Coming Soon! Depending On Your Definition Of “Soon”!
The big news for the week—and we’re talking monumental, stop-the-virtual-presses-type news—is that Snow Leopard is coming in the first quarter of 2009!
Totally! It’s 100% guaranteed in the bag! We’ll all be rollin’ with Snow Leopard in January! March at the latest! Word to your mother!
Well, OK, it was on this one guy from Apple’s slide (note to Dan, snow leopards don’t pounce—they are amongst the deadliest but also the laziest of cats and kill their victims from a reclined position on the couch). But, you know, it’s not like Apple’s ever said they’d deliver an operating system at a certain time and then, well, failed to deliver it at that time.
Except the last time. And probably some other times.
OK, look, can we all just agree to be happy when Snow Leopard eventually ships in June?
Continue reading "The Macalope Weekly: Leopards and monopolies and DRM! Oh, my!"
Do Not Want
First up, let’s face some facts.
The Macalope’s inclined to agree with John C. Welch’s superb piece this week, which deflates the wild enterprise fantasies of some Apple followers. Welch lays out the reasoning pretty well, but more importantly do we really want Apple to be an enterprise giant?
Microsoft is more than an 800-pound software gorilla—it’s also a cautionary tale. The larger an organization gets and the broader its customer base is, the greater the force of inertia. And inertia leads to anger, which leads to hate, which leads to crappy prequels.
Look, the point is, an Apple beset with the demands of stodgy corporations just isn’t the Apple the horny one grew up with. Yes, not all of the ’90s was a fun time for Applephiles, but let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water.
Because that’s guaranteed to get you a visit from Child Protective Services.
That’s A Wrap, Everyone! See You In January!
The Macalope regrets to inform readers that Apple has announced that there will be no more Apple announcements for the year.
After this one.
Of course, it’s just two months until Macworld, so that’s not exactly a big hardship, is it? If you can’t go for two lousy months, you might need to check yourself into a 12-step program. The rumors had Apple announcing new iMacs and Mac minis, the latter of which is feeling “not so fresh.” The refresh speculation had followed speculation the mini would be summarily dropped, which always causes a great wailing and rending of garments.
AppleInsider then learned that an Apple representative told a miffed miniphile to “be patient”, which everyone is now parsing as “GLORIOUS MINI UPDATE COMING SOON! WILL INCLUDE LASERS AND FREE PIE!”
While the horny one believes the mini will continue to be with us in some form or another, color him brown and unimpressed with this news. Was “be patient” anywhere near “your call is important to us” and “stay on the line” in this conversation?
Small Children and Pregnant Women May Want To Avert Their Eyes
Hey. Want to see something really scary?
Well, Microsoft gave a first look at Windows 7 this week and if interface looks could kill…
Just like Vista, Windows 7 will apparently be filmed in GlaucomaVision!
To take the scary off, our good pal Rob Enderle provides a light-hearted introduction to this shop of horrors in which things don’t exactly work right.
Now that’s schadenfunny. And it’s a twofer. It makes both Microsoft and Enderle look bad. Rob stays a champ, though, and refuses to mention the A-word. Your evil masters will certainly reward you for that, Rob!
Apart from the failure of the thing to work right, though, the Macalope was also concerned about the ergonomics. Or, more to the point, the lack thereof. Hey, Rob, why don’t you try resizing and editing a hundred photos with your arms extended like that and then tell the Macalope how your shoulders feel?
But remember, Windows is, as Robert Scoble has been fond of saying, about “user scenarios”. For those of you just got off the boat and don’t know what “user scenarios” are, they go a little like this:
User’s elbows are tied together behind the back with duct tape with the hands stuck in a burlap sack full of chiggers. The user’s only means of operating the computer is via the butt cheeks. The user must run a variance analysis of quarterly fixed asset depreciation, including graphs.
See, it doesn’t matter if it’s not realistic. What matters is that you can do it on Windows. It doesn’t matter if you’ll need rotator cuff surgery about 15 minutes after doing it. What matters is that you can do it on Windows.
Ever see those people who’ve been in horrible sky-diving accidents and their arms are in casts sticking straight out from their body? Windows is so going to own that market.
They’ve Been Digging In The Wrong Place!
Apple announced typically awesome results on Tuesday during its quarterly conference call. The company reported earnings per share of $1.26, beating Wall Street’s estimate of $1.11. That wasn’t unusual. What was unusual is that the company’s stock went up after the call.
See, the way this is supposed to work is that Apple announces results that shatter estimates but then puts on a frowny face and issues a dour forecast for the upcoming quarter. Wall Street—always looking for future growth, not past performance—screams like a B-movie starlet and issues a massive SELL order. But what Wall Street had not previously realized is that Apple is using the “Staff of Ra” method of announcing quarterly guidance.
You remember the Staff of Ra from Raiders of the Lost Ark, don’t you? The Nazis thought the staff was the wrong height because they only had one side of the headpiece, leaving them digging in the wrong place while Indy found the Well of the Souls and the Ark. Well, apparently Wall Street has now hired that grizzled, cackling old seer who has deciphered Apple’s trick of taking back 10% before giving guidance to Wall Street, “to honor the Hebrew God whose iPhone this is.”
Well, OK, maybe this is where the analogy gets a little thin.
But still, it appears the jig is up. Somewhere at Apple there’s a spreadsheet that needs updating. We certainly can’t have Wall Street knowing what the real guidance is, can we?
Continue reading "The Macalope Weekly: Getting results and acting out"
Won’t Someone Think of the Hippies?
Since there’s a slight chance that you were in a hyperbaric chamber all week conducting experiments on the human mind, the Macalope will now inform you what the rest of the world already knows: that Apple announced an entirely revamped line of laptops on Tuesday (now who looks stupid, Mr. MIT Ph. D. Candidate?).
With the exception of the bookending traditional white MacBook on the low end and aluminum 17-inch MacBook Pro on the high end, the line now sports an iMac meets MacBook Air look. Moreover, they set a new standard in green construction (well, at least for Apple anyway).
But don’t worry, Greenpeace. You can still get everyone’s attention by standing on the diving board and yelling “Look at me! Mom! Look at me! Look at what I can do! Mom! Mom! Mom! Mom!”
Continue reading "The Macalope Weekly: Hippies, Loose Accusations and They Got My Partner!"
And This Was The Turning Point
Let’s lead off with the big news of the week. Now, this is HUGE, people. It has the potential to crack the desktop computer market wide open for the Mac. You know what the Macalope’s talking about. That’s right, Swedish Foreign Minister Carl “the Build” Bildt has converted to the Mac.
Carl, as you know, is not so much a trend setter as a trend maker in Sweden, so it’s just a matter of time before the Mac OS startup bong is heard echoing through the fjords. And you know the old saying: as goes Scandinavia, so goes the world.
You haven’t heard that? Oh.
Continue reading "The Macalope Weekly: The Build, the Brick and the Dock"
