As cloud computing services become ever more popular, you might begin to wonder how much you can really trust them to perform when you need them? I decided to find out - by testing the top file-transfer/file-storage/file-backup services.

In many ways, getting a file from one computer to multiple computers is the most challenging task for the cloud. And because I like to use multiple computers running multiple operating systems, including Linux, Windows and the Mac, that function is particularly important to me.

Cloud Services Can Lag

I am pretty agnostic when it comes to cloud providers - as long as they are free or close to it. However, as I was moving files around while preparing my most recent book A Week at the Beach The 2013 Emerald Isle Travel Guide I was a little surprised at the lags I sometimes experienced using the big-name cloud-based file-transfer services.

More than once when I wanted to use a file from one computer to another, I was disappointed by my cloud services. There were a few times that I got so tired of waiting for a file to show up on my other computer’s cloud drive that I resorted to sneakernet using a USB thumb drive.

After my book was published, I decided to go back and run some simple tests to see just how long the four best-known file-transfer/backup services actually take to put the files where you want them.

To compare Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon Cloud, and Microsoft’s SkyDrive I started by exporting a 500K JPEG test image from Lightroom on my Windows 8 computer directly to each of the four services.

Fighting The Randomization Factor

After running the tests a few times, I noticed what can only be described as random operating system differences. Sometimes the file would pop up first on my Mac and other times it showed up first on my Windows 7 laptop.

In order to eliminate the operating system differences, I restarted the tests and this time stopped the timer when the file showed up on either my Mac running Mountain Lion or my Windows 7 laptop. I also reran my tests with a variety of sizes and types of files. In all I ran twenty-five sets of tests.

The differences were significant, if not overwhelmingly huge. The fastest synchs took less than 3 seconds, while a few others took several minutes. The biggest chunk of tests clocked in between 10 seconds and one minute. A few synchs never completed. But which service recorded the best times with the fewest problems?

Dropbox FTW!

Dropbox ended up being fastest 56% of the time. Even more importantly, it was slowest only 4% of the time.

Skydrive brought up the rear. It was fastest on 12% of the tests, but but slowest on a whopping 80% of the tests. It also had two files that never showed up on the Mac and one that never showed on the Windows 7 laptop.

The Amazon Cloud slightly outpaced Google Drive - which had one file that never showed up on the Mac and another that took a very long time to complete.

If my tests convinced me of anything, it is that Skydrive is a work in progress and has a long way to go. I even had trouble setting up the tests on Skydrive.

My tests also revealed a number of odd results. When testing files saved from Word, strange extra files sometimes showed up on all the cloud drives except Dropbox. The file names always began with the characters “~$”. Sometimes the mystery files disappeared and sometimes they hung around.

Cloud Drive Recommendations

So here are some quick recommendations:

• First, do not treat your cloud drive as one huge dumping ground. Create folders and try to force a little organization on yourself.
• If you save a file to the cloud in order to work on it from another computer, quit the application or close the file on the first computer after you have saved the file to the cloud drive.
• Make sure you have a local copy of important files in your documents folder - not just the replicated cloud folder on your computer. Interesting things sometimes happen when cloud files get updated or deleted from another computer. When you come back to the computer where you first created a file, you could be in for a nasty surprise.
• If you cannot get a cloud folder on your computer to update, trying quitting the cloud application or rebooting your system.

Dropbox and Amazon appear to be the most reliable solutions with only occasional delays. Google isn't far behind, and I can't imagine that Microsoft won't work hard to improve Skydrive - the company's subscription model depends on it.

Even so, I have no plans to throw away my USB thumb drives.

Until recently Apple has been on an unstoppable roll. Apple's iPhones and iPads have been flying off the shelf. But when Apple's latest quarterly results got a thumbs down from Wall Street, from the market, lots of people started wondering if Apple had lost its mojo.

Dan Lyons put it this way here at ReadWrite, “It seems Apple has hit a wall. It’s not just about sales and earnings, but also about innovation. It’s been years since Apple did something truly revolutionary.”

A Delicate Balance Of Innovation

But truly revolutionary can also be truly risky. With 75 million iOS devices sold in Q1 of its 2013 fiscal year, Apple’s success is now increasingly all about iOS. To keep the iOS train moving and churning out profits, Apple needs to innovate - but not so much that it scares away the legions of happy iPhone and iPad users.

Might iOS, the very product that helped put Apple on top, require risk taking beyond what the new Apple can handle? Current users love iOS - but Apple seems to losing the numbers war to Android.

To turn the tide, iOS may need to be re-invented. That often happens to operating systems, but it is not easy to pull off without killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. Other companies have seen inordinately popular operating systems actually hold them back from getting fully behind new and improved versions.

The Windows XP Comparison

Look at Microsoft. Windows XP was released on October 25, 2001 and it took until August 2012 before Windows 7 had more users. Windows 8 - given its challenging new interface - might have an even tougher time moving the needle.

Windows XP was successful because - as David Johnson, an analyst with Forrester has noted - “It was a very, very good operating system... a superb OS because it removed a lot of pain.” While the Macintosh was often called great, Windows XP was often said to be “good enough” and with inexpensive hardware as a platform, it won the desktop computing war.

Windows XP retains a strong hold on many users, to Microsoft's chagrin. The company would like to see them buying new computers loaded with Windows 8.

Is it conceivable that Apple has achieved that magic “good enough” formula with iOS on its current iPhones? People hang onto to their iPhone because it has been a positive experience for them and it works - will that affect Apple's ability to get the to try something new and presumably better?

The iPhone and iOS revolutionized smartphones and tablets much like the Mac popularized graphical user interfaces. Now, in spite of huge Apple numbers, the smartphone and tablet markets are slipping away to Android much like the computer market went to Windows XP.

Is iOS Falling Behind?

Where does iOS stand today? Erica Ogg at Gigacom argues that while there have lots of releases of iOS, there has been little change.

“While iOS has seen six new releases since its debut in 2007, there have been few major changes. The arrival of the App Store in 2008, and push notifications in 2009 were the last big adjustments in how the software works.”

John Martellaro, a Mac Observer writer who used to work for me at Apple, recently had this to say in his article, We’ve Changed and Grown. Apple’s iOS Hasn’t:

“iOS, now roughly six years old, was designed in an era of much less hardware capability and launched on the small 3.5-inch display of the original iPhone. Now, it's being pressed into service on ever larger iPhone and also iPad displays. One of the big annoyances is the single foreground app/single window design.”

The iPhone is also losing some notable users and influencers, including Steve Wozniak and Robert Scoble. Yet in spite of all this, the number of people who own iPhones and who are planning to switch to another platform remains small. A recent study suggests that the number of iPhone users planning to buy another iPhone has dropped only from 88% to 75%.

Why Change Will Be Hard

If the iPhone and the iPad are no longer the clear technology leaders, big change seems in order. Ironically, Apple's loyal customers who still plan to buy a new iPhone might be a hurdle. How much Apple can change iOS without losing the loyalty of those customers?

In a recent Ars Technica survey - iPhone users: what does Android have that you want? - 8% said they wanted bigger displays - but 10% said they would never switch from their iPhone.

Apple Has Been Here Before

Finding just the right amount of change in that environment won't be easy. But Apple has successfully faced this type of pivotal moment before - sometimes even without the help of Steve Jobs. Apple's history demonstrates a willingness to make technology breaks when needed.

Today's need for innovation while maintaining a satisfied customer base calls for the same boldness that Apple displayed when it moved users from the Apple II line to the Macintosh line, and later from Mac OS9 to Mac OSX and finally to Intel processors. Apple users gave Apple high marks for these difficult transitions.

Can Apple Do It Again?

But this is a different Apple - and a different, arguably less-forgiving market. As Blackberry and Nokia so clearly demonstrate, things happen quickly in the mobile space, with little room for error.

Whether Apple can innovate enough to stem the Android march while keeping current users happy might be the first big test for the new, post-Jobs Apple.

Apple still has one key advantage. Apple owns the whole widget, the hardware and the software. In the past it has made the ecosystem change so compelling that loyal customers followed without hesitation. But Google and Microsoft are starting to copy Apple’s whole-widget strategy - and that could make any iOS transition even harder.

