Then I read the orgy of criticism that washed over the blogosphere last night about all the device's perceived failings and, on mature and considered reflection...

I still want one.

(Maybe two, so I don't have to fight with my wife over it.)

What really strikes me about the iPad is how "Apple" it is... in the sense of Apple's product introduction strategy for the last several years. Define a minimum feature set to delight a particular constituency, sweat all the details to serve their immediate needs, ruthlessly leave out features near and dear to the twitterati, and leave plenty of room for upgrades later.

(I mean, look at your iPhone. Do you remember how many limitations the very first iPhone had, less than three years ago? Heck, I didn't buy one until the App Store came online... do you remember that wasn't until a year after launch? And global search and cut-and-paste, to name just two features I use daily, didn't arrive until version 3.0 of the OS.)

This is iPad 1.0. We'll see a lot of changes over the next couple of years. (And, yeah, I'll feel like a chump for being an early adopter, but c'est la vie.)

That being said, my thoughts on a few specific perceived deficiencies:

1. No stylus. I predicted this last week. Give him credit for consistency... Steve Jobs has clearly decided that multi-touch and on-screen keyboards are the future, and he's sticking to his guns. I happen to disagree, and wish there had been a stylus option, but he's the CEO, not me. I'm going to optimistically treat this as a third-party opportunity, and wait for someone to bundle a capacitive stylus with an app similar to OneNote.

 

2. No camera. I have to admit, this one surprised me. I was really expecting a front-facing camera for video iChat. I can think of a couple of reasons why it didn't happen. The prosaic one would be that AT&T told Jobs that their wireless network would keel over and die if millions of people started using videoconferencing in 2Q10... but, if that were the case, it could have been limited to Wi-Fi only.

   I'm going to take a more Jobsian view. Whatever device you have with a front-facing camera—be it a MacBook, or one of the Nokias, or an Android device—you never quite make eye contact with the other party. And this is the sort of detail that drives Jobs mad.

   Check out this Apple patent. Conventional wisdom is that the iPad will get a video camera in a future hardware iteration. I'm claiming otherwise. I now believe that you won't see a version of iPad with a separate front-facing camera... we'll have to wait until the technology matures enough that you can look straight into the screen.

   At which point, we won't be able to imagine doing it any other way. Very Apple.

 

3. Connectivity. I think Apple did exactly the right thing by offering a Wi-Fi only version and a 3G-plus-WiFi version... and the price points aren't bad. People in the U.S. can complain about being limited to the AT&T network all they want, but we have no idea how much money AT&T put on the table to maintain exclusivity!

   For me, since I already have an iPhone with 3G, I'm hoping for some sort of tethering between them. If not... I think you could make a compelling argument for buying the WiFi-only version and a Verizon MiFi. I think that's what I'm going to do.

 

4. Charging. Sigh. This was just wishful thinking on my part. I thoroughly understand Apple's need to control the proprietary 30-pin dock for synching and docking and hardware accessories. But I was hoping that they'd have put in a mini-USB jack with only the power pins connected... so, if you're out somewhere and your battery is dying, you can use a standard charger to get some juice. Mini-USB chargers and cables are ubiquitous, because they're used in Blackberrys, and cameras, and Bluetooth headsets, and even my Harmony remote control. This would have been nice, but I didn't really expect it.

 

5. Micro-SIM. This was my only real "WTF" moment of the announcement. So you create an unlocked 3G device, which will clearly ship globally sometime this year, and instead of the bog-standard SIM card that's been around since rocks were soft, you go with some funky new "standard" that no one else has adopted yet? You can't tell me there's not room for a standard SIM card in a device this size! I don't get it. Apple is all about driving adoption of next-generation standards—from 3.5 inch floppy drives to FireWire to USB—but this just strikes me as dumb. Somebody please explain?

 

Anyhow, those are some of my initial reactions to the criticism. (Which I think will eventually look a lot like "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.")

I already read a lot of books on my iPhone, and this will clearly be a better solution for that... meaning I was right not to jump into the Kindle/Nook fray.

