While I did note in my prior posts on the subject that I believed that the consolidation of quality, Apple-approved applications in one convenient and integrated storefront would be a boon to consumers, I still wasn’t too keen on the idea of a desktop app store. Perhaps it was the often-frivolous nature of most App Store transactions — $0.99 for Angry Birds here, another $1.99 for Hipstamatic there, etc. — that caused me to sense some inherent bad fit for the OS X environment. Desktop software is often substantial by its very nature, boasting complex features built to take advantage of what is still the predominant human-computer interface, with pricing models to match. One-click purchases in a centralized storefront did not seem to befit this paradigm.

I was wrong.

Although I haven’t spent nearly the same amount of money at the Mac App Store as I have at the (other) App Store, I have come away more impressed with the product than I could have predicted. Having installed a few apps (mostly freebies) on my Mac, I can now more fully sympathize with the argument made by the Mac App Store’s boosters that PC-to-Mac switchers with prior iOS experience will find themselves in a more familiar and therefore appealing environment. One-click installs and updates that are both so unobtrusive as to be practically invisible just work on the Mac. Centralized updates, too, are an enormous convenience. It also certainly doesn’t hurt for iOS fans making “the Switch” that the Mac App Store has desktop-sized versions of popular iOS games like Flight Control and, yes, Angry Birds, along with Mac ports of AAA titles from the other side of the OS pond (which are admittedly of varying quality).

Bottom line? If the ever-growing popularity of iOS devices does in fact lead to increased OS X market share, then the new switchers will find themselves more or less at home in their new computing environment. And if they in turn recommend OS X to fellow iOS users — well, that’s the basis for a winning strategy.

As the song’s chorus began to subtly loop itself in my head, I somehow managed to actually examine what was being sung, and on an apparent whim, I stopped to attempt to draw out some meaning. For those unfamiliar with the song, I have reproduced the relevant lines below:

Hey, soul sister
Ain’t that Mr. Mister on the radio, stereo
The way you move ain’t fair, you know
Hey, soul sister
I don’t want to miss a single thing you do
Tonight

I hadn’t the faintest idea what to make of this. (In fact, it wasn’t until I was doing the research for this post that I discovered that Mr. Mister was actually an ’80s pop band, and not some nonsensical lyrical construction specific to this song.) It led me to wonder, genuinely, what the song’s countless fans (it’s gone 5x platinum in the U.S.) saw in these words. What did this song mean to them? The answers would doubtless be almost as numerous as the people giving them. But one overriding theme seemed to stand out to me: the sheer force of earnest, emotional will by which the band’s frontman and vocalist seemed to affect the listener. Separated from their performance, the lyrics seem gauzy, if not downright silly. Nonetheless, the record sales speak for themselves.

So, what do we make of all this? Angela Watercutter wrote last year that we are entering a new, post-ironic era of earnestness. She posits that the rise of such shows as Glee, and their performances of hit songs (yes, of which “Hey, Soul Sister” was one) demonstrates that we are ready to leave irony behind. Granting her this for the sake of argument, it’s not hard, then, to see how music labels aim to profit off our newly-rediscovered sentimentality. This song, along with so many others written by similar bands, certainly appears to be able to revive, however temporarily, the feelings of compassion and earnestness that seem increasingly absent from the world. People buy this music to feel again. But at what cost?

The artistic goals of the members of Train notwithstanding, we are witnessing the shrink-wrapping of the heartfelt emotion. Like the imperceptibly shrinking containers of food at the supermarket, we are being given the appearance of fullness but receiving much less than we expected. What’s worse, earnestness is ill-equipped to resist such appropriation; a cathartic track or record filled with thinly-veiled metaphors for the greed of music labels neither evokes nor suits groups like Train. Such an approach is more typical of and frequently carried off better by indie bands (admittedly also a blanket term fraught with complications), whose songcraft often features lyrics that are equally allusive and elusive. (In some cases, this can be true to an excessive degree.) This, of course, brings us firmly back into the realm of the ironic, to the dismay of Watercutter’s earnest brigades.

None of this is to say that groups like Train don’t have a place in the vast sweep of the musical world. But perhaps we would do well to apply to yet another of our daily endeavors the classic maxim: caveat emptor.

