Here’s the unboxing video that a few people had wanted me to do when I got my iPad. I did some editing to the video, as it took me forever to unwrap the bubble wrap with one hand.  I think the back design by Colorware looks gorgeous with the matte finish and everything.  Thanks so much to Digg, TapTapTap and Colorware for this very excellent prize.

So far I’ve had the device for a day and my impressions are pretty mixed.  Here’s a quick run down of my thoughts

What I like

• Very snappy device.  Makes my iPhone look like chop liver with regards to speed
• The iPhone games are actually better on the iPad.  I find I’ve played games I didn’t really bother with previously because of the cramped controls on the iPhone
• The screen looks gorgeous under the right lighting conditions
• Downloaded Air Video application and it streams my media flawlessly over my network.  Saves converting my media to another format which is a total pain.  Definitely looking forward to watching stuff while I cook as we don’t have a TV on our main floor.

Here’s what I didn’t like

• No iBooks available in Canada.  Since Apple hasn’t actually launched the book selling features in Canada they have held back the iBooks app from the Canadian iTunes store.  I had a bunch of ePub books I bought in anticipation of receiving my iPad and the only free solution that I found was using Stanza, which is still iPhone only
• While the games convert well to iPad, the apps like Facebook, Stanza etc. look really crappy when blown up on the big screen.  I know this problem will be resolved when more devs get their iPad compatible versions of the apps out.
• As I know many have complained about, the smudgy screen.  As soon as you’re anywhere with sun exposure the problem becomes pretty apparent
• Since Apple hasn’t launched the iPad enabled iTunes store in Canada there is really no way of finding top iPad apps or anything.  Some apps are available through iTunes, but not really organized at all.  You can’t even download apps from the device yet for this reason, which is a pain.
• Seems odd Apple omitted a silent switch.  Have to turn the volume all the way down. Having my iPhone, iPad and iMac all notify of the same email is a bit annoying

Since my iPad is a Wifi only version and Apple saw fit to keep the device from data tethering with my iPhone. Luckily since iPhone is jailbroken I was able to buy the app MyWi and create a local wireless network to give my iPad data on the go.  Gave it a spin last night and it seemed to work pretty well, though given my iPhone is in need of a new battery I’m not sure how viable that method is for a long usage period.

I found almost instantly that all the features I miss from my iPhone are the jailbreak customizations I’ve made to my phone.  The biggest is GriP, which enables Growl style notifications for the iPhone.  Seriously I don’t know how a regular iPhone users cope without it.  Makes me wonder how long I’ll hold out before I jailbreak my iPad.

I’d say so far I like the device, but don’t love it yet.  Probably once the full app store is available to us Canucks later this month I’ll be happier with the functionality it offers.

I’ve waited a couple days now to comment on Apple’s latest product, the iPad. I typically don’t like being “that guy”, evangelizing Apple to other people. I know the company isn’t infallible, but really how many companies out there are? The iPad is definitely flawed, but I don’t think it is flawed for many of the reasons people are currently crucifying it for.

The Name
This was the first thing that people seemed to have gone off on. In the last 3 days everyone seems to have made the obvious feminine hygiene product jokes. We laughed. Stupid Apple. But didn’t we say the same thing about the Nintendo Wii? It was stupid. Everyone made all the obvious urination jokes. Boy was the Wii a failure. Oh, wait, no it wasn’t. It’s gone on to sell almost double the amount of units of it’s nearest competitor. So in the end, people will get over an unfortunate name and they won’t even bat an eye when you mention iPad.

It’s just an oversized iPhone
I’ve heard quite a few people complain about how the iPad is running “just” the iPhone OS. The problem with this argument is that it’s more then likely being used by people who have never used a tablet PC. To put it simply, a full operating system like Windows or OS X isn’t meant to be used on a touchscreen. Stuff like scroll bars and tiny interface buttons don’t work or make sense on a touchscreen. This is the reason why most tablet PCs use a stylus, as your fingers are too inaccurate for controlling a touch screen. And more then likely this is a good reason why tablet PCs have never really taken off, as they tried to put a square peg in a round hole by offering a desktop OS on a touchscreen device.

Apple was among the first, if not the first to offer a proper touchscreen experience on a mobile phone. It’s been an obvious success as they essentially revolutionized the phone industry and caused every other manufacturer to take note and create similar touchscreen devices. They’ve already proven the iPhone OS is a winning touchscreen solution, why not have it running on the iPad?

