A few weeks ago Gizmodo, the popular gadgets blog, managed to secure a preproduction fourth generation iPhone, which they dissected for the whole world to see. So, given that everyone more or less knows the hardware specifications of the next iPhone, some commentators wonder whether Apple CEO Steve Jobs will still impress the crowd at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference on 7 June, where he will likely formally unveil the next iPhone.

I'm of the opinion that Mr. Jobs still has a few tricks up his sleeve. Namely, while the world knows how Apple intends to improve the iPhone hardware — new case, second camera, etc. — very little is known about the software Apple has cooking in the labs to exploit these new hardware features.

For it's the software that makes or breaks today's consumer electronics.

When Apple introduced the iPod in 2001 a number of other companies sold products with very similar hardware specifications. It wasn't hard to find another music player with a hard disk for storing lots of music and a simple five button interface. But the iPod's singular software, married with a superior music jukebox, iTunes, made the iPod a far superior device.

Likewise, it's almost impossible to buy a mobile phone today without a large touch screen, a 3G cellular radio and other features found in the iPhone. But it's the iPhone that has proved a runaway success because the iPhone marries its hardware features with software that makes those features usable and utile.

Or look to the Android operating system. I would wager that most people care more about whether a phone runs Google's Android operating system — that is, uses Google's software platform — than care about the particulars of the phone running the Android operating system. Because it's the software that makes all the difference.

Hence, it's the software that will really make the fourth generation iPhone sing. For instance, mobile phones have had front facing cameras for many, many years. (The Sony Ericsson P990 from 2006 comes to mind.) But, as far as I know, they're not exactly widely used. It's not merely the presence of a front facing camera on the new iPhone that's something to keep an eye on. It's how Apple implements a video conferencing feature in software that will make video calling popular or leave the status quo as it is.

And, notably, neither Gizmodo nor any other news outlets have seen the software implementation that will likely steal the show in a few weeks time when Mr. Jobs takes the stage at Apple's developers conference.

I've had my iPad for over a week now. It hasn't changed my life nearly as much as the iPhone, but I'm not sure how I ever managed to live without it. It's certainly preferable to my laptop for "light" computing, such as reading research papers and blogs, or browsing the iTunes Store.

(Some people have complained to me about the lack of PDF annotation tools. One can't, for instance, highlight a sentence in a PDF document on the iPad. I'm of the opinion that highlighters serve no purpose, so I can't say I really mind.)

But there is one feature of the iPad I could live without: the attention it gives me. While many people don't give me a second glance when I'm sitting in a corner reading Les Echos on my iPad, many other people have what seems an uncontrollable urge to exclaim, "Is that an iPad?" and ask me for a demonstration. Admittedly, if I'm not doing anything particularly important, it doesn't bother me all that much to pause and show off the pinch-to-zoom features in the Photos application. And, given I'm on a college campus, it's not as if I don't know most of these people anyway. Still, there are occasions when I just want to sit and read my economics journal without any disturbance.

I really hope everyone on my flight to Portland this Saturday has an iPad. People have shown no hesitation in inquiring about my Kindle, and I doubt they'll attempt to contain their curiosity any more when it comes to a product as "hot" as the iPad. And, unlike encounters on the street or in the grocery store, it's not as if I have a credible excuse (or even the possibility) of walking away to avoid answering a litany of basic questions about the device's specifications one could easily find on Apple's website.

Should be fun.

I'm writing this on the iPad, just to see what it's like. But this has more to do with one application I'd love to see on the iPad: Mathematica.

I'm a big fan of Mathematica. I don't know why people still use calculators when they can have the full computational power of another computer algebra system instead. Take 3D plotting as an example. It's a lot nicer to have a color, manipulable plot that refreshes instantly, as opposed to some anemic gray mesh on tiny low resolution graphing calculator.

Though I suppose I forego Mathematica for a calculator, or simply a pencil and paper, from time to time, mostly because lugging my laptop to class is something for a chore, and I find having a computer distracting.

Which is why I had hoped Wolfram Research would release a Mathematica application for the iPad. (I feel like the iPhone's screen is too small to support the full Mathematica interface.) I would gladly pay over $100 for that application. To have Mathematica's amazing computational power at my fingertips would improve my life immeasurably. Some would point to Wolfram Alpha, available via the web or a purpose-built application for the iPhone and iPad, as a potential substitute. But Wolfram Alpha, while powerful, isn't quite the same. I still haven't figured out how to factor polynomials in finite fields with Wolfram Alpha, but it's easy to do with Mathematica.

But it occurred to me that we'll likely never see Mathematica for the iPhone OS. For Apple prohibits developers from executing arbitrary code in third-party applications, which is exactly how the Mathematica interface works. Mathematica is not just a program — it's a programming language as well.

Hopefully, given that the iPad is closer to a general purpose computer than the iPhone, Apple will ease up slightly on their restrictions. Perhaps more on this tomorrow when they take the wraps off iPhone OS.

I finally received my fancy new iPad on Monday, and I figured I would share some first impressions. I'll post something slightly longer later, perhaps in the context of whatever Apple unveils at its iPhone OS 4 event tomorrow afternoon.

For the most part, I really like the device. It's extremely fast, snappy and responsive. Whereas the iPhone often struggles with complex web pages, the iPad rivals my laptop in tasks like rendering web pages or paging through high resolution photos. The device's peppiness obviates the need for most multitasking, save for the ability to run background processes for music players and syncing, as I discusses in my previous post. Applications open almost instantly in most cases, and those that have been reworked for the iPad do an excellent job of saving the application state on quit, so applications appear just as they were left when they're reopened.

The gigantic multitouch display makes the device itself melt away. It's hard to describe just how intuitive it feels to browse the web with a touch interface on a display so relatively expansive. But suffice it to say that it's orders of magnitude better than the experience on the relatively minuscule iPhone- or iPod touch-size display.

I've been using the device extensively as I work on final research papers for two of my economics courses. It's much easier to enlarge graphs, pan around data tables and quickly navigate through long research articles on the iPad's big multitouch display than on my laptop or on my Kindle.

Of course, the iPad is not perfect. Despite all the talk about it only weighing 1.5 pounds — which I will concede is impressive, given the device's capabilities — its form factor is not conducive to being held comfortably for hours on end. For long form, linear reading, I still prefer the Kindle's E Ink display and more compact, lighter profile.

The iPad's software keyboard — which really is almost exactly the same size as a conventional keyboard when the iPad is in "landscape mode" — is no substitute for a mechanical keyboard as far as I'm concerned. It's better than the iPhone's keyboard by miles, but I suspect most touch typists will be disappointed. (For hunt-and-peck typists, though, it might be an improvement, thanks to the large key size and iPhone-style automatic suggestions and corrections.)

It's also clear that most third-party developers suffered as a result of not having prerelease access to the device. The ABC Player application, for instance, seems to crash every other time I launch it.

And while the device does run most iPhone applications, the iPhone applications are no substitute for applications that have been written or retooled for the iPad. I was sorely disappointed with the iPhone version of OmniFocus on the iPad. (I can only hope the OmniGroup has an iPad version out the door soon!)

Shortcomings aside, though, I suspect this device has forever changed the way people compute. With a few more features and some software tweaks, I could easily see the iPad becoming many peoples' primary or sole computer in just a few years time.

As people following me on Twitter know, I did not receive my iPad on Saturday, much to my annoyance. The mailroom is closed on Saturdays, so I planned to intercept the UPS driver when he arrived. But apparently UPS was so overloaded on Saturday with iPad deliveries, that they didn't have time to properly log package "events" as they usually do. Hence the "Out for Delivery" status on my package that I hoped to use as my cue to run outside and wait never showed up. According to the package tracking log, the driver attempted to deliver the package but failed as the mailroom was closed. But the folks at UPS (who I spent 20 minutes on hold for) assured me I will have my iPad tomorrow.

That's not really what I intended to write about, however. No, I want to address one of the biggest gripes people have about the iPad, namely that it "cannot multitask." I suppose this criticism has been leveled against the iPhone and iPod touch as well, though perhaps not as conspicuously in the last few months.

First, I want to emphasize the fact that, from a technical perspective, the iPhone OS, which powers the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch, can run multiple processes simultaneously. Otherwise, it would be impossible to receive a phone call on the iPhone or listen to music in the iPod application while using another application. Rather, as Apple has stated publicly, third-party applications are restricted through software from running "in the background" for performance- and battery life-related reasons.

Broadly speaking, this makes quite a bit of sense. My laptop would verge on being unusable with less than a gigabyte of memory. The iPhone and its cousins, meanwhile, have but 128 or 256 megabytes (one eighth or one quarter of a gigabyte) of memory. Keeping the devices snappy, then, requires "not too many" processes run simultaneously. Even a very fast, modern desktop computer would feel very slow if it were processing a billboard size image, factoring a large integer and trying to load a webpage all at the same time.

Deciding what constitutes "not too many," though, requires a level of technical sophistication beyond what normal people should be expected to know. So, in essence, Apple just defines "not too many" to be one application's processes plus a few important system and first-party processes.

This system tends to work quite well as far as I'm concerned, and I'm certainly a demanding computer user. On the iPhone, the display is far too small for me to want more than one application eating up the screen. I haven't touched an iPad yet, so I will reserve final judgement on that device relative to running multiple applications side-by-side. That said, I'm so used to using computers with large, widescreen displays that I expect I will have similar feelings about the iPad. In fact, my old 12" PowerBook G4 from way back in 2003 had an XGA resolution display, just like the iPad. While I loved that model's compactness, (relatively) low resolution display drove me crazy by the time I was ready to buy a new computer.

But I do believe Apple needs to give third-party developers at least some ability to run processes in the background. Specifically, there are two cases where I feel like developers should be able to run background processes, and I suspect that if developers were allowed this level of access it would go a long way to ward off this notion that the iPhone OS cannot multitask.

First, developers of applications geared toward audio playback — Pandora, NPR, AOL Radio, etc. — should be able to latch onto some sort of background audio playback API, with behavior similar to that of the iPod application. The AOL Radio application is useless to me if I can't open Tweetie at the same time.

Second, developers of applications that "sync" — OmniFocus, Things, Tweetie, etc. — should be able to launch some kind of periodic background process, say something that runs every hour, or at some user- or application-specified interval. I hate sitting around for five minutes while OmniFocus syncs with the server whenever I launch it. (Aside: As much as I like OmniFocus, it takes far too long to launch. Things for iPhone, which I idiotically paid $10 for and never used, launches almost instantly.) I feel like this strikes a nice compromise between performance, battery life and convenience. It keeps the application in sync, while not killing performance and the device battery by keeping the whole application open in the background. Before MobileMe and Google switched to push email, I had the iPhone's Mail application setup to do something to this effect and it seemed to have little impact on performance and battery life.

And on another related note, Apple desperately needs to do something about the iPhone OS's notifications system. It's one area where Palm's WebOS and the Google's Android OS have an unambiguously superior interface. On the one hand, the notifications that do show up on iPhone OS bring the device to a screeching halt. I want to know I've received a new text message and see who sent it. I don't want a dialog box to interrupt my movie or the email I'm composing, however. On the other hand, other notifications are too subtile. When I receive a new email, it would be nice to see who sent it or perhaps the first line or two of its contents. For now, though, the iPhone OS just makes a pinging noise. In many ways this makes sense, for with the present notifications system, having one of those intrusive dialog boxes open every time I opened an email would drive me crazy.

Despite what certain computer enthusiasts claim, I don't see any real reason to enable true multitasking as it exists on traditional desktop operating system on the iPhone OS, or any other "mobile" operating system, for that matter. Physical limitations make it undesirable from the user's point of view, and hardware limitations make it somewhat costly, in terms of performance and battery life. Yet, I do see some room for improvement when it comes to audio playback and periodic background tasks. Hopefully UPS will delivery my iPad tomorrow so I can attack this issue from a slightly more informed perspective.

As someone who consumes a lot of gadgetry, there often comes a point when the old needs to make way for the new. In years past, I've used eBay to unload my gently used gizmos and gadgets to people with less demanding technology needs. It's not a process I find especially enjoyable, though I still go through the rigamarole of taking photos, writing copy and setting a price. First and foremost, reselling my old gadgetry ensures my old peripherals don't contribute to the growing electronic waste problem. And I don't object to the revenue the sales generate either.

Today, however, I discovered Gazelle, a service that makes eBay — at least as I use it — obsolete. Users simply visit the website, find the gadget they no longer want and Gazelle mails a prepaid box to that same user. Gazelle then takes delivery of the item, verifies the condition of the gadget and sends a check. There's no copy to write, no photos to take, no wrangling with a buyer over method of payment.

I'm sure the reimbursements Gazelle gives its customers are not as large as the sums one could generate by selling the same item on eBay. But given the time commitment and uncertainty associated with listing an item on eBay, I'm not convinced a person isn't better off just using Gazelle.

I haven't actually used the service yet, but I have every intention to give the service a whirl when my iPad arrives in April. Gazelle claims they will give me about $50 for my aging 30 GB 5th generation iPod, which I see my iPad as replacing. (For interested parties, I pre-ordered a 32 GB WiFi-only iPad.)

I'll report back when I've given the service a try.

For the last seven years I've used an original Apple Wireless Mouse. That's the model without the laser tracking engine, easily soiled scroll nub or even the ability to simulate a right click. To provide some context, I bought it alongside my 12 inch PowerBook G4 way back in 2003. But a few weeks ago that mouse stopped working. So, as I still prefer a mouse whenever I'm sitting at my desk, I ordered the latest and greatest in Apple mousing technology: the Magic Mouse.

