the apple insider website is predicting that the mac mini is dead.

it’s probably true. the website has been pretty accurate as of late, and this rumor makes sense. the mini hasn’t been updated in ages, i don’t think apple sells as many of them as they thought they would, they don’t have much of a profit margin, and they probably cannibalize sales of the new apple tv.

still.

it was the mini that made me return to apple, after a five-year-or-so hiatus on the dark, dark pc side of things. and if this rumor is true, it saddens me a bit.

the mini isn’t a very cost-effective purchase if you run the numbers. you can buy an imac for the cost of a mini + display + keyboard +mouse, and get a better, faster computer in the deal. it makes more sense if you are reusing your old display, or hooking it up to a tv.

but the truth is in the pudding, to mix a metaphor. go to an apple store, count the minis you see on display, and compare that to the number of imacs you see on display. there’s a reason for that. it’s gotta be supply and demand, pure and simple. if apple sold tons of minis and made money on them, you’d see tons of them out on display in the store.

if the mini goes away, there will be a gaping hole in the low end of the mac product line.

expect to see it filled.

with something, i hope, really fantastic.

at least not yet, i’m not.

i know–heresy.

i have my reasons.

the apple tv is a not-unattractive box that wirelessly connects your computer to your widescreen hdtv. that allows you to listen to your itunes music, and watch your itunes videos, all on your tv. pretty cool, huh?

really i think it is pretty cool.

and i have a widescreen hdtv, and i have a mac, and i have itunes with lots of music and even some purchased video (notably, season one of wonder showzen). and i recently cancelled my cable television subscription, retaining only a 768k broadband internet connection.

so what’s stopping me?

i went to the fifth avenue apple store and looked at one, that’s what. and i watched a few seconds of lost, and a few seconds of the incredibles. and it looked like crap. i’m no videophile, but there were noticeable blocky areas and jaggies and dark indiscriminate areas and i’m not paying for that.

and i’m too honest to limewire content. it feels like stealing to me, even if there’s a good argument that it’s not. plus it takes forever, it takes up enormous gigs of hard disk space, and then you watch it once or twice and have to figure out what to delete and what to keep. too much trouble.

and i am far too lazy to rip my own video content from dvds to watch it later. i honestly don’t see the point in that. and all that crap would still litter my hard drive. it’s much easier just to put the netflix dvd in the player, and send it back when done.

and you can’t watch video on the internet. oh, i know. you can hack your apple tv so it can play other video formats, and run joost to watch internet tv, and all that. but apple tv doesn’t do that out of the box, and i’m not a hacker. i want a solution that works, not one that i have to fiddle with and void my apple tv warranty to get going.

the apple tv music streaming would be nice, and i’m sure kirk would love to have a break from the constant drone of npr, which i listen to non-stop since there’s no tv to watch. but the truth is, just like i’m too lazy to rip video, i’m too lazy to rip my cds too. i would probably listen to more music if i organized it digitally. but i have hundreds and hundreds of cds, and the thought of ripping all of it is just too daunting. and the vinyl? my god, the vinyl. and the cassettes.

ugh.

some weekend i’ll get up the gumption and set up an assembly line of sorts and rip all the cds i own. and i’ll selectively make mp3s out of some of the vinyl, at least the stuff that’s ultra-rare. that day is coming soon. but music is different than movies and tv. music, i’ll listen to many, many times. it’s worth the time investment to digitally organize it.

movies? tv? i can count on one hand the number of movies i watch repeatedly.

and don’t tell me to buy an xbox, or a slingbox, or a media center pc, or whatever. i could care less about all the tinkering i’d have to do to get those things running. i want an apple solution, because i know it will just work easily, and work right. that’s my prerogative as a consumer, to wait for what i want and do without until i get it, even if that’s never.

i want democracy tv, or the equivalent, to work through my apple tv.

my point is this: at some point, i’m betting the apple tv will be a conduit for all manner of online video content. some of it will be crappy and free, and some of it may be decent and free, and some of it may be hd content from the itunes store.

when i have better apple tv video options provided by apple, they will get $299 or $499 or whatever from me. i hope i don’t have to resort to buying a mac mini to hook up to the tv. that would be an ideal solution, but it feels like expensive overkill.

for now i’m taking a raincheck.

and if, as i suspect is true, the apple tv will only ever officially be tied to purchased video content at the itunes store?

i might still buy an apple tv, if the content looked good and the price was right.

and if it was rental video content at the apple store?

sold. one apple tv in jamie’s living room.

you just lost an hour, if you’ve forgotten.

at work, it’s a major headache. microsoft somehow botched the transition to the new congress-improved version of daylight savings time. so we have to go back and reschedule outlook appointments for a certain time period, because microsoft couldn’t figure out the transition. and everyone who booked conference rooms for meetings may lose those conference rooms, because the time didn’t move properly, so someone else may have booked the room for the time slot they needed, in the interim.

among other glitches. geez louise, those guys are idiots.

at home, i have a mac. got up this morning, the time was displayed properly in all applications, and everything just worked.

tell me again why you don’t use a mac?

