Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

During a discussion today about potential iPad sales, a friend and I got distracted by reflecting on the tremendous value delivered by a vanilla PC. Over on the Dell Web site right now, a basic 15″ laptop costs $499 and includes 320 GB of hard drive and 3 GB of RAM. So for the same price as an iPad, you’ve got a machine that can do the following:

• give each family member his or her own private and personalized set of files, programs, and bookmarks
• support the creation of almost any kind of document, plan, or project
• run nearly all of the world’s software development tools
• function as a videophone
• function as a television, DVD player (and burner), radio, and videogame
• be used almost anywhere in the world (multi-voltage power supply and standard 802.11 wireless adapter)

The machine exacts a price in terms of learning and administration, but it does a lot for $499!

So… can Apple sell a huge number of machines at the same price that do a lot less? Sure, at least to those who have an extra $499 for an indulgence.

Let’s look at Apple’s track record:

• Macintosh: substantially more expensive than competition, 2-5 percent market share
• iPod: comparable price/megabyte to competition, 55-70 percent market share
• iPhone: slightly higher price than other smart phones, 16 percent market share of smartphones (source), negligible market share of all mobile phones

There have been enough spendthrifts worldwide to keep Steve Jobs in Gulfstreams, even when an Apple product carries a premium price, but Apple has only touched the mass market with products that are close in price to competitors’ products.

The best predictor of iPad world dominance may therefore be how much it costs to buy a similar tablet from a competitor. I.e., if the competition costs about the same (see “Zune”), Apple could end up with most of the market.

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One of the highlights of my trip to Phoenix was a visit to Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright’s summer camp for teaching and working. I learned that parents may be able to influence a child after all, contradicting The Nurture Assumption to some extent. Frank Lloyd Wright’s mother home-schooled him and filled his childhood with architectural drawings and models. Her plan for him to become an architect worked out spectacularly well.

Frank Lloyd Wright provides an inspiration to older folks. He established Taliesin West at the age of 70. He did approximately 30 percent of his work between the age of 70 and his death at age 92. He worked until five days before his death.

Related: 2008 posting about Fallingwater.

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After my initial one-year deal with Verizon FiOS ran out, they sent me shocking near-$200 monthly bills, so I downgraded my service to the bare minimum last fall. I had Internet plus a lifeline phone. Then they started filling my mailbox with an offer to go back to the glorious world of Verizon unlimited phone, Internet, plus some TV for a $65/month teaser rate, escalating to $95/month for a total two-year period. I finally took the bait and upgraded my service via the Web site that they provided.

Five minutes later, my Internet stopped working. I called FiOS tech support. “You placed an order for new service, so of course we had to shut off your old service,” they helpfully explained. When would the Internet that I was already paying for be restored? “You’re scheduled for an install on April 9th.” So the upgrade process has a designed-in two-day service outage? “No. Sometimes people are cut off for a week or more.”

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I have drafted a summary/review of The Greatest Trade Ever. Comments/corrections would be appreciated.

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At dinner this evening we compared a recent generation Amazon Kindle with the iPad for use as an electronic book. The text on the Kindle is definitely sharper and far more readable in bright light. The text on the iPad has the fuzzy edges that you’d expect from a color screen, but under typical home lighting is easier to read than the Kindle.

The Kindle users around the table, ranging in age from 14 to 46, all found that the iPad was unpleasantly heavy. For handheld use, e.g., on a treadmill, the Kindle is much better. For travel, the Kindle is also the big winner due to its two-week battery life and therefore ability to travel without a charger.

People generally liked the iPad, but not as a substitute for the Kindle.

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My rental car here in Phoenix is a 2010 Toyota Corolla. It is a reasonably nice car, but once again I am struck by the lack of innovation in the car industry. It is as though the semiconductor revolution never occurred. The car is seemingly identical to a compact car from 1985. The climate control is the same (no thermostat). The radio is the same (AM, FM, CD; no HD radio, no satellite radio). The Internet connectivity is the same (none). The navigation capability is the same (none). The monitoring and recording capabilities are the same, i.e., none (you’d expect by now cars to have some cheap video cameras to record the lead-up to crashes, to warn of lane departures, etc.).

The only reason that the owner of a 25-year-old car would upgrade to this 2010 Corolla would be if the 25-year-old car had fallen apart. So… as car makers improve durability they are digging their own graves as far as sales are concerned.

Update: The book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do cites research from both Norway and the U.S. that found people were more likely to crash and more likely to be injured in newer cars compared to older cars. This was adjusted for miles driven. (This is a response to folks commenting that the 2010 Toyota is worth 30X as much as a roadworthy 1985 Toyota because it has better safety features.)