What's Next?

All things point to Apple making significant changes in iOS in 2013. Most Apple iOS users will follow wherever Apple goes - but that is only half the battle.

It all boils down to two things. Does Apple have the vision to make the next version of iOS a true advance? And even if the next iOS is a huge hit among current users, will it be enough to stem the tide toward Android?

If Apple can pull off this difficult transition, it could find itself set for another 5 years. If not, it will face increasing pressure from many sides.

Image by Fredric Paul.

Windows 8 is not really my cup of tea. Mac OS X Mountain Lion is not what I hoped it would be. Google's Chrome operating system is not powerful enough for my purposes. What is a power user to do?

Use multiple operating systems at once, that's what! And with advances in desktop virtualization, that's easier than ever to accomplish.

With today's powerful multi-core processors and inexpensive RAM, it is easy to take advantage of a trend that has already swept the Fortune 100. It just needs a little tweaking for the home environment. Let me show you how it works for me.

What Is Virtualization?

First, a quick bit of background. Virtualization is all about separating the software from the hardware, creating virtual machines that act like real machines inside another operating system. Server virtualization is all the rage because it allows companies to create multiple "virtual" servers on a limited number of physical servers, boosting efficiency, adding flexibility and lowering costs.

Desktop virtualization, meanwhile, creates one or more virtual environments on a single piece of hardware. And it's hardly new. In the early '90s we used Soft PC to run Windows on Macintosh computers.

Early virtual environments were slow - and the extra memory they required was expensive. Today, a fussy operating system user like me can build a complex system at home with lots of memory for not a lot of money. And that lets me do some very interesting things.

Obviously it would be simpler to stick with one operating system. But I have developed a fondness for certain programs over the years and some of them are platform specific. I want to use all of them, and advances in virtualization let me have my cake and eat it too.

What Does My Home Virtual Environment Look Like?

I have three screens on my desk, driven by two powerful but inexpensive computers. One is a Lenovo tower PC driven by an Intel Core i5 chip with 8GB of RAM. The other is a Mac Mini with 16GB of RAM.

Total spending - including a new LCD monitor to join the two I had- was less than $1,500. That includes a very reasonable $50 for VMware Fusion, virtualization software. I also downloaded the free non-commercial version of TeamViewer to let me remotely control a desktop computer from another computer.

While all of this may sound pretty complicated, it's actually a fairly simple way to create just the environment that I want.

I love the Linux desktop environment. And AbiWord offers a good balance between advanced word-processing features and simplicity. 

But I don't want to live entirely in Linux. I don't to give up Pixelmator on the Macintosh for my graphics work or Rapidweaver for my websites. And I prefer Microsoft Excel on Windows for my spreadsheets. I also like Postbox on Windows for my mail and Adobe's Lightroom for my photos. I actually run Chrome and Firefox browsers in all three operating systems as needed.

The 16GB of memory in the Mac lets me easily run a virtual Linux environment using Fusion. Teamviewer lets me control my Lenovo PC from the Mac - and run the latest version of Excel and Postbox in a PC Window.

If I want to move files from one environment to the other, I use Dropbox. It is the only popular cloud storage tool easily usable on Linux by someone like me.

With my system it is easy to use whatever tool I prefer - no matter which environment it lives in - with the power of two modern microprocessors and plenty of storage. I can ignore the parts of Windows 8 that bug me while still getting access to Windows programs. I don't have to give up my specialized Mac programs like iMovie, but I can avoid the iOSified version of iPhoto for my daily photography work.

Getting It All To Work

Not surprisingly, there were some hiccups putting this all together. I never got Microsoft's Remote Desktop Client to work with Mac OS X Lion, but Teamviewer worked on the first try. Selecting the right version of Linux required a few tries, but with VMware's installation program you can install directly from a downloaded ISO image.

One of the neat things about virtualization is that my Linux environment is just a file on the Mac. Dedicating hardware to Linux is still not as easy as using a virtual Linux machine that takes advantage of all the hardware drivers that come with the Mac environment.

Cost-Effective - And A Built-In Backup System

I could have also installed a virtual PC environment on my Mac, but when you look at the $99 cost of a Windows 8 license, buying a whole PC got me another CPU, 8GB more RAM, a 1TB hard drive, keyboard, mouse and DVD burner for just $400 more.

I also could have bought a powerful Mac Pro system to run everything. But the economics of that approach make no sense. A Mac Pro with less RAM and about the same amount of storage costs almost $3,000. Would it be faster? Hard to say. It would certainly be more elegant and compact, but my virtualized setup works great for me.

Having two systems also lets me one as a backup. If necessary, I could upgrade to the Windows version of the VMware product and move over my Linux environment by just copying a file.

More to the point, I love having every piece of software I could dream of at my finger tips.

Even as IT departments in enterprises work to keep up with the demands of cloud computing and bring your own device, Federal IT shops are struggling to meet these same demands - while laboring under sometimes Byzantine rules and regulations.

It's a big problem: in 2012, the United States spent approximately $79.2 billion for government information technology services.

And Federal IT programs impact all of us, with systems like my SocialSecurity accounts, which has personally given me trouble when trying to create an account. I suspect others have many examples of government systems that do not work when we need them.

Still, with all this at stake, the government spends an unbelievable amount of money to contractors who sometimes deliver software many IT professionals would have hard time accepting.

Vivek Kundra, a former Federal CIO, speaking at Ingram Micro’s Cloud Summit, summed up the problem well last summer.

“My first day at work I was told there were $27 billion in projects years behind schedule and we were hundreds of millions of dollars over budget," Kundra told his audience.

Steven VanRoekel, the current Federal CIO, is in similar straits. And, having visited former Federal CIO Karen Evans a few times, I saw first-hand just how tough a job she had.

The problems of IT at the Federal level are compounded by budgetary restrictions that are daunting at best. For instance, most business CIOs would be surprised to learn, there is only one Federal department-level CIO, the Veterans Administration CIO who actually has budgetary authority.

It's Not All Bad

Some things have gotten better. It has been years since I heard of a government site requiring Internet Explorer. That's significant because getting a government website fixed is not an easy task; just getting the initial meetings started often took a couple of months.

Internet Explorer's former lock on web sites highlights what still may be the biggest challenge for government technology: the decades-long dominance of Microsoft.

When I picked up the remnants of Apple’s Federal team in 1995, one of the first things I had to deal with was the planned elimination of Macintoshes in favor of Windows 95 at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Fortunately for Apple (and NASA), pressure from NASA Macintosh users and the efforts of our team working with the government resulted in a 1996 Office of the Inspector General report condemning the decision to eliminate Macs for the space agency.

But Microsoft and Windows still had a strong hold - eight years later I got an invitation to visit the Johnson Space Center with one of our Apple account executives, who was still trying to revive Mac sales there.

Federal computing, I have learned, is not easy to change or even examine. Transparency is a myth.

Game Changers

There are a few technologies with the potential to change the federal IT market.

• Cloud Computing. Federal agencies are currently operating under a mandate to create a “Cloud First” policy.

• Virtualization. Here the Federal government appears to be running behind commercial enterprises.

• Open Source Software. There have been a few Federal open source successes, most notably the VistA project within the Veterans’ Administration and the White House using Linux and Apache to run its Web site.

• “BYOD” or bring your own device. There is already a Bring Your Own Device policy page. iPads and tablets can play a big role but also create a huge security challenge. The USDA has a very successful iPad implementation that seems to have managed security issues.

These are four key technologies that could give government IT managers room to innovate and expand their services.

Heading For The Future

The recent announcement of a $617M joint enterprise licensing agreement between Microsoft and the Department of Defense gives the strong impression that not much has changed. Will the agreement offer real flexibility that will change the complaint that are Federal users are over a Microsoft barrel when it comes time to renew licensing? Time will tell.

One operating system vendor owning my desktop makes me uncomfortable. So how could one company’s hold on the United States government's desktops possibly be a good thing?

It's not just the desktop. Server architecture, email services and directory services have all been tied together in one neat bundle by Microsoft. And once you subscribe to that bundle, it is hard to get free.