A lot of my evening Internet consumption will fit nicely on my iPad, and I can always walk across the room to my laptop if I need to compose an email of more than a couple of lines.

I'm actively looking forward to walking into presentations with this and a VGA cable (although someone sorely needs to make a thinner VGA cable, or it will be bulkier than the iPad!).

I'm not going to give up my laptop or my iPhone, but I think there's room in between. In two months, we'll see if anyone agrees with me.

I made an expedition to Gwinnett County recently to look at a blimp. (For those reading this who aren't familiar with Metro Atlanta, Gwinnett County is a huge fast-growing region northeast of the city of Atlanta. It has a substantial high-tech base and a committed evangelist. Those of us Inside the Perimeter make a lot of jokes about those hinterlands Outside The Perimeter. They return the favor with nonsensical blather about big houses, great schools, and the absence of random gunfire. De gustibus non est disputandum.)

Anyhow, Tamir Sagle, the CEO of TopEyeView, invited me to a demo of his product. Unlike most demos I see, this one couldn't be done in a Starbucks or in a university lab. This one required an empty parking lot, a honkin' big truck/trailer, and a handful of people. (Tamir says they can do it all with three people in twenty minutes, and I see no reason to disbelieve him.)

Out of the truck comes a partially-inflated blimp. You can get an idea of the scale from the pictures above. You can't ride it, but it can carry a few dozen pounds of useful payload. In this case, a gyroscopically-stabilized broadcast-quality video camera.

Click on the photograph above for a better view: there's a pair of nylon ropes stretching up to the blimp, which is hovering at 450 feet. (TopEyeView has been cleared by the FAA to operate up to 500 feet just about anywhere in the U.S. that's not near an active runway.) A wireless transmitter on the blimp shoots the video signal down to the control station; the line-of-sight ground antenna is about the size of a big hardback book.

The flight director sits at a portable control station where he controls the camera with a joystick. He can zoom in and out, pan up and down, and rotate it 360°. The blimp acts like a huge weathervane, so if you're filming a static target (like a concert stage), the director has to manually keep the camera aimed in the right direction. That job will belong to software in a future version.

The zoom is incredible. The image above is of a baseball field three miles from our parking lot. (All I had was my iPhone camera; it looks a lot better than this photograph implies.) Keeping the image stable was no problem, and the quality was clearly good enough to put on the national news.

When you're done, you let out some of the helium, winch it down, and stuff the partially-inflated blimp back into the truck.

Who would need such a thing?

• Television news stations, obviously. It would have been riveting to have one of these filming from 500 feet up, a quarter mile away from the burning Georgia Theatre this morning.

• Major sporting venues. The Goodyear blimp is an icon over the SuperBowl (although, with roofed stadiums, I don't know why they bother) but this could be deployed for college football games. (Or, in Plano, for high school... )

• Concert and festival promoters. That's a twofer... a security "eye in the sky" during the event, and top-quality video footage to be used for the TV special or DVD later.

• The Border Patrol. The Secret Service. Greenpeace (what's really going on on the other side of that factory fence?). The list goes on.

TopEyeView provides the same quality video that you'd get from a broadcast-equipped helicopter. But you can use it to silently observe your event from the sky all day long for just a few thousand bucks. A helicopter plus a pilot will run you tens of thousands of dollars per deployment, plus they make a hellacious racket, plus they can't fly low over crowds, plus they can only stay on station for a limited time until their fuel runs out. UAVs like this Georgia Tech spin-out are stealthier and quicker to deploy—handy for your local SWAT team!—but can't provide the staying power ("loiter time") or crowd appeal of a blimp.

Tamir and TopEyeView have done all the right things... built a working prototype, gotten some early customers, navigated the FAA's regulatory path, and are—if you'll pardon the pun—ready for takeoff. The next step is to upgrade the blimp to transmit HD video, so they're looking for investment. I met then through Space Angels Network, one of the investment groups I participate in. If you're interested in more information (on the company or on Space Angels Network), drop me an email.

