billpalmer.net

The new Apple value proposition: throw in the kitchen sink

So just when I'm about to sit down and take in all the various specs of today's new Mac models, I get a phone call that sends me straight into distraction. Who was it? A customer, employee, reporter, telemarketer, wrong number? Nah, an old friend calling to hash out the details of the upcoming trip we're all taking to Cedar Point (an Ohio theme park) in mid-September. It seems like this all used to be so much simpler. Back in the old high school days we'd all just pile into someone's car and head in the general direction of a theme park for a few days during summer break. These days it's still the same set of friends, but now some of us have wives to bring along, some of us have to figure out what to do with the kids, some of us have to plan around our work schedules, some of us have to make sure we have internet access in the hotel room so we can take our work with us, and some of us don't even live anywhere near each other. But things become more clear as we spend a good half hour slogging through the details: on a weekend in mid-September, we're flying out Friday afternoon, sight-seeing Friday eveing, going to the theme park all day Saturday, and flying home at some point on Sunday. So we're all set and all that's left to do is to book our flights, and I realize that one minor detail managed to elude me: I'm not sure which mid-September weekend we're going on. Never bothered to ask. Things used to be easier when I had a functioning brain.

I guess maybe my mind was overly focused on the new iBooks (at least that's the excuse I'm going to use). And to answer the question that any number of you have written in to ask me today, the answer is yes, I'll be buying one. But first I'm going to wait until the new model shows up on Amazon, to see if the current iBook rebate can be used with the new models, because if I can combine that with no sales tax, that'll be a nice chunk of change saved. Although, and I really can't imagine how none of us saw this coming, but Amazon's iBook rebate expires on July 26th, which is today (probably yesterday to you, if you're reading this on Wednesday). See, the Mac rumor sites don't need to buy trade secrets from rogue Apple employees, they can just check Amazon's expiration date. Sheesh, no wonder Amazon hasn't added the new iBooks to its system today. Although, knowing Amazon, there just might be a new Amazon iBook rebate offer starting tomorrow. Seems like there always is.

And I should point out that, although I was hoping for a "Third Age of iBook" with a new design that featured better wrist ergonomics that came closer to the original iBook, I'm fine with the current design. I've gotten used to the white iBook's wrist-slashing angles before, and I'll get used to them again. After all, they're not that much worse than those of the PowerBook I'm currently typing on (and please don't write in and tell me to get a wrist pad, it would defeat the entire purpose of having a laptop in the first place). And as far as the looks of the current model, at this point I could care less about what it looks like. As long as it's got an Apple logo on both the outside and the inside, I'm home.

But with all that out of the way, let's see what we're getting here with the new model that we wouldn't have gotten if we'd bought, say, yesterday: marginally faster processor, twice as much RAM, 33 percent larger hard drive, better video card, built-in Bluetooth, sudden motion sensor, and trackpad scrolling. I think there also might be a kitchen sink in there somewhere. Good thing I waited, eh? I mean, that's an awful lot to throw in for the same $999 price tag. And the deal gets even sweeter for those folks looking for a 14 inch iBook, as (if I'm not mistaken) they now get a SuperDrive standard on top of all the other goodies.

And in terms of Macintosh history, we just might now be entering the Era of the Kitchen Sink.

We saw some hint of the kitchen sink effect earlier this year with the new PowerBooks, as Apple appeared to be holding nothing in reserve by putting both of its new mobile hardware innovations, the motion sensor and the trackpad scrolling, into play in the same revision, across the entire PowerBook line. Common thinking was that it was Apple's way of making up for the fact that there was no G5 to be found. But now, with Intel on the horizon, Apple has an even steeper hill to climb to get some folks to go ahead and ante up for a new Mac prior to the actual Intel shift. It's mostly a phychological thing, as there really is no downside to buying a PowerPC-based Mac right now. And for the folks who don't pay any attention to Apple news, the word "Intel" may not even be on their radar as they head out to buy their next (or for that matter, first) Mac. But for those folks who pay attention, Apple has seemingly adopted a new philosophy to get you to add one last PowerPC-based Mac to your arsenal: throw in everything.

Every tech company holds back something somehow. They offer low-end models, but they invariably reserve some features solely for the high-end models as an incentive to get you to upsell yourself:

"Hmm, I don't even know what a 'card slot' is, but the PowerBook has it and the iBook doesn't so I guess I should pay several hundred extra for the PowerBook just in case."

"I have no idea what a processor even is, but a G5 sounds like it must be better than a G4."

