All Things Digital

With battery technology the biggest barrier to the proliferation of electric vehicles, companies like electric sports-car maker Tesla are constantly surveying their battery options. At the Clean Tech Investor Summit in Palm Springs, Calif., Tesla Chairman Elon Musk said the company is moving its battery-pack production from Thailand to California, and wants to one day buy battery cells produced domestically as well–potentially even getting into the battery cell business themselves.

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Having seen Apple’s MacBook Air notebook computer up close, I’m as dazzled as everyone else who’s had a chance to examine this delicious piece of industrial design.

Dazzled doesn’t translate to handing over a credit card, however–at least not yet, and not solely because it’s almost never a good idea to buy Apple’s (or anyone else’s) hardware immediately after its initial release.

Even if serious flaws didn’t frequently surface in the company’s first batch of new models, I’d hold off on buying one of these, despite my admiration for the genuine accomplishments in this one. Cost isn’t the issue; rather, there are just a few too many feature compromises for my work-style.

My friend and your co-host here, Walt Mossberg, explained them well in his recent review. They include a nonremovable battery; non-expandable RAM; a paucity of ports; lack of an on-board optical drive; and a relatively small 80GB hard disk. (I wouldn’t even consider the flash-memory model for the moment, due to its high price and lower 64GB capacity.)

The somewhat modest central-processing power is a non-issue. Intel’s new Merom-architecture chip, running at up to 1.8GHz, has plenty of muscle for the kinds of duties a machine like this would typically handle. Graphics and media professionals would disagree, no doubt, but this ultra-svelte device isn’t aimed at them in any case.

I certainly can imagine why some folks have already ordered one. A frequent traveler whose computing tasks include little more than email, document-handling, Web browsing and watching a video will have lots to love.

But if she’s one of the increasingly global members of the workforce, and (unlike Steve Jobs) flies coach internationally except when she’s lucky enough to get an upgrade, she’ll discover that the roughly 5-hour battery life is good enough for domestic travel. And if the battery gets flaky or fails on the road, as has happened to me in two laptops, one an Apple, she’ll be up a creek.

Laptop batteries wear down eventually. Apple says it’ll replace batteries for the same price as MacBook batteries, with no labor charge, but there’s a serious inconvenience factor in having to take or send the machine to a repair shop.

Our otherwise happy purchaser will encounter other problems. She’ll arrive at her hotel one day and discover that there’s no Wi-Fi in the room. Out will come a dongle that fits into the single USB port, which is contained in such a tiny space that lots of USB devices will need extender cables, allowing her to use the room’s wired Ethernet connection.

In fact, it’s already clear that anyone doing serious computing will be hauling around a slew of dongles for the MacBook Air. The adapter for video presentations is a fact of life already for Mac notebook users. You’ll need a small USB hub just for starters, plus various adapters for things like an EVDO or other high-speed cellular modems that many serious travelers now rely on for domestic connections.

Apple’s design choices were surely aimed at one goal: creating the thinnest, lightest and most beautiful notebook around. You can find lighter Windows machines, but they have even more compromises, often including dreadful keyboards. (Not that I’m a fan of the Chiclet-y keyboards Apple now includes with everything but the MacBook Pro; some folks love them but I’m distinctly underwhelmed.)

The best keyboards on any notebook computers are in the ThinkPads from Lenovo, which bought the line from IBM a while back and, so far, appears to have maintained high standards. The smaller ThinkPads, especially the X models, are sturdy, reliable, capable and smartly designed in their own right, though not remotely jaw-dropping like the new Macs. But the ThinkPads have been the absolute class of notebook computers for many years.

Which leads to the obvious point–something I and at least a few other people have been publicly advocating for a long time, not that Apple is paying any attention. We keep wishing that Apple would either make a deal with Lenovo to sell ThinkPads with Mac OS X as an option, or make a deal with whatever company actually manufactures the ThinkPads. Then we’d enjoy the best of both worlds. (An upcoming ultra-portable, ultra-capable ThinkPad model would be the perfect machine for the Mac OS.) I would pay a premium, and so would plenty of other folks.

Some day, I predict, Apple will make such a deal. While we wait for Steve Jobs or his successor to realize why it’s a good idea, we can expect a host of improvements to upcoming versions of the MacBook Air. Not incidentally, some of these will also make Apple even more money.

