mikataur's Profile

You heard it here first: Chris Seibold == John C Dvorak's illegitimate love child! (Except of course Dvorak is claiming the opposite: Windows running on Mac hardware.) Seriously, I thought the iPod proved beyond all doubt that there is indeed a market for a strongly branded, well engineered and aesthetic hardware device ALONGSIDE generic ones. People love Mac hardware, and will continue to do so. The main reason Mac marketshare is limited is that Windows has a monopoly on the industry - it's what everyone uses at work and home and most people don't want to rock the boat, so they go with the no-brainer choice, safety in numbers. Sheer inertia keeps people pacing the Windows treadmill. Many people would love to jump off it into the Mac jacuzzi, but it's harder than you think, when all your software, familiarity and peers are firmly planted in the Windows world.

#1, I think you've been trying to coerce Mail into being the email client you're used to, rather than appreciating its alternative design. Case in point: when I started using it back in the Jaguar days I hated it with a vengeance, because I was so used to the Outlook/Entourage way of doing things. I gave it about a day, then reverted. Then in Panther I started exploring it again and learnt its hidden delights, one of which is the simplicity Aaron talks about. Another was the instant search, which I think sold it to me: I do a lot of customer support and being able to pull up similar responses in an instant with just a few keywords is an immense timesaver over Entourage's ponderous text search. Yet another was the excellent rules/AppleScript integration, which is both extremely powerful and very easy to do. I have rules doing things as simple as changing the color of incoming message headers, to launching sophisticated post-processing scripts to collect information from a couple of different apps and generate an auto-replied email. Of course Mail supports pictures, they're even integrated from the other iApps such as iPhotos. Standalone pictures have always been drag & drop for me. Maybe yours didn't have a ".jpg" extension? And so to today in Tiger, with the many improvements in Mail 2.0, whenever I have to load up Entourage I truly hate the latter with a vengeance...! Give Mail a chance without the preconceptions of what an email client should be like, and you might be very surprised at how effective a different approach can be.

Has it actually be *confirmed* that Microsoft was working on their own portable player? There has been speculation that they might try a combined PSP/iPod killer, which would have a PSP style form factor and probably play games, but I don't think it's anything other than a "they could do this and call it XPlayer" type rumor. But if there has been more concrete evidence, link please! As to the Google possibilities, I feel Google will stay on the software/services side and not release hardware. There have been rumors of a GooglePC, a GoogleOS to run on it, and now you're adding a GooglePod! Google wants mass market adoption, not a niche of someone else's pie, so they'll do things that run on every PC. That means software and web services. GoogleTunes is highly possible, but a GooglePod to play them on doesn't gel. Other than getting Robin Williams on stage to insult anyone who dared to ask about such things and distract attention, there's no evidence whatsoever they'll get into hardware. By the way, did you know that Google Video already supports direct downloads into PSP and video iPod formats? I think that's the way they'll go: "work with what's out there."

You are reading FAR too much into the "may not have the opportunity to speak to you before the April 1 anniversary." It simply means the next likely keynote is the WWDC conference in June, which is something that mainly developers and tech journalists attend. As an aside, Apple Matters is getting a lackluster, too. Instead of insightful commentary, telling us stuff we didn't know or that may come to pass, it's turning into negative criticism and outlandish speculation that any seasoned MacRumors visitor knows to dismiss outright...

Sometimes I think all the news that Microsoft is on the out might actually earn them underdog status and have people rooting for them. Let us not forget they still have over 94% of the desktop sown up, make more revenue in a week than Apple does in a quarter, have a captive audience for all their future product releases even if the computer cognoscenti don't endorse them, still have double digit revenue growth from software with obscenely high gross margins, and have enough money in the bank to last decades even if by some miracle Google's ventures cause them to flatline. Bill G might be sobbing that his demos went phut, but he's still laughing all the way to the bank.

Excellent BTO graphics capabilities. However, if this takes the months and months to wait for like my 6800 did, I'm going to scream.

Even if it is a ripoff, it's not a ripoff of Microsoft... MPEG-1 Tuner cards + remote + playback software bundles have been available since at least 1998 (which is when I first gone one - all the drivers are Win 98 friendly). That's long before Microsoft brought out MCE in 2002/3. Apple's main innovation here seems to be the snazzy, Motion/OpenGL inspired interface. Ho hum. I'll wait until I can install it on my existing Mac(s) before passing judgement.

You are so cynical! I'm just waiting to see some of my favorite podcasts as video podcasts... Then we'd really see if Dawn & Drew were faking it or not! But the big question is, who can afford the bandwidth to host all of these?