But how will you get any real work done on this thing?
The reality here is that this isn’t even being positioned as a work machine. I think the definition of “real work” for most people would have the requirement of being able to type. If you were expecting to be able to code websites or type the next great novel you were probably barking up the wrong tree in the first place. This device is meant as an entertainment device. The type of thing you can surf the internet on while watching TV. Given the explosion of smartphones we have become a generation of multi-taskers as these devices have enabled us to passively answer emails, send a quick tweet or browse the web from anywhere in the world, including the living room sofa. Nobody complains that they can’t get any real work done on an iPod Touch. It’s simply not the reason why 99% of people bought the device in the first place.

The fact that this device starts at $499 should also tell you this isn’t meant as a workstation. This item is meant to compete with something like the Amazon Kindle DX, which retails for $489 US. People are willing to spend that kind of money on a Kindle, so you can be sure the public would be willing to spend the money on something like an iPad.

It’s too expensive
I’ve heard people complain about the price as well. This is possibly the most ridiculous complaint out of them all. Here’s a chart for the device pricing.

People complaining about the pricing are the types who don’t actually know the true cost of devices like the iPhone and similar smartphone devices. But the iPhone 3G is only $199, this is so much more expensive they might say. The fact is that is the subsidized price offered by cell phone carriers. Without a contract an iPhone costs much more. On eBay a new, unlocked 16GB iPhone 3GS sells for roughly $500 US, and $650 to $700 for the 32GB model. So you can see Apple’s pricing is quite close to being inline with the real market values of similar current generation iPhones.

I already have an iPhone, what’s the point of it?
The iPhone is a great device, but it’s not ideal for all types of browsing. Something I did this morning was fill out an online form to get tickets to an upcoming event that had been promoted through Twitter. I wasn’t quite ready to get out of bed yet, so I filled the form out using my iPhone. As I’m sure anyone whose used an iPhone or iPod Touch for filling out forms you know there just isn’t enough room on the screen to fit the keyboard and see which form box you’re filling in sometimes. This would be a piece of cake using a 10″ screen to browse the page. Another thing I instantly thought of was using an iPad in the kitchen. I like to look up recipes online, but find it a pain to actually use that info in my kitchen. I don’t have a printer(nor really want one), so I either write down the recipe on paper by hand, haul our 15.5″ Toshiba laptop into the kitchen(where it takes up valuable real estate) or I look it up on the iPhone. None of these solutions is ideal. This is exactly where the iPad comes in.

The iPad is far from perfect, but I think it’s a good start. I feel Apple made some boneheaded decisions (no USB, SD, 4×3 screen resolution among others) but the concept definitely has promise. Looking at devices like the first Eee PC netbook or the first generation Kindle have shown companies don’t always hit a home run with their first attempt, but people will buy into the concept none the less.

I think many people have gotten caught up with years of rumour mongering about this mystical Apple tablet that it could do little else but disappoint. They could have announced the iPad came with a free unicorn and the public still would have been letdown by the announcement. People had the perception that this device was going to meet all of their personal computing needs, so when it failed to meet those lofty expectations they have essentially thrown it under the bus instead of looking at what Apple is actually offering.

Sure this device isn’t going to be for everyone, but my guess is that it’ll be another Apple success once people actually have a chance to use it and figure out the value of the device. So lets take a chill pill and wait until April when you’re actually able to go to a store and try one out.

Things are about to get interesting in the mobile phone market in the next couple of months. Industry Minister Tony Clement disclosed today that he would be overruling the CRTCs decision to not allow Globalive to operate in Canada. The CRTC had ruled in September that the company did not meet the Canadian ownership requirements, a ruling that was heavily influenced by the incumbent mobile carriers Rogers, Bell and Telus.

This could viably be great news for Canadians as we finally have a new competitor to stir the pot in an otherwise stagnant market. The Canadian mobile phone market is what I would call “duopoly” in much of the country. Sure we have 3 big providers, but when you boil it down any choice to be made when picking a mobile provider, Rogers or Bell. Telus’ stronghold is in the West, so they don’t quite stack up to the top 2 companies. The problem with this duopoly is that there is little to no competing going on. Both of these companies are more then willing to pad their fat bottom lines instead of actually compete.

