in the absence of having anything else more interesting to say, i’ll just mention that apple released their new entry-level notebooks today.

read all about them, for they are interesting, and buy one if you can afford it, for they are a good value.

except for the black one. you basically pay $150 just to get a black one, instead of the standard white. that’s quite a style premium.

henry ford, who would give you a model t in any color as long as it was black, must be spinning in his grave about now.

it’s a style premium that i’m sure a lot of people will be paying, though. apple is going to sell these new macbooks, black and white alike, by the truckload, or bushel, or whatever measure you prefer.

apple has started to advertise the mac.

it’s about time.

if you haven’t seen them yet, head on over to the link above. they are marvelously done, with the slight exception of the “better” ad, which is not my favorite.

the rest of them, though, have a perfect tone. there’s a geeky guy (john hodgman from the daily show) who plays the part of the pc, and a younger, hipper guy (justin long, from ed and dodgeball, among others) who plays the part of the mac.

the way they set these up is brilliant. past apple ads have been condescending toward pc users, the very people they are trying to attract. these ads are set up so that the pc guy admits his own (or, by proxy, his computer’s own) mistakes. and the mac guy is always cute, never threatening or insulting, yet gets relatively obscure geeky points across in a humorous way.

whoda thunk that viruses, or networking, or the horrors of constant restarting, could be explained in such a humorous and cute way?

i saw the ads on tv last night for the first time, during “american idol” and “house”. i’d watched them all online before that, though.

and i would have seen them during “24” on monday night and would have been completely surprised by them, which would have been really cool. but kirk the asshat had to keep jumping up and running to do things during the commercials on “24”, which meant that i paused the show on the pvr and then hit the live button, thus missing the commercials.

kirk isn’t really an asshat. but isn’t that a great word? i’ve seen it online a few places recently. great word. so i just wanted to use it, even though it wasn’t an appropriate use.

anyway, my favorite is “network”, followed by “viruses” and “ilife”.

go watch them.

and then go find out all about why and how to switch to a mac

and then switch, dammit. it’ll be the best thing you ever did.

by the way, assuming that i actually post regularly, i’m going to start putting the entire post on the front page, rather than putting a teaser on the front page and then making you click to read the rest.

let me know what you think.

stuart at 36 degrees design, the designer of the template i used to make my widget for queerspace, has made a great new widget.

in his words, with capitals intact, “The widget has two sides, the first of which is an excel spreadsheet, filled with some meaningless data, and the back side is a word document, accessed by flipping the widget with the ‘i’ in the top right corner.”

now is that brilliant or what. perfect for nefarious work avoidance.

download it here.

after shedding innovation after innovation to try to make a 2006 ship date, the next generation of microsoft windows, named vista, has been delayed until january 2007.

at the earliest.

it’s kind of sad.
Continue reading “windows vista delayed” →

bad, bad news on this front:

microsoft windows vista will not support efi booting (intel-based macs only support booting via efi)

the new intel macs use efi to boot, and expectations were that vista would support efi to facilitate dual-booting of windows and os x. microsoft has decided to stick to their old bios scheme with 32-bit versions of vista. they may support it on the 64-bit version of vista, though they haven’t confirmed it.

the way i read this, that means that users of the new intel macs (which have a 32-bit chip) won’t be able to easily boot vista any more than they are currently able to boot xp.
Continue reading “screwed by gates?” →

it’s a heckuva(n) upgrade.

apple introduced a new mac mini yesterday.

a couple of questions, but for the most part, kudos to you, apple computer.
Continue reading “big day for the mac mini” →

much has been made of the fact that there are no viruses for the mac, in contrast with windows which has approximately 108*2 to the power of 5 viruses.

but all over the mac internets today is the story of the first mac “virus”.

relax. the virus score is still windows three million, mac 0. or, depending on your definition of what constitutes a virus, windows three million, mac 1.

but it’s an eye opening experience, reading about this. and i’ve learned a lot.
Continue reading “needless viral hysteria” →

microsoft is going to charge people $49.95 a year to keep their computers free of viruses, spyware, keyboard loggers, and all of the other crap that infects pcs which run the windows operating system.

you can read about it here.

amazing. release an operating system so riddled with errors and bad coding that semi-literate pre-teens the world over can hack it, and then charge people a yearly fee to fix what they should have gotten right in the first place.

and, sadly enough, i’m sure it will be an enormous revenue stream for them.

people. please. apple.

osx.portraitofakite.com.

this site transforms a browser window into a mockup of the mac os x experience. i pulled it up on my pc at work, and it actually gave me a moment of panic before i remembered it was just a browser window and i could alt-tab away from it. that’s how realistic it is.

it certainly isn’t perfect, but it’s a great place to get an small taste of the os x experience, which in my opinion is far superior to windows. ever wonder why i rattle on so much about how great macs are? try this link and get a small sample.

if apple was smart, they’d flesh this out and feature it on their site.

another day, another reason to be irritated with intuit.

i’ve documented my beefs with intuit, the makers of quicken and, i now remember, turbo tax, all over this site. here and here and here and here, to be specific. but i just must beat this dead horse one more time.
Continue reading “intuit still sucks” →

very busy day at work, so I’ll just give you a great link to go to instead.

it’s the story of one guy’s experience with pcs and why he switched to a powerbook.

i’m going to keep coming at you until you at least go to an apple store and try one out for yourself.

update: and mike rogers at blogactive.com also uses a mac, apparently. i knew i liked that guy for more than just being a kickass rabble-rouser.

the stevenote is over. and my wallet will stay [mostly] shut.

don’t get me wrong. from a certain perspective, it was a fantastic stevenote. apple has lots of new products that will fly off the shelves.

just [mostly] nothing i need.
Continue reading “i can breathe now” →

tomorrow is the stevenote at macworld.

is that total greek to you? or, should i say, geek?

let me explain.
Continue reading “tomorrow’s the day” →

here’s a link to a very comprehensive list of all of the maintenance procedures you should regularly perform to ensure that your windows pc is safe, secure, and runs well:

windows pc tune-up guide.

it also serves as a comprehensive list of all of the things i never have to waste time doing anymore, now that i’ve switched to a mac.

i know…sometimes i’m a smart ass. but, honestly, why are you still using that pc?

hot on the heels of yesterday’s post about our new hdtv comes news of a possible new mac mini-based home theater center from apple coming in january.

do i have good timing or what?

of course, several problems remain, not the least of which is that, even if the thing is relatively cheap, we won’t have the money right away. and it doesn’t matter anyway, because my rule is to never buy first generation anything–electronics, computers, cars, whatever. they always need time to really work the kinks out based on real-world product usage.

that just gives me time to save for the second-generation implementation of the thing, which i’m sure will be around in time for christmas 2006.

in the meantime, i’ll be happy with my hd-dvr.