1. Automatic Backups. The OS has an automatic backup utility built into it called Time Machine and it’s pretty slick. Always protected, all the time.

2. Easy data management. If you pay the mac store reps $89 they’ll migrate all your info over from your old computer to your new one. Once you go mac, you can use the built-in Migration Assistant to move your info from your old mac to the new one with the click of a button.

3. Macs require no maintenance. They don’t get viruses, they don’t require defragmenting, they don’t need security software, and every utility you need is already included in the software. The only thing you’ll need to buy is Microsoft Office. The OS doesn’t come with stupid trial software (called bloatware) and you’ll never have to reinstall your OS. No bluescreen of death, ever. They’re just a hell of a lot more stable and secure in general.

4. All the compatibility issues of yesteryear are no longer issues. Macs can read any PC-formatted drive, they can read any open file format (.doc, .xls, .pdf, anything you can think of). PCs on the other hand, can’t read mac-formatted drives. And if you really really needed to, the new macs are intel based, so you could install windows on your computer as a dual-boot (but really, why would you? OS X is so much better!). The mac store reps call it Boot Camp.

5. These puppies are wicked fast. Scary fast. Snow Leopard, the OS is lightweight and the machines are so locktight. When you buy Apple, you’re buying a brand, yes, but you’re also buying a format. So everything Apple makes is custom built to work with everything else Apple makes. PCs are cobbled together by competing manufacturers and so you get driver problems and hardware incompatibility issues, but because Apple makes every component in their computers, it all works seamlessly inside that little silver case. This means it will all work seamlessly with your iPod too.

6. They last forever. I had a roommate that had her mac laptop STRUCK BY LIGHTNING and it still ran for four years. Mine is going on six years old and it still runs great. It just couldn’t keep up with the demands of HD video playback, a notoriously resource intensive codec and for work, I really need to be able to edit HD in real-time, without waiting around for stuff to render. I’ve converted my old mac into an entertainment system. I got a free OS upgrade, a free battery replacement, and lots of patient genius representatives that spent a good two hours trying to figure out why my USB bus suddenly stopped providing enough power to spin a 7200rpm drive (they fixed it, by the by).

7. Freebies. The Apple summer deal is going on, so if you buy this month or next you’ll get a lot of freebies. A free printer, a free iPod Touch, a rebate on MS Office, they do a lot of summer deals at the apple store and god damn if the iPod Touch isn’t a really fun little machine. Think of all the travel you do!

8. They’re incredibly usable. They’re just fun. They come standard with a lot of really fun features and you can do anything you want right of the bat really easily. You can make movies, download music from iTunes, stream netflix, record your own songs, make photobooks, all sorts of fun stuff. They’re pretty, they work well, and most importantly, they’re easy to use. The biggest thing you’ll have to learn how to deal with is using the command button (the cloverleaf) instead of the ctrl button. Other than that, almost everything else is the same nowadays.

9. Mac developers are awesome. We’re a passionate bunch, and the cocoa development group is incredibly dedicated to creating awesome, well-formed, elegant programmes and solutions. They’re so much out there that’s mac only and near-perfect software. The Panic team has some amazing applications, Daylite changed my life, and everything from Adobe to Skype is just so much prettier on a mac. The devloper base alone is reason to switch.

10. They’re cheaper. No joke. If you put a Sony Vaio, a Gateway, a Dell, and an Alienware PC with the exact same speeds and specs side by side, you’ll find Apple’s version is actually a better value. Sure you can’t get a mac for cheap, but you also can’t get a bad mac. I can find several $400 laptops that, pardon my french, blow chunks and are impossible to use. But even the $700 mac mini, the cheapest mac you can buy, runs like a dream. That’s what I call value.

There’s more too, the amazing possibilities it allows, the premiere software it offers, the de-facto status among creative professionals, but for now, 10 reasons are enough. You fanboys and girls out there, any other important reasons I’m forgetting?

AT&T recently announced a new set of data cost plans for smartphone users. Essentially they’ve broken up the old model where customers who wanted wireless internet connectivity had to pay $30 for an unlimited plan and instead created a second bracket for half the price. Understandably, the light-user plan (DataPlus) has a data limit, which AT&T has set at 200MB per month. From a business standpoint this is a great move to cut costs and to lower the barrier to entry for potential customers not willing to pay the old price for a data plan. That’s not the part that’s incited the wrath of the masses. It’s the heavy-user plan, which used to be unlimited, is going to be capped at 2GB per month starting Monday.