Just look at the recently launched iPhone on Bell and Telus. While it heralded a new day for choice of iPhone providers in Canada, it offered little to no incentive to consumers looking for a break on phone and data plan pricing. All 3 companies were more then content to just have the hottest handset on the market instead of actually competing for customers.

It is the hope that Globalive and their Wind Mobile brand will breathe some new life into a very stagnant market place. Canada is drastically lagging behind other countries when it comes to the cost of running a smartphone. With Vodaphone in the UK I can get a phone plan with 500megs of data for less then $35 CDN, taxes in. In Canada a plan like that is practically unfathomable. And

We can hope that Globalive is able to stir the pot a bit and actually able to bring competitive phone and data rates to Canada. Globalive is backed by telecom giant T-Mobile, so this isn’t a company that is coming into the market as nobodies. And if this leaked info from May is anywhere close to true, Canadians might finally have a true alternative to Bell and Rogers.

Ever since the iPhone was released, along with the iPod before it, it seems companies have constantly released devices that have been labeled as Apple “killers”. Devices that aim to finally knock Apple off their pedestal as market leader. To date there has yet to be an “iPhone killer”, yet that doesn’t stop the media from ramping up the hype for the next upcoming device.

I was recently at a monthly meetup of designers and developers in Waterloo and a representative from RIM was there presenting on the merits of the Blackberry as a development platform. At one point during his presentation he mentioned how Apple was very good at articulating what they are good at, yet Blackberry does a crappy job of this very thing. To me this isn’t something that is exclusively the realm of Blackberry. Pretty much every smartphone manufacturer has the same problem when competing with Apple.

After seeing this new Verizon commercial yesterday, this served as a perfect example of what handset manufacturers are doing wrong. It’s a quaint and clever concept that I’m sure Verizon paid a boatload to get the rights to using the Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer characters. But after watching that video, what handset got the most facetime in that commercial? While it wasn’t the actual iPhone in the commercial, the viewer saw Verizon’s iPhone stand-in on screen for 20 seconds of a 30 second spot. The Verizon handsets only show up between 23 seconds and 28 seconds of the video. So 66% of the commercial featured the iPhone, and 10% was spent talking about the products they sell, then the other 24% spent talking about Verizon and their network.
Message: The iPhone is useless because AT&T has a crappy network. Verizon has an awesome network. Buy this Windows phone, or buy this Google Android phone.

Contrast that ad with an Apple ad selling the iPhone. Nothing but the phone and its function are shown for the first 23 seconds. 1 second devoted to app store logos, 2 seconds for iPhone logo, 2 seconds for carrier logo and 2 seconds for Apple logo. So 76.6% of the commercial was devoted to showing the product and 23.3% was used for the of branding various partners. Apple didn’t once mention verbally the network or the carrier.
Message: Look at all the cool stuff you can do with your iPhone

Can you see the disconnect here? A new device like the HTC Droid hits the market within the last 2 weeks. It’s supposed to be a real contender to the iPhone throne. Yet the handset is relegated to 2.5 seconds of face time in this Verizon commercial. Do we know anything that the device is capable of? About the only info you get is what smartphone OS the phone is running and the price. Apparently the only reason to get one of these 2 phones Verizon is offering is because their network is better.

Apple’s device has been on the market for over 2 years now, yet Apple focuses on the positive. They show you what cool things the iPhone empowers you to do. They maximize the amount of time you see the product on screen and keep the message simple and on point. The carrier is an afterthought.

This is where Apple has diverged from all other handset providers. They control how the iPhone is sold and marketed. They don’t allow it to be lumped in with a bunch of other similar looking phones in the carriers marketing. Essentially they are selling a phone, they don’t care about the network or the carrier, they allow their product to sell itself instead.

When talking to the RIM rep I commented to him about Apple’s carrier relationship and marketing contrasted with how Blackberry and the rest of the smartphone makers. He mentioned that BB spends a lot of time managing and working their partnerships with carriers, helping them implement things like carrier branded app stores. While I’m sure they do great business together, Apple has done it differently. They only need the carrier for their network and retails sales channels. Apple handles pretty much everything else. The carrier is an afterthought.