At CES today, the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem announced more details of its “buy once, play anywhere” cloud-based authentication system for digital video content. The scheme, which was dubbed “UltraViolet” last year, will allow users to purchase video content from any participating retailer and then authenticate that content on any UltraViolet-compatible device.

UltraViolet will support six accounts per family, each of which can access the full set of family-owned video content, and it will support 12 unique devices per family. That might sound like plenty, but DECE envisions UltraViolet content being displayed on Internet-connected TVs, game consoles, smartphones, computers, Internet-connected Blu-ray players, tablets, and set-top boxes.

While this seems like a fine development on the face of things, I have to echo some of the concerns raised about it both in the article and in the comments section. First, the Ars take:

All of this could have been accomplished years ago by just selling the video without DRM, like the music industry finally did, since anyone interested in pirating the content had no difficulty in doing so anyway. But DECE and UltraViolet look like a decent second option, and people have shown their willingness to put up with DRM when it doesn’t get in their way (Kindle, iPhone apps, iTunes video, Xbox games). […]

Still, we’re quite curious to see how this works out in practice, especially without Apple’s support. The paranoia that Hollywood has shown for so many years around tight DRM, broadcast flags, and more makes us suspect that UltraViolet will be locked down tightly enough to be annoying, despite DECE’s many protests about openness. But we’re willing to be surprised by sanity.

I, for one, am not holding my breath, for precisely the reasons mentioned here. Paraphrasing one of the commenters on the article, do we really want the people who took over a decade to figure out a remotely equitable rights-management and authentication scheme to be the same ones governing said scheme across multiple platforms and media production outlets?

Nor is this scheme even a global panacea. Of particular note was this commenter’s critique of the still extant “regional” distribution model:

The distribution (and rating) model is hopelessly inadequate.

If I live outside the US, I am at the mercy of distribution agreements and focus group testing as to 1) when an episode will be played here, or 2) whether it even comes over at all.

Great. So I want to see the latest episode of Chuck, but my Cable TV provider is only showing season 2. Or I want to watch Leno, which isn’t even shown in this country.

I can’t pay for an online subscription to a network or a series of shows. There isn’t an ad-supported way to access these shows from outside the US. What option do I have other than to pirate?

I was doing my best, for the sake of argument, to think of some method by which this commenter could acquire the content he or she sought without having to resort to piracy. In this age of obstinate traditional media conglomerates trying (and failing) to stare the Internet down into submission, I unsurprisingly couldn’t think of a single one.

The law-abiding/pro-copyright citizen might simply argue that that person would simply have to go without that particular content until such time as it was made legally available from a licensed source. Naturally, to anyone who loves his or her music, movies, or TV shows, this seems a profoundly unsatisfying response — particularly today, as we near the Age of Etewaf. On the other hand, the implicit assumption of those who take no issue with content piracy — that consumers have an uninfringible right to the content they desire, copyright holders and other restrictions be damned — seems equally untenable. Of course, attempts at understanding this impasse and trying to bridge it are made difficult by the fact that the reasons people pirate are almost as numerous as the people doing it.

While systems like UltraViolet are intended as a means of solving the Internet era’s dilemma between equitably compensating rights-holders and the ease with which copyright is violated, I’ll believe the entertainment-industrial complex has come up with a proper solution when I see it.

[Image: Flickr/tom-b]

How Perception of Time Relates to Decision-Making

This lecture by Professor Philip Zimbardo, he of the infamous Stanford prison experiment, is absolutely fascinating. The video is well worth the ten minutes of your time it’ll take. I couldn’t help but think of my own time-perception leanings — I’m past-positive and present-hedonistic, primarily — as well as nod in agreement/self-recognition in the segment about how education must change in the face of an increasingly digitalized generation. What’s your perception of time, and how has it affected the way you live your life?

Saudi Arabia’s Creeping Liberalization

Or so we can hope. It’s actually kind of exciting to see this move forward, as I wrote briefly about the unveiling three years ago of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (mentioned in the article). The article does an excellent job of portraying Saudi Arabia as on a precipice of sorts — either this newest liberalization initiative will succeed and open the door for future efforts, or it could backfire horrifically and give broad political cover for the religious hardliners in the political establishment.

