my mac mini media center

since i posted yesterday about my wonderful new over-the-air hdtv antenna, i thought people might be interested in what it’s hooked up to.

namely, my recently assembled mac mini media center.

first, the relevant equipment:

» a Philips 23PF5320 23-Inch Flat Panel Widescreen LCD TV, which i’ve had for a number of years. positives: it’s a great picture, it’s just the right size for our apartment, and it has a vga pc port. negatives: it’s older, it doesn’t have a digital tuner, and it only has dvi, not hdmi.

» a 1.83ghz core 2 duo mac mini with a combo drive, which we purchased recently. i chose to get a mac mini rather than an apple tv because i wanted to be able to watch internet video content (hulu, and the like). positives: came with leopard, just works perfectly with no hassle, no viruses to worry about. negatives: although it has a dvi port, it doesn’t play nice with the dvi port on the tv, so it’s hooked up via vga.

» elgato eyetv hybrid, which is both the digital tuner that the tv lacks, and a dvr to record shows. positives: perfect picture, easy to use software, easy installation. negatives: none.

» philips fr994 receiver, which i’ve had for i think 8 years or so. positives: new enough to have digital audio inputs, wide variety of other inputs, programmable display. negatives: so old that there’s no video inputs or controls, only audio.

i can’t tell you how perfectly all this works together. the hookups are: mac mini vga to tv vga port, mac mini audio out to digital port on receiver, elgato eyetv hybrid usb stick plugged into the back of the mac mini, antenna coax lead screwed into the hybrid. i get broadcast tv, dvr, and internet video all in 1080i hd and 5.1 surround sound, and the only monthly fee i have is the internet access from the cable company. i don’t care about cable channels, so i don’t pay for them and i don’t feel i’m missing out.

i’ve ripped all of my cds, so i don’t need to use the cd player anymore. everything’s in itunes on the mac. and if i did need to play a cd, i’d just stick it into the mac mini and play it. same with the dvd player. we have a vhs player/dvd recorder that we used to dub a lot of kirk’s old tapes, but there’s no need now. just stick the dvd into the mini and play it.

if i choose to get cable somewhere down the road, the hybrid can work with the cable channels, with or without a cable box.

at some point i may want to get an all-in-one remote like the logitech harmony one, but for now i’m good with the remote for the receiver + keyboard and mouse.

i think i’m covered on entertainment for the forseeable future.

i(phone) shoulda known better

after all of the hype about the new iphone 2.0 software, and the app store, and all the goodies awaiting me, i went to work today having told kirk to update his iphone when itunes showed the update.

usually i’m pretty sensible about these things. if yesterday you had asked me what to do, i probably would have told you to wait to update. make sure everything is working properly. give it a day or two. but i got caught up in the hype. i figured that as important as this was to apple, and as much as they had advertised and flogged this new phone + new software, they would have their act together. i assumed that updating our original iphone to the new software would be seamless.

boy was i wrong. kirk sat all morning fiddling with this. the last email i got from him seemed to indicate that the phone was updated and activated, but still wouldn’t sync because itunes is still down. so i’d guess that he has a working phone, with no contact info etc. on it. which apparently is better than some people.

should i have obeyed my common sense and told kirk to wait? you bet.

should apple have hyped this new phone + new software to the moon and back, like they did? you bet.

should apple have been technically ready for this onslaught, the one they created? you bet.

will this be a non-issue tomorrow? i’d guess so. i certainly hope so.

look. it ain’t a pacemaker that we’re talking about. small children will not lose their lives because the iphones won’t update smoothly. but it irks me that, due to apple’s lack of preparation, kirk wasted the morning of his day off, and probably still hasn’t finished syncing the phone. lots of people are angry about this, and it’s because a) apple markets themselves as the easier technological alternative, which amplifies their missteps, and 2) people love their damn iphones and are pissed when they suddenly don’t work.

hopefully it will be fixed by tomorrow, because he’s leaving for reading, pa for sunday and monday, and it would be nice if he had a working phone to take with him.

