So I went trodding off to my local Best Buy to find a suitable replacement. That’s when I came along this little fellow – the Rocketfish Bluetooth Wireless mouse. Upon first glance it almost looks like a MightyMouse, which is intentional as Rocketfish markets this mouse as an iMac accessory. But at just $48, it cost almost half the price of Apple’s own wireless mouse and seems to have better ergonomic design. How does it stack up? I’ll be writing about this mouse more in the days ahead as I get more play time with it, but so far it looks and feels really good. Stay tuned.

That realization comes with a price for me. When Apple first introduced this radical departure in design my initial thought was “Oh for crying out loud! If I wanted to type on a laptop keyboard I’d replace my Mac Pro with a MacBook!”. I thought Apple had made a colossal blunder, and I eschewed the very notion of using a notebook style keyboard with a desktop. I waved my old white/lucite Pro keyboard in the air like Charlton Heston wielding a Springfield rifle; proudly boasting that you’d have to pry it my cold carpal tunnel strained hands before I gave it up.

But my careworn keyboard has been in a steady state of decline, accumulating enough pet hair under the keys to weave a hair piece. The key are sticking, the lucite case is developing cracks thanks to one too many close encounters with canned air. Needless to say, it was time to chuck it in the trash. So, with my birthday looming over me this week, I decided to treat myself to an early present.

With no other alternative, I decided to bite my lip and purchase the wired version, since the wireless model is more expensive and lacks a numeric keypad. I returned home with my new toy, hastily unpackaged the sleek frame, plugged it into the back of my Mac Pro, and slowly sank back in my chair, eager to see what new experience awaited me.

Now I’m eating crow and washing it down with a glass of error in judgement. I clearly miscalculated the appeal of this input device. Apple is once again ahead of the curve, and I am falling in love with my Mac all over again.

Let me say straight off that I am imbibed with as much Mac fetish as the next fanboy. When it comes to notebooks, the MacBook Pro still remains the standard by which all contemporary laptops are judged, in my feigned humble opinion. But today’s “new” MacBook rollout left me feeling as though I’m watching reruns of early 1950s sitcoms. Did Apple’s hardware design team go on a writer’s strike? Was Johnny Ives shipped away in a crate to some Chinese manufacturing plant? Why is Apple prolonging the life of these tired designs?

Both the pro and consumer MacBook are getting long in the tooth. The MacBook Pro hasn’t seen a cosmetic change in almost five years – before Apple first slapped an Intel chip inside the PowerPC-based PowerBook and changed its name to MacBook. And the really disturbing implication from today’s product rollout is that Apple will likely be selling these regurgitated MacBooks for another eight months, until Intel launches its next generation mobile processor later this year. I closed my eyes and looked the other way when the Mac Pro came and went without a redesign, but not the MacBooks.

I never thought I would come to say this of Apple, but the company is beginning to fall behind the crowd. The MacBook once stood out as best overall consumer notebook on the market, in terms of hardware design and software. While the latter remains true, its design no longer holds up to contenders. Its once chic white motif is fading in popularity with consumers, even with Apple for that matter (read: aluminum iMac). With so many Sony Vaios in different colors and styles available for the same price (or less), it’s hard to justify paying Apple’s excise tax for the fingerprint-attractive black model. And at five pounds, MacBook isn’t exactly the Kate Moss of notebooks.

And it’s not just neglected aesthetics that have me playing the violin here. The polycarbonate plastic enclosures Apple is using for the MacBook isn’t known for its rugged qualities, despite claims to the contrary. Recently manufactured units still exhibit the same discoloration and cracking that made first generation MacBooks famous, in an infamous way. I’d like to see Apple move to an all aluminum design (similar to the iMac) available in a variety of iPod-like colors. Hey, they’re doing it with the iPod classic, why not extend that design to the MacBook for continuity? Makes sense to me.

At any rate, the purchase of a new MacBook Pro isn’t in my immediate future. I’ll hold onto my Ben Franklins a bit longer and wait for Apple to finally put some fire back in my furnace. Come Apple, bring Johnny Ives home and put your designers back to work. Build a MacBook to make your customers drool once more.

To look at my blog and read my rapturous Apple exalting posts, you might assume that I am a long time Mac fanboy who gets teary eyed in the presence of an Apple IIc, or screams like a giddy teenage girl at the mere mention of SCSI drives. Nope. That was all long before my time. The truth is that I am a “Switcher”; A Windows user who converted to Mac. And even then only recently. My affinity for Apple grew over a number of years, culminating in the final decision to move to OSX as my primary platform, supplanting Windows. It didn’t happen overnight, and it almost didn’t happen at all.