"I'd like my combo 'Value Sized' even though I don't really want the extra fries or soda."

"I'll buy Windows XP Professional Edition because I believe in professionalism."

You get the idea. Every tech company does it. The more responsible ones will offer you a low-end model that, while it doesn't have the bells and whistles, isn't crippled in any way for most users. And for awhile, that's what the iBook has been. You want a bucketload of RAM or Bluetooth, you've got to add it yourself. You want monitor spanning, too bad. You want the very latest bells and whistles, too bad, get a PowerBook. But for everyone who just uses their computer and doesn't do a lot of funky stuff with it, the iBook more than fits the bill. Except now it does more than that. The latest iBook sports more bells and whistles than a child's bicycle, and suddenly it seems Apple is less interested in selling you a more expensive model and more interested in simply get you to buy one at all.

It's an interesting time we're in now, and how much of the Kitchen Sink Effect has to do with the Intel thing, and how much of it is an actual new long-term strategy, only time will tell. But in the mean time, enjoy it. I know I intend to. And if you're worried that Apple's profit margins are going to come crashing down as everyone flocks to the low end, don't worry: the next version of the PowerBook is likely just around the corner, and if Apple was willing to sink this many of the PowerBook's features into the iBook, I can't wait to see what the company has up its sleeve for getting people to take another look at the high end after all.

How are long-time residents of the Macintosh universe going to deal with the tourists?

It seems that as Apple users, we've now entered one huge holding pattern. Which is odd, because if one thing's always been true about Apple in the New Steve Jobs Era, it's been that you never knew what was coming next (unless someone leaked it). But look at the state of Appledom right now:

- We're waiting for the iTunes phone, which was announced more than a year ago, but might be unveiled this week. If you know what the difference between "announced" and "unveiled" is, you're a better PR person than I.

- We're waiting for the new iBook, which we know is coming not because someone leaked it, but simply because it's been so long since the last new iBook.

- We're waiting for Intel-based Macs, which we know are one to two years off, and yet we keep looking at our watch every five minutes anyway.

It's an odd time. There are legitimate reasons for all of the above, as the iBook delay appears to be just an anomaly, the iTunes phone is a great journey into the unknown that had to be announced early to scare other phone companies out of trying to compete with it, and the Intel thing had to be announced way in advance so that developers would have time to start taking things in that direction. So it's not as if there's been a fundamental shift in how Apple handles upcoming products; all you had to do is listen to Tim Cook say the phrase "We don't comment on future unreleased products" fifty or sixty times during the recent analyst conference call, in response to analysts' continual attempts to get him to spill the beans about something they could then blab about. But that's nothing compared to how bad the media has gotten in overfocusing on upcoming Apple products. You need look no further than CNN quoting Think Secret to know that something isn't quite right.

There's been no Mac news, in fact it's been so dead that I've hesitated to bring MacMischief out of hiatus for fear of not being able to find anything to report. And while there's always iPod news of some sort (since the whole word seemingly takes time each day to say or do something iPod-related), it's been slow lately as well, with much of the "news" having less to do with the iPod itself and more to do with the surrounding circus.

So by the looks of things, you would think things sucked right now or something.

But then you remember that Apple currently has the best operating system in history, a stable computer lineup that's growing three times as fast as the industry, a solid and mature slew of software that you can't get on any other platform, music sales through the roof, music player sales coming in higher than anyone had predicted...

Maybe that's it. Maybe things are just too good right now for them to be all that interesting to talk about. To paraphrase Jack Miller of AppleTurns, the disappointment that comes with hearing bad news about Apple is mitigated by the fact that it makes coming up with stuff to write about a lot easier. To that end, it's probably worth noting that during this "nothing's going wrong" period, AppleTurns hasn't been updated in close to a month. Almost as long as I went without updating MacMischief.

So where does this leave us? As Mac users, we're in the perfect spot to be in. But as armchairists, we have to be a bit more creative than usual. There's lots of good news, but none of it really counts as news, and there's almost no bad news. So what are we going to report? Baseball scores? The weather? I really don't know. But rather than just becoming boring and staying boring, here's hoping that the Mac Web finds new ways to be relevant and interesting. I'd tell you what my contribution is going to be in terms of making that happen, but the truth is, I'm still thinking about it.

I mean, it's not as if we're less relevant. There are more Mac users than ever, new Mac users every day. If anything, we should be the welcome wagon for all these new people coming in from other platform(s). That "s" is in parentheses of course because there is only one other platform -- and maybe that has something to do with it. When I encounter a Mac user who has just switched two months ago, I don't even know how to have a Mac-based conversation with them. Everything they talk about is in terms of how this or that compares (favorably) to Windows, and how surprised they are at this or that, and they'll make comments about how "this is better than the way a regular computer works."

