Archive for January, 2008
If you wake up in the middle of the night shivering like a maniac high on caffeine, it’s a good idea to turn down the fan and shut the window that’s open over your bed.
I think I executed enough emergency actions to deter the oncoming cold but I have an incessant headache that drugs can only push to the back of my consciousness. The body sensitivity (aka body pains) is mostly gone with just a little bit over my left side above the ribs still being irritating.
So yeah, listen to your body.
I was, still am a bit, ecstatic about the Macbook Air. Seeing pictures of it and watching the tour really attracted me. But I won’t be getting one for a while. Here are my reasons:
- Battery not replaceable. For my iPhone, not a care since all my cellphones have never needed to change the battery. But for a laptop? Five hours run time is cool and all, but with my current Macbook Pro and its spare battery, I can run it for nearly 7-8 hours. Enough time to fiddle on it at the airport and still enough juice to play with it in-flight (though it’s hard to use if the passenger in front slides his seat back). Even if I don’t travel often, not having the ability to swap the batteries is a major factor for me not to get a Macbook Air.
- No expansion slot. I just bought an ExpressCard/34 to read the SD card for my camera so I don’t waste its battery syncing it to my laptop. At first, I wondered what the heck I was going to use that expansion slot for. Now, I can’t see not having it. There’s the Lexar JumpDrive Trio which was awesome when I had it, but I gave it to a friend. Also, read the next bullet.
- One USB port. At home, I’d only use the USB port to sync/charge my iPhone. Traveling? It’d be used to not only sync/charge my iPhone, but charge my Jawbone bluetooth headset, use the external SuperDrive (maybe not often), used with the JumpDrive Trio or similar product to download my photos from the SD card or just connect my camera to it. Oh! And I can’t do any of these if I want to be connected to the internet at a location where I need to use an Ethernet cable since I have to use the USB to Ethernet cable adapter.
- No built-in Ethernet port. See previous bullet why this is a BAD thing.
- Shoddy graphics card. I have a desktop rig to play games, but sometimes I want to play on my laptop somewhere else in the house (or elsewhere even). The games I play, I won’t be able to with the Macbook Air (at least not enjoyably). My Macbook Pro, though, is cherry.
- Minuscule drive space. 80 Gigs? Too small and if given the option, I’d go with Solid State Drive any day, but again too small (64Gigs). My gaming rig is just that… for gaming. My laptop will be the command center of my life and thus will hold all of my writing, photos, music, movies, expenses (when I get my ass into gear) and whatever development projects I do. Not to mention that I have Parallel Desktop and Vista installed for any work-related stuff I’d have to do.
While the Macbook Air is filled to the brim with Hot, Sexy and Cool, I think Apple went a bit too far with Form and left out too much Function. Either put back a built-in Ethernet port or add a secondary USB and it would be much more attractive. I don’t see how you can add in a beefier graphics card but then again, the Macbook Air isn’t targeted to gamers (or media editing maniacs, for that matter). But even the demographics they are going for may not like it much when in order for them to get stuff done, they have to hassle and juggle with adapters.
I’m really attracted to the new laptop, but even if my Macbook Pro is heftier, the weight is proportional to its features. The Macbook Air just seems like a downgrade in comparison. I’m hoping that the next version will have a bigger SSD drive and at least another USB port. I don’t know if they’d be able to make replaceable batteries for the Air, but that’d be good too, because while I can deal with not pimping it in an airplane, I don’t think I could lose my command center while Apple replaces my battery. That is unless, it’s made known that Apple Store Geeks can replace them. Until then, I get plenty of love from my MBP.
The Macbook Air is so edgy, so sharp that it cuts cool and slices seductive. I’ve had my Macbook Pro for just over a year and when I got it, never thought I’d get a new laptop (unless it was an improved MBP). But what does Apple do? It redefines ultraportable.
And baby, I’m all into that. The highlights are the crisp display, full-sized keyboard (with backlight!), huge trackpad, which made me cringe until I saw the guided tour and what you can do on that pad, and the wireless conventions they’ve incorporated. Even the optional Solid State Drive they have available sounds awesome.
All this is dandy, but there’s got to be some lowlights, right? Yes, yes there are. First is the icky graphics card, don’t think I can play some of the games I’ve installed on my MBP (not that I play exclusively on my laptop). Then it has no built-in optical drive (but there’s an external drive accessory and the wireless interface to use other computers’ optical drives) and no express card slot, which I just bought one to read my media cards. The SSD drive is also smaller than I hoped it’d be. But regardless of all these lowlights, the highlights pretty outshine them and makes the Macbook Air a very dangerous temptress.
The display may be 13 inches but it’s LED backlit and is sharp, bright and crisp. The keyboard retains its awesome Apple status. The trackpad. Is. So. Nuts! Just like the iPhone, you can pinch and slide. Just like other Macbooks you can use two fingers on the pad and click for a right-click or scroll through stuff. They altered the sizing adjustment gestures to affect other applications, like the Finder windows and not just limit it to photos in Photobooth. You can even rotate photos with a gesture. Many things are wireless now, which is funny that the power supply isn’t wireless (KIDDING!). Since there’s no built-in optical drive, you can use the wireless feature to use optical drives on other computers (as mentioned above). They’ve even popped in an iTunes rental system ad in there. Also, Time Capsule looks to be the wireless solution for backup. This would be awesome too, since I have to plug my external drive to my MBP everytime I want to make a backup. With Time Capsule I can do it wirelessly. Of course, I’m sure my MBP would be compatible with it too.
Which illuminates my dilemma. Do I want to get this shiny new tech that’s too sexy for my shirt? Damn you Apple. At least Sony makes cool looking pieces of crap, which allows me to separate myself from them speedily to the next hot, sexy, cool. You, on the other hand, make hot looking stuff that works pretty darn good.
First post for the new year and it’s a tie-in to last year. Over the past weekend, I went into movie marathon mode and rented a few movies from Vudu as well as purchased a couple (I wouldn’t have but it was the only way to watch them). While I was disappointed that Minority Report and Donnie Darko weren’t in the library, I was pleasantly surprised with a couple of foreign movies I wouldn’t have watched otherwise. Video quality was very good for all but one movie and the sound quality was still pretty good even coming out of the TV stock speakers. Since I don’t have a sound system, I won’t get into the audio. Even though I don’t have an HD TV, my set is relatively new so the display is pretty vibrant. There were no artifacts (except for that one movie, but I think it’s just how old that film may be) and, if I didn’t see the download progress whenever I paused or rewound the playback, I could be fooled into thinking the movie I was watching was on a DVD and not streamed to the Vudu box.
I mainly used the “My Wish List” feature to bookmark movies I was interested in but didn’t want to watch right away. While the “Find Movies” search is pretty nifty, I do get lost in the moment of perusing the titles and “waste” time. So, before the weekend arrived, I added a few movies to my wish list and waited for the weekend before starting my marathon. This method worked out pretty well but also made me miss some of the featured movies on the home screen. The featured movie list is great for newly available movies.
I think the Vudu system works well for anyone who wants to watch a movie “right away” aka to impatient to wait for delivery of the movie or too lazy/uninterested in driving to a movie rental shop. Although you might not find exactly what you’re looking for, you may be surprised to find a few gems you may not have come across otherwise.