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Top of my reading list here in Phoenix is The Greatest Trade Ever, about many of the folks who profited from the inability of Phoenicians to pay their subprime mortgages. The value of a house here is down about 50 percent from the peak (chart). Being a tourist in town, one does wonder why investors thought that the citizens of Phoenix were sufficiently educated and clever to earn enough to pay off such expensive houses. Here’s a sampling of the local labor force:

• waiter at $300/night Montelucia resort could not pronounce “pinot noir” and knew less than nothing about the food that was being prepared in the kitchen
• waiter at $300/night Arizona Biltmore brought bone-dry Cobb salad to the table with no dressing and no bread
• waitress at a Mexican restaurant decided that two water glasses would be adequate for a party of six (we can’t blame the Mexican schools for this one; she was about as white-bread an American as can fit into a pair of mule-sized blue jeans)
• Enterprise rental car agency delivered car with liquid spilled coffee in cupholders and various other parts of the interior

The incompetence of the average worker here ended up being inspiring. If people like this can have jobs, the U.S. economy can’t be doing that badly. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be relying on them to make mortgage payments.

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My friend David had a business trip out to Phoenix and I decided to tag along. This morning we went for a walk up to the Sears-Kay Ruin. As we prepared for the 10-minute stroll through the desert, his wife asked me “Do you think there are rattlesnakes up here?” I replied confidently that there was no need to worry because the trail was so heavily traveled.

When we got to the top, a local pointed out a 5′-long rattlesnake in the brush just a few feet from the trail. “We had one about that size in our garage in North Scottsdale,” he noted. “I pulled him out of the garage with a rake, but he just kept wanting to go back in. So I shot him with a .22.”

Other wildlife seen on the walk: An Arizona Giant Centipede (venomous, of course), a bunny, a few lizards, and a German Shorthaired Pointer (whose presence caused the rattlesnake to activate his rattle).

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I just finished reading Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, the 2009 biography that had gotten such great reviews everywhere, supplemented by The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor. I had always loved her work, but knew nothing about the author. It saddened me to learn that she had died at age 39, a victim of lupus. Being a significant contributor to American culture seems to be hazardous; George Gershwin died after about 39 years as well (of a brain tumor).

Brad Gooch’s achievement as a biographer is too complex to summarize in a blog posting, but I will say that I learned a bit about what enabled Flannery O’Connor to become one of America’s greatest writers at a young age. She kept her life monkishly simple, with few possessions, no spouse, and no children. She almost always had friends or family who took care of her basic needs, which freed her to block out two hours every day in which to write. Her mind was not cluttered with calling the plumber, straightening out the cable TV bill, preparing tax returns, running after children, etc.

The biography is highly recommended for those who are interested in the literary life of mid-century America (O’Connor lived from 1925 to 1964). It is also interesting for its exploration of Southern writing, e.g., Walker Percy and William Faulkner. Finally the book is interesting because O’Connor’s last decade overlapped with the beginning of radically changed relations between blacks and whites in the U.S. and in the South.

The funniest letters in the collection are replies to English Literature professors from O’Connor. It is rare that a living writer is confronted with academic interpretations of his or her work. In the case of O’Connor, it seems that the Ph.D.s teaching her work to young people expended a lot of effort and yet failed to comprehend anything that she was trying to communicate. (This subject is also treated in the Rodney Dangerfield movie Back to School when Kurt Vonnegut is brought in to confront the professors who’ve been teaching his novels.)

Now it is time to reread Flannery O’Connor : Collected Works.

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It was a perfect day for helicopter intro lessons today, but some of the Groupon customers will have to wait a bit longer before taking the controls of an East Coast Aero Club Robinson R44. Barack Obama came to our city to attend two fundraising events. Having been shut down by the temporary flight restriction put in place, I became interested in what Obama had to say. In this video, Obama talks about how the Massachusetts flood shows the value of Big Government. Without Big Government, he says, we wouldn’t be able to handle Nature’s wrath. This struck me as odd because, though we are new to our suburban neighborhood, we’ve gotten so many offers of help from neighbors (they’re aware that our house is right next to a pond and, indeed, the pond has expanded to cover parts of the driveway). Had our house been flooded, we would not need to go to a government-run shelter because at least four or five of our neighbors would be willing to take us in until the waters subside.

I’ll be the first to admit that we need Big Government if we are to bring democracy to 31 million Iraqis (there were a lot fewer when we invaded, but the Iraqis have been prolific (older posting)). But isn’t it kind of insulting to suggest that Americans wouldn’t be willing to help their neighbors and therefore the government must step in to deal with heavy rains that seriously affect perhaps 1 in 100 households?

[I might add that approximately one percent of the people I know in Massachusetts had a serious problem, e.g., a flooded basement that destroyed their furnace and/or hot water heater. In no case did they get any help from a government worker. In no case did they get any help from an insurance company (there is some fine print in the standard contract that excludes flood damage). They got help pumping out from neighbors, family, and friends.]

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