Want a Job? Give Yourself One

The New York Times examines a growing trend, and one I might very well be joining myself: recent college grads starting up their own businesses rather than shopping their résumés around hundreds of times to no avail.

Out of Our Brains

This blog post over at the New York Times’ Opinionator on the extended mind fits nicely with my recent post on learning and the above video. Key ‘graph:

Is it possible that, sometimes at least, some of the activity that enables us to be the thinking, knowing, agents that we are occurs outside the brain?

This kind of idea is currently being explored by a wave of scientists and philosophers working in the areas known as “embodied cognition” and “the extended mind.” Uniting these fields is the thought that evolution and learning don’t give a jot what resources are used to solve a problem. There is no more reason, from the perspective of evolution or learning, to favor the use of a brain-only cognitive strategy than there is to favor the use of canny (but messy, complex, hard-to-understand) combinations of brain, body and world. Brains play a major role, of course. They are the locus of great plasticity and processing power, and will be the key to almost any form of cognitive success. But spare a thought for the many resources whose task-related bursts of activity take place elsewhere, not just in the physical motions of our hands and arms while reasoning, or in the muscles of the dancer or the sports star, but even outside the biological body — in the iPhones, BlackBerrys, laptops and organizers which transform and extend the reach of bare biological processing in so many ways.

North Korea Embraces Social Media

Sort of. I had previously heard of the Hermit Kingdom’s embrace of YouTube and Facebook, so I ended up being far more interested in the article’s discussion of South Korean censorship of North Korean media.

I was unaware of the fact that South Korean authorities were actively preventing South Koreans from accessing propaganda from the North. Naturally, South Korea has made enormous strides towards political liberalization in the past thirty-some years, but censoring Northern propaganda seems counterproductive at best. Shouldn’t the inherently ridiculous nature of a self-proclaimed “self-sufficient” ideology in an authoritarian state that is isolated and starving to death speak for itself? What exactly does the South Korean government have to fear from these bizarre missives from an alternate universe? It seems to me that the worst that could happen would be a brief surge of morbid fascination, followed quickly by a return to utter indifference.

R.D. Laing on Madness

Andrew Sullivan recently linked to this 2009 blog post on the troubled personal life of counterculture psychiatrist R.D. Laing. If you find that post intriguing, The Sunday Times article linked to in it is also worth a read. For my part, the following snippet from the post led me to download a copy of Laing’s famous treatise, The Divided Self:

Inspired by existential philosophers, Laing produced a series of humane and revolutionary books during the sixties that argued that we undervalue both the experience of mental illness and those who are mentally ill.

Madness, he argued, was a transformative experience, rich with personal meaning, that functions like an existential rite of passage. Delusions and hallucinations were the expression of the unmentionable, illustrating the emotional double-booking keeping of the family with an unignorable tear in the fabric between the conscious and unconscious mind.

While modern neuroscience has most likely made this particular hypothesis untenable, it’s a fascinating interpretation nonetheless.

Chris Meadows at TeleRead cites a TechCrunch piece by Sarah Lacy on the lack of a reliable citation solution for e-books:

While there are a number of possible reasons one might think paper books are better than e-books (including aroma), Lacy’s reason comes down to simple annoyance at a lack of page numbers. In particular, she found herself at a loss for how to cite books she read on Kindle in her academic papers.

In the follow-up discussion of the article, some readers point out that the Chicago Manual of Style offers a guide to citing e-books […] And it includes an example of a “Kindle edition”. A “location” number would seem to be a perfect example of an “other” number. In fact, it might even be more useful than a page number, because the “location” would be about the same no matter which device you read a Kindle e-book on, whereas a page number only applies to one specific version of the printed book.

There are MLA and APA guidelines to citing e-books, too, though neither of them expressly mentions (that I can find) what to do about a book that has no page numbering. But I imagine “location number” would suffice in those cases too, especially with some explanation to the professor of the nature of the source.

While both TechCrunch and TeleRead are right to examine the real problem posed to current academic citation conventions by reflowable digital documents, it seems to me that there’s a serious case of missing the forest for the trees here.