You would figure that Apple’s way of doing business would have carriers running the opposite way, yet as seen in Canada recently, nothing could be further from the truth. Bell and Telus, after losing large chunks of marketshare to Rogers and their exclusive iPhone arrangement, spent billions of dollars to build an HSPA+ network in part to accommodate the iPhone. Now that Rogers exclusivity agreement with Apple is over rivals Bell and Telus will also be offering the iPhone as well. This after Bell spent the summer mocking the iPhone in their Palm Pre ads. It will be curious to see how Bell and Telus will market the iPhone, given Apple controls the advertising and they won’t be able to play the my networks better then your network card against Rogers.

Handset manufacturers will never create this “iPhone killer” if their device is always playing second fiddle to the carrier.  By allowing the carrier to handle promotion of their devices they are shooting themselves in the foot with every new handset they release.  While Apple’s iPhone stays in the spotlight, the latest RIM, Motorola, Palm or Samsung device just becomes part of the crowd because carriers don’t market one smartphone any differently then they do the others in their lineup.

For pretty much as long as I’ve been using Twitter, which was in March 2008, I’ve been looking for the perfect Twitter app for my Mac desktop. I don’t quite understand why it’s been such a long search, but I suppose you could classify me as picky. For a long while I haven’t even been using an app in the conventional sense, but web app converted to a desktop app using Hahlo.com and Fluid. While not ideal this solution achieves what I look for first and foremost in a Twitter application, zero desktop footprint.  When using a PC I can achieve this ideal setup by using Digsby, which has been promising a Mac version for about 2 years now and still hasn’t materialized.  I’m not holding my breath on that one.

Fluid and Hahlo.com as an app

I know loads of people who swear by using TweetDeck, but I consider myself the opposite of a TD user. I don’t want a behemoth app, with unlimited columns and bells and whistles. Since I don’t see a new 24″ LCD in my budget to pair with my 24″ iMac, I tend to covet the screen real estate I do have. I want lean and mean, yet still with the bulk of the functionality you would expect out of a Twitter app.  I’ve tried NatsuLion, Syrinx, Tweetie, Twitterific and TweekDeck and none of them meets my criteria of the perfect Twitter app.

My Perfect Twitter App wishlist

• Zero desktop footprint.  Apps like Tweetie and Twitterific have menu bar icons, but don’t function like dropdown menus.  I want the app to disappear as soon as I click outside of the dropdown
• Growl notifications
• Ability to follow and unfollow people right from the app
• Ability to easily retweet other people’s tweets
• Be able to view tweets breakdowns by people you follow, tweets directed at you and direct messages.  I find my iPhone apps do this well, but none of the desktop apps I’ve tried do this as well

Yesterday I broke down and upgraded my iPhone 2G to the most recent iPhone OS 3.0. Since my iPhone was jailbroken this process wiped out all my jailbreak apps and settings. It’s been a long while since I’ve used a virginized iPhone, so my first impressions of using 3.0 was mainly all the great things I was missing. I’ve seen many people online mention about what is the benefit of actually jailbreaking would be anymore, given 3.0 was supposed to remedy many of the main benefits of jailbreaking, like data tethering and copy and paste functionality. While those issues are now moot with the new update, there are still plenty of reasons you might want to jailbreak a phone running 3.0.

SBSettings – This is a great little add-on that allows you to change settings from within any app on the iPhone. Just drag your finger from the top of the screen to the middle and it will pull down a menu with many handy options. I find I use it the most when my phone has inadvertently latched onto an open wifi network and I want to use an Edge connection. Many of these settings are buried 3 menus deep within the phones settings, so being able to change these on the fly is very handy.

5×5 icons – I find this one makes you realize how much wasted space there is on an iPhone. Being able to cram a whole other row and column of icons onto your screen is great since it means your apps now take up less pages. Once you get a few pages of apps you know how annoying this can get. The video I linked to shows you what you need to do to give your phone the ability to show up to 25 app icons on your screen compared to the usual 16.

5 row QWERTY keyboard – There are all sorts of keyboard tweaks you can do when you jailbreak, but none are as handy as having a 5 row keyboard. Not having to go to the second page and back just to put in a number or special character is quite awesome. Sure this isn’t for people with overly large fingers, but I wouldn’t say I have small fingers and I do alright with it.
Update Jul 20/09 Unfortunately we’re still waiting for this one to materialize. The holdup is that iKeyEx hasn’t been updated yet, mainly because there were apparently a bunch of changes made with regards to how the iPhone handles the keyboard layouts in 3.0

Categories – Along the same lines of fitting more in, the Categories app allows you to group your apps in folders. I have my stuff grouped into games, media apps, net apps and miscellaneous. It just generally allows you to keep on top of all the various apps you have and only keep the ones that you use on a regular basis available and cut out the rest of the clutter.

