Today Apple, Inc. released a brand new addition to their MacBook product line dubbed “MacBook Air”. This beautiful laptop is being toted as “the worlds thinest notebook” computer and is, like all of Apple’s products, an absolutely beautiful machine. Unfortunately, while I can see why people would want to own this machine, I can’t understand why anyone in their right mind would purchase it over it’s equivalently priced companion the MacBook.

The MacBook Air is no doubt an amazing computer, but it isn’t priced competitively with the other laptops in the line. Truth be told, while the machine is supposed to be an over-powered “sub-notebook”, it’s actually more like a more expensive crippled MacBook. For the same price as your 13 inch screen, 1.6 Ghz processor, 2 GB memory, 80 GB Harddrive MacBook Air with no optical drive or ethernet port, you could get a 13 inch screen, 2.0 Ghz processor, 2 GB memory, 250 GB Harddrive MacBook with a Combo Drive, ethernet port, a copy of Final Cut Express, and still have enough money left over to take yourself out to a nice dinner.

This is clearly a product not targeted towards the average consumer. No, this is a device for the early adopters and/or people with a lot of extra cash to burn. No one walking into a store to buy their first Mac should buy one of these. At least not at it’s $1799 price point.

posted by Christopher Schnese

It’s no secret that I’m no a fan of Microsoft. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that I hate the company. And it’s not just because I’m an Apple Fanboy. Oh no, I hated the company before I saw the light and switched to Macs. It just seems to me like they do everything wrong. Everything except their gaming devision, which has somehow managed to turn the Xbox 360 into the only next-gen console I’ve purchased or even care about purchasing. I recently had an epiphany that changed my original opinion of the consoles lack of out-of-the-box HD-DVD support.

I’m as big a fan of HD content as the next geek, but I don’t own an HD television. Because I do not, I wasn’t super disappointed long ago when it was announced the the Xbox 360 would not have a built in HD-DVD drive. I did, however, find it funny that everyone was comparing the prices of the the three next-gen consoles in terms of pure dollar amount and not the actual bang for your buck. The truth was after buying the add on HD-DVD drive (to equal the Blu-Ray DVD player standard on the PS3) the two consoles are almost identically priced.

So, at the time of release, it was quite obvious to me that the decision to ship the Xbox 360 without a built in HD drive was simply a ploy to lower the cost of the system to make it more appealing when compared to the PS3. The epiphany came to me when I began thinking of the “Console War” in terms of the “DVD Format War”. It would seem, and I may be giving Microsoft  too much credit, that they might have had the future in mind and weren’t just being frugal.

Due to the recent decision of some big hitting movie studios to exclusively join the Blu-Ray camp, it looks like HD-DVD may be on the way out in the coming year. To present day, Microsoft has been standing firmly on the HD-DVD side of the war. Here’s where the genius comes in. Even though their chosen format is on the verge of being phased out, they never offered them built in. The Xbox 360 offers the technology as an external attachment. In theory, the Xbox doesn’t care or even know what type of drive is connected to it via USB. It just knows their is a USB device that’s sending HD content down the pipe.

This means that if, and when, HD-DVD loses the format war, it wont be hard for Microsoft to make the switch over to Blu-Ray by offering another external drive. Unfortunately for sony, if their format loses the war, the PS3 is stuck with it’s built in dead format. It really makes you wonder. Was this Microsoft’s secret genius plan all along, or was it just blind luck?

posted by Christopher Schnese

Have you ever been driving in your car, listening to the radio, or watching a movie and heard a song you really liked, but had no clue what the artist or song title was? Well, if you had a jailbroken iPhone you wouldn’t have to wonder. Thanks to a new iPhone application released today called “Listen”, it would only take about 5 seconds to figure it out.

The idea of the application is simple. Hear a song that you’d like identified, launch the application and hold your phone up to the audio source, a little abracadabra, and out pops the track information for the playing song.

I’ve heard of similar services offered in other phones, but this if the first time I’ve had the opportunity to see it in action. I’ve tested it out on a few tracks and it works really well. Though I don’t have a whole lot of use for the service, it is pretty fun to play around with.

posted by Christopher Schnese

I am, and have been,  a huge fan of the concept behind the Netflix service. I love the ability to pay a reasonable fee every month to be able to watch as many movies as I’d like. The problem for me is that I don’t truly have access to the 90,000 titles that are offered. I really only have access to the three movies delivered from the top of my queue. This all may change with the introduction of the Netflix set-top box.

