Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Are we entering the Third Age of iBook?
Hoo boy have I been a slacker around here this week, although it's not without good reason. Just don't ask me what those reasons were, as at this point I'm a bit too sleepy to remember what they might have been. Not good, consdering it's only Tuesday. But something managed to perk me right up today, well two things actually, and while they might not be connected in your mind, my little world has them linked together hand in foot (is "hand in foot" a real saying? because it sounds right, but I'm not sure). Anyway, everyone who hasn't been hibernating knows that new iBooks are coming soon, and anyone who's been reading knows that after spending quite a bit of time (measured in months, not days) evaluating my changing needs, I resolved to replace my aging fifteen inch Titanium PowerBook with a new twelve inch iBook just as soon as the new twelve inch iBook sees the light of day. You see I'd figured I was waiting on a minor speedbump and perhaps the jacking up of a few obscure specs, and that was presumably worth waiting for, seeing as how I wasn't in a real big hurry. I'm upgrading mainly for speed (and to shed the three extra inches I no longer really need), but a spending a little more time on my current rig wasn't going to kill me.
But the rumor mill (or whatever is left of the rumor mill) says today that the new iBook will in fact not be just a minor rev, but instead a whole new iBook: new enclosure, new screen ratio, and lots of other new stuff, although the new reality in the Apple rumor business leaves us with scant details about what they might be. From the sound of it, though, we're looking at the Third Age of the iBook, with the first having been the various clamshell incarnations, and the second having been the square white models. If the Third Age of the iBook is indeed just days away, then it's sure starting to look like I did the right thing by waiting. This looks like it's going to be a whole new Mac.
I know, there are those among us who feel that life is but a joke...no wait, that's not the line I was looking for...There are those among us who feel that it's best not to buy the first rev of any brand new Mac, instead letting the early adopters complain about whatever doesn't work so well in practice as it did in theory, and waiting until Apple clears up those issues with the second revision. But I don't have that kind of time. And there are those who have vowed to hold off buying their next Mac until after their favorite model goes Intel, but that's mid-2006 at the earliest, and I definitely don't have that kind of time. Nor am I willing to instead go what some might call the "safer" route by simply settling for one of the existing iBooks. Sorry, not my cup of tea. I've always felt that the iBook lost something (actually, a lot) when it went from the clamshell to the white square design. The angles are all wrong, there's not enough room to rest your wrists on the iBook's top surface, and when you allow your wrists to hang off the front egdes, your wrists pay the price for the white iBook's sharp angles. I've always considered the white iBook a compromise product, designed specifically to shut up those who complained about the bulk and the styling of the original clamshell. If I had my way, I'd go back to a clamshell over a white iBook, but considering that there aren't exactly any new G4 clamshells on the market, I'd convinced myself that I could live with the white iBook's compromises after all.
And I can, if I have to. But not if I can instead latch onto something else. I don't think the iBook's ergonomics can get any worse than they already are (although they're better than any Windows laptop I've ever used), so here's hoping that Apple can improve upon the current model, as they so often do. In that case, I'll place the first pre-order, the minute the thing goes on the market.
And here's hoping that that happens sooner than later. You'd almost think that my current PowerBook has heard me talking about replacing it, and wants to punish me by falling apart prematurely. I'm not sure that doing so would actually work in the PowerBook's favor, but nonetheless my PowerBook has chosen to take its own space bar to a lonely grave. Although it still works, it now sticks to the point that it interferes with the natural flow of writing a column. It's gotten so aggravating that I've pulled a keyboard off an old iMac and plugged it into the PowerBook for now. I mean, we're only talking about a matter of days here, right? Or at least we hope. But I'll be darned if I'm going to settle for buying a soon-to-be-extinct iBook if I can wait just a bit and end up with something new and cool and better. And I'll be darned if I'm going to drop cash on a new PowerBook keyboard that I might only end up using for a few days. In the mean time, I've been reduced to a cheerleader:
Here we go new iBooks, here we go!
