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Archive for August, 2007


Thursday, August 30th, 2007

You know it makes an awful lot of sense. When you are price shopping for a new car, you’ll check off the options list and see that both have similarly powerful six-cylinder engines, air conditioning, perhaps a navigation system, satellite radio and so on and so forth.

At the end of the process, you tally up the sticker price, or whatever the dealer gives you as his “final offer,” and see where you stand. I’m assuming here that we’re talking about two similar makes, such as a Honda Accord and a Toyota Camry, and you’re making the final decision on price alone.

But what if one dealer said he could save you a few hundred by giving you the four-cylinder version, that changes the basis for comparison, and it’s up to you to weigh slightly better fuel economy against additional power.

You cannot, however, say the two vehicles are comparably equipped.

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Wednesday, August 29th, 2007

So I’m reading a CNET review of the high-end Mac Mini, recently revised to include a 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 1GB of RAM and a 120GB hard drive. The unsung hero of the Mac line, CNET found ways to malign it, some accurate and some downright misleading.

Indeed, you have to put this machine into perspective. It’s just an entry-level computer, with no pretense of offering a fat, fast hard drive, or a speedy graphics card for gaming. But both are big deals to CNET’s writers and editors, who seem to believe that such features are would be required by buyers of such a box, and they therefore downgrade the mini as a result.

Another major negative is that CNET feels the competition from Dell and HP offers better pricing for the same features? But do they?

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Tuesday, August 28th, 2007

It seems that every time Apple is close to a new release of Mac OS X, I’m here begging and pleading for a decent upgrade path for recent purchasers of new Macs or the previous Mac OS upgrade box. Of course, Apple doesn’t pay attention and they do what they planned to do anyway.

However, I think my argument becomes ever stronger with each upgrade, for various logical reasons, at least that’s what I believe.

When Mac OS 10.0 became 10.1, of course, the upgrade was essentially free, unless you ordered for shipment direct to your home, in which case a $19.95 “shipping and handling” fee was required. Lest we forget, that fee was the subject of lots of heated arguments about Apple’s alleged profiteering ways.

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Monday, August 27th, 2007

Months before the iPhone debuted, Apple was being asked over and over again about the prospects for running third party software on it. But a short time before the hot-selling gadget shipped, Steve Jobs was saying that Apple hadn’t decided how to handle development for the iPhone yet, but that a workable solution might come at a later time.

Not long thereafter, during his WWDC keynote, Jobs said that developers could build Web-based applications using Safari, but there would be no other supported method. Was that meant to close the door permanently, or just to give Apple more time to develop a secure solution?

Now it’s not as if the iPhone is bereft of software. Apple provides plenty of useful tools, including as full-featured a browser as you can expect on such a device. But what about the stuff that hasn’t arrived yet, such as a chatting application and other niceties?

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