If I was hanging out alone every night I might be able to jump through my queue without any hiccups, however, I spend most of my time with my girlfriend or hanging out with the guys at the house. Because we all have different tastes in movies, my queue is often neglected. Even when we decide on a movie, I can really only add it to my queue. Best case scenario, I have it in two days. Unfortunately, I always already have three movies checked out, so unless I’m willing to return a movie I haven’t watched yet, I’m still never going to receive the next film in the queue. For example, I’ve had the same three movies checked out for about four months now.

The Netflix set-top box could take the beauty of having 90,000 titles available, and remove the inconvenience of the queue. There’s no official word yet on the price of the box or the price of service with the box, but just imagine the possibilities. You’re hanging out with some friends watching some TV and up pops a DVD ad for a movie you all missed in theaters. Rather than adding it to the queue and waiting the two days for the disc to arrive, you just pull out the remote and you’re watching the movie within a matter of minutes instead of days.

Now netflix already has a feature called “Watch Now” which allows similar functionality to your PC, but the catalog and number of hours of content you can watch is limited. And you’re forced to watch it at your computer. Hopefully, when the set-top box becomes available, the restrictions on the content will disappear. It they do, and the price is right, I’ll definitely have to pick up one myself.

posted by Christopher Schnese

Once upon a time, I was the proud owner of a legacy PowerMac G5. The machine was my baby and I loved it. Unfortunately, one morning it exploded (and I mean literally shot flames out of it’s back) and I had to replace it with an Intel Mac mini. Now while I love the little guy, I bought it while a little strapped for cash and decided to opt for only one gig of ram.

While that may be enough ram for day to day usage, it was hardly adequate for doing work that heavily relied on Photoshop and other resource intensive applications. A guy can only take so many 3 second hands from clicking the Text tool in photoshop before he starts to go mad. I decided that after the holidays were over I was going to upgrade. I shared the plan with Anita, the girl I’ve been seeing, and she awesomely decided to surprise me with a 2GB Mac Mini ram kit as an early Christmas present.

So, last night my little Mac mini underwent a little surgery and I installed the new chips. Most of the time, installing ram yourself isn’t a big deal. You just pop open the side of your tower or pop out your laptop keyboard and slap in the new ram. The Mac mini proved to be a little more difficult. Well, maybe difficult isn’t the right word for it. I think scary is more accurate. Anytime you have to take a putty knife to your computer to pry it open, it’s definitely scary. I’m not totally sure, but I think there’s a very good chance that I voided my warrantee by hacking apart my computer, but it was worth it.

Thankfully, the computer surgery was a complete success and everything seems to be running smoothly so far. There were a couple moments when I was trying to pry it apart when I thought for sure I was going to break something and a few moments putting it back together where it didn’t seem to want to fit right, but all is well at the moment. All I know is that I haven’t had to fight the machine once today and, voided warrantee or not, that’s all that really matters to me.

posted by Christopher Schnese

I’m just going to come out and say it. Firefox is the best browser around. I know that their are some great niche browsers out there that may accomplish one task better than Firefox, but you’d be hard pressed to find a better all around browser out there. More importantly, the Firefox Community is constantly building a million different extensions and add-ons that take it from being just the best browser around to being just about anything you need it to be.

As amazing as Firefox is and can be, it’s not [at all] without it’s faults. The browser seems to have some sort of memory issue that often causes it to hang, which often takes over my system until I force quit the thing. I’m not going to pretend to understand or claim to have regressed the issue, all I know is that when Firefox runs out of memory or sits in the background for two long, it goes “bye-bye” and then takes my system with it when I try to tab back to it. Though not enough so to deter me from using the software, it can be extremely frustrating when your job involves having Firefox running 8 hours a day.

This morning, however, I was delivered some salvation. When I came into the office this morning and launched Mail.app, a little story came down my Ars Technica feed talking about the release of the latest Firefox 3 beta. While the new features seemed cool enough, the real intrigue to me was the cited memory leak fixes and memory management improvements contained in this release. This was obviously exciting to me, as it could very well mean the solution to my frustrations. So, I downloaded the software and have been running it all day.

Having spent the last several hours using the browser, there are really only two issues which I can actually live with at the moment. 1) None of the previous extensions and add-ons I’d installed in Firefox 2 work, and 2) the beta hangs when I attempt to quit.

Surprisingly, since I usually tout the add-ons as one of the greatest features of Firefox, the lack of support is almost a non-issue. I run so many extensions and add-ons that I honestly couldn’t tell you which ones I have installed. They’re all there and their uses vary according to which sites I’m on. Learning to live without them doesn’t take much. In fact, I’ve gone the entire day without even running into a situation where I noticed or missed one of my add-ons. Additionally, the hang when quitting hasn’t really hurt me much yet. Believe me, I’d rather have Firefox hang at the end of the day when I try to quit it, than have it happen every 30 minutes all day long. Plus, all I have to do is remember to force quit it when I want to close it.