How did I arrive at this point, you ask? Read about my long journey after the jump.

*Queue dream sequence music.*

It all began more than a decade ago, 1996 to be precise, when I purchased my first PC. Like most consumers, I wanted to get on the newly paved information superhighway, and a computer was required to ride it. My PC was a clunky beige tower made by a now extinct PC vendor named Magitronix. Powered by a classic Intel Pentium processor (the original) clocking in at an astounding 166mhz (this was 1996 remember), it had just 32MB of RAM and a “spacious” 2GB hard drive. I was completely new to personal computing and didn’t know a mouse from a modem, but I was young and had an insatiable passion for learning. And still do. Like fine wine, I improve with age – ignoring the bits of cork rot here and there of course.

That PC sparked my love for technology, and I became an instant geek. Microsoft’s Windows 95 was the state of the art OS at the time (and coincidently received almost as much animus among users as Vista), but my machine came with Windows 3.2 pre-installed, better known as Windows for Workgroups. I had nary a clue how to upgrade my OS, but I wanted Windows 95 if only to have the latest and greatest thing along with the satisfaction of running what everyone else was using. I didn’t want to feel left out after all. Before I knew it, I was learning the nuances of drivers, IRQ settings, and god knows whatever else it took to get my system fully Win32 compatible. After just 30 days of ownership, I was under the hood of my PC, armed with a screwdriver and sense of purpose, ripping out the default crappy OEM sound card that came with the system and replacing it with a superior Creative SoundBlaster16 ISA card. I had upgraded my PC all on my own.

I popped in the Windows 95 installation CD, loaded the OS, and was soon among the growing legions of Windows 95 users enjoying all the frills and benefits of 32-bit application support. I didn’t know what the hell any of it meant, I just knew that I wanted it. I was on the ground floor of new computing experience, and I loved every moment of it. I had not one, but two office suites installed on my system since I couldn’t decide which I like better among the two competing suites at the time; Office for Windows 95, and Lotus Smartsuite. Believe it or not, there was a time when office suites were actually exciting. Even more shocking, there was a time when Windows was exciting. Amazing, isn’t it?

I watched software design grow up, and entire industries created right before my eyes. PC Gaming evolved from basic 2D card games to advanced 3D shooters that revolutionized computer graphics, giving rise to the first dedicated graphics cards. At the time, PC graphics were 2D only. The first true gaming card for PCs came in the form of an add-on component, made by Diamond Multimedia, called Voodoo 3Dfx. I can still recall running to my local Best Buy, eagerly knocking over shoppers to get at this magical new Voodoo 3DFX card sitting on the shelf, when it first came out. And then enjoying the amazing graphics it unlocked with advanced 3D games like LucasArts first-person shooter, Jedi Knight. Ah, those were the days.

As time passed, and technology changed I followed along the merry upgrade path (or treadmill, such as it was) eagerly embracing every new technology that came along, from processors to graphics chips. Windows 95 was replaced by Windows 98. Windows was fun to use, it has to be said, and this was back in an age when Windows as actually an innovative and well liked technology, instead of the loathed bloatware of today. Windows was so widely adored among consumers and office workers that people enjoyed customizing their desktops with Windows 98 desktop themes, elaborately personalizing their workstations with wallpapers, color schemes, and sound effects. Anyone remember Windows Plus! packs?

There were pitfalls and pain points throughout, to be sure, but with each challenge Windows PCs threw at me, the more I learned and the more skilled I became. In some sick way I actually owe my professional life to Windows and all its problems. That got me into computing as a career, working for companies in various odd jobs as low-level IT worker to company computer geek. And I owed it all to the PC, Microsoft, and a love for technology. It was great to be a geek, or at least a PC user.

By the end of the 1990s I had outgrown Windows 98, and migrated to Microsoft’s more stable NT codebase when I got the opportunity to beta test Windows 2000 (NT5), still in its early stage of development. It looked the same but offered a quantum leap in stability and performance. Win2kPro, as it was affectionately known to its users, was arguably the best operating system ever put out by Microsoft, and was Windows at its zenith. Comically Microsoft’s confusing branding and use of calendar years to market OS releases led many consumers to mistake Windows 2000 Professional as an upgrade from Windows 98. I can recall notices hanging in the software aisles at Best Buy, warning consumers not to buy this software for their home PCs. One trade publication, I can’t recall which, called Win2k “the best Windows upgrade you’ll ever make by accident”. I had graduated to “Pro user” and earned my stripes as a hardware geek. Computing couldn’t possibly get any better than this.

