Apple

There's a whiff of desperation in the air. The iPad is now supposed to be the white knight that can save publishing. Is it?

I wrote before how the iPad will define a new market for consumer technology. There's no question of the appeal of a simple, extremely portable device with a decent-sized screen to peruse news headlines and browse magazine articles. But the mainstream media hype seems perhaps overblown a bit.

Despite the restrictions, the iPad's full color touchscreen is seen as a game changer for media companies that have long struggled to make money off digital content, which most consumers expect to get for free or at a very low cost.

Book publishers see a new chance to get their electronic offering right -- and win more bargaining power if the iPad emerges as a viable rival to Amazon.com Inc's Kindle.

I find myself wanting an iPad to read the news in the morning. It would be nice for magazines, too, I think. Of course I'm assuming that the usability will be very good. Maybe I'm wrong.

But I think the iPad will be a big success.

What do you think? Is the iPad a must-have device for you?

Of course, if Apple's iDisk didn't actually suck — didn't actually sync at dial-up data rates, didn't actually take days to sync a few megabytes of files, didn't actually stop syncing altogether at the first file conflict it encountered (which should be conflicting at all), didn't actually corrupt files due to all of the above — then Dropbox would probably have a much smaller market, at least among Mac users.

But iDisk does suck.

And Dropbox is easy peasy.

And Dropbox is also cross-platform, so you can sync across all kinds of computers.

And Dropbox makes individualized sharing of folders possible.

So now I am using Dropbox, and when my MobileMe account expires, I'll have to see if syncing other stuff via MobileMe is worth $99/year. After all, I'm already syncing email and calendars via Google.

This whole situation boggles my mind, though. It's not as if Apple didn't have the resources to make iDisk totally rock.

First, I want to say that I love Snow Leopard. This latest OSX (10.6) is wiki-wiki! All the more so on my SSD MacBook Pro. I log in and within 2-3 seconds I have desktop, ready to go.

But to be honest, it has not been a bug-free experience. Which is why I read with amusement in the Ars "review" (which really isn't a review, more of a background piece) that Snow Leopard was a no-new-features/no-new-bugs release. There are new features, which others have covered more than adequately.

There are also new bugs. Or at least the new OS has shifted enough that apps declared stable and supported on Snow Leopard may be supported but certainly are not stable, in my own experience.

And it's only been since Saturday, so my experience is thin. But in that time I have spent a lot of time in Apple's own Keynote app (iWork '09) and Adobe's InDesign CS4.