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?

If you spend a week reading my articles, you’ll likely come to the assumption that I’m a big Apple fan. You’d be right, though I haven’t used any of their products for more than ten minutes at a time. I get Macworld from the library, I read Apple news online, and I’ve read several books about Apple and their products. I don’t have a Mac yet, but I definitely want one. Why, besides being totally obsessed with Apple products (a.k.a. “The Pinnacle of Innovation and Design”)?

First of all, Windows sucks. I’ve been using Windows since before XP was around, and it wasn’t very good. XP came out, and it was more stable and a little easier to use. Nowadays, Microsoft is marketing the heck out of Vista, and I’m thinking “How stupid does Microsoft think we are?” Vista is at least a step backwards. Vista is basically Windows XP with some security patches, a new interface, and more versions. The new “cool” interface may look cool, but from what I’ve seen it definitely hinders usability…and performance. Buy an OS with higher (like double) minimum spec requirements so I can have translucent window borders? No thanks.

In the hardware area, things aren’t much better. New PCs generally have Vista preinstalled, and you run into the problem of your computer self-destructing in two years. Throw-in bad tech support, device conflicts, malware, and the headaches start.

Some people will tell you that Macs have “compatibility issues.” Well, Vista definitely has “compatibility issues.” Only a third of software that runs on XP will run on Vista. You’ll need a new secuity suite for sure, and countless other apps won’t work. Meanwhile, Macs are becoming more and more adept at running Windows apps. Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion allow you to run Windows applications in the Mac OS. That’s right, they even appear in the dock. How is that possible? Now that Macs have Intel chips, it’s a lot simpler to run apps in a “virtual Windows playpen.” Before, virtualization systems had to emulate the chip as well. Of course, some programs won’t run in a virtual state (3D games for example). That’s where Apple’s Boot Camp software comes in. With Boot Camp, you can have an actual copy of Windows installed on your Mac. You can turn off your Mac, and restart it in Windows so you can play Need For Speed or whatever processor-intensive program you need to run. And get this: Vista runs faster on Macs than on any other PC on the market. The Vista Upgrade Adviser even scores iMacs higher than any other non-Apple machine. So…wait…how high would a Mac Pro score?

I think all of the above is enough reason to go Mac.