iPhone: The Agony and the Ecstasy

So I decided that today was the day to get a new phone — a shiny, happy iPhone 3G.

Little did I know that, at about the same time, the gremlins decided that today was the day to screw with me...

The local AT&T store was still out of stock, but we're lucky enough to have two Apple stores in Orlando. I called the Apple store at the closest mall to me while driving there to check availability and wait time. I waited on the phone for over 30 minutes, but at least I got a prompt every thirty seconds or so telling me how many calls were ahead of me in the queue. After getting to a person, I found out that they had plenty of phones in stock but the customer queue was about 4 or 5 hours long! By the time the call was done I was in front of the mall.

I called the other Apple store at another mall about 5 miles away. They said they had plenty of inventory but almost no line. Go figure! So I headed over there like... well, let's just say 'expeditiously'.

I walked through the mall, entered the queue, and waited for 45 minutes to get into the store escorted by a guy in a pale blue iPhone 3G tee shirt and flip flops. This would be my 'activation assistant'. Then the real fun began.

After telling the pale blue tee shirt guy that I wanted a black 16GB iPhone and the 900 minute calling plan, he gets the device and proceeds to scan in the serial number and SIM card information printed on the box. Then the activation process starts. He collects my existing phone number and my SSN last 4, and verifies my address from my driver's license. All of this was collected in the little mobile POS device. POS is an acronym for point of sale, although another possibility soon came to mind.

Of course, there was something on my account that thwarted the normal activation process. The handheld POS came back with an error, and so Mr. blue tee shirt called AT&T support. The guy on the phone got my account set up with the new SIM and device information, and changed the rate plan. OK, so a little snag but we recovered well. Or so I thought...

Then Mr. blue tee shirt tried to ring up the phone so I could pay for it. Whoops! The device rings up at $499. The price is supposed to be $299. Why the difference? According to the POS terminal, I don't qualify for the 'upgrade price' on the iPhone and have to pay full price, which is $200 more, and I still have to sign a 2 year contract. 

Well, of course, I say that this is not acceptable. You see, I had heard about this pricing issue and went over to my AT&T store to verify that I qualified for the upgrade price. So why the change of tune now? According to the Apple guy, it's all AT&T's fault since their system is the one that says yea or nay to the upgrade based upon my account status. So he calls AT&T again to track it down.

15 minutes later, he's still on hold. Thinking he got mis-routed, he tries again.

35 minutes later, his call is answered and the dialog begins. After a while, it's determined that when the first agent activated the iPhone he made a mistake and went too far by assigning the iPhone service plan. When the Apple system called the AT&T system, it looked like my account already had an iPhone 3G on it, thus I didn't qualify for a 'second' upgrade.

Mr. blue tee shirt and the AT&T rep worked the problem for about 3 hours, and there was no possible way that they could find to activate the account for the upgrade price. There was no override capability for the AT&T system, nor was there a way for the Apple store to adjust the iPhone price.

Well, because the iPhone was activated, my working Blackberry worked no more. So now I had no phone and the prospects were dim.  I suggested that they try to add the iPhone as a second line, cancel the first line and move the phone number over. This looked like it would work, but no, it couldn't be that easy. See, the Apple POS system insisted that the iPhone was already sold and couldn't be sold again.

In the end, the Apple folks gave me a new iPhone to get around this problem. They had to pull the SIM from the first one and put it in the second one to make it work. Unfortunately, they ran out of the black phones an hour before and so I had to take a white one. They gave me a voucher written on the back of a business card to exchange the white one for a new black one when more were in stock.

In the end, I spent over 5 hours and 45 minutes getting the iPhone working; 45 minutes in line and 5 hours pulling hair through the sales and activation process. Apple is going to have to dump two perfectly good 16GB iPhones and probably resell them as refurbished. I have to go back to the store and exchange the phone again (hopefully this time they'll just swap the SIM).

I have a working phone, and it's nice, but all of this leaves me wondering why these systems are so brittle and so restrictive. They've had a long, long time to plan and test. What's the excuse?