update: took my 2:00PM afternoon constitutional, which just happens to take me right past the action. at the at&t store at 54th & 6th, there was a security guard at the door letting people in a few at a time, and ~50 people in line. said security guard was getting yelled at by an extremely old man clutching an iphone who couldn’t connect to itunes. security guard nonplussed. at the flagship apple store on 58th and 5th, a few hundred people in line, stretching around the corner and down 58th by fao schwartz. calm and orderly — i think the store may have been closed to all but iphone shoppers, but i’m not sure about that.

update 2: kirk just called. from his fully functioning iphone. that has all the contacts and info loaded on it. perfectly normal. what’s the big frigging hullabaloo?

obama “outraged” with wright’s comments

from the article:

In his harshest criticism yet of his former minister, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama said he was “outraged” by Wright’s comments at the National Press Club Monday, and “saddened by the spectacle.”

personally, i’m guessing that wright chose to fall on his sword to a degree — to get out there and make comments so outrageous that obama would have an opportunity to really put some distance between them. obama has been less than forthcoming about all this, i think. and i have to admit that the people who can’t understand why he stuck with the church have somewhat of a point. i know that church does not equal pastor, and there’s a new pastor now, and you should be going to church for the institution more than the personalities involved.

still. maybe this will precipitate a clean break between the two. let’s hope so.

in any case, better sooner (now) than later (october). there’ll always be a percentage of people unable to separate the two in their minds. hopefully this will mitigate the damage that’s been done.

i want that small squidgy thought floating in the back of my mind — “perhaps hillary is more electable after all” — crushed mercilessly.

update: just remembered what this was — obama’s sister souljah moment.

apple tv: i am [not] moved

lots of cool new stuff from apple. including an updated apple tv, which is the thing i’m most likely to buy, but i think the wallet is staying in the pocket for the short term. longer term, there’s a small possibility of an apple tv in my home.

» the apple tv can stream photos and music to your tv. i can do that with the wii and wii transfer.

» the apple tv can show me you tube videos on my tv. using the wii’s browser, i can watch you tube videos on my tv as well.

» the apple tv can feed me audio and video podcasts. i can’t do that on my tv, but i’m not sure i need to. i need to look at the video podcasts that are out there and see if they are compelling.

» the apple tv can let me buy tv shows and rent movies. the buy tv shows bit intrigues, but the rent movies part doesn’t. netflix is cheaper. you can rent hd movies using apple tv, but i’m not sure there’s enough of a visual difference between regular dvd quality and hd quality to make that a reason to shell out the apple tv bucks.

although the apple tv does make me pretty sure i’ll never buy a high definition/blu-ray dvd player. i would buy an apple tv first, i think, and just rent the hd movies if i for some reason just had to have high definition movies.

but i don’t think i do need them, especially since i’m viewing content on a 23″ lcd screen. and i know i can bittorrent shows and movies and encode them and transfer them and burn them and whatnot, but who the hell has time for that? and anyway, call me a nerd, but i like to keep it legal.

i am attracted by the slickness and the interface, though. although there’s much of the apple tv’s function that i can presently replicate, it has a cobbled-together feel and doesn’t work perfectly.

for a while, i thought i might like to get a mac mini to hook up to the tv, instead of the apple tv. but you can’t rent hd content using a computer, only the apple tv, because of the copy protection inherent in the hdmi connector which the computers don’t have. even though i don’t think i need hd content, i think you buy hardware looking forward, not back. i don’t want to lock myself into not being able to get hd content. so, it’s apple tv, or nothing.

with a caveat — my tv doesn’t have an hdmi connector, just a dvi connector. if i can’t rent hd content with the apple tv hooked up that way, it’s a non-starter. i’m not buying an apple tv and a new tv as well.

i’ll do the taxes (we might get a big hit this year), let the dust settle, let others be the guinea pigs, and then we’ll see.

this-and-that

» today is anniversary #8 with kirk. you can read all about it. love ya baby.

» next tuesday is the stevenote at macworld, which means lots of new apple stuff to potentially spend money on. in case you just stumbled here, i’m a big apple fan. what could get me to blow the dust off of my wallet? perhaps an updated 3g iphone — kirk could get the new one and i’d take his old one. perhaps something more useful than apple tv to hook up to the hdtv, since we don’t have cable tv. maybe it’s the whatever-they’ve-come-up-with-that-noone-has-thought-of. maybe the wallet stays intact.

