After several months of hard work I completed the installation of a Mac mini into my car. Well, almost completed, I still have some software and the main bezel to finish up. But the entire process along with pictures and video is documented at:
Oops, too late. Sorry.
Along with giving the booth worker a heart attack after closing the new portable’s display, the following are my first impressions of everyone’s favorite new ‘Book.
- MagSafe: Genius. No polarity on the plug. Not to hard, not to soft, the magnet seems like the right strength. Booth workers assure us that having a magnet of such strength neighboring the other laptop components is “not an issue”. *cough*
- Relocated wireless antennas: Fear. They are now located at the base of the display hinge (the matte silver insert). Does anyone else remember the joys of wifi on a titanium PowerBook? Booth worker response: “It’s better than the previous generation”. So is the current hydrogen bomb.
- 8 is Great! No wait, the marketing fluff said 4x faster. Whatever. It was noticeably faster, Safari page renders where better than G5 towers I’ve worked on. The IR port on front is distracting and ugly, it’s a shame they can’t solve that (little) aesthetic issue. We can put men on the moon but IR port covers will forever remain a startling black-red.
- Built-in iSight camera: A natural conclusion. I’m sure these will appear in every CPU from now on (except of course towers). If they don’t appear in the next rev of the displays, someone missed a meeting.
- $1,999: Worth every penny.
Although I seem to travel a regular amount as of late, this travlers convience made me double-take as I was walking through a concourse in the Atlanta airport.
While I didn’t have time to play, the touch panel interface looked easy to use and the machine presented an overall high quality feel. While it’s yet another interesting direction in automated commerce, I can’t help but question two things: 1) I’m surprised Apple agreed to have it’s product re-sold in such a manner. For a company obsessed with the customer purchase experience and over all brand integrity, it seems like an uncharacteristic move. 2) Are you allowed to shake the machine if your $200 nano gets stuck like a ¢75 bag of M&Ms?
Impulse buyers beware.
Apple’s presence on Jeopardy! the other night reminded of a recent SNL bit that was well executed.
In yet another example of how one unique company continues to reach an ever increasing audience, an entire Jeopardy! category was devoted to Apple trivia last night. Sadly, I missed the episode (if you happened to record it please send it my way) but found a few of the questions online which were presented to the participants:
- An Asian feline that shares a name with the latest Mac OS X version: What is Tiger?
- The type of computers the iBook and PowerBook are: What are laptops?
- This man has a salary of $1: Who is Steve Jobs?
- This product shares its name with a place where aircraft take flight: What is Airport?
- A “speedy” product that works on the Mac or PC: What is QuickTime?
It would have been a hot day in San Francisco were I to have answered that second question correctly. What is a Macintosh computer? What are personal computers? What are portable computers? And countless other completely logical answers…all would have been wrong. What where they thinking when the decided on that question? Did they see it as a clever trick, or was it their lack of experience on the topic that created a flawed question?
This brings up something that has always bothered me about fact finding, specifically in the news media. Ever read a local newspaper article discussing something your overly familiar with? Ever sit through a painful 4 and 1/2 minute piece on your profession aired on the five’o clock news? Every time this happens for me I’m irritated by the inaccuracy of the information presented. I understand that it’s my job to know more on the topic than these all-purpose reporters, but then what about the information that I learn from them on other topics that are foreign to me? I have to assume they are riddled with the same surface details, misconceptions, and tainted facts.
Enjoy your morning newspaper.
I’ve always said that no matter how important the processing power of a workstation is, the usable display size is even more impactful to productivity. Even if the processing speed of a task you’re performeing is slower, having more usable screen space allows you to do something else, like simply reading a displayed page while waiting for a process to complete. Finally, some proof:
On the bigger screen, people completed the tasks at least 10 percent more quickly - and some as much as 44 percent more quickly. They were also more likely to remember the seven-digit number, which showed that the multitasking was clearly less taxing on their brains. Some of the volunteers were so enthralled with the huge screen that they begged to take it home. In two decades of research, Czerwinski had never seen a single tweak to a computer system so significantly improve a users productivity. The clearer your screen, she found, the calmer your mind.
One thing that never ceased to amaze me while consulting, was the average users ignorance in utilizing available screen space. It’s like people had tunnel vision, they focused all of their windows in the center of the screen leading them to work habits that would never allow them to be as productive as they could be if they were fully exploiting the screen real estate they paid had for.
This brings to mind my recent joy when upgrading to the latest PowerBook which sports a screen size 26% larger than the previous model. It’s still just a drop in the bucket compared to my primary desktop system with a combined resolution of 3200×1600, but 1440×960 makes this portable system an even better tool than before.
1280×854(red) vs 1440×960
However it seems a byproduct of the increased pixel density was a noticeable horizontal banding in the display image. I’ve since only found one or two people online stating they see the same thing, but my feeling is that this will be a consistant experience with the new models, it’s simply a question of whether or not the user has something to compare to which makes the horizontal lines more obvious. It’s unfortunate that the increase in brightness and resolution will in the end most likely be overshaddowed by this "defect" which is extremely distracting for any discernable user. I tried to capture it with a digital camera but it’s not nearly as noticable in the photo as it is in real life. Here’s to hoping the issue is identified and corrected in future production runs.
Horizontal banding