Yesterday I caught up on my news and opinions and it seems this pissed off a lot of folks. I cannot understand why. I’ve read the rants and the arguments and the frustrations, but people need to get real. For starters, internet isn’t free anywhere, and while iPhone users may only be 3% of AT&T customers, they command 40% of AT&T’s bandwidth and cellular data service. Not only does this demand fail to scale as more users join, but it just isn’t cost effective either. As a result, AT&T could be throttling smartphone data service to its customers anyway to make sure its mobile network remains usable. There just aren’t enough towers to cover the number of high-bandwidth users on the network. So essentially, yes we get “unlimited data” but at the price of worse coverage and worse service. AT&T isn’t the only telco in this pickle, there isn’t a CDN (content delivery network) out there that can handle the cost of transporting that much data over that far of a distance. If discerning users allows for better, faster internet connectivity for those of use willing to pay the premium, then I’m all for it.

The other major gripe seems to be the fact that there is a data cap at all, even for users willing to pay more for AT&T’s “DataPro” plan. I download like it’s going out of style and in the years I’ve owned a smartphone, I have never once gone over 2GB in a single 30 day period. Of course there are services you simply not offered over 3G, such as streaming video services, television, or downloading movies, but even when those services become available the amount of transfer speed they require will far outstrip the IMT standards capacity, no matter how much faster 4G promises to be. To watch TV on your phone will mandate a wifi connection, and anything you access via wifi won’t be part of your data usage cap anyway. Moreover, even if we do start watching slingbox on our iPhones via 3G, AT&T says DataPro users can buy more bandwidth at $10 a GB. 3GB of data, almost the entire the capacity of my first gen iPhone, will will cost a DataPro user $35 dollars. That’s what most unlimited users pay now, 65% of whom use under 200MB per month, according to AT&T. That’s a better deal any way you slice it.

Japan has much better mobile internet service in terms of speed, coverage, and standard features and services. They have a smaller net to cast, yet a larger number of fish in the catch, so they have higher prices for all phone plans. What surprised me however, was that the idea of an unlimited data plan in Japan simply does not exist. The SoftBank representative was dumbfounded when I asked how much it would cost for unlimited data coverage. Australia has some of the slowest and shoddiest internet service I’ve experienced. You’d think a country the size of the continental US would have it down, but instead the internet service I purchased for my house only allotted me 200MB per month. Try video chatting with your family on skype and the conversation can only last around 12 minutes before you’ve used your quota. And this is for wifi, not even cellular data coverage. Extra bandwidth was AU$10 a GB (see any striking similarities to the new AT&T plan yet?) and over the course of the six months I lived there, I spent $350 dollars on extra bandwidth, not because I was watching lots of YouTube, but because I was a cinema student that had to submit my completed projects via you guessed it, internet. My point is, there are few countries that have as many smartphone users (or just people) as we do, and there are fewer still that have to provide cellular service over a space as geographically large as the US is. To me, the fact that we offered an unlimited plan to begin with seemed too good to be true, and I’ve seen this change of costs and services headed our way for a long time. So how could so many others feel so blindsided?

When I started to think about the reaction AT&Ts announcement incited, I realised it isn’t a problem of logic. I think AT&T customers feel betrayed. It’s the principle. As Dustin Curtis put it, knowing there’s a cap means we all now have to worry about how much we download every time you open your phone or switch on your iPad. Consumers already feel dicked around by the cellular providers, and the reality that the rules could change again without warning (higher price, lower limit) can sour the service. But there’s more to it than that. The fervor incited by such a simple business change is indicative of something much bigger: the internet has grown up.

Mobile computing has made the internet indispensable. It’s no longer a plaything or a specialised device. It’s become a utility. Flowtown published a laughable info graphic asking “Are we addicted to the internet?” like internet usage is the latest incarnation of pornography or methamphetamine. Saying we’re addicted to the internet is like say we’re addicted to electricity. Just because we use it every day doesn’t mean it’s a leisure activity. It’s a utility, same as water, power, and gas, and it’s about time we started treating it like one. To function in industrialised society, you need internet access. Ever tried to live without it? I have, and even if I wanted to give the internet up for good, it’s not so easy to do anymore. Even basic, vital functions like paying rent or filing your taxes are difficult to do without the web, and it’s getting harder every day.

It may sound like I’m just telling people to pony up, but what I haven’t talked about is the big “if” in this equation. When the iPhone and Blackberry took off, I highly doubt AT&T’s network infrastructure was equipped to deal with the swarm of smartphone users that came along. So (and here’s the if), if AT&T follows through and gives DataPro users better mobile data service at a cheaper price, then the change was in both of our best interests. It’s common practice to sort your customers into a hierarchy and that’s fine. There is, however, a difference between what Comcast got sued for and what airline reward programmes do. Denying or degrading the quality of service to a customer based on the amount of data they consume is not acceptable. It’s a service you pay for, so it damn well be what it says it is. Rewarding frequent, high-paying customers on the other hand, is something else entirely, and I’d strongly encourage AT&T to treat the DataPro plan like a Pro plan. After all, if they get this right, it’s a game changer for American mobile content delivery.