Despite the media hype, I find little evidence that the government has embraced Linux servers as enthusiastically as the world in general. While the White House Web site is running on Linux servers and the Navy has subs using Linux servers for sonar, those are pretty minor in the big picture.

A few Federal agencies are moving to a Gmail-based email architecture, which is a sign of cracks in Microsoft's monopoly. GSA’s mail architecture is a notable win for Google, for instance.

The fact is, the world of Federal computing is different than the world of commercial computing, where the Microsoft monopoly is gone. Government technology has been derisively called trailing edge in recent years, and this is one of the reasons why.

Yet the government has a history of being a force that moves information technology forward. Though some would have us believe differently, the United States government did have a big role in developing the Internet.

I personally witnessed the government’s role in developing HDTV. On calls to the Naval Research Lab, I got to see some of the first HDTV broadcasts long before the technology was commercially available.

We must be aware of our government’s use of technology and be prepared to work with administrators and legislators to get Federal IT moving in the right direction again. Not just for their sake, but for all our sakes.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Dan Lyons's provocative question about Why Do American’s Hate Android And Love Apple?, got me to thinking about even larger questions involving my fellow countrymen's relationship to technology.

A.J. Schuler, in his 2003 paper, "Resistance to Change," lays out 10 reasons why people resist change. His first two points may help us understand why we cling to technology that might not be the best for us.

1. The risk of change is seen as greater than the risk of standing still.
2. People feel connected to other people who are identified with the old way.

Why Did Macs Never Rule America?

Dan suggests one reason Americans support the iPhone is because "Apple is an American company, and Americans like to root for the home team." He also says "lawsuits against Android phone makers have been an effective form of marketing" and that Apple fanboys have depicted Android users as "low-class people who are uneducated, poor, cheap and too lacking in `taste.'"

While we might like the home team and being part of the cool-guy club, there is more to iPhone love than Apple and its "superior" marketing.

For instance, when Dan asks, “Why do such a huge majority of Americans go out of their way to choose Apple?” he is talking about smartphones - because as a country we are not really in love with Apple’s computers. According to Ars Technica even at their peak of popularity, the computers of Apple have never even been one third as popular as the iPhone.

From 1996 until his death, Steve Jobs tried fairly unsuccessfully to get Americans public to embrace the Mac the way they now love, love, love the iPhone. (As a former Apple employee, this is a problem that I lived first hand.)

For many years after Mac OS X’s initial release on March 24, 2001, it was arguably the best desktop operating system in the world. For one thing, OS X was far more secure than Windows XP. Whole agencies in the federal government could be taken down by a virus or worm attack, but their CIOs would cling to Windows XP like they were married to it.

Many businesses were even worse. And it isn't all about not liking Apple. Many companies still cling to Windows XP when almost anyone with computer experience will tell you that Windows 7 is a far superior operating system. And let's not even talk about Windows 8.

Because Everyone Else Is Doing It - And They Will Help You

So why are the 11-year-old Windows XP and the no-longer-clearly-superior iPhone still so beloved?

It could be because they were the first widely accepted products of their type. While the Macintosh brought us the first graphical user interface, it was never as widely accepted as Windows. People got used to Windows, and the risk of going to something different became greater than the risk of sticking with XP.

In a similar fashion there were smartphones before the iPhone - but Apple's breakthrough was the first one to be widely accepted.

In technology, "being connected to other people who are identified with the old way" also means that you have a support system of people to call if you screw things up.

If you needed assistance when Windows XP broke, you probably knew someone who could help. And if you have a problem with your iPhone, how hard is it to find another iPhone user?

Fast Food - But Not Fast Internet?

It is not just Microsoft’s operating systems or Apple’s smartphone technology that Americans cling to. We seem perfectly happy with slow Internet access that even Russia and the notably technology adverse British wouldn't tolerate.

“Technology adverse British” is actually a slam our friends across the pond do not deserve. The Brits have adopted smartphones faster than the United States.

It's An American Thing, You Wouldn't Understand

Still, I wonder how America, birthplace to the personal computer and so many other technologies, has become so complacent when it comes to adopting the latest and greatest. I worry about the security vulnerabilities caused by our government’s refusal to aggressively diversify its operating system portfolio.

But whatever you think of iPhones or Windows XP, there is one thing that we should all be able to rally around: faster Internet connections.

Once we see the positive results of forcing change even when we are comfortable hugging our cable modems, perhaps change will come easier to us the next time.

That's important, because a "good enough for me" attitude towards technology is not the best way to keep up with the global economy. And we might fall even further behind if our international competitors can see more on their larger smartphone screens.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

One company started in a garage. The other started in a guard shack in China with $25,000, according to The Economist.

The first company took “Computer” out of its name on January 9, 2007. The other is now the leading seller of PCs in the world, by some measures at least.

Who Owns The Computer Market?

We all know that Apple is still a money machine - and the best in the world at it. But observers like Dan Frommer are now predicting that “Mac shipments… seem to have peaked for good." That is a stinging comment.

Lenovo, meanwhile, might be the best in the world at making computers - at least the desktop and laptop versions.

So where will these two behemoths end up over the next few years?

Opposing Approaches

Tom Peters' seminal book, In Search of Excellence, listed eight themes that defined the success of the corporations. One rule was “Stick to the knitting – stay with the business that you know.”

Apple might have rewritten that rule. While there have been questions about the research behind Peters’ book, there are few about Apple's success through creating and mastering new lines of business. The iPod, iPhone and iPad are powerful examples of how a company can define its own future by strking out in new directions.

Still, it is very interesting to speculate on which company’s strategy will win in the end. The question draws me back to my days at Apple - when I watched the company set off in the directions that now define it.

What might surprise some people is that the decisions that Apple made were often not conscious ones. They sometimes just happened in Apple’s unique corporate culture.

I have described trying to manage at Apple as trying to herd a bunch of cats over a wall with a pitchfork. To complete the image, there was one person whose voice would send the all the cats over the wall instantly. That person, of course, was the late Steve Jobs.

Different Paths To Different Places

Let me try to shed a little light on why Apple and Lenovo are fundamentally different.

The first difference is Lenovo’s strategy of making sure there is place to buy one of its computer very close to where the consumers are. Even in an emerging market like China, Lenovo's goal is to be within 30 miles of every consumer.

Apple, meanwhile, got to what I like to call its "metropolitan strategy" through a combination of missteps and vision.

In the early '90s, Apple wanted to strengthen its sales presence in the K-12 education market. Instead of hiring more people, it chose to strengthen the agent model by reducing the number of resellers who could be educations agents. As a manager in Apple’s Education division, I had to make some very difficult calls to small rural dealerships and tell them Apple was changing their contract so that they could no longer sell to education customers. For some of these small resellers, losing Apple's education business was a death knell.

That was a misstep.

The vision part came in when Apple figured out that its now-weakened resellers would never do as good a job as Apple-branded stores could. That was the genesis of the fabulously successful Apple Stores.

Not everything has changed. Apple has a history of disappointing its partners. Former and current Apple resellers have endless stories of Apple not letting them sell iPods to predatory specials at Apple Stores to chronic availability problems on hot products.

For its part, Lenovo has exclusive resellers in China and exclusive territories in India. Both setups are very different than the retail situation in the United States - but they've played a big part in Lenovo’s growth and are now actually targets for Apple.

The Business Market

Another huge difference is Lenovo's focus on corporate PC sales. Lenovo has doubled its success in that market, according to The Economist.

At one point, I actually led Apple’s most successful enterprise sales team. We tripled Apple’s sales into arguably the most Windows-centric market in the world, the United States government. But our tiny team were fish swimming against the tide in a company rapidly transforming itself into a consumer powerhouse.

Price Matters

Here's one final point. Apple has come to believe it cannot make anything worthy of the Apple brand at a low price point. Lenovo believes it can deliver quality and still serve customers looking for a good deal.

If they are both right, that's a big win for Lenovo.

One morning this week, at 4:25am Eastern time, I got an email from Amazon:

“Great news! You can now enjoy photos on your Kindle Fire using the Cloud Drive Photos app. Store your photos online and have them at your fingertips on your Fire.”