Despite all the digital ink spilled on the topic, neither Meadows nor Lacy mentions the perhaps too-obvious reasoning for page-number-centric citation — to facilitate quick fact-checking for peer or professorial review. When you have a medium that allows for instantaneous word and text-string searches, why do you need to know the page number? You can determine if a particular quotation in a paper is actually in the cited work literally as quickly as you can type. As semantic search technologies in particular mature, it’ll become easier than ever to determine the veracity of a particular citation even in cases of paraphrasing.

Now, I might very well be over-trivializing the issue, but I can’t for the life of me understand why, as Lacy puts it in her TechCrunch post, Amazon has “to design for it [the academic market]” by correlating Kindle “locations to “real page numbers” (which, as Meadows rightly points out, are a nebulous concept at any rate). It seems even now, in the age of the iPad and Kindle, we’ll have to wait for yet wider adoption of e-books and tablets/readers before we stop mentally forcing e-books into the print paradigm of consumption. Once we begin to recognize the full implications of instantaneous search and annotation in e-books, I suspect we’ll wonder how we ever lived without them.

[Image: Flickr/bjornmeansbear]

I’m tempted to be cautious in the way I say this, but I can’t come up with a real reason to be, so I’ll just say it: I have definitely learned a lot more on the Internet than I ever did in high school.

High school, at least when I attended it, was much more about learning social skills than educational information. The education side of things was more like one big game. You had to figure out how to play the game so you could get into a good college. It was about memorizing things for tests that you’d forget a week later, and figuring out how you could do your homework in the free period before the class in which it was due. I more or less remember nothing from high school beyond the times I spent with friends. And I know I’m not alone there.

One major problem with high school learning is that you are forced to take certain classes which you couldn’t care less about. I understand that the rationale behind this is that it makes you a more “full” person, and you might learn you love something that you didn’t realize you would. But that mentality is from a pre-connected world. I would guess that a lot of students these days know what they’re really passionate about at a much earlier age, thanks to the Internet.

Certain people will need to go to places of higher education for the access those institutions have to tools that a person would otherwise not be able to get access to. And there’s no denying the value of a good teacher/professor. And certain people will definitely always benefit from the combination of social environment mixed with structured learning. But not everyone learns the same way.

If you’re a self-starter, why shouldn’t you be able to get your education on the web? Because there are too many distractions?

I personally find it remarkable that it’s 2010 and we haven’t yet had a serious discussion along these lines. MG’s summary hit the nail on the head in my case.

Certainly I enjoyed the social aspects of high school, but like MG, I hardly remember much, if anything, from the classes I took. As I enter my final semester of college, I find that I remember less of the specific content I learned about earlier in my undergraduate career and more of how it affected my thinking. And certainly my wonderful alma mater has afforded me a variety of tools and opportunities to which I would have not otherwise had access. But some of my most rewarding pedagogical experiences have taken place during my own free time; that I was physically on campus during these experiences is merely incidental.

Former classmate Ben Casnocha recently wrote about the four qualities necessary to be an outstanding scientist, citing among them “[d]ual abilities, both to generalize and to concentrate on the particulars.” Although I’m no scientist, I found this an interesting way to frame my own mental tendencies. My intellectual interests often follow the same trajectory as my musical ones — discovery of an intriguing new topic (or artist), followed by a period of intensive, almost single-minded, study (or listening) until I am sated, and the process repeats. If I go too long without stumbling across a new idea or concept (or musical artist), I inevitably find myself bored, restless, dissatisfied. Fortunately, this is not often the case — the breadth and depth of the Internet has allowed me to broadly expand my thought processes and worldview as I hone in on specific topics across disciplines. Thematically, they tend to hew to a specific theme: the yawning gulf between the disorders of humanity and the order of the universe, and our potential to reconcile the two. To date, my Wikipanion bookmarks span across such disparate concepts as anagnorisis, brane cosmology, the Dunning-Kruger effect, hysterical realism, post-scarcity, saudade and sehnsucht, and wage slavery.