Update on Solar Power

Digging into this subject some more, I came across Bright Source Energy, a private company developing solar power. Google is one of the investors, as well as several other energy companies and venture capital companies. 

Bright Source builds and operates 'power tower' solar plants that use a field of flat mirrors to focus sunlight on a collector mounted on a tower. You can watch a short video on their technology here. They claim the lowest cost per watt of any solar power generation technology.

I also found out that there are quite a few solar power stations already operating commercially (at a profit!) in California's Mojave Desert, collectively producing over 300 megawatts since the late 1980s. Here's what one looks like:

View Larger Map

These use an older technology that require parabolic mirror 'troughs' which are more expensive to create and don't generate as much heat as the power tower approach.

Bright Source estimates that covering 2% of the Mojave with their stations can generate all the power needed by the entire state of California. If they're correct, 20% coverage could generate all of the power needed by the entire country. Remember, this is useless desert land, so there's no environmental impact. There are places all over the southwestern USA like this.

This BusinessWeek article has more information on the subject.

Power for the Future?

With the cost of gasoline nearing $5 per gallon in the USA and increasing political instability in the regions that provide most of the world's crude oil, many people are concerned about the long-term viability of our oil-driven industrial society. Some extreme thinkers are worried that we (or our children) will be destined to live in a world that looks a lot like a "Mad Max" movie, but I don't think that's going to happen.

To keep our economy humming we need power. Power for cars, trains, planes, tractors,light bulbs, microwave ovens, computers, televisions, radios, and factories. Right now most of the worlds power comes from fossil fuels, and some comes from nuclear fuels. Both of these fuel sources are limited (there's only so much oil and uranium in the ground) and also have troublesome environmental issues from their production through their consumption.

So when the oil runs out or gets too expensive, what's going to happen? Will we collapse into a dark age of anarchy? I don't think so. Thankfully, we have alternative sources of energy that can provide all the power we need for the future — the sun and the oceans.

Solar power generation is becoming more viable every day. It's now estimated that the entire energy requirement of the USA could be met by building about 100 reasonably-sized solar power stations in the desert southwest. All day long, energy can be generated by keeping lots of mirrors reflecting the sun's light towards thermal towers, concentrating heat to drive turbines that generate electrical power. The excess heat is so great that it can be stored and used to generate power during the night — it's actually more efficient to store energy as raw heat than to convert it to electricity and store it in batteries.

Some of this electricity will be sent to facilities that take seawater and create hydrogen through the process of electrolysis; passing electricity through water causes the hydrogen and oxygen to split. The hydrogen can be collected and used for power where electricity isn't appropriate; in jet engines, long-range road vehicles, and industrial manufacturing processes that require a lot of heat. The hydrogen can be bottled and trucked or sent through pipelines to get to its point of consumption.

Cars and trucks of the future will probably be driven by electrical motors, because they are simpler, quieter, and more efficient than the internal combustion motors we use today. The power for these may be provided by a battery pack or a fuel cell; in the latter case the vehicle will contain a hydrogen fuel tank that can be refilled at hydrogen filling stations.

In the end, we'll have all of our needs met, create less pollution, cause less political strife, and yet still have private cars and single-family homes and all of the luxuries of life we're used to today.  And we'll power it all from the sun and the sea.

The End of the Telephone?

The telephone as we know it has been evolving slowly since its invention in the late 1800s, but many of the basic concepts haven't changed much. The standard 'home telephone' is still an analog device that works over a copper wire circuit. There are, however, some game changing developments that may be signaling the end of the traditional public switched telephone network.

The first of these is mobile telephony. Introduced to the masses in the 1980s, the first cellular phone networks bore many similarities to the analog fixed network but have since evolved into a totally digital medium. Mobile phones introduced the concept that one calls a person and not a place; no matter where I travel, you can call me at a single number. Where traditional phone networks were organized around a strict hierarchy of fixed locations, mobile networks are more dynamic; the endpoints (mobile terminals) can rearrange themselves in real time and the network routing infrastructure must compensate by sending signals over different frequencies, radio antennas, and even to other peered networks.