update: in addition to all the other issues, after the microsoft “fix” of outlook, all of my “all-day” appointments (the reminders at the top of each day) now span two days. microsoft is truly an idiotic company.

so out of boredom i made an anonymous post to a thread on the “fake steve jobs” site.

wherein i hypothesized that fake steve was john gruber, of daring fireball fame.

it’s an idle guess, but one that makes a bit of sense. to me there’s always been an east coast vibe behind the west coast veneer. and john gruber has been putting up a lot of links to the “fake steve” site. the writer of the site would have to be a knowledgeable mac insider, and gruber certainly qualifies.

i’m probably way wrong. i don’t think that whoever fake steve is would have approved my anonymous comment if it was on target.

or would he? or she? hmmmm.

nevertheless, it’s a fun guessing game about a very fun site i check out regularly.

the zune is microsoft’s answer to the ipod, and it’s coming at you sometime in november.

if you do a bit of research, you’ll see that the ipod’s dominance is probably not at all threatened by this ill-conceived electronic gadget. microsoft will sell quite a few at the expense of the market share of ipod’s comeptitors, but not at the expense of ipod’s own market share.

which is about 76% of portable music players. an unheard-of market share.

anyway, microsoft’s latest salvo in the ipod wars are the tv commercials revealed here at youtube. microsoft is trying really hard to be hep, and down with the younguns, and all.

i’m sure they’ll flock to the stores after seeing dog scratch. nothing to put you in the mindset of spending $250 on a brown (!) music player than watching a dog nose its privates.

whatever.

you’d be much happier spending $29 on a refurbished ipod shuffle. that’s what i did today.

last night i tried to go to the iTunes music store, but couldn’t connect. i kept getting an error message.

what? my mac isn’t perfect?

no, of course not. we had an issue with the isync in kirk’s account that was particularly vexing. but other than that, i’ve had no problems and have done little to no maintenance. 99.9% of my time on the mac has been completely productive.

sometimes i kind of miss pc maintenance–spending hours tracking down a device driver conflict, or manually removing a particularly insidious piece of spyware. the detective work was kind of fun.

yeah, right.

anyway, i was aghast when i couldn’t connect to the itunes store. thought that there was a problem with my mac. fiddled a bit (though there’s not much “under the hood” to fiddle with, to be honest) and nothing worked.

today, i read that the problem is with time warner cable, and nothing to do with apple.

well, of course it isn’t.

in other news, it might be obvious to everyone but me, but i didn’t know about this fun mac activity that i just discovered:

» download a .midi file. you can start looking here. there are .midi files for every song you can imagine.

» open garage band and drag the file into the open window for the new file. it instantly populates with all the tracks and all the instruments.

» fiddle and change the instruments and sounds to your heart’s content. speed it up. slow it down. add a sound loop. hook up a microphone and sing along. send it to itunes and burn it on a cd.

instant rock star, and you don’t have to know how to play musical instrument number one. hell, i can’t keep time with a stick and a tin can. garage band sat on my computer for a year, and i never bothered with it. now i can’t stay out of it.

of course, you could do something constructive for work or whatever with microsoft office too, if you have to. i do that once in a while.

but mostly, i just have a blast, do fun stuff, surf the internet without fear of viruses and spyware and keyboard loggers and such, and generally enjoy myself. when i get a few more songs done, i may just post them for download, so you can see for yourself how easy it is to make good music, if you have some talent. and make music that’s a step above mediocre, if like me you have no talent at all.

i enjoy my mac much more than i used to enjoy a pc.

i’ve written before on the non-random nature of my ipod shuffle.

i have an 512mb ipod shuffle, and itunes loads songs randomly onto it. the shuffle has a small capacity (about 120 songs) and i have thousands of songs in itunes, so i should get a good variety of music. problem is, i’d swear that my ipod plays favorites, because certain songs get loaded onto the ipod all the time.

and, further, the ipod shuffle itself has a shuffle feature, so that the randomly loaded songs should be played in random order.

it doesn’t though, i swear. certain songs are loaded every time, and those same certain songs are randomly picked every time i switch the damn thing on.

back in july of 2005, when i first wrote about this, the earworm song was “money back guarantee” by the five man electrical band. it got so bad that i deleted the song from my itunes playlist.

my ipod shuffle’s current obsession is “hallelujah” by leonard cohen. a much better obsession, to be sure, but nevertheless one gets tired of a steady diet of mr. cohen.

i’ve taken steps to minimize the damage–i don’t put the ipod shuffle on shuffle. in other words, i don’t randomize the random loading of songs anymore.

all this is prompted by today’s wall street journal article about one man’s quest to get to the bottom of the randomness.

he’s a computer science lecturer and a random numbers expert, and he’s bought an ipod and promises to get to the bottom of all this.

good luck, dude.

i’m betting the ipod wins the battle.

supposedly apple is working on their version of a cell phone–unofficial name: iphone. i’d love to have one. not just because i’m an apple fanatic, but because i’m sure it would just work.

