MacBook Is Upon Us

This post is meant for yesterday, Tuesday.

I showed you a peek of it yesterday, and now here it is again: the MacBook (no Pro). Pardon the tardiness of this "Tuesday" post, but the baseball game was impromptu (still no Bonds home run) and didn't come back home until morning. I will have a Wednesday post up tonight though and will just breeze through yesterday's stuff. Anyway, that is not my laptop, I merely stole the picture from AppleInsider's look at the new laptop. So what's the point of this new laptop from Apple? As Apple puts it, "it's the most advanced affordable Mac notebook ever." I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this replaces the iBook line (and likely the 12-inch PowerBooks), if you know what those are like. I'd personally still get a MacBook Pro being a developer and gamer, but your average Joe will verily enjoy this creation. It still has WiFi, it's extremely portable with it's gorgeous 13.3" screen and 1.08" profile, you have Front Row for multimedia use on-the-go, it actually has both USB 2.0 and FireWire ports, and it packs quite a punch in power as well with a 1.83-2.0 Ghz Core Duo (the MacBook Pros have been bumped up to 2.0-2.16 Ghz, in turn), 60-80 GB hard drive, and 512 MB of RAM. How much is it? $1,100 to $1500 depending on how fancy you want it, but the black ones are the high-end ones. There are even a few perks, like built-in iSight, an easily replaceable hard drive, built-in Bluetooth support, magnetic latching, an infared port, and of course the MagSafe magnetic power adapter. What's with all those rumors claiming that it would release last Tuesday? Apparently, they were producing them early and announcing later so that they could have them immediately available in the Apple store, so those insiders weren't necessarily wrong, just misguided. Any drawbacks here? Well, the graphics chipset is integrated, which helps keeps costs down, but means that you're not going to want to play Half-Life 2 on it. It's really not a big deal if you're not a power user. So should you run out and buy one? Well, you should go to an Apple store and fiddle with one, and weigh the price value, and you may want to wait for reviews and other geeks to try and find any issues with them being the start of the MacBook line, but it looks pretty solid to me.

Wait, that's not all from Apple! Tuaw took a look at the improvements in iWeb 06, and they sound good, but still leave much to be desired. That seems to be a common theme for Apple though: just incremental improvements until the big releases. The Discovery Channel has added some programming to iTunes, but I'm not a big Discovery watcher. I'm sure at least one of you is. Shifting gears to Google, they've opened a new office in Sydney, and it looks almost as neat as their Palo Alto office. They've also opened the beta to their Google Notebook service, so I'll be trying that out and will let you all know how it is. Yahoo has totally redesigned their homepage, and thank God they didn't decide to just copy Google like everyone else has. It won't officially take effect until the Fall, but it is about time they update it. Lastly, Firefox has continued to gain ground as it gained almost as much usage as IE has lost popularity since January. Now we must wait and see if the release of Firefox 2.0 gives them a boost at all.



You cannot tell me that you don't like that Superman Returns poster, because it really is pretty neat. I'll admit, it looks a little CG, but what a nice shot. The Da Vinci Code will be out this weekend, but guess what? The reviews aren't so great! So far, in fact, it's dead rotten. Don't know what to make of all this, but of course Sony is still keeping the publicity machine running with the cast's grand entrance at Cannes, and some exclusive clips over at Yahoo Movies. Fantastic Four 2 has bumped itself up to a June 2007 release, presumably because the studio is afraid of the release of Transformers on July 4. That was probably a good choice for them since two big-budget movies from the same genre on the same weekend would just clash. Bryan Singer may be removing himself as director of Logan's Run should Superman Returns do well enough to warrant a sequel, as I'm sure it will. He'll probably still help out in a less time-intensive role, but this just goes to show how committed he is to Superman, and that probably bodes good things for the movie. Lastly, there's a new trailer for Santa Clause 3 (only for IE 6 users, I'm afraid), and it looks pretty bad. Martin Short must be getting desperate to have agreed to this one!

I'm going to kick it up a notch this week and go for some TMI Tuesday:

Note beforehand that I'm pretty inexperienced at this stuff, so don't take my answers to be advice for your life or anything like that.

1. Can you be in love with someone you don't trust?
No way! That would not work at all. I don't care how hot she is, that's an unacceptable turnoff.
2. If someone shoves you up against a wall while kissing you, your reaction is?
Neato. =P or, more likely: Really, God? Have I been that good lately?
3. Would you rather have a partner who has been around the block or a virgin?
Definitely a virgin. Don't comment and say, "yeah, right," because I'd probably be worried that I couldn't compare if I was with someone experienced, and I'm probably more geared towards waiting than rushing into things.
4. On a scale from 1-10, how controlling are you?
Probably a 7 or so. Sorry, that's just the way I was built! I try not to be, but being an officer in a couple of clubs and having to manage affairs at my apartment has certain side effects.
5. The old Dear Abby question... if you had to pick between kissing/affection/cuddling or sex/sexual touching and could only have one for the rest of your life, which would you pick?
Oh, that's so cruel! I'm going to go with the first one, but don't set it in stone or anything! I'm just a closet romantic like that.