Soon after cellular telephony was introduced, the Internet began its ascendancy into popular consciousness. At first used for simple things like file transfers, electronic mail, and web pages, the Internet has grown into a reliable real-time data transfer platform for almost any kind of information. With increasing bandwidth and decreasing latency, the Internet can now support real time audio and even video transport. This enables applications like Skype, iChat, and other communication applications to emulate and even interface with fixed and mobile telephone networks. Due to the openness and flexibility of the Internet, these applications can provide additional functionality that telephones cannot, such as real-time presence notifications and the ability to transfer messages, sounds, images, and data files. This opens up many new possibilities for human interaction.

Now we are witnessing the fusion of mobility and the Internet. 3G radio networks can transport data at over a megabit per second to and from mobile handsets, and those handsets have enough memory and processing power to render all kinds of media in real time. Many people, especially younger people, are using mobile phones exclusively, ditching the idea that they need to have a land line in their home.

I wonder how long it will be until the PSTN as we know it is relegated to an anachronism, supported as a backward-compatibility feature for old phones and other equipment like fax machines?

Here are my thoughts about what the future might look like:

• The network will become less visible to people. Right now people have to know arcane dialing codes to make phone calls. In the future,  people will have one or more network addresses that look like email addresses. Instead of dialing 407-555-3223 you will contact joe.difonzo@att.net.
• People may have multiple network addresses. This would allow them to separate personal and business communications, for example.
• A single network address will support all types of communication, from instant messages to e-mail to voice and video calls. The person initiating contact will simply select who they want to contact and what type of contact they want. For example, I may choose to contact John Smith at his personal identity and send a video message, or Mary Jones at her business identity and start a live voice communication.
• Integrated presence management (seen today in instant messaging applications) will let people share their current status with friends and colleagues; this will let my wife see, for example, that I'm currently in a meeting and avoid her calling me only to listen to a ring tone for 30 seconds before she can leave a voice message.
  
• Applications like address books and calendars will be server-based, enabling access from multiple devices. This will allow, for example, my secretary to add calendar appointments while I'm on an airplane. The mobile device will stay synchronized with the server any time it's connected to the network.
• Voice will be transported over IP and not the current circuit-switched network. The mobile network as we know it will become more homogeneous by eliminating the circuit-switched network interface.
• Personal applications will become location-aware, and provide new functions that are sensitive to the location of the user. For example, reminding them that they need to pick up dry cleaning (if it's on their to-do list) when they are in the vicinity of the shop.

I don't know how long it will take to see this transition complete, but it seems that the pace of change is accelerating and we may be at the tipping point sooner than we think.

What do you think?

Out in the Mountains

My wife and I took a trip this week to the Rockies, and I interviewed with a tech firm in Denver.

This is an excuse, I guess, for my lack of posts this past week.

While out here I've had a chance to clear my head a little bit and relax. We went to Rocky Mountain National Park north of Boulder, explored downtown Denver, and visited the resorts at Vail and Breckenridge which were quite busy even though the ski season is over.

The weather was great and the scenery was impressive. If you haven't been out to the Denver area, I recommend taking a trip.

Better, or just different?

While I've been setting up my new Macbook Pro, I've been thinking about why computers are so freaking hard for most people to understand.

The Mac, of course, is supposed to be the paragon of human interface goodness. As I lifted the lid and booted the machine for the first time, choirs of angels were supposed to be singing and dazzling rays of light were supposed to be washing over my pudgy face. Here I was, finally liberated from the dreaded Windows PC that held me in shackles for all of these years. Hallelujah!