unlike my current sony ericcson z520a phone, which i’ve quit carrying around because it constantly takes pictures of the inside of my pocket, thanks to the external camera button that you can’t disable. and same said button falls right where your finger naturally does when you hold the phone to talk, so in order to talk to someone and not simultaneously take random photos, i had to retrain myself in how to hold a cell phone.

very usable. thanks sony.

anyway, while i’m waiting on steve jobs to bless me with an iphone and solve my problem, here’s an absolutely hysterical review of an sprint/lg phone with a built-in mp3 player, via daring fireball. evidently sony ericcson fired the designer of my phone, and he went to work for sprint or lg, or maybe both.

here’s a sample, from the article:

Turn on the phone. Go into the MP3 player again. There’s no signal, and, guess what? You can’t get into to the MP3 player unless you can establish a network connection to the Sprint Music Store. Even to play your own MP3s!

OK, so this is an MP3 player that doesn’t really work on the subway and won’t work on a plane, the two places I’m most likely to listen to MP3s. Not very appealing.

A little bit more exploring and I discovered that there’s another entirely separate MP3 player on this device. It’s hard to find. You have to go to Tools, then Memory Card, then to the Music folder, and another MP3 player starts up which you can use to listen to your MP3s. For this player, you don’t have to be on the network, so it works in the subway, but—get this—the minute you close the clamshell, the music stops! I am literally not making this up. There are two bad MP3 players on this device, neither one of which remembers where you’re up to, neither one of which can be used on the subway with the phone folded in my pocket, neither one of which has a fast-forward feature.

I have literally never seen such a useless MP3 player.

great piece of writing. and the funniest part is that sprint gave the guy the phone for free, so he’d use it and blog about it.

i have no idea how any of these companies stay in business.

well, apple did it. they showed me the gadget that was guaranteed to get my wallet out.

next year. damnit.

today was the stevenote–the day when steve jobs calls the media and announces the new apple products. it’s a highly anticipated event which rarely disappoints, and today’s event was no exception. i like following the apple announcements, though i rarely actually purchase any of the stuff. my only apple products are a mac mini, an apple wireless keyboard, and an ipod shuffle.

and the shuffle really doesn’t count, because kirk got it for free for filling out surveys.

i’m a pretty lousy apple fanboy.

but the one thing i really wanted was a way to wirelessly hook up my computer and my tv. that way, i can watch video content on the tv from the computer in one room, while kirk is in the other room actually on the computer, surfing the net or whatever.

we could buy a second computer, but that’s expensive and wasteful. enter itv.

engadget has a pretty good writeup of it. basically, it’s a little box that plugs into your tv, in my case an hdtv, and then you can watch the content from your computer on your tv.

content that you’ve bought from the apple store, or gotten from wherever. how cool is that?

problem is, it’s not shipping yet. it won’t ship until 1q07. that’s months from now, so the wallet will stay in the pocket. i have a feeling he announced this new gizmo to put pressure on the movie studios to get on board his new movie download service, which has disney movies only at this point.

and the movies aren’t hd quality, though i’d bet they will be by the time the little itv thingy is on the market.

the other stuff he talked about, mainly new ipods, are cool things, but mainly just the same old ipods with more capacity for less money. i like my shuffle just fine–it does what i need for it to do, which is play music while i’m on a machine at the gym.

so apple will get some more of my money.

just not yet.

how hard could it be to give dell your money?

harder than you’d imagine. i’d forgotten how senseless and confusing the dell website was, until i stumbled across this blog post.

surely this is exaggerated, right? it can’t be that hard?

well, i’ll be damned if he isn’t right. i went back to browse the dell site, having not been there for a while, and the dell site is a logistical nightmare. one more reason (as if you needed more) to buy a mac. the apple website is clear, as is the pricing. when i bought from dell, i was never sure i was getting the best deal, and i always just assumed that even though the price was decent, someone else was getting a better deal.

i hate all that coupon crap–even though dell says they are moving away from that, i’m still suspicious.

i’m going to keep at you, dear reader, until you switch. you’ll be glad you did.

the online apple store was closed for an hour or so earlier today.

sending mac fans everywhere into paroxysms of delight. usually this means there’s a new product being sold. was it a new ipod? the video ipod? upgraded computer hardware? something no one had guessed as yet?

unfortunately for them (and me, by proxy) it seems to be nothing more than routine maintenance.

we’re a sad lot sometimes, apple fans are. but when the products are usually so good, it’s easy to get caught up in the hype.

in microsoft windows vista, that is.

take a look for yourself. it has to be seen to be believed.

i’m sure this will be fixed before this supposed windows xp replacement is released. right? right?

please explain to me again why you aren’t using a mac.

there’s rumors on the internets that apple is killing the shuffle as soon as current inventories (supposedly high) are depleted.

i hope these rumors aren’t true. the shuffle is the only ipod i own, and i love it. it’s perfect for the gym, and the damn thing is indestructible. i have a feeling that i’m the exception, and that most ipod shuffles are owned by people who have another “big” ipod, which makes this a curious marketing decision by apple.

i hope this rumor isn’t true.