All in all, it's a nice product. The Magic Mouse feels sturdy, thanks to its mostly aluminum construction, and tracks much more accurately than my old mouse. It must also have a much better Bluetooth radio or better internals than its older sibling, as it connects and disconnects much more quickly than the original Wireless Mouse.

Of course, the "magic" moniker likely refers not to the aluminum body or laser tracking engine, but rather to the fact that the Magic Mouse has a multitouch shell, capable of separately tracking five fingers and detecting complex multitouch gestures. It's quite nice to be able to right-click with my real mouse for the first time in seven years. The scrolling with momentum works quite nicely, and feels quite natural, especially as I've become so used to the behavior on the iPhone. Scrolling from the top to bottom of a long page takes just seconds, but that capability doesn't come at the price of being unable to scroll precisely.

I don't know that the Magic Mouse is really "magical," however. It certainly has more advanced technology than many pointing devices with less whimsical names. But even my laptop's giant buttonless trackpad can detect more complicated gestures than the Magic Mouse. And, beyond that, it's not as if the Magic Mouse can conjure a bottle of Champagne out of thin air.

Apple also likes to associate the word "magic" with the iPad, billing it as, "A magical and revolutionary product." Just how magical that device is will have to wait until mine arrives in early April.

From time to time the fine folks who run our dining commons allow a student or two to play deejay for the evening, regaling diners with whatever bizarre blend of music they wish. I've rarely been thrilled with the musical selections made by these individuals, though I'd be the first to admit I have far from typical preferences when it comes to music. (There's also not quite right about eating dinner to the sounds of a dance anthem.)

What really bugs me about most of these would-be deejays, though, is not so much the music they play, but the quality of the recordings of the music they play. More often than not, it's apparent they either ripped the song from a CD seven years ago or, more likely, downloaded it from some metaphorical Internet back alley without looking at the encoding information.

Back in the dark ages, when dial-up Internet connections were the norm and music players measured their capacity in megabytes rather than gigabytes, this tradeoff between sound quality and file size made sense. It was impossible to squeeze more than a few dozen songs onto a Diamond Rio (remember them?) with a quarter gigabyte of storage. Even the original iPod — with 5 gigabytes of storage at $399 — would only hold about 500 songs encoded at 256 kbps. Portability and flexibility came at the price of inferior audio quality.

Today, however, when even the most inexpensive iPod comes with eight gigabytes of memory and even a basic laptop ships with a capacious hard disk whose capacity is measured in hundreds of gigabytes, this tradeoff makes no sense. In fact, the two largest retailers of digital music — Amazon.com and Apple — now sell tracks encoded at 256 kbps, and many classical labels sell tracks encoded in a lossless format. So why do people persist in tolerating low-quality recordings?

Most people I ask this question say something to the effect of, "This music sounds good enough to me." Which drives me crazy. Anyone who claims they can't hear the difference between a track encoded at 128 kbps and 256 kbps should have their hearing checked. (Or buy a pair of halfway decent speakers.) I don't see why we should settle for less when having more has virtually zero cost.

As I exited the library yesterday, I noticed a placard on the checkout desk that announced the Bates College library had acquired a Kindle. I'm going to be blunt: I can hardly think of something more idiotic a library could do, save perhaps for burning its collection or committing its binding supplies to the aid of terrorists in a glue stick-powered takeover of the government.

First of all, there's the cost of the Kindle hardware itself, about $260, or enough to buy about 10 "real" books, even at publishers' list prices. So, right of the bat, the library has sacrificed the ability to grow its collection by at least 10 volumes. And any savings associated with the fact that the Kindle can access public domain works, like Pride and Prejudice or Othello, is offset by the fact that the library probably owns at least two copies of such famous public domain works.

Second, there's the huge opportunity cost of buying a book for the Kindle. The nature of Amazon.com's DRM on Kindle books means that only one person at a time will be able to read whatever collection of books the library purchases for the Kindle. Contrast this to the conventional arrangement, in which different books can be lent to different people at the same time. It's as if one particular shelf or stack of the library's collection had to be checked out at all at once, and only one person could check out that stack or shelf at a time.

It would make far more sense, assuming Amazon makes the technology and licensing available, for the library to purchase copies of electronic copies of books and magazines that students who happened to own a Kindle could access, much as Sony does today with many public libraries.

And all this is not to say I don't like my Kindle. It's a great device for linear reading, where one starts on page one and moves sequentially to page n. But the Kindle is a device to read content, not a piece of content itself. People don't go to their local libraries to check out televisions; they go to check out DVDs.

In the wake of my previous post about the iPad and the inaneness of the Bates IT security policy, I've done some additional research and talked the matter over with more than a few of my peers who are likewise frustrated.

Unsurprisingly, many security experts agree that trying to do client-side authentication makes for an ineffective network security policy. In particular, the Cisco NAC that Bates uses is vulnerable to numerous exploits. At a recent Black Hat conference, for instance, some researchers demonstrated that the Cisco product could be spoofed by simply having the computer assert to the NAC that it had the right antivirus and firewall settings and gain access without a hitch, despite having no anti-virus or firewall software installed. (There are many, many more exploits, which interested parties could easily track down via a simple Google search.)

To me, this means that the client-side network authentication layer is utterly superfluous.

Given that the device effectively does nothing to keep really determined hackers off the network, it essentially just serves to inconvenience and annoy normal people. If Swedish intelligence officials decide they want to join the Bates network to wreak havoc on our course database, they'll have no problem. But Ellen T. Student will panic when she can't connect her laptop to the network to print an important paper due to an authentication malfunction, and John T. Student won't be able to share the latest video of his dog surfing in Nantucket with his cousin from his iPhone.

Not to mention, the college likely spends more than a few dollars to keep this ineffective layer in place. Of course, there's the huge cost associated with the purchase of the hardware and software. But there's also the labor cost of maintaining that hardware and software over time. Further, the college has to hire lots of employees for its technology "Help Desk," largely because no one can figure out how to install the parasitic client-side authentication software and the mandated (and equally impotent) Sophos anti-virus software.

It's almost comical. In the midst budgetary problems, the college continues to spend thousands of dollars to inconvenience people to no benefit, while my professors feel compelled to make fewer photocopies.

This doesn't really strike me as the kind of policy consistent with the very liberal values of the college, nor, as I've written in the past, does foster an open, generative computing environment. Yuck.

I've more or less decided to buy an Apple iPad. On the one hand, I'm convinced it will be an excellent device for the consumption of media. The purported 140 hours of music playback time would be wonderful for the long haul flights I find myself on so often. And I love the idea of having an enormous multitouch web browsing experience. On the other, the iPad has a lot of productivity potential. I'm already in love with the idea of bringing an iPad to meetings for Keynote presentations rather than my comparatively bulky laptop. The folks at Omni Group also set my heart racing when they announced that they intend to port all of their major productivity applications to the iPad. OmniGraffle on the iPad will be sublime, I'm sure.

Bearing that in mind, I've now begun to ask myself whether I should buy one of the standard WiFi-only models or spring for an iPad with a cellular radio. Apple managed to strike a great deal with AT&T — no contracts, low prices — and the device is unlocked.

But as I began to consider the matter more closely, I realized I may need to buy the 3G-equipped model more out of necessity than an occasional desire for ubiquitous Internet access on a third portable device (see iPhone, Kindle).

As I initially considered it, I figured a 3G iPad might be worth buying just in case I ever wanted a month or two of service. I like the idea of popping in an Orange SIM card in Paris and killing time on the train to Lyon or Cannes on a trip to France. But then it occurred to me that the inane Bates network security scheme would prevent me from doing such routine tasks as checking my email on the iPad via WiFi, as is the case with my iPhone and the Bates network. As it stands now, I can only check my email on the iPhone thanks to the spotty coverage provided by the fine folks at AT&T.

Not that our charming IT people make it easy for me to connect to the Bates WiFi network on my phone in the first place. Regardless of the number of times I tell my phone to remember and automatically connect to the auxiliary BatesGuest SSID, it can't seem to pull it off. And when I manage to connect to the network, I'm forced to authenticate in the browser with my username and hard-to-type 15 character mixed-case alpha-numeric-symbolic password every single time. Not once every 24 hours, or even once every hour. If I were to authenticate right now, visit a website and put my phone to sleep, I would have to re-authenticate in five minutes if I decided to open Tweetie.

In case the previous two paragraphs didn't make it clear, I feel strongly that these policies are ridiculous and utterly absurd.

I already have a more or less unfettered Internet connection from the college on my laptop. If I wanted to break into a secure database or launch a cyberattack on the Defense Department, preventing my benign mobile phone from joining the WiFi network won't provide any defense at all.

Of course, the people in IT also like to argue that allowing just any device onto the network creates the possibility that I or someone else will spread some horrible virus to the rest of the campus. But I fail to see how locking devices out of the network does anything to stop this. First of all, as I already mentioned, my laptop, which poses a far greater risk in that regard, is already on the network. Banning my iPhone or iPad does zilch. More importantly, though, most viruses and malware are spread through the Internet! So if I were just to send people on campus a virus-laden email from a cellular modem, just as many computers would be infected. Beyond that, the tightly-controlled environments like iPhone OS are, to my knowledge, not even capable of launching some kind of sophisticated attack.

What rationale do these people have for keeping my iPhone off the proper WiFi network? I say none whatsoever.

I'm sick of being treated like a criminal. Give my iPhone unfettered Internet access!

Already a number of people have asked me a flavor of this question: "Do you regret buying a Kindle?" No, I don't regret buying a Kindle, even in light of the fact that I may well buy one of these iPad contraptions as well, despite the new device's limitations. The E Ink displays the Kindle, Nook and other dedicated reading devices use are infinitely better for reading than any other display technology I've used. So, for people who read a lot, such as myself, having the Kindle or Nook is a godsend. I spend enough time as it is staring into a backlit computer display — I'm doing it right now to compose this blog post! When I sit down to read a book, I want something that doesn't give me eyestrain after two hours. Not to mention, the standard Kindle is smaller, lighter, thinner and cheaper than even the cheapest iPad. And it has no-fee wireless book downloads.

Which is not to say that the iPad won't prove a popular electronic book reading device. I suspect less voracious readers — that is people who don't read one or two books a week — would be perfectly fine with the iPad. Certainly, eBooks have been quite popular on existing mobile computing platforms, like the iPhone operating system. But for serious readers, or people who spend enough time as it is staring at backlit displays, the Kindle is still a great product.

Today Apple released its tablet computer, the iPad. While I admittedly have no first-hand experience with the device, I can say that it looks good based on what I have read and seen online. Good enough that I might buy one. That it's much cheaper than I had anticipated also gave my buying calculus a nudge in the "right direction." But beyond the fact that I have succumbed yet again to the Apple reality distortion field, the iPad may well signal the death of the general purpose desktop or notebook computer.

I say this because the general purpose computer -- an iMac, MacBook Pro, Sony Vaio, etc. -- has frustrated and continues to frustrate average people. Even Mac OS X, which I regard as the least complicated desktop operating system, is just too complicated for people without a very high degree of computer literacy. On top of that, because the computers are complicated and will execute just about any code they encounter, they pose a huge security risk. Many people fail to install security and bug patches not because they're risk-seeking, but rather because it's just too complicated. Consequently, many millions of unsuspecting ordinary people unwittingly aid hackers in running denial of service attacks and sending obnoxious spam email.

Compare this experience with that of the iPhone. A three-year-old can figure out how to use an iPhone. Sure, the user interface is well-designed and the touch screen makes certain operations easier. But that's not really why the iPhone is so easy for the average person to use and understand. Rather, unlike a general purpose computer, the iPhone hides the technical details that frustrate people so much. Take installing applications as an example. On the iPhone, one tap in the App Store automatically downloads and installs the new software. There are no DVDs or CDs to keep track of, no installation prompts. It just works. Apple even allows users to re-download applications, just in case they're accidentally deleted.

Or consider that the iPhone does not expose the file system to users. People never forget where they stuck that photo, that music file or that document. Notes are in the Notes application, music and video are in the iPod application, and photos are in the Photos application. It couldn't be easier.

Additionally, because Apple screens and sandboxes applications, users don't have to worry nearly as much about security. Nor does their lack of computer savviness put themselves or others at risk. The iPhone and iPad don't execute anything and everything they encounter. It's just not possible, for instance, for a user to unwittingly install a piece of trojan horse software by accidentally opening an attachment.

Without a doubt, this blend of simplicity, accessibility and security comes at a price. People who demand more than basic computing functions will need more flexibility than the iPad or iPhone provide today. It's hard to imagine, for instance, scientists at CERN analyzing the results of a particle physics experiment on an iPad. But for everyone else, I suspect devices like the iPad will eventually supplant their regular computers. There's just no reason for people who just want basics, like web browsing, email and music playback, to subject themselves to the complexity of a whole general purpose computer.

I've had my Amazon Kindle for about a month now. It's a great device, despite its many shortcomings. The E Ink screen looks great. Unlike the backlit LCD displays on my iPhone or laptop, the E Ink screen doesn't tire my eyes after even hours of continuous use. Of course, the Kindle's display can't display colors, refreshes slowly and doesn't quite match the contrast ratio of a printed page. Nor does Kindle have the same heft and tactility that a real book does. But it's a great device for long-form, linear reading.