Custom backgrounds – And by background I mean pretty much anything on the screen. You can change your icons, colour of your wifi indicator, fonts, you name it, there’s a tweak for it. Default black and white for everything is no longer necessary.

Video applications – If you’re like me and have a 2G, or even the 3G iPhone Apple still hasn’t unlocked the ability to capture video on our iPhones. Given this is one of the main selling points for the new 3GS model, I can kind of understand why they wouldn’t want to suddenly open that functionality for the previous models. Well fear not, there are loads of jailbreak apps that allow you to capture video. I personally use Cycorder and Qik on my phone. Qik is great in that it automatically streams your video to qik.com and it’s instantly viewable to others. It also allows queuing of videos, so if you don’t have a data plan or wifi connection you can still capture videos and upload them later.

I finally finished up my Hackintosh HTPC project on Friday and have been able to do some tinkering with various media frontends to run on my computer. So far I’ve installed both Boxee and Plex and had somewhat mixed results.

quick intro to boxee from boxee on Vimeo.

Boxee was originally what got me excited about building a Hackintosh in the first place. The concept of the project was to give the XBMC project a social makeover, enabling Twitter, FriendFeed, Last.fm and other services to be integrated into an app for the living room. The app comes loaded with loads of built-in services to enable you to connect to Hulu, Netflix, Pandora and many more popular services. And therein lies the problem. While this app would absolutely rock for US users, those outside the US are pretty much left out in the cold. I also attempted to get my streaming media to work over the network to mixed results. My goal all along has been able to stream HD content from my iMac to my living room. I currently have a wireless connection between the second floor and the basement, which is the probable bottleneck to the whole thing. I’m hoping to run cat5 cable down to the basement to get a hardwired arrangement going at some point.

I gave Plex a go and wasn’t too impressed with it. It was rather cumbersome to add network shares in and didn’t do a very good job of showing you onscreen status of processes. It would just sit there frozen for a few minutes while it worked whether it was actually going to load something.

The part that has irritated me the most about this whole process is that most of the media frontends leave much to be desired to those outside of the US. This really isn’t their fault, more so the draconian copyright rules that regulate content these days. The content rights holders are so worried about getting their slice of the pie that they forget about the people the content is created for, the consumers. Ideally I would love to use services like Hulu or Pandora to legally listen. The big content holders in the US like to point fingers at Canada as a haven for digital piracy, yet they put so many barriers in place to keep viable alternatives to downloading from showing up in Canada. I would gladly pay $10 a month for a Netflix subscription to have on-demand movie streaming. That’s a no brainer there.

Since we finally settled into our new house I’ve started upon doing something I’ve always wanted to do. Being a Mac guy pretty much since childhood I’ve always kind of envied the PC side of the computing world for the ability to build and upgrade their own PC boxes. I’m inherently a geek and just want to muck and fiddle with electronics. Macs have always had minor upgrades and tweaks you could make to the system, but since Apple ran on PPC chips very few manufacturers actually made compatible components. It used to be a task just to find a USB mouse that was Mac compatible, forget upgrading your graphics card. But that all changed after Apple switched the x86 cpu architecture and resourceful modders figured out how to run Apple’s OS X on regular PC hardware.

Now with that I decided to be a little resourceful and try my hand at building a home theatre PC for our basement. The goal I had in mind was to create a computer connected to my HDTV that we could watch movies and stream online content to the living room. I had originally bought the Xbox 360 to be able to handle being my media front end in the living room, but since it can’t stream online video it kinda failed in that regard. When Corina and I moved into our new house we decided to go without cable as a test. So far it’s worked out pretty well, though I’ve found the only bump in the road being that we couldn’t actually watch live streamed TV, having to resort to watching on the laptop of in my office on the iMac. Since I want us to actually use the basement to its full potential, HTPC seems the way to go.

nMedia 2000B HTPC case

I’m hoping to have everything assembled over the weekend and be a fully operational Hackintosh next week so we can watch the LOST season finale in the living room.

