Category Archives: Apple

Bad Company

Amid all of my relentless Apple boosterism, I still feel it important to periodically speak out about where the company is wrong and where it behaves maliciously, a self-appointed duty of which I have not been particularly conscientious, admittedly. But, if you’ve got any streak of blue-blooded American fight in you, not to mention a hint of that brand of indignant pride for the primacy of the First Amendment in Our Way of Life, then it’s difficult to ignore this putrid lawsuit that Apple Computer has filed against several online journalists publishing their work on, well, Apple-boosting Web sites.

What transpired was this: before this past January’s Macworld Expo, several highly accurate rumors about then unannounced Apple products appeared at the rumor-based Web site Think Secret. Wasting little time, Apple quickly filed a lawsuit against the publisher of Think Secret and other “unnamed individuals,” ostensibly to smoke out the rumor sources but, in effect, attempting to put a chill on rumor activity in Apple fandom at large. (This particular lawsuit also happens to be just the latest in several similar actions the company has taken to protect its proprietary rights.)

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Too Much Is Not Enough

PowerBook 3400cMacintoshes in my apartment, right now: A 12-in. PowerBook G4, which is my principal machine, on which I do nearly all of my work. A 15-in. Titanium PowerBook G4, which I retired a year ago, but which I still use for miscellaneous tasks and as an impromptu file server. A Power Macintosh G4, aging but still remarkably serviceable and running Mac OS X Panther quite nicely — this is my girlfriend’s workhorse, but it too will soon retire as she makes plans to buy herself a PowerBook G4. And finally, tucked away someplace where my girlfriend can’t complain about it, an ancient PowerBook 3400c/180, a relic of the nineties with a busted motherboard that I’m toying with getting repaired just for the heck of it.

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ABCs for iPods

iPod ScreenOkay, I’m kind of fixated on iPods right now, so bear with me. Since getting my new iPod photo, I’ve been in turns pleased with the way the user interface has been rounded out with new features — rating songs right in the iPod, for example, is terrific and something I didn’t have in my old iPod — and also I’ve been a little frustrated that a few fundamental changes haven’t been put in place.

A friend of mine wishes that, when in shuffle mode, the U.I. would allow him to take the currently playing song and shift out of shuffle mode and into that song’s native album. That sounds handy and I’d be happy to see it, but not before I’d want to see the addition of something much more fundamental: the alphabet.

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Walk This Way

If you live in a town where most traveling to and from places is done by auto, you might not experience this phenomenon, but I see it every day: when I walk down the street I pass person after person plugged into a pair of white iPod headphones. In New York, this is almost a given feature of pedestrian life, a subtle way in which Apple has left a mark on the character of the city. The other day I started wondering how many iPods I actually see during, say, my walk from home to work in the morning, was it just a few that seemed like many, or was there really an iPod consumer on just about every block?

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Apple Is My Man

iPod photoHere’s some quick, back-of-the-envelope math to tally my recent Apple-related purchases: US$99 to renew my .Mac subscription for another year, US$79 for the iWork suite to get my hands on Keynote 2, US$79 for iLife ’05, US$19 for an extra iPod cable and US$29 for a Contour brand iPod case — both to complement the king of my recent Apple acquisitions, a brand new 40GB iPod photo. That last one goes for US$499 retail, which brings the total value of my spending to US$804, before tax.

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Keynote Schizophrenia

Keynote 2My copy of Apple’s iWork productivity suite arrived the week before last, just in time for me to get it installed and running before leaving for Nashville. I’ve done little more than install, open, and briefly monkey around with one of the templates in the suite’s Pages word processing and layout application, so the jury’s still out on it. But for the past ten days or so, I’ve been putting its other component, Keynote 2, through its paces.

In anticipation of a big meeting last Thursday, I used that program to prepare a major presentation, replete with about 20MB of screen shots and perhaps two dozen informational graphics constructed in Adobe Illustrator. Understanding that no software upgrade will ever embody that elusive ideal of perfectly balanced features, elegance, performance and ease of use, I have to say that I’m pleased with the upgrade, but also impatient to see the next revision.

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Do the Shuffle

iPod ShuffleHaving been, for nearly a week now, on the cusp of buying myself an iPod shuffle, I was reminded by my girlfriend that the principal mode of listening to music through this new device is antithetical to my own listening nature. That is, by habit, I still listen to songs in the mode of albums, and that I rarely will put iTunes in shuffle mode across my entire music library. When she said this, my reaction was first, “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” But then I thought about it for a moment, and I realized that she’s right. When I’m sitting here at my desk in our apartment, I’ll launch iTunes and play whatever albums I’ve recently acquired over and over — and over and over.

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Second Helpings at Macworld

Mac miniEverything that Steve Jobs announced in today’s Macworld Expo keynote address can be thought of as a kind of second helping. There’s a sequel, like the iLife ’05 suite of digital lifestyle products. There’s a second taste of Apple’s teasing foray into a full-productivity suite, in which the new version of Keynote is bundled with a brand new word processing program under the name iWork. There’s a new, lower-priced version of Apple’s winning digital music player called the iPod shuffle, which almost seems as if it’s being sold as an accessory to its larger siblings. And there’s the Mac mini, which is being pitched as either a replacement for a Windows PC or a companion to an existing Macintosh. In an unexpected way, you could even say that it’s a kind of sequel, too.

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Lose Your Head

The 2005 edition of Macworld San Francisco is next week, and the Mac-focused Web sites are all worked up, as is their wont, over various, rumored announcements that may or may not come during the keynote address. There’s talk of a “headless Mac” in the US$500 price range, and also murmurs (and circumstantial evidence) of a productivity suite called “iWork.” These completely unqualified murmurings have me a little worked up too.

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Keys to the Keyboard Kingdom

Matias Tactile ProLots of people have been singing the praises of the Matias Tactile Pro Keyboard, which bills itself as the resurrection of “the best keyboard Apple ever made.” According to Matias, the Tactile Pro is built from the same “premium keyswitch technology” behind the original Apple Extended Keyboard, which many longtime Macintosh users tend to remember with great affection. That one had a satisfying ‘clickety-clack’ quality that suggested solid construction and a definitive level of responsiveness to typing fingers. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say it had a very macho quality in comparison to today’s more cheaply made keyboards, which are often referred to as ‘mushy.’

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