Now, however, everyone's attention has turned to Apple's impending announcement on Wednesday, where pundits expect the Cupertino-based company will release some kind of tablet form-factor device. While I'm sure I'll follow the Steve Jobs presentation zealously, I can't imagine what Apple could possibly announce that would compel me to part with another $300 of my money. (Granted, I think I made a similar comment even after Steve Jobs had announced the iPhone in January 2007, six months before I bought one the day after they went on sale.)

On the one hand, I have a laptop, one of those wonderful 15 inch unibody MacBook Pros. It may not be effortless to carry around, but it's certainly portable, and there's little I can't do with it. On the other hand, I have an iPhone, which, while nowhere near as powerful as my laptop, is extremely portable and fulfills 80% of my computing needs. I can check my email, browse the web, listen to my music and even unlock a ZipCar. Together, and supplemented by my Kindle, there's rarely a moment my technology bubble can't support what I need or want to accomplish.

Some have pointed to the Apple tablet as a Kindle competitor, positioning it as a sort of "multimedia surface." Indeed, Amazon quietly announced last week a new 70-30 revenue sharing policy (à la the Apple App Store) for authors peddling their works in the Kindle Store. They also took the wraps of a Kindle SDK to allow developers to write "apps" for the Kindle. But, unless the Apple device has some kind of dual-mode display that can swap between E Ink and a standard LCD, I doubt whether any serious reader would opt for the Apple device over the the Kindle. For me at least, the killer feature of the Kindle is the easy-to-read E Ink display. As for multimedia applications, I've never really been satisfied watching movies or TV shows on my iPhone, and I doubt the new tablet will be much better, even at a rumored seven inches.

But I'm not one to underestimate Steve Jobs and Apple. I'll probably have one of these tablet devices before the year is out.

I've reviewed my macroeconomics notes a gazillion times, and I'm convinced I won't remember anything more if I continue to recite definitions for the next two hours. So instead of continuing my bout of superfluous studying, I'm going to weigh in on the App Store pricing debate.

Since it's debut in the summer of 2008, many pundits have criticized the downward trend in application prices on the App Store. They argue, quite reasonably, that a norm of super-low prices has driven all kinds of quality out of the market. But then many of them add some commentary about the cheap applications conditioning people into thinking all applications should be cheap. I suspect the market breakdown is more a flavor of the "lemons problem" as made popular (among academics) by George Akerlof's famous paper on the market for used cars. (Lemons refer to bad used cars, not the fruit.) In other words, people are only reluctant to spend money on applications because they have little or no idea whether an application is worth more than $0.99.

Certainly, my problem with the App Store has always been the lack of information about particular applications — the symptom of a market with problems due to information asymmetry. Namely, I have virtually no idea whether an application will be a high quality application or not when I click the "Buy" button in iTunes. Some would point to user reviews as a way to reduce asymmetry, but I have a hard time gauging how much I will like the application based on the shallow commentary of a random stranger.

I only bought a $20 copy of OmniFocus for the iPhone because I knew the Omni Group has a strong reputation, and because I figured the iPhone client must be at least as good as its desktop counterpart. And even then, I worried that I might have paid $20 for a clunky, inoperable piece of software. Likewise, I have been reluctant to buy a copy of Tweetie for the iPhone, despite its relatively low price and the bevy of positive reviews from reputable sources, precisely because I cannot try it out.

More recently, the fine folks at Wolfram Research released a Wolfram Alpha application for the iPhone. Much to my surprise, they priced it at $50. A number of technology bloggers (e.g., John Gruber) have applauded the move, claiming that it represents a return to prices that allow developers to create high-quality applications. But my objection to the $50 price tag on the Wolfram Alpha application has nothing to do with an intrinsic opposition to paying for software. Rather, I don't understand how they expect anyone to pay $50 for an application that offers content no different than what one can access through the iPhone's web browser. It's called a single-price monopoly folks.

Fortunately, there is a possible light at the end of the tunnel. Apple recently allowed developers to do in-application purchases in free applications. This opens the door for developers to offer a free, but crippled, application that can be easily upgraded, the same sort of model most Mac desktop software uses. It's certainly the only reason I paid my $80 for a copy of Panic's Coda software.

A little over three years ago I bought an Apple Cinema Display. It cost a bundle, but it has proven to be a good investment. In fact, it's lasted through not one, not two, but three laptops. Not to mention, it still blows away most other displays in terms of its color reproduction, viewing angle and industrial design. (It has touch sensitive brightness and sleep controls!)

Unfortunately, however, one of the display's biggest features is also its biggest drawback — at least for people crazy enough to attend college 3,000 miles away from home. UPS charged me upwards of $70 to ship it one-way from Portland to Lewiston. So, at about this time last year, I set about finding myself another big widescreen monitor to plop down on my dorm room's desk. At the time, I reached two conclusions. First, I wanted to buy another Apple display. Second, I didn't want to buy old technology.

Thus I waited. In fact, I spent my entire sophomore year of college waiting patiently for Apple to take the wraps off something new and improved. But Apple never refreshed their Cinema Displays. In fact, they discontinued the 20" and 23" models without replacing them. (I'm not counting the weird 24" LED Cinema Display because it has a MagSafe connector and one of those accursed glossy coatings.)

Now, as I head back to school, I find myself in more or less the same position I was in a year before. I need another display for school, but I don't want to buy outdated technology and I really don't want to buy a piece-of-junk Dell display with a TN panel.

Part of me wants to keep waiting, despite the hit my productivity takes when I'm confined to the relatively small display on my laptop. While other manufacturers do offer displays with comparable image quality, none of them quite have the look of an Apple display. The less superficial, more pragmatic part of me wants to pick up an Eizo or a high-end NEC.

Decisions, decisions.

Earlier this morning, Apple sent reporters invitations to its annual iPod media event, scheduled to take place this year on 9 September. Apple also sent many of its educational customers, such as myself, a marketing email to remind everyone that their back-to-school promotion, in which educational buyers receive a free iPod with the purchase of a Mac, ends on 8 September.

It's no secret that Apple's back-to-school promotion is designed to help them clear out their inventory of old iPods before the holiday shopping season arrives along with revamped iPods. I do admire, however, how ruthlessly Apple runs the promotion. The very day after their back-to-school promotion ends, new iPods will almost certainly be unveiled. Such is the consumer electronics industry.

After I posted my last piece on Snow Leopard, I received a couple of emails from friends at school asking me why the Bates College "Help Desk" folks had advised them against upgrading. At first, I was baffled.

I've had Snow Leopard installed since last night, and I tested every application I use on a regular basis — R, Mathematica, Word, Excel, Photoshop, Illustrator, Coda, et al. — to make make sure I can go back to school without a hitch next week. Unfortunately, I completely forgot one very important application: Cisco's pathetic excuse for a piece of software, the Clean Access Agent.

Said software, which I've blogged about on a number of other occasions, facilitates access to the Bates campus network. It's a terrible implementation of a very good idea: ensuring users have the right credentials and security features installed before allowing them onto the network.

So, naturally, it turns out the Cisco Clean Access Agent does not work on Snow Leopard. To put it mildly, I find this inexcusable. Registered developers, like Cisco's engineers, have had access to pre-release versions of Snow Leopard since June 2008. That's over a year. That one of the world's largest technology companies couldn't manage to bring their software up-to-date in the space of 14 months is outrageous.

The folks at the OmniGroup, who develop such wonderful applications as OmniFocus and OmniGraffle, had fully Snow Leopard compatible versions of each and every one of their applications the day before Snow Leopard shipped. This in spite of the fact that each one of the OmniGroup's applications is probably an order, or several orders, of magnitude more complex than Cisco's dinky little Clean Access Agent, and the OmniGroup is a tiny company with far fewer than 1000 employees.

All this incident has done is reinforce my perception that the Cisco Network Access Control product is really, really awful. Get on it Cisco!

It took a lot of luck, a touch of ingenuity and a great deal of pain to install Snow Leopard; though my travails are no fault of Apple's. The whole sad sorry tale is long and dull, so I will skip it here. Interested parties should read my Twitter updates concerning the ordeal. My unique installation woes aside, Snow Leopard is a great $29 investment for anyone who has a 64-bit capable Intel-based Mac.

Beginning with the installation process, once I had the installation DVD working, everything was a breeze. Apple's claim that it only takes 15 minutes to install is a bit out of whack — it took more like an hour — but the process was painless and error-free. Not to mention it freed up about 20 gigabytes of space on my laptop's hard disk, far more than Apple's claimed 7 gigabyte gain. The installer freed up less space on my parents' iMac and my sister's MacBook Pro — those machines realized 16 and 14 gigabyte improvements, respectively — though the gains still beat Apple's advertisement.

Booting into Snow Leopard for the first time, it's clear why Apple priced the update at $29. From the user's point of view, nothing whatsoever has changed visually, aside from some of the Dock features, which I'll discuss later. The changes that Apple did make to the guts of the operating system, however, make a big difference.

For starters, Snow Leopard does a much better job of leveraging lots of RAM. Under Leopard, my "core four" applications — Safari, Mail, iTunes and Tweetie — rarely used more than a gigabyte of memory. Now, with just those four applications open, my laptop uses all of the two gigabytes of RAM I have installed. This makes a huge difference in terms of responsiveness: so much so that I'm upping my MacBook Pro to four gigabytes of RAM, as I suspect it will now make a perceptible difference.

Snow Leopard also realizes huge improvements in speed by running most of the core applications and processes in 64-bit mode. Everything feels much, much faster, from running a Spotlight search to browsing the Web with Safari. Unfortunately, though, my beloved Safari AdBlock — which does a great job of killing banner and Flash advertisements — only works when Safari runs in 32-bit mode. Otherwise, I'm just waiting for the rest of my applications to receive the 64-bit treatment.

The one big visual change Apple has made concerns the Dock, which now sports translucent gray contextual menus, rather than the system default off-white panels, in addition to a revamped implementation of Exposé. I have mixed feelings about the change in the Dock's context menu color scheme: it seems inconsistent. The new Exposé is also hit-and-miss in my book. Nouveau Exposé, as I'm calling it, arranges the windows in a predictable grid pattern, which lacks some of the charm of the original Exposé's higgledy-piggledy method of fitting the thumbnails on the screen. I do appreciate the fact that Nouveau Exposé includes thumbnails of any docked windows along with everything else.

Buying a copy of Snow Leopard should be a no-brainer for anyone using a 64-bit Intel Mac, especially given that Apple only charges $29 for a single-user licensee. (Users of the original Intel Macs with 32-bit Core Duo processors will see improvements as well, but they are not as pronounced.) Snow Leopard is, as Apple claims, the same Leopard everyone knows and loves, but snappier, more refined and better positioned to leverage new hardware.

It occurred to me that there's another compelling reason to improve the fidelity of our phone calls: fewer cell phone-related accidents on the road.

While I'm too lazy to find even an article on Wikipedia to back this claim up, I will assert that the amount of cognitive power required to understand an audio recording is inversely proportional to the quality of that recording. In other words, people have to use more of their brainpower to understand a poorly made recording than to understand a high quality recording.

If we take this to be true, it becomes clear that improving the fidelity of phone calls would reduce the number of cell phone-related driving accidents. The real danger posed by cell phone use while driving is not the physical distraction of fumbling for the phone or awkwardly holding the device against one's ear. In fact, studies — which I will conveniently not link to here — have shown that drivers using a hands free kit are no less distracted while driving than drivers who simply hold the phone to their ear. It's the cognitive distraction that causes problems. And, part of the reason that cell phone conversations are more of a cognitive distraction than, say, speaking to someone in the passenger seat, is the fact that drivers' brains must devote more of their cognitive power to understanding a low fidelity phone call than to understanding someone's un-garbled voice in the next seat over.

That said, I don't know whether improving the fidelity of cell phone calls would remove enough of the cognitive load placed on the brain by making the phone call to make driving-whilst-phoning safe. So it still might make more sense to ban cell phone use among drivers. But, at the very least, I have another reason to whine about the lamentable fidelity of phone calls.

I hate talking on the phone.

Part of me hates the fact that I can't make eye contact with the other person. Even in bona fide face-to-face conversation, few things irritate me more than people who don't make eye contact when we're speaking. But more than that, I hate talking on the phone because the sound quality is so inexcusably awful. I've stopped counting the number of times I embarrass myself because I couldn't understand what the other person on the phone was saying. To think, I can upload photos to Flickr or download music from iTunes anywhere I have a cell signal, but the sound quality of phone calls has remained virtually unchanged over the last two decades!

Industry executives usually respond to such criticism with the claim that offering higher fidelity phone calls would overtax their networks, landline and cellular. Call me a skeptic. While I'm not an expert in today's super efficient audio compression algorithms — or any other audio processing algorithms for that matter — I have used Skype to make voice calls.

Many people like Skype because it makes long distance calls either inexpensive or free. I love Skype because the sound quality is so deliciously good. When I speak to someone on Skype, their voice doesn't sound mechanical, processed or tinny. It sounds more like that person is sitting across from me in the same room. What's more, the folks at Skype manage to transmit their high fidelity voice calls at between 24 and 128 kilobits per second. For reference, most phone calls in the United States require about 40 kilobits per second of data transmission capacity.

This to me says that telecoms could easily transmit high fidelity phone calls without any major changes in bandwidth requirements. Assuming, of course, that improved sound quality does not increase customer demand for phone use.