I had to laugh.

I Was Late To The Party

My first thought was "better late than never." Then I noticed the software had been released back in November, so the joke was actually on me.

Still, Amazon taking a year to release a decent cloud-based photo app had sent me right into the arms of a Nexus 7.

The Kindle Fire I got for my Christmas 2011 gift had been my first adventure into tablets. (I’m hooked on photos - which you might know if you read my post on Photo Finishing Your Memories Old and New.)

As an Android user (see Seniors Should Be Dialing In On Smartphones), I was expecting an App on the Kindle Fire like the “Gallery App” on my LG Spectrum smartphone. After all Amazon is an expert with the cloud so it should know how to store my JPEGs. There was no cloud photo app at the time.

Amazon Cloud Drive Couldn't Figure Out Photos

So I experimented by putting some images on my Amazon Cloud Drive. My Kindle and/or Amazon didn’t seem to know what to do with them. Inevitably when viewing the photos, some were always oriented wrong. Often it was the ones that I really wanted to show.

This was surprising, since Amazon seemed to know exactly what to do with my Word documents. It turned them into books that I could easily page through on my Kindle Fire.

Portfolio: A Third-Party Alternative

It wasn’t long before I discovered Portfolio, a neat $2.99 app for Android that worked with Microsoft’s Sky Drive among other things.

I didn’t really care whose cloud had my photos, I just wanted to show a few images using my Kindle Fire when I visited with friends. Portfolio worked really well for me. Just dropping the photos in a folder on my SkyDrive automatically created a slide show.

When I bought a Nexus 7 this holiday season, I was pleased to get my Gallery App back. Ease of access to my photos, more consistent sharing options and the speed of Chrome on the Nexus 7 relegated my Kindle Fire into a backup tablet that I keep in my upstairs office.

Amazon Cloud Drive Photos Rocks

But when I got the note from Amazon this morning, I had to give its Photo Cloud a try. I installed it on my Windows 8 tower, Windows 7 laptop and my now famous Mac Mini running Mountain Lion. Installation was simple and it workeds well on all of them - although, annoyingly, it did install Java Runtime on the Mac.

Uploading photos is as easy as right clicking or dragging and dropping. Unfortunately there is no Linux client yet.

Just to put it to the test, I used the software on Windows 8 to put photos from my Google Drive on the Amazon Cloud. On Windows 7, I uploaded pictures via my Lenovo laptop from the shared media library of my wife’s Windows 7 laptop. I also uploaded photos from Dropbox and the desktop on the Mac to the Amazon cloud. There is a nice option in the Mac version to import from iPhoto. You access it from the cute cloud icon in your menu bar. It is easy to choose what you want to import.

The pictures all show up in a nice slide show on my Kindle Fire. The only challenge so far is that I cannot seem to find the original handful of pictures that I uploaded last year. Of course I might have copies in a few other places.

The big ruckus of comments (118 and counting) following my Mac Mini post last week (see Apple Is No Longer Easy, A Mac Mini Tale Of Woe) convinced me to make one more try to fix the issue. Unfortunately, the woe goes on.

My Original Tale Of Mac Mini Woe

Here is a quick recap. My new Mac Mini booted for the first time last Saturday night. I went to the Apple App Store for software updates. The Mac Mini came with OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.1. At the App Store it got updated to Mountain Lion 10.8.2.

It appeared to be the same operating system that I was using on an external hard drive which was running my dying iMac for several months.

However, when I tried to boot the Mac Mini with the external drive, it would not boot the Mac Mini. That’s not a normal thing for a Mac. I checked with some folks at Apple and was told that there are multiple builds of OS 10.8.2 out in the wild but only the latest version will boot the Mac Mini. Below is a snapshot of the build on the external drive.

Logically the fix was to download the latest version of Mountain Lion 10.8.2 and install it on my external drive. At that point the story gets weird. The Apple App Store would not let me download it and even told me that what it had just installed on my Mac Mini was incompatible with my Mac Mini.

Discussions with Apple friends yielded no suggestions. They did believe the problem would be fixed when OS X 10.8.3 is released. Clearly - except for in the minds of the most fervent Apple fans - this is a problem with the Apple App Store. My friends at Apple all acknowledged this with the hope that recent management changes might bring more focus to OS X and prevent this in the future.

Never Give Up

Whatever the cause of the problem, I didn't want to give up hope. A return trip to the Apple App Store with the old iMac using the Firewire Drive allowed me to download and install what in theory was the latest release of Mountain Lion. Unfortunately, it was the same version that was already on the external drive.

Next I tried “System Restore” while booting the Mac Mini. This supposedly allows you to install a bootable operating system on either an internal or external drive.

It seemed to be working and indicated it was installing some new stuff on the external drive. In the end, however, it turned out to have the same build number - and it still won’t boot the Mac Mini.

Why Boot From An External Drive?

Why would anyone want to boot from an external drive? First, it is a way of preserving your software investment. It gets you off the forced upgrade roller coaster that software companies seem to love so much. Second, if you ever have a problem with your internal drive or a new system install causes hiccups, you can boot from the external drive and get back to work quickly.

Years ago I paid $900 for raster image processing software only to watch it break on the next Mac OS upgrade. Fortunately I got a free upgrade that time, but I learned a valuable lesson. When the software broke again on the next major upgrade and there was a huge cost attached to the software upgrade, I was ready with a second drive that did not have to be updated. That way I could keep using the software I needed.

I will keep my fingers crossed that I don’t have a problem with my Mac Mini. The App Store doesn’t seem to be able to create another bootable drive, so an internal hard drive problem would be serious.

It appears that at least some things that once were easy don’t even work at all now on the Mac.

(For the technical details of the latest efforts on the Mac Mini, check David's post on his own site:  Loving My Mac Mini, But Questioning Apple.)

Lead image courtesy of Apple.

My decision to continue to stay on Apple’s Macintosh platform was not a particularly easy one. Three of our last four Macs have come to untimely deaths. Since 1984 dozens of Macs have lived on my desk and I have fond memories of several of them. My problems with Apple hardware might be unusual, but it is my reality and gave me some reservations about sending more of my money to Cupertino.

Upgrading To A Mac Mini

As I was coaxing the last few DVDs out of my iMac, the infamous iLemon (see My iMac Has Turned Into An iLemon, And It Makes Me Concerned About Apple), I placed an online order for Apple’s least expensive Macintosh, the Mac mini.

For those not familiar with Macs, the Apple store price for that model is $599 and it comes with 2.5 GHz I5 processor, lots of ports, but almost nothing else except an HDMI-to-DVI connector. I also ordered additional memory from Amazon Prime. And I bought an external Samsung DVD drive, for a lot less than the Apple model.

My growing frustration with my dying iMac meant the Mac Mini rested on the sofa in my office for just 24 hours after it arrived.

My Mac mini with DVD drive just behind the keyboard, and an external LaCie Firewire 800 hard drive on top of the Mac mini.

Easy Digital Migration?

One of the great things about Apple products for the last several years has been the migration assistant, which helps you move everything from an older Mac to a new one. I used it with my iMac and it worked flawlessly. However, given that my iMac had problems that even Apple couldn’t solve, and that I was running it off an almost completely full external hard drive the same size of the drive in my new Mac Mini, I thought it best to start from scratch.

I sort of expected there to be some conflict when I plugged the Samsung into the Mac mini, given all the court cases, but it worked great as I installed my Microsoft Office 2011 for the Mac. My other software, Rapidweaver 5, Nisus Writer Express, Fetch, SnagIt, Chrome and Firefox were all downloaded without a hitch.

But when you get a new Mac, you almost immediately end up at the App Store. Surprisingly Apple’s App store was where the real pain started.

My first shock came when I arrived at the App store and clicked the “Update All” button. It didn’t take long before things ground to a halt. The first thing I noticed was a message “We could not download iPhoto” because OS X version 10.8.2 or later is required.

Next I got a message that I needed to do an EFI firmware update. For those not familiar with EFI, it is basically today’s version of the BIOS. Of course, the EFI message immediately made me think I had slipped back into the world of DOS. But the Mac Mini that I purchased was introduced on October 23, 2012, not even three months ago.

