Ars Technica Reviews HP’s EliteBook Folio G1

The review is titled "HP’s EliteBook Folio G1 is the MacBook as it could’ve been".

That’s not true of the 4K version of the laptop, which loses more than three hours of battery life in our test exclusively because of the screen (almost all the other components, including the CPU, were identical across models). It’s a very pretty display, but it might also be the difference between having a laptop that lasts all day on a cross-country flight and one that dies before you can get to the hotel.

Thin and light, fewer compromises

In some ways, the EliteBook Folio G1 feels like the MacBook that could’ve been, had Apple’s priorities been shuffled around just a little bit. It’s almost as small, almost as thin, and almost as light, but it’s got a keyboard that most of you will already be used to and a second USB Type-C port for added versatility. Those USB Type-C ports also provide Thunderbolt 3 support, so you have more bandwidth for external accessories if you want it. Apple’s laptop is better designed (and if you prefer OS X to Windows, it’s all moot anyway), but HP’s is perhaps more attuned to what current buyers (especially power users) want and need.

Neglecting to include battery life and screen quality alongside the other compromises is disingenuous.

Both HP and Apple are making sacrifices in order to be as thin and light as possible, and while their differing priorities are interesting, the results aren't surprising. The HP has more/better ports while sacrificing either screen quality or battery life. The MacBook infamously only has one port, but offers a great screen and long battery life.

Hardware-wise, HP is selling you a thinner and lighter PC with the compromises and benefits of a PC, and Apple is selling you a Mac with the compromises and benefits of an iPad.

I have never been so onboard with the MacBook as I am after reading this review.

Snippets, TextExpander, and Subscription Pricing

I’ve been going through somewhat of a snippet renaissance lately. Snippets are text abbreviations that get automatically replaced with commonly used content. For example, typing “;screenshare” inserts the phone number and link I use for online conferencing. The value may seem trivial, but the alternative requires me to:

1. Remember which application has the information.
2. Switch away from the document to that application.
3. Find and copy the information. (This is surprisingly difficult in some conferencing apps.)
4. Switch back to my document and paste.

Multiply those steps by the hundred or so times a year I send out an online conference and the convenience and time saved with my “;screenshare” snippet is obvious, but there is also an even bigger, less noticeable, benefit — flow. Not only does my snippet reduce steps, performing those steps takes me out of the task at hand, both mentally and in process. My snippet turns an ancillary and discrete task that requires special attention to just another noun in my document.

As someone who already loved using technology to enable laziness without consequence, snippets came surprisingly late to my arsenal of scripts, automations, and shortcuts. When I inevitably did decide to take the plunge a little under a year ago, there were a number of snippet tools to choose from. For me however, the choice was always obvious. Smile’s TextExpander was already by far the most popular snippet utility in the Mac-centric circles I tend to follow. I was so confident in my purchase, I even got the $60 family pack rather than the $45 single license, just incase my wife took interest. That may sound ridiculous in this culture of $.99 or free, but the Mac community has a long track record of reasonably priced great software with even more reasonably priced upgrades. Take for example someone who purchased TextExpander 4 when it was released in 2012 at a price of $35 and then upgraded in 2015 for $20. While the total $55 may seem cost prohibitive, the annualized cost is just under $15 – very reasonable.

In fact, TextExpander has been a great example of the value people get when paying for software… until last week when Smile announced that TextExpander 6 would be moving to a subscription model where individuals can pay just $3.96 per month. Some have criticized the model, but in my mind subscriptions are just codifying the status quo wherein developers release paid updates every year or so and good Mac citizens pay it because we like supporting great software. Subscriptions aren’t the problem, it’s the cost – plain and simple. Our example someone who was paying an average of under $15 a year is now on the hook for close to $48. Switching to a subscription model is fine, but using it to obfuscate what amounts to a 3X rate hike is borderline insulting.

If there is one hesitation I have regarding subscriptions is that they demand trust. Paid updates put the onus on the developer to release compelling updates and have faith that consumers will pay. Subscriptions are the opposite. They effectively ask customers to pay upfront and give developers the benefit of the doubt that updates will come. This is what makes converting from licensing to subscriptions so difficult. What to me is most perplexing about Smile’s strategy is that they already enjoyed a ton a goodwill, so while any subscription might have been met with some grumbles, I suspect a rate comparable to previous upgrades would have been largely accepted as a sound business move. By charging so much, they’ve effectively poisoned that well of goodwill. This not only jeopardized what I think would have been easily the type of steady revenue most developers only dream about, it also alienated their core customers who, at this price, can’t even make the once an no-brainer recommendation even if they wanted to. I don’t see how $48 price point a year grows the TextExpander community.

Smile has offered discounts to the those using previous versions of TextExpander, but the discount seems to be limited to one year. This was mentioned in their damage control blog post alongside explanations of how the new pricing will bring TextExpander into the future and the various great things to come. Unfortunately, it’s hard to trust a company that just tripled your rate.