As a long-time Mac user who doesn't touch Windows except through incidental contact, how, exactly do you relate to these people in terms of having a Mac-based conversation? You're almost better talking about baseball or the weather. Don't get me wrong, it's easy to help them, to show them stuff and teach them things. But a philosophical discussion about the Macintosh universe? It's like discussing life on Earth with someone who just moved here from Mars two months ago. They're constantly amazed that this planet has water, and yet you wouldn't know how to live without it.

So I can't help but wonder if we're heading into the age of the Odd Couple. Mac websites writing from the viewpoint of someone who's been here forever, and an increasing number of readers having just arrived. They say you can tell the tourists from the locals in New York City by looking at where they're looking. The locals have seen it all before so they're not paying much attention to what they're walking past, but the tourists are always walking around looking upward, trying to take it all in because it's all brand new to them.

Maybe it's time for Mac websites to start acting more like tourists, or perhaps more accurately, tour guides. After all, going forward, tourists are going to make up a larger and larger part of our readership.

So this is how Apple rumors get started

Two separate instances regarding the impending new iBooks in the past twenty-four hours have both demonstrated, rather humorously, how Apple rumors can sometimes get started, and just how little they can be based on. Yesterday I wrote an article asking if this was going to be the "Third Age of iBook," and today both instances happened as a result:

1) Some guy sends me the following email this morning:



Hey, it wouldn't be the first time Apple prematurely posted specs for a soon-to-be-released product by accident. So of course I race over to the Apple Store Canada, but I can't find anything. Apparently, the images had gotten pulled nearly as fast as they'd been posted. I checked around on various Mac news and rumor sites and couldn't find a word about the Canada thing, though. So I wrote back to the guy who had written to me, and after going back and looking at the same page again, he realized that he was mistaken, and that he had somehow managed to confuse the fact that the 14 inch iBook is wider than the 12 inch iBook in their joint photo, and mistakenly thought that it was in fact the new widescreen iBook.

Can't blame him for anything, he just made a mistake in what he was looking at. And it's not as if he was trying to start any rumors, as he was using Apple's own website as his source. In fact, he was trying to help me after reading that I was planning on buying a new iBook the minute they appeared. He thought they had appeared, so he alerted me to it. He just goofed, was all.

But imagine if I (or some Mac rumor site) had reported it as fact. The entire Mac Web (and possibly portions of the mainstream press) would have lit up like a Christmas tree today over the fact that the new iBook had briefly appeared in the Apple Store Canada, and no one would ever have known that it never really happened.

2) This evening, someone sent an email to MacMischief, stating the following:



I thought gee whiz, I've only ever heard the phrase "third age iBook" one other time in my life, and it just happened to be yesterday, when I wrote an article whose title mentioned that same phrase. Apparently this read my article this morning (or more likely, just looked at the headline posted on another site), and then spent the rest of the day trying to find out something about this "third age of iBook," which if you check Google, is a phrase that has apparently never before been uttered in the history of the internet. The guy apparently had no idea that the Mac news site he was writing to ask about the "third age iBook" just happens to be run by the same person (me) who wrote the headline that got him up and running in the first place. He probably wrote to a bunch of other Mac news sites as well, and some of them probably began scratching their heads as to what this "third age iBook" might be.

So there you have it, kids. Two separate instances of someone jumping the gun. One guy thinking he saw something he didn't really see, and another guy reading a headline without reading the whole article, both resulted in cases of unfounded Mac rumors that, thankfully, didn't actually spread, but easily could have. So the next time you read a "confirmed Apple rumor" from a "reliable source," you might want to stop and think about how this stuff gets started in the first place.

That having been said, I'm all excited about the new Third Age iBook, and I really don't understand why the Canadians got to have it before we did.

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!

This upside-down new world with Apple on top

What happened? No really, what did I miss?

It seems like just two or three years ago, we Mac users were still seen as an irrelevant sideshow, still forced to defend our choice of platform even when we had no interest in having the conversation, still subject to a near-daily recessitation of the List Of Bad Things About The Mac That Are No Longer True or Never Were, as if it were a list of absolutely true facts, by someone, somewhere, in some manner. Mac users just couldn't buy a vowel when it came to getting an ounce of understanding about the Mac out of anyone outside of the Mac user base.