Now, it’s possible that some classes I could take would touch on some of these subjects. But if such phenomena as these are discussed in more “focused” classes, their mention is inevitably fleeting. There is no intellectually omnivorous option available for the curious student — something I was disappointed to find out about higher education. Independent study, perhaps the one option closest to this ideal, doesn’t lend itself well to cherry-picking highly specific topics of interest across disciplines because such diffusion makes it increasingly difficult to obtain the all-important quantitative results of one’s studies. I’m no polymath, but that seems to be the closest existing word for this phenomenon with which I identify. Perhaps “polypiqued,” or something similar, would more accurately describe it.

Where exactly do the polypiqued fit in? Are we really to relegate them to either self-educate with regards to their interests or otherwise slip through the cracks?

[Image: Flickr/samwebster]

While I’m no budgetary expert — and as such am in little position to pass judgment on the validity of Salmon’s criticisms of the NYT’s budget tool — I found it an informative experience. And I think this is where Salmon’s criticisms miss their mark. While Atlantic readers, or avid NYT or Reuters readers, might have identified some of the same deficiencies as Salmon brings up and indeed might even sympathize with them, the NYT’s tool is still factually correct in its summarization of the major details and probable effects of various budgetary and taxation options. That’s good enough for 98% of people using this tool.

I suspect that that was the entire point: to move the deficit debate from the realm of the abstract, even for the reasonably well-informed, into a concrete and manipulable entity in order to move the public discourse onwards and upwards. The built-in Twitter integration is key in spreading the deficit-busting fun from one predisposed policy wonk to his friends and family, and on and on from there until suddenly average Americans are talking seriously about previously arcane concepts like capping Medicare growth to 1% above GDP growth starting in 2013. That can only be a good thing.

Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (over 8,000 of them have doctoral or professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000 parking lot attendants. All told, some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS says require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree.

That’s from this piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, via Jon Bischke on Twitter. […] For hundreds of thousands of Americans, spending four years and untold amounts of money (and debt?) gets you a job as a waiter, parking lot attendant, or janitor. Yet everyone from Barack Obama to Bill Gates keep pushing a college education as the way to secure one’s economic future. That is a view that should be heavily qualified.

Pivoting off this information, TechCrunch’s Sarah Lacy covers an intriguing Founder Institute presentation (with video) from angel investor Mike Maples about resisting the urge to give in to the predominant build-it-and-flip-it culture in the Valley right now:

In the talk below, Maples walks you through three examples he invested in: ngmoco, which did a pricing pivot; Chegg, which did a product pivot; and Odeo/Twitter, which did an entire company pivot. Maples doesn’t do that thing that startup PR departments love. He doesn’t sugar coat how horrifying and uncertain these moves were at the time. He doesn’t make the startups or investors sound like they’d seen the future through some magical product/market oracle. He shows that each of these pivots were made out of semi-desperation, and he talks about how risky each move was. In each case the entrepreneurs had something, but not enough to make a big business and they had to throw that thing they’d already slaved over away in order to get to the larger business. Watch the video for the details.

I keep hearing from other super angels out raising funds that LPs are ga-ga over Maples and until this talk I wasn’t sure why. Now, I get it. In one talk, he details severals ways his investing model is distinct from the broader super angel movement: He still believes this business is about homeruns. He still believes you have to have a business model. He believes product fit isn’t just lots of people using your product, it’s about being able to make money delivering it, otherwise, it’s “wasted innovation.” He still believes that huge upside usually requires huge, gut-wrenching risk.

On the one hand, a college degree generally (but especially in economics or business) instills the kind of attention to detail and perspective that would give potential entrepreneurs a good idea of how to craft a solid business model — and, more importantly, to know when to “pivot” (that is, transition) to a new state of doing business in order to make the business a sustainable entity. Of course, anyone who knows Ben knows that he has repeatedly extolled the idea of self-education for those highly predisposed towards curiosity and motivation, so it’s clearly not required for everyone. But for the vast majority of entrepreneurs, is a college degree still required to achieve something greater than a build-it-and-flip-it product?

