Apple

Newspapers.Com is Becoming My Second Search

I keep thinking I'm going to cancel Newspapers.Com but I can't bring myself to do it, despite the $19.90 monthly cost. It's becoming the second place I look for information after Google and the clipping feature makes it easy to share stories on the web. Here's an example. I saw a mention online that Apple was extremely eager to license Mac OS to IBM and other PC makers in 1994 and Jim Carlton had covered this for the Wall Street Journal. Carlton's story didn't turn up in search engines but it ... (read more)

2021/04/08

Jonathan Franzen Also Hated Mac Dude

A few years ago, in one of Apple's last big marketing campaigns while Steve Jobs was alive, the company mocked Microsoft by having Justin Long portray a Mac and John Hodgman a PC in TV commercials. Long's comfortably scruffy dude in sneakers was supposed to be cool, while Hodgman's pudgy businessman was supposed to be a dork who couldn't quite catch up to the times. I wrote in 2007 that the commercials were doing something for Microsoft it couldn't do for itself -- make the company lovable. ... (read more)

2013/09/14

Buying Our First iMac for Video Editing

My son Max has volunteered to help athletes at his high school edit video of their game highlights to send to colleges. The athletic department devotes an Apple iMac to this purpose and also has some Windows 7 laptops. Since my sons all have an interest in filmmaking, thanks to YouTube, we're going to buy an iMac that will be devoted to editing video and find classes to help them nurture their inner Akira Kurosawa. As a Windows and Linux guy, I'm not sure what we need to purchase. I have a ... (read more)

2011/01/21

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the iPad

Like Cory Doctorow and some other longtime computer hackers, I've been thinking of the Apple iPad as a dire milestone on the road to a restricted computing future where giant corporations control everything we do on our devices -- and the only decent job that former programmers can get is to hunt and kill replicants. Believing this has helped me resist the urge to buy an iPad. Unfortunately, Greg Knauss has written a blog post that completely demolishes this sentiment: Simplicity has a ... (read more)

2010/04/06

Apple Commercials Make Microsoft Lovable

At the D: All Things Digital conference Wednesday, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates appeared onstage together for the first time in 20 years. One of the topics they discussed was Apple's series of Mac Dude and Windows Dork commercials: Here in the present, while discussing some recent Apple commercials in which an Apple hipster out-talks a nerdy Windows guy, it seemed almost as if Jobs and Gates were acting in starring roles in the same ads. Jobs, in his black turtleneck and jeans and stubbled beard, ... (read more)

2007/05/31

Meet Apple Switcher Janie Porche

Janie Porche is so effusively perky in her ad that I googled to see if she's a real human or some kind of test-tube baby cultured in a secret lab at Apple. It appears that Janie is a senior at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, who was on the school's golf team last year, though some of her rounds were not pretty (116!) [Google cache link]. At Trinity in 1999, she was ticketed on a "minor in possession" alcohol charge with nine others and they printed Mu Iota Rho (MIP) T-shirts, ... (read more)

2002/10/14