Do or die time, Apple

Ahem.

I have had around $2500 set aside specifically to use for buying my first Mac, a MacBook Pro (witness the iPhone “halo effect” in action) for 5 months now. Anyone who has been reading this blog has seen me predicting them for a while now. I was all set to buy one, had already gotten a quote on a BTO model with lots of accessories, and then boom! The rumors – some of them seemingly credible – started coming out about imminent hardware updates (see here and here for early examples).

Not being one to blow $2000+ on an outmoded architecture, I said I’d give Apple till the holiday season to announce new MBPs. If nothing was forthcoming, I’d look elsewhere. Then I said I’d give them through the launch of the i5/i7s. Then I said I’d wait until the MacWorld Expo. Then I said I’d wait until after the iPad launch.

5 months ago, I didn’t *need* a new laptop, but I *need* one now. Tradeshow season is starting, and I need a mobile workhorse. My aging Windows XP HP laptop is choking some of the editing software updates I’ve installed. I’m lucky to get 2 hours out of my battery, and I fly the 6-hour cross-country BOS to LAX route on a monthly basis. Meanwhile, In the past 5 months, I’ve grown to really enjoy Windows 7 on my desktop PC. Sony, Asus, and HP have all put out some very attractive, very competitive, very powerful i5 and i7 laptops.

If Apple doesn’t launch something this month, I’m out – Sony or Asus will have my business. There’s no excuse for Apple to go almost a year between hardware refreshes. They’re playing in the big leagues – they need to be updating every 6 months, at least. Release early, release often. Iterate. Evolve and improve.

It took Apple 15 years to convince me to switch to a Mac – and it only took 6 months for their policy of absolute secrecy on their product roadmap to give Microsoft and PC manufacturers the chance to win me back.

iPad Gut Reactions

For weeks now (really, years) the tech world has been ablaze with rumors of a pending Apple tablet device. Each possible aspect, every leak and every “leak,” every business move by Apple that could be connected to the fabled device, every hint of a whiff of an scent of a specification has been analyzed a thousand times over by every tech geek, Mac fanboy, financial analyst, and casual observer the world around. Hell, even I chipped in a few thoughts on the device a few months back (mostly “shut up and bring me new Macbook Pros!”).

So now that the specs have been revealed and the device is available for all to see, what’s my gut reaction?

Meh.

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An open letter to Democrats

Enough, already

What is it with indie films and their incessant need to mix in music by these obscure bands that no one has ever heard of and then beat us over the head with it? Is it not enough to simply *use* the music? To feature the song in your intro and prominently in some pivotal scene? Why must the characters engage in an existential debate about the meaning of the song and how it changed their lives and on and on, knowing full well that 99% of the audience has never heard of them and has NO idea what the characters are talking about (even though 80% of the audience will, as of tomorrow, be experts on the band, their history, their influences, and will profess to have been fans of theirs “before they went mainstream”). It’s stupid, it’s trite, and it’s obvious. Grow up, indie directors: we know you were a really great bassist in high school, but you’re never going to be a rockstar, and Rolling Stone is never going to hire you as a writer, no matter how amazing that characters’ analysis was of the meaning of the Editor-in-Chief’s favorite song was in that movie you made a few years ago that grossed like $10 million in the box office.

Seriously, just stop. You don’t have to stop using the music, but the next time two characters engage in that kind of discussion about some rando indie band that will immediately drop their label and sign with one of the big studios a week after the movie comes out (the soundtrack grossed twice as much as the film, and indie musicians need their Escalades too, you know) the next time they do it I’m going to walk straight out of the theater, drive home, log onto iTunes, and post a rant just like this one as a 1-star review of their (now iTunes front-paged) debut album on their soon-to-be-former label.

Forget the Slate; how about new MacBooks in January?

I think it’s funny that so many tech journals are buzzing about the possibility of the Apple tablet (rumored to be codenamed “Slate”) announcement event in January, when there’s a far more likely main attraction to this event than that.