Anyway, the EFI update wasn’t a problem other than it had to be done separately. Then I went through a huge system update to bring my brand new Mac Mini from OS X version 10.8.1 to 10.8.2. Only then would the App Store let me update my iPhoto. The net of this was far more rebooting than I normally experience when bringing up a new Mac.

Mac vs. Windows, Redux

It occurs to me that maybe Microsoft should shoot a new version of the old iMac commercial where a boy and a dog race a man and a desk full of boxes to see which can get on the Internet first. I think Windows 8 might win. I say that because I got my Mac mini only a week after I first booted up a new Lenovo desktop tower PC. I know this will bring howls from the Apple crowd, but it was easier to get started using the Lenovo PC than it was to get the Mac mini going.

There were more challenges along the way. Apple’s Mail wizard did not know how to configure my old .Mac email accounts. I did a Google search to find the right settings. Postbox on my Windows 8 machine did a better job.

The surprises were not over. As I've noted before, my decision to stay on the Mac platform was largely based on the tight integration of the iLife products, iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD. While I checked to make sure iLife was included, I didn’t think to check to see if the definition of iLife had changed.

I was floored when I found out that iDVD not only wasn’t included, but it no longer exists. A little searching confirmed that Apple had indeed ditched iDVD. I missed the news because when I migrated to my iMac in October 2010, the migration assistant brought iDVD along. Given I was using iDVD on my external drive just before I started unpacking the Mac Mini, I was floored.

Boot Troubles

This turn of events made it essential that I boot my Mac Mini from my external Firewire hard drive so I could use iDVD. This being a Macintosh, I thought it would be no problem. After all I have been booting Macintoshes from external drives of one sort or another almost since the Mac was introduced. And my current external drive was successfully running my dying iMac just a few minutes earlier.

But apparently thinking that it would work easily pushed me into some sort of reality distortion zone. It's time to admit that some things no longer just work on a Mac. My new Mac would just hang when trying to boot from the external drive. Given that both drives have the same version of the OS, I knew talking to first-tier Apple support was a waste of my time, so I went a little higher up the ladder to find out the real scoop.

Turns out that the Mac Mini requires the absolute latest build of OS X 10.8.2. My external hard drive likely has an earlier build. I bought Mac OS X Mountain Lion for my iMac this fall and it got the update to 10.8.2 on October 4, 2012. Who knew we had to keep track of build numbers for Mac OS X?

Well I thought, no big problem, I paid for a copy of Mountain Lion, I will just go download the latest and greatest version from Apple’s App Store. Sorry folks, this journey into the magical mystery world of Apple isn’t going to end that nicely.

Just to be sure I did not dream the whole thing, I just tried downloading it again, and the message is still the same. “Mountain Lion isn’t compatible with your computer.”

Well this is actually a pretty ugly turn of events. I checked back with my Apple contact. He too was mystified, but assured me that all will be well whenever Mac OS X 10.8.3 is released.

Really, that's what he said.

There are more adventures in this, but here's one more tidbit. During all of this I installed VMware’s Fusion software. With zero challenges, I got Xbuntu Linux running on the Mac mini. Maybe Linux running perfectly on Mac is a message from Steve that the gnomes in Cupertino need to focus a little more on OS X?

I just finished setting up my second Windows 8 computer. The first one, a Lenovo Yoga ultrabook/tablet, has a touchscreen. The second one, a Lenovo desktop tower, is hooked up to a standard Dell flat-panel LCD monitor that I bought a few years ago.

While I installing the last piece of software on my new tower, I read Brian Profitt’s ReadWrite post about the current infatuation with touchscreens (see Hey PC Industry: Stop Being So Damn Touchy-Feely).

But my experiences have convinced me that the ride into the new Windows 8 world is not going to be that bad. And more to the point, the touchscreen interface isn't the biggest issue.

Touch Is Not the Problem

The problem is not that Microsoft is dragging us kicking and screaming into the world of touch interfaces.

The real challenge is more complexity. To a certain extent I see some similar challenges - albeit on a smaller scale - in Apple’s Mac OS X Lion. They both offer too many different ways of accomplishing the same thing.

One of the first things that I do when setting up a Windows computer is to get rid of the free trial subscription to some bloatware security program. Windows Defender is free and has worked well for me. We all know security programs have big enough egos that using two at the same time will cause problems.

Uninstalling a program on Windows requires you to go to the Control Panel. That used to be fairly straight forward on Windows 7 and earlier operating systems. You went to the Start Menu. When I tried setting up my first Windows 8 computer, I had not figured out that you could get to the Control Panel multiple ways. Even once I figured it out, I learned that getting there was context-sensitive - and confusing.

Complexity With Strange Options

If I am on the Windows 8 Start screen with the tiles and I move my mouse or finger to the upper right corner of the screen, the soon-to-be-famous Windows 8 "charms" come out. One is Settings - which you might think would take you directly to the control panel, but it doesn’t. At least not in that context.

When I am using a regular Windows desktop application like Firefox, going to the upper right corner of the screen also reveals the charms. Select Settings here and you will find the Control Panel listed as the number two item on the right of your screen.

Just to make it a little more confusing, if I am running an application like Google’s Chrome in its Windows 8 mode when I do the same thing, the Settings charm that shows up is for Google Chrome - and there is no Control Panel anywhere around. However, if I run Google Chrome in desktop mode, the Setting’s charm that shows up does lead to the control panel.

As I was working on my new tower PC, I also discovered that if you go to the lower left corner of your screen and right click with your mouse, you will get a pop-up menu which has the Control Panel.

It would be far easier have one simple, consistent way to get to the control panel. It does not matter to me if I get to it with the mouse or my fingers. That choice I can handle. Among my current choices I will likely remember going to the lower left corner and right clicking. It makes the most sense to me.

When I first started using Mac OS X Mountain Lion, I had some similar concerns. If I want to open and application, I am not exactly sure why I need Launch Pad, the dock on my screen, recent applications under the Apple menu, the Finder sidebar, and the ability to double click on an application icon. However, I have learned to ignore the ways that don’t work for me.

Learning Curve On Windows 8 Not So Bad

That's slowly happening with Windows 8, as well. When I started working on my first Windows 8 system, I got so frustrated that I finally installed Start8 from Stardock. It gave me back the old Start Menu and let me gradually become accustomed to Windows 8. I did not bother installing Start8 on my second system. I learned enough to not need it. (For more, see Could Restoring The Windows 8 Start Button Fix Everything?)

Having used Windows 8 very successfully with a mouse, I’m not very concerned about being stuck if the touchscreen capability is not there in a system. The Intel Core i5 Windows 8 desktop tower that I bought came with a 1TB hard drive and 8GB of memory and a nice keyboard. The cost before taxes was $499. That is a lot of computer for less than $500. Who cares it if doesn't have a touchscreen?

All-In-One Computers Are Wasteful

I am more worried about all-in-one computers than touch interfaces. I have seen some reports that LCD screens could last for up to 20 years. We all know that even the best of computers become functionally obsolete in three to five years. If you buy an all-in-one computer, your screen is going to outlast your computer by more than a decade.

Our family has purchased seven iMacs since 1998. All have been retired except my iLemon which is just waiting for my new Mac Mini’s arrival to give up the ghost. All the screens were functioning perfectly when we gave up on the computers and recycled them.

When my new MacMini shows up this week it will be hooked up to an Apple 20-inch flat panel Cinema Display that I purchased in December 2004 for close to $1,000. I suspect the old screen will outlast the new MacMini. The iMac I bought in 2010 will be our last all-in-one computer.

Touchscreen Price/Reliability Not A Big Issue

I doubt that touchscreen pricing and reliability are issues that are going to heavily weigh on the success of Windows 8. Touchscreens have proven themselves in some very rugged scenarios and the prices are dropping quickly.

The key point for the Windows 8 user interface isn't worrying about too much dependence on touch vs. the mouse. It's about whether the user interface is simple to use and doesn’t confuse us with too much choice.