Hoo boy have I been a slacker around here this week, although it's not without good reason. Just don't ask me what those reasons were, as at this point I'm a bit too sleepy to remember what they might have been. Not good, consdering it's only Tuesday. But something managed to perk me right up today, well two things actually, and while they might not be connected in your mind, my little world has them linked together hand in foot (is "hand in foot" a real saying? because it sounds right, but I'm not sure). Anyway, everyone who hasn't been hibernating knows that new iBooks are coming soon, and anyone who's been reading knows that after spending quite a bit of time (measured in months, not days) evaluating my changing needs, I resolved to replace my aging fifteen inch Titanium PowerBook with a new twelve inch iBook just as soon as the new twelve inch iBook sees the light of day. You see I'd figured I was waiting on a minor speedbump and perhaps the jacking up of a few obscure specs, and that was presumably worth waiting for, seeing as how I wasn't in a real big hurry. I'm upgrading mainly for speed (and to shed the three extra inches I no longer really need), but a spending a little more time on my current rig wasn't going to kill me.
But the rumor mill (or whatever is left of the rumor mill) says today that the new iBook will in fact not be just a minor rev, but instead a whole new iBook: new enclosure, new screen ratio, and lots of other new stuff, although the new reality in the Apple rumor business leaves us with scant details about what they might be. From the sound of it, though, we're looking at the Third Age of the iBook, with the first having been the various clamshell incarnations, and the second having been the square white models. If the Third Age of the iBook is indeed just days away, then it's sure starting to look like I did the right thing by waiting. This looks like it's going to be a whole new Mac.
I know, there are those among us who feel that life is but a joke...no wait, that's not the line I was looking for...There are those among us who feel that it's best not to buy the first rev of any brand new Mac, instead letting the early adopters complain about whatever doesn't work so well in practice as it did in theory, and waiting until Apple clears up those issues with the second revision. But I don't have that kind of time. And there are those who have vowed to hold off buying their next Mac until after their favorite model goes Intel, but that's mid-2006 at the earliest, and I definitely don't have that kind of time. Nor am I willing to instead go what some might call the "safer" route by simply settling for one of the existing iBooks. Sorry, not my cup of tea. I've always felt that the iBook lost something (actually, a lot) when it went from the clamshell to the white square design. The angles are all wrong, there's not enough room to rest your wrists on the iBook's top surface, and when you allow your wrists to hang off the front egdes, your wrists pay the price for the white iBook's sharp angles. I've always considered the white iBook a compromise product, designed specifically to shut up those who complained about the bulk and the styling of the original clamshell. If I had my way, I'd go back to a clamshell over a white iBook, but considering that there aren't exactly any new G4 clamshells on the market, I'd convinced myself that I could live with the white iBook's compromises after all.
And I can, if I have to. But not if I can instead latch onto something else. I don't think the iBook's ergonomics can get any worse than they already are (although they're better than any Windows laptop I've ever used), so here's hoping that Apple can improve upon the current model, as they so often do. In that case, I'll place the first pre-order, the minute the thing goes on the market.
And here's hoping that that happens sooner than later. You'd almost think that my current PowerBook has heard me talking about replacing it, and wants to punish me by falling apart prematurely. I'm not sure that doing so would actually work in the PowerBook's favor, but nonetheless my PowerBook has chosen to take its own space bar to a lonely grave. Although it still works, it now sticks to the point that it interferes with the natural flow of writing a column. It's gotten so aggravating that I've pulled a keyboard off an old iMac and plugged it into the PowerBook for now. I mean, we're only talking about a matter of days here, right? Or at least we hope. But I'll be darned if I'm going to settle for buying a soon-to-be-extinct iBook if I can wait just a bit and end up with something new and cool and better. And I'll be darned if I'm going to drop cash on a new PowerBook keyboard that I might only end up using for a few days. In the mean time, I've been reduced to a cheerleader:
Here we go new iBooks, here we go!
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