Apple Eclectic’s Review of 2008: December

As 2008 slid gracefully towards its denouement, confirmation that Apple had lodged itself firmly in the popular consciousness — as if confirmation was needed — came in the form of The Simpsons, who mercilessly did for ‘Mapple’. Apple’s share price fell on the news. (You may notice that the only existent footage I could find on YouTube was this Hulu-approved clip. I hear that Apple’s legal team have posters of Fox’s lawyers on their office walls.) If you had to pick out Apple’s biggest success of 2008, the sure-fire winner would have to be the App Store. In December we received news that in just 5 short months it had swelled to include over 10,000 applications, and had served over 300 million downloads. Could there be a happier group of individuals than iPhone developers? Well, yes. Easily. Much mewling and puking was to be heard over the rash of 99¢ ‘ring tone’ apps, which were said to be driving down prices and making serious development for the platform impossible. Responding to this criticism, Apple did some quick retooling of the way the lists of most popular apps were displayed in iTunes, and when that didn’t stop the whining, though “well bloody ... Read more..

Apple Eclectic’s Review of 2008: November

When they come to write the definitive history of the 21st century, November 2008 will be remembered for one thing and one thing only — it was the month when Sesame Street came to iTunes. There was also some kind of election in the US, returning the country’s first black President. Apple’s share price fell on the historic news. Barack Obama — whose name, coincidentally, is still not recognised by OS X’s built-in spellchecker — soon joined Russian President Dmitri Medvedev in the pantheon of world leaders photographed near MacBooks. We can only hope that they were having more luck with them than other flush early-adopting sods were having with their aluminium unibody MacBooks. Reports of problems were flooding in, mainly centring on the new glass trackpads. We also heard how, while the MacBooks did have undocumented support for 6Gb of total RAM, it didn’t always work. But worst of all, the laptop’s HDCP proved to be a bag of hurt when some copy-protected media failed to play back over analogue outputs. Eager to ride the zeitgeist, owners of PowerBook G4s launched a class action lawsuit over dodgy memory slots. They formed a neat orderly queue behind the 128k Mac owner’s ... Read more..

Humble Ipod Pie Anyone?

I can honestly say that when I bought home an iPod Touch just days before we were to leave the country for a year my partner of 25 years was very annoyed, actually she was down right cranky. You see we had planned to purchase the iPod Touch with frequent flyer points because we were embarking on a journey without a guaranteed wage for 12 months! You can see where I am going with this right? As things turned out, there was none in stock at Frequent Flyer Points HQ and so I decided to buy it anyway. My thinking at this at this point was, we need it - what the hell! As you can imagine, literally three days before flying everyone was exhausted. So when I turned up with the iPod the questions were like "what were you thinking?", "we don't need this kind of expense at this stage!" could be heard coming from my partner’s normally calm and serene lips. After some talking, I assured her that she would see the benefit. We are nine months into the trip and I have to say that since then I have been enjoying seeing my partner eat humble pie ... Read more..