So far I am not enthusiastic about the latest releases from either Microsoft or Apple in that regard. Maybe I will go have a look at KDE in the Linux world. It is hard to believe that Linux has come so far that I might be looking at it as relief from Mac OS X or Windows 8, but who knows?

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

The New Year often reminds us of things we have meant to do all year. Many New Year's resolutions often fail, but setting one revolving around a digital solution can sometimes work its way into your routine with less pain than a daily trip to the health club. Organizing our family's photos is one of the things that became part of my routine after making a resolution a few years ago.

If your parents are still alive, you could be faced with shoe boxes full of old photos to add to your own collections. Such pictures might be important peeks into your family's history and are worth preserving. If you add to those boxes your own collection of pictures and the digital photos that are scattered over your various devices, you can be looking at a huge challenge.

The best solution is a routine that takes care of the present and starts nibbling away at the past. With a history of storing photos in the cloud for years, I have put a lot of thought into organizing and protecting our photos. Others might have different ideas, but this is what works for me.

My solutions are not operating-system specific. It will work on a Mac or a Windows machine, or you can accomplish the same thing with a computer running Linux.

I'm going to suggest that photos you are going to archive deserve to be cropped and adjusted before you save them. You will be surprised how pleased you will be in the future with your handiwork. There are a number of photo editing programs out there, but I've been using Picasa and iPhoto for years. Picasa is free and iPhoto still comes free if you buy a new Mac. Picasa is one of the first applications that I load on a new computer. I have even been running it on Windows 8 since early December 2012 without any problems. Picasa also runs on any Intel-based Mac. There are a number of Linux photo solutions though the one I prefer on my Ubuntu system is Shotwell Photo Manager.

Dealing With The Present

When working with present-day shots, I never let my photos age on the camera's memory cards. When I come in from my morning or evening walk, I immediately import my photos to my Windows laptop. A quick scan will usually reveal six or seven that I like. I mark them with Picasa's "star" tool, then crop and adjust the lighting and color. My goal is always to tune the image to look the way I remember the scene looking to my eye when I snapped the photo. If I wait even a few hours to do this, it is much harder to recall the setting for the picture.

Once I am happy with the photos, I export the starred ones to my Google Drive in the cloud. You could just as easily use DropBox or Microsoft's SkyDrive for this step. On Linux Google Drive is not officially working yet, so I would use DropBox. My photos go in a folder automatically given today's date. The next thing I do is "share" my edited photos to a chosen album in the cloud on my Picasa web album account. Basic Picasa web album accounts are free and tied to your Gmail address. Once in Picasa web albums, my chosen photos are already in the cloud at two different places.

Some reviews of photo archiving software complain that Google has made using Picasa for this purpose more difficult, given Google's effort to push sharing through Google+. There is a simple secret to solving this. I have two Gmail accounts and one of them is not tied to a Google+ identity. I use the one disconnected from the Google+ identity for photos because I can send my photos directly to Picasa web albums without having to first share through Google+. However, sharing a set of photos through Google+ does automatically creates a Picasa web album, so if you have no problems sharing in two places, you'll still get your Picasa album.

Typically, I also set up albums for special trips or events. I always have a bucket album which covers photos for a three month period like "Fall of 2012."

Google has made it very easy to add photos to your Picasa web albums even if you don't use the desktop application Picasa on your computer. Once you access one of your Picasa web albums via web browser, you can select the action "add photos" and then just select photos on your Google drive or computer and drag them to the browser window. Once the photos are on the web, it is easy to re-order them, add captions or even select the cover photo for the album. You can also share links with others to an individual photo or an album. If your photos have GIS information, you will also see that in Picasa web albums.

I go one step further with my photos. I carry the same photo memory card upstairs to my office and import the photos once again to iPhoto. Often seeing photos on a different computer screen with different software will have me choosing a few more that I want to keep. On the Mac it is easy enough to "flag" the photos that I like and have tuned up and then upload them to the same daily folder on my Google Drive. I then repeat the process of adding the additional photos to the cloud-based Picasa web album I have chosen. At the end of the process, I have my preferred photos in the cloud in two places, and on two different computers that are backed up regularly. Only then do I sometimes share general-interest photos on Facebook or Twitter, and special ones on Pinterest.

Photos taken on my smartphone get automatically uploaded to my DropBox account where it is easy to import them. It is also easy to share a photo taken by my smartphone using Bluetooth sharing to my Windows laptop.

Archiving The Past

For the last few years, I've been tackling boxes of photos, albums and slides from the past. I usually manage to find some down time in December to do that. Scanning photos is a good way to escape holiday insanity.

Last summer, as we were moving from our home of over twenty years, I actually finished up all the photos we've collected over the years. After I threw away photos that no one could identify or were of poor quality, I handed the boxes of photos and slides over to my oldest daughter to see if she wanted to comb through them one more time.

When tackling boxes of real prints and slides, I use an Epson Perfection V500 scanner. I chose it because the software works well on Macs and Windows computers and it was fast. I can scan each photo in less than a minute. Slides take a little more time, but because you can load a few slides at one time, it is not a lengthy process.

As I get a number of photos scanned, I will import them into iPhoto or Picasa and then move them into an album on Picasa web albums. I usually tempt the other family members to add their own by sending them a few photos or a link to the album of recently scanned photos.

I could have done the same thing on Flickr, but I find the sharing and privacy options a little more to my liking on Picasa web albums. My extra 25 GBs of Google storage costs me $2.49 per month. Even with my huge collection of photos and email, I have only used 41% of my storage.

Regardless of which services you use, or how you want to organize your photos, the important thing is to establish a pattern that will make your photo organization less of a chore and more of a part of your daily routine.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

With one billion smartphones now on our planet, it is amazing that one device can provide such utility to so many different people. The combination of apps on my LG Spectrum let me do things I couldn’t do without it. However within my over-sixty demographic, I find myself in a small group of smartphone users. I find myself wondering why something so useful to me is embraced by so few of my friends? 

Estimates for smartphone users my age range between 8% and 24%. Actually, among friends of my age, I suspect only around 10% of the people I know have a smartphone. That number is exclusive of my former colleagues in the real estate industry where smartphone usage is very high, even as the average age of agents is 54.

Making Progress

Seven years ago, I was just happy to have the contacts on my Mac computer sync with my Nokia 6620 cell phone. I gave up even that when I went to work in real estate in January 2007, where many were hooked on Blackberries and Windows computers were the standard. That summer, though, Apple introduced the iPhone and the world of cell phones began to change rapidly.

In March of 2010, I bought a Droid phone mainly because of Verizon’s network. I was impressed that the Droid could be populated with my address book and Gmail accounts while we were paying for the phone and signing the terms of use contracts.

The increasing sophistication of the apps that helped us do business in real estate convinced me of the utility of smartphone. It was great to be riding around in car with a client and be able to instantly find out information on a home that caught their eye.

Even outside of business, I found some great uses that helped me become a dedicated smartphone user.

Apps For Every Pursuit

With a life long love of GIS and maps, I became smitten with a wonderful free app by Google called My Tracks. I love to hike, boat and kayak. My Tracks records those adventures and lets me store them on the web at My Places, which is in turn hooked to my Google account. I can see how far I walked or kayaked and share the maps with others. I can also edit the maps and attach pictures to the locations. It is really neat to take someone on a boat ride of our marshes and then share with them a map of their trip.

I also love to take pictures and it is not unusual for me to take hundreds in a day. The edited ones I want to keep are uploaded to my Picasa web album account. Since my original Droid, the Gallery app has been a repository for not only the photos I have taken with my phone, but also all of the pictures stored in the cloud within my Picasa account.

Last year, I got a Kindle Fire for Christmas and desperately wanted something similar to the Android Gallery app. I ended up finding a neat app called Portfolio. At the time I was experimenting with Microsoft’s SkyDrive so I ended up putting Portfolio for SkyDrive on both my Android devices. It is the easiest way to create a slide show. Now if I know that I want to show some photos, I just drop them in a folder on my SkyDrive and can show them from my phone or tablet. They also have apps for Flickr and Picasa.

Another neat app that I find very useful is Google’s Latitude. My son and I often use it to track each other when we are traveling. If you are trying to meet someone, Latitude is hard to beat. You can see other person’s progress on a map showing your current location. Latitude is another tool integrated with Google Maps.

