Who are these people who say the iPad will replace the laptop?

Do they not listen to music and write an email at the same time? Do they open every application on their computer one at a time, with NOTHING running in the background? Do they NOT need to type with reasonable speed ever? Who are these people? 

Some people deserve to get their money taken from them. I applaud Apple for finding these people and taking it.

In the Adobe Flash vs. Apple pissfight, I side with Adobe for a few reasons. Not because of some love affair with flash, but for a number of reasons. Hear me out. Apple complaining that it doesn’t like flash because its a closed system is the pot calling the kettle black. Apple is the chief architect of closed experiences; proprietary ports on its devices, arcane app review process, among various other things. At least Flash, like Photoshop, is a set of tools that anyone can acquire, and anyone can experience.  HTML5 at times is more of a CPU hog than Flash. In fact on Windows, every Browser OTHER than Apple’s Safari, Flash was either on par with or slightly more effecient than HTML5 in the same tests. I have never had flash crash my pc, or even hog its cpu cycles in any noticable way. Why? That brings me to the next point. The reason Flash isn’t efficient on Macs is because Apple isn’t allowing it to be. On windows and other platforms, the latest version of flash can use hardware acceleration which greatly reduces cpu load. Apple doesn’t allow access to the necessary APIs on its OSX/Safari platform to make it’s hardware available. So the reality is, not even HTML5 will be as efficient as it will be on windows, just because it wont be able to do hardware acceleration.   In fact, you have to use Safari on Mac to give HTML5 any appreciable performance edge (And seriously, in a world where firefox and Chrome exists, why use Safari?) Safari on windows can’t even play html5 video, and with todays web, that seems to be a bit of a odd position for Apple’s html5 evangelism.  At the end of the day, it has more to do with Apple wanting to control content, more so than any belly-aching about performance. It can be efficient if they let it be efficient. But why would you buy a $3 app from the app store, when someone could make a web based flash app that does the same thing for free? Why buy a iPhone game for 2 bucks when you could be playing hundreds of Kongregate games that could potentially be designed specifically for iPhone and iPad hardware? Apple’s ire over flash is really just about them wanting to be the merchant and gatekeeper to virtually every form of media you consume, and by extension every potential revenue stream.

Steve Jobs is on a moral crusade against porn?

Has Apple CEO Steve Jobs been off his meds recently? He has been increasingly unhinged over the past couple of months. Now, in an exchange with a Gawker writer, he talks about the world of “freedom” he is creating; a part of that “freedom” is apparently freedom from porn.Why is he so preoccupied with exerting a such an extensive amount of control over not just the products themselves, but how you are allowed to use them?

It seems half of tumblr’s mac users are porn posters! Will they be putting Cybernanny on the webbrowser next? If I purchased one of their products, why should they care so much about what I am using it to do? They are ironically enough becoming the Orwellian enemy they claimed to be defeating. At least they make nice laptops. 

So… I am in the laptop buying market again.

It’s about that time that I buy a new laptop, and I am ironing out which Laptop I should buy. I have owned a Sony Vaio FE for a few years, and it has been a dream. It’s sturdy, reliable, and stylish even against newer laptops from other brands. But the reason this time is interesting, is once again, I have to money to choose between PC and Mac.

I had that choice 3 years ago when I bought my Vaio, and it essentially came down to value. Viao’s are notoriously more expensive than most other PC brands, but the experience I have had seems to have been worthy of that premium. However substantial Apple’s build quality is (which is being called into question with the iPhone 4), 3 years ago I had a hard time justifying $1.5k for the specs of a $600 PC. Is the tale the same today as it was 3 years ago?

Yes, and No. 3 Years ago, PC’s were running Vista, a resource heavy OS that at every turn acted like a cybernanny warning you of some action you were taking. Today, theres Windows 7, that I can personally attest its fast, efficient, and pretty reliable. Macs over the course of those years, are still Macs, with the major difference being a move to a unibody design, and a spec bump. But ultimately the Apple-tax is still there. For example I can buy a pretty impressive Vaio for $989 and to get the same spec Laptop from Apple would cost me $2,199. 

Seems like I am going Vaio again.

I hate the new iPhone commercials

It spends an entire commercial demonstrating things that pretty much all other modern smartphones do, and in some cases do better, and act as if they are splitting the atom. In one of the commercials they demonstrate downloading an app, REALLY?

Then they end it in saying, ”If you don’t have an iPhone, you don’t have an iPhone.”

Who is approving this stuff?

For all of my issues with Apple’s products, it is hard to deny that Steve Jobs had vision. RIP Steve.