AirPlay: The Most Under-appreciated Apple Product(s)

Every Thanksgiving my family hosts a turkey fry.  For the uninformed masses: frying is the most delicious of all the many preparation methods for the bird. Briefly, you dunk a well-seasoned 15 lb. turkey into a big pot of 360º peanut oil for 45 minutes. My mouth is watering just thinking about it. Anyway, our annual turkey fry is a 20-year tradition involving close friends and neighbors coming to our back yard Thanksgiving morning and consuming mass quantities of Bloody Marys while I dunk their birds.  This year was typical.  15 turkeys were fried while about 40 of our closest friends got drunk way too early in the morning. After 20 years, the spectacle of two bubbling cauldrons with bobbing birds has become rather commonplace to our visitors, but me controlling my outdoor music system with my iPhone widened some eyes.

Even though I've had an Airport Express connected to my music system for three or four years now, this Thanksgiving it garnered attention when I got a request to "turn it up" when one of our local favorites' tune began playing from my well-crafted playlist. Instead of grabbing some infrared remote or twisting a knob, I retrieved my iPhone from my pocket and thumbed the slider on Apple's Remote app. One of my less technical neighbor's eyes widened and he asked, "How did you do that with your phone?!!" As I explained the basics of AirPlay to him, I noticed several of my guests had stopped what they were doing and began paying attention. Before long, I was giving an impromptu demonstration of Apple magic.

That event reminded me of how much I take my Apple infrastructure for granted. My home network includes an AppleTV (2nd gen) and two Airport Expresses connected to two separate music systems. I have the Remote app installed on all my iDevices, giving me the ability to send all types of media from any of my three Macs and all my iDevices to any mix of three different music/video systems. All this capability cost me less than $300. ($69 for each Airport and $85 for the AppleTV, all from Apple's refurbished stock) That may sound a bit expensive until you price other solutions from Sonos and the like.

My neighbors' fascination with all this capability reminded me of just how wonderful AirPlay is. It is absolutely simple to set up, requires no cryptic instructions to operate and like most everything Apple makes, it just works! Believe me, I've tried the DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance standard employed by Microsoft) hardware and found I had to continually fiddle with it to keep it working. There always seemed to be a permission issue or network problem that needed resolving (or re-resolving) before I could get music or video from my Windows PC to my home theatre. Someone less determined or less tech-savvy would probably give up.  Given DLNA's slow uptake, it appears many people have.

This makes me wonder why more people don't know about AirPlay. It's built into iTunes for free. Is it just something nobody wants? Based on my limited data, (admittedly gathered in a mild vodka fog this Thanksgiving) I don't think so. Maybe it's something Apple simply doesn't push. I seem to recall something about AirPlay capability in some Apple commercial, but the details escape me.  Seems to me, it would be an easy sell. I know I've helped them sell two AirPorts since Thanksgiving, one of which I had to help set up.

Sometimes I hate being the computer guy.

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Apple is Still in Very Good Hands

Since last year's passing of Steve Jobs, speculation about Apple's health have dotted the technical and financial media landscape.  I must admit to some personal trepidation along those lines.  The recent 20% drop of Apple's stock price did nothing to ease those worries.

Yesterday, Businessweek published this interview with Tim Cook.  After reading it, my mind was put at ease.  In fact, I've come to see that Jobs' naming Cook as his successor was the final item of an innumerable list of brilliant moves that made Apple what it is today.  If you have even a casual interest in Apple as a company, this article is a must read.

Why I'm an Apple Guy (And Why You Should Be Too)

The recent release of Windows 8 reminds me why I became an Apple fan in 2006. Before that, I had been a DOS/Windows proponent since 1982 when the company I worked for installed an original IBM PC in the lab where I worked.  It was my first experience with personal computers, having previously only worked on minis and mainframes. The idea of having a computer at my (and only my) disposal to use as I wished was a transformational experience.  With this new box I could keep notes, build spreadsheets and perform a host of other tasks that made my job easier and greatly increased my productivity.  I became completely enamored with the concept.  So much so, I decided to make personal computing my life's work.