» i’m starting to get more political again — i find myself going to more and more political news sites and blogs. i get geared up every election cycle, and this one promises to be no different. i’m sure to bore you with my mumblings and rantings, but i gotta be me. still liking that obama guy. but i may change my mind. maybe i’ll even vote republican this year. it could happen. you never know.

» via kottke, a great article by kevin smith about his new movie, “zach and miri make a porno”. anything by kevin smith is a must-see for me (chasing amy is on my top-ten favorite films of all time), but with a title like that i can hardly wait.

» have a great weekend! i mean it. no excuses.

our wii media center

who needs an apple tv? not us.

we have a mac in our “home office”, which is in fact a shallow closet. elsewhere in the apartment, we have a wii, and we have the wii hooked up to the hdtv, and we have the wii hooked up to the home theater. and the mac and the wii are on the same network.

enter wii transfer.

for a $19 shareware fee, which i paid and so should you when you use shareware, this little program feeds music, movies, photos, and browser bookmarks from your mac to the wii’s internet browser. so if i want to listen to itunes music through the stereo, or watch a downloaded video file on the hdtv, or watch a slideshow of my iphoto pictures, i can now just fire up the wii, use the wii’s browser to pull up the content, and bob’s your uncle, as they say in paraguay. it installed easily with practically no configuration, and worked perfectly out of the box.

there are a couple of minor drawbacks. you can’t play purchased drm-encoded video, so all my wonder showzen episodes bought in itunes stay on the mac. and audio files don’t stream yet (they are copied over to the wii on the fly), so you run into wii memory issues with large audio files. no radioshift yet.

but those are very minor quibbles. quibbles i can put up with when spending $19 for wii transfer, as opposed to $299 or even $399 for an apple tv. we listened to itunes playlists all weekend.

great stuff.

real advice from fake steve

fake steve jobs on why to avoid business school, and school in general, if you want to truly be successful.

from the article:

Business school dude, listen up. Forget shadowing me. You’ll never be like me, because I’m one of a kind. I came out and they broke the mold. But if you want to learn how I operate, do the following. Quit business school. Go work at some shitty electronics company and learn how to source components. Travel to India and seek enlightenment. Grow your hair down to your ass. Take LSD. Smoke pot. Live on a commune. Sell your van and start a company. Put yourself in danger. Create a situation where if you fail you’ll be unable to pay your rent and you’ll be out on the street. Struggle to make payroll. Get screwed by suppliers. Learn to screw them back. Bounce checks. Run out of money. Go hungry. Be scared.

wow. i really wish i had the guts to do that. but i’ve resigned myself to the safety of dronedom.

our iphone is updated and perfectly fine, thank you

we updated kirk’s iphone on thursday night. completely without incident. he synced, the update installed, it restarted and relocked itself, and it now works perfectly with lots of added functionality. as we expected, because we didn’t ever attempt an unauthorized hack. not even the so-easy-a-child-could-do-it ringtone hack. however begrudgingly, we paid 99 cents for the ringtones on the phone.

i treat my mac the same way. applications only. i try not to install anything that modifies the system, even though these mods are authorized, as opposed to the iphone, where all mods are unauthorized. self-contained apps only, as much as possible. less trouble that way, come update time.

of course, the media coverage of the update makes it seem that the vast majority of iphone users are howling, wailing, and bemoaning the loss of their precious at the hands of the evil apple empire, which willfully turned their functionings into non-functionings.

give me a break.

if you are savvy enough to be able to unlock your iphone, which is in itself not the easiest of processes, then you should have been savvy enough to have found and read the admonitions of apple, who implored people not to update modified iphones lest they become unusable. that news was all over the internet for days before the update was issued.

and you are also savvy enough to have found and read the news that the dev team that produced the unlock method implored people not to update unlocked phones lest they become unusable, until they come up with a workaround.

and you are also savvy enough to realize that, if your phone is locked but you have installed third-party apps, you should heed apple’s advice, not install the update, and wait to see how everything shakes out. or, at the very least, restore your iphone to pristine condition before updating.