Those two hurdles being out of the way, I have to say that I’m really loving Firefox 3 (beta 2) so far. Everything seems a little snappier and my repeated memory hangs are completely gone (at least I haven’t run into one all day). I’ve all ready replaced the old version and am using the beta as my primary browser. It also doesn’t hurt that someone on Digg.com linked to a pretty little Firefox Theme that makes the browser look more “OS X-esque”. I think everyone should give it a try at the vary least. If you don’t like it, you can always regress to the older version.

posted by Christopher Schnese

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last several months, you’re likely all to familiar with the iPhone and all the hype surrounding it. What you may not know is that when the phone was released, Apple, in all it’s glory, pledged to give a free iPhone to all it’s employees who had been with the company for over one year. Well, it now appears that some 800 employees, who had received that free iPhone, took it upon themselves to cash in their $100 rebate for said phone. And Apple is pissed.

I still remember watching the live text feed from apple’s keynote when Steve Jobs announced the price drop for the iPhone. I remember the feeling of being crushed by a company I love. I expected a $100 price cut by the christmas season and I was happy to have paid that as an “early adopter tax”, however having the price drop twice that in the first 60 days was unthinkable.

In the end (a few days later), Apple heard the cry of it’s customers and decided to offer a $100 rebate to all customers who had purchased the phone before a specific date. Though I was excited about the rebate, I was also a little concerned. Unfortunately, I had purchased the smaller 4GB iPhone and had not saved the receipt, so I was somewhat scared that I might not receive my rebate. To my surprise, apple created a very easy method for claiming your rebate. You simply logged into their website, entered in your phone number, entered in the code from a text message the site sent you, and then printed out your $100 gift card. It was so simple, but apparently too simple.

Apparently, several enterprising Apple employees (as many as 800) decided they’d take it upon themselves to use their iPhones to claim the rebate also. Well, considering Apple gifted those phones to them (free of charge), claiming the rebate is tantamount to stealing from the company. So, as you might have guess, Apple has canned 800 employees. As well they should have.

I guess everyone is always trying to find a way to game the system, but it’s sad to think that this many people would take advantage of a company that was generous enough to give all it’s long term employees a free phone. I’ll be honest, I’d love to work for Apple. And I’m sure that in doing so, I could steal programs and whatnot from the computers in the store just by plugging in my iPod on my lunch break. But am I? No, of course not. You should have some sort of loyalty towards the company you work for. Especially one that treats it’s employees as generously as Apple had in this case.

The simple fact is that those employees got what was coming to them. Now, as they sit behind the desks at their new position as a member of the Geek Squad, they can think back to when they were once Apple Geniuses.

posted by Christopher Schnese

Take a moment and think back on all the technologies you own. Think about all the features in your phone, your iPod, your wrist watch, and your computer. Think back to when those features first appeared and whether you ever thought you needed them before their introduction. Sometimes it seems like with every new feature, not only do I find myself suddenly needing to use it, but I often have to play catchup just to get to the point where it can be a viable feature.

Now I can attribute this observation to many technologies and features, but right now I’d like to touch on the ability of portable media devices to display the album artwork of the currently playing track. While just about every portable media player now has the ability to display artwork in addition to playing music, this simply wasn’t the case back in the days of Napster when mp3s really became popular. There simply was no computer metaphor for flipping through your music collection. Your media appeared pretty much as a glorified Excel document.

Well things have changed and an album’s artwork has become the new metaphor for sifting through music. Features like Coverflow, built into Apple’s iTunes software, completely abandon the textual view of your music and laterally allow you to swipe through your music library as if you were sifting through the physical discs.

Admittedly, I rarely ever use this Coverflow feature in iTunes, however simply I cannot avoid the effects of album artwork on my iPhone. When you’re playing music on your iPhone, the album artwork is not only displayed, but takes up the entire screen. The beauty of the presentation is arguably undeniable. The problem is that when your currently playing track doesn’t have any artwork associated with it, you’re presented with a generic and unexciting missing artwork image.

Maybe this doesn’t bother the average person, but I can’t stand the blandness after being treated to the aesthetic delight of a fully artwork supported music sample. So, I have to make use of this feature. There is one major problem inherent in this decision. I’ve been building my music collection since way before album artwork was a support feature. So, there are huge sections of my collection without artwork at all. This can be an enormous pain when you have a collection with over 1447 albums (and that’s just the ones without artwork).

So now here I sit, tirelessly adding artwork, one album at a time. And if I were to continue this, adding art for 50 albums a day, I will eventually finish my collection in about one months time. All this work for a feature I had absolutely zero need for before I was introduced to it.

posted by Christopher Schnese