Author Archive | Harry McCracken

Are Macs More Expensive? Round Four: The Skinny on the Mini

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 25, 2008 at 12:00 am

Pity the poor Mac Mini. After being unveiled with plenty of hoopla in January 2005 as “the most affordable Mac ever,” it departed the limelight with surprising swifness. The glossy white micro-Mac has received only minor updates such as CPU upgrades and actually got less affordable when the base model went from $499 to $599. Last year, there were even premature reports of the Mini’s imminent death, and most Mac enthusiasts didn’t seem too griefstricken at the prospect of its demise.

But the Mini lives–and even though $599 is no longer anywhere near a dirt-cheap price for a computer, it remains the cheapest Mac. It also comes in a super-small package that’s still fun and distinctive. So it’s the subject of my fourth excessively in-depth Mac-vs.-PC price comparison. My goal, as always, is to gauge whether you pay a “Mac Tax” when you buy a Mini instead of a roughly comparable Windows PC.

Before we get started, here are links to earlier comparisons in this series, just in case you missed ’em:

Round one: A mid-range MacBook vs. custom-configured Windows laptops.
Round two: The cheapest MacBook vs. cheap Windows laptops.
Round three: The iMac vs. Windows all-in-ones

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New iPod Nano? Sure. This One? I’m Skeptical.

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 23, 2008 at 9:45 am

Digg’s Kevin Rose has blogged that new, cheaper iPods will arrive in the next two or three weeks. That I can believe. (I’d bet on the outer edge of the prediction timewise or even a bit later, since Apple will almost certainly need a little time to invite journalists to a press event to roll out the new line.) But Rose has also posted a photo of what is supposedly the new iPod Nano in a skinny form factor that looks more like the original Nano than the current, more squarish design:

Like all alleged spy shots of unreleased products, this one is conveniently fuzzy-wuzzy…actually, it appears to be in black and white. (How come nobody with access to a top-secret product ever has a decent digital SLR handy?) But the shot is clear enough to see that the touch wheel has a menu button, backward and forward buttons, and a play/stop button.

And that’s why I think this photo is a fake. Presumably, the design involves holding the iPod in portrait mode when listening to music, and rotating it into landscape orientation to watch video. But in landscape mode, the orientation of the touch wheel doesn’t make a lot of sense: Backwards becomes up and forward becomes down, and the “Menu” label is sideways. Yes, you could figure it out. But I have a hard time believing that Apple would do anything so apparently ungainly and inelegant. (The iPhone’s rotating screen makes perfect sense, since the touch-screen controls rotate, too–and note that the one button on the iPhone’s face was designed to look exactly the same no matter what the orientation.)

Full disclosure: I’m probably predisposed to hope that this isn’t the new Nano, since I think the current square one is one of Apple’s nicest industrial designs ever. (I’m not sure why, but think of it as being a little guy; there’s something human about the proportions and styling.) If this one looked like an improvement, I might be more inclined to suspend my disbelief. For now, though, I don’t wanna believe.

Let’s end with a flashback to late 2006: Kevin Rose said that the iPhone was on its way (right!) but said it would be released on all carriers simultaneous, would have a slide-out keyboard, and would sport dual batteries (wrong, wrong, wrong)!

I hope that once again, he’s right on the timing and wrong on the details…

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Gmail: Love It! Hate It! Love It! Hate It!

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 22, 2008 at 6:19 pm

There are applications and services that I know I like. There are applications and services that I know I don’t like. And then there’s Gmail. Ever since I got my hands on an invite back in 2004, I’ve been a fan…or so I’ve thought. But recently, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s slowly driving me crazy–and that it may be time for an intervention of some sort.

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Twenty Thoughts About a Microsoft Ad Campaign I Haven’t Seen Yet

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 21, 2008 at 12:29 pm

The big news in the blogosphere today involves new details about Microsoft’s upcoming $300 million Windows ad campaign: It will apparently feature Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld, use the slogan “Windows, Not Walls,” and begin on September 4th. I’m not a professional ad critic, and I can’t even play amateur critic before I’ve seen the ads in question. But I can’t stop my mind from racing ahead, either.

So without any further ado, lemme throw out ten initial questions, impressions, and reflections about the campaign and Windows marketing in general–all of which are subject to revision and retraction once the ads hit the airwaves in a couple of weeks.

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The iPhone 3G: It May Not Be Perfect, But at Least It’s Invulnerable

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 20, 2008 at 12:55 pm

In the weeks since the iPhone 3G’s release, I’ve written a lot about it…and much of what I’ve written has involved the phone failing to live up to its considerable promise. So it’s nice to have an opportunity to write about it behaving in a way that seemed practically superhuman (superphonic?).

A few minutes ago, I was standing in my garage. I took a step and felt something under my right foot, after I’d already shifted my weight onto it. I looked down. It was my iPhone, sitting under the sole of my dress shoe. (Don’t ask how it got there–it’s not so much that it’s embarrassing as that I’m not entirely sure.)

The phone seemed to be making a crunching noise. I went into a brief spasm of horror. I thought that I’d probably broken the screen…and that, if I hadn’t, I’d be very lucky if I had a working-but-extremely-scratched-up iPhone. The screen was fine. The phone turned on without incident. I saw no deep gouges anyewhere.

I polished up the phone a polishing cloth, and darned if there’s absolutely no evidence that I’d applied 150+ pounds of pressure to it against a rough concrete floor. It looks brand new, front and back.

Now, I know there’s a large randomness factor in phone damage; if I’d stepped on it at a slightly different angle, it’s possible that it would have been toast, or would have at least gained a beauty mark or two. (My old Treo 650 ended up with such a heavy patina of scratches, nicks, scuffs, and embedded grime that I liked to think of it all as showing character.)

I’m still impressed, though. Especially considering that every iPod I’ve ever owned has acquired at least a few scratches within milliseconds of the moment I took it out of its packaging.

While we’re on the subject of iPhone torture tests–intentional or otherwise–here are a couple of videos from my PC World pals–one involving the original iPhone and one with the 3G:

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The Treo Pro: Finally Offically Official

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 20, 2008 at 10:09 am

“With the Treo Pro, Palm Inc…shows it, too, can innovate.” That’s how a Dow Jones story on Palm’s new smartphone starts off…and it’s a jarring, unfair note on which to begin it. Yes, Palm has seen more than its fair share of woes in recent years, many of them self-inflicted. But this is a company with a rich history of innovation–if you were to list the most important and influential mobile gadgets of all time, both the PalmPilot and the original Treo would rank high. Palm surely wants to prove that it can innovate again, but history is not going to look back at this company as an also-ran.

The Treo Pro, which Palm announced today after a couple of false starts, is entirely evolutionary. Pace Dow Jones, but I’m not sure if there’s anything truly innovative at all about it–what it is is a much-needed and overdue refresh of the basic Treo design, which had changed amazingly little since the release of the Treo 600 back in 2003. But a phone doesn’t have to be particularly innovative to be sexy, and the Treo Pro is the first Treo since the 650 that can reasonably be described as sexy…

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