But then something happened. And while some will say that a lot of things happened, everything from the rise of the iPod, to the rise of Windows security issues, to the rise of consumer-level multimedia apps on the Mac, these are all merely things that helped that "something" to happen. And just what is this something? Well, it's sort of an ethereal thing, not something that can be described in literal terms or adequately demonstrated by a single example, so I'll sum it up like this:

Apple no longer has the plague.

It really is as simple as that, I think. For the longest time, Apple products all had the plague, at least in the minds of the ninety percent of the world that wasn't using them. It didn't matter, you see, if Apple's products were better or worse, costlier or cheaper, faster or slower, prettier or uglier. None of that mattered because you simply don't touch something that's plague-ridden. And, thanks to a long confluence of events that ranged from everything from Microsoft's long campaign to paint the Mac is incompatible and therefore unusable, to Apple's own long period of screwing things up so royally it didn't really need Microsoft's help to make a mess of its public image.

But somewhere within the past year or so, the plague has simply and miraculously been innoculated (of course, it helps that, as you and I know, the plague never really existed in the first place). The quarantine that had been in effect for so many years has been lifted, and word has begun to spread to this effect. Now sure, there are still plenty of people who are still afraid to touch something that once had the plague even though they're quite confident that it no longer does, but slowly but surely (and actually, not very slowly at all these days, seemingly), people are forgetting that the plague ever existed, or in some cases, are too young to have ever been aware of it in the first place.

If the fact that Mac sales are now growing more than three times as fast as PC sales doesn't speak to this sufficiently, then perhaps the fact that Apple CEO Steve Jobs is now a rock star among people in their teens and early twenties does. When he gets invited to speak at a college graduation ceremony, it's not because he invented something twenty years ago. It's because half the students in the audience during the speech have secretly snuck one of his products into the ceremony, so they can listen to it during the other speeches.

It's a new world now. Apple's on top. Everything's upside down. Long-time Mac users are no longer looked at as a leper colony. Now, the Windows-using public looks at us with a mixture of "please help me find my way into being a Mac user" and "please don't point out the fact that you were right all along." You almost can't help but think big and start wondering just how far this all can go. If you'd asked me two years ago, I would have said that my best-case scenario would be that the Mac would attain perhaps twenty percent marketshare and take its place as a minority too large to ignore. But now, I see no reason why it can't become the dominant platform.

I knew the world would start figuring it out eventually. I just didn't think it would happen this fast.

There's a depraved lunatic slandering me, and it's time for it to come to an end

The last thing anyone wants to read when they come to this website is the airing out of dirty laundry, so I promise I'll try and keep this short and sweet. But there's an issue here, and I'm afraid things have reached the point where I feel I need to say something publicly and set the record straight, so everyone who comes into contact with this issue knows exactly what they're dealing with here. I'm only going to address this issue this once, after which I will have nothing else to say about the matter going forward:

About twelve months ago, an individual named Philip Smith contacted me because he wanted to work for my company, LoadPod. Or, as he put it in an email he sent me on June 30th of 2004, "I have an interest in doing the loadpod service and offering it my store." Because LoadPod already had sufficient coverage in Mr. Smith's area code, I politely turned him down.

But he persisted, and his actions over the next few days were, well, a bit odd. First, on July 12th of 2004, he signed up on the LoadPod website pretending to be a customer, even though he wasn't. Then, on July 13th of 2004, he claimed that he knew two people who wanted to be customers, even though he didn't. He couldn't accept the fact that we simply didn't need any additional personnel in his area, and instead of having the patience to wait until we did, he decided to play games with us. At that point I'd seen enough out of Mr. Smith that I was quite relieved that I hadn't hired him. I mean, hey, what a goofball.

And that was the last I heard of him -- or so I thought. About three months ago, some character named "Adzoox" began surfacing on various parts of the web as what might best be described as some kind of stalker. First, he began posting lengthy rants about me on his own personal blog, and when that apparently didn't bring him enough attention, he began a habit of going to any website that posted any kind of a link to anything that I'd written for any of my websites, and proceeded to post a link in the comments section, begging people to come and read what he had to say about me. This rather odd practice of his was brought to my attention by various friends, and even readers, who were concerned that I appeared to have picked up a cyber-stalker.

So just what did this "Adzoox" character have to say about me? Well, a lot of rather creative name-calling, for one thing ("retarded delusional" was my favorite), and that's all well and good. Thank goodness we live in a country where you have the right to call someone a retarded delusional if you really want to. But I'm afraid that was merely this guy's warm-up act.

