Apple's New Notebooks

I know it's been a while, which is why I'm reporting on Apple's event, an event that happened nearly two weeks ago. There wasn't a whole lot of exciting news this week though, or last week, so I thought I'd talk about it some.

The MacBook Refresh

It's funny listening to podcasts after Apple's events to hear a consensus on an incorrect prediction. Apple announced a few new laptops (get all the details here), but not at the $800 price point people were speculating. Also weird, in my opinion, is that none of them support HDMI output yet (though you can get a converter to HDMI for what they do support, DVI) or Blu-ray (which is more of a licensing issue). You'd think that with dismal sales projections that Sony would be begging computer manufacturers to support it. Anyway, the new MacBooks are pretty slick:



The $1600 model has 2 GB of RAM (on a 1066 MHz FSB, but no idea what you'd do with one that fast), a 250 GB hard drive, a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo processor with a 3 MB L2 cache, a backlit keyboard, a 13.3" screen, and an nVidia GeForce 9400M. Yeah, it's real beefy. The $1300 model processor has 400 less MHz and its hard drive is 160 GB. Also nice is the aluminum body and glass, multi-touch trackpad (so you can do iPhone-like stuff on your computer). The MacBook really starts at $1000 though (slightly slower processor, half the RAM, and a 120 GB hard drive), but only comes in white. There are pricier Pro models though: $2000 will get you a 15.4" screen with the same specs as the $1600 one and $2400 will you a slightly faster processor, a 320 GB hard drive, and double the RAM. If you need a larger monitor though, $2800 will get you 17" and a marginally faster processor (and will cause your friends to question the size of your junk, most likely - I'm sorry, but it's true). Oh, and these all have superdives inside to play CDs and DVDs, iSights, mini display ports (supports DVI), 5 hour battery life, ExpressCard slots, digital input, firewire ports, ethernet ports, and Bluetooth. But wait, there's more! They're releasing a new Air in November with the same nVidia card, 2GB of RAM, and gorgeous screen, but a 120 GB hard drive instead and a 1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo with a SIX freaking MB L2 cache. As you would expect, all models are thinner than before, but I don't think anyone was bothered by their current thickness. They also have an upgrade on their supernaturally beautiful 24" CinemaDisplay monitors, which has a MagSafe power port (for your laptop), a USB port, and (of course) a dispaly port for $900 (that's more than the computer I'm writing this on costs).

He ended the presentation bragging about why Macs are doing well and razzing Microsoft, as always, but I thought that it was a strong lineup. They machines are cooler than I had predicted a couple of weeks ago, and I wouldn't say that they're really exciting but I do think they're well-built, well-designed, high-end computers. They're still a little over-priced, but I can't argue with the quality of this hardware. I think everyone was a little disappointed that they're not coping with the economy by releasing a netbook or even a $900 laptop. Can college students really afford these things? They're definitely targeting students with their marketing, but they're still not cheap. Why not drop the price on the current MacBook Air and keep it out there? Or heck, drop their MacBook Pro to be a cheap MacBook. Are they just trying to keep their image as a high-end computer manufacturer?

Samsung's Air Competitor

I love my Samsung TV, so I had to be a little excited by their entry into the ultra portable laptop market with the X360. It looks beautiful, it has an antibacterial keyboard (we've all seen how dirty our keyboards get), 10 freaking hours of battery life, it supports Bluetooth and Gigabit LAN, it has a great selection of ports (including HDMI and 3 USB and memory card), and the display is incredible. I really want one of these, and at $800 it's really not a bad deal. Now we just have to wait for it to actually be released! I think this may be one of Samsung's first laptops because I haven't heard of them being in the market before, but please correct me if I'm wrong.

Joost's Grand Re-opening

I talked about Joost when it launches as I got into the public beta rather early, and while I had high hopes for it I was ultimately disappointed by its heavy software and un-intuitive interface, though the video quality was superb. Well, one of those things changed: all its content is now available straight from your web browser. The interface for browsing the site still is not as good as Hulu, and its content selection could use some help, but it has a pretty decent number of movies (including The Fifth Element) and it's still snappy, which is impressive considering the video quality. I hope its content base grows bigger, and I wouldn't be dissatisfied if it just showed a large number of ad-supported movies and left television to Hulu.

Speaking of Hulu though, they've been showing the season premiere of 30 Rock a week in advance of its actual premiere on network television. I thought that was really awesome and bodes well for old media adapting to new media, in my opinion.

Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 is Out

The Mozilla Foundation released Beta 1 of Firefox 3.1, and it looks to have some nice improvements. At the top of the improvement list is the TraceMonkey Javascript engine, which makes it easier for it to process Javascript-laden websites (which is pretty common in this post Web 2.0 era). It also has improved tab switching behavior and a visual tab switcher with graphical thumbnails, which I'm guessing is an upgrade from what's at the far right in the tabs row. I'm really looking forward to the smart session restore though, which allows you to micro-manage what it will restore better on boot-up or after a crash. For being a 0.1 version change, I think it has some pretty solid improvements - possibly the best of any 0.1 version change they've previously released. I can't wait till its ready for prime time!

Closing Notes

It's past my bedtime and I'm on call this week so it would be wise for me to get my rest. Here's just a few final items real quick:

Oprah has endorsed the Kindle! My confidence was never low for our performance in Q4, but with Oprah's army turned on to the Kindle
I feel even better about it. Maybe Amazon will have a section for Oprah's book club? That's not insider information, I have no idea what the Kindle team is working on (I don't think they're even in Seattle).

CNet has a sobering list of tech layoffs if you want to see how this economy has affected techies. It's not pretty, but it could be much worse so I think we should definitely be thankful that we still have work out there and many of us still have our jobs.

The Android platform is now fully open source! I think that's pretty cool, and literally the exact opposite of Apple's stance with the iPhone, it seems.

Lastly, Gizmodo has a list of gadgets that give infinite pleasure (get your mind out of the gutter, not that kind of pleasure), and it's just really fascinating. I could totally get into the one of bubble wrap that you can just keep popping forever.

Have a great week everyone, and pray that I survive my first week of on call!

Yahoo's Blue Bar

No single news item today really grabbed me, so I thought I'd just talk a bit about the new blue Yahoo search bar. What's so great about it? That's just the thing: nothing. Let's compare it to the Google search bar, shall we?


I could've sworn that there was a time when Yahoo was actually creative. Granted, this isn't quite as direct a knock off as their Yahoo Mail chat thing or their changes to Yahoo Maps, but when I saw it I immediately was reminded of the Google search bar. More importantly is that I don't know why they even care to make such a UI tweak. It just makes it look a little more like Launch, or Yahoo Music or whatever they want to call it nowadays. I really think that Yahoo needs to get its butt in gear. They're kind of just hanging out there as a minor competitor to Google, and they haven't been on the offensive in a long time. By being on the offensive, I mean that they don't have any application that makes them better than Google, they just minimally compete. Hell, maybe they are just coming up with the same ideas but taking longer on them. Still, that's a problem. This blue bar might as well just be a blue screen of death if they don't put forth a better effort.

On the iPhone front, Apple has announced that iPhone users will be required to have accounts with the iTunes music store. Why? No one really knows quite yet. Could it be for synching data to their servers or something? Because that would be interesting, but scary privacy-wise. Even then, why require it? You're just complicating the release process. Even more interesting is that cell phone retailer Pure Mobile is selling unlocked iPhones to work on any carrier. They're a legit service, so it doesn't seem like a con, but how is this possible? Maybe it's only for Canadians? It would have to be legal, or else Apple would've already sued them. It's especially fishy though because Apple said that only AT&T and Apple stores would sell the iPhone, or at least in America.

Something I didn't really mention about the WWDC keynote is that Steve Jobs pimped out EA as providing more games to Macs now that they're on Intel chips, but it turns out that they're really just EA PC games running in Cider. And what, pray tell, is Cider? It turns out that it's a portability engine that adds a layer to your Mac to allow you to run Windows games on it. Hence, these EA games aren't ports, and won't be running natively. I'm not even a Mac user and I think that's lame. What a total cop out from the largest video game studio in the world.

Sorry, there's just a lot of Apple news today. Ars Technica tried out the new 17" MacBook Pros featuring Santa Rosa chips, and it turns out that they're really not much of an improvement over the last iteration of the 17" MacBook Pro (Revision B). It still costs nearly 3 grand, and it's still a solid machine, but you just get a faster FSB, a slighter faster clockspeed, and a little bit more battery life. So much for the hype behind Santa Rosa. Ars Technica also tried out Safari for Windows, and they weren't impressed. I'm glad that I never got it.

In an effort to be more sexy, eBay has opened up its APIs in beta for eBay, PayPal, and Skype for third-party development. I wonder if uShip is using this? In any case, it's an interesting move from one of the few companies to survive the dot-com boom. At least they're making the effort to adapt, but it's still restricted, and one would hope that that changes once it's out of beta.

I think that the Business 2.0 list of who matters is kind of funny because it has Bill Gates at #41 but Digg creator Kevin Rose at #6, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg at #14, Engagdget founder Peter Rojas at #9. Yeah, that list isn't skewed at all.