so, in spite of apple’s warning’s and in spite of the dev team’s warnings, these people updated their iphones anyway. guess what happened? in some cases, their iphones were unusable. unlocked phones were definitely unusable. gee, what a revelation. if only they had, somehow, been able to know.

oh, that’s right. everybody on the internet told them, but they didn’t listen.

if you don’t update your modified phone, will it still work? yes it will. the people with hacked phones who didn’t apply the update are still merrily using their iphones on tmobile or using their third-party apps or whatever, and are completely unaffected.

is apple legally responsible for the non-functioning iphones? hell no they are not. you can argue whether or not apple should have been a better corporate citizen in all this, and i personally think that it’s not only bad form but bad business for apple to have done what they did, but the fact remains that no one held a gun to anyone’s head and made them update.

is it legal to unlock or modify your phone? sure it is. it’s your phone. you paid for it. do what you want to with it. but when you modify your iphone, you are taking a step down a lonely road. no matter how small or insignificant the hack may seem to be, the first mod you make means that you are assuming full responsibility for maintaining the hardware and software, with whatever assistance the unauthorized third-party developers who produced the hacks you installed choose (or choose not) to provide. and it’s your responsibility, once you have hacked, to keep yourself updated on the status of that hack, and how the hack affects your use of your iphone.

responsibility. you assumed it when you hacked. you can’t then whine because apple bricked your iphone. apple didn’t brick your iphone. you did.

from the ny times article:

Jennifer Bowcock, an Apple spokeswoman, said that when people went to update their software with their computer through iTunes, a warning appeared on the computer screen, making it clear that any unauthorized modifications to the iPhone software violated the agreement that people entered into when they bought the phone. “The inability to use your phone after making unauthorized modifications isn’t covered under the iPhone warranty” Ms. Bowcock said.

from the same article:

Ross Good, a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, had added several programs, including one for instant messaging. After the upgrade, the phone went into a semifrozen state.

When Mr. Good called Apple, the reception was cool. “They said I put third-party software on my phone, and so it was my fault no matter what.”

Joel Robison, a systems network engineer near Seattle, said his phone stopped working immediately after he installed the upgrade. He said that when he took it to an Apple store, he was accused of having unlocked the phone. But he said that with the exception of one aborted attempt to install a piece of outside software, he had made no modifications to the phone.

“Their accusation was very damaging to my opinion of Apple’s service,” Mr. Robison said.

stop whining. start taking responsibility. apple did. the producers of your hacks did.

you didn’t.

update: daring fireball’s john gruber and i arrive at the same conclusion at independent times, but of course he states it more elegantly. hopefully his broader reach will prompt some people to think twice about their entitlement.

kinda loving the iphone

even though it’s kirk’s iphone and not mine, he’s generous and shares, and i get up before he does, so i get some time to monkey around with it. and i know his passcode.

i made a ringtone out of “stigmata” by ministry and kirk’s under strict orders to use it for when i call. actually, of course, i asked nicely.

it’s still tough to type on it, i have to say. but i also don’t use it that much. i’m sure if i had one and used it constantly i’d get used to it.

of course, there’s tons of crap being written about the iphone on the internet. and i’m contributing to that, in a noneffective and useless way. the macalope had the most interesting comment i’ve seen in a while:

Here’s the one thing that makes the horny one think that Apple might announce a 3G phone before the end of the year: the iPhone was still selling briskly at $575…when the company cut the price to sell even more. There’s plenty of room at the top end of the market for more features.

If you were having a hard time imagining what the so-called “iPhone nano” would be like, all the while laughing yourself silly at the idea of a rotary-dial scroll wheel, maybe it’s because the iPhone as we know it is the “iPhone nano”, at least for 2007.

