The iPad arrives

Once it hit Oakland, it moved quickly.

Interestingly, the return address on the box is Elk Grove, CA.  Looking at the labels on it, there is very little evidence of its travels.  However, on the FedEx mailing label, it has text that says "bill third party" (I assume the Shenzhen shipper was a FedEx affiliate), and, above the Elk Grove address, it  says, "ORIG ID: SZOA" and a series of numbers.  I googled this, and it stands for Shenzhen Optometric Association, a major glass manufacturer. 

I haven't even opened the box yet.  I'm way too interested in the packing labels!

The journey of an iPad

My iPad is due to arrive tomorrow.  Through the miracle of Fedex tracking, I've been watching its every move on this journey.

Like so many products, it seems to have been manufactured in Shenzhen, right near Hong Kong.  And then it moved to Lantau Island -- home of the Big Buddha!  It's a big island and is also the home of the Hong Kong airport, so that wasn't a surprise.  The bigger surprise is that Shenzhen ships from Hong Kong.  It makes sense, but there is an informal country barrier there.  What did Shenzhen do before Hong Kong airport opened up for shipping?

It was a bit of a surprise to see that it sat on Lantau Island for so long.  On June 3, 4, and 5, it checked in as "at the facility."  As I tracked the iPad, as each of those days passed and it just sat there, I wanted to pick up the phone and call someone: Don't you know that my iPad is at your facility?  Can you do something to change that status?

Chek Lap Kok was a new one for me.  It's apparently the actual name of the Hong Kong International Airport.

I like the "local scan time."  It arrived in Anchorage six and a half hours before it left Hong Kong.  

Now it's in Anchorage.  I've been watching for two days: why has it just been sitting there?  For 26 hours?  Fedex keeps telling me it's going to arrive on time tomorrow.  It seems to be on a plane to somewhere now....  Will it go right to Oakland or to Fedex in Nebraska before being shipped to Oakland to Berkeley, to me?

I will be watching this and haunting the mailroom at work tomorrow.

iPad genius

The iPad is far more revolutionary than it gets credit for.

Because it is wireless and has no disk drive, you can only get things like software, music, movies into it via the air.  As a result, as an anti-piracy tool it is spectacular.  No more handing someone else a CD and allowing them to make a copy.  Piracy moves from the privacy of one's home, which is hard to police, to the ether, which, while still hard to police, is a far more public place.

Microsoft gets screwed.  Or perhaps it is screwing itself.  There are no Microsoft products available on the iPad.  Suddenly, Pages and Keynote become not just the fabulous-but-I-use-Office-anyway apps, but become something we have to learn.  And we will learn to love them.  Until Microsoft builds its apps for an iPad, Apple has a head start in persuading its customers that there are alternatives.

Before putting this thought toward iPads, in a recent presentation (done with PowerPoint, although I'd also done a small presentation in Prezi), I talked about things I think will go away in five years.  Mice, I said, because they were created to help us point at screens, and now we can touch our screens.  Cables connecting things, definitely.  Keyboards, potentially, although I just purchased an iPad keyboard (and I don't even have my iPad yet).

And, as reinforced by the iPad, local storage.  Cloud computing and things like Dropbox (which I just signed up for, to serve my future iPad) means that we won't need a lot of disk space any more.

I like the idea of not using local storage.  I am OK with learning the iWork suite.  I sadly wave goodbye to friendly piracy.