Then there was Apple.

Like any serious PC user at the time, I viewed Macs with contempt. They were, in my view, inferior machines to be ridiculed and shunned for serious work, and rightfully so. Macs were toys. Apple machines at the time were horribly overpriced compared to comparable PCs, underpowered in terms of raw specs, and crippled by an OS that was simply inferior to Microsoft’s more advanced Windows 2000 Pro. MacOS 8, the OS that powered Apple hardware at the time, was primitive by comparison, and couldn’t even manage memory like a modern OS, relying on a byzantine management scheme known as collaborative memory where applications shared memory, and had to be manually allocated by the user. In plain language; Macs sucked. Yes I know there are those who will douse me with petrol and strike a match for saying that, but that’s the way I see it, and given the circumstances of the time, I think it’s a fair statement. I saw nothing in the Mac experience that could kindle the slightest interest in me. PCs were just better, plain and simple.

So how did I, a PC loving Windows fanboy, become a Mac lover? It started like this…

I was a tech news junky, since I had a deep passion for technology… even if it was technology that I loathed. And Apple was often featured on tech news sites like C|Net’s news.com (my favorite tech site at the time), and I frequently watched Steve Jobs keynotes if only to mock Apple products, like the original iBook that resembled a toilet seat – oh the laughter that brought. That laughter stopped one day eight years ago when Steve Jobs took the stage, at MacWorld 2000, and introduced something that blew me away: OSX. I can remember watching the live video stream of the event, with Jobs demoing each feature and nuance of this seemingly revolutionary new OS, and everything he showed left me captivated.

Animated windows that bend and shrink to the bottom of the screen – icons that scaled with every mouse gesture – a desktop layer based on Adobe PDF. “My God”, I thought, “this is like some wonderful dream! Except that Elizabeth Hurley isn’t laying beside me.” Nothing I had seen before compared to what I was seeing now. It wasn’t just eye candy either, OSX had serious plumbing under the hood and and advanced software stack on top. Apple had just changed the game, taking desktop computing to a new level. For the first time in my computing life, I looked at my Windows desktop and stopped liking what I saw. This new OS that Jobs was demonstrating seemed light years ahead of Microsoft. In that one instance I stopped laughing at Macs, and started questioning my own platform.

Since the introduction of the iMac I had a certain affection for Apple hardware design, minor though it was. The iMac was cute, but not something I wanted sitting on my desk. How could I appear credible to my colleagues while using a strawberry colored computer? But soon after Apple shipped OSX it revamped its professional line of machines as well; the PowerMac, introducing amazingly sleek looking enclosures with cutting edge designs. Now Apple had an OS that I was quickly falling in love with, wrapped in hardware that I found myself drooling over. And what did I have? I had an OS that looked like it was a decade behind and sitting inside a boring beige plastic box that looked equally outmoded. I was still a PC guy, but no longer loved the experience. The fun was done.

OSX had fractured my devotion to Windows, and Apple’s design aesthetic had me repulsed by the sight of beige. I wanted something better – I wanted a Mac. “No! I can’t do that, stop this crazy talk.” So went the inner monologue that happened within me each time I passed by an Apple retail display. It was painful. But despite my wavering allegiance to Windows, I remained a PC user in part because of my devotion to PC gaming. And when it came to gaming, and subsequent hardware support, Macs were not an option. So for now I would have to sit on the sidelines and admire Macs from afar. Then in 2002 I decided on a compromise. If I cannot make a wholesale plunge into the Mac platform, why not go halfway? I could buy a basic Mac, explore what Apple’s platform had to offer, and still use Windows as my primary platform. Briliant! So I purchased my first Apple computer, the original flat panel iMac. That beautiful little computer introduced me to OSX.

So began my schizophrenic arrangement with Apple and Windows as my creative side battled with my technical side. A PC sat on one side of my desk with a Mac occupying the other; a classic left-brain vs. right-brain metaphor. The Mac became my mistress, but I remained married to Windows, and part of me wanted a divorce. It was Apple’s decision to move to Intel processors that offered a turning point for me. Until that point a Mac and a PC were completely different things. Now they were one and the same, even running on the same hardware. At last I was no longer painted into a corner, forced to make a choice. I could simply select whatever software I needed for any given task, all on the same machine without the tradeoffs incumbent in dedicated systems.