It's refreshing to see an old concept thoroughly reworked with modern technology. And this demonstrates one of the strengths of Atlanta's entrepreneurial community... we're not all Web 2.0 developers (although we're good at that). We're aerospace, and materials science, and semiconductors, and telecomm, and medical devices, and vaccines, and solar cells, and biofuels, and Lord knows what we'll see next. Amid all the economic doom and gloom, Tamir is a reminder that it's a great time to be an entrepreneur in Atlanta!

One of the reasons I love what I do... getting to hang out with cool guys like Blair McIntyre!

Here's the signing ceremony at GEDC in Technology Square. Joy Laskar, director of GEDC, is at the podium, and various GT, state, and customer representatives are at the table.

Today, I received my invitation to the official opening of the Marcus Nanotechnology Center at Georgia Tech, which reminds me that I never posted the photographs from my tour a while back.

The front lobby, facing Ferst Drive, is bound to be a hit for campus receptions. (Note for non-GT alums: Yes, that's how you spell "Ferst" at Georgia Tech. It's the continuation of Fifth Street. Obviously!)

I wish the top picture above did the room justice... without a fisheye lens and a video camera, you can't get the full effect. Weird polygonal fascias bulge out, looming over the space like Neanderthal eyebrows. The red light that I've circled slides back and forth endlessly, like the old-fashioned Cylons from Battlestar Galactica. And you're looking through coated glass at one of the clean rooms (see below) with all manner of mysterious expensive-looking boxes.

Basically, all you need is a bald guy in a wheelchair with a white cat, and you have the perfect lair for a Bond villain.

But looking through that glass, you can begin to see why the $80 million Marcus Nanotech Center is going to be such an asset for the state of Georgia.

Here's the semiconductor side of the building; 20,000 square feet of clean room space dedicated to the sort of equipment that you see in Intel commercials. That's wonderful in and of itself, since Georgia Tech's existing microelectronics center is jammed full and can't expand. But the magic comes on the other side of that square hatch in the back wall. (I didn't get a clear shot of it—follow the red arrow.)

Walk around the building, and here's that hatch from the other side. Now you're looking at it through 10,000 square feet of biochemical "wet labs." Yes, the Marcus Nanotech Center has both physical-science clean rooms and biochemical wet labs in the same building. And researchers can pass samples and work-in-progress back and forth between them.

Such a simple concept. But most of the dozens of nanotechnology centers around the world are either dominated by solid-state physicists moving down in scale from silicon MEMS, or by biologists moving up in scale from enzymes. At Georgia Tech, the intention is to strike a balance between the two worlds. That balance isn't just on a PowerPoint chart... it's cast into millions of dollars of concrete.

Speaking of concrete, this isn't the sort of tilt-up building you can construct in a few weeks. The amount of air-handling alone—for both the clean room and the wet labs—would give most commercial architects a heart attack. This picture shows the expansion space, which isn't yet built out. The bones of the building can accommodate a doubling in lab space when demand justifies it (and when we can find funding).

(And let me take the opportunity to tip my hat to Bernie Marcus, whose philanthropic contribution picked up where the state appropriations left off. As so many people in Atlanta have learned to say: "Thank you, Bernie!")

The Marcus Nanotech Center has been a long time coming, but it'll open this month... equipment installation and shakedown will probably take most of this year. I can't wait to see the innovations that start pouring out of this building!

Jeff Foxworthy said once, "If the directions to your place include the phrase 'Turn off the paved road,' you might be a redneck."

I'm not sure if American Maglev would appreciate the comparison, but it's apt. A little ways off Thornton Road in Powder Springs, about twenty miles west of Atlanta, down an unpaved road, is a glimpse of the future. I got a chance to visit them yesterday.

"Magnetic levitation" is one of those delightful polysyllabic phrases. It's routinely invoked in science fiction books and films to connote swoopy futuristic trains hurtling across the landscape at hundreds of miles per hour.

