billpalmer.net

Apple's peripheral adventure

I'm working on a news story for tomorrow about what Apple's intentions are with regards to the iPod accessory market, which is currently largely in the hands of third parties, and how Apple's newly-announced speaker system (radio remote, nanotubes, etc) and leather cases play into those intentions. Is Apple slowly trying to take over, or merely nudge the industry along in the right direction? How is Apple's entry into the iPod peripheral market being perceived by the iPod user base? Right now I'm seeing it as a net positive for end users (and the entire aftermarket, for that matter), but there are cases to be made for both sides.

If you have thoughts on the matter one way or the other, feel free to post them in the comments section.

Mac mini price quietly hiked to $599

What's the old phrase I'm looking for, the one that gets the point across that I'm submitting this particular piece of information without comment? Oh that's right, submitted without comment:

The new Intel-based Mac mini now starts at $599. The original $499 price point appears to be gone from the face of the earth (or at least the face of the Apple Store). Don't know what it means yet, therefore the lack of any comment. I'm sure plenty of you will take occasion to tell me exactly what you think it means, though.

While I'm at it, let me ask you Mac mini lovers this: coming into tday I heard a lot of speculation about set top boxes, television integration and more, but I don't see any of it. I just a price increase and a faster processor...and (finally) some extra USB ports. So was this the machine you guys were looking for today?

Just hours before a major Apple media event, you'd think I'd be wanting to make predictions and all of that good stuff. But I think I'll wait to see what's actually announced before trying to say much of anything about it. After all, speculating about what the company might do next year is always fun because there's not much else you can do about it. But speculating about what the company might do tomorow inevitably has a "couldn't we just wait until tomorrow and find out for real?" kind of feeling about it. So we shall see.

Interesting weekend, during which I went a full thirty-six hours living virtually divorced from twenty-first century technology. Didn't take my iBook, didn't touch any other computer either. Didn't take an iPod with me. Took my cell phone but not the charger. I guess it wasn't all that daring, as it was a weekend after all, but nonetheless it was something I hadn't done in at least a year or two. Spent the whole time in and around the Disney compound with old friends from way back. We crashed the Planet Hollywood for dinner, a four story tall planet-shaped building that at this point is significant for being one of the few Planet Hollywoods left in the country. But for us the significance was that it was the exact same restaurant that we had had dinner at ten years ago, on a high school field trip of all things. Time flies almost freakishly sometimes.

I've been trying to incorporate more walking into my daily routine, which is somewhat complicated by the fact that I don't quite have a hard and fast daily routine to incorporate it into. The challenge is that I don't usually like to go for a walk just for the sake of doing it; when I'm done I prefer to actually end up somewhere I was supposed to go anyway. The lakefront is just under a mile away, a nice leg-stretching venture, but unfortunately it falls into the former category; I get there, there's nothing to do, I turn around and walk home. There are a few destinations that fall into the latter. A pizza-by-the-slice place about a half mile away. It's the kind of place you'd find every few hundred feet in a place like Manhattan, but it just might be the only pizza joint in this entire town that sells it by the slice. I know, going on a walk and then eating pizza sort of defeats the point, but in my mind it's a bit healthier than driving and then eating pizza.

I can walk downtown, where there are a few restaurants and a movie theater. But the theater only has two screens, so there's obviously only so often that you can go there. And that's about it. The rest of the town's destinations stretch beyond walking distance. As with every other town in Florida, it's designed in such a way that walking just isn't practical as a primary form of transportation. Most streets don't have sidewalks, which is okay because most of the side streets have so little traffic that you can walk right down the middle of them. But people backing out of their driveways don't tend to catch the fact that someone is walking right behind them; if they don't see something as large as a car in their rear view mirror, it doesn't register. After all, who in Florida would be walking anywhere?

Which I find kind of ironic. Here we are in the one State where the weather makes walking ideal. There's no snow to get in the way, it's not too cold in the winter (at least down south), it's not too hot in the summer (at least according to us natives), and if it starts raining it's usually done within a few minutes. And yet I've never encountered a town in this State where people actually walk as a means of transportation. Actually, I've heard that people who live right in the heart of downtown Miami can get away with walking everywhere, but I'd imagine that the radius of where you can live and get away with it has to be pretty small.

Miami actually has a little bit of public transportation down there, but not enough, and the rest of the State more or less has none at all. Which is probably at least partly why no one takes walking seriously. There's got to be some way to get over to the other side of town in hurry when you have to, or to get your twelve bags of groceries home when the need arises, and if there's no public transportation to make that happen, then you're going to end up owning a car one way or the other. And if you own a car, you tend to end up wanting to use it for everything. Going a quarter mile down the street? Drive. Going to that pizza joint? Drive. It's an addictive habit that leaves you believing that there's only one way to get around. You wouldn't know the bus schedule if your life depended on it, you're not entirely sure whether you could actually get a taxi cab to come out to your place or not, and you wouldn't have the slightly clue about how to even learn about either one of those options. And walking is merely something you do to get from your front door to your car door.

