Mar 13
The Macalope laments the current state of online journalism in this week’s Macworld piece which finds three particularly odious examples.
Mar 12
ONLY A FOOL WOULD PRE-ORDER AN IPAD!
Whatever, InfoWorld.
The Apple web world is rife today with people telling you which iPad they pre-ordered. If there’s a more disgusting display of first-world conspicuous consumption the horny one is fortunately not aware of it. Really. Sickening.
But anyway, here’s which one he’s getting!
16 GB WiFi only.
Whaaaaat?! Base model?! LAME. FAIL. LOL.
OK, here’s why.
3G – The Macalope struggled over the issue of 3G, but ultimately he thinks what he really wants is ubiquitous access on his MacBook Pro. If one uses the base amount of bandwidth, the price per MB of adding WiFi to the iPad is about the same as buying a Virgin Mobile broadband card and buying their al-la-carte service over the first 8 months (after that Virgin Mobile is more expensive). The price points are different and Virgin quickly becomes more expensive the more bandwidth you consume (nothing beats a $30/month all-you-can-eat plan), but given the added flexibility it seems like a better option to the Macalope.
Size – When the iPhone first came out, the Macalope bought a 4 GB model and, while he had to make more conscious decisions about what to put on it, he didn’t regret that decision at all. It was fine and only in the last few months of its life cycle did he really feel constrained. Last summer when he upgraded to the 3GS, he bought the 32 GB model which is chock full of movies and TV shows that he never watches. If he ever gets stuck someplace he’ll probably be glad they’re on there, but so far the extra 16 GB has been a bust.
The difference with the iPad, of course, is that he’ll want the movies he’s ripped to be at a higher resolution than he might have on the iPhone and he expects that applications will also be larger. But, unlike the iPhone, there’s no plan to deal with here. If he decides to sell or gift his iPad in a year and upgrade, he can do that.
The combination of a bad economy with an uncertain job market as well is making him a little more cautious with his money.
As Marco Arment, who came to the same conclusion for slightly different reasons, says:
Obviously, your needs will vary from mine, so you might decide differently.
Mar 06
This week’s Macworld piece looks at Rob Enderle’s, that of the critics of Apple’s lawsuit against HTC and Windows Phone 7 Series.
Mar 01
One presumes that Don Tennant would conclude that Apple’s emphasis on maintaining high margins is the reason child labor has been found to have been used by the Chinese companies that supply it, Dell, HP, Lenovo and other computer makers.
Couldn’t be China’s fault.
Feb 27
This week’s Macworld piece is nothing but pure takedowns of jacktastic Apple commentary. Just like you like it.
Feb 26
Did you gu[FLASH AD]ys read that ar[ROLLOVER FLASH AD]ticle on Wi[FLASHING FLASH AD]red on how the iPad really need[MOVING FLASH AD]s Flash?
Feb 20
After a post-Macworld coma, the Macalope is back up on Macworld this week, talking about Windows Phone 7 Series and that tremendous lunk everyone likes to kick, Flash!
Feb 08
Our friends at Retrevo are ginning up hits to their little shopping site again, this time with a survey that says “iPad Hoopla Fails to Convince Buyers”.
Which is an odd title because that’s exactly what it did. Retrevo makes a big deal of pointing out that the number of people who said they weren’t interested in an iPad nearly doubled from before the announcement to after it. Wow! The iPad is doomed!
What Retrevo “oddly” (ironic quotes intentional) doesn’t call out is that the number of people who said they would like to buy an iPad tripled. Not only that, the number of people who said they were interested but needed more information also went up. Equally shocking is the fact that the number of people who said they hadn’t heard of the iPad and weren’t interested shrank from 35% to 18%! The number of people who said they “need” an iPad (as opposed to “want” – nice phrasing, Retrevo) went up as did the number of people who though maybe they “needed” on.
