After looking on the Apple forums for a few minutes, I stumbled upon an interesting post. Several users claimed that there were two known causes for the fan suddenly spiking up in speed, even after rebooting the system multiple times. The first was a corrupted Dashboard widget, which was accessing the CPU and fans for stats. I ignored this, since I rarely use Dashboard widgets, and I haven’t installed a new one in 6-8 months. Next, they suggested that the file permissions on the disk were wrong. I thought about this for a minute, and it hit me. What does mdworker do? It indexes files/directories/etc for Finder. It’s running all the time. What would happen if it suddenly hit a file or group of files that it couldn’t read properly? Well, turns out, what happens is the CPU goes crazy, and so does the fan. I opened up Disk Utility, and told it to fix the permissions on the file system. It found almost 800 files with the wrong permissions. The really funny part, was as I watched the list of files go by, the moment it hit the Adobe Flash plugin, and fixed its permissions, the fan went quite and the CPU dropped back down to normal.

As a side note, for the last couple of weeks, every time I opened iTunes, a warning message would pop up asking me if I wanted to allow incoming connections to iTunes. This started with the last security update from Apple. I always clicked “Allow”, but it seemed strange that I kept getting this message on every iTunes launch. After a couple of minutes in the Apple forums, I found the solution to this problem too. Turns out, in /Library/Prefences, there were two copies of com.apple.alf.plist. A version marked orig and a new version created on the date I did the security update. After deleting these two files, and restarting iTunes, a new version was created, and it no longer asks the Firewall question.

The good stuff:

The iPad has a nice large screen that will make certain applications a lot easier to use and navigate. It also incorporates some new user interfaces not available in the limited real estate of the iPhone and iPod Touch.
There appears to be some sort of local storage, the ability to work on and create iWorks documents, leads me to believe that somehow we can store files on this device outside of the regular sync process, even for Apple products.

All iPhone apps will work on the device. This is the biggest plus Apple has going for them.

The iBook reader, hate they used this name again, leaves all other book reading devices in the dust.

The 10 hour battery life sounds amazing, but real world tests may determine that this means the screen is so dim that this means nothing to achieve such battery life.

The ability to connect a Bluetooth keyboard is a mistake Apple has finally corrected, at least for this device.

The bad stuff:

It’s just a big iPod. Really, I’m going to say it again. It’s just a big iPod.

The 3G version costs a lot more than the non-3G, for no real reason.

It runs iPhone apps. I know that was under the good stuff too, but this is also a negative. I can never use this device instead of a laptop, it’s always another device I would carry with me.

The lack of Flash! I hate Flash, I really do, but it’s time Apple gives up this war with Adobe. Flash sucks, Adobe can’t get the damn thing to work well with Safari. Just get over it. There are too many things being missed on the web by a mobile version of Safari that lacks Flash.

It comes in 16, 32, 64 GB sizes. It should start at 32 and go up to 96 GBs.

The shit that doesn’t matter:

Please stop talking about multi-tasking. This is the same sort of silly argument people use when comparing the price of a PC and a Mac. The iPhone does multi-task. It does it all the time. If it couldn’t multi-task, you couldn’t listen to music while doing anything else. You couldn’t close Safari, re-open it, and it still be on the same page. If you are a Jailbreak user, you realize that the reason Apple apps are so much faster than all other apps on the iPhone is because once you open them, they stay open. The iPhone is multi-tasking all the time. Also, how would you multi-task on a device like the iPhone, or the iPad. There is no “shrink” window. You can only do one thing at a time. I will admit that some of the Jailbreak apps that take advantage of true multi-tasking, like qTweeter, are the path Apple should be taking. However, there are very few apps that could really take advantage of this feature the way most users are thinking.

So, am I going to rush out and buy one? No. This simple answer is why I think there are serious problems with this device. I am an Apple fanatic. I have 3 macs, 3 shuffles, an iPod, 2 iPhones and an AppleTV. If Apple makes it, I usually go buy it. There is no “wow” factor here. I can think of some cool things I could do with this device, but none of them outweigh the price and small drive size. It’s too big to replace an iPod and too limited to be a laptop. I would have a hard time using this as a music player, and I’m not sure how often I’d really watch movies on it. I can’t carry it around and take pictures with it, and I still have to sync up with iTunes to get things on and off of it. I agree that netbooks are pretty worthless, and I’m kind of glad Apple has decided not to dilute their product line by racing to the bottom. However, this device just doesn’t seem to have a place in my day to day life. I’ve never been able to say that about an Apple product before.

People talk about the “Mac Tax” when in fact, you are simply getting a better computer. It just works. She’s had her iMac for over 3 years, and never had an issue. During that time, they have gone through several PCs, totaling more than the iMac that has lasted 3+ years and counting. If you buy cheap equipment, with second level parts inside, you get what you pay for. A cheap computer that lasts about as long as any other cheap thing you purchase.

I find it funny that within 3 weeks, they decided that they hated Vista, didn’t like the quality of the laptop and wanted to switch over to a Mac. It will be their first Mac laptop, so it should be interesting to see how that experience goes in the coming weeks. It will also be her first experience with Snow Leopard. Her iMac is still running Tiger, which I need to take care of in the near future.