Overwhelmingly, people don’t like it. I agree that it is badly flawed, and I’m surprised that Apple let it out the door.

If you look at a picture of the device, what do you notice missing? Controls! There aren’t any buttons on it. Some designers at Apple decided to move them to the headphone cord.

You heard me right. The controls are on the headphone cord, meaning you must either use Apple’s headphones or buy a device that you plug-in between the device and your own headphones. If that’s not bad enough, the controls aren’t too great either…

The control box has three buttons, two to adjust the volume and a big center button that does everything else. To play or pause the music, you press once. To skip to the next track you press twice. To go back to the next track, you press three times. Need to rewind? Push the button three times, but continue to hold it the third time.

In short, Apple moved from a perfectly good user interface in the previous iteration of the iPod Shuffle to a horrid, Morse code style method tied to the headphones — just so they could release a new device that’s even smaller.

Starting at $1799, the Air is so thin it can fit inside one of those yellow envelopes (pictured to the right). It’s tiny, and it’s a full-featured Mac. Well, almost full-featured.

To fit a computer into that tiny package, some compromises were made (as usual with ultraportables).

• Few upgrades available
• Internal Lithium-Polymer battery cannot be swapped-out at will
• No optical drive. You can (and will want to) purchase a $99 external DVD burner. There’s a feature that allows you to “borrow” the drive of another PC/Mac via Wi-Fi, but you really should pay the extra $99.
• Lack of ports. There is only one USB 2.0 port, a micro-DVI port, and a headphone jack
• Internal speakers are mono

Other than that, this is a real cool computer.

• The Touchpad responds to several iPhone-like gestures (pinch to zoom, etc).
• It weighs 3.0 pounds, and is only 0.76 inches thick.
• It has a 13.3 inch display and full-size keyboard (no dedicated numerical keypad, though)
• 802.11n
• 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo (or optional 1.8GHz)
• 2GB of RAM (only option available)
• 80GB Hard Drive or 64GB SSD (no higher capacities for either)
• Onboard Intel GMA X3100 graphics
• 5 hours of battery life

If you need a thin and light laptop, and can deal with the limitations, this is the computer for you.

Further Reading

• MacBook Air: Holding my breath
• MacBook Air’s tradeoffs
• MacBook Air: Thinning My Expectations

However, iTunes hasn’t gone totally DRM-free yet. Plenty of their music still carries DRM, and the albums that are available without it cost more.

I’d like to say iTunes isn’t dead yet.

The iPod is by far the most-owned portable music player, and the average iPod-owner is too tech-illiterate to know that Amazon sells music, know that it works with their iPod, and know how to get the music they bought on to the iPod. iTunes is so easy that my cat could by music and load it onto an iPod.

Also, Amazon may be the first to be totally DRM-less, but I’m sure iTunes will follow suit. Heck, there won’t even be record labels in a few years. Instead, artists will simply distribute their music through iTunes, Amazon, etc. There’s no need for the big record labels anymore.

Apple needs to fix the current bugs, and add some new features. Namely,

• A volume switch on the device. Using the touchscreen to control volume can’t work too well.
• The ability to download and subscribe to podcasts over Wi-Fi.
• Flash support for Safari.

Here’s how I want the “Ultimate MP3 Player” to work:

• You plug the device into an AC outlet, so It’s charged when you need it.
• While it’s plugged-in, it connects to your Wi-Fi network. It would repeatedly check to see if any of your subscribed podcasts are updated, and download them. So you have all your podcasts on the player, as well as it being fully charged.

I don’t load new music onto my current MP3 player anywhere near as often as I put new podcasts onto it. Forget Wi-Fi sync, I want a device that can download podcasts itself.

Get going, Apple!

Here’s a screenshot.

What’s the catch? Your TV will become a rather expensive paperweight, as traditional televisions cannot process the digital signals. If you have an HDTV, or a modern digital-ready TV, than you’ll be fine. If not, then you’re options are to either buy a new TV or purchase a converter box that processes the digital signals and feeds them to your antiquated television.

This isn’t news, the FCC has been planning it for a few years now. Why are they vacating the TV Spectrum? It can be used for other purposes, such as cell phones and wireless broadband, as the UHF spectrum will soon be. Unfortunately, there’s a depressingly high chance that the spectrum will simply be sold to a large corporation, where it will benefit no one except whichever telecom company has deep enough pockets to buy it.

Personally, I don’t mind the spectrum being vacated (as long as a corporation doesn’t gain exclusive control over it), though I am opposed to digital TV. I think it’s unnecessary, and that TV could be better broadcast over the internet.

It’s insane for the FCC to expect us to go out and buy new TV sets on such short notice, and don’t forget that their forcing the high-definition rubbish on us too. Sometime around the death of VHF TV, the stations will stop broadcasting in the standard definition as well. Does someone in the FCC have stock in the TV set industry? You have to wonder…

Whenever I clear my cache (Ctrl-Shift-Del), which I do often when I work with CSS and JavaScript, I’m logged out of Del.icio.us (which is no big deal, and expected since I’m flushing the cookies). As soon as I clear out Firefox’s cache and cookies, logging me out of Del.icio.us, I get this stupid prompt from the Firefox extension. It looks like this:

How do I get rid of this stupid prompt? I want to leave the few copies of my del.icio.us bookmarks in Firefox, and I don’t want to be bugged about it whenever I log out of del.icio.us.

• The wimpy $500 Mac Mini
• The “all-in-one” iMac
• The $2500 Mac Pro

So you have you’re choice of a cheap, and tiny, computer that won’t meet the needs of most power users (let’s see you edit video on a Mini); an “all-in-one” computer with enough for most power users, but little choice in the monitor area since everything is built-in to the LCD; and the expensive “ultimate computer” with 8 processing cores.

There needs to be a midrange model that allows for the use of your own monitor, like the ill-fated G4 Cube. It’s stats should be something like these:

• 2.4GHZ+ Core 2 Duo
• 2GB of RAM
• 250GB-500GB of Hard Drive space
• 8x Dual-Layer SuperDrive
• ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT with 128MB memory

It’s pricing should be comparable to the iMacs, seeing as the specs would be similar (though the cost of the LCD is cut-out).

Since July 28, 2007, I have been taking screenshots of the different buttons, and I’m publishing the screen grabs here. It’s kind of fun, seeing a different button every day, but the question is “why?” Why is this happening? Are there some bored employees at Google?

Here are the buttons:

This odd occurrence is still happening, and I’m still taking screenshots of the new ones.

Meanwhile, Microsoft, Apple, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, Dell, Lenovo, Toshiba, Viacom, Real, Napster, Samsung, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Sandisk, and other companies are being sued by some lunatic “company” that patented the concept of playlists. Oh, and “Premier International Associates” has no company history prior to the lawsuits. How the heck did they get the patent in the first place?