• 2.1 Apps that crash will be rejected.
• 2.2 Apps that exhibit bugs will be rejected.
• 2.6 Apps that are “beta”, “demo”, “trial”, or “test” versions will be rejected.
• 2.14 Apps must be packaged and submitted using Apple’s packaging technologies included in Xcode – no third party installers allowed.
• 2.19 Apps that require license keys or implement their own copy protection will be rejected.
• 2.20 Apps that present a license screen at launch will be rejected.
• 2.21 Apps may not use update mechanisms outside of the App Store.
• 2.24 Apps that use deprecated or optionally installed technologies (e.g., Java, Rosetta) will be rejected.
• 6.2 Apps that look similar to Apple Products or apps bundled on the Mac, including the Finder, iChat, iTunes, and Dashboard, will be rejected.
• 6.3 Apps that do not use system provided items, such as buttons and icons, correctly and as described in the Apple Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines will be rejected.
• 7.4 Apps containing “rental” content or services that expire after a limited time will be rejected.
• 7.6 In general, the more expensive your app, the more thoroughly we will review it.
• 9.2 Apps that rapidly drain a products battery or generate excessive heat will be rejected.
• 11.1 Apps portraying realistic images of people or animals being killed or maimed, shot, stabbed, tortured or injured will be rejected.
• 11.3 “Enemies” within the context of a game cannot solely target a specific race, culture, a real government or corporation, or any other real entity.
• 11.5 Apps that include games of Russian roulette will be rejected.

I’ve left out Nilay’s commentary on each of these points — you can click through at the second link above to read his thoughts in the original post. But I’ll add a couple of thoughts of my own.

One of the most glaring points that I saw in the selection above was the juxtaposition of items 6.2 and 6.3. Apple has set forth very specific and exacting guidelines as to how all software on its OS is supposed to look and perform as the UI is concerned…and yet also says it will reject third-party apps that closely resemble first-party apps? This is simply preposterous. Apple’s UI guidelines all but demand that Mac OS apps resemble native first-party apps precisely because Steve Jobs has always wanted a unified user experience across the OS. As Nilay rightly points out, there isn’t a single Mac app that doesn’t in some way resemble one of the major system components, especially the ones 6.2 specifically mentions.

Without rehashing yesterday’s argument too much, I have to say this move by Apple is baffling me more and more. I get the argument for a closed and curated mobile platform — you can argue that your smartphone is responsible for so many important aspects of your life, communication and otherwise, that you want it to be as stable as possible, especially while you’re out and about. Given that your phone is far less user-serviceable (in terms of hardware and software) than your personal computer, it makes sense to maximize stability at the cost of removing some degree of user freedom.

Computers are, of course, different beasts altogether. Naturally, stability is a virtue here as well — Apple’s dedication to in-house hardware and software work certainly evinces that — but the methods by which we interface with our computers are far more robust than those on our smartphones. With the latter, you are essentially limited to the touchscreen (and possibly a physical keyboard on some models) and a single I/O port, be it Apple’s 30-pin dock connector or a micro-USB port. Compare this to your computer, which has both a mouse (and/or trackpad) and keyboard, as well as numerous I/O ports of varying types. The greater flexibility afforded to the user on the larger device affords him or her far more control over the device far more easily; everything from changing Dock orientations and desktop wallpapers to Terminal hacks that alter fundamental parts of the OS X UI is possible on your computer. This is obviously not the case on your phone: users have no access to command-line functions (without jailbreaking), and so they have little to no recourse if one bad phone app seriously damages the integrity of their device.

So why bother with a similarly-curated app store on a more flexible, more powerful, and more user-accessible platform? Given the fact that Mac users will be able to “sideload” apps onto their computer from all sorts of other venues, the Mac App Store will hardly diminish the “threat” posed by poorly-designed apps. Users have greater recourse in dealing with such problems on their Macs; they don’t need Steve Jobs holding their hands all along the way. Since the Mac App Store’s use obviously won’t be mandatory, it’s not as big a potential subject for debate as the iOS App Store. But the Mac App Store still seems thoroughly unnecessary to me. Apple could be focusing its efforts on more productive ventures than simply slapping mobile features onto the desktop.