So, in 2006 I ordered a Mac Pro. It offered all the qualities I wanted in a PC; performance, freedom and flexibility in hardware, with the software I wanted in a Mac. From then on I have lived a dual life in both camps. I still have two computers sitting on my desktop, Mac and PC, but much of my daily workflow has now moved to the Mac. The software environment is simply better and the experience is richer. Part of me still remains a PC hardware enthusiast, and probably always will. But one thing I’ve learned over the years is that software is more important than the hardware it runs on. All the hardware in the world cannot make a bad OS better, or turn mediocre software into innovation. Vista proved that. Any operating system that makes my computing life richer and more productive is where I hang my hat, and for now OSX is my hatrack.

If Apple can turn a long time Windows enthusiast into a Mac user, they’re doing something right. And so my journey continues, and I remain “switched”.

Scads of third party tools that perform the same task have been available since the OS first shipped last year, but this is the first time that I can recall Apple having retrograded a feature at the request of users. The fact that Apple actually listened to the outcry of disgruntled Leopard users is staggering. Why Apple chose this path from the beginning is a mystery to me. It’s a visual effect one would expect to see in Vista, and that isn’t meant as a compliment.

Translucent menus are a usability nightmare. The effect makes text options less visible and muted. And aesthetically its charm quickly wears off once that semi-translucent menu bar turns into a blurry mess at the top of your screen. Needless to say I and legions of other users are happy to see the transparency effect go.

Thank you, Apple. You’ve made the right choice. Now, if you would kindly replace the homely looking Dock and kitschy space wallpaper with something more tasteful?

What came from today’s big event was the vacuous sound of what didn’t. For starters, no SDK was announced, nor any update given on its inevitable release. What we got instead was a firmware update that offers a few really nice features, but barely chips the surface on what is by now a mountain of feature requests from users. No copy/paste. No Exchange support (not that Exchange IMAP fiddly bits we get now). No Flash support for Safari. I keep hearing that song from OneRepublic playing in my head… “Stop and stare. I think I’m moving but I go nowhere.”

But all is not for naught. Firmware 1.1.3 gives us a few decent featureware additions sure to pacify even the most puerile cynic, like myself. To begin with, control of icon placement in the dock is finally wrestled from Apple’s totalitarian grasp. The phone app, Mail, Safari, iPod, can all be relocated to the homescreen, repopulating the dock with any app you choose, though I strongly advise leaving the phone app where it is, unless you enjoy making calls from the homescreen. In fact, all homescreen icons can now be rearranged around as you please simply with one finger by tapping and holding on any icon, at which point all the icons begin to dance and gyrate like Brittany Spears staggering to her car after a night of bingeing.

And when you run out of screen real estate for all those icons, the homescreen paginates, represented by a series of small white dots depicting the number of viewable “pages” that scroll from left to right. If that sounds suspiciously similar to the multi-page implementation found on SummerBoard, you’re correct. A little too similar. So much so in fact that I can’t shake the feeling Apple is using the very community of iPhone hackers it shuns as free outsourced R&D. When what appeared yesterday as a hack from community sources now appears today from Apple, your mind begins to ponder where the real magic of software design is happening; Cupertino or somewhere in the cloud. All I can say is, if Apple is going to *ahem* “barrow” innovations from hackers it damn well better open the door good and wide for developers in the coming (presumably) SDK, offering unfettered API support. That’s all I will say on that subject. Now back to the firmware review.

Meanwhile, Apple puts the fun back in function with Safari in the form of a handy new feature allowing users to pin webpage shortcuts, called Web clips, to the homescreen. This is where the new homescreen paginate feature comes into play. After launching Safari, post-update, you’ll notice a new “+” sign at the bottom of your screen display. Tapping this brings up a dialog panel offering a choice of bookmark options. Tap on the middle selection; “send to home screen” and whoosh! Well actually there is no whoosh, per se. Another prompt screen appears allowing you to name your soon-to-be icon, at which point you get dumped back to the homescreen to admire your lovely new icon. If you want to delete a user-generated icon, just tap and hold, wait for the gyrations to begin, and now a delete emblem appears in the upper left corner of the icon in the same way that Dashboard widgets are handheld in OSX. It’s that simple.

By now you’re asking yourself… damn, why doesn’t Kent post screenshots of all this so we can see what it looks like? Ah, well that’s where we go back to that whole “dude! where the hell is my SDK you lying bastards?!” thing. With this latest firmware update, as with all others before, iPhone gets sent back to prison, behind barred doors and razor wire fences to keep out unwanted developers hackers. And with that goes the breadth of applications and useful utilities developed by creative and telented people. One tool in particular I use for taking screen captures for posting. So goes that. Now it’s back to blurry photos of my left hand holding iPhone for image capture. If you sense that I’m growing tired of this game, you’re right. Apple, it seems, devotes more effort taking features away from me than it does providing them, and that just kills my inner child. Ok, so I lied about dropping the whole Apple vs. Developers thing. This time I will, I swear.

