In LA

I’m finding it fun to watch the Breaking News Map scroll around and display bits of world news over the appropriate spot on a world map. It gives a god-like top-down sense of place to each story.

Eric Lafforgue returned from a trip to North Korea with a set of 205 amazing photos. Wow. Click the photo to go see the entire set.

My first thought upon seeing the name of this product was that finally former two-time heavyweight champion George Foreman had had enough with the iPod craze, and was now selling a grill designed specifically for frying iPods to death, with a sales pitch along the lines of:

The non-stick surface makes it easy for Georgetta to remove well-done iPods from the grill. Any melted white plastic drips down the center channel of the angled grill and into the removable tray for easy cleanup by George VI.

It turns out that my first guess was completely wrong. Here’s part of the actual product description:

The unique appliance not only grills, but it can also provide music to help set the mood–whether romantic or fun and festive during a party. For music capabilities, the unit comes equipped with a 10-watt speaker and the ability to be used with an iPod or MP3 player.

I’ll readily concede that there may be one or two people out there who would really like a large indoor-outdoor electric grill that can also play music, but I’m convinced that the very existence of the George Foreman iPod Grill is a sign that the end is near.

Technorati Tags: Apple, buy.com, cooking, iPod

I don’t have the data to back this up, and am too lazy to gather it, but it feels to me as if the value of Apple’s shares plummet every time they announce a new product, only to recoup their value over the course of the next month.

It appears that I’m not the only person to have noticed this pattern.

The new Macbook Air. Tiny. Great for businessfolk on the go. I wish I could use it, but it’s not an option for me or many other media professionals due to the fact that it cannot be connected to audio and video devices over firewire, lacks gigabit ethernet, and has an Intel integrated graphics chipset. Here’s a more detailed list of my thoughts.

The Great

• Really really tiny for its size –.76″ thick at the back, .16″ at the front. Less than 3 pounds. Should be fun to carry around. I want.
• 45W power supply –should not cause Airplane power outlets to shut down nearly as often as does the MacBook Pro’s 85W power adapter, and the 45W adapter probably takes up much less space in a bag than its chunky 85W cousin. With any luck Apple will go with a thinner and longer power supply to match the laptop’s shape. Has anyone seen the power supply?
• Full size keyboard –Thank god. I’ve used the tiny keyboards on the Sony Vaio subnotebooks, and I can’t say I enjoyed the experience. Yuck.
• 13.3″ 1200×800 resolution LCD screen. LED backlit for instant illumination, low power consumption, and better recyclability (no mercury).
• Runs OS X –I like OS X. It’s Unixy, like my NetBSD box, only with a pretty and functional interface.

Neutrals

• No optical disc –but the MacBook Air comes with new software that allows you to access optical drives on other computers (OS X or Windows) over the wireless network.¹ In all the news about this product that I’ve read and heard, Apple’s people have been careful to only use the word “access”, which to me implies that it is unlikely that it will be possible (at least with this first version of the software) to burn discs on remote computer’s optical drives from a MacBook Air. Apple is likely betting most MacBook Air purchasers either already own a Mac or PC with an optical drive, already download install most of their software over a network, or will buy Apple’s “MacBook Air SuperDrive” for $99. Perhaps other brands of external USB drive will also be supported by the MacBook Air’s version of OS X for reading and writing to discs.
• Storage: slow and fragile vs. fast, non-volatile, and very expensive –1.8″ 80Gb hard drive (standard) or 64Gb flash-based drive. 1.8″ hard drives of the sort used in iPods are slower and more fragile than 2.5″ laptop hard drives, which are in turn less robust than the 3.5″ hard drives in desktop computers. That’s why your friend’s 2-year-old iPod sometimes doesn’t boot, and freezes, and skips. Of course, the small machine requires smaller drives, and this tradeoff is a necessary evil. Data backups will be very important for users of the MacBook Air who opt for the internal hard drive. It’s likely that the hard drive is a stopgap measure and the flash drive, now optional, is the future for this product. Flash drives, like Samsung’s SSD flash drives, use less power than conventional hard drives, provide greater speed, have no moving parts, and have longer life and greater reliability than tiny hard drives. The only problem is that they’re maddeningly expensive right now. Want a flash drive with 14Gb less space than the stock 80Gb hard disk in your Macbook Air? That’ll add $999 to your order.