Build Specs
nMedia 2000B $134
GIGABYTE GA-G31M-ES2L Intel Motherboard $61
Intel Pentium E5200 Wolfdale 2.5GHz Dual Core Processor $91
Enermax ETK405AST Tomahawk 405W Power Supply $54
Corsair DDR2 PC2-5300 2GB Ram $34
EVGA 128-P2-N428-LR GeForce 7200GS 512MB Graphics Card$29

Update May 13, 2009 My goal of being finished in time to watch LOST probably isn’t going to happen. Over the weekend I assembled everything, thought I was good to go and turned on the power, at which point nothing happened. Disassembled, reassembled to make sure I hadn’t missed anything and still nothing. After doing some troubleshooting it seemed to point to the power supply. I took it back to Canada Computers and had them test it, at which point it was confirmed to be dead. I picked up another, had them test it in the store to verify it worked, then reassembled my computer for what was the 3rd time. Flipped the switch and still no life. I posted on a support forum, got lots of handy feedback to be able to troubleshoot the issue. Turns out I had the 4 pin connector that is only supposed to fit in 1 way in backwards. I felt pretty stupid afterwards, but at least it seems to be working. Now I just need to try and get the BIOS setup and then an OS installed on the machine.

Update May 15, 2009 I am writing this update from my fully operational Hackintosh HTPC. Getting to this point was of course not without issues. After I got the machine powered up I couldn’t get my HDTV to display the BIOS settings. Turns out the TV couldn’t handle the resolution setting it switched to, so it just flashed at me. The solution ended being I had to borrow a decrepit 15″ CRT from my sister-in-law, which sorted the problem right out. From that point I was in business. I had some issue with installing the proper kext drivers for the video card and audio, but as usual the InsanelyMac forums came in quite handy.

Overall I am quite happy with the whole project. Having a fully operational, streaming internet in the living room is what I’ve always wanted. In future I’m planning on getting a video capture card, but since we don’t currently have any cable I guess it really doesn’t matter right now.

A refrain I’ve been hearing lately from people is that they have been getting a lot of unwanted phone calls from solicitors. The government created the federal Do Not Call registry and it seems to have done absolutely nothing. I myself wasn’t one of the people who rushed out to add my number to the registry and apparently it really doesn’t matter if I do. People I’ve talked to recently who have put their name on it still get calls regardless. The part that pisses me off the most about the whole registry is that they removed the exemption cell phones used to have. Now I get random phone calls on my cell phone during the day at work. I have hardly given my cell number to anyone and have only had it since September.

This is the reason I brought this topic up. Last Friday I received a phone call from a California area code during the middle of the day. Not recognizing either the number or the area code I didn’t take the call. I get a message a minute later saying there was now a voicemail. Thinking this was odd I used my exorbitantly costly daytime minutes to check the message. Turns out its just a high pitch squeal for about 5 seconds, then nothing. I’m on pay as you go, so I decided to check out my transaction record through Rogers and found they charged me a message delivery fee for the voicemail of $6.50, plus the cost of my voicemail call. I was fuming over that. I’m sure many people who have pay by the minute or pay as you go accounts will be mightily pissed if this type of garbage is getting billed to their accounts.

I think after this I’m installing MCleaner on my phone so I can block numbers from out of area code from even getting to my voicemail. To all telemarketers, I assure you I don’t need an extended warranty for my car, a wowee zowee introductory credit card offer or a subscription to the Toronto Star.

Over the weekend I decided I would give Valve’s Steam a whirl and download Team Fortress 2. I had heard good things about it and after seeing on Digg that the game was on sale for $10 this weekend, I figured hell why not? So far I’ve quite enjoyed the melee chaos that is TF2, and at $10 how could I go wrong? But this blog isn’t about Team Fortress 2, it’s more about why I ended up buying it.

I have long advocated when it comes to media that exorbitant prices should be lowered to stimulate sales in the music and film industries. It just seems like common sense. Obviously the perceived value of digital media has taken a hit since the advent of digital downloading. People simply don’t feel there is value in what the industry charges, so therefore they look for alternatives. To me $10 is the most I would spend on a CD, and even then I would have to really want it. $10 is impulse buy territory. Most people won’t even think twice about spending ten bucks. When the price gets to $15-20 it gives most people pause and makes them second guess themselves.

By lowering their price Valve got me to make an impulse purchase that I probably never would have made otherwise. I installed their software and they now have a new customer out of the deal. If only other digital media distributors figured this out they probably wouldn’t be in the spot they are in now.