May 5, 2010

New MacBook Pro

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Well, I’ve done it again, although this time it really wasn’t my fault. The old PowerBook, now creeping up on five years old, is going to need Last Rites soon, and I decided to replace it before it had gone completely to hell. So last week I held my breath and jumped into the deep end of the MacBook pool, going in for one of the new 15″ models with an i7 processor and 8 GB of memory. This was with not nearly the joy I had at splurging on the iPad, as that was a toy, and this is necessary. It showed up today, a day ahead of schedule.

So far it’s, um, pretty sweet. I like the feel of this keyboard way better than the old PowerBook, and it’s much lighter (though still plenty heavy). I don’t want to rush things, but I’m already doodling “MichaelBook Pro” on stray bits of paper.

 

April 29, 2010

The iPad: A Review

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As I’ve mentioned a couple times in the past weeks, I got myself an iPad only a couple of days after they hit the shelves. I knew the risks, and decided that I wouldn’t buy one unless I was willing to feel like an idiot if it turned out they are superfluous or badly designed. This was out of character for me; I didn’t run out to get an iPod or iPhone, waiting for second- and third-generations of those devices. Why was the iPad different? It might be my long-standing interest in multi-modal texts, and the idea of a book-like, cross-media device makes it more likely that the future of text might finally get off the drafting board and into the marketplace. Or it might be the bright colors and shiny exterior, I don’t know. At any rate, after having the thing around for a couple of weeks, I’ve come to some tentative conclusions about what it is and isn’t good for. I’ll start with the verdict:

The iPad is very cool. But if you’re on the fence, wait.

(more…)

 

April 16, 2010

Tablets Glass and Stone

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I’m still working on my review of the iPad. I might need to have a full two weeks with it before I know what I want to say. There’s a lot to love about it, but as you’d guess from what everyone else has already said, there’s plenty to drive you crazy as well.

In the meantime, an old essay by Umberto Eco has helped me understand why I’m such a believer in Mac products: it all goes back to my Catholic roots.

 

April 5, 2010

Evening Conversation

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The Object of My Desire

Me: (sigh) If I had an iPad, I could sit on the couch and read on the Internet while we watch the basketball game.

Jen: You can do that with your laptop.

Me: (sigh)

~

I almost bought one today. But it’s going to take a little more convincing before I can believe that (a) somebody else isn’t going to make a better one, and/or (b) the iPad doesn’t have annoying glitches that will piss me off, and/or (c) iPad 2.0 isn’t going to be much better, and soon.

But not much more convincing.

 

January 28, 2010

The iPad

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My thoughts on the iPad run like this:

1) I want this.
2) I’m not sure what I’d do with this.
3) I don’t need this.
4) But it’s cool.
5) Repeat.

Slate’s Farhad Manjoo explains how great the Kool-Aid tastes. And Tyler Cowen notes that the design would seem to cleverly position the iPad as the first iTextbook. Now THAT makes sense:

My theory is that Apple wants to capture a chunk of the revenue in this nation’s enormous textbook market — high school, college, whatever. Why lug all those books around? The superior Apple graphics, colors, and fonts will support all of the textbook features which Kindle botches and destroys. Apple takes a chunk of the market revenue, of course, plus they sell the iPads and some AT&T contracts. There are lots of schoolkids in the world.

That’s pretty brilliant. And here’s the company that’s going to make it happen, apparently.

 

July 31, 2009

On the Kindle

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Novelist Nicholson Baker gives Amazon’s Kindle 2 a try, and has some trouble adapting:

Yes, you can definitely read things on the Kindle. And I did. Bits of things at first. I read some of De Quincey’s “Confessions,” some of Robert Benchley’s “Love Conquers All,” and some of several versions of Kipling’s “The Jungle Book.” I squeezed no new joy from these great books, though. The Gluyas Williams drawings were gone from the Benchley, and even the wasp passage in “Do Insects Think?” just wasn’t the same in Kindle gray. I did an experiment. I found the Common Reader reprint edition of “Love Conquers All” and read the very same wasp passage. I laughed: ha-ha. Then I went back to the Kindle 2 and read the wasp passage again. No laugh. Of course, by then I’d read the passage three times, and it wasn’t that funny anymore. But the point is that it wasn’t funny the first time I came to it, when it was enscreened on the Kindle. Monotype Caecilia was grim and Calvinist; it had a way of reducing everything to arbitrary heaps of words.

It’s a longish read, but I won’t tell you his conclusions, because you should–say it with me–read the whole thing. Baker does mention that it’s possible to read Kindle’s books, and others, on the iPod Touch and the iPhone.

Meanwhile, Apple’s upcoming Tablet looms…

 

July 29, 2009

Apple: iPhone Hacking Could Lead to Terrorist Attacks

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The Copyright Office is apparently considering making iPhone hacking legal. Now, I don’t know for sure that Apple’s response is bullshit. But it smells like it.

The company’s filing explained that jailbreaking could allow hackers to altering the iPhone’s BBP — the “baseband processor” software, which enables a connection to cell phone towers.

By tinkering with this code, “a local or international hacker could potentially initiate commands (such as a denial of service attack) that could crash the tower software, rendering the tower entirely inoperable to process calls or transmit data,” Apple wrote the government. “Taking control of the BBP software would be much the equivalent of getting inside the firewall of a corporate computer — to potentially catastrophic result.

David Kravits mocks:

Threat Level had no idea the iPhone was so dangerous. We’re gratified that Apple locked down this potential weapon of mass disruption before hackers could unleash cybarmageddon. This also explains why Apple rejected the official Google Voice App for the iPhone this week. We thought it was because Google Voice posed a threat to AT&T’s exclusivity deal with Apple. Now we know it threatened national security.

 

September 7, 2008

Please, Apple, Get a New Ad Campaign

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I’m sitting here watching the Brady-less Patriots play the Croyle-less Chiefs, and that’s bad enough. But then another one of those Mac vs. PC ads come on, this one with John Hodgman hiding in a pizza box trying to catch college students, because they just loooove those Mac laptops. So I’m shouting this message out into the Internets, hoping they’ll hear me:

PLEASE STOP.

I just can’t take any more. These ads are not persuasive, and they’re not funny. This ad campaign jumped the shark so long ago that it has gone up the beach, through a couple of sand castles, and has been impaled by somebody’s beach umbrella. Please, please leave John Hodgman alone, so he can be funny again. Like this:

UPDATE: If you had to watch a preview for that awful-looking movie Eagle Eye in order to see this clip, like I just had to, I sincerely apologize.

 

August 26, 2008

Mac the Knife

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I’ve been a fan of Macs since before they were Macs… The earliest version I remember having was an Apple IIc, back in… oh, who knows, I was probably about nine. I’m part of Apple’s die-hard demographic, but I managed to sit through the entire first round of iPhones without going out to get one. I was just positive I was going to get one of these 3Gs that came out in July, and I just about broke down and did it a couple of weeks ago. I wasn’t sure whether I had chickened out or had come to my senses.

Well, this new Slate article suggests it was the latter. I’m hoping that Steve Jobs and company figures out that this new customer base they’re bringing in with iPods and iPhones aren’t going to stick around if they figure out Apple will give them the shaft every chance they get…

 

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