The Macalope Weekly: Hippies, Loose Accusations and They Got My Partner!

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!”

Read My Lips: There Is No “Apple Tax”

Lao Tsu Sun Tzu [Curses! The Macalope mixed up his ancient Chinese secrets!] said the best way to defeat your enemy is to attack his greatest strength. But Lao Tsu Sun Tzu’s obnoxious brother, Ron Tsu Tzu*, said the best way to annoy your enemy is to say “I know you are, but what am I?”

And Microsoft is running the Ron Tsu Tzu playbook and running it hard.

Displaying a remarkable facility with canned talking points, Microsoft’s vice president of Windows Consumer Product Marketing, Brad Brooks flogged the word “tax” like a gold-medal flogger flogging whatever a competitive flogger flogs.

This is pretty rich coming from the company that charged hardware manufacturers for Windows licenses even if users wanted a different operating system. Although, to be fair to Microsoft, that’s not a tax. It’s extortion. So, you know, a little difference there.

(* Yes, pedantic readers, the Macalope knows that in Chinese the family name comes first, but “Lao Sun Ron” just sounds stupid [and like a petrochemical company].)

Oh My God, They Got FireWire!

With the realization that the new MacBooks lack a FireWire port, there’s been a lot of concern that Apple’s killing the venerable and much-loved interface. Not FireWire! And it was only two weeks away from retirement!

Now, there’s the distinct possibility that this is much ado about nothing. The new MacBooks join the Air as the only members of the Apple hardware lineup that have no FireWire port at all, but remember that the original iBooks didn’t have them either.

Maybe FireWire’s not really dead, it’s just gone pro. In which case we look forward to its slow slide in performance, frequent disagreements with management and inevitable retirement to focus on the string of car dealerships it owns up and down the eastern seaboard.

Fjord-Gate

Finally, the horny one would like to address the issue of fjords.

No, no. Don’t get up. This’ll only take three or four hours.

Now, the Macalope wasn’t expecting his first hot-button topic to be a Scandinavian geological feature. But after his loose sentence construction last week appeared to be insinuating that Sweden has fjords, the comments were filled with angry would-be fjordologists pointing out that it is, in fact, Norway that is veritably ribbed with fjords as if for her pleasure.

The brown and furry one knows Wikipedia doesn’t pass the 12th grade term paper test, and we here at the Macworld family take the concerns of our commenters seriously, no matter how pedantic and off-topic they are. So seriously that Macworld Editorial Director Jason Snell has been dispatched to Sweden to investigate the situation.

We look forward to Jason’s in-depth report on this critical issue to Mac users.

Or not, as that’s not really what he’s there for.