I understand Smile is seeking a sustainable business model and I think subscriptions are the way to go. Without knowing anything about their business, here’s my suggestion from the peanut gallery – $2 monthly or $20 a year. Roughly the same price of an upgrade, but with predictable consistency. I would gladly pay it and I am sure many other customers would to.

Update: Great minds think alike. There are still some other concerns with the new TextExpander, but good on them for addressing the pricing.

Goku Goes to the Dealership

I love these Dragon Ball Z Ford ads not because they are clearly pandering to one of my interests and also not because I appreciate the subtext of using a well known Japanese anime to sell American cars. I love these ads because they bring some much needed levity to car advertising as a whole.

As someone who watches a good amount of American football, I have seen my share of car ads. When they aren’t hawking the latest deal, most are busy inflating the importance of the product. But trying to elevate what most people know they need and that many already find appealing is a bit tricky. Remember those Star Wars¹ special editions Lucas put out in the 90s? With not a whole lot to improve upon, the result was something less than the original.

Artificially injecting gravitas can make a seemingly nice luxury sedan look just as ridiculous as that added scene between Han and Jabba the Hut. These Dragon Ball Z ads are the opposite. The ads are ridiculous while the car they’re selling just gets to exist.

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1. The Director of SEO Marketing here told me to mention Star Wars at least once this year or he’d fire me. ↩

The Opposite Side of the Same Problem

Commenting on my argument that Microsoft’s Surface line is in-part to provide the PC’s need for better hardware design, Nick Heer astutely added:

…by choosing to license their operating system in a loose way, Microsoft places the reputation of their software¹ in their licensee’s hands.

Nick² then followed up to some related comments texted by Jonas Wisser, which I would like to also address. First was Wisser’s comment regarding Mac clones:

Kinda surprised you didn’t make the connection between licensing killing a quality OS problem and Old Apple.

Macintosh clones are indeed a very good connection and like Nick I am also surprised they didn’t come to mind when I was writing my piece, especially given my mind was clearly already in the neighborhood. As I wrote in my footnote:

In another example of computer industry symmetry, an increasingly irrelevant mid-90s Apple faced the opposite side of this same problem when it struggled to produce compelling hardware, leaving buyers asking why they should pay more for what seemed to be the same beige box as the competitors’.

While I agree that mid-90’s Apple faced the same problem, what I find particularly interesting is that the Mac maker came to it from the opposite side. Today’s Microsoft is struggling to convince the world that Windows and the PC are a choice on par with the more premium Mac, and not just a cheaper compromise. Microsoft is faced with a commonly held belief that Apple Macs are better than PCs enough to be worth the extra cost. Mid-90s Apple struggled because it failed to establish that same value proposition after Windows 95. A vast majority of people not only thought Macs weren’t worth their premium, but many thought that Apple was actively trying to rip them off.

The existence of Macintosh clones only adds to this symmetry. Out of desperation to improve the PC experience, today’s Microsoft has started making premium hardware that enjoys tighter integration with its Windows OS a la the Mac. Out of desperation to be competitive, Mid-90s Apple licensed Mac OS to commoditized hardware manufacturers a la Windows. The only break in this symmetry is that Microsoft has little to fear with their Surface venture whereas the Macintosh clones legitimately jeopardized Apple’s main line of business in the 90s, partly because Apple also struggled to justify their premium against the clone makers just as they did with the PC.

Wisser also added:

The problem for Microsoft is that they can’t win back control of their consumer product the way Apple did.

Their enterprise and embedded footprint is way too big.

[In my opinion], the only way they could do it would be to turn Windows into a legacy product and ship their own hardware running a new OS.

I agree 100%³, but also wonder if Microsoft needs PCs to be as good as Macs or just good enough that most people don’t feel they benefit from spending extra. Who knows if that’s possible with the current situation. I think that the best Microsoft can hope for now is that other PC vendors will eventually come to the same conclusion they’ve already reached and start producing nice enough hardware to keep users from yearning for a Mac.

Who knows? It could happen.

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1. I wonder if Google knows it can see the future. ↩

2. Because Nick is clearly much more on top of his blog and engaged with the community than I am.  ↩

3. This is a similar point to the one I made in arguing Microsoft should have done a Metro only tablet back in 2011. While then I was talking about software partners, I think the same logic applies to hardware vendors. ↩

4. I might be addicted to Markdown footnotes. ↩

Reference Design

Ever since Microsoft introduced its line of Surface tablets, there has always been a lingering question as to why. Why is Microsoft risking alienating OEM partners just to go into a business that is both costly and relatively low margin when compared to software? One answer I’ve been thinking about for a while now is that Microsoft’s move is at least partly about giving commoditized PC manufacturers a high-end design to reference that isn’t Apple’s.

The PC industry as a whole, and therefore Microsoft, benefits whenever one or more manufacturers succeed by offering high-end quality computers, because doing so sets the bar for everyone else to measure up against. The best example of this that I can think of is the IBM ThinkPad. If you worked in an office in the late 90s, chances are you hoped for a ThinkPad, but ended up with some cheaper Dell or Compaq. This often worked out fine because whatever laptop you were given was still trying to be a ThinkPad, just cheaper. But therein lies the problem – with the vast majority of PC buyers being IT departments of variously sized organizations with limited budgets, PC’s success wasn’t driven by quality as much as it was price. IBM ¹ would be undercut by Compaq who would be undercut by Dell who would be undercut by HP, and so on and so forth. Now everyone is provisioned the same sub-$500 5lb brick with build quality standards based on what was already second rate in 2005.