You see, in an alternate universe that apparently exists only within this guy's head, it turns out my life is quite a bit different that I thought it was. In Mr. Smith's imaginary universe, it turns out that none of the advertisers on any of my websites really exist, I have no income, and perhaps most interestingly, my company LoadPod has no customers and doesn't really exist. Furthermore, all those times I've read articles about LoadPod in the New York Times, or BusinessWeek, or watched news stories about LoadPod on television, none of that really happened. And the quotes about LoadPod from those news sources that are displayed on the LoadPod website? In Mr. Smith's imaginary world, it turns out I made them all up.

Needless to say, this was all a bit of a shock to me, but I actually found the whole idea rather humorous. I mean, here's this clown who has nothing better to do all day than to sit back and create this alternate life for me, in which none of the fortunate things that have happened to me over the past two years have really happened after all. I really got a laugh out of it. Just some harmless lunatic, right? Almost what you'd call a groupie. The price of an increased profile, I suppose. The best part of it all, I think, is how he would post stuff in the comments section of his own site, pretending to be me -- and then he (no longer pretending to be me) would criticize me for posting the comments! It takes a special kind of crazy to come up with stuff like that. Who was this guy, and what did I ever do to him? I didn't know.

But then he slipped up one day, and in one of his rants about me, he let slip the fact that he had once applied for a position at LoadPod. I checked my records and, sure enough, this "Adzoox" is none other than Philip Smith, the same Mr. Smith who had unsuccessfully attempted to become an employee of mine a year earlier. So at least now I understood his motivation. The only thing worse than a disgrunted former employee, is a disgruntled former employee who never managed to get a job with you in the first place. But still, he was just a harmless lunatic, right?

Even when Mr. Smith began sending harassing emails in my direction last month, I still knew better than to take the bait. He was hoping beyond hope that he'd get some kind of response out of me, and was probably lying awake at night wondering just what he had to do to get me to finally respond and give him the kind of attention that he's apparently so desperate for. But he was, simply put, a cockroach not worth getting my shoe dirty over.

This week, however, I got word from one of my advertisers, letting me know that Mr. Smith had contacted him and told him the same bizarre lies about me that he's been posting on his personal blog all this time. He also attempted to get my advertiser to stop advertising on my website, and even threatened to launch a smear campaign against my advertiser's company if he kept advertising on my site.

Kind of changes the whole equation, now doesn't it? No more just a harmless lunatic sitting in his little corner of the web and making stuff up about me, Mr. Smith has now decided to launch an all-out invasion on my entire existence, it would seem. What next? Will he call my mother and tell her about the time I turned in my term paper late back in the eleventh grade? Sorry pal, she already knows about it.

Right now I'm contemplating my next step, and I'm not entirely sure whether that's going to be hiring a lawyer and getting an injunction against Mr. Smith, or just calling his local police department and filing criminal charges. Frankly, I've never had to deal with an individual quite so depraved as this guy, so this is something of a new stretch of territory for me. What I can tell you is that after today, I never intend to speak publicly of this matter again, because I simply won't allow my audience (on any of my websites) to become bored to death with this kind of nonsense. But because this lunatic has so thoroughly crossed the line, and appears to have no limitations whatsoever as far as his plans to keep coming after me with increasingly bizarre and disturbing behavior, I did want to get this all out in the open so that, going forward, everyone knows exactly what they're dealing with here. I will only say the following once:

Every single word that has ever been written about me by Philip Smith is an out-and-out lie. Every word Philip Smith will ever write about me in the future will also likely be an out-and-out lie. He's nothing more than a disgruntled and very disturbed individual who is attempting to extract some measure of revenge on me for the fact that I didn't hire him when he applied for a job with my company last year.

And that's all I will ever have to say on the matter.

Hunting season on me is over.

Now, let's get back to business, shall we?

Buying a new iBook: to wait or not to wait?

I believe I've changed my mind about my next laptop yet again. I'm buying a Dell. I really love Windows, and as much as Dell advertises on television, I know that they just have to make good products. And then I'm going to buy a Mac mini, because what I really want is a desktop with a separate monitor. I just love that idea. Then I'll go to the Miami Dolphins games this fall and root for the New York Jets.

Alright, I'll drop the sarcasm before I take it any further, lest any nasty false rumors start spreading about me (because there aren't enough of those these days), and share that I may have once again leaned back the other direction in my ongoing internal iBook-PowerBook debate. I know, this has to be at least the fourth time I've officially changed my mind, and if that doesn't make me Mr. Wishy-Washy, I don't know what does. In defense, though, quite a few of you reading this have been this indecisive about your product purchases -- you just haven't been silly enough to do so in public.