I will also admit to using Evernote, Instagram and Foursquare. My Tracks is great for a full hike, but with Foursquare I can check in at landmarks and see how long it takes me to get to the next one. I also find Foursquare a good way to keep track of restaurants and places that I like. I had some great lobster in Maine this fall. I may not immediately recall the name of the restaurant, but I could find it easily in my Foursquare history.

Another app that I like is Share My Position. When I am on the road and take a different route, the first chance that I get, I will share my location with our children. If I drop dead, they will at least know where to find me.

Texting on a smartphone is a revolution compared to the old way of using a numeric keypad. It gets even better using voice input or when you install Mighty Text on your computer and your smartphone. I can send texts via my smartphone easily from my computer. Once in a while I even get a response from my grown children.

I even use the Alarm/Clock app to keep my afternoon naps to a reasonable length.

I also use CallTrack in conjunction with Google calendars. It records the date, numbers and durations of all my cell phone calls. With the calendar app it is easy to synchronize with my Google calendar, which has everything from our church calendar to the local tide tables.

There is one final app that I have to mention. It is the Sea Tow app. Sea Tow is like the AAA for the water. You pay a yearly fee and if you run out of gas or get stuck, they will come rescue you. I boat a lot. This summer for the first and I’m sure not the last time I got my skiff stuck on a sandbar. I used the Sea Tow app to send the GPS coordinates of our location to our rescuer. Even with a drive to launch his boat, he reached us in about an hour after I sent the message. It only took a few minutes to get us off the sandbar and on our way. It would have been a lot harder without the app since their captain was unfamiliar with the area. While I have a GPS on the boat, coaxing the coordinates out of it is more difficult than tapping “send.”

While I could live without my smartphone, it has become a great tool that I use all the time. Given the useful and personal nature of all of these apps and more, it still surprises me that more people my age don’t take advantage of smartphones.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

I’ve been using Apple’s computers since August of 1982, and I worked for Apple for 20 years, and until two years ago I’d never had a bad experience with an Apple product.

But that one — an I5 iMac purchased in October, 2010, which I have come to call my iLemon — has been a nightmare, and while this is only one iLemon in four decades of using Apple products, I think buyers going into the holiday season should listen to the challenges that I have faced and weigh them as they consider purchasing a new computer.

Here’s my story: In the fall of 2010, I started a project that required more horsepower than my four-year-old MacBook could provide. I bought an iMac with an I5 processor and 27-inch screen for just over $1,800.

The iMac had some quirks. It generated a lot of heat and I found the SDHC reader which was located below the DVD drive to be very inconvenient and something of a pain to someone like myself who takes a lot of pictures.

Nevertheless, things were fine for 15 months. But in the spring of 2012 the iMac began to exhibit some disturbing signs. It was taking well over fourteen minutes to boot Snow Leopard. I did some research and talked to some Apple folks and eventually decided that I was suffering from “Slow Snow Leopard.” I followed some homegrown remedies that I found on the Web since Apple seemed to have no suggestions. I did get the boot time on the iMac cut down to reasonable time.

Dire Warning

About three months later, the iMac gave me a dire warning that I should copy all of my data to another hard drive, reformat my drive and reinstall the operating system.

I went one better and after copying the data to another drive I did a complete clean install of Apple’s Lion operating system onto an external Firewire 800 drive. I ran that until I was comfortable with Lion. Then I formatted the internal drive and did another completely clean install except I moved up to Mountain Lion, Apple’s latest operating system.

When I say completely clean install, that means I went back to CDs or disk images for all my applications. The operating systems were installed from Apple’s app store. Starting at square one actually worked well except for a set of upgrade disks that I had purchased from Apple.

For some reason Mountain Lion would not recognize the upgraded iPhoto. I solved the problem by spending another $14.95 at the Apple Store for a new purchase of iPhoto.

All this worked, sort of, for a couple of weeks. Being of a cautious nature, I only installed a completely new, small iPhoto library on the internal drive. In spite of that, I started to have iPhoto library corruption problems. It wasn’t long before I figured out that the internal drive was dying.

The computer quit booting from the drive so I upgraded my external drive to Mountain Lion and started running the computer off the external drive again. During all of this I wasn’t too worried about my data since I am a heavy user of Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft’s SkyDrive. I also have regular time capsule backups of my data.

Card Reader Problems

At the same time, I switched to the external drive I started have intermittent problems with the SDHC reader on the Mac. Sometimes it would read a card from my camera and sometimes not. I would often rotate my chair fifteen degrees, insert the same card in my Lenovo laptop, load the photos into Picasa, and export the ones that I wanted to my Google drive and then import them from Google drive to iPhoto on the Mac.

Surprisingly sometimes I could come back later in the day and the iMac would read the same card that previously it had refused to read. It might read one or two of four cards or sometimes none of them.

I also was having more trouble with iPhoto. I ended up reinstalling iPhoto from the Apple Store twice. For any of you who have done that, you know that it can take a few hours with a cable modem. For a while it seemed like the iMac was always downloading something from Apple.

Asking Apple For Help

With a long career at Apple, I still have a few high-level email addresses so I sent a note to someone high enough up the corporate tree to see if Apple was willing to stand behind their product. I wasn’t too surprised when I got a call on my cell phone the next day from someone in executive relations promising to help me resolve my problem.

That weekend and the following Monday, I spent much of my time running tests and doing screen shots. I formatted several types of SD cards with five different cameras to try to determine a pattern on my malfunctioning card reader. I also tried to document the strange problem I was having with photostream in iPhoto. I took all that information along with my system profile and sent it to my contact at executive relations.

I spent well over an hour on the phone with an Apple expert and let him download all sorts of stuff from my computer in the hopes that he could resolve some of my issues. He seemed to tire of the whole thing and we never got to the photostream issue. He promised to pass the information on to his engineering team and get back to me.

I waited a week to hear back from him and then sent a note to him and my executive relations contact. The next day I got a call back from my executive relations contact. All she said was that it had been determined that I had a loose wire on my SDHC reader, and I should take the system to my local service provider. My nearest Apple store is three hours away.

So now I have an iMac with a dead hard drive, a card reader that has intermittent problems and Bluetooth that no longer works. I’m thinking that spending more money on this iMac is probably a waste.

Some will say that I should have purchased Apple’s AppleCare extended warranty. I feel the same way about extended warranties on computers that I do about extended warranties on cars. I should not have to buy an extra warranty to get a product that is trouble free for a few years.

The shame is that all of this hardware worked fine at one time. None of this relates to the user not knowing how to get a computer to work. All of this is in Apple’s lap.

Lessons I Learned

The experience confirmed several of my thoughts about the new Apple. Number one is Apple is no longer the leader in reliability. You don’t have to take my word for it, you can read this reliability report published in February of 2012. Apple is in fourth place and way behind Lenovo, which ranks number one.

My second thought is that Apple often pushes design to the point that it impacts reliability. I was surprised to find that the hard drive on my iMac has a temperature sensor that shuts down the drive if the temperature gets too high. It is the first time I have been aware of a Mac outside of the Xserve that has a sensor like that. You can cook your hand on the top of my iMac at times. I have to believe that all the heat contributed to the early death of my hard drive.

Third, the Apple value proposition isn’t what it used to be. The two HP laptops that I bought for a total of less than $1,500 are still working great. As laptops they have had a harder life than my iMac which has never left its desktop. They’ll soon be three years old and are still functioning. The iMac never even made it two years. My original HP laptop that I bought over five years ago is also still working.

Fourth, just because you pay more for Apple, don’t expect better service especially, if you live outside the major metro areas. I was really disappointed with my “troubleshooting” experience. The whole thing seemed to be aimed at minimizing what Apple would do to fix my problem.

On top of it all, after the call with the Apple expert, I got an email to me addressed “Dear Robert.” I have to say if you cannot even get my first name right, you probably aren’t going to solve any of my problems.

Others Provide Better Service

I have to compare my Apple experience to the phone call that I received from Adobe’s director of worldwide operations on a Sunday night telling me that he was sending me by FedEx a free copy of Dreamweaver to make up for problems I was having with an upgrade.