Fast-forward to 2006 when I purchased my first iPod.  It was a 5th generation model, the first one with video capability.  I was an IT manager for a Fortune 500 company, a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer and responsible for a data center, around 150 desktops and a small IT staff.  The iPod purchase prompted me to install iTunes for the first time on my Dell laptop.  Using the little chrome and black pocket-sized device to listen to music and watch video was as eye-opening an event as the day I got that first PC some 22 years earlier.  After fighting network connections, registry settings, user permissions and all the other crap that comes with managing Windows, I was completely flabbergasted by the iPod's simplicity and ease of use.  It just worked and I was hooked.  Within 2 months I purchased my first Mac.

Fast-forward again, this time to the present. When I left the dark side, I went "all in".  I now own two Macs, an iPhone and an iPad. I've replaced all three of my daughters' PCs with Macs and they all use iPhones and iPads as well.  I left the IT management position I held for 9 years to start my own company that does web development and specializes in Apple technology integration into business/enterprise systems.  I guess you could say Apple's much ballyhooed "halo effect" built into every product they sell was at full strength in that first iPod I purchased.

But let's be frank.  No magic spell influenced my decisions.  In fact, the "halo" wouldn't exist if it weren't for the superior products Apple produces.  In my case, that first iPod was a simple introduction to the Apple ecosystem.  An ecosystem where one Apple device works well with other Apple devices and Apple software by simply plugging it in.  No learning curve, no cryptic instructions, no engineering necessary.  Unlike the world of Windows PCs and peripherals, the Apple landscape is populated with products designed from inception to work with each other.  Apple has an uncanny way of making extremely complex technology simple and easy to use.  Ergo, pleasurable.  In fact, the only problems I encountered as a new Mac user were the ones I created for myself.  I habitually over-thought things.  Coming from the Windows world, I had difficulty accepting how simple Macs are.  I couldn't believe that connecting my MacBook to a WiFi network only required me to enter a passphrase.  I didn't need to tell it what type of encryption to use or what channel to connect to.  It had already figured that out for me.  I didn't need to tell it to backup my system to my external drive, how often to back it up or how much data to keep.  It knew all those things also.  The list goes on and on.  With few exceptions, all I do with my Apple products is enjoy them and get things done.  Oh sure, if I ever feel the need to put on my propeller beanie, the OS X terminal is there for me, replete with all the UNIX goodness I could ask for.  The difference is, I rarely have to to make my Macs do what I want.

So now Microsoft is trying its best to replicate this positive user experience with Windows 8.  I've spent several days with the new OS and must admit to being pleasantly surprised.  The new "Metro" (or whatever they decide to call it) interface is beautiful and simple to use and much of the drudgery of setting up a new PC is gone.  It's a great start, but I think its just that, a start.  Though very different visually, Windows is adopting the same ease-of-use strategy OS X employed from its inception.  The only problem is, the rest of the software development world has a ways to go before it catches up.  Running applications in Windows 8 often means reverting to the old Windows desktop (minus the "Start" button), so using the new interface was sort of a "catch as catch can" experience. New applications designed for Windows 8 look and run beautifully, but right now, there isn't what one would call a wealth of Windows 8 applications available.  We'll just have to wait and see how the developer world responds.  One question I can't answer is whether a Windows mobile phone and the new Surface tablet will work as seamlessly with Windows 8 as my iPhone and iPad work with my Mac. It's fair to say the jury is still out, but I'd be willing to bet that at best, it will be a "Rev. 1" experience.  Certainly, nothing I've seen or read tempts me to ditch my iPhone just yet.  As with all things technical, I prefer to wait until revision 2 or 3, just to give the majority of the bugs a chance to be exterminated.

Until then, I'm very grateful to be an Apple guy.  My Macs run beautifully and work flawlessly with my i(Phone, Pad, Pod). My address book, calendar, reminders, notes, music, messages and photos stay perfectly in sync across all my machines and devices without me doing a thing.  I rarely have to deal with software crashes and rebooting has become something I need to remind myself to do every few weeks (just for good measure).  It's good to see the awakening of the good people in Redmond, but Microsoft is just beginning down the path Apple has been on for years.  Call me when they get there.