The funny thing is, I'm not typically this hesitant these days. I happily used my Third Generation iPod for a few years, but when the new U2 iPod with color screen hit the market last week, I took one look at it, identified it as being exactly what I wanted, and ordered one immediately. So why the extended six month saga on my next laptop? Well, up to this point most of it has come down to the fact that I haven't been in a real hurry to get rid of my current PowerBook. Sure, it's only a 667 Mhz G4, and sure it's got a growing list of things wrong with it. But it's been just fast enough not to slow me down, and conveniently, none of the things that no longer work have directly impacted my workflow. So I've waited, stalled if you will, and casually evaluated my various options on an ongoing basis over the course of 2005, figuring that sooner or later I would eventually identify the right time to make the leap to something now.

The short version of the back-story, for those of you who haven't been around long enough to have endured it the first time around, is this: six months ago, I couldn't afford squattadoodle anyway, so I figured I'd wait another six months and then buy a G5 PowerBook when it reached the market. But three months ago I got antsy, and not wanting to sink two grand into yet another G4 PowerBook, flirted with the idea of moving to a G4 iBook. I ended up nixing the idea after realizing that, although none of the PowerBook's other features mattered to me, my workflow at the time would have been rather cramped by the smaller screen resolution of an iBook. Last month, after the Intel bombshell dropped and we all learned that 1) There was never going to be a G5 PowerBook, and 2) The Intel PowerBook was 12 to 24 months away, I figured I might as well go ahead and buy a new G4 PowerBook after all, making it my final PowerPC-based Mac. But I figured that an update to the PowerBook line was just around the corner, so I decided to wait for one more revision before taking the plunge.

But as it turns out, my workflow has changed just a bit. Now that I've finally hired a real webmaster for the iPod Garage, I'll rarely ever have to use DreamWeaver again, and when I go down the list of the software I depend on day-in day-out, it was Dreamweaver that was most responsible for my wanting to stick with a fifteen inch screen. And with that mostly out of the picture, everything else became negotiable. A few minutes of fussing with my FileMaker database (thankfully, I'm a better database designer than web designer), and the layouts that I'd originally for a 1280x854 screen now looked just spiffy in 1024x768. And that's pretty much the ballgame.

Which means, of course, at this point I might as well take a serious look at the 12 inch iBook after all. I mean, why not? There's quite a bit of attraction to a product that costs me a thousand dollars less, allows me to not have to carry around three extra inches of screen space that I no longer need, and isn't missing a single feature that I need. The point really got driven home earlier today. I don't keep a TV in office because I don't want the distraction, but today I wanted to watch certain portions of the Live 8 rebroadcast (since so little of it actually got broadcast the first time), so I grabbed my laptop and took it out to the living room with me. And the thing just felt big. Big to pick up, big to carry, big to try and balance on my lap. Maybe it was just the right situation at the right time, but it really make me long for a little 12 inch bugger. So much so that I almost ordered one.

And I would have...except for the fact that new iBook models are presumably just around the corner.

What's funny is that I weren't quite so plugged into the Mac scene, I would have no idea that there were new iBooks coming, and I would have gone ahead and ordered one, and then I would have gone on using it blissfully unaware that waiting a week or two would have netted me an upgraded revision. But knowing what I know, I can't seem to make myself pull the trigger. It's not that I don't know anything that you don't. In fact, I don't know anything, beyond the fact that the iBook line almost always gets upgraded every six months, and this time around it's been nine and counting. And of course, here in the post-inunction rumor landscape, we have the rumor sites reporting nothing beyond the above statistic I just quoted, because they've got nothing at all. I guess the fact that rogue Apple employees are now too scared to sell Apple's trade secrets to rumor site scum for fear of being identified, the rumor sites are no longer of any help when it comes to planning an Apple purchase. So be it. We never had any business having access to Apple's trade secrets anyway.

But here I am, ready for something faster right now, fully embracing the idea of something smaller, sitting here with my finger on the trigger for a new 12 inch iBook...and waiting for Apple to finally give us the next iBook.

Let's hope it happens before I change my mind again.