There's something obnoxiously ironic about the fact that, of all the features phone companies could have improved over the years, the quality of their core product — phone calls — has barely budged. I love that my iPhone can take pictures, surf the Web and send email. But I would be happier still if all those features did not come at the expense of my phone having an improved "phone" feature.

On Monday CourseSmart took the wraps off its iPhone application, which will allow students who rent electronic textbooks from CourseSmart to read their textbooks on their iPhones and iPod touches. I suppose, in theory, this might be a good idea. Students don't usually pay as much for the textbooks they rent from CourseSmart and, assuming they are one with their cell phones, always have their books at hand. Environmental types like that trees needn't be cut down, and publishes love the juicy margins on electronic books.

But who would want to read a textbook on an iPhone? The screen, while adequate for reading short emails or watching the occasional video clip, is hardly ideal for reading dense technical literature or looking at detailed diagrams. Nor is the iPhone's battery life well-suited for the kind of last-minute studying so many of my peers subject themselves to before exams.

For that matter, who would even want to read a textbook on a computer screen or an electronic paper device? While both those options offer more screen real estate than the iPhone and, in the case of the computer, the ability to add whiz-bang features like animated diagrams, having the real book is still vastly superior.

I like to reference multiple textbooks simultaneously, or at least leave them open for later reference. Such a simple study setup is difficult pull off with electronic books, unless one owns a workstation with a pair of 30 inch displays, or a dozen Kindles. (Even at my fancy private New England liberal arts college, I no know one who boasts either arrangement.) But more importantly, I can lend real textbooks to other people, reference them as long as I own them and access them without an Internet connection.

Of course, six months from now I'll probably read another article in the Wall Street Journal about the iPhone application's runaway success. Sometimes the market acts in mysterious ways. Or perhaps consumers aren't as smart as we economic type like to think.

Sometime today Dell launched a new section of their main website called "Della." While Dell makes no overt claims about Della's intended audience, it's clear Della targets women buying computers.

No doubt, within a few hours the hoard of feminist technology bloggers online will produce (or have already produced) a few volumes worth of writing decrying Dell's latest initiative as misogynistic, sexist or both. "Surely," these bloggers will argue, "Women don't need to have a special section of the Dell website with softer corners, pastel corners and helpful tips to buy a computer."

But I disagree. In my experience, most people — women and men — have a hard time wading through page after page of configuration options when they go to buy a computer. So much so they would benefit from a dumbed-down buying experience.

On Dell's website, for instance, people have a choice between 13 different laptop computers and 14 different desktop computers. Even the particularly adept souls who manage to pick one model have even more choices to make once they've whittled those 27 choices down to one. By my count someone who choses to buy a Dell Studio 15 laptop can configure the computer in nearly 3 sextillion different ways, assuming they only either buy one or zero sets of speakers along with their laptop. (A sextillion, by the way, is a one followed by 21 zeros. A stack of 3 sextillion one dollar bills would reach from the surface of the earth to the sun and back about 10 million times.)

For tech savvy people, the degree of customization Dell offers is wonderful. Should I ever decide to defect from the Macintosh camp and buy a Dell laptop, the number of choices Dell offers would draw me to their site. For everyone else, however, such choices are surely confusing. When most people buy a computer they want a product that will edit their photos, or allow them to email their friends. I doubt they care whether their computer's processor can do 2 billion calculations versus 2.4 billion calculations every second.

This is one reason Apple has been so successful of late. Indeed, they offer online shoppers the ability to customize many of their computer's features. But they also offer a fairly limited selection of computers, and they do not try to befuddle consumers with choices. Their online store also makes it easy to skip right past the "Customize Your Mac" step to the shopping cart.

By stressing the fact that every computer they sell ships with iLife and OS X, Apple implies that every computer can do everything most people want to do with a computer: edit photos, browse the Internet and so on. The few choices consumers must make, such as whether to buy the MacBook or the MacBook Pro, can be done without too much of an understanding of technology.

The average buyer could probably answer the questions, "Would I be willing to pay $700 more to do everything faster?" or "Do I care about having a 15-inch screen?" without too much difficulty. On the other hand, John Q. Shopper would not know whether the "Dell Wireless 1397 802.11g Half Mini-Card" or "Intel WiFi Link 5100 802.11agn Half Mini-Card" best fit his needs.

Dell has the right idea with Della: make buying a computer less confusing. But in this case, it's the men of the world — or at least the men who refuse to shop for a computer with pink flowers all over the page — who lose.

When Apple announced in January that all music in the iTunes Store would go DRM-free later in the year, I applauded the move. Sure, it came at the expense of the flat-rate 99¢ pricing model. But I was thrilled that I would finally be able to buy albums and song, for instance, Deutsche Grammophon's wonderful DG Concerts series, without feeling guilty. And I would finally have the chance to upgrade the vast amount of DRM-protected content I purchased — naïve as I was back in the earlier part of this decade — to the DRM-free format, which also offers vastly superior audio quality.

Today was the magic DRM-free transition day. According to Macworld, every single track and album on the iTunes store now comes without DRM and in higher-quality 256kbps AAC encoding. Unfortunately, though, there are some hiccups.

First, I have yet to find a single track for 69¢. There are many tracks, mostly new popular singles, which hit the higher $1.29 price point and many tracks whose prices haven't changed from their classic 99¢. Not even recordings of obscure French baroque music from composers most people have never heard of go for less than 99¢. I was secretly thrilled about the new tired pricing system in iTunes because I tend to buy lots of unpopular music, mostly from obscure classical and jazz groups playing obscure classical and jazz pieces, and much less popular music. Yet I suspect far fewer tracks moved down to 69¢ than moved up to $1.29.

Second, my iTunes music library still has 443 protected purchased tracks from the iTunes store. I would be more than happy to pay the 30¢ per track — or over $130 in total — to upgrade. But apparently those tracks either no longer exist in the iTunes store, or a programmer at Apple needs to work overtime this weekend to fix the glitch.

Of course, none of this stopped me from snapping up the new recording of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos by the Academy of Ancient Music. Highly recommended.

As usual, the vast majority of the goods on display at CES were evolutionary and rather humdrum. Polaroid had a new digital camera on display that can print photos instantly. (Didn't a company called Polaroid invent that decades ago?) Dell, HP and Sony all took the wraps off more "netbook" computers — those miniature laptops with keyboards just small enough it's difficult to type. And, of course, Microsoft released the first public beta of Windows 7, otherwise known as "what Vista should have been two years ago."

One company, though, announced a product so great I sat through an hour-long video replay of the announcement event. That product, is, of course, Palm's new smartphone, the Pre. I would be surprised if the engineers down in Cupertino aren't working overtime this afternoon to catch up. The team at Palm has packed the Pre with a host of brilliant, incredibly well-engineered features that make my iPhone look clunky.

The Pre's hardware is nothing to write home about. Palm's industrial design team did a nice job on the device, though the Pre's design is inferior to that of the iPhone. The capacitive touchscreen looks more or less the same as the one found in the HTC G1, the iPhone and the BlackBerry Storm. Granted, it appears Palm has done much more work than either Google or RIM on the software side, so that the touchscreen on the new Pre supports the kind of wonderful multi-touch gesturing that makes the iPhone such a fantastic product.

Palm did, however, make one interesting and decidedly brilliant hardware design choice. Unlike any other smartphone I know of, the Pre features a touch-sensitive "gesture area" underneath the screen. From what I saw in Palm's launch presentation, this gives the device a slew of extra capabilities.

For instance, reading long web articles, from the New York Times or Wikipedia, can be a chore on the iPhone. Of course, I have to keep flicking the page down as I read. Unfortunately that means I must move my finger onto the screen, estimate the correct amount of "scroll" I need to advance just enough to read the next paragraph, but not so much that I miss some of the article, and I have no choice but to obscure a quarter of the screen with my thumb, making what's on the screen difficult to discern.

Not a problem with the gesture area on the Pre. One simply swipes a finger downwards or upwards in the gesture area — leaving the display uncluttered by an extra thumb — and the device automatically scrolls the page one screen-length up or down. Genius.

On the software side, Palm has come up with myriad ingenious software innovations. Its Synergy technology automatically and — more importantly — intelligently aggregates data from all corners of the Cloud and presents it in a useful way. Rather than feature umpteen messaging applications — one for AIM, one for SMS, one for MMS, etc. — the Pre's software just lumps all the messages between you and a given contact, regardless of what service or protocol they came from, into one long thread. The Synergy software enables the Address Book application to pull data, not just from a single sync source, but from Exchange, Google, Facebook and many other repositories of personal data. So, no need to worry whether you copied someone's phone number from Facebook into your iPhone or Google account. If it's out there, the Pre will find it.

The new Palm WebOS, which powers the Pre, also deals with notifications far more elegantly than on any other device I've used. Whereas a run-of-the-mill Nokia, or even the iPhone stops everything and displays an intrusive box when an alarm goes off or a text message arrives, the Pre simply slides a small notification onto the bottom of the display, leaving the open application completely unaffected.

I could go on and on about how much I like of what I've seen of the Palm Pre. Jon Rubenstein — who, by the by, helped Apple develop the original iPod — and his team have done a fantastic job. I doubt I will give up my iPhone the moment the Pre goes on sale. The iPhone is pretty great. But I will not hesitate to recommend the Pre to anyone in the market for a smartphone. And I sincerely hope Apple has something spectacular in hand for the next version of the iPhone. The competition has finally arrived.

It has been a long, long time. Forgive me.

More topically, I just bought a fancy new MacBook Pro. I needed a bigger hard drive, but I didn't feel comfortable completely disassembling my old MacBook Pro to replace it. That and I felt compelled to have a 64-bit processor and more than 2 GB of memory. It just sounds good.

What I really love about the new machine, though, is not the zippy processor or the more capacious hard drive — as compared to my previous computer — but the build quality of the laptop's case. Unlike the aluminum PowerBook and original MacBook Pro — whose cases were cobbled together from a mishmash of stamped aluminum, plastic gaskets and fasteners — the top case of Apple's latest offering begins its life as a solid block of aluminum, which a series of machining operations whittles down to the final product. The result is something to behold.

My two previous computers, a PowerBook G4 and a first-generation MacBook Pro, never seemed as well constructed as their price tags led one to believe. To be certain, neither computer feet as flimsy as an inexpensive Dell Inspiron. But for $2000, a laptop should be constructed like a tank. Yet, both the aluminum PowerBook and the MacBook Pro would creak whenever I picked them up or warp slightly when the processors were running at full bore.

The new "unibody" MacBook Pro, on the other hand, feels like a $2000 computer. There are no seams, far fewer joints and thus no creaking. The computer is built like a tank. Not to mention it looks great too. I especially like the sleep light, which disappears completely when it's not in use, thanks to some rather brilliant engineering on Apple's part.

Of course, the new MacBook Pro has a few flaws. First and foremost, Apple does not offer the 15" model with a matte display. Admittedly, I like the screen more than I thought I would. The glare is not that obtrusive, even in bright sunlight. At the same time, however, I cannot help but wish I could chop the screen off my old computer and superglue it to my new one.

A FireWire 400 port would also make a nice addition. While I appreciate at least having a FireWire 800 port, unlike the unfortunate folks stuck with no FireWire whatsoever on the new unibody MacBook, the absence of a dedicated FireWire 400 port annoys me. First, I can't use the FireWire hub on my gorgeous Apple Cinema display. The cable is built-in to the monitor and, so far as I can tell, no one sells a FireWire 400 to 800 adapter dongle. Second, without a dedicated FireWire 400 bus, the super speedy FireWire 800 will drop in speed if so much as one device on its tree cannot operate at FireWire 800 speeds.

All in all, though, I like the new computer. It's nice not to crawl along with only a gigabyte of free space on my startup disk and the new made-from-a-brick case is nothing short of wonderful. The glossy screen is not so irksome, both on its own and, in my case, when there is a big matte Cinema Display to use instead.

As much as I love FedEx, I cannot say it made me happy to fork over $100 last spring to have my Apple Cinema Display shipped across the country for the summer. Thus, upon my return to school this August, I set about buying another monitor to keep on the East Coast.

But, after three months of perusing reviews sites, I have concluded that there really are no goods substitutes for an Apple Cinema Display. Or at least none that I could find. Apple, as far as I can tell, is the only vendor that still sells LCD displays driven by IPS (in-plane switching) technology.

IPS driven LCD panels, while technically superior in most every respect to their TN and PVA brethren, cost much more to manufacture. Thus, most manufacturers switched to TN panels to bring prices down for price-obsessed consumers.

This annoyance underscores the distorted way in which most people make choices. As far as I can tell, most American consumers care only about the price on the sticker, rather than the true economic cost. They readily accept a TN panel at a lower sticker price, even though a more expensive IPS panel would ameliorate, if not completely eliminate, the problems many consumers have with LCD displays generally.

(I didn't realize this until just a few days ago, though now that I do, I finally understand why my Cinema Display looks so much better than most other monitors I've used.)

Every once in awhile, someone asks me about the United States' transition to digital television scheduled to take place two years later than originally planned in February 2009. Given the enormous sum of money the government has spent on public service announcements, coupons and other publicity, it always surprises me just how little the average person knows about the upcoming changeover.

That is, until I paid a visit to the FCC's digital television information website at dtv.gov. The government — or at least the FCC — must think Americans are incredibly stupid. I could not find a video, article or advertisement that actually explains the difference between analog and digital broadcasts. The page titled, "What's DTV?" completely misses the boat. It begins:

This makes me think, as most uneducated consumers do, that moving to digital from analog television is really a transition to high definition television. It's not. (And it's not their fault they don't understand it either.)