Keep in mind that the relentless pace of technological improvement means that the processing power, memory and storage capacity of the MacBook Air will get dramatically better in coming months and years in any case. So that 80GB drive will be 160GB next year, and the 64GB in the solid-state version will double, too, for the same cost. As always, customer patience solves some issues.

But if I were czar of the MacBook line, I’d do two things right away. First, I’d find a way to make the current model modular, with one additional port that would connect to a dock in the home or office or both; the dock would in turn connect to a monitor, keyboard, mouse, printer, Ethernet line, external storage and other typical gear. This would resurrect the still-classic mode of the old Mac Duo notebook systems, which even now are fondly remembered as the best hardware combination of Apple’s portable-machine history. (Of course, the PC-laptop world–and, yes, the ThinkPads–have been doing this for a long time.) The docks would, like other Apple-made peripherals, become a profit center in their own right.

Second, I’d launch another notebook model. Call it the MacBook Air Pro. It would weigh a half-pound more than this one, and it wouldn’t be quite as gorgeous. But it would add back ports such as Ethernet and Firewire, along with a more capacious hard disk, removable battery, MacBook Pro keyboard, built-in EVDO and expandable RAM, among other things.

Meanwhile I’ll count on all you early adopters to find the inevitable bugs in the first batch of MacBook Airs. And I’ll count on Apple, as always, to be a pace-setter in design.

But I suspect I’m in a large class of potential customers. I’d love a computer that’s high art, but I need one that’s right for hard work.

Very often, in the excitement accompanying a new technology, there is some sort of “elephant in the room” that everyone convinces themselves is not really there. In the heady, early days of the World Wide Web, for example, investors in particular seemed to ignore the need for profit in the business models of so many of the Internet IPOs.

At the recent D5 conference, I could feel a familiar, collective excitement in the air as speaker after speaker described in glowing terms the opportunities for delivering more and more media content to our mobile devices. Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman, for example, told us that “mobile was one of their key platforms,” and that they were now specifically designing TV shows, such as “Lil’ Bush,” for the mobile platform.

During the conference, representatives of Google, Yahoo, AOL, MySpace, and Facebook, among others, indicated that they were specifically redesigning their services for user-friendliness on our handheld devices. Eric Schmidt, chairman and CEO of Google, dubbed the coming trend “SMS gone wild”–people sending and sharing all kinds of stuff from phone to phone. And the platform vendors–Apple, Samsung, Sony, Palm and others–described some of their plans for the next generation of devices on which we will consume this new content. Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, even predicted that the mobile phone could perhaps become the home PC for lower-income households. Heady stuff, indeed.

So, as one of the few “energy” executives in the room, I kept waiting to hear how these new applications and devices would be impacted by–and planned to circumvent–what some insiders are calling the “run-time gap.” The run-time gap describes the difference in demand for power and energy in mobile devices, and the ability of battery technology to deliver it. The demands for “portable power” are skyrocketing–thanks to the technologies and markets we heard about at D–but battery improvements are comparatively flatline. The difference in the two growth curves, graphically, gives us an ever-widening gap. I wondered: Would “Lil’ Bush” have to be edited to 15-minute episodes so that the credits could roll before the battery rolled over?

At first, I thought it was just the old elephant in the room–the secret problem with mobile multimedia that nobody wanted to talk about. But then it became increasingly clear to me: The run-time gap was not an issue in that audience–and perhaps in most other audiences–because nobody even seemed to be aware of it. It was, instead, an elephant not in the room.

When the questions didn’t come, and I couldn’t stand the suspense any longer, I finally raised a hand myself and posed the power question directly to Apple CEO Steve Jobs: How are you going to deal with the power demands? With the iPod and video iPod behind him, and the multimedia iPhone then ahead, he, at least, should be concerned. And he was; he said, essentially, that “power is the No. 1 issue with portable devices.” Think about that. From Steve Jobs’s mouth to your ears–at least metaphorically. “Power is the No. 1 issue with portable devices.”

Now, I have a vested interest in the issue because my company builds a sophisticated plastic membrane that makes tiny, mobile-oriented fuel cells possible. We happen to believe that mobile devices should have continuous and uninterruptible power that can be replenished by inserting a small fuel cartridge, small enough to be carried in a pocket or purse–an ideal solution for power-hungry, multimedia portable devices and the flood of new content coming our way.