So, iPhone Pro anyone?

that makes sense. i’ll bet you all the iphone buyers thus far did buy the iphone nano. i’ll be damned.

but it matters not. we’re enjoying what we have. you can’t delay a purchase of technology because the gadget might get better. if you did that, you’d never buy anything. you have to pick your point of entry, and jump in. i think that right after the $200 price cut wasn’t such a bad time.

and i know i always swear that i’ll never buy version 1.0 of anything, but this is a bit different, because it’s a gadget that’s infinitely upgradeable via software. the gadget itself might be 1.0, but it’s as polished a 1.0 gadget as you’ll ever see, and it’ll just get better as apple pushes out new uses for it.

and i promise not to get envious when the next, speedier, better version comes out.

i promise.

no, really.

fucked without a kiss

i had to laugh at this quote from a ny times story about distraught iphone customers who feel that they overpaid:

“I just felt so used as a consumer,” he said. “They hyped up the iPhone for six months and built up our expectations, and then they grabbed our extra $200 and ran.”

leave it to some random apple fanatic with a blog to “feel so used”. it’s like the hooker stole his wallet while he was in the bathroom or something.

god knows i’d never waste my time obsessively blogging about a company and its products.

and just because kirk and i bought an iphone last night doesn’t mean that i buy into the hype.

and just because we wasted $69 on apple care for it doesn’t make me a mindless fanatic.

and just because we spent the entire evening oohing and aahing over it’s fantastically well-thought-out capabilities doesn’t mean that i have lost my perspective.

and just because the first thing i did this morning when i got up was rush to turn it on, baby, doesn’t mean that i don’t have a well-honed sense of life’s priorities.

it, after all, was a very practical purchase. made perfect sense. no other alternative, you know.

steve jobs is a marketing genius

don’t tell me that apple and steve jobs didn’t have this whole thing planned.

» step one: sell hundreds of thousands of iphones at $599 to enthusiastic early adopters.

» step two: lower the price by $200 two months later.

» step three: wait for the outraged early adopters to blather their outrage all over the internet and in the msm.

» step four: a day later, issue $100 store credits to all those early adopters, ensuring that they’ll buy yet another apple product.

» step five: bask in the love from all the early adopters who once again love you unconditionally, and from the bloggers and the msm and the analysts and so on.

apple tweaks the consuming public better than any other company. but with that said, at $399 we’re probably taking the plunge and buying kirk an iphone. his motorola razr is dying a slow death, and it’s as good a time as any.

My Afternoon in Wal-Mart’s MP3 Download Hell

Thank jeebus that the medialoper tried wal-mart’s new download service, so i didn’t have to.

so it’s not really my afternoon, as my post’s title might indicate. it’s the medialoper’s.

a typical snark-filled excerpt:

Eventually I give up searching for music and decide to browse by genre. I start with Rock -> Alternative. I’m happy to find that many alternative rock classics are available from Wal-Mart, including: Ted Nugent’s Greatest Hits, Frampton Comes Alive!, and Meat Loaf Bat Out Of Hell. They even have Jethro Tull. It’s like Wal-Mart has created an online alternative rock superstore.

Since this is only an experiment, I decide to download the Emo classic Do You Feel Like We Do? from Frampton Comes Alive!. That’s when I find out that the song is not sold separately. If I want the song I’ll have to download the whole Frampton Comes Alive! album, and I’m not about to do that. Not even in the name of science.

fun reading, and it’s tasty too.

learning about joybubbles

one of the great things about the internet is that by goofing around you can stumble across the most interesting things.

and yesterday, via boing boing, during my lunch hour i learned about joybubbles.

joybubbles was the adopted name of joe engrassia, a blind man who was one of the first phone phreakers. phone phreakers predate computer hackers — they specialized in manipulating the phone system for fun and [sometimes] profit, but mostly for fun.

for instance, did you know that years ago, captain crunch cereal gave away a whistle as a prize in a box of cereal, and the sound produced by the whistle could be used to get free long distance calls? that’s just the beginning of a long, fascinating history of phone phreaking that was recounted in a seminal article in the october 1971 issue of esquire. among the readers of the article were two california guys named jobs and wozniak, who were then inspired to start tinkering in the garage. and we all know how that ended up.

the author, ron rosenbaum, took me on a journey into an underground that i didn’t know existed, and now i can’t get enough of reading about it. set aside an hour and read this. it fulfills my first rule of good writing: take a subject that no one knows about, and could care less about, and make it so engrossing that you can’t stop thinking about it.

