Apple’s (New) Game Plan

Much to my excitement, Apple released updated iMacs, Mac Minis, MacPros and a host of other items last Tuesday. I’d been looking forward to picking up a new iMac for a month or so, since keeping my media on an airdisk drive is really grating on me. At the time, I began looking at the high-end iMac (3.06gHz, 2GB DDR, 500GB HDD) and saw that it was upgradable to 4GB DDR/1TB for a few hundred bucks more. Deduct my company’s employee purchase plan discount and that became a pretty solid machine at a reasonable price. Read more…

iPhone apps I’ll most likely download on day one

Below is a list of apps that I’ll almost definitely download on day one of the iPhone App Store.
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Data Plan, eh?

AT&T published their iPhone 3G landing page today. For the most part, it doesn’t say much that we didn’t already know. However, there are two lines that bother me a bit:

  • Add a Consumer Data Plan for iPhone 3G to a qualified voice plan for $30 per month.
  • Add an Enterprise Data Plan for iPhone 3G to a qualified voice plan for $45 per month.

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Core Strength

In the months, weeks and days leading up to WWDC this year, all of the talk was on the iPhone. We’d heard that it would be both thicker and thinner. We’d heard about 3G. We’d heard about GPS.

We’d hoped for a better camera. We’d hoped for video. We’d hoped for a front-mounted camera to support video conferencing.

Then, much more recently, we began to hear about this new OSX 10.6, dubbed Snow Leopard. Interesting choice of names since we’re already using Leopard.

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36 Hours of iPhone

It’s been just about 36 hours since I walked out of the AT&T store in Hoboken with a spanking new iPhone. Since then, I’ve not been able to put it down. Here are my first reactions to using it, much of which has been echoed around the internet.

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On Safari

When Steve Jobs dropped his “one more thing…” dirty bomb on Monday, my immediate reaction was to quit my job and go to culinary school. I downloaded the beta and gave it a brief whirl on the Mac and the XP box (I’ve since uninstalled the Mac version to go back to 2.0 since that’s what we support, but I’ve left 3.0 on XP).

I really don’t see Safari being a huge hit for the Windows users, and my reasoning is as follows: Most Mac users don’t even use Safari. Most Mac users that I know use Firefox because they know better. Safari is effectively the IE of the Mac world. It ships with and is the default browser of the OS in question. Non-technical people who use Macs typically use Safari because it’s there and it works. In the same way that many Windows users use IE because it’s there. I won’t get into whether it actually works.

Sure, developers and technophiles are going to download it and play with it, and we may add it to our test suites, but it’s not becoming a default for us. That leaves the non-technical Windows users, and if they’re in the market for a different browser, chances are they’re already using Firefox.

I’m interested to see how Apple tries to market Safari for Windows, who they target it to, and ultimately how well it does. It’s not off to the best of starts, although releasing an update within a couple of days says good things about the development team and their commitment to security and fixing bugs.

No Leopard? No problem :-)

All of this talk about OS X 10.5 Leopard being delayed until October is really shaking things up in the Mac world. According to Apple’s statement:

…we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned…We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing

So, Leopard would’ve been released at WWDC, eh? And developers will see a “near final version” and receive a “beta copy” to play with. But in reality, what does that really leave us at WWDC?

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Long Live the Shuffle!

Apple just released a bunch of new iPod Shuffles the other day, and although I’m a huge fan of the color orange and that’s one of them, that’s not what’s inspiring this post.

No, what’s behind this is my continued thinking (dreaming) about the iPhone. With its 4 or 8 GB storage capacity (2-6 GB for stuff outside the OS), I’ve been thinking about how it will fit into my life (and those of others) as a possible iPod replacement. After all, much of Apple’s target audience for the iPhone is users who carry both a cell phone or a smart phone in conjunction with an iPod.

Those of use who were reared on the old-school hard-disk based iPods that have up to 80 GB of space, tend to have enormous music collections as a result of all of this capacity. Mine is upwards of 25GB, and I know there’s more on the way. So, what are we to do with a measly 6 GB of space on our new device?

One word: Shuffle.

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Waking Up on the iPhone

After sleeping on the iPhone for a couple of days and thinking about my initial thoughts regarding it and its ability to sync with different software, etc., I ‘ve come to the following conclusions/opinions:

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Regarding MacWorld

Ah Macworld… It’s one of at least two days per year the entire Macintosh community can gather around the proverbial fire in eager anticipation of something cool.

So, what’d we get?
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