I have a friend who is a prof at a uni. She wants to use part of her budget to purchase a new laptop for work and prefers a Mac. The uni has a contract with IBM and would prefer her to buy a winbox. They told her she can “opt out” and purchase a Mac as long as she can justify the purchase. Can the 43f HiveMind give us some ideas on how she can justify the Macbook? She is a sociologist if that helps get your creative juices flowing.

TUAW Interviews Merlin Mann

My tall, new friend Scott McNulty interviewed me yesterday for TUAW’s Macworld coverage — unintentionally providing me a fine bully pulpit from which to perpetuate my baseless theories and half-baked forecasts abut how Apple might eat the lunches of about three different industries over the next couple years.

If they can pull it off, if they can fix .Mac, and if they have the vision to re-imagine themselves as the company who makes your entire digital world safe, fun, ubiquitous, and flawlessly integrated.

Anyhow, on with the motley, but stay tuned after the jump for value-added hand-waving.

So, exactly what the hell nonsense am I talking about here?  read more »

The new MacBook Air announced at yesterday’s Macworld keynote doesn’t disappoint; it’s pretty much the laptop I’ve wanted ever since I stupidly broke my 12” Powerbook trying to replace the hard drive. All things remaining the same, I’d buy it simply for the difference in weight, a full two pounds less than a MacBook. As someone who’s put a lot of miles on his kicks with a laptop bag on his shoulder, that would make a world of difference.

What’s interesting though, is what the MacBook Air isn’t: it’s not simply a sexier MacBook Pro on Jenny Craig, it’s a different class of machine. John Gruber rightly points out that it’s clearly designed as a secondary machine for people who do their heavy lifting on a desktop. Without another machine standing by at home or the office, only a select group of geeks could really get by without an optical drive, not to mention the diminished overall specs of the MacBook Air may not please a power user without reinforcements (a.k.a., the folks willing to spend upwards of $2000 on a laptop).  read more »

MacBreak Weekly 70: Happy Life Day!

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Alex Lindsay, Andy Ihnatko, Chris Breen, Merlin Mann, and Scott Bourne

It’s the Macbreak Weekly Year Ender!

Here’s a direct MP3 download of MBW 70.

And here’s linkage to a few of the things I mentioned (adapted from this episode’s show notes):  read more »

I was reading Jeff Kirvin’s blog today and he had a very interesting take on the possible “ITablet” and why Apple has been channeling Microsoft lately. The short version is that he thinks the whole lockdown of the iPhone and the crippling of the iTouch may be to make the “iTablet” with a SDK and open platform more attractive and to basically allow Steve Jobs to reach into your pocket a third time in 12 months or so. The site is www.jeffkirvin.net.  read more »

Not exactly OSX, but I thought some people here might enjoy this:

I found this Macintosh IIci at work. I read the wikipedia page on it, and it mentioned something about an Easter Egg:

"If the system date is set to September 20th, 1989 (the machine's release date) and the Command - Option - C - I buttons held during boot time, an image of the development team will be displayed."

I looked for images of this picture on the web, but couldn't find it. So, here it is!

Can anyone tell me who's who?  read more »

Daring Fireball: The Amazon MP3 Store and Amazon MP3 Downloader

Given the Amazon MP3 Store’s audio quality, prices, and user experience, I can’t see why anyone would buy DRM-restricted music from iTunes that’s available from Amazon. And given that Amazon is quite a bit cheaper than iTunes Plus, you might as well check Amazon first. I plan to.

I’m with Gruber — this is a welcome and fan-friendly addition to the marketplace. And, frankly, I’m glad there’s finally somebody out there who can really give Apple some competition in this area.  read more »

Updates from Google Docs and Google Calendar

Whoa, check this out:

The Google Calendar team, along with the mobile team, released an upgrade to the Calendar interface on the iPhone. It is now tailored for the iPhone, and you can now see your different calendars in distinctive colors. You can see the new Calendar interface by going to http://calendar.google.com on your iPhone browser.

As an iPhone user and recent convert to gCal: Daddy like.

I’ve become an ardent Google Documents fan over the past few months — especially as its support for Safari has improved (didn’t say perfect; just improved). I use it for collaborating with clients and 43f guest authors, as well as for managing small projects and keeping various small teams organized. Personally, I find it simpler than a wiki and a lot more powerful than using a static .doc.

My favorite use right now is to use a single shared document as a common space that 4 or 5 people have access to and that they can use to give each other to-dos, ask questions, etc. I know stuff like Basecamp does this better and certainly with more sophisticated features, but I’m really attracted to the simplicity of the one-document approach — especially for informal, remote teams.

I think my gDocs cincher was the first time that it occurred to me to see if I could even look at my documents on my iPhone; I was gob-smacked to see that it actually worked. Obviously it’s not optimal for doing lots of editing, but you can see and perfunctorily edit your documents without a laptop, and that’s just pretty mind-blowing to me.  read more »