Cold Day in the Sun

- I almost had to go to New York City tomorrow. We were asked to do a television interview, and due to various circumstances, for a brief moment it looked like none of our people in the area were going to be able to represent us. And since I wasn't about to let the opportunity go splat, I was looking up flights when I got word that the local bunch was going to be able to cover things after all. After all, every now and then, I have to remind the world that I single-handedly built the iPod loadingindustry from the ground up. That's not arrogance, it's just business. I only bring the whole thing up, though, because even though I wasn't particularly looking forward to dropping everything and heading out on a hideously overpriced last-minute flight, I really liked the idea that I was headed back to New York City. I miss the place. I miss the fact that MacWorld Expo isn't there anymore. I do believe I'll head up to the City sometime before the warm weather ends this summer, Expo or not. And for sure, I'm headed to MacWorld San Francisco in Janaury, nasty cold weather or not. Three years without visiting New York City is far too long. So is three years without attending MacWorld Expo. I'm not sure what I was thinking by letting it go that long in either case.

- I can't tell you how much fun I'm having with the new iPod Garage. I've been waiting what seems like forever to be free of the shackles of my own limited web design skills, and now that the day has finally arrived, I'm ecstatic. I think there was a point my life where turning over webmaster duties to someone else, only to have everyone universally agree that the new design was better than mine, would have struck me the wrong way. But at this point, I just take it as confirmation that I made the right decision. Anyway, the site's become a whole big production number now, with nine weekly columns written by seven different people, ten hands-on reviews published per week, and up to the minute iPod, iTunes, and music news updated ten or more times per day. If you're an iPod website, and the iPod is a music player, how can you not report that Luther Vandross died? And how can you not report on the epic worldwide impact of Live 8? Other sites will carp because every third story in our RSS feed has nothing to do with technology, but so be it. And I absolutely loved the fact that, shortly after we started reporting on Live 8 on Saturday, another iPod site threw up a token Live 8 story of their own. Leading with music industry news is a pretty big risk, but the copycatting must mean we're doing something right. Every day's like a big extravaganza over there.

- Seems like I can recall saying that I was quite sure that the pie in the sky unit sales projections being thrown around by analysts for the Mac mini were simply being made up out of thin air to support their original assertion that the thing was going to be a hit, and that eventually, the analysts would begin significantly decreasing the imaginary numbers they were throwing around, lest they get caught in the act. Well, today, one of those analysts reduced his Mac mini sales projections by almost half. Hey, it's not like I didn't tell you how this was gonna play out. Up next will be Mac mini apologists across the web trying to come up with rationalizations as to what's going on, including a whole lot of blaming Apple for not advertising the thing. Then they'll blame Circuit City for not putting up the posters right, and perhaps they'll even blame Apple for not pricing the thing correctly. Sure, these arguments are cut and pasted from the mouths of apologists who tried to explain away the Cube's failures, but it'll be the same story here. They'll blame Best Buy, they'll say Steve Jobs didn't want it to succeed, perhaps they'll even claim that the product didn't sell because a few units had some cracks in them. That was my personal favorite among the Cube excuses. Toward the end, something equally absurd will serve as the final rallying cry as to why the mini failed, and as to why it should be brought back four years from now at an even lower price. This thing has "Cube" written all over it, on all six of its faces. I really hope Steve fires the clown who talked him into this time-wasting exercise.

- Just so I don't have to end on that note, I'll share that after a good fifty listens to the whole album, my favorite track on the new Foo Fighters album just might be "Cold Day in the Sun"...which, oddly enough, is the one that the drummer sings. No, not Dave Grohl. The other drummer. Come to think of it, is there anyone in that band who doesn't playthe drums? In a past life, they could have been a marching band. Have I mentioned how much I love the fact that our iPod site has the guts to lead with an album review each Tuesday?

Man, this is some fun stuff. Sometimes I just can't believe I get to do this stuff for a living.

Scratches and dents and old and newness and iPods and Macs

I skipped the fireworks this year. Normally they have them down by the lake, which is within walking distance, but with the lakefront under construction this year, the nearest fireworks are somewhere across town. So I'll have to wait til next year for fireworks. Or more likely, next week, as it seems every time I go to the movies at Downtown Disney, the movie lets out right around midnight, just in time to take in the fireworks at Pleasure Island. And since we've started off completely off-topic, I'll throw in that the best Fourth of July fireworks display I ever saw was back when I was in college. I was working part-time as a security guard at a condo in Boca Raton, and I got paid double to work on the Fourth, and since I was the roving guard who got to go anywhere instead of being stuck at a desk, I headed up to the roof of the twenty-three story building, sat on the roof and simultaneously took in the fireworks shows of five different cities, all visible from my two-hunded-feet-in-the-air perch.

