Dear Friends,

I woke up early yesterday morning with excitement about iPhone 4 day but soon heard my old iPhone vibrating on the desk. I saw it was Katie and when I picked up, she simply said, “we got robbed!” She had been at our store since the alarm went off and had met the police at the S. Burlington location. Some low-life had thrown a rock through the window, scampered in and stolen a couple dozen iPods. Scared by the alarm and the police sirens, he skipped the iPads and MacBooks.

The S. Burlington Police Department is awesome and is usually on the scene literally within a minute of the alarm and expressed disappointment that the crook got away, at least for now. We have him on video and will work with the police to arrest him. Katie, Gary and Mark were on the scene, secured the area and started the clean up to get ourselves open for the day. I guess this is a by-product of selling the hottest products on the planet, but it sure does make us invest in security where we could be passing savings to customers.

As I was driving home last night, I had an experience that was in marked contrast to this bad news. There is a small organic farm stand on my way home and I frequently see the farmer working his garden both early in the morning and late in the day. I stopped by to get some strawberries after he was gone for the day. Sure enough, there were several baskets of berries sitting on the counter and big basket next to it. I looked in the basket and smiled because inside was a bunch of money, singles, 5s, 10s, 20s and more. It was truly a self-service honor system and I tossed a 20 into the basket and made myself change and drove off with my berries. What a wonderful feeling to have such a great resource near me. I sure hope that he can continue to exhibit that kind of faith in humanity—it is such a breath of fresh air. And really good organic berries, too!

I got my iPhone 4 yesterday and Hapy and I immediately tested out FaceTime and even with our weak signal in the office, we were able to carry on a good conversation and see each other clearly. I was playing with Voice Control when I got home. I was definitely wowed by that new feature. You can control iTunes by saying, “Play more like this song” or ask “What’s Playing?”. Even with Hammerhead barking in the background, the iPhone told me what song was playing and created a genius playlist based on that song. Then I tried it with the phone and when I said, “call Grace” it responded with “multiple numbers for Grace; which do you want?” and then listed them all. Very, very cool.

I started organizing my apps into folders and tested out multitasking, too. The iPhone is a winner for me; I love the bright clear display and the speed is so much better than my iPhone 3G. One of my friends did some testing on tethering and here’s his report:

“Just thought you might be interested to know that I have spent the last five hours doing some heavy iPhone 4 to MacBook tethering, and I now feel confident that I can ditch my Sprint AirCard wireless broadband. I went to speedtest.net and tested them both out on multiple times. The iPhone ping time averaged about 120ms vs. 158ms for the Sprint, the download speed was around 2.40mps vs. 0.38, and the upload 1.07 vs. 0.30. Pretty impressive.”