However, being completely objective — which is hard to do with a shiny new (and expensive) piece of hardware sitting in front of you — I can't say that using OS X is much easier than using Windows. As I've been attaching the machine to my network, adding printers, configuring preferences, and performing other mundane tasks associated with getting a new computer set up, I've encountered lots of stuff that puzzled me and certainly would be undecipherable to the average person.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a hater. The overall Mac experience is much, much better than any PC I've worked on. The reliability and security of UNIX-based OS X is a huge improvement over Windows, the amount of software that you get with the machine is incredible, and the total package is tight and pretty.

However, I've come across many cryptic dialog boxes, I've needed to try things multiple times, I've had to repair keychains, and I've spent a fair amount of time Googling to validate problems and find solutions. Once you learn some tricks the answers seem obvious, but until then you could spend a lot of time scratching your head.

I think a major source of this problem is that a computer, as Alan Turing taught us, is an 'anything machine'. Unlike a calculator, a car, or an iPod which has a few basic capabilities, computers can be extended with programs to do thousands of different things. Because of this, no two computers are alike; someone bought the same model Macbook I did on the same day last week, but I guarantee that by now our machines have lots of different software in them. Additionally, because computers can interface to so many things, the differences multiply by the number of printers, network routers, external storage systems, cameras, portable media players, and other types of peripherals that they have to deal with. The probability of any two computers being completely alike within a week of purchase is basically zero.

All of this different software and all of these different peripherals lead to complexity and inconsistency. There are just too many options, too many choices, too many potential conflicts. There's no rule book that says, for example, if you're building a network router, here are the five items that should be user-configurable. In fact, it's just the opposite; in an attempt to gain market share companies try to make their products different, try to add new features, and as a result end up putting a hundred knobs on something that would work almost as well with two. Look at the millions of ways you can configure Microsoft Office! Does anyone really need every one of those options? Of course not, but when you want that one specific option you're going to complain if it's not there. (I'm sure that somewhere there is someone who wants to have page numbers only on every 7th page!)

So we have millions of dialog boxes, each designed with its own sense of a task flow and vocabulary that is relevant to the program or peripheral for which it was designed but not obvious to the unacquainted. As a result, we have billions of users getting confused and potentially screwing up, costing time and money. Yet overall the balance pays off, so people put up with the crap and try to deal with it as best they can. Sometimes they have to call Geek Squad, or a relative who can fix it for them. Sometimes they just live with the problem — I know people who are OK with restarting their computer multiple times a day because it locks up or drops the Internet connection!

I'm going on, I know, so I'll wrap this up by saying that Apple can't really solve this fundamental problem. No single company can. If things ever do get easier, it's going to take some more advanced logic that will hide all of these complexities from the user, not just present them in a prettier dialog box. Something that can analyze all of the dependencies and potential issues and automatically make the best decision based on the intent of the user rather than their direct input. This is a problem that's worth solving!

iJoe

I took the plunge into the Cult of Jobs today and bought a MacBook Pro.

Since my ex-employer liberated me from the Dell I had been using, I needed to get some kind of notebook computer to take on interviews and vacations. It seemed like the Mac was a decent choice in terms of performance and features and, since my wife has a Mac as well, I avoided the Microsoft Tax by not having to buy another copy of Office — the home edition comes with three license keys.

Of course, all of that should be taken with a large grain of salt since this machine is also somewhat of a new toy for me. (I hope my wife doesn't read that!)

The specs, in case you're interested:

• 2.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo w/ 6MB L2 cache
• 4GB DDR2-667 RAM
• 200GB 7200RPM HDD
• GeForce 8600M w/ 512MB of GDDR3 memory
• Slot loading SuperDrive
• LED-backlit 15" 1440x900 display

It may be the fastest PC in my house, and it all fits into a 5.4 pound package!

So far things are going pretty well, but I have to get used to the keyboard differences. The delete key, for example, is where the backspace key should be, and it performs the same function as backspace on Windows. To get the delete function as on windows you have to use fn+delete. I guess this is just something you get used to as you learn to Think Different™.

I'm curious to know how many of you are Apple users and how many have converted from Windows recently. If you have any tips for me, I'm all ears.