anyway.  In this respect, I’m tempted to get a folder together that is just for Google Music, but more likely than not I’m just going to drop out of the Google Music beta.  The web app is hard to navigate (sluggish) and I don’t own an Android device.  The second twist is that you have to download a song before you listen to it, you don’t stream it over the air.  Now this may change, this specific version of the service is in beta, but it’s important to note.

So what can we derive as the biggest improvements?  Arguably, reviewing your purchase history is the most tangible benefit, one we can take advantage of immediately. The other huge step forward is the PC-free status iOS now shares with Android. Previously, iOS didn’t have anything on par with the setup experience of an Android device: open box, input google ID, everything is there.  Now iOS competes in that regard.

One thing that isn’t on par with other streaming services is the mechanics of iCloud’s music streaming - a misnomer as it in fact does not stream.  Bring up your purchases in iTunes on your iOS device and find that you can stream the standard 90 second preview of each song, but to listen to the whole thing, you must download it.  You can download over 3G, which AT&T must not necessarily care for, but you can.  Most of us assumed that the purchase of Lala was to institute some new streaming service where no local storage was needed, but what we got was multiple downloads of purchased (free to redownload) and ripped ($25/year) content.  Streaming content providers like Rdio, Pandora, Last.fm, and the like are safe for the moment.

The last thing I would like to point out are the number of technologies or ideas that Apple has added to iOS 5 that have already been done elsewhere:

1. Notifications (Cydia’s MobileNotifier)
2. Lockscreen widgets (Cydia’s Intelliscreen)
3. Reading List (App Store’s Instapaper)
4. Wifi / iCloud Sync (Android Market’s Doubletwist / Google ID integration)
5. Reminders (App Store’s Things and other GTD apps)
6. iMessage (RIM’s BBM network)
7. iCloud Documents (App Store’s DropBox enabled text editors)

Point out any that I have missed.  That’s not to say Apple stole any of these technologies, hell, they hired Hajar for MobileNotifier, but it is interesting to note how much of this release is catchup to existing concepts.  We’ll have to see how Apple’s takes on these concepts measure up to what’s out there, and whether “it just works”.

I installed and began uploading at 5:00PM, May 26th.

By 7:30AM, May 27th, 1,467 out of 16,139 tracks have been uploaded.

At that rate, it will take 159 hours, 20 minutes (6 1/2 days) to complete the upload assuming all track sizes are average.

That’s at an average upload rate of 600KB/s, with the average American broadband upload speed less than 1Mbps (yielding an upload speed of about 100KB/s or less) an average American household would take six times as long to upload the same number of tracks.

I have a client who has over 700GB of music in his iTunes, an amalgamation of tracks ripped from his thousands of CDs, “borrowed” tracks from buddies at work, and purchased music from iTunes, both DRMed and non-DRM.  With that volume, he would have to select the 20,000 tracks to upload, a process I’m sure he would loath to do.  Let assume he picks a solid balance of track sizes.  His home internet connection is 5Mbps downstream, 600Kbps upload (with a yield of 75KB/s maximum upload, practical yield is around 40KB/s).

On his connection, it would take (and this is rough math, I assure you) approximately 740 hours (30 days) to upload the portion of his collection he wished to stream to the cloud.

I am already growing impatient with this upload, and I have a good connection.  Good enough that I’ve seen some sort of progress from yesterday to today.  Folks with poorer connections will be less patient than I, and the stigma will be, “Google Music is a cool idea, I could never get the upload to complete.”  This, to me, is why Google Music and Amazon Cloud Drive are going to pale next to iCloud (or whatever Apple’s music service will be called).  With label support, iCloud will be able to scan your collection and immediately mirror tracks that are already in the iTunes Store, no upload required.  You’ll be able to use the service for a vast majority of your music from minute one, and with no arbitrary track limit.  For that convenience (and the removal of the associated hit to my monthly bandwidth cap at Comcast) I would be willing to pay.

I’m not saying I’m not impressed with Google Music’s promise, 20,000 tracks is a huge amount of data to store for each user.  I’m sure their data centers needed massive storage pool upgrades before they went online with this beta, I’m just not sure that this technological feat of storage and network streaming is based on a good concept.