With so much information floating around, readily available, it can become overwhelming fairly easily and, in the case of many naysayers, so easy to simply denounce. However, the accessibility of how-to information and new communicative mediums like social networks and forum communities can also give rise to some incredibly inspiring material. People are doing amazing work, and that work is making its way around the interwebs to incite change and invite other great derivative works. Because of these two facts, it makes it rather difficult to those of us well attuned to both society and technology, for we are constantly struggling with the balance between unnecessary information and life changing information.

Recently I set about purging my RSS feeds and social networks, and while I fully expected to unsubscribe from half of them, I ended up only choosing to filter out a few. My criteria has become quite clear, and yet the problem I faced was reading a large bookshop filled with authors who have great things to say. I just didn’t have the time to read all of it I wanted to, and yet I still wanted to be able to skip a few days of feed checking and not be overwhelmed by the backlog. After all, I find the writing of certain others a huge source of inspiration and advice, and the idea of missing out on the things these people have to say is a truly stressful prospect.

Yet, despite such an overwhelming amount of high-quality content, alas I had to trim down my 100+ blogroll. Generally I read up on many different subjects as varied as graphic design and typography to cooking and nutrition to lifestyle design and personal finance to asian culture and nomadic travellers. It wasn’t even the length of blog posts that forced me to unsubscribe. When Bread and Honey ends up ranting for several paragraphs about nothing related to food at all I still find myself reading every word, while sometimes Brooklyn Nomad’s 500 word posts are just too long for me to bother with. It’s a wide world out there: if Steve Pavlina has mastered the longform, Seth Godin is a ninja of the short, which just goes to show there’s no real formula. If you’re good enough, I’ll read it.

In spite of well-written posts and a decent topics, there are three major criteria that are nagging enough to make me unsubscribe to otherwise totally worthy blogs, and I thought perhaps not every blogger out there has spent a lot of time matching their format to their audience. This isn’t wholesale advice, it’s my personal opinion and a small insight into what I think can get in the way of your stellar content, despite your best intentions. You may not care that you’re one reader down, but then again you may take my complaints into account as I outline the top three reasons why I unsubscribed to your blog.

1. Truncated RSS Feeds
Now, I know there’s been a huge debate raging in the blog world about full vs. truncated RSS feeds, but in my opinion it’s a no brainer. The risk you run of getting your feed scraped is infinitely less important the risk you run of not connecting with your community. Not only is a shortened RSS entry more likely to get skipped over by me in comparison to the full-length posts flanking it, but I am incredibly unlikely to click your link. There’s no good excerpt length either. A few sentences is not enough to get me interested and tends to have the opposite effect, while a few passages is just enough to make me frustrated I have to open up my browser, wait for the page to load, and then reread the bits I’ve already read. I rarely bother. So if you have a truncated RSS feed, I urge you to try a full post feed and see if you convert better. See if your community grows stronger. It drives me nuts because I do want to read your entree posts, but I’ll settle for the appetiser version instead of consuming all your content. Stop with the truncation and let me use my feed reader as it was intended.

2. Updating Too Often
I hate this with a bitter passion. If you update more than twice a day, I will not read your blog. I’d rather you write amazing, in-depth posts once a week than tiny morsels every hour you think about it. That’s what twitter is for, not your blog. I suppose this reveals my preferences for actual people rather than aggregate sites because I value a single person’s opinion, even one I disagree with, infinitely more than several. Do I read the Gadgeteer? No. Do I read everything Julie from the Gadgeteer reviews? Yes. Because she only writes when it’s worth writing about and she’s has one of the only sensible female voices in the industry. I Love Typography only updates one a month but each post is incredibly information-rich, perfectly formatted, and thoughtful. Die-hard Man U fan though I may be, I don’t read a single news feed because it would be barmy to hear the same quote about Nani seventeen times a day. It’s easy for me to stay subscribed to you if you don’t update as often as I’d like, but it’s much harder for me to continue to put up with your excess posting if I only like part of what you offer. Don’t update 11.7 times a week. It means you aren’t spending enough time on your writing.