Rather, the DTV transition will move over-the-air broadcasts in the United States to a digital method of transition from an analog transmission system. I can describe the delight of eating a box of Moonstruck chocolates in English or in French. But regardless of the language I choose to speak, the intrinsic meaning of my prose remains the same. "Moonstruck chocolates are delicious," conveys the same message as, "Les chocolats de Moonstruck sont délicieux." In the same way, broadcasters will now transmit a 480 line, interlaced picture via digital broadcast rather than via an analog broadcast. The picture remains intrinsically the same.

Of course, my choosing to speak in English rather than French has some benefits. For one, I have a much stronger command of English than French. I could describe eating a Moonstruck truffle as, "A blissful experience that sends one into a transcendent state of nirvana." But, without a French-English dictionary handy, I cannot describe the experience of eating a Moonstruck truffle with as much metaphorical detail. So too can broadcasters, by virtue of the digital transmission method now beam fuzz-free standard definition and beautiful high definition pictures with 5.1 channel surround sound into people's homes.

Consumers, however, may need one of those mythical converter boxes if their television doesn't have a digital tuner. It would be as if I asked one of my non-French speaking friends, "Connais-tu une bonne boisson pour accompanger des chocolats de Moonstruck?" An older television glosses over the digital signal because it has no idea what to do with it or what it means. The converter box acts as a sort of translator that could step in and convert my previous statement into English: "Do you know a good drink to go with some Moonstruck chocolates?"

See? It's not that complicated! Would it kill the FCC to actually explain the technical difference between analog and digital television? Their oversimplified explanations only serve to make me and everyone else befuddled and confused.

The BBC just ran a story about the TrueCall, a device developed by a group of British eggheads sick and tired of receiving unwelcome phone calls. The idea behind the device is quite brilliant, though not particularly original: numbers on a user-created white list go through normally, numbers on a black list receive a snippy recorded messages and unidentified callers must wait on hold while the end user decides what to do. Ad blocking browser plugins and some spam email filters work in much the same way.

With that idea in mind, it struck me that some kind of iPhone application might be able to do something similar. The iPhone, with its works (almost) anywhere Internet connection, could download a list of known telemarketers' phone numbers and display the incoming call to the end user depending upon its status. Then I remembered that Apple has yet to grant developers that kind of system-level access — namely the ability to tinker with the Phone application — to make such a system possible. Unfortunate.

In the interim, someone — perhaps me if I have enough time — should put together a plugin for Mac OS X Address Book that syncs one huge vCard file with the name "Telemarketer" and known telemarketers' phone numbers between Macs and a user-created telemarketing blacklist in the cloud. I would never need to answer another junk phone call again. Unfortunately, there's no way to have the iPhone answer the call and play a pre-recorded message.

For whatever reason, I decided to join Twitter, the popular micro-blogging service that allows people to broadcast the mundane aspects of their day-to-day existence to the world. But as much as I love the concept, I have realized that Twitter is more or less useless without more than a few people to follow.

Apparently, my friends are just too cool to use Twitter. Arriving at that realization was really quite comical. I exported my 300 or so contacts from Address Book into my Gmail account so Twitter would be able to access all of their email addresses. Then I clicked on the "continue" button and waited. I could not and cannot believe that, of the 300ish people in my Address Book, only one person has a Twitter account!

Anyway, for those people who have a desire to read about the mundane aspects of my life, I can be found at twitter.com/josephkibe.

For a few blissful seconds, I thought I had true network connectivity on my iPhone here at Bates. For a few blissful seconds.

A few minutes ago, I accidentally opened the WiFi configuration panel on my iPhone. As it happened, my phone showed not one, but two different wireless access points: Bates — the campus-wide WiFi I have complained about ad nauseam for the last nine months — and BatesGuest, something new. In a moment of chimerical optimism, I connected to the aforementioned network, just to see what would happen. To my astonishment, just a few minutes later I could open Safari and browse the World Wide Web on my iPhone without any perceivable restrictions.

Then I tried to check my email.

I pushed the Home button, tapped Mail and waited for that wonderful new mail ping. Ten seconds passed. Then thirty. Then sixty. Then I knew I wouldn't have my cake and eat it too. Bates ILS, doubtlessly in the name of network security, has restricted devices using the BatesGuest access point to TCP/IP traffic only. No FTP. No IMAP. No ZeroConf.

While I understand most users have an inexpert understanding of network security, this kind of sandbox is ridiculous. Not only am I unable to check my email on my phone, I'm also prevented from using a host of incredibly useful tools that necessitate my phone and computer be on the same subnet.

Take Air Sharing, a promising application that allows users to copy files from their Macs to their iPhones by way of a Bonjour connection. I can't use it to, say, save paper by storing PDF readings on my phone rather than carrying around a printed copy. Or the Apple iTunes Remote application. Not to mention the fantastic applications just waiting for Apple's okay. (Provided they actually make it.)

The college campus has spawned a host of revolutionary innovations. Bates' lack of a computer science department notwithstanding, the school's ruthless IT security policy means the next Facebook or Napster will likely be developed elsewhere.

As much as I object to some of the experimentation that happens in dark corners of the campus, college is meant to be a place for people to experiment. Unlike experimentation in the physical world, however, software permits perfect control. So, while a student could decide to scream "Fire!" during the drama department's next performance to, say, test the boundaries of free speech — bearing in mind our nation's current laws — perfect control of our network means no experimentation whatsoever. And that's unfortunate.

As I have mentioned more times than I care to admit, I love my iPhone. It's pretty great. And, over the last two months, I have become even more of an iPhone evangelist thanks to Apple's iPhone SDK, which allows approved third party developers to develop amazing new applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch platforms.

While the vast majority of the applications available on the App Store have absolutely no purpose and merit no attention, other than as examples of how not to program, a few gems make the true potential of the iPhone as a computing platform clear. Super Monkey Ball, for one, takes advantage of the iPhone's accelerometer and relatively powerful 3D graphics capabilities in an amazing way. I'm also a big fan of OmniFocus on the iPhone (and the desktop, for that matter).

But, understandably, Apple has taken measures to ensure the iPhone platform remains safe and malice free for its millions of users all over the world. Unfortunately, these measures will keep some truly fantastic ideas from ever making it into the hands of consumers.

Just today, news broke that a fantastic application will never make it onto users' iPhones. As someone who likes podcasts and owns an iPhone, I have often wondered why I can't download podcasts straight from the cloud to my phone. After all, the iPhone can connect to the Internet via WiFi and over the cellular network. Yet, I have no choice but to download podcasts on my Mac and sync them down to the phone. Apparently, someone else had the same qualm. And that someone developed an application to permit iPhone and iPod Touch users to download and play podcasts right on their devices.

Sadly, however, no one — save perhaps for the developer — will have the opportunity to use the application. Because Apple rejected it.

I respect Apple's right to exercise control over the applications distributed on the iPhone platform. They have the best intentions. Nevertheless, Apple should adjust its policy so far as approving applications goes.

Apple should reject applications only when absolutely necessary. Only, that is to say, if the application violates their agreements with AT&T (e.g., a music store application that used the cellular network to pull music from the cloud) or poses a significant threat to users.

Other applications should, regardless of Apple's opinion of the applications utility or other subjective traits, receive a free pass. Apple has an uncanny ability to predict what will and will not work. They are not, however, as intelligent as the market, which has already exerted a profound influence on the way the App Store works. Many developers have responded to customers' complaints about high prices by lowering the prices of their applications, sometimes significantly.

Apple may suffer from time to time by taking this path, when some idiotic journalist links an equally idiotic application to Apple in error. But Apple stands to gain so much more. By allowing risky, unproven ideas onto the platform, Apple could easily find themselves with the platform running the next great, breakthrough piece of software. That, in turn makes the iPhone an even more compelling product for consumers.

By removing subjective discrimination from the application approval process, everyone wins. Developers have more opportunity to reap the fruits of their labor. Consumers have a richer experience. And Apple hooks even more people with their thoughtfully designed, brilliantly engineered products.

I've just moved in to my dorm for the 2008-2009 school year here at Bates. By and large, I like the room assigned to me by the housing office. I have a single in the fancy new yet-to-be-named dormitory. Given the building's youth, the walls remain blissfully whole, the baseboard does not crawl with dust, and the furniture does not look dated or overused. For the most part, it's quite nice.

Unfortunately, however, one of the building's greatest virtues is also its greatest vice.

This new dormitory, following Bates' obsession with environmentalism, has a number of features that make it very energy efficient. The lights in the bathrooms dim automatically after motion sensors detect a certain level of inactivity. A fancy ventilation system cools and heats the building with great efficiency. And the windows have a metallic coating to keep heat out in the summer and keep heat in during the winter.

But the windows' metallic coating keeps out more than just heat. It also reflects the microwaves cell phone's use to send and receive phone calls. Thus, no matter where I stand inside, I have absolutely, positively zero reception on my trusty iPhone. Apparently, this has posed a problem to big businesses as well. On the one hand, they want to sell themselves as environmentally responsible by improving the energy efficiency of their offices. On the other, however, cell phones and their derivatives, are essential to business in the new millennium.

The solution, according to what I've read, is to install special repeaters, leased from the cell carriers, inside buildings to ensure phones work.

But it makes more sense, at least in a building like mine with great WiFi reception inside, to simply give cell phones the ability to make calls over the Internet using a WiFi chipset. T-Mobile already offers a service along those lines, however, users must install a special WiFi access point and use a specific phone designed for WiFi-GSM hand-offs. Carriers could still bill customers for minutes talked over WiFi. I would not object to that. I do, however, object to having absolutely no cell reception inside.

While the new iPhone 2.0 software has yet to formally go online, Apple put up a downloadable software restore package, which, unsurprisingly, the hoard of Apple-obsessed people online late last night managed to discover. As such, I downloaded the software and upgraded my iPhone to the version 2.0 firmware.

The third-party applications for the iPhone are nothing short of amazing. They add a tremendous amount of value to what was already, far and away, the best mobile platform. I've used the Palm OS, Symbian and Windows Mobile. Nothing on any of those platforms comes close to replicating the experience on the iPhone.

But rather than jabber on in vague generalities, I've written up a few short reviews of the iPhone applications I've had a chance to take for a spin.

Image courtesy B Tal

For my part, I do not plan to snap up the new iPhone. Given AT&T's spotty 3G coverage — especially in not-on-the-cutting-edge Lewiston, Maine where I go to school — I cannot justify spending $299 for what is essentially the same phone, on top of the $15 rate hike I would sustain on my already insane monthly AT&T tariff.

Nevertheless, I read some of the early reviews, which by and large echoed my thoughts: faster Internet, better location via GPS, way more expensive in the long run, not terribly different than the original iPhone. At least one reviewer, though, resurrected the MMS issue. Since the day Apple began peddling the original iPhone, many members of the digerati have bemoaned the iPhone's lack of multimedia message or MMS functionality.

But I cannot understand why. I have never sent an MMS in my life. Nor, for that matter has one of my friends ever remarked, "Oh, let me send you an MMS of that photo." As far as I can tell, no one actually uses multimedia messaging. The MMS is essentially an email, with the difference that most carriers charge some outrageous per-use fee for each one sent. Especially on the iPhone — with unlimited data and all — it makes far more sense to send a plain old email.

I see Apple's omission of MMS as a well-planned feature, not a glaring omission. By not even including the ability to send multimedia messages, Apple gently nudges people away from spending 40 cents to send a photo via MMS. Instead, people use the convenient "Email Photo" button integrated in the iPhone's Photos application. Anything that helps consumers escape from the nickel and dime lunacy of America's wireless carriers is good news — and good choice architecture — in my book.

My two visits to the AT&T store to activate other phones took what seemed like an eon. I had to wait as other consumer asked the salespersons simple questions about phones and rate plans, which the AT&T reps seemed unable to answer in a way that gave the consumers any real guidance. I had to cajole the salesperson into giving me the phone I wanted, rather than some lesser model that gave them a higher commission. I had stare blankly at an unattractive wall of replacement power adapters while the inept salesperson spent half an hour activating my phone.

Needless to say, it was not pleasant.

Buying my iPhone, on the other hand, was as close to cell phone buying bliss as is possible to be. I strolled into the Apple Store, asked for an iPhone, paid and left. At home, I connected the iPhone to my laptop, and, within about five minutes, I had everything up and running. Veni, vidi, vici. So simple.

If AT&T's marketing copy is to be believed, their new policy aims to make consumers' lives easier. Yes, of course! For I so enjoyed spending my Saturday afternoon cramped in an AT&T store waiting for a sales rep to activate my phone.

Of course, the AT&T people would argue that I, a sophisticated computer user and gadget addict, represent a tiny minority of iPhone buyers: the "average consumer" could not possibly navigate the iPhone activation process, with its Byzantine twists and mad Visigoths waiting to take the first-born children of all those who fail to check the correct box.

That, however, is as ludicrous as their unlocking policy (i.e., completely insane). Consider Apple has sold well over 100 million iPods. That represents over 100 million people who successfully plugged their iPods into their computers and downloaded music to their devices.

The first-generation iPhone, I will admit, was not quite as simple as to setup as the iPod. I had to enter some contact and billing information to pay for the AT&T service. But the process is as simple as they come. Anyone capable of navigating the financial transaction required to buy an iPod could handle the extra mental strain.