But in the pine woods of this Atlanta suburb, Tony Morris (a Georgia Tech graduate) and his team have built a reasonably-swoopy train car and a third of a mile of elevated trackway. A lot of money has been spent here... nearly $50 million over the life of the company. The latest investors are from Dubai.

And the darned thing works.

Maglevs are cool for lots of reasons. By floating the car over the rail, you eliminate friction. No wheels, no bearings. By inducing eddy currents in the track, the car becomes part of a linear induction motor that's as long as the track. No rotary motors, no gearing, nothing to lubricate. By using electricity as your motive power, you have no local emissions... and if those electrons are coming from nuclear or solar or hydro plants, no emissions at all. And there's not even much noise to complain about.

In science fiction, maglevs require superconducting magnets. Superconductors come in two flavors: high-temperature and low-temperature. "High" temperature is a relative term -- these are cooled by liquid nitrogen at minus-320°F, so they're still awfully cold to you and me. But liquid nitrogen is cheap... about the same cost per liter as beer. Unfortunately, high-temp superconductors are pretty lousy from an engineering viewpoint. Hard to work with, brittle, low current densities -- not a good answer.

Low-temperature superconductors are cooled by liquid helium. Liquid helium costs more per liter than Glenmorangie. And it boils off and has to be replaced constantly. And keeping anything cooled to minus-452°F means massive engineering challenges. So maglevs based on low-temperature superconductors are horrendously expensive.

American Maglev has declared "a plague on both your houses" and isn't using superconductors at all. Just honking big electromagnets (like the ones in your radio speakers, but bigger) with a sophisticated sensor and control system. This system monitors the gap between the magnets and the rail thousands of times per second, adjusting the electromagnet drive current as necessary to maintain a constant 3/8-inch separation.

The team's mantra is "smart vehicle, stupid track." This makes a lot of sense. The track is elevated (keeping it out of the path of kids, cows, or cars) and consists of two load-bearing steel rails, two more steel rails to carry the electric current, and a series of flat aluminum plates down the middle. It's supported by pre-cast concrete towers every 88 feet... meaning that building a track means digging sixty deep holes per mile and snapping pieces together, rather than the laborious bulldozer, grading, filling, and paving process needed for traditional light rail (trolleys) or heavy rail (MARTA or Amtrak).

Levitating the car only requires 40 kilowatts (50 horsepower) of power; about the same as two dozen hair-dryers. Making it go sucks more current, but you get some of it back when slowing down (by charging on-board batteries). Overall, the company claims to be able to transport passengers and freight for approximately 1/3 the power of steel wheels on steel rails.

Inside, the car feels like a five-fourths-scale model of a MARTA car. It's about two feet wider inside and a bit taller, which makes it feel much more spacious. There's plenty of room for various seating arrangements, or even carving it into compartments if required. The current car would seat 100, or allow 200 to stand at American densities, or allow over 300 to stand at Tokyo density.

There's no driver; everything is computer-controlled. For long-haul routes, the company expects there to be an attendant of some sort in each car to make passengers feel more comfortable (and probably to sell snacks and Cokes). For urban routes, we'll probably be on our own -- just like the underground trains at Hartsfield.

I've written elsewhere about the advantages of private vehicles over mass transit. But, if we're going to have mass transit, can't it at least be good mass transit?

MARTA claims that it can build new heavy rail for $200 million per mile. They're probably wrong; the Los Angeles Red Line cost an eye-popping $700 million per mile in current dollars. (For the math-impaired, that's over $11,000 per inch.)

American Maglev claims they can build their system for $20 million per mile. Even if they're optimistic, that's startlingly less than heavy rail. It's even less than light rail... and, because American Maglev's vehicles travel on an elevated track, they don't have to be hardened against collisions with cars and trucks like trolleys... which means the swoopy levitating vehicle will actually be cheaper than old-fashioned electric streetcars.

Smart software means that, instead of an eight-car MARTA train controlled by a trained operator, you can have a bunch of single cars running more frequently. I don't know about you, but the statistical indeterminacy of how long I'll have to wait for a MARTA train is one factor in why I don't use transit much. If I knew there'd be another car along every two minutes, I wouldn't care so much.