It looks like Live Free or Die Hard isn't too hard for teenagers, because it has earned a PG-13 rating. There's no doubt that this will rake in more money for it, but it doesn't bode well for the quality of the movie. Not that PG-13 movies are usually bad, but this movie's action can't be too violent (it's an action movie, for Pete's sake!) and it can't be too dark of a plot either. Oh, and kiss sexual inuendo "goodbye" (except for a "brief sexual situation").

David Goyer has decided that his next project will be re-imagining The Invisible Man. Doesn't he have a better movie to do? Not to knock the original movie, but I'm just tired of re-makes and sequels.

AICN has a review of Transformers from someone whose background seems to match mine with the franchise, and I swear it sounds like they had an orgasm during the movie or something. So it would appear that the movie is more than just eye candy, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed!

Now for the Wednesday Mind Hump:

1. Have you ever cut or burned yourself while cooking?
Almost every time I cook, yeah! I just often cut my thumb a bit when I'm cutting onions.

2. Have you ever put in a wrong ingredient in a dish (sugar instead of salt, for example)?
I was boiling eggs once just to eat them like that, and I accidentally sprinkled MSG on one instead of salt because my room mate's mother had given him a shaker of MSG (they were Vietnamese). That was an interesting experience.

3. Have you ever dropped, or otherwise ruined, a dish just before serving it? Bonus points if you had a large number of people waiting to eat it.
Not that I can recall.

4. In case you aren't a cook - Have you ever had a restaurant make a klutzy move that affected your meal? Tell us about it!
Last Friday, I went to dinner with some other interns, and one of my friends ordered fish and chips, but the waitress dropped them on her way to him. Then, when she went to get a new plate, the cook dropped it. Third time was a charm though, and he got it free (plus a free pitcher of beer).

Zudeo Rivals YouTube?

I didn't talk about the beta release of Zudeo (from the makers of Azureus) yesterday because I personally didn't feel it was that big of a deal. However, Wired seems to be rather enamored by it so I felt that I just had to speak against them here. Zudeo is little more than a respository for torrents. In other words, you can't watch videos inside your browser, you must download Azureus first and use it as an intermediary. I'll admit that it's cool that you can get HD quality video and that you can start watching a video before it's done, but it relies on the Java Runtime Environment, so it's bound to devour RAM, which is why I never got it and I'm not going to right now. When it comes down to it, how many people are going to download a program to watch a video on Zudeo because it's higher quality than its YouTube counterpart? The mass appeal of YouTube was that it was so easy to publish, share, AND view content. If you're at the office or at a library or something, you can't just install Azureus. If they were to produce a thin, web-based client, then they'd be in business. Until then, my verdict is that this won't dent YouTube anymore than Stage 6, which also toutes high quality video and I think has a much better site. It does require you to install their web player, but at least you can still watch the videos from within your browser. I don't see how Zudeo is much different from browsing around on Mininova, and I don't think it'll spread very easily to the mainstream.

Let's start with the Apple stuff. Reliable sources claim that Apple is readying a 12" MacBook Pro, likely in the $1700-$1800 price range. I know that people would really be interested in that, though I personally think that any smaller than like 14" widescreen is too small. The other thing from Cupertino is that they've apparently acquired a video asset management firm called Proximity that basically allows artists and producers to easily manage their work. Some speculate that this is related to iTV, and I'm sure others think it's to spruce up Final Cut Pro, but it looks like it's targeted at the high-end market (like companies offering videos on iTunes), not regular consumers. Technology Review interviewed C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup about the problems of programming today and Stroustrup actually gets rather defensive when C++ is challenged by the interviewer. It's not a bad read, but I still think that it's a little idealistic to claim that C++'s verbosity and tight syntax rules don't hurt programmer efficiency.


That picture comes from the new Will Ferrell flick, Blades of Ice. Just thought it was kind of quirky. Anyone, not much else in movies. I finally got around to seeing the trailer for Blood and Chocolate, and it looks pretty bad. At least Evanescence finally has a movie its crappy music actually fits. There's a much better horror trailer for The Host, which I believe is a Japanese film, and those Eastern horror flicks are always the best so I'm looking forward to this one. The only other thing is that Don Cheadle has finally gotten the wheels turning on his biopic of jazz legend Miles Davis, which he had been working on getting the rights to for 6 years and now he's commissioned some great writers to work on the screenplay. I know, I know, too many musical biographies, but maybe Miles Davis has a really interesting story.

Before I conclude I just wanted to plug this article about cluttering. It's not a very well-known condition, so I hope to educate people about it who mistake me for a stutterer. I'm still working past it, obviously, and hopefully this will help some of you understand me a little better.

I'm going for the Ten on Tuesday meme this week:

10 Things You Love About the Holidays
10. Holiday spirit
9. Fresh food for four weeks (plus what I take back with me in January)
8. Christmas carols
7. Bowl games
6. Hot New Year's Eve bashes
5. Christmas sweets!
4. Cold weather
3. Exchanging gifts
2. Taking a break from school work
1. Seeing family

Phones for a Few Bucks?