Beyond the dancing icons ala Brittany, and Safari bookmarking, there are two other notable additions sure to leave you leaning forward in your chair and reciting biblical proverbs. From the book of Jobs, Verse 21: And Steve said…“Let there be group SMS messaging.” And behold, from the towers of Cupertino poured forth multi-party SMS and it was good. Well it’s not a burning bush, but having the ability to send one SMS to several friends or group members is a much needed feature. The tendons in my thumb splintering to shreds from having to peck out the same message for different recipients. Thankfully that ends now.

Those above features, while tasty, are mere potatoes compared to the real meat of the update. The signature feature to this firmware update has to the revamped Google Maps application which now integrates some rudimentary location aware functionality that enables iPhone to perform some form of GPS mimicry. By using crude cell tower triangulation, the new and improved mapping app is now able to locate your current location on a map, in proximity to the nearest tower. It works well and might even help you find the nearest town or borough, but I wouldn’t trust this app to help medical personnel locate me should I fall into a deep crevasse while hiking through Middle-of-Nowhere Montana. When I tested this feature out twice today it did find my location, but was off about… oh… one square mile. That’s one hell of a margin of error.

Beyond that astonishing feature introduction, the mapping app still works and looks largely the same. Apple did clean up the UI quite a bit, and concealed function buttons that were previously at the forefront behind a page layer that displays interesting page curl effect when activated. Again, nothing overwhelming here, just nice touches to fit and finish. A disturbing revelation came during today’s keynote when Steve Jobs announced that users of iPod Touch, iPhone’s cellular-castrated cousin, have to pay Apple a tax of $20 to download the firmware update. That doesn’t bode well for iPhone users as this is no doubt a harbinger of things to come. We can now look forward to the prospect of one day paying for software updates as well. Sucketh!

And that ladies and gentlemen pretty much wraps up this otherwise underwhelming update. In the long history of firmware updates, this one won’t receive any special honors. No statues will be erected in its honor. But 1.1.3 still stands head and shoulders above 1.1.2, which I best described as the DDS release for “Doesn’t Do Shit”. And that’s the kindest compliment I can pay today’s firmware update, believe me. Yet this release offers so little and I find myself, as always, wanting so much more. Like someone who has crawled through a hot arid desert, with Apple offering me only a thimble of water to assuage my parching thirst. Just one more layer of the onion peeled back, so many more to go.

Keep updating your software Apple, you’re getting closer.

Enjoy the MacBook pR0n. Visit my Flickr gallery for more photos.

A new study conducted by PiperJaffray shows that iPhone is already gaining iconic status, with more than 85% of 500 students surveyed having knowledge of the iPhone. Even more surprising, 25% of of those same students show an interest in purchasing the iPhone, despite its steep $500 entry price point. Hey, 500 out of millions of unsurveyed students can’t be wrong. Expect a sharp increase in teenage prostitution to follow.

Source: AppleInsider

Apple disclosed total iPod sales volumes to date, revealing that over 100 Million units have been sold since the little white music player that changed the world was first launched.

Apple today announced that the 100 millionth iPod® has been sold, making the iPod the fastest selling music player in history. The first iPod was sold five and a half years ago, in November 2001, and since then Apple has introduced more than 10 new iPod models, including five generations of iPod, two generations of iPod mini, two generations of iPod nano and two generations of iPod shuffle. Along with iTunes® and the iTunes online music store, the iPod has transformed how tens of millions of music lovers acquire, manage and listen to their music.

Congratulations Apple.

Source: Press Release

Just when you thought your three month old Mac Pro was safe from obsolescence, Apple pulls the rug out from under your workstation. Today the company announced its long awaited dual quad-core system based on Intel’s new “Clovertown” Xeon processors. That’s four cores on a single die, totalling eight cores, for those of you whom are math challenged. I barely use the full potential my single quad core Mac Pro offers, let alone 8 bloody cores! Still, I can see real world applications for video professionals and science fields.

If you want one be prepared for sticker shock. The “entry level” 8-core model starts at $3,298. Fortunately standard dual-core models based on Intel “Woodcrest” Xeon remains available starting at a reasonable $2,200.

Jump to the link.