No, I suspect profits provide the true motivation for AT&T's tyrannical policy. Like the original iPhone, the net price of the new iPhone 3G probably sits around $400. This time around, however, AT&T subsidizes the cost of the phone, such that consumers need only pay $199 for the device. AT&T, then, recoups from the $200 loss through the tariffs consumers pay for their wireless service.

By allowing consumers to simply walk in and buy the device for the subsidized price of $199 without committing to a two-year contract and wireless plan, AT&T runs the risk that the consumer hacks the phone, exports it to an excited Chinese cell phone user and costs the company $200 in revenue. It is, then, understandable that AT&T would want to take steps to avoid this.

But that is not to say AT&T could not have accommodated those who wanted to activate their iPhones in their homes or offices. AT&T could have sold the phones for $399 in the store, but provided a $200 service credit to those people who took the phone home, activated it from the comfort of their Aeron chair and agreed to a two-year contract.

I still love my iPhone, my Mac and just about every other product I own that bears the Apple logo. (The $29 iPod photo connection gizmo was not worth the money.) I am, however, coming to realize how much I dislike AT&T.

Apple CEO Steven P. Jobs announcing iPhone 3G

Image courtesy James Mitchell

I'll start with the good. Since Apple announced the iPhone SDK back in April, many — myself included — wondered how applications like instant messaging would work, since Apple forbade developers from running background processes, even after the application quit. In other words, for an instant messaging application, it would not have been possible to receive instant messages while using another application on the phone, such as Maps or Weather.

Fortunately, Apple debuted a brilliant solution to the problem with a push notification service that allows developers to ping a person's iPhone when new information becomes available. Hooray!

Apple's .mac replacement, MobileMe, is nice, but hardly revolutionary. It only makes me feel slightly less idiotic for giving Apple $100 every 12 months for a suite of Internet services. Still, I welcome the over-the-air magic synchronization features, à la Microsoft Exchange, especially since they cost me nothing more than I pay now.

Then came the much-anticipated iPhone with 3G radio, or "iPhone 3G." When first I read of the announcement, I felt good. For $200 less than I paid for the first iPhone last June, Apple would sell me an iPhone with super-speedy 3G data connectivity, a real live GPS module for genuinely accurate positioning and a blessedly non-recessed headphone jack. What was not to love?

Once again, AT&T, that demon of a service provider, stole the whiz-bang magic from Apple's product announcement. While Apple dropped the initial purchase price of the 3G iPhone (with 16 gigabytes of storage) to $299 from $499, AT&T increased the price of the special iPhone cellular service package.

Now, instead of paying $20 a month — plus the price of my voice plan — AT&T wants $30 for the special suite of iPhone cellular services. That lovely little piece of fine print moves my cost of upgrade to $540 from $299, assuming I have the iPhone 3G for 2 years. For not only do I have to buy a new phone, I have to give AT&T even more money for their less-than-perfect service.

I was also a little put out that Steve said nothing whatsoever about the Mac.

After I bought my iPhone last June, it quickly became apparent that I no longer needed a laptop computer. My phone does a more than adequate job of retrieving my email, keeping my calendar in sync and giving me access to information online.

With that in mind, I have been hoping, since June 2007, that Apple would release the chimerical prosumer Mac, a rung above the iMac and a rung below the Mac Pro. I may be a sophisticated computer user, but I do not need two quad-core processors. I would, however, like a Macintosh without a built-in monitor with a little more pep than an iMac and a little more room on the end-user side to modify the hardware.

I suppose there is always next year.

On Friday, 26 October, insane Apple fanatics once again gathered outside of the Cupertino-based company's retail stores to obtain the first publicly available copies of Mac OS X "Leopard." As I possess some dignity and a certain measure of sanity, I waited until Saturday morning to pick up my copy. No queues of crazy people. No problems.

By and large, I like Leopard. Apple has made a number of subtle, well-conceived changes to key applications, like Mail, iCal and the Finder, that add extra polish to the already stellar Mac OS. QuickLook — the nifty new technology that permits one to open a full preview of common document formats like Word, Excel and Keynote files — makes hunting down documents and photos far less of a chore. iCal no longer keeps event information squirreled away in an awkward drawer on the right or left side of the calendar. Instead, version 3 of Apple's calendaring software implements a rather charming pop-up editor that the software displays inline with the rest of the schedule.

The biggest improvements in Leopard, however, are under the hood. Though clever and thoughtful engineering, Apple has managed to dramatically improve application responsiveness and performance. In large part, they have accomplished this by better leveraging the dual- and quad-core processors that reside in newer Intel-based Macs. Everything — from Safari to Spotlight — responds much more quickly on Leopard than on Tiger with the same hardware.

Developers can also leverage a host of amazing new tools like Core Animation, the visual fireworks behind many of Leopard's visual improvements. Apple has also ushered in the era of Objective-C 2.0 with Leopard's Xcode 3. It finally frees developers from Cocoa's often confusing memory management scheme with garbage collection and, with properties, eliminates much of the monotony of creating accessor and mutator methods.

On the other hand, two integral elements of Mac OS X took a sharp turn for the worse. I speak of the Dock and the menu bar. As many commentators have already noted, the "improved" transparent menu bar is not only a superfluous use of transparency, but also quite detrimental to usability. With some desktop pictures, it is next to impossible to decipher the menu's text composited over the unsightly visual mélange of gradient and photograph.

Apple's decision to make the Dock a pseudo-three-dimensional reflective shelf is, to my retinas, what the Ottoman army was to the people of 15th century Constantinople. Its presence, superimposed on the two-dimensional desktop, is quite incongruous. But, more than the simple visual unpleasantness the new Dock imposes, I really dislike the new Stacks feature of the dock. Where once I could stash folders and files, and click once to open them or click and hold to view a folder's contents, I am now forced to use Apple's ridiculous "Stacks."

Fortunately, I managed to whip up a special, modified version of Apple's once-default Aqua Blue desktop picture (and my neutral desktop picture of choice) with a strategically positioned strip of white at the top, which gives one the illusion of an opaque menu bar. (Interested parties may download a copy from my flickr account).

Nonetheless, I strongly recommend that every Mac user make the leap and upgrade to Apple's latest cat-named operating system. Apple's subtle improvements and the amazing potential of Leopard's new system-level features make Leopard an essential upgrade.

Since EMI began peddling wonderful DRM-free, high-quality AAC files on the iTunes store in May, I have hoped against hope that Vivendi's Universal Music Group would do the same. Universal, as it happens, controls three of my favorite pseudo labels — Deutsche Grammophon, Decca and Verve — whose classic and jazz music sound sound far better with that extra 128kbps of audio data.

Of course, Universal, in its perpetual ineptitude, decided to put its snazzy new DRM-free, high-quality music everywhere but iTunes. Initially, I was angry. Yesterday, however, Amazon.com launched their "MP3 Downloads" store, which sells, among other music, the new Universal stuff. While I would compare the experience of browsing their store to wrenching a pair of jeans out from someone's grip on the first day of the Nordstrom anniversary sale compared to the serene minimalism of iTunes, I still managed to find a few songs worth purchasing, all of which sound terrific.

But my mild happiness turned to letdown when I discovered that Universal did not make its wonderful Global Concert Hall series of live digital recordings, released under the Decca and Deutsche Grammophon labels, available to Amazon.com. I really like the Global Concert Hall Series. It has featured the New York Philharmonic and the world-renowned Chamber Orchestra of Europe performing everything from Schumann to Chopin. The live recordings from iTunes teem with vivaciousness and energy, but the 128kbps bit-rate has always left me somewhat underwhelmed, especially compared with higher quality classical recordings in my library.

Take heed Universal! I want my Global Concert Hall and I want it at 256kbps!

It is no secret that Apple CEO Steve Jobs likes to surprise his audience. But nothing in my recent memory has created as much of a stir as Apple's decision yesterday to slash iPhone prices by $200, just two months after their release. Apple's share price fell by nearly five percent after the announcement. Investors, however, were not the only ones seething.

Admittedly, when I purchased my iPhone at the end of June, I knew that it would eventually see a price cut or some kind of improvement. But, as most industry analysts noted, such a drastic price cut two months after a product's introduction was, to say the least, unprecedented. I felt betrayed, wronged, and, above all, quite irate.

Even when I purchased a Nikon D50 for $1000, scarcely weeks after its release, it took Nikon over three months to cut the price by $100, or about 10%. Apple, in this instance, waited a scant two months to cut the price of the iPhone by nearly 40%.

But, around noon, Apple released a statement that, among other items, contained this statement:

Frankly, I still feel somewhat cheated, despite the fact that I will eventually receive a hundred dollar rebate. But, I suppose that is literal price of being on the cutting edge.

Mention of the Bose brand in conversation usually results in one of two discussions. Audiophiles sneer and assert that Bose ought be called "blows" for the mediocre audio quality its products offer. The rest of the world praises the ear-pleasing audio quality of Bose speakers, but recoils slightly at their inflated prices. Despite these differences, however, everyone can agree that the Bose brand oozes pretense.

Not that Bose does anything to make their image less ostentatious. Their advertising never makes mention of the price, as if to associate their Wave Radio or Lifestyle speaker systems with other super-premium luxury items whose price is only disclosed to the small portion of America's bourgeoisie who can afford them.

And, on one level, I wholeheartedly concur with the audiophiles. Bose speakers always imbue music with an excess of something I can only describe as "cheer." They make Bartök and Kabalevsky sound almost uplifting — something that, to anyone who knows anything about classical music, is conceptually impossible. I also cannot fathom why Bose sets such outrageous prices. They must have fantastic margins. When it comes to noise-canceling technology, however, Bose QuietComfort headphones set the bar for quality. David Pogue could not be more correct when he says, "The world just falls away," in his review of noise canceling headphones.

So, when my previous pair of noise canceling cans — a venerable set of Sennheiser PXC250 headphones — decided to malfunction a few weeks ago, I figured I would splurge and buy the best.

For the most part, the Bose QuietComfort 2 headphones meet my expectations. My Bartök sounds a trifle too jolly to be Russian, and the noise cancelation is marvelous. The included carrying case, however, contained something so incredibly pretentious I burst out laughing.

Inside the padded carrying case Bose provides a dozen business cards, which state:

Bose has redefined the meaning of narcissistic. Not only do they think the customer will love their headphones, they also seem convinced that total strangers, who merely catch sight of the Bose logo painted subtly on the side of the earphone, will inquire about the product's loveliness.

Frankly, I think Bose would probably do better business if they dispensed with their air of snobbery and, instead, appealed to the average American. It is the average American, after all, who would want speakers with a touch of added cheer.

Yesterday I recounted my adventure with push IMAP email from Yahoo! on my iPhone. In the time between then and now I sent an email to the Yahoo! technical support team, in the hope that someone would be able to provide a solution to my conundrum. I wrote:

The Yahoo! technical support representative who responded to my email used his English language skills, no doubt honed by a Harvard English degree, to craft this very insightful response:

What a revelation! I can access Yahoo! services on the Internet with my iPhone. No one would never draw that conclusion. Apple, after all, calls the iPhone an "Internet communicator." I, for one, took that to mean it played music. Perhaps I can visit other websites too. Or for that matter, maybe I can use my iPhone to make phone calls. It would never have crossed my mind.

If anyone from Yahoo! quality control reads this email, this man needs a promotion. Never have I received such an insightful and informative response from a technical support technician. Wasted talent, to say the least.

Are They Yahoo?
Why is my email unavailable on my actual computer?

With so many advantages, then, I figured I would take Yahoo! up on their offer. I signed up for a mail account, found a suitable user name and input the settings into my iPhone to start receiving the push IMAP goodness. Remarkably, the whole shebang sang. The second an email was sent to my new Yahoo! address the iPhone leapt to life and immediately informed me that I had a new email to read.

But when it came time to setup my computer the experience dove like the Dow, sinking from peachy to painful in a matter of seconds. I opened Mail on my laptop, pulled up the preferences and entered the appropriate settings. Unlike my iPhone, my MacBook Pro refused to cooperate, claiming that the server could not be found. So I tried again. Zilch.

I next turned to Google, hoping to find an answer. After five minutes of sleuthing I discovered that the iPhone uses a non-standard method of communicating with the Yahoo! servers that permits the iPhone — and no other devices — to access push IMAP email on their servers.

For $500 — in addition to the extra $20 I now pay to AT&T — I cannot have access to my Yahoo! email on my laptop with OS X Mail. I can live without custom ringtones and the sometimes molasses-like speeds of AT&T's EDGE data network. Locking my desktop email client out of my email, however, is something that I cannot tolerate, especially at that price.

Knows It's Not a Bee
Unlike my other, defective iPod, Apple's replacement does not buzz whilst I listen to music

Today, for instance, I took my iPod to one of Apple's famed Genius Bars address the strange buzzing my iPod had begun to emit during music playback. The Genius donned a pair of headphones and informed me that he had, "Never seen anything like this before." What cosmic forces conspired to sell me the one iPod of millions that had a strange buzzing issues I will never know. To Apple's credit, however, the Genius did give me a brand new iPod to replace my defective model that clearly missed its calling as a bee.

But the recent "Defect at the Apple Store" saga does not end there.

A week ago I purchased an iPhone -- hands down the best cell phone I have ever used -- but I had been bothered by a slight looseness on the lower left side of the device's lower plastic antenna cover. So, having waited forty-five minutes to see a Genius, I brandished my steel and black communicator and inquired about the gauche give. As it turns out, that too constituted a defect. So the Genius also replaced my iPhone.

