Tuesday, 11th January, 2005

Fire up the Rumourmills, Batten down the Webcast

Oooh, big day today Any time Steve Jobs does a Keynote Speech, me and the rest of the Apple fangirls/boys start dribbling all over our streamed webcasts.

What's it going to be today then? The headless, sub $500 iMac? the MS Office killer? The Apple iPhone? MacOSX 10.4 Tiger launching? The various rumour sites have been buzzing for weeks about this stuff.

It's very usual for this to happen, but this time it seems like everyone's been in a frenzy about it. Personally, I'm hoping that the rumoured iHome — a Mac masquerading as a home media centre — is for real. But I dunno I'm certain that whatever Apple announces today, there's going to be an anticlimax, as whatever it is won't live up to the squeeling fanboys' expectations.

Cue 500 comments in Slashdot, all saying "Lame"

Anyway, whatever the outcome, it seems that watching it live over the web isn't an option, since Apple have decided to delay broacast by about 9 hours — a shame, but one probably calculated just in case Steve has a Bill Gates moment and the machine he's demonstrating on crashes

(Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Bill, you're such a muppet)

Anyway, whatever. In other news, it's my dad's birthday today — and I actually remembered to send a card And a friend is coming round this afternoon to talk about doing some colaborative work for an exhibition. Not sure what we can do — my head is firmly lodged in StripeWorld still

k 14 writes:

my brain really hurts tonight...

So how likely is a sub 500$ imac thing? and would it have enough ram to run 10.3?

Should I post a poem that I wrote here?

Hmm, I'd love to say very likely indeed — but Apple's always been against doing keep PCs just to increase market share. Having said that, they've kinda created their own market of people with iPods who want to have a computer to match ... but again, that's what the iMac G5 is all about.

As to RAM — almost all of the machines that come out of Cupertino haven't got enough RAM. But it's not expensive these days. An extra 256MB (which is usually all you need) is about $50 (?)

I really doubt it — but I guess we'll find out in a few hours

And go ahead — post a poem ... as long as it's not rude honey

Katie writes:

I was slightly concerned this morning as, when reading your diary, I realised that I did not understand any of it although every now and then one of the words looked familiar. Oh No! Have I lost the power of literacy? Then I realised it is written in a specialist dialect known as 'geek'. Which is actually where the phrase 'It's all geek to me!' came from although this phrase has since undergone a slight lexical shift. Having entered the text into a translation site the entry today in English reads — some bloke that I really like is going to say something about computers (I really like the computers too) but it might not be as good as I am hoping — although I hope it is as good as I am hoping.

Well, pretty close baby. Basically...

Each year, there are conferences all about Macs that Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, makes a speech at. Steve's Keynote speeches have become traditionally the moment when Apple unleashes it's Next Cool Thing™ on all of us aficionados.

He starts them off by waffling on and on about financial reports, then sums up the current software ... and then ...

"One more thing"

It's an occurance like clockwork. Steve says "One more thing", the crowd goes wild, and across the world, in IRC channels all over, people start frantically typing "He said one more thing!!!!!! OMG!!!"

And then the new Mac Thingy gets shown.

This year, there's been tons of rumours flying around that the new thing will be (a) a new iMac that costs less than $500 — some rumours say it will be called the "iHome" and will be a digital media centre, (b) an update to Apple's Appleworks software — which could challenge Microsoft Office as the Wordprocessing/Spreadsheet software of choice for a lot of people, (c) a new audio device that connects via FireWire to your Mac — which has almost been confirmed by Apple suing the guy who leaked the information about this, (d) an Apple branded mobile phone — the iPhone — although these rumours came from Motorola's work with Apple in developing a mobile phone that you can connect to the iTunes Music Store with, so an iPhone is just wishful thinking, and (e) the release date for the next version of MacOSX — Tiger, which we've been holding out for for almost a year.

The fact though, that everyone's let their imaginations run away with themselves means, I think, that there's going to be a lot of disappointment. Whatever the New Cool Thing is, it's not going to live up to the (almost mad) expectations of the die-hard Mac lovers

I know I'm one of those die-hards, but I've been trying not to get my expectations up too much.

Normally, they broadcast the speech live over the 'net — but they're not this year (no-one knows why, it could be than when BIll Gates was presenting some stuff last week, the machine he was using crashed, and Apple doesn't want to take any chances), instead, they're broadcasting it 9 hours after the event.

Which means, darlling, that it's very likely I'm going to be sat at my machine at 2am tonight getting all excited.

I'll understand if you don't want to join me

NRT writes:

You'll love this, then: Powerbook user switches to WinXP laptop.

Yeah, I saw that a few days ago — what struck me about it was here was a guy who was so used to using Window's quirks, that he couldn't figure out how to work any other (some might say "better") way. 'S fair enough I guess — if you've been using Windows that long then you're probably far too gone down the geek-path to be saved.

Anyway, Mr NRT Sir, did you not say to me the other day that you were desparing at your employers for trying to switch everything to Windows?

NRT writes:

Um, no. That was a proposed plan to tie us into a MS CMS for certain web developments, which would require me to use FrontPage and optimise for IE, which would indeed be a Bad Thing.

Personally, I'm reasonably happy with a Windows platform, in a 'it's not really important enough to me to attempt to change' -sort of way.

Oh, OK. Fair enough

...

In an attempt to steer this away from a `my Mac's better than you PC' debate, let me tell yous about The Most Annoying Child in the World.

Someone, up my street, decided it would be a fantastic idea to give their son, for Christmas, an electric scooter. You know — like those push-bike scooters that were all the rage a year or so ago, but with electric motors attached.

Fine so far...

But it also has a horn. That beeps. In an annoying way Which would be fine if it was used for what its intentional purpose was presumably: "I say, pedestrian. Be so kind as to get out of my way. I'm riding an electric-powered scooter and if I collide with you you will not come away uninjured"

But no. This horn is being used in a "Beep beep be be beep. Be be be beep ... bee beep" way. Over and over again. Since Christmas. Every day. Most of the day. Up and down the street. Again and again

I caught a glimpse of him the other day — before I thought it was a car or something — and it was a little guy, on his scooter, just riding up and down, doing the "beep beep" thing.

If I wasn't such a wimp, I'd go stick a pole through his spokes.

La la la — Fingers in Ears

The trickle of minute-by-minute accounts of the Keynote are starting to appear in my RSS reader. I think I'll turn it off — it's like finding out whether you're going to have a boy or a girl before the birth. Or like finding out what happens at the end of the last episode of Buffy before you've seen it.

I'm going to try and wait until I watch it all tomorrow.

But I probably won't be able to resist

Beth writes:

YAY! ne mac time We wil certianly be buying a mini mac, however it will have to wait untill AFTER China

Bill gate writes:

Yes, but it doesn't come with a monitor so if you have an imac or Ibook you're screwed. Got to buy a screen. it was too good to be true

beth writes:

so you need to blow 30 quid on a second hand moniter, or 80 quid for a new one

ahem "Bill", why on earth would you be buying an Mac Mini if you already have an iBook or an iMac? I suppose you could plug it into your telly and watch DVDs