On the iPod
You may have missed the news because of more important things, but Apple officially retired the iPod line of music players last week. That’s not exactly true, as the iPod Touches that were discontinued were more iPhones without a cellular radio than anything resembling the classic iPods. But, still, Apple no longer sells a dedicated portable music player. There have…
Jacked
Apple product launch announcements aren’t the must-watch events they once were for me. I’ve scaled back my purchasing of new electronic toys to a much slower pace.[1] No more new Mac to replace a perfectly good one every 12–18 months. I keep my phones well past the two years I’m obligated to keep them without having to pay to upgrade.…
Musical Interlude
Some words about music. I’m wrapping up my first week of a rather grand experiment: avoiding iTunes/Apple Music and using Spotify in their place. I cancelled my subscription to the now defunct Rdio streaming service and went all-in with Apple Music as soon as it went live back in June. While Apple Music wasn’t perfect, I liked how it was…
iPad Vs. Macbook: The Verdict
I’ve been (almost) exclusively on the iPad + keyboard combo for nearly two weeks now. How’s it going? I’m glad you asked. A couple years back, in the midst of the nine or ten month netbook craze, I picked up a cheap MSI netbook. I tried to use it for work, but it was just too damn small. The keyboard…
Taking A Flying Leap
After a couple of days of preparation, today I begin my latest technology experiment: can I survive with just an iPad? I’m often struck by the silliness of me switching back-and-forth betwen the iPad and the MacBook Air throughout the day. I always held on to the Air, though, because it seemed necessary for longer writing and for work assignments.…
App Review: Kingdom Rush
I don’t spend a lot of time playing games on my iPad or iPhone. I’ll buy a handful each year and maybe get really interested in a couple of them. It’s rare that a game captures my imagination for more than a couple days. But for the last three weeks, I’ve been loving Armor Games’ Kingdom Rush. I bought it…
Something New And Apple News
You may recall that I took a crack at running a separate blog dedicated to my musings on Apple and technology. Like many of my Internet dreams,1 it seemed like a great idea but in practice wasn’t such a huge success. Turns out it’s hard to write every day about the same subject, especially when there are about 1000 people…
Why iPhones Are Made In China
This is a terrific article on several levels. It examines some of the inside story of the development of the iPhone. It points out fundamental demographic advantages that China has over the U.S. And it gets into the potential moral delimma Apple, and other successful US technology companies, has when balancing profitability, share owner value, and the needs of the…
What Belongs To Us
I’ve been kicking around the idea of starting a new blog, not to replace this one but rather in addition to it to give me an outlet for all my technology geekery. If that happens, I’ll let you all know. I wrote something this morning that would have fit such a blog perfectly. But, in the absence of it, below…
What To Buy
As promised, some thoughts on whether should buy an iPad or perhaps something else. To quickly recap my initial thoughts about the iPad from a year ago, I thought the iPad was super cool and immediately set aside some money to get one when they were announced. After that initial interest waned, though, I reconsidered and evaluated the tech products…