As bad as PC’s race to the bottom has gotten for the business market, I would argue it’s even worse for the consumers. Because as much as IT may not give a damn about the hardware quality of your brick, they care deeply about the software and service that comes with it. You only get the software that’s perceived to be needed and if your brick dies, it will be fixed or replaced. Consumers on the other hand don’t have such luxuries. That lack of profitability on hardware means most consumer PCs are sold with minimal support and buyers can’t even count on a clean user experience thanks to preinstalled trial software (lovingly called crapware) that relentlessly advertises paid upgrades.

The only company to avoid this fate has been Apple. Thanks to some sort of alchemy where gross incompetence was followed by expert leadership, Apple has remained a consumer driven company where it continues to compete primarily on quality. As a result, Apple now singularly owns the high-end computing market. Because of this and the fact that there is no one else to follow, PC makers have increasingly and more obviously emulated Apple.

The has led to the current PC market, which I think can be described in four categories:

1. Old style business bricks.
2. Old style consumer bricks that are filled with crapware.
3. Higher end MacBook knock-offs that are filled with crapware.
4. Wacky laptop/tablet all-in-ones that are filled with crapware.

With old style laptops looking increasingly dated and all-in-ones feeling a little under baked, I would wager number 3 is the most compelling category for most consumers right now. From there, the choice becomes either buy what is known to be a crapware-filled knock-off or just spend the extra money and get the real McCoy². Whether or not the PC or Mac gets purchased at this point becomes somewhat irrelevant because the decision process itself concedes that Apple makes the better computer. This looks bad for the PC industry and, because Apple is the one major computer maker that doesn’t include Windows, looks bad for Microsoft too³.

Apparently I am not alone in this thinking. Joanna Stern succinctly made a similar observation on a recent episode of John Gruber’s The Talk Show:

Apple makes the best Windows computer. And I said it when I was working at Engadget. I said it when I was working at The Verge. And I’ve said when I’ve been working here at the [Wall Street] Journal. When you install Windows on a MacBook Air or a MacBook Pro, Windows runs better there than it does on pretty much any other laptop I’ve ever tested in the last 10 years. And that is a problem for Microsoft.

As a long time Mac user, I have no qualms saying that Windows has gotten leaps and bounds better in the last 5 years, but those significant improvements have been largely erased by mediocre hardware, penny pinching IT departments, and the continued horrible practice of crapware. I am sure no one is more frustrated by this fact than Microsoft, who I believe has been desperately trying to elevate the PC back to respectability. I think the Surface exists as part of that strategy to help⁴ the rest of PC industry with a unique⁵ reference model not entirely owned by PC’s oldest and now biggest competitor.

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1. “Who exited the business by selling off ThinkPad with the rest of its PC division to Lenovo 2005.” ↩

2. In another example of computer industry symmetry, an increasingly irrelevant mid-90s Apple faced the opposite side of this same problem when it struggled to produce compelling hardware, leaving buyers asking why they should pay more for what seemed to be the same beige box as the competitors’. ↩

3. Would Microsoft even bother with Surface in a world where Apple was somehow a high-end Windows OEM? ↩

4. Or perhaps to threaten. ↩

5. Aside from uniqueness, I think the laptop/tablet form factor is ideal for Microsoft for two reasons.

   
   
   1. Apple’s stated disinterest in the market leaves an open opportunity for Microsoft to pursue and gain competence while minimizing comparison to arguably the best hardware maker in the world.
   
   
   2. Microsoft makes Windows and actually has a proven history integrating hardware and software with Xbox, which in my book gives them a shot at the legitimizing a heretofore wacky form factor.
   
   
    ↩

Love All 5 Starred Songs in Current Playlist

I use ratings in iTunes, mostly for smart playlists, and am a bit worried they will be going away in favor of the binary "Loved" introduced with iTunes 12. To that end, I have built a simple AppleScript to quickly love all songs with 5 stars in the current playlist and thought others might also find it useful.

You can download the script here. Enjoy!

Note: This script requires Yosemite since it uses JavaScript for Automation.

A Windfall for Executive Greeters

From Noam Scheiber, at The New York Times:

President Obama announced Monday night a rule change that would make millions more Americans eligible for overtime pay.

The rule would raise the salary threshold below which workers automatically qualify for time-and-a-half overtime wages to $50,440 a year from $23,660...

This reminds me of a Simpsons quote where-in Homer gets a job as a greeter at the newly opened Sprawl-Mart.

Homer, would you be interested in the position of executive greeter?

That's been my dream ever since I heard it existed right now. What do I get?

You get to work overtime without us paying you extra.

Perhaps even funnier is that I came across this little gem while searching for the above quote.

Employment benefits and competitive salary options await qualified Walmart greeters.