I must commend Apple for so deftly handling this issue. Rarely do I walk into a store with two broken gizmos and walk out an hour later with two fully-functional replacements. Though I would really appreciate it if a consumer electronics company saved me from having to replace the gadget in the first place.

Better Sideways
The landscape keyboard and its larger keys make for easier and more accurate text entry

As many reviews have noted, the EDGE data moves data extremely slow. (For the technically inclined, the one test I ran with CNET's broadband speed test put my EDGE data speed at about 42.3 Kbps). But I have found, in my very limited usage of the EDGE network, that the speed suffices for viewing most non-graphics intensive web sites and retrieving email. My wireless network, connected to a modern high-speed Internet connection, sped the load times considerably.

Everything works as Apple advertised on television and online: applications load extremely quickly and I have only experienced one very non-eventful crash.

But beyond the fun and fancy features that everyone knows about, like the touch screen interface and the colorful animations, the most impressive feature of the iPhone is its sheer simplicity. Take voicemail as an example. On my old mobile, just configuring voice mail was a painful and befuddling experience. On the iPhone, I ran through a few simple screens that made the process effortless. I have not had a chance to try the visual voicemail system, however, if it functions as simply as the initial setup, I will doubtlessly find myself quite impressed.

In fact, I can only think of three features Apple should add: text selection, a system-wide landscape keyboard and a jog wheel.

The iPhone, to the best of my knowledge, does not permit the selection of a block or line of text. In an email, say, I cannot run my finger over a sentence and highlight it, as I might do with my mouse in a word processor. Instead, the iPhone forces the user to move to the end of the line and tap the backspace key until the text has all been deleted.

Apple also missed the boat with its landscape-oriented keyboard. In Safari, the iPhone permits text entry with a landscape keyboard, which is infinitely easier to use than the extremely skinny vertical keyboard present in the other applications. The landscape keyboard should be accessible in every application, not just Safari.

And, finally, Apple needs to add a jog wheel. Yes, the finger-flick scrolling looks cool and, in certain applications, comes in handy. But when I read my email, it would make one-handed operation much less of a hassle to have a wheel on the side of the device, like the old BlackBerry handhelds or Sony's long-dead Clié line of PDAs.

Nonetheless, save a scenario in which the other cell phone manufactures have some secret device stashed away in their R&D labs that the public has yet to see, I doubt anyone will overtake the iPhone so far as the software is concerned. Obviously, the people who feel compelled to have a seven-megapixel camera embedded in their phone should probably look elsewhere. For someone who wants an elegant and dead-simple smartphone, however, the iPhone fits the bill.

Mum as Ever
Apple CEO Steve Jobs giving his annual keynote address to developers at WWDC 2007 (Image courtesy acaben)

So what happened to those so-called "secret features"? Theoretically Apple could add more functionality to its operating system between now and its release in October. But Apple calls the product that Mr. Jobs demonstrated today a "near final" release of the software, which implies that Apple engineers will not add any substantial functionality between today and the final release of Leopard in October.

This disappoints me. Since January, Apple has done almost nothing but promote the iPhone. Admittedly, they refreshed some hardware and released a nice upgrade to Final Cut Studio, but otherwise, it has been all iPhone, all the time. Most of their consumer software -- iLife, iWork, Final Cut Express HD and Logic Express -- has not been updated for almost 18 months. And the last significant refresh of their hardware was the Mac mini's introduction in January 2005. The Mac Pro still makes use of an enclosure that has remained more or less unchanged since its release four years ago in June 2003.

I have seen enough of the iPhone. It clearly has some innovative features, though I will reserve final judgement until I can actually hold and use one. Unless the iPhone really knocks my socks off on June 29, I intend to purchase a Nokia E61i.

Hopefully the two percent decline in Apple's share price that followed Mr. Jobs' presentation will wake management up to the fact that they did not live up to their promise. Certainly, Leopard looks interesting, and I will gladly shell out $129 to buy a copy come October. But I do feel a little let down by the fact that Mr. Jobs did not unveil anything particularly amazing that really warranted his "top secret" label.

The Dream Crusher
Nokia's N75 disguises its inner-weaknesses with a well-presented façde of "feature packed-ness."

Initially, I had a very sanguine outlook on the matter. The Nokia N75 sports a 3G radio that actually works in the US and a high-resolution 2-megapixel camera. It also happens to run the fantastic Symbian Series 60 operating system. Cingular's first N-Series phone even has a swanky external screen that displays pertinent information, like the time and date, when the phone is closed. With so many supposedly wonderful features, I saw only two disadvantages between the N75 and the N80 I was on the verge of purchasing.

Firstly, the "initial handset investment" with the N75 is only lower than that of the N80 when you sign your soul away to Cingular for two years and send in a mail-in-rebate for fifty dollars. Yuck. But then, I doubt I will change carriers in the next two years: Cingular has never offended me too seriously. Secondly, the N75 has only one camera (the N80 has two) and the one it has takes less detailed pictures than the better of the N80's two optical capture devices.

Then I read an actual review of the N75. Aside from its messaging features, the reviewer could not find much to praise. Commenting on the design, the reviewer says, "The closed shell is shaped like a brick, and open isn't much more attractive." Call quality, something Nokia usually does very well, also falls short of expectations: "We couldn't help but be disappointed by the sound quality on calls, which came through a bit muddy and far too warm for our tastes." The review describes the camera as, "A real letdown from a phone in a family with such a photographic pedigree." As for the 3G features I so enthusiastically received, "We had some serious problems getting Cingular Video to function properly." It reads almost like a movie poster, but with negative comments instead of well-chosen praise.

My hope evaporated before it ever melted; sublimated, if you will. I would buy the N80, but Amazon.com has conveniently decided to be "Sold out" of the more attractive (and more inexpensive) black model. So wait I shall.

Humans will locate Atlantis before I manage to buy a new cell phone, because, in an unexpected twist, two problems have emerged. I mentioned in my previous cellular phone post that I had three choices: the Nokia N80, the Sony Ericsson P990i and the Sony Ericsson M600i. At some point on Sunday morning, I decided that I would plunk down the money and buy the M600i. After all, I have two digital cameras, what would I do with two more? But then, just as I was about to click the "Buy It Now" button on eBay, I had a sudden protective impulse to make sure that the phone would sync properly with my computer.

My reaction served me well. For when I checked said stat, I discovered that, in some cruel twist of fate, neither the P990i nor the M600i syncs with Mac OS X. Apparently it has something to do with those phones' cutting-edge UIQ 3 software, which requires some radically different driver in order to sync with OS X. And, more perturbing still, Apple did not address this problem in their latest OS X update, 10.4.9. Naturally, 10.4.9, happens to be just .0.1 away from 10.5.0, which just happens to be the version number of Mac OS X Leopard. So, I would probably have to wait until Apple releases Leopard in the vague "Spring 2007" timeframe, if not longer, to use either of my two choices with my laptop.

But that's not all. As I snooped around for information about the obnoxious incompatibility between phone and computer, I discovered more bad news. According to the cell-heads whose forum posts I thumbed through, the United States uses the 2100 MHz spectrum for transmitting high-speed 3G data. Everyone else, however, uses 1900 MHz spectrum. And, as luck would have it, neither the P990i nor the M600i have a 2100 MHz 3G radio. Wonderful.

In theory, I should have already purchased the N80. I cannot, however, bring myself to do it. Perhaps my fears that the N80 is too thick are unfounded. Though I simply cannot ignore the fact that my instincts have a very good track record.

While I may have an unhealthy affinity for gadgets, I am lagging far behind when it comes to cellular technology. Unlike the mobile phones owned by nearly everyone in the United States, or even Ghana, my cell phone is over three years old. Admittedly, I have spent countless hours attempting to find a replacement, but nothing fit the bill. At this point, however, I have become quite desperate: I really need a new mobile.

Most people would automatically put me down as one of the lunatics who will buy an Apple iPhone the minute they go on sale. But, unlike most gadget addicts, I do have at least some degree of sense. First generation products, of course, have an unpleasant tendency to break or malfunction in some way. Not a desirable trait. The iPhone's lack of a 3G wireless radio also seems somewhat backwards to me, especially considering the iPhone's remarkable HTML web browser.

So, I have narrowed the playing field down to three possible choices. None of them perfect, but I suppose one of them must do.

Nokia's N80 model is choice number one. It may not have a QWERTY keyboard for easy texting or datebook entries, but it does have three very impressive features. For one, it has not one, but two cameras: one on the front and one on the back. The rear camera permits the user to take high-quality 3-megapixels photos and the one on the front can be used for video calls. Secondly, it has the aforementioned 3G wireless radio so that I don't feel like I have been transported back to 1998 when I browse the Internet. And thirdly, it has a comparatively high resolution screen.

But the N80 is enormous. Unlike the Motorola RAZR, it measures over one inch thick! It may not sound that bad, but an inch-thick mobile would create a very uncomfortable bulge in my pocket.

Contender number two is the Sony Ericsson M600. Like the N80, it too has a 3G radio. Though unlike the N80, the M600 has a slick touch-screen and a QWERTY-esque thumb keyboard. It's also much thinner than the N80, measuring just four-tenths of an inch thick. The M600, however, does not have one key feature: a camera. I cannot honestly say I use the camera feature of my phone very often, though I like the idea of having one, or even two cameras, especially if I can wow people with video calls.

My last cellular possibility is the Sony Ericsson P990i. It has every bell and whistle anyone could possibly cram into a phone: a 3G radio, two cameras, a touch-screen, a full QWERTY keyboard, a numeric keypad and even WiFi. But the P990i is even more bloated than the N80. It's both over an inch thick, has generous horizontal and vertical dimensions, and weighs a lot, for a cell phone. The P990i also has the added disadvantage of costing the most of the three.

At the moment, I am leaning toward the M600. As I said, I really do not use the camera all that often and I like the idea of having a more svelte phone. Granted, I also cannot say that many people have two cameras on their phones. Decisions, decisions, decisions.

It's Quite Clear
HDTV looks incredibly good and more networks will make the transition later this year. In other words, it's a great time to buy. (Image courtesy Pioneer)

The picture quality of HDTV continues to blow me away: I often feel as if I am gazing through a window — albeit one with a restricted depth of field — not into a television set. Watching the second two hours of the 24 season premiere on Monday night, I could see the sweat coating the characters' faces and the minute imperfections in the actors' skin. Whether the makeup department needs to augment each actor's allocation of foundation, I don't know: it certainly looks more realistic, though, it is far from flattering. Even the on-screen clock, shown to indicate when in the chronology the episode takes place, looks sharper, almost becoming a feast for the eyes.

And with the promise of much more HD content — from CNN, the Food Network, FX, Sci Fi and TBS, among others — coming later this year, HDTV is even more compelling, as far more content will become available.

Granted, the HD movie situation does not look any better than it did a month ago. LG's new combination HD-DVD+Blu-Ray player costs far too much and, according to the various gadget blogs, it lacks the software to play interactive HD-DVDs. Warner Brothers' solution, to offer discs that will play in both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD players, also offers no fix. While it may play in both players, consumers will still have to contend with the fact that some studios only release their films on one format or the other. Movie buffs who, for whatever reason, enjoyed Poseidon, for example, can only find that movie on Blu-Ray.

Nonetheless, now is the perfect time to upgrade to HDTV. The prices of small- and medium-sized displays have fallen significantly in the last 18 months, and, with new 8th generation manufacturing plants coming online, prices for larger sets will likely plummet in 2007, making price much less of an issue. HDTV has finally matured to the point where I can say, without a moment's hesitation: "Upgrade!"

Watching parts of the Macworld Keynote on Apple's website, I could not help but notice the somewhat incongruous nature of Cingular's CEO Stan Sigman's presence when he took the stage. Unlike Google's CEO Eric Schmidt, who jogged onto the stage, Mr. Sigman waddled quietly out of the corner like a middle-aged, overweight penguin. Mr. Sigman also made the choice to read his speech off of notecards, something the other three speakers — Jobs, Schmidt and Yahoo Co-Founder Jerry Yang — wisely avoided. Even Bill Gates, whose speeches I generally consider quite marginal, manages to present sans notes at trade shows.

But even using the penultimate speaking crutch, Stan Sigman seemed incapable of articulately communicating his message. He stumbled on small words, created popping noises in his lavalier microphone — a feat I thought impossible — and he even confused Cingular with its new corporate parents. Whoops. Almost any fifth grade elementary schooler could have delivered a better speech, albeit without the industry buzzwords. (Though, that might actually constitute an improvement).

If I were the one giving the presentation, I would have been in the corner, cringing as Sigman doddered across the stage, ruining my meticulously prepared presentation.

Next time Cingular, send the PR guy.

For the last two and a half years, I have refrained from upgrading my cell phone. I have no doubt that my cellphone needs a replacement, but, at least today, nothing on the market has the fairly unimpressive feature set that I want in a phone. It really comes down to six features:

1. A logical, simple, aesthetically-pleasing and stable user interface
2. Seamless syncing with my Mac, without gobs of extra software or encumbrance
3. A GSM/UMTS radio that operates both in Europe and the US
4. Easy data input, either via handwriting recognition or a Blackberry-style thumb keyboard
5. Basic PIM and email functionality
6. A reasonable price

Some models have come close, indeed very close, to meeting all six of my not-that-outrageous criteria. Palm's Treo 680 comes close, but Palm OS syncing on the Mac is quite painful and the Treo 680 lacks a 3G radio. Samsung's widely publicized BlackJack also scores well, but it uses Windows Mobile, which does not sync easily with the Macintosh and runs the notoriously unstable and obfuscated Windows Mobile OS. Sony Ericsson's P990i, available only in Europe, does everything, but it costs $1000 in the United States: far more than I would like to spend on a phone.