After many years of development, the technology is now on the verge of packing more energy than batteries, more safely, in less space and weight. But whether or not you share our vision, if you have a vested interest in mobile devices, mobile applications and mobile content delivery, you cannot ignore the power issues. It does nobody any good to be able to watch the latest episode of “CSI” on their favorite mobile device if the screen goes dark before we’ve found out whodunit.

Apple’s new iPhone may well be a revolutionary product in some ways. But after testing one of the devices that went on sale late last month, I’m steering clear, at least for now, of the most shamelessly overhyped consumer product since Windows 95.

For all its admirable features–the large screen, gorgeous industrial design and advanced user interface in particular–the iPhone feels like a beta product. It’s still early in development and suffers from deal-breaker drawbacks.

The worst is the overall control-freakery from Apple, the manufacturer, and its telecom partner, AT&T. You want choice? Not a chance.

Consumer Reports notes that AT&T is one of the least-favored U.S. mobile carriers, for network quality and customer satisfaction. Worse, the company’s low-speed digital network is inadequate for a device that boasts of being Internet-native, and the Wi-Fi capabilities don’t make up for that lapse. (And never mind AT&T’s recent decision to become Hollywood’s accomplice in tracking customers’ Internet activities, not to mention its Big-Brotherish coziness with government snoops.)

I’m a frequent traveler outside the U.S., and this phone doesn’t cut it for serious international use. If I want to make GSM calls, I’m stuck with AT&T’s roaming rates; with my current phone I can swap SIM cards to use another carrier’s cheaper local service if I don’t like the international roaming rates from T-Mobile, my current carrier.

Apple can’t fix AT&T. But the device itself, however alluring, needs upgrades. For example, on the international roaming front, the iPhone provides no access to other carriers’ 3G networks, which means the phone won’t work at all in places like Korea, where my 3G-equipped GSM phone works fine.

The onscreen keyboard isn’t bad if you’re “typing” in landscape mode in the Web browser, because the keypad in that mode is sufficiently large to help you avoid errors. But if you’re trying to create an SMS or email message in the phone’s portrait mode–it doesn’t adjust to the sideways view with those applications–be prepared for some frustration. I wasted lots of time backspacing over mistakes and retyping things, and the “predictive-text” feature didn’t predict my words with much accuracy.

The camera is adequate for some purposes, and that’s the best you can say about it. There’s no zoom, and no video recording mode.

An especially cheesy “feature” is a headphone jack that requires an adapter for many popular headsets (or some surgery on your current headphone plug). There’s no excuse for this.

Then there’s the nonremovable battery, which Apple says is designed for at least 400 charge cycles and an unspecified number of charges at up to 80% of battery capacity afterward. That will steer people–perhaps this is the idea–toward new phones. Meanwhile, Apple has found another way to make money on this design choice: It’ll sell a new battery for about $80 and keep your phone for a few days in the process.

Despite running a version of the OS X operating system, the iPhone is locked down in its software capabilities, which means that third-party software developers–and therefore customers–are mostly out of luck if they want the kind of applications that have made other smart phones so versatile. Apple’s claim that there’s enough flexibility in the Web browser for third-party development is beyond ludicrous; it’s downright insulting.

More lockdown: The iPhone is unusable in any capacity until it’s activated with the phone company. Want to use it just for Wi-Fi-based Web browsing, plus video and audio and note-taking? Forget it.

Still more: I can use my current phone as a modem with a PC or Mac, something I do on occasion when out of range of a broadband or wireless network. The iPhone doesn’t allow this. Why not? (To be fair, some phones are locked this way.)

No doubt, some of the iPhone’s current drawbacks will be resolved with software upgrades. Some problems can’t and won’t be fixed, at least not in the U.S. version, where AT&T will be the exclusive carrier for the next few years.

All that said, I do love the way the thing looks and feels–and in many respects, the way it works. If other phone-makers don’t adopt the iPhone’s best features (I assume they will), I’ll definitely consider getting one at some point.

But I’ll consider it only when Apple starts selling it in Europe or Asia with 3G capabilities; when I can install a SIM chip from the GSM/3G carrier of my choice; when the software is significantly upgraded; and when third parties can give me the features I want, as opposed to solely the ones Apple thinks are good for me.

That sounds like iPhone 2.0, at the earliest. For now, the initial product doesn’t come close to living up to the hype.