AppleSoapbox

Elegance begets elegance

Many great pieces will be written about Steve Jobs today, as his death becomes widely known while people watch or listen to the morning news. At least a few (if not many) will probably hit upon some of these thoughts, my thoughts. Many things have inspired me. Some are obvious: my wife, my kids, my friends, my passions, my pains. Others aren’t quite so obvious, like the feel of a seemingly…
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AppleComputer

Minority shareholder

I’ll bet you didn’t know I owned Apple. No, not AN apple. This isn’t a post about an epic journey to the grocery store. This is the story of something I wanted to do for a long time: buy stock in my favorite computer company. This isn’t a story of buying low and selling high, of market savvy, or mad money. This is a love story. If you’ve been on Apple train for the…
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AppleComputer

MacBook first impressions

The spacebar makes too much clicking noise, but I like the illuminated keyboard more than I thought I would. I do most of my writing after dark, and while I can type, it’s still nice to be able to see the keys. I’m going to miss the PB keyboard overall though (dark or not). The trackpad is simply huge. The scheme of making the back half physically clickable (the whole thing pivots…
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AppleBeth

A butterfly sneezes in China and my back hurts

The Mac turned 25 this week. I’m one of the privileged few to have one all this time. I was twelve when my father came home from Ray’s Connecting Point with the first Mac. I didn’t buy my own Mac until my freshman year at UF – a sweet Mac Plus with a full MB of RAM, an external hard drive, and an ImageWriter II – a set up that only set me back a few grand of…
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Apple

A warning to the uninitiated, or preaching to the chior

Syncing my iPhone with two different macs produced disastrous results. It all may have worked out if I hadn’t cancelled the sync on my PowerBook prematurely (having originally done all the sync work on the iMac). Chalk number one up to the idiot user. The second issue is a serious failing on Apple’s part. NO syncing of tasks from iCal… and no native task organization tool on the…
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AppleComputer

My wallet smells danger

Cheryl’s been making a lot of noise about our Verizon contract, and the ten months* left on it. She’s been making even more noise about the iPhone, and how she’d like one. Damn woman! Can’t you see my fiscal restraint is hanging by a thread? There’s real trouble on the horizon too: we’re about to walk out the door – to go to the International Plaza in…
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Apple

Sosumi

One of my favorite anecdotes from Apple lore is the story of the system sound called “Sosumi.” I’ve tossed it into a few posts, but I never offered any explanation – in case you don’t already know this important piece of American corporate history. First, the all important backstory: Apple (the computer maker) and Apple Corps (the music company founded by the Beatles)…
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Apple

Ten months and counting

Steve announced the iPhone SDK today (if that doesn’t ring the bell for the Pavlov dog in you, I feel terrible for your loss). Machinist – Salon.com: Last June, a day after buying Apple’s much-hyped iPhone, the first thing I noticed was that the thing wasn’t a cellphone. The iPhone was revolutionary, I wrote then, because it was the first fully-mobile general-purpose…
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