Much of my trepidation comes from the software side of the equation. OS X 10.7, or Lion, provides an intriguing look into the future of desktop computing. But I can’t help from feeling, to a certain extent, like Apple is trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Granted, the enhanced multitouch features of Lion like Launchpad and full-screen apps — shamelessly ganked from iOS — provide a new and compelling raison d’etre to products like the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad that had previously lacked one. Given the apparent lack of a niche for those two products at their respective launches, and knowing that Apple has a plan for just about everything, it wasn’t unreasonable to expect something like this to happen.

But like the original MacBook Air, Lion seems to be ahead of its time — and not in a good way.

The original Air was a radically slimmed down device that, at first glance, seemed highly attractive for the OS X-loving road warrior seeking an ultraportable. And there’s no denying that the Remote Disc software that Apple included with each Air was an ingenious workaround for the lack of an optical drive. The Air’s one problem? Wireless. 802.11a/b/g/n was by no means ubiquitous then, and still isn’t now: free public Wi-Fi remains something of a pipe dream (albeit less so now that the FCC has approved plans to go forward with “white space” wireless). Cellular data has stepped up to fill the gap somewhat, but network congestion and delays in nationwide 4G rollout have proven we’re still a long way from wireless broadband. (Not to mention the fact that the Air lacks a built-in cellular modem.) At a fundamental level, the Air seemed to have been designed with ubiquitous wireless connectivity in mind — a wonderful world, to be sure, but one that doesn’t yet exist. Its glaring paucity of physical I/O ports therefore left it lame in a networking sense compared to other notebooks and ultraportables in a world that hasn’t yet learned how to, as Verizon’s marketing division puts it, “rule the air.”

To be sure, Lion doesn’t remove any of the most common features of desktop computing, and so the “Lion-as-software’s-MacBook-Air” analogy doesn’t quite hold up one-to-one. But the underlying principle is the same: Apple is changing the user experience at a fundamental level before the requisite infrastructure is in place. With the original Air, this was ubiquitous wireless; with Lion, it is the ubiquity of multitouch applied to devices not in the mobile sphere. Apple arguably owns the majority mindshare when it comes to touch/multitouch devices, but the trick is convincing the consumer that touch/multitouch is equally as valid an interface on the desktop as it is on mobile devices, even when the specific software implementation is largely the same across differing physical platforms. In my mind, Apple hasn’t yet done that. They didn’t release any sales figures for the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad at today’s event, but I have to imagine those markets aren’t enormous at this point in time.

Furthermore, many of the design conventions of iOS — fullscreen apps (apps themselves!), app folders, iOS’ version of multitasking, etc. — were adopted precisely because Apple realized mobile devices are fundamentally different from non-mobile devices. To then come back around over three years later and proclaim that the mobile OS should inform practices on the desktop sounds like terrifically circular logic to me. Device and screen size, battery life, efficient data transmission and reception, memory limitations, heat issues — these things manifest themselves in a far different fashion on mobile devices than on the desktop. To take software features from a mobile device and transplant them wholesale into a desktop device doesn’t intuitively make sense. (On the other hand, I do think that Apple’s iPad-inspired use of specific hardware features — flash memory, instant-on, and long standby times — was a terrific update for the new MacBook Air, although it will still suffer from connectivity problems like its forebear due to its lack of built-in cellular data.)

Exactly how is the Launchpad a superior way to browse one’s applications, as opposed to a Dock-mounted springboard list item? Why bother with the iOS implementation of folders on the Launchpad at all, since we have far greater screen real estate on the desktop? What do fullscreen apps bring to the table that current windowed ones lack? The Mac App Store has potential to bring more user eyeballs to lesser-known software developers, to be sure, and a centralized place for all application updates would be most welcome. But will Apple enforce the same stringent app guidelines as on iOS devices? Granted, OS X devices have the advantage of sideloading that iOS devices do not (at least not without jailbreaking), so such guidelines would not be as devastating in OS X as they have been for some devs in iOS, but they would serve only to alienate potential developers for the Mac App Store platform.

None of this is to say that Apple hasn’t considered these issues or that they won’t in the future. But I can’t help feeling that Apple has failed to give a compelling reason for any of these much-lauded iOS features to make the jump to the desktop just yet.