I’ve been predicting an update to Apple’s MacBook Pro line for over 4 months now. The line is due for a refresh, and I thought for certain it would happen with the latest round of releases back in October. I was wrong – that update was confined strictly to the iMac line and the regular MacBooks, but I’ve been predicting a January launch for new Pros ever since.

In the meantime, Intel has released the Clarksfield (Core i7) quad core and announced they will release their new Arrandale dual core on January 7th, 2010 – exactly 2 years to the day after they released their previous major mobile processor family, Peryn. Keep in mind that after that upgrade, on 07 January 2008, Apple took just about 7 weeks to release their new family of MacBooks, in late February 2008.

The integrated GPU on the Arrandale alone is expected to create huge performance leaps, and given that the MBP is marketed as a media editing powerhouse, I’ve got to believe Apple will want to get those into their top-end machines ASAP. The fact is, Apple needs to either put out a quad-core MacBook Pro to justify the high top-end prices in the current lineup and remain competitive – especially given that you can get the very sexy (MacBook lookalike) HP Envy with a quad core for $1800 – or they need to add some other form of WoW factor to bring back the justification of such a high price tag. MBPs are supposed to be the ultimate combination of style, power, and efficiency, which ultimately justifies their significantly higher price point.

The reason so many of us (anecdotally speaking) are holding off on a laptop purchase right now is that the new tech that is right around the corner is such a huge improvement over what exists today, we’d be fools to pull the trigger before we see what’s just around the bend. Quad core laptops, integrated GPUs, and other goodies all work to create an almost overwhelming sense that 2010 is the year of the notebook.

And now there’s this likely Apple event on January 26th. Look, while everyone is hot for the Apple tablet, I’m not convinced this is the time to announce it. Not on the heels of a massive recession holiday season. Give it 3 or 4 months, start building momentum for next holiday season. Time it right, and the Apple tablet could be the “must-have” “gadget of the year” for 2010.

I think ultimately the January event will be focused on the release of new Arrandale- and Clarksfield-based MacBooks, with a theme along the lines of “[energy] efficiency, speed, and mobility.” Which, come to think of it, does tie  in nicely with the tablet …

WoW’s LFG tool

(NB: Pardon if this is slightly rambling and off pace – I wrote it over the course of 3 days)

It’s been two weeks since the new LFG tool went live in WoW. Last week we got tons of reactions: Spinks is a fan; Tipa’s in favor of it, if not as enthusiastic as Spinks; Tobold looks at it through his usual pragmatic lens and finds it to be an improvement; Ravious at KTR doesn’t necessarily take a position on it, but does make some interesting observations; and Syncaine wonders why crushing one’s own genitals in a vice isn’t a popular pastime around these parts any more.

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Simple truths, revealed via Facebook

Yes, yes I do.

12 Days of Christmas

Epic. My new favorite Christmas Carol.

Snowball effect

Via AdMob (read the PDF report) we learn today that the iPhone now generates 55% of all US mobile web traffic, up from a 24% share just one year ago (see here). Meanwhile RIM’s share of mobile web traffic in the US has dropped from 27% last year to only 12% today. Indeed, the Blackberry OS is now #3 behind the iPhone OS and Android OS (which represents 20% of domestic web traffic today, up from 0 a year ago). The trend isn’t just domestic. Over the same period, the iPhone has grown globally from 15% to 50% of all traffic, while RIM has dropped from 10% to just 7% today.

So, we know that, given the current adoption rate and consumer plans for future purchases, sometime next year there should be more iPhones on the market than Blackberries, and that’s assuming Apple doesn’t release a new iteration of the phone (because iPhone adoption spikes with each new release, whereas RIM’s adoption rates remain constant). We know that iPhones have higher customer satisfaction than Blackberries by a wide margin. We know that developers are abandoning other OS environments for the iPhone because they aren’t profitable enough, or don’t have a big enough audience (read: market share).

I’m not saying that Apple has won the mobile wars by any stretch of the imagination (2 years ago, one could have said the same of RIM), but it’s hard to argue with that kind of inertia.

I’ve been saying this for years

This, combined with Dogbert’s method basically sums up the entirety of my career in troubleshooting and technical support. Click the image to enlarge.

Via everyone’s favorite, xkcd.