Last summer I got a call from the executive assistant to the CEO of Toro telling me that they were sending me a free cable to replace the broken one on my lawn mower. I’ve been using Toro mowers for nearly 50 years. The cable might get me to continue to use them.

Just a month ago, Nikon agreed to fix my Nikkor telephoto lens even though they could not find their copy of the extended warranty card. I won’t be buying anything but Nikon cameras.

I want Apple to be a premium brand willing to go the extra mile because I have paid premium prices for my Apple products. Unfortunately my experience even with some high-level intervention shows that it is “buyer beware” with Apple just as it is with many other companies that sell products not nearly as expensive but sometimes more reliable than Apple products.

The Latest iMacs Don’t Appeal To Me

Apple’s latest refresh of the iMac line adds some more twists to the equation. You can no longer upgrade your own RAM in an iMac and if you want a DVD drive you have to buy an external one. Apple’s RAM prices are about as expensive as the market will bear.

From the review that I recently read, Apple has substituted a lower performing hard drive in the least expensive iMac. Based on my experience I cannot think that is good.

Then in the ultimate convenience move, the SDHC reader is now on the back of the monitor. The only reason that I can see for an iMac being thinner and lighter is that it will be easier to carry into a mall Apple Store for repair.

It saddens me to say that in the nine months since spring I have invested more time in this iMac than I did keeping my Vista laptop running over a couple of years while I was calling Vista a quagmire.

My 2013 Resolution: New Technology

I am going through a complete technology refresh on my desktop in the next 12 months. Likely there will be an Apple product on my desk, but it will not be an iMac. Whatever Mac I get will be here on probation since my recent Apple experiences have not inspired confidence.

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving I bought a Lenovo Yoga running Windows 8 for $999. My older Lenovo laptop is now hooked to an external monitor and acting as my main desktop system while I try to figure out how to replace my iMac.

I bought a new Lenovo because of the great experience with the previous one. It is the best laptop that I have used since the Powerbook G4 Titanium that I used as an Apple employee. So far I am very pleased with the Lenovo Yoga, which is a combination ultra-book tablet with a touch screen. I’ll be sharing my Windows 8 experiences and the decisions I make on other purchases here at ReadWrite.

You can read more about my Apple experience by checking out my recently published Kindle Book, The Pomme Company. Finally, rumors of my book causing iPads running Kindle reader software to overheat are unfounded.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Two weeks ago my interview Dan Lyons on ReadWrite, What's It Like To Work For Tim Cook? A Former Apple Sales Exec Dishes, caused a bit of controversy in the Apple world.

Some of what was said about me, including the comment that I probably never met Tim Cook, made me smile and think that the Apple world in its own way is starting to resemble the strange reality of some American conservatives who have listened to their own voices for so long that they cannot hear or understand another voice.

I am not a newcomer to the world of Apple. I started selling Apple computers in September 1982 at a small reseller in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. I sold everything from the Apple II+, Apple III, and Lisa to the original Macintosh. Then I went to work for the mothership in November  of 1984. I remained at Apple until July 2004 when I got shown the door. If you want more details on my life at Apple there is a book for that, The Pomme Company.

Yes, I Know Tim Cook, And I've Been Writing About Apple For Years

Until I pulled many of my Applepeels articles down in preparation for my book, I had over 1,100 pages online about Apple. No one at Apple ever challenged the truth in those pages. Some were there for seven years.

In the summer of 2010, I did write an un-named executive a Thanks for arranging my exit from Apple. The executive was Tim Cook. The comments after that post are most interesting especially if you have never worked at Apple.

Some of you might have even seen the follow-up article that I wrote in response to my comments on the Dan Lyons story, Tim Cook Is One Of The Three People Who Saved Apple. If you read my book along with my other materials and still think I hate Apple, I will be very surprised.

To some, like John Gruber of Daring Fireball, I am a “noted Apple pessimist” who said in 2007 that the iPhone might be the high water mark for Apple. I actually I don’t think that I would change a lot about the comment except to say that the iPhone’s market share has gone down faster than anyone could predict, and that the iPad’s success has been as big a surprise to me as anyone.

I'm Not Religious About Only Using A Mac

I am different than most computer users. I long ago decided that the best way to understand computers is to not be stuck in one environment. On my desk is a Windows 7 laptop, an I5 iMac, and an old Dell tower running the latest Ubuntu Linux. I use them all each day.

Based on my experiences with competing hardware, I long ago predicted that Apple would have a very hard time getting to 10% market share in worldwide computer shipments. Even today with all the Apple hype, Apple’s 2 million units per quarter doesn’t even earn a place on the list of the top five companies with worldwide computer shipments, so I stand by that prediction unless Apple changes direction.

Back in 2009, I believed that with aggressive promotions and by taking advantage of Vista dissatisfaction and a continued commitment to price competitiveness Apple could make a dent in the worldwide PC world. That really didn’t happen, and unfortunately for Apple, Windows 7 turned out to be much better than most of us expected.

Apple has made more than a dent in the US PC market, but real success in the worldwide market has been much more elusive, and I don’t see the innovation coming out of Apple to continue to aggressively grow its PC share in the United States.  So as someone who has always thought that Apple has been and remains good for the world of technology, I am worried.

While this is mild criticism of Apple and perhaps Tim Cook’s leadership at Apple,  I think that comments from people like me who love Apple in spite of everything should not be ignored by Apple or others in the Apple ecosystem.

Perceptions Of Apple Are Changing

Since the iPod, Apple been a company that enjoyed success because a lot of people rightfully believed Apple was ahead of the rest of the manufactures in the technology world. That perception is subtly changing.  You can see it in the dialogue of many technology articles.  The Apple pendulum is swinging back somewhat.

Having been at Apple when Apple had great technology and the world mostly ignored it, I know how dangerous it is for Apple to reach a tipping point on the perception it is a technology leader.

I’m not sure what Apple has shown us since Steve died has done much to enhance Apple’s reputation of being a technology leader.  Interestingly when I was at Apple, one of the things the company believed strongly was that competing on specs was a road to failure.

Competing on the resolution of your Retina Display is exactly that. It is likely not working out the way I suspect the folks at Apple thought.  Just look at comments on the iPad mini.

Why Won't Apple Innovate On Computers?

It is hard for me to understand why a company that competes on design has been able to offer so little on design when it comes to towers, the Mac Mini and the iMac. The case on the Mac towers dates back to the summer of 2003.  Does Apple really believe their own press: “October 23, 2012—Apple® today unveiled a completely new iMac® with a stunning design?”  The design hasn’t changed much in five years.  Certainly the materials have changed, but I would argue that serviceability on the iMac is worse than it has ever been.

Inevitably the comment will come back that Apple has moved beyond typical computers. That might be the case. However, there were 87 million computers shipped last quarter. Apple shipped a little over 2 million computers in the same quarter, so that looks like an opportunity to me. I also don’t think Apple has to get all the way down in the trenches with the lowest cost PC makers in order to make a difference.

Is bringing innovation to lower cost world of PCs a challenge? Of course it is, but it might be easier than suing every other technology company. I would like nothing more than to write another post like, The genius of Apple, which I wrote on July 1, 2006 when I took delivery of my white MacBook. I haven’t seen an Apple computer under $1,000 worthy of such a post since then. 

I Wish I Could Get Excited About The New Macs, But I Can't

I might have gotten excited about the MacBook Air but in typical Apple fashion they left off something on the low cost system. Unfortunately it was my beloved SD slot. Certainly my I5 iMac with the hard drive hidden behind the LCD panel doesn’t deserve such a post. I’m also sure the new iMac doesn’t deserve a post since the SD slot is behind that lovely Retina Display. I cannot imagine reaching behind the display every time I want to move photos.

I will remain on watch for that next bit of Apple computer genius. Maybe they will ship a compact, reasonably priced I5 or I7 mini-tower. Of course I have been waiting for that for a long time. I actually plan to go ahead and buy one of those small towers this shopping season, but it will be from one of the less innovative PC manufacturers who have figured out how to do what Apple either cannot or will not do.