Reuters is reporting the head honcho of Google as claiming that cell phones should become free in the near future, when that's not exactly what he said. Still, at least they were on the right track in reporting it. He believes that phones should become heavily subsidized by way of on-phone adverts (texts and photos), which I have a couple of thoughts on. First of all, how can you make it feasible to transmit pictures to a phone? This satellite Internet crap is slow enough as it is. Second of all, if you're giving away phones that cost hundreds of bucks for even a few bucks, don't you have to show someone a good bit of advertising? Some sites online are bad enough, and I think there's a certain point at which people tire of advertising. With your phone, you want to be able to easily make phone calls, and I think people are willing to pay a premium for reliability and convenience associated with that. That's why the pay model (minus subscription-induced subsidies) works so well. No one would pay to use Google because that'd be annoying and pricey (I'd imagine), and obviously not everyone wants to pay for television (hence antenna-accessible networks) so advertising works there, but I've never heard of someone not getting a phone because it was a bit pricey because they consider it to last them a good while and be extremely useful. The three things you always leave the door with are wallet, keys, and phone, and if the first two don't have ads strapped to them then why should the third? Maybe Schmidt is right, maybe it is the future, but I just don't buy it quite yet.

Think Secret has discovered that the newly released Core 2 Duo laptops from Apple pack a secret feature: 802.11n draft 1.0 compatibility. No word on driver availability for this functionality in the near future, but the factor of 10 speed increase on this new standard would indeed be a delightful surprise to customers if it ends up being unlocked with the proper drivers and support, which isn't guaranteed by a longshot since it's just for a draft of the upcoming standard. I ran into this list of courses that nerds would have fun with, and I thought I'd plug it simply because I've taken a few of these (or heard good things) and they really are great choices for the nerd in you. Google Earth added a neat new feature: historical maps. They're not all that detailed, but fun stuff for World History enthusiasts, I'm sure. Photo editing enthusiasts will really love Pixer, which allows you to edit your pictures via the nifty Web 2.0 application. It's obviously not as feature-rich as something like Photoshop or even Paint .NET, but it's great for the quick things. Lastly, MTV has redone their site and I just wanted to point it out for the sake of what not to do when re-designing a site: moving backwards. I wonder if the designers were thinking that it would be a great idea to make the whole site Flash so that it'd be laggy as Hell, force you to watch videos from startup (and always have it off to the side, mind you, to kick your RAM in the butt), and then pop up an ad whenever you click a link.

In case you didn't catch The Simpsons trailer yesterday, don't worry because you didn't miss much. You can see it over here, but it gives us pretty much nothing. What's much more interesting is this extremely early review of Shrek the Third. The fact that it's good in such an early stage is definitely a good sign, though I'm skeptical as to whether they'll add in enough to make it as good as the first two as the reviewer suggests it's lacking since it's already storyboarded out. An early review of A Night at the Museum wasn't nearly as good though and claims that the movie was pretty disappointing and very much lacking in big laughs.

I thought I'd end here with a rather funny Post Secret postcard that most guys wouldn't own up to, but they know they're guilty of:



Now for some Monday Madness:

1. From ch'i:
If you could only read one blog every day- which one blog would be on your daily list?
Unfortunately, many of my faves have been on a sort of hiatus, so I'll go with Delicious Days (link on right sidebar).

2. From kat:
What do you do to de-stress from a hectic day?
Dance and/or sleep =P

3. From paxil princess:
What is your favorite piece of clothing to wear in the winter?
This nice brown, stretch merino sweater my sis-in-law-to-be got me from Banana Republic a couple of years ago.

4. From sherle:
Do you prefer discussing problems with a sibling, a parent, a significant other, a psychologist, or a total stranger?
None of the above: a close friend.

5. From trista:
How long have you been blogging?
I believe I started in December 2004.

6. From lisa e:
Which side of the bed?
Left side =P Thought I have a twin bed here in Austin.

7. From elton:
How often do you pig out when you eat?
Yay, they used one of my questions! Maybe once a week or so. It depends on the week, but it's usually on the weekend if I do.

8. From karen:
Do you watch the space shuttle launches?
Nope. Astronomy just isn't my bag.

9. From dawn:
What's your favorite leisure-time activity?
Other than sleeping? Probably dancing, I suppose, because it's so social.

10. From sherle:
When is the last time you said, 'I love you' and to whom?
What about hugs? Who is the last person you hugged?
Not sure. I probably said it to my friend Jennyfer in the past few days though. Maybe I said it to my mom yesterday? Last person I hugged was my friend Raquel at TLD practice last night.