3. Unoriginal Content
I’m not just talking about stealing someone else’s material and not attributing it, though that is a scary-big deterrent for me. I’m talking about what happens when a blog stops writing anything original and instead just guest posts, hosts blog carnivals (link roundups), interviews people, and reposts. This is why I do not understand how most people use tumblr. If I know you personally, I totally care what you read and what you listen to and what you like. That’s what del.icio.us, goodreads, google buzz, retweeting, and youtube subscriptions are for. Not for your blog. If you’re going to share a video, please explain why you shared it. If you’re going to interview someone, you better say something no one else has said about them. If you’re going to host a carnival, it better be framed by generous commentary and you better have five times more original content before you even think of hitting the publish button. This is a blog for goodness sake. Make it personal already. Travel blogs make this mistake a lot. I can find good flight deals and reservations in wherever you’re travelling on my own, but I can’t see it as you do or meet the people you did. I can look up volcano whatever, but I can’t have a spiritual awakening during a night hike. You have to make me care beyond the norm. The best travel writers write about what they did and why it was worth reading instead of where they are and how they got there. Liz Learns Japanese utilises ideas from all over the place, but although the story is the same everyday (”I’m practicing Japanese!”) she manages to make it personal, tells you a victory or a struggle from her daily life or a neat trick she’s tried, noting common phenomena through a unique voice. And guess what, I freaking love it. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, you just have to make it yourself.

Today Apple announced the release of their newest mobile device, a tablet with the unfortunate name of iPad. Is it a neat device? Can it do cool things? Was huge step forward for netbooks and e-readers? Yes. Was it a bit of a letdown? Absolutely.

It’s slick, with that fancy interface familiar to iPhone and iPod Touch users, but with the added juice of a netbook. The tablet itself boasts a new chip I’m sure we’ll start seeing elsewhere, a ridiculous battery life of 10 hours, and finally answers that question of who wants to watch a movie on an eight centimeter screen. But for the company that made me reconsider digital convergence, the people that made me inseparable from my mobile phone, the design team that made me require more of my technology, the iPad was terribly disappointing.

While it’d be easy to say the iPad was overhyped (it was) or that it doesn’t tout any groundbreaking UI changes from the iPod Touch (it doesn’t), these aren’t the disappointments. To be honest, I applaud those choices. Apple doesn’t have to re-invent the wheel when they have an interface they know works, an impressive library of apps and games that already exist, and a landscape of other tablet products that, well, suck. In many ways, the iPad is a good move, and hopefully will get us moving in the right direction. Why the long face then? The truth is, the iPad is most disappointing because it isn’t for me. I’m not the market, and here’s why: sure it has a big touch screen, but the iPad doesn’t do anything my other devices don’t. It doesn’t even do something better than my other devices.

It’s supposed to fill that gap between the smartphone and the computer, right? Well (and this is why I used to hate digital convergence) it doesn’t fill that gap particularly well for people like me. It isn’t a suitable computer for me because 1) I can’t edit on it, 2) it has no input ports, 3) you can’t multitask, 4) the price point and AT&T contract don’t match my wallet or my fancy. But it isn’t a suitable mobile device for me either because A) I can’t put it in my pocket, B) the charge isn’t long enough for serious travel, C) it still requires a computer to add content, and D) I already have a device that can run the same apps, has the same 3G coverage, and fits in any purse. It doesn’t turn-by-turn navigate as well as an in-car GPS, it’s much harder to read and offers fewer books than the Kindle or the Nook, and is much too large to make a convenient phone call. So when I, an extended traveller who would love nothing more than an in-between device that let me stop worrying about laptop theft and international roaming charges, can’t see the point of owning one, you have to wonder with whom the appeal lies.

It isn’t supposed to be a computer, or a phone, or even an e-reader. That’s all well and good, and perhaps I’ve judged the iPad too quickly, but if that’s the case, then what exactly is it supposed to do? If you’re the business commuter who occasionally looks at a photo, might like to read a book or watch a movie, and really needs to edit spreadsheets, then the iPad is for you. Since Apple hasn’t given me a reason to need the iPad like I need my iPod, then it’s going to be up to the developers to provide the impetus. Perhaps this was Apple’s plan all along, since the app store has singlehandedly carried the iPhone through competition. In that regard, it isn’t a bad plan at all, but as it stands out-of-box, the iPad is for people like my father, like that girl that always takes the Red Line to the last station, and for the the grandparent that, when it isn’t masquerading as a digital picture frame, uses the iPad to play FIFA with their grandchildren. Maybe it does fill the gap between computer and phone for these people, maybe your answer to “do I really need another device?” is a resounding yes, and maybe mac developers will come out with a trillion different uses for this thing that deem it indispensable. All of this is possible, I don’t deny. Only, right now at least, the iPad doesn’t do much for me.