All that happened here is that more people were aware of the iPad after the announcement and more had formed an opinion about it. The bulk of the people who hadn’t heard of one and already weren’t interested (who could those people be?!) moved to the “Yes, I’ve heard of it and I’m not interested” category.
Dur-hey.
Again, this survey was of “more than 1000 randomly selected Retrevo users” who we’ve already determined are not in Apple’s core customer group.
At least Macworld caveated its report on the survey this time by linking to the Macalope’s previous takedowns of Retrevo’s nonsense. The Macalope dreams of a day when we can all just ignore them.
Feb 06
More shameless iPad boosterism in the Macalope’s Macworld piece this week. Sorry. He takes down some silly pundits, though. Everyone likes that, right?
Feb 05
Chris Seibold at AppleMatters gets the ball rolling in one of the most dunderheaded arguments the Macalope’s ever seen.
Is Apple is going to switch to Apple chips for the Mac? The question arises because Apple uses an in house design to power the iPad.
The arguments for the switch are abundant:more control, more profits, a chip expressly designed for Macs. Seems good on the surface but what if the Mac’s surge in popularity is predicated on the chips from Intel?
He goes on to provide a series of charts that show the line for Mac sales rising precipitously after the Intel switch. But a coincidence of timing does not necessarily imply causality.
Over at ZDNet, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes thinks he knows the real reason behind Mac sales.
I have a different idea, one that’s linked to the Intel CPU, but not directly.
Boot Camp. Yep. My take on the Mac sales explosion is that it was the ability to set up Windows on a Mac as a dual boot OS was what really made Macs both viable and relevant.
…
Intel CPUs made Boot Camp possible, so in a way it was Intel that helped boost Mac sales, but only indirectly. What really boosted Mac sales was Windows.
Wow.
The Macalope really can’t believe this argument. It’s like watching two medieval barbers arguing whether leeches or bloodletting saved the patient.
Certainly the switch to Intel chips and the consequential ability to run Windows were contributing factors. The PowerPC was increasingly unviable for running a desktop operating system and there’s a good argument to be made that Mac sales would not have taken off if Apple had stuck with it and fell behind in speed. But that’s different than the chip driving sales. It was more like a pre-condition. Kingsley-Hughes is right that most people don’t care what processor is in their computer. Why should they? They just care about what the computer can do. But how many Mac users really run Boot Camp? Maybe the thought that it was always there if they needed it provided some comfort, a foot in the door, but if anything they were trying to get away from Windows, not run it on different hardware.
The Macalope would contend that three larger contributing factors than simply the brand of processor or the ability to run Windows were:
- Microsoft’s inability to ship a viable alternative to XP for nine years. This is probably the biggest one. Seibold portrays this only in terms of Vista, asking if Vista drove PC users to the Mac, and there’s no real causality there, obviously, because he’s asking the wrong question. If you look at the graph he presents, the uptick in Mac sales starts about when the normal life cycle of the first machines with XP pre-installed ran out, around late 2003 to early 2004. When people started looking for new machines, they started questioning their choice of operating system and many decided to get something that had actually been updated in the last four years.
- The iPod. The iPod made Apple a household name and restored confidence in Apple. People loved their iPods and were willing to consider getting a computer made by the same company the next time the opportunity came up.
- The Apple Store. The first stores opened in 2001, but the company didn’t really achieve saturation in the major urban centers until a couple of years later. Oh, right about the time Mac sales took off.
Is it harder to believe that neither one of these guys even discussed these factors or that the Macalope continues to be surprised by this kind of blinkered thinking?
To Seibold’s question about whether or not Apple switches Macs to its own chips, the Macalope suspects that certainly wouldn’t happen any time in the near future. Boot Camp is a nice feature and some users rely on it. But more importantly ramping up to that volume would not happen overnight. And does the company really want to tell Mac developers they have to recompile again?
From the perspective of a Mac user, however, other than having to go back to relying solely on emulation to run Windows on a Mac, why would they care?
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