I'm afraid I can't get back on-topic just yet, as I also feel compelled to point out that someone was kind enough to put a big ole dent in the front right fender of my car this weekend, a good three inches deep and six inches across, which I just noticed today. I don't know when it happened, but I do know that if I'd been in the car at the time, I would have seen, heard, and felt it, meaning that it happened while the car was parked somewhere. And with the dent being as large as it is, it's pretty clear that whoever hit my car certainly saw, heard, and felt it...meaning that they simply chose to flee the scene in true Beavis fashion.

I've had a couple hours of being angry about it by now. But the car's five years old, has six figures in mileage, is just a few months away from being paid for, and it ain't worth putting a claim in on my own insurance, so the bottom line comes down to two words: oh well.

Obviously, I'd have felt different if I'd already gone ahead and bought a new car by now. My car is old by any standard, but I've seen no reason to consider replacing it, especially with the prospect being able to keep driving the thing after it's paid off. And considering today's event, I guess that worked out in my favor in a manner not expected. 'Cause if that was a brand new car out there in the driveway with a six inch dent in the fender, I'd be wanting to be out there doing some CSI stuff on it in hopes of being able to hunt down the offending party with a pitchfork, if you know what I mean.

Oh, you wanted this column to be about Apple? Yeah, getting there. Because the whole incident with the car today got me thinking about just how little I cared how many scratches and dents my old iPod picked up toward the end, and yet now I won't so much as take my brand new U2 iPod away from my desk without putting it in some kind of protective case, lest even the tiniest scratch mar the chiseled autographs of Bono and the gang.

Accordingly, my aging PowerBook has so much paint missing from it at this point that I'm beginning to wonder if its looks couldn't be markedly improved with a cheap can of silver spraypaint. But once my next laptop finally makes my way into my hands, I suppose I'll be just as protective of it as I am my new iPod. But on the other hand, laptops (and iPods and cars) aren't meant to be bought as museum pieces; you use them, you try to keep them in the best shape you can, but in the end they're going to show some wear and tear. Because no matter what you do, someone's going to hit your car while it's parked eventually...unless you never leave the house with it.

I wonder if there's some fireworks on television.

Drool now, buy later: how the Apple Store books a sale eventually

I hope you're enjoying your Fourth of July weekend, which is to say I hope you've found something better to do this weekend than read this site, and that you're just now catching up on Tuesday morning. Considering the stack of work probably sitting on your desk as you begin a shortened week, I'll keep this one short. I do want to mention, however, that somewhere in this town they must be selling defective calendars, because quite a few of my neighbors appear to mistakenly believe that Independence Day is on July 3rd, if the steady stream of fireworks this evening is any indication. Nothing to do with my upcoming point, just felt like mentioning it.

But here's where I stop acting like I'm on vacation and start hinting at my eventual point, so that's your cue to take an extra-large swill of your coffee and begin paying attention. You see, we've had this guy call LoadPod no less than four times this week, and for privacy reasons I won't go into detail other than to say that each time, he called to quiz us on how we did or did that, or how we handled such and such circumstance, all under the guise of trying to decide whether or not to use our service. At some point I was tempted to believe that perhaps he was attempting to do all the work himself, and was merely using us a free Cliffs Notes on how to get around the various hurdles he was running into. But sure enough, today he calls and actually places an order with us.

It got me thinking about how we'd have lost the sale if we'd cut his all-too-frequent calls off earlier, on the basis that the odds were shrinking with each call that this was an actual potential customer. As far as my own company, I took it as a lesson learned. And immediately, it made me think of the Apple Store. You know, the ones where no one works on commission, and everyone is openly invited to come and in and just play with the products on display all day. As we all know, the Apple Stores turn a profit in their own right, and move a whole lot of merchandise in the process. But every time you go there, you see any number of people who have just stopped by to check their email, or listen to some music on an iPod, or play a video game on a display Mac.

And if a bean counter were in charge of the Apple Stores, he would run those folks out of the store just as fast as he came across them. But you gotta figure that for each person who casually hangs out in the Apple Store on each of their visits to the local mall and never does buy anything, there have to be others who, simply by virtue of frequent contact with and increased familiarity with Apple's products, breaks down and buys one eventually, even if they never initially intended to do so. A lot of these people will end up buying Apple products at some place other than an Apple Store.

But if you're Apple, who cares? You booked the sale, albeit belatedly and through a third party, but that doesn't change the fact that you booked the sale. And as we all know, no one buys just one Apple product.

Alright, that's enough for now. Hope you enjoy (or perhaps more accurately, enjoyed) the fireworks.