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.

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.

I will say, certain aspects of the device look awesome. Running all my iPhone apps natively? Sweet. 10 hours battery life and a month standby on one charge? Oh hell yeah. The form-factor is very nice, and the design (aside from the 1” bezel on all sides) is gorgeous.

And, unlike investors (who are typically underwhelmed by Apple announcements due to over-hyped expectations set by the rabble- ahem, TUAW, BGR, MacRumors, Giz, Engadget, and others) I’m generally impressed with the specifications of the device. It’s a souped-up iPhone – it’s got all the bells and whistles you’d expect, and it’ll likely be an extremely polished device.

But with that said, I’d like to pose the question here that I’ve been asking the folks around me for several days now: where does this device fit into my lifestyle?

What gap in my technological lifestyle does the iPad fill in?

In his keynote, Steve Jobs mentioned that there are something like 250 million users who already know the interface for the iPad, with 125 million credit cards in the system. Apple SVP Scott Forstall said that Apple thinks “it’s going to be a whole other gold rush for developers as they build apps for the iPad.” They’re not a pitching that for consumers; that’s a pitch to investors and developers. Apple wants them to believe that the iPad is going to sell like hotcakes – but more than that, that it will have the same kind of lasting mass-market appeal that the iPod Touch and iPhone have had. They’re pitching this as a cultural milestone.

But I would ask them, sincerely, why that’s the case.

The iPad fails to replicate one major feat that helped catapult the iPhone to market-dominating levels of success: it doesn’t replace anything essential.

The Macbook is a superior laptop to the one you’re reading this on. The iPhone is a superior phone to what’s in your pocket. The iPod is a superior MP3 player to what you’ve brought to the gym.

But the iPad is an add-on device that can’t replace anything you already own. Apple isn’t just trying to innovate here (something which they do extremely well) – they’re trying to create a market to create demand for a product they want to sell. As Steve Jobs said in his presentation, everyone has a laptop these days, and everyone (so it seems) has a smartphone. But I disagree with his conclusion that the iPad needs to do things better than both of them – I think the iPad needed to be a viable replacement for one (or both) of them.

Now, Steve Jobs has started more Fortune 100 companies than I have, so I’m guessing he has a bit more insight into this than I do. That said, I just don’t see where the fit is. I agree with Gene Munster over at Piper Jaffray on one point, at least: I think this is going to eat into sales of iPod touch devices. But I seriously wonder if it will do much more than that.

Speaking for myself, I can’t justify getting one, not yet. I have my iPhone, I have my laptop;  what do I need a third device for? I’ll have to bring my phone and laptop everywhere I go – adding a third device just seems superfluous.

To my Democratic friends around the country, on behalf of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, I extend this message:

You’re welcome.

Today, Massachusetts did you a favor.

Massachusetts replaced the late Sen. Kennedy with a Republican. A seat which has been safely Democratic for 57 years, a seat once occupied by John F. Kennedy, now belongs to a man who sought to deny aid to Massachusetts 9/11 workers, who posed nude for Cosmo, and who would allow pharmacists to refuse to deliver emergency contraception to rape victims.

Why would Massachusetts, arguably the most liberal state in the country, opt for such a man?

Because Democrats refuse to offer anything better.

President Obama and Congressional Democrats have proven themselves either unwilling or unable to make good on the promises they made to get elected. Universal healthcare? Fixing the corrupt financial markets? Ending the unnecessary wars abroad? Which of these have been accomplished? Which are even remotely on course?

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.

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 …

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.

Personally, I’ve been PuGing random Heroics since the tool went live, and I’m really pleased with the new LFG system. Typically, I can play for 1 – 2 hours a couple of days a week, sometimes a bit longer on weekends, but nowhere near as often or regularly as the guilds required to raid would need me to be. Therefore, my only chance to enjoy group content is via PuGing it, which means I’m usually running Heroics. Anything that makes the process of putting a group together is a good thing in my book.

As for the potential long-term impact, remember that games have had this for a long time, and if the results there are any indication, the application of the LFG tool to MMO PVE content is probably going to be a huge success. This isn’t a feature that started with WoW – it didn’t even start with MMOs. I’d go so far as to compare this to Xbox Live-style matchmaking – in particular the system that Bungie built for Halo 2. Seeing how well that was received (it’s all over the place today), it will probably be something we see a lot more of, to the point where I’d imagine it will become a standard element of MMOs in the future. After all, if grouping and group content are at the core of a game, be it Halo or WoW, getting people together to play that content can’t be an afterthought – it’s something that should be built into the game itself.