Well, I suppose I should stop philosophizing on transportation issues and call it a day. Tomorrow there'll be actual Apple-related news to talk about, so maybe we'll get back on track in terms of keeping things on topic around here.

Looks like I was onto something with 10.4.5 after all. I've been told that the Intel version of the 10.4.5 updater is more than one hundred megabytes, while the PowerPC version is barely six. What does it signify? Not a lot. That there was more to clean up in the first publicly released Intel version of Tiger than in the fifth PPC version of Tiger? Means nothing to the end user. Which is what I initially found amusing about the whole thing: all this behind the scenes action, hundred megabytes of whatever, simultaneous releases of separate operating systems, and yet for all of it, the end user won't know the difference unless they check their "About" menu. Pretty cool, actually.

Been a long week. It never seems to fail that any time you've got a week where major things are going on that need all of your brain's attention, any number of peripheral things will automatically spring up out of nowhere in an ill-timed attempt to vie for your attention. Which is a rather long-winded way of saying what I've already said: it's been a long week. I don't have the time right now to wonder why cell phone reception in my office has gone from pretty good to completely non-existent in the span of less than a month, or for that matter, why my new cell carrier thought significantly overbilling me would be a good way to start off our relationship. I don't have the brain cells to devote to pondering how on earth the freeze plugs on my car's engine could possibly be rusted out, or whose fault that could possibly be (knowing me and cars, probably somehow mine). Ah well, can't let the peripheral nonsense bog you down. In a less busy week, some of it might even have been seen as humorous distraction. Some of it, anyway. Still, these are exciting times and this is going to be a fun year. But it's Friday and my brain is shot, and right now I can't think that far ahead.

Eh, screw it. I'm going to Disney World.

10.4.5 update surprisingly small

Two things caught me off guard when my iBook kindly informed me that it was time to install the newly release MacOS X 10.4.5 updater. See if you can spot the two irregularities in the screenshot below:



First off, even a full month after the launch (and some eight months after the announcement), it was still a bit disarming to see that the updater was clearly labeled as being the "PowerPC" version. Oh yeah, right, there are in fact Intel Mac users out there, a group growing in size by the day, and heck, I'll be one of them some day soon.

But perhaps the more surprising thing was the update's file size. Can anyone recall the last time a MacOS X update was a mere 6.4 megabytes in size? Seems like they're usually closer to fifty megs these days. It's almost as if there's nothing inside this one at all. Not that I'm complaining, but you have to wonder the point of even releasing the thing.

Intel iMac users out there, what's your file size for this update? Perhaps 10.4.5 is all about Intel, and they're just throwing us PowerPC users a few megs to keep us quiet.

It's thirty-something degrees outside right now. And this is Florida.

Where am I living again?

Fun story from last night, straight from the "this couldn't happen to anyone but me" file: I go to the local theme restaurant for dinner, and although I've been going there about once a week since the place opened, because I'm the most boring eater in the world I've ordered the sirloin every single time. I've had my eye on the salmon, but I've always avoided it for the simple reason that the menu states that it comes with all kinds of sauces on it, and again referencing the fact that I'm the most boring eater in the world, that doesn't work for me. I've found over the years that asking them to "leave off all the crap and just give me the plain piece of meat" generally has too small a chance of succeeding to be worth taking the risk.

But last night, right in the middle of the dinner hour by the way, the waitress informs us that the restaurant has run out of sirloin. Not wanting to even try to understand how such a thing could happen, I instead took it as a sign that it was finally time to go ahead and order the salmon for once. I make it clear to the waitress that I want nothing on it, and she makes it clear that she understands, so at that point I figure there's at least a fifty percent chance of things working out OK.

I should not have been so optomistic.

The waitress comes out to apologize for the fact that the kitchen went ahead and put sauces all over my salmon despite her instructions, so she had told them to cook a new one for me. When she brought out everyone's dinner, she brought me a plate consisting of french fries and corn. Oh well, I knew I wasn't going to get through this unscathed. But then along comes the manager, apologizing and informing me that the kitchen has again put sauces all over the second salmon they cooked for me, -- and that once the third piece of salmon was finished being cooked, I would be dining for free. At that point I actually burst out laughing so hard that I didn't think to just tell him to go ahead and bring me thing, and I'd just scrape the sauce off of it.

I was still laughing when our poor waitress (who looked like she wanted to hide under a table) finally brought out the third, and seemingly successful, attempt at serving me a piece of salmon. Go I grabbed my silverware and dived right into my salmon, only to find that it was still literally frozen on the inside. Sent it back, got it cooked, and the final result was actually quite tasty. Too bad most of the people I was eating dinner with had already finished their meals and left before I got it.

Oh well. Got a good laugh out of it. These things really don't happen to anyone else but me, do they? Next time someone tells me they're out of sirloin, I think I'll just order the New York strip.

So I'm out to dinner last night, and someone asks me whether the iPod can only be used with Apple computers.

This is the year 2006, isn't it?