An article on TUAW about the history of the MacBook Air prompted me to think back in early 2010, when I was comparison shopping for a lightweight laptop. My search had come down to four choices:

• the Toshiba Portégé M800,
• the Panasonic Y5,
• the Lenovo ThinkPad X301, and
• the MacBook Air.

At the time, these light-weight machines were premium-priced products that were selling between $2000 and $3000. So only after painfully extended deliberation did I order the Lenovo X301 because of its inclusion of the DVD drive. However, Lenovo cancelled my order in the spring of 2010. And that has made all the difference.

I have always despised that convention unique to PCs of appending a bunch of numbers to the name. Fittingly enough, I would have been fine just choosing the MacBook Air on that criteria alone. But practically, I wanted a very light machine with as minimal a power brick as possible. And I could not make that personal compromise about my DVD drive very easily. The funny thing is that I ended up buying a SuperDrive, trying not to make that compromise at all. I used it once since I purchased it. Smart compromise, Apple.

To round out the experience, the support for my MacBook Air has been fantastic, with only one battery issue between the two machines I owned (side note: I was a bit impetuous when the late 2010 MacBook Air refresh came out with the 4GB of RAM that I really wanted in order to run VMWare smoothly).

I have been asked about my favorite product before, and it is hands down my MacBook Air. I choose to remember that the past was filled with backache and heavy messenger bags loaded up with power adapters and extra batteries. I know that a better way exists, and that the right compromises were hard to accept but necessary for each of our sakes. Looking forward to 2012, I want to make products that solve people’s problems and to make the right compromises in the process. It will be a tough road, but definitely worth traveling.

Addendum: http://www.tuaw.com/2012/01/15/the-macbook-air-four-years-later/

• Keeps liquids pretty hot for a while, almost the same (unscientific) temperature range for 6 hours!
• Tea strainer is handy and removable as you need it.
• Slim profile makes it easy to carry in a bag.
• Single-button sip-from-anywhere top is convenient!

Cons:

• No handle to grasp.
• Carrying tote isn’t conducive towards convenient access to the mug, especially if strapped to a bag.
• Difficult to clean and requires a good scrubbing and soak to prevent stains.

Suggested improvements:

• Since the silicone gaskets need TLC and inspection every so often to ensure a good seal, perhaps offer a set of spares in the package and show some more details about care and longevity.
• Make a better (optional?) carrying tote that has a handle or integrates better with bags.

Buy it here!

I recently finished reading Dan Roam’s “The Back of the Napkin,” which is a great introductory and reference book on communicating with pictures.  I also spotted Seth Godin’s blog post commenting on this NYTimes post and its validity.  And last but not least, one of my favorite examples of multiple dimensions of data plotted on a single illustration is explained by Edward Tufte.  I mention all of these examples because it’s easy to make a bad picture, but not too hard to make a really good one.

My career is filled with all sorts of illustrations to prove a point. Whether it was as pedestrian as a pie chart, or a project timeline, or a business roadmap, illustrations allow someone to demonstrate a few things:

• That you’ve researched the problem at hand, and know what you’re talking about.
• That you can show variations of the issue (by drawing on top of the picture).
• That your analysis is sound.

There’s an inherent danger to pictures though, which is that sometimes they lend too much credence (as Godin points out above) to a weak analysis.  Godin points out that

“reviews never reflect the product, they reflect the passion people have for the product. As Jeff Bezos has pointed out again and again, most great products get 5 star and 1 star reviews. That makes sense… why would you be passionate enough about something that’s sort of ‘meh’ to bother writing a three star review?”

The point for any viewer of the illustration is to be skeptical of the data that underpins the picture.  Note that the NYTimes post relies on shaky data, whereas the Minard illustration is based on mostly secondhand (but reliable) accounts.  Both require at least two passes across the pictures shown, and the biggest difference is that the NYTimes post discredits itself, whereas Minard’s builds on itself.

Conclusion: Check to see if your pretty picture relies on not-so-pretty data.  If it does, don’t be lazy; find better data (i.e. garbage in, garbage out).

One of the first harsh lessons I learned right away is that this type of remote is not forgiving to a novice.  If you don’t know what you’re doing, be prepared to have a lot of patience.  Despite the wizard’s attempt to outline the steps needed to get my equipment working and trying the remote out with a simple “All Off” activity, the wizard tool (Pronto Configurator) kept giving me a “There is an error with the configuration data. No valid configuration can be generated.”  Suffice to say, I wish that it would have specified what exactly the error was, and a great deal of restraint went into:

• reinstalling the software,
• installing ProntoEdit Professional to take a look at the code database (but not necessarily knowing what to look for),
• performing a lot of code “learning” for the code database, and
• being bewildered as at some point, the “My Database” set of codes wouldn’t populate with entries and I could not open alternate databases such as the One1R database.

After spending nearly 12 hours (spanning three days) tweaking and testing and revising, I was finally able to call my little project done!  Based on that experience, here are some lessons learned:

• Where possible, test out and stick with the Factory Database codes.  Only teach the codes that really don’t exist in the database and always duplicate the component before you start adding or changing things around.
• Expect a lot of trial-and-error when looking for a code set from the Factory Database.  Sometimes the codeset ID will map to a device’s model number, and other times, not at all.  I found that relying on the Component Type helped somewhat, but it would be useful for Philips to include information such as “Codeset xyz works with ACME G-500 and likely similar devices.”  That way, a user can at least test out codesets for devices that you might recognize as part of a product family.
• Think long and hard about your “Activities” (which are in essence your use cases).  I ended up making four Activities that involved multiple devices and mapped buttons that coordinated all of the devices in concert, but I also added four Activities to correspond to each piece of equipment.  Those activities’ sole purpose was to mimic all of the commands possible with just the device remote.  Where a hard button would not cover a command in an obvious way, I duplicated it on the list of additional “Screen Functions.”  This goes a long way in keeping me from reaching for the original remote.
• Make sure you download this little piece of software (here) provided by Philips.  It should save your sanity if you get the “There is an error with the configuration…” message.

Two hardware improvements that should be made:

1. The silver scroll wheel is a great idea, and its implementation is most of the way to where I think Philips should be.  Instead, I would suggest that the wheel either take the form of a thumbwheel next to the screen (scroll and click, like a Blackberry), or else to simply lower the profile and introduce raised bumps for the cursor arrows.  I found that pressing the cursor arrows usually shifted the scroll wheel to another Activity that should not be active.
2. Along the same lines for the scroll wheel, introducing a discrete instead of a continuous wheel (with slightly more resistance/friction) to give more feedback on the menu item selected and also let the user know of accidental movement of the scroll wheel.

Recommendation: Change the scroll wheel to be more flush with the remote’s surface and introduce a bit more tactile feedback.

It’s clear that a lot of thought and effort was put into aligning this product with the marketplace offerings and distinguishing it from the rest of the Pronto lineup of products to offer consumers a great choice.  With some touchups on the minor hardware and software issues, this would be a no-brainer choice for a universal remote without a touchscreen.