Thinking about it, given that this solution has been so ubiquitous in other genres – even existing inside the MMO genre in the form of PVP matchmaking – I’m a bit surprised that the LFG tool has taken so long to finally make it into MMO PVE. If I had to guess why, it’s because MMO developers have always left it to the players to organize themselves to tackle group content, using a tool that has existed since the earliest MUDs: the guild. As both Syncaine and Spinks note, the LFG tool decouples the game content from the social content, which is what I think has made this such a shock to some individuals. But game-changing updates tend to be shocking, and I think in a very short time the LFG tool will come to be regarded as one of the most significant non-content content upgrades in a long time.

Here’s the deal. The end-game content of WoW breaks down into two categories: solo, and group. Up until 3.3, raiding – and to a lesser extent, Heroics – pretty much required you to be in a guild. Indeed, unless it was content you were vastly out-geared for, you pretty much needed a guild to raid or run Heroics*.

Why is that? For raids, mostly organizational constraints. Organizing MMO players is typically compared to herding cats. That’s because, despite what the naysayers believe, the requirement to actually get 10 people online to do the same content at the same time isn’t the entire extent of raiding. You need 10 people to perform half a dozen very different, very specific roles (MT, OT, MH, OH, RH, DPS, CC, etc) who know their roles as they relate to the other 9 people’s roles, who know the content even if they’ve never played it, who have all the right mods and access to the same Vent server and …

The problem is that the attitudes about raiding have spilled over to raiding. Players adopted a belief that every dungeon, quest, and effort involving more than two people needs to be approached like a progression raid. Perhaps not to the point of having Ventrilo servers and mod coordination, but there’s still an expectation that if you’re not perfectly (overly) geared and expertly trained for the content (ie, it’s on farm), you’re not cut out to run it at all.

While Syncaine laments that players can now “rid themselves of the annoyance of a guild” in order to access group content, I’m more inclined to believe it’s going to improve the nature of guilds in the first place. Two reasons for that.

First – and this one is somewhat obvious – by removing the tedium of finding groups, players can focus on playing the game, which accomplishes two things: one, it encourages more players to play the content, increasing role skill (via practicing said role – ie, healers healing, tanks tanking, DPS not standing in the fire, etc); two, it brings the average level of gear up across the board, as players are playing more, which means they’re earning more badges and downing more bosses and looting more gear, which means they’re getting more upgrades and generally improving their kits. This means the average gear level of an average guild increases (as average guilds are composed of average players), which means more guilds can tackle top-tier content.

Second, by decoupling pre-raid gear progression from guilds, players are more free to use guilds to organize themselves socially. As average gear level and skill levels increase, it becomes more likely that a given guild will have the necessary gear and skill to complete advanced content, which means that players will be less likely to remain shackled to an incompatible social group in order to maintain access to their level of content. An increased focus on using social tools for social organization leads to a better social environment, which leads to more harmonious relations within a guild (I still think cross-guild raiding alliances and content partnerships  would lead to a better raid organization environment, but that’s another topic for another day).

That’s not to say this is a silver bullet – far from it – and certainly the most hardcore of players and guilds will continue to exist exactly as they always have, but among the masses – among the >95% of players who never completed a dungeon beyond Karazhan during the Buring Crusade era – I think the LFG tool is a massive game changer. In a sense, for many (most?) players Blizzard has with 3.3 “released” more content in a single patch than ever before, because they just blew open access to a huge chunk of the game for that large group of people.

We’ll save the topics of the long-term impact of cross-battlegroup instances (how long until we start merging servers altogether, and usher in the era of the standard 15,000+ player server?) and the LFG tool (and its future as a raid organizing tool, just for starters) for another day. I’m already 1200 words deep, and I’ve spent too much time writing this.

*if you’re going to argue that guilds weren’t required to run heroics, remember, I’m not talking about stuff you vastly outgear – I’m talking about the perspective of a fresh level 80 in dungeon and quest blues. If you were lucky, you’d see “LF2M Heroic XXX PST for gear check and invite” so you knew to skip it. If you’re unlucky, you’ll show up at the dungeon entrance only to be kicked out of the party with a quick “sry ur undergeared.” Unless you were gearing up with a guild in order to fill a raid spot for them or you lucked out and found equally gear-deficient party-mates, you’d be hard pressed to find a group.

Yes, yes I do.

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.

Via everyone’s favorite, xkcd.