American Maglev's test track in Powder Springs is their third generation of technology, but they intentionally kept a low profile until late last year. Now that they have working hardware, they're hosting frequent delegations of potential customers from around the world. They're bound to win one or more of the projects they have bid on, from Los Angeles to Asia. Personally, I think it'd be great if they convinced the Atlanta Beltline folks to go with maglev!

I visited yesterday as part of a delegation from Georgia Tech. I appreciate the time that Tony and his team took to demonstrate the system and answer our questions. We had a great time, and I'm thrilled to see this unexpected new player in Atlanta's high-tech community.

I had a hardware problem with my MacBook Pro today. Apple delivered a model of stellar customer service. I figured the least I could do in return was write about it.

My three-week-old laptop woke up dead today. I Googled the symptoms on another computer, performed some tests, and convinced myself it was a hardware problem.

(It's almost never a hardware problem. According to Pournelle's Law, it's usually a cable. If it's not a cable, it's something you did to the software. Bugs, viruses, and hardware problems are way down on the list of likely culprits.)

A hardware problem meant calling AppleCare, or visiting an Apple Store in person. I don't think Genius Bars replace logic boards, but I figured it was better to hand my laptop to an Apple employee than to rely on UPS/Airborne/whatever, since our building has had problems with package delivery in the past.

I called the Apple Store at Lenox around 10:30 am. Their first Genius Bar appointment was 7:00 pm tomorrow. When I sounded disappointed, the woman who answered the phone volunteered to check the Perimeter store, and found a 3:45 appointment today. First example of excellent customer service: she didn't have to do that, but it made my life better.

I got to the Perimeter store a little early. Friendly T-shirted employee greeted me, sent me to the Genius Bar maitre d', he explained they were running right on time, and asked me to wait until 3:45. At 3:45, he came over and introduced me to Brendan behind the counter.

I had had a few minutes to think over what I'd say to Brendan, so I dove in:

Laptop wouldn't boot this morning, wouldn't pass POST, got three long beeps. Googled that, and it means bad RAM. Popped the case, started swapping RAM modules. It runs fine with the bottom slot empty and either module in the top slot. It fails POST with either module in the bottom slot. Sounds like a logic board problem to me. I figure it's gotta go back?

That took thirty seconds. Brendan's immediate reaction was: "Hmm. It shouldn't do that. We can send it back... but is this a custom build-to-order? If not, we can see if we have a laptop like this one in stock." No dithering, no "let me go check with my manager," no "expediting fee," just trying to figure out the best thing to do for me.

Wow. This is really above and beyond the call of duty, and I didn't expect it.

Turns out they had an identical unit in stock (one argument against buying BTO). He hauled it out, broke the seals, popped out the factory hard disk (which required removing only one screw!), popped in my non-standard Samsung 500 GB, closed it back up, and handed it to me. He spent more time doing the paperwork than the hard disk swap.

I was out the door smiling at 4:06 pm. Elapsed time, 21 minutes.

I don't think you can do that with a Dell.

Let's do the math. At 3:47 pm, there were two machines in Apple's store. One was broken, the other one was going to get sold to someone else for full retail. Apple was obligated to fix my broken one under warranty, but they were perfectly within their rights to ask me to ship it back to a repair depot, leaving me without a laptop over the weekend (at least). And I'd likely have had to drive out to Perimeter again to pick up the repaired unit sometime next week; that's most of an hour round-trip. But my time and inconvenience are not a tangible cost for them. This approach would leave them with the untouched new machine on the shelf, ready to be sold for $2499.

But Brendan instantly decided to swap machines with me. I walked out with the new one, and Apple gets my old one back. They'll repair it and sell it as a refurbished unit online for (I suspect) $2299. So, choosing to delight me as a customer incurred a real cost for them of $200.

Is Apple hardware overpriced? What's your time worth?