five minutes with the iphone

walked up to the apple store at 58th and 5th during my lunch hour. i figured that today would be a good day to venture there to see the new products, what with the terrible weather.

and it was. the apple store was indeed merely very crowded, and not packed so tightly with people that you could not move. and i saw the new imacs (very attractive — maybe that could replace the hdtv in the living room?) and got a chance to play with an iphone.

i’ve read all about them, but i’ve never actually seen one other than brief flashes. and i’ve never actually held one. my first impression was very good. it felt heavy enough to be substantial without being weighty — it gives one the impression of being a well-constructed singular thing, like it was hand-carved from a solid piece of metal.

and the screen is very impressive. it doesn’t noticeably smudge or get fingerprints on it, and the glare is really no problem indoors, though i don’t know what viewing while outdoors would be like.

i tried surfing the web — it seemed relatively fast, though i’m not sure if it was on wi-fi or the at&t network. i’d guess wi-fi. the iphone version of safari, the browser, was absolutely stunning. the pages were crystal clear, and zooming in and out worked perfectly.

i tapped on the address bar and tried typing “queerspace.com”. i’ve read that you should just keep typing and let the built-in error correction handle things. so i did that. maybe “queerspace.com” isn’t a fair test — what i got was qiwersoveee.com or something similar. it took quite a bit of effort to get “queerspace.com” into the address bar correctly. i’d guess that you’d get better with time, and that it would learn from your mistakes and all. i’ve never used a blackberry, so i don’t know how i’d do with an actual micro-keyboard. but with the iphone touch keyboard, i was all thumbs, and not in a good way.

basically, doing anything that didn’t involve the keyboard was intuitive and flawless. there’s no need for an owner’s manual, i’m sure. you wouldn’t need it. everything just made sense, and just worked.

google maps was cool, but in the end it was google maps. the widgets were cool, but in the end they were widgets.

the ipod worked spectacularly. scrolling through cover view and looking at songs was a breeze, and similarly scrolling through photos was easy and fun. i took a picture of myself with the camera and tried to email it to myself (again struggling with the typing of my email address), but the email wasn’t configured or something, so it wouldn’t leave the outbox. no dice there.

you tube videos played smoothly and were easy to access.

oh, and dialing the phone was easy. i called myself at work, and the sound quality of my voice mail message sounded clear and loud and perfect. much better than my current phone.

so, did i like it? absolutely. were there flaws? except for the keyboard, none that i could see. do i want one? yes, but not enough to shell out $600.

i’m glad i tried one. i’m betting the keyboard would get easier to use over time. someday i’ll have one.

but not yet. the new mac comes first.

things i’m hoping for today

» i hope someone else besides me comes to work today. there’s absolutely no one else on my entire row of cubicles.

» i hope that that hysterical tourist who got off the 1 train at 50th street with her husband and left her kid on the train gets her kid back safe. i hope that someone on the train took care of the kid. if the kid was old enough, i hope that mom had made the normal contingency plan for such events–get off at the next stop and wait. i know she was a tourist, by the way, because she had a fanny pack. not a single person who lives in any of the five boroughs wears a fanny pack. they did a study.

» i hope that the food at the riverdale garden is as good as everyone says it is. it’s one of two michelin restaurants in the bronx (the amazing roberto’s is the other), and it’s a couple of blocks away from our new apartment. it would be nice to have an awesome restaurant in the hood.

» i hope for world peace and a cure for aids and an implementable solution to global warming and the full and sensible restoration of new orleans. why the hell not, right?

» i hope leopard ships early. i want a new mac, either an updated mini or an imac — not sure which. but i’ll wait until leopard ships, because then i’ll get it free with the new computer, rather than having to pay $129 for it. i’m cheap, or sensible, that way. since we don’t have cable tv, i want a mac to hook up to the hdtv so we can watch internet content on the tv. so we’ll either get an imac, and hook up the old mini to the hdtv, or we’ll get a new mini and hook it up to the hdtv. not sure which — probably the latter. the old mini still works fine for what we use it for — email, web surfing, light photoshop, and garage band.

» i hope you don’t think i’m too privileged. i worry about that quite a bit. not, i mean, what you think of me, but rather that i’m too comfy with my stuff.