With all of the buzz surrounding Steve Job's keynote tomorrow morning at Macworld, I have adopted a hopefully attitude that, tomorrow, I will finally have the opportunity to upgrade my phone. But if Apple makes the phone too consumer centric, then I doubt it will have a GSM radio compatible with European networks or any easy way to input data. Nonetheless, it is Apple, so I have high hopes that, perhaps, they will release two or more models, if indeed they aim to make the phone consumer-centric, rather than catering to the Blackberry audience.

I cannot wait to see what Apple announces tomorrow morning at Macworld, be it this long-rumored Applephone or a menagerie of other fun gizmos. Though, a cell phone that satisfies my six criteria would really make my Tuesday.

In truth, I never thought the war would begin. Certainly, Sony and Toshiba had developed rival, incompatible high-definition discs. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, respectively. But consumer electronics manufacturers offset that threat by assuring the public they would produce hybrid devices capable of playing both formats.

Obviously, I was wrong. As quickly as consumer electronics manufacturers had promised to produce hybrid players, they withdrew their offers. Consumers, typically, bore the brunt of the moves. They could either wait — depriving their big new flat-screen televisions of content — or they could invest thousands of dollars in one technology and hope to live.

Then, early this morning, I thought I saw a ray of hope. LG, in the pre-CES announcement blitz, had finally unveiled their hybrid movie player, which could read both of the competing formats. Once again, however, I met only disappointment. According to engadget, the LG BH "Big Hoax" 100 will cost a mind-numbing $1200. Only imbeciles or people suffering from chordophobia would ever pay $1200 for a hybrid player, as you could buy separate Blu-Ray Disc and HD-DVD players for less than $1200.

LG will either fail to meet expectations or make the player more inexpensive, unless they have a marketing campaign imbibed with a quantity of cleverness never before seen. Otherwise, even the most facile consumer will notice the deficit of thought in LG's pricing.

As much as I love my MacBook Pro, I could not help but feel a pang of annoyance when I read this morning that Apple had finally released MacBook Pro notebooks with Intel's latest-and-greatest Core 2 Duo processors. After all, I only purchased my MacBook Pro about a month ago. But Apple did not stop with the processor. The new MacBook Pros further humiliate me by featuring twice as much memory, a 120 GB hard disk, FireWire 800, and an improved optical drive that can burn dual-layer DVD disks.

My computer still performs quite speedily, regardless of improvements made in Apple's latest offering. At the same time, however, I could have purchased a much faster computer for the exact same sum of money, had I waited just a few weeks longer to replace my dying PowerBook.

Thanks obsolescence!

Il étincelle!
Image courtesy *nathan

With my old computer on the auction block, I intend to buy myself a lustrous new MacBook Pro complete with 15" widescreen, 2 GHz Core Duo processor, and at least 1 gigabyte of memory. Hopefully, my new number cruncher will run Photoshop and Dreamweaver at reasonable speeds while I wait most impatiently for Adobe to release Universal versions of said software products. (Did you hear that Bruce?) Granted, other than those two applications, all of my other applications will speed along as Universal binaries.

Obligatory unpacking photos should appear on my flickr picks page and in my flickr photostream once I buy and receive my dandy new computer.

As I mentioned earlier, I have recently begun to freshen up my website after my somewhat inept (or perhaps communication impaired) web hosting company finally managed to rehabilitate my website. However, now it appears that my computer would like to hinder my efforts as well. My lovely twelve inch Apple PowerBook has served me quite venerably in the last two and half years, but it has reached the end of its illustrious life, so far as I am concerned. It now strains to perform even the simplest task, making the notion of using Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Safari simultaneously seem quite laughable.

If all goes according to plan, I will replace my PowerBook with either a charming new MacBook or MacBook Pro in the coming weeks. At the moment, the fate of my eBay auctions predicate my decision, though I may buy a MacBook simply because of its smaller size. I had intended to buy a MacPro, but as my PowerBook does not seem to function in any reasonable capacity, replacing my laptop seems a much more prudent course of action.

Once again, please excuse the mildly unattractive nature of my website at the moment.

As far as I can tell, something has cursed me. Just about every gadget or gizmo I buy seems to fail, die, or otherwise incapacitate itself at some point during its lifetime. However, with Apple's products I have experienced a slight downtick in the number of problems. My PowerBook, for example, only had its logic board and hard drive die, and neither of my two iPods has ever needed servicing. All of that my not have the aura of good luck per se, but relatively speaking this is progress. The first digital camera I ever owned died when the mode dial popped off.

So, it came as a real shock when I realized about five minutes ago that my gorgeous Apple Cinema Display had developed what I believe to be a dreaded "dead-pixel." For the less computer oriented, a dead-pixel is one tiny little dot on an LCD monitor which either does not turn on, or, in my case, remains one color all of the time. Some argue that dead-pixels are almost expected when the panel composes some 1.7 million dots. However, when Apple charges what they do for their displays, they should look perfect. Furthermore, a dead-pixel cannot begin to function again with mere tinkering. To fix the problem one must remove and replace the entire LCD panel - something neither cheap nor simple.

I hope that this problem does not actually exist, but rather cropped up out of nowhere for a temporary period of time. Software exists for the purpose of running the screen through a barrage of tests to attempt to fix the dead pixel, though I have no idea how well said software works. It is also possible that I merely need to "rest" my computer monitor overnight. Though, if my problem turns out to be real, then I will feel absolutely enraged at not having 5.66890000053 X 10^-5% of my display.

Today, among many other things, Apple released a new iPod related product - the iPod HiFi. Typically when Apple releases a product, I find myself in a position where I cannot help but ogle at the sheer brilliance of whatever Apple has just released. I also tend to feel incredibly tempted to drop everything and go purchase whatever Apple has unveiled. However, with this iPod HiFi contraption, I feel no need to replace my Bose SoundDock. In fact, there are only two attributes I wish my SoundDock had that the Apple product does.

First is the audio input jack. On the new iPod HiFi Apple has mercifully included an audio input jack on the back of the extruded-rounded-rectangle-thing. Bose, on the other hand, failed to add this little item. Frankly, I cannot understand why, for three hundred dollars, Bose chose not to include some sort of audio input jack on the back (or side, or front for that matter) of their product. Had they included said connector, I could conveniently attach another device and enjoy the mind-blowingly amazing sound quality produced by the deceptively diminutive speaker system.

My second gripe concerns the power brick. Apple has, in typical Apple fashion, hidden the power brick inside of the iPod HiFi. The exposed power brick on the SoundDock bothers me less than the lack of an audio input, but nonetheless, I would much prefer to have an invisible power brick. There is also that ever-present inescapable fact that the SoundDock costs three hundred dollars. For that kind of money no one, not even someone with an MRI machine, should see the power brick.

Granted, the newfangled iPod HiFi does sell for three hundred fifty dollars - fifty dollars more than the SoundDock. Still, an audio input and hidden power brick could not possibly cost so much extra for Bose to add that they could not have included them with the SoundDock. I mean - at three hundred dollars the SoundDock costs as much, or more, than all but one iPod.

So, while I wish Bose had included a few items Apple managed to add to their iPod HiFi, I do not feel the urge to splurge on another piece of white acrylic audio equipment. My SoundDock renders music quite prodigiously, albeit without an audio input or hidden power brick.

In my first blog entry of the year, I hope to display the displeasure I currently feel towards my computer. While I love the beautiful design and the oh-so-handy lightweight design, since purchasing a (gorgeous) twenty inch Apple Cinema Display, the computer has felt slow. Really slow. So slow, in fact, I titled this entry Slow like a Sedated Snail. It's that slow.

More recently though, all of this animosity has been exacerbated by Apple's recent announcements at Macworld. From what I have heard, the new Intel-based Macs run circles around their PowerPC counterparts. Then I got my hands on a copy of iLife '06 (also announced at Macworld), which would be really great, if it did not run like molasses and consume nearly all of the remaining space on my hard disk. So little space remains on my hard disk that I could not use the fun new tools to produce a DVD or make a movie if I had a DVD or movie to make.

I need a new computer !

Programming for Mac OS X in Cocoa with Objective-C is something of a mixed blessing. For one thing, it is incredibly hard to grasp initially and there is not exactly an abundance of learning resources. On the other hand, once a sufficient level of Cocoa comprehension has been reached, creating complicated applications becomes painfully simple.

At the moment I am working on a Cocoa project to both hone my Cocoa skills and solve a problem. The problem being a lack of a halfway decent recipe organization tool for Mac OS X. I tried several different recipe management tools, all of which were dismal. So I said to myself, "Self, you should just make your own," and so I did.

Of course, it is not quite finished yet. There are some particularly peculiar problems I am having trouble dealing with. I am slightly disappointed with the number of tutorials available for Cocoa programming, but then, there are not exactly droves of people programming in Cocoa.

I really have no clue when I will finish this masterpiece, but when I do, it will be the best recipe management tool ever created. Once I get all of the features mostly working I will post a public beta, which people can try. I am thinking that anyone who really beta tests it will get a free license. I will also need people for localization in languages other than English and French. They will get free copies too. Pricing for my product is yet to be determined, however it will most likely be in the range of $25-$80.

Podcasts are fantastic. In fact, they are so great I am planning on making one myself. Eventually. At any rate, ever since Apple released iTunes 4.9 Podcasting has started going mainstream. A medium once restricted to people who were willing to pay for software and hunt down RSS feeds has now been integrated into iTunes with one-click supscibing.

Early Podcasts tended to be poorly produced independent ventures. Some of these were quite good, others were atrocious. Then, at about the time Apple announced they would be adding Podcasting to the next point version of iTunes, a number of larger media organizations started making their own Podcasts to try riding the iPod wave. Organizations like ABC were early adopters, creating Podcasts such as the ABC News Shuffle, which was probably some pathetic attempt at trying to make their very bad news summary Podcast sound hip and interesting.

Since ABC's well produced, but altogether awful bits (though I cannot speak for the Spanish news Podcast; that just went over my head) a number of other media heavyweights have tossed in their entries to the Podcasting ring. Most have been big improvements over ABC's attempt. I subscribe to a number of excellent Podcasts of BBC radio programmes.

However, I realized Podcasting had really gone mainstream when I heard Tim Russert inform viewers about the Meet the Press Podcast, available at msnbc.com. I subscribe to that one too, along with the NBC Nightly News Podcast. I am waiting for ABC to post their evening news program as a Podcast.

Since I was nearly fourteen there has been a debate as to which sort of vehicle I will be zooming around in once I get my license. At first it seemed I was going to be behind the wheel of a MINI Cooper. It sounded fun, but a) the insurance was insane and b) it seemed somewhat excessive.

So more choices emerged. After the MINI there was the VW Jetta. Of course, that is not a luxury car, so the Audi equivalent (Volkswagen makes the Audi), the Audi A4, came into the fray. If the MINI was somewhat excessive, the A4 is just plain excessive. Does one really need a $30,000 plus car as their first car ? I mean, I bet it's safe, but still - it seems excessive.

Then the auto show rolled into town and other choices were pondered there. The Scion (from Toyota) tC was a contender. However, the whole Scion brand has a sort of urban (pardon my slang) "gangsta" sort of connotation. Though, I must admit, for a $13,000ish car, it had a very nice stereo system.

The Smart ForFour
Quite an ingenious contraption. All they need to do is release them in the US. (Photo Courtesy Smart)

But then, there was a day of reckoning. Caught up in my daily news reading I stumbled upon some article about the Mercedes B-class. At any rate, I meandered over to the Mercedes international website and poked around. Eventually it came to me that I should visit the Smart website to see what they're up to.

From day one I have absolutely loved the Smart automobile. They're engineered by Mercedes Benz, meaning they drive very nicely. The Smart is smaller than the average car, meaning that it not only gets better gas mileage, but is ideal for city driving. I could go on for a very long time babbling about how great the Smart car is. They're pretty great.

The one big, very important, drawback to the Smart automobile has been that they were not sold in the United States, which made it rather difficult for me to purchase one. Until now, that is. At the Detroit Auto Show earlier this year Smart announced they were going to begin selling their vehicles in the US. Now it is only a matter of time before I can get one of these great cars. I think I'll get a Smart forfour. They're pretty great

The move on the behalf of Apple computer to switch to Intel processors is mostly a good one. For several years the Intel Pentium M laptop processor has been best of breed, and I would love to have one in the next PowerBook I buy, some twelve to eighteen months from now. However, I really think the PowerPC G5 has a lot of potential. Microsoft is using it in their next generation game console and it's a 64-bit chip. It is in many ways superior to what Intel has out at the moment. But perhaps Intel has something I don't know about that will go into the Intel-based Powermac in 2007.

Switching to Intel processors also creates a problem for me. Until a few days ago I thought I would be buying a Powermac sometime in the next six to eight months, if not sooner. However, now that I know that I will, in a sense, be buying obsolete technology, I don't know that I want to do that. But at the same time, I realize the PowerBook I have now, while great for most things, really gets bogged down when I do processor intensive tasks. Memory is also really expensive compared with the Powermac.

I suppose I'll just wait and see how things pan out. Maybe Apple will release a dual 3.6 GHz Powermac in October or November. I can't possibly feel like I'm buying obsolete technology if they do that.