I got into a discussion about Georgia Tech academics the other day, when I mentioned how difficult the undergraduate curriculum was. The other person (who graduated from a state university that shall remain nameless) retorted with "Well, Tech doesn't even have a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa!"

That's true. We don't. And I started digging into why.

From the "Stipulations" on the ??? Web site:

Grades earned in applied or professional work shall not be counted in computing the grade-point average for purposes of eligibility. Applied and professional work shall be understood to include those courses intended primarily to develop skills or vocational techniques in such fields as business administration, education, engineering, home economics, journalism, library science, military science, physical education, communications, secretarial studies, speech, and applied art and music.

Well, excuse the hell out of me.

I actually don't have an engineering degree, although I've worked in an engineering capacity more than once during my career. But I'm a ramblin' wreck from Georgia Tech and a helluva engineer, even if my diploma says theoretical physics. (Summa cum laude, thank you very much.) And these pantywaist literature majors from Swarthmore and Vassar Dickinson have the temerity to lump engineering courses in with P.E. and "secretarial studies"?

Scroom.

If those are their rules, we don't need a ??? chapter. They are clinging to a worldview and a set of rules that are increasingly irrelevant, if not downright harmful.

The "Two Cultures" debate goes back a lot further than C.P. Snow, but I'm tired of this attitude that engineering (and the associated "hard sciences" and mathematics) are somehow superfluous for the truly educated. There's not an engineer alive who would say "Sorry, I can't read." But if you propose a math problem any harder than splitting the check at lunch, I bet half the English department at Duke would throw up their hands and say "Sorry, I can't do math."

(Of course, I suspect most of them also can't write a clear English sentence at gunpoint, but this isn't a post about deconstructionism.)

The classic "liberal arts" major (which is what the self-perpetuating ??? aristocracy is claiming to be the ideal) has a lot to be said for it. Studying classical history, the Great Books, a bit of Latin and Greek, and the rest of the underpinnings of Western civilization made a good background for a young man (for it was always men, back then) to go into the City of London or to Wall Street and manage institutions that were based on the strengths and foibles of individuals. If you knew a bit about how Caesar managed his campaigns, or Lee managed his lieutenants, you had a better chance of managing your Midwest regional vice president and making sure he made his numbers for the quarter.

Now, however, businesses are based on more than that. Internet speed means you'll be making decisions in far less time than Caesar or Lee enjoyed. Global connectivity means you will be managing staff in Bangalore that you may have never met. And, of course, your white-shoe Wall Street firm has a back room of "rocket scientists"—in reality, bright science and engineering majors—developing a dizzying array of financial derivatives such as credit default swaps that allow you to pyramid your profits to the sky.

Oops. Did someone mention "credit default swaps"?

I think there was some math involved there. Didn't you say you couldn't do math?

I minored in history at Georgia Tech, back when that was technically impossible. (I actually never got a "minor" designation; I just took a bunch of courses, and read one heck of a lot outside of class.) I think every educated person should understand the causes of the fall of the Roman Empire and the connection between Columbus's voyages and the Renaissance. And he (or she!) should have read and thought about and written about some Shakespeare, and Cervantes, and Tennyson. (And Kipling, dammit!) And we should all be competent in at least one foreign language. (I'm not, and I wish I were.)

But every educated person should also be able to solve a series of linear equations, or guesstimate the power consumption of a server rack, or give a layman's explanation of private-key cryptography. Technical problems are important in today's world, and top managers don't have the luxury of just saying "let the geeks figure it out." Because that road leads to credit default swaps, or multi-millions of dollars wasted on failed SAP implementations, or cancellation of nuclear power plants that would emit less radiation than the coal-fired plant you build instead.

So the ??? types don't think our "applied and professional" courses are good enough for their precious honor society? Well, I'm not terribly impressed with what the ??? keyholders have done to our financial system, or our government, or our educational system. Maybe it's time to give the engineers a chance.

Because a "liberal arts" education is no longer enough. If young men and women want a well-rounded education that prepares them for the real world we're living in... they should major in Mechanical Engineering. That's the liberal arts degree for the 21st century.