» i hope the mets stay in first place and win the division. the braves have me worried, as do the phillies.

iphones sold — 0 to 700,000

goldman sachs says 700,000piper jaffray says 500,000global equities research says 525,000blackfriars says it could be a million.

it all reminds me of the old sparks song, “i predict”:

You’re gonna take a walk in the rain
And you’re gonna get wet
(I predict)

You’re gonna eat a bowl of chow mein
And be hungry real soon
(I predict)

in other words, no one knows what the hell the real number is. what we do know is that it’s an earth-shattering number, one that doesn’t include me but will someday, perhaps soon.

and when we do know the number, it will be an actual number of iphones actually sold to actual people, instead of the fake-y pretend numbers of “products in the channel” that you get from most companies like microsoft and sony.

nintendo reports actual numbers sold for the wii as well. you have to read these references carefully. for instance, here’s a quote from a story that went out on the wire today — Nintendo Wii outsells Sony PS3:

Nintendo has said it sold 5.84 million Wii machines worldwide in the five months since its release in November, 2.37 million in the Americas, and 2.0 million in Japan. The Kyoto-based company said it expected to sell 14 million more Wii machines in the fiscal year ending in March 2008.

Sony has shipped 5.5 million PS3 machines in the fiscal year through March.

note the wording? nintendo: sold. sony: shipped. that means that while 5.84 million wiis are in homes being used, 5.5 million ps3 boxes are god knows where. still in the store, unsold? i’m betting that most of them are.

glad that the companies i support with my dollars, apple and nintendo, don’t play these mindshare games.

and i’m betting that the first announcement you’ll hear from apple is that they have sold one million iphones.

and that announcement will come this week, or early next week.

and to that, i unabashedly say, go apple.

fake steve on the iphone, consumerism

day in and day out, fake steve jobs for my money has the funniest blog on the web. even if you aren’t an apple fan, it’s still worth a read. his takes on apple, technology, current events, and miscellany are consistently hilarious.

and often insightful as well.

as was the case with a recent post: 29 june 2007, the day the world changed. it’s set up as a fake message to the apple faithful, on the occasion of the release of the iphone. but here’s what he has to say about the thousands of people lined up for hours, or days, for their iphone:

It’s about saying, Look, I realize there’s something bad happening in Darfur, and there’s some kind of AIDS epidemic in Africa, and there’s some crazies who want to blow us all up, and there’s a war in Iraq where thousands of people are dying for no reason — and yes, those things are important, and someday we may take to the streets to say something about them, if we can think of anything to say about them, but for now we Americans take to the streets for this cause.

i can’t recall reading a better summary of the times in which we currently live.

iphone: want, not buying

i’m not going to bother to link to any of the 35,000 articles flogging, explaining, bashing, hyping, or excoriating the iphone. google iphone if you want. there are lots of reviews and opinions out there.

here’s mine.

it [seems to be] revolutionary, user friendly, cost-effective (when you consider the total investment of more expensive phone + less expensive monthly plan), ultra-cool, and a great all-in-one replacement for a lot of separate older gadgets i have. i like that it is basically a small computer, so upgrades will be software based — that means that improving the phone won’t mean replacing the phone, as it does now. i like the form factor, the idea of the touch screen, the utility of the included apps. i’m on at&t (the new cingular) anyway, so i wouldn’t have to switch phone providers.

it all makes sense. the sole major drawback, the slow speed of at&t’s edge network, is not an issue for me in new york city, as i’d be on speedy wi-fi nearly all the time i’d use it.

i’m not getting one anytime soon, though. three reasons:

» i just bought a coop. no extra money in the budget right now for a frilly phone.

» it’s 1.0 hardware. never, never, never buy 1.0 hardware. that’s my personal rule. let the early adopters sort out the issues.

» i get a corporate discount through my employer on my at&t cell phone service. that’s a no-no for the iphone…you lose your discount. that’ll change eventually, i’d bet.

so, strike three. iphone is out. for now.

6 months from now? we’ll see.

of course, i work with some people who’ll get one pretty quickly. if i see one in person, i reserve the right to satisfy my wanton iphone lust at any time.