Out with the Old, Intel with the New

Intel MacsOn the last day of 2005, I walked all the way from my apartment to the best Apple retailer in New York City, Tekserve, with a credit card burning a hole in my pocket. I was all ready to buy myself a brand new iMac G5, having settled on that model of new Macintosh as the big purchase that would help me take advantage of year-end tax write-offs.

But when I got there, I was frozen with inaction; for thirty minutes, I stood around debating whether I really needed a new computer at all. Ultimately, I decided I didn’t, that the iMac, while attractive, didn’t truly do anything all that different from my trusty 12″ PowerBook G4 — at least not enough to warrant the purchase. I realized I didn’t need the new machine, and to the amazement of my girlfriend, I left the store and returned home empty-handed.

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Eighty Years on Eight DVDs

The Complete New YorkerYou’d be hard-pressed to find an offline publication that’s had a more fitful and ambivalent attitude towards digital media than The New Yorker. I’m not talking about antipathy or outright scorn for online publishing; plenty of magazines openly eschew the Internet and, whether one agrees or not with that tact, at least those publications are resolute and unambiguous in their positions.

The New Yorker, on the other hand, seems intent on embracing the digital availability of its work, but in its actions, has demonstrated such an obvious hesitancy as to be maddening. Reportedly, internal debate over whether the magazine should have even a nominally substantive Web site was so heated, the site didn’t launch until early 2001, long after most of its peers had ventured online and well into the fallow period that followed the dot-com bust. Even then, its offering was generally stilted and paltry, with content from each issue available only during the week of its newsstand date; with some alterations, the same general dearth of online enthusiasm remains to this day.

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