The Perfect Laptop

Business Week’s recent cover story on Lenovo’s new ThinkPad X300 laptop caught my attention. Can you imagine spending 2 years working on a super thin, super light laptop for release in February 2008 and then have Apple announce the MacBook Air on January 15th? What a commotion must have been had at Lenovo after Jobs’ […]

Apple Form Factor Evolution: 1976 through 2007

Core 77, one of my favorite design blogs, links to Edwin Tofslie’s visual time line of Apple products from 1976 to the present day. Very cool. Print this out, then put a mark by each device or accessory you’ve personally touched at least once. It’s the perfect Mac User Group conversation piece. 🙂 Enjoy the […]

iPhone Envy

Admittedly, my sample is skewed, but I have yet to talk to anyone at work who doesn’t want an iPhone. Even the skeptics, after playing with one in person have tried to purchase one. Tried and failed only because every store in the state of Washington is sold out right now. There’s even been some […]

The 1.0 that wasn’t

From what I can gather, the biggest problems with the iPhone seem to be as follows, in order of severity: You can only use AT&T network The EDGE data network is slow The keyboard takes some time to learn Making a phone call can take more “taps” than with other phones No way to Cut, […]

iPhone. A Guided Tour.

This week Apple has released a 20 minute guided tour of the iPhone that shows in great detail the new user interface. You can download the high quality version here. Apparently there are millions of people excited, even hysterical, about the iPhone’s release this Friday. I must be out of the core news/media channels, but […]

iPhone requires iTunes account?

I just got the second email from Apple after signing up with them for breaking iPhone updates via email. I read the mail a little bitterly, since I felt the least they could have done was to send me an email when they had the ship date nailed down. Well, the tone of the email […]

Hardware and Software

John Gruber writing on Apple’s choice of AAC as the DRM-free format sold on iTunes, makes this interesting comparison: Apple’s use of AAC in lieu of MP3 is analogous to the Mac’s switch to USB in 1998. USB was an industry standard that wasn’t taking off because PCs didn’t ship with built-in USB ports, which […]

Great by Default

The Future Parc at the Cebit trade fair in Hanover, Germany is a place to showcase future technologies. I didn’t go, but two of the products I read about caught my imagination and got me thinking. Here they are: Tobii Technology’s eye tracking system It’s one thing to use multi-touch to move things about on […]

My WWDC Wishlist

After reading John Siracusa’s hilarious post about WWDC Buzz Word Bingo, I got to thinking about what I’d most like to see at WWDC. Here’s my list: 1. Make it brain dead simple to write multi-threaded applications. How simple? If my application runs fast on a dual core machine, I want it to run twice […]