Negatives

• No Firewire –a dealbreaker for me. Lack of a Firewire 400 port means I can’t use the MacBook Air for video capture, can’t connect external drives of usable speed for video work, very likely can’t boot from external drives, and can’t use Firewire target disk mode for diagnostic and data recovery purposes. Audio professionals, who could probably make use of a silent flash-based tiny laptop for field recording, are also out of luck since most professional audio interfaces require Firewire.
• No ethernet port –not a big problem for business travelers and the average user, since they can get by with wifi or with Apple’s USB 10/100Base-T ethernet dongle, but us media types really like our gigabit ethernet to copy our big files or even use them over a network, and you can’t do that over USB 2.0.
• Not the greatest graphics processor (GPU) –a dealbreaker for me is that the laptop uses an Intel integrated graphics chipset. As far as I know none of the Intel integrated chipsets are usable or certified for use with two applications I use frequently: the Final Cut Studio suite’s “Motion” and “Color”.
• No expansion slot –I didn’t expect one in a subnotebook, but the fact that expansion is only possible through the USB2 port is unfortunate. An ExpressCard slot would offer 2.5 Gbit/s of bandwidth, USB 2.0 only does 480 Mbits/s peak. I wouldn’t bother dreaming of USB 2.0 gigabit ethernet adapters or USB 2.0 eSata adapters, such would be pointless. I could live with this deficit for the size.
• No Firewire port –did I say that already? It still bugs me. A lot.

Ah well. This will be an awesome machine for any non-media-professional who travels a lot or would like a lighter and thinner laptop. It’s a very capable computer for its size.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Apple rumor, Macintosh, OS X, unix

1. they never do say whether running this software to make one’s mac or PC host its optical drive for use on a MacBook Air means that the host machine can’t itself use the drive [↩]

I like the copyright notice/warning at the bottom of designer Rafael Morgan’s web pages (scroll all the way to the bottom).

Technorati Tags: copyright

Matt Kagler of Tag Team Records cajoled me into making the new splash page for their site. The process involved scotch, a projector, a shadow-puppet of zhu bajie, and a borrowed computer. Here’s a small version: The full-size version can be seen on the Tag Team Records website. The image is meant to publicize the upcoming U.S. releases of the new Lonely China Day and Rebuilding the Rights of Statues albums. –Speaking of Zhu Bajie, I’m about to ship off to Hengdian to work on a film based on the classic novel Journey to the West. With any luck I’ll get to see someone wearing a Zhu Bajie costume. Hardly seems kosher.

You may have heard that the concept of intellectual property hasn’t developed here in China to the same point that it has reached in the West. “Counterfeit”, “pirate”, or otherwise infringing products are sold very openly. That is one side of the coin. The flipside is that the understanding of branding and brand marketing is a nascent field here.So it was with great interest that I noticed an Apple store in a small town near Shanghai. Stores selling Apple computers in China never seem to have gotten the memo –they are not nearly as appealing as the Apple stores in the U.S., possibly because they are all independent resellers and are not run by Apple itself. In contrast, this store was doing everything right.

The store had a huge apple logo over the entrance, a nice layout, and the products all prominently displayed the apple logo. Posters on the walls showed the logo alongside athletes (a ping pong or badminton champ) endorsing the product, and the whole place was very clean and bright. But the most amazing thing about this store was that despite its appearance it was not an Apple store. Instead it was a store for “Golden Apple™” brand athletic shoes, obviously it’s simply a coincidence that their logo and store look very much like those of a famous company headquartered in Cupertino.

Since I needed a pair of shoes, and I have been making a habit of buying ostentatiously infringing products (preferably with misspelled brand names) whenever possible, I purchased a pair. The apple logo on the insole of the shoe even had a piece of clear plastic over it to protect it during shipping –that’s the kind of care taken to present one’s logo in a positive light that I expect to see from a company like the U.S.’s Apple Inc.

I played dumb and asked the employees if they also sold computers, and they told me “oh no, that is an American company. We are a Chinese company and do not sell computers.” They added “our logo is different, it has a bite”, perhaps with that statement betraying that they actually do understand intellectual property issues related to trademarks. They seemed so sincere they almost had me convinced, but their logo really is practically identical to Apple Inc’s logo.

On the plus side, If Apple Inc ever decides to sell shoes in China, I know just the company they should partner with. “Golden Apple” is perfect –they understand branding and customer experience better than most Chinese stores, and already have experience selling Apple branded products. They’d just need a few training sessions to get up to speed on intellectual property issues.

I love my Apple –excuse me, Golden Apple shoes.

This is reportedly a leaked photo of the long-rumored Apple iPhone, corded version. I had placed this image alongside a previous post, but I think the device is important enough to warrant its own entry.

If I am interpreting the image correctly, the phone appears to feature multi-line support and iPod-inspired rotary dialing (yes!). I hope it works with hotel PBX lines without frying its modem.

I am very excited about this. Aren’t you?

This image is likely by far the most accurate leaked photo of the Apple iPhone (at least until Kevin Rose, who often vacations in a cupboard at an Apple hardware testing lab, posts a sketch). However there do appear to be a number of more fanciful fan photos of iPhones on the net. Some of them are nice 3D renderings, and worth a look.

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