Kyle LeBoeuf

I got a chance to check out the new Magic Mouse at work today. The verdict?

It’s chock full of awesome. More to come later.

Kyle

The Google gods have smiled upon me. I got an invite early this morning.

I am really excited. More to come soon.

An email from Apple just hit my inbox. I decided to read this one (I get a lot emails from Apple). It’s an info ad about the new lineup of iPods. If you signed up for anything from Apple, then I’m sure you got this email. I would post it up on here, but I’m sure that violates some kind of copyright law. Anyway, the ad focuses on the upcoming iPod lineup. There’s only one thing that’s missing:

The iPod Classic. Seriously. Where’s the love Apple?

I’ve read countless reports and articles over the past year related to the direction in which Apple is heading with the iPod market. Most tech pundits agree: the iPod Classic is quickly approaching its demise. If Apple still carries the iPod Classic, then it doesn’t make sense to exclude it from the promotion and marketing material for the Classic, unless they are trying to get rid of it.

With flash memory becoming less and less expensive and their chips becoming smaller and smaller, there’s plenty of opportunity to simply offer iPods that have large flash-based storage capacities. Flash-based storage works better for music players for a few obvious reasons. The first of which is its resistance to physical movement. A hard drive-based iPod is susceptible to abuse and damage because of the spinning platter. But flash memory is movement-friendly and perfect for things like exercising. Another benefit to flash memory over hard disks is power consumption. Power efficiency is much better on flash-based devices rather than hard disk-based.

Despite the obvious phase-out, I don’t understand why Apple can’t continue to tout the original design as long as they are continuing to produce more units. I owned an iPod Classic for almost a year; then it was stolen. And I mourned its loss. Seriously. There’s still a significant market out there for people with big music libraries who need a device with enough capacity to fit everything.

In the end, I am sure that Apple will replace the Classic with large-capacity iPod Nano and iPod Touch units (or even a new class of iPod all-together).

iPod Classic, even though our time together is drawing to a close, we still love you.

Kyle

I drank the kool-aid.

My new Toy

And I love it. More to come later.

I wonder if Palm actually expected to get away with this?

[USB forum sides with Apple in Palm Pre sync dispute] AppleInsider

Saw this article today on TechCrunch stating that Twitter is taking in another round of financing at a $1 Billion valuation.

This is insane. $1 Billion for a company that has zero profitability? Wow.

[Twitter Closing New Venture Round At $1 Billion Valuation] via TechCrunch

I’ll admit to being intrigued by the idea of netbooks when they first started to creep into the portable computing market. Portable, affordable, and packing a ton of battery life, it was really easy to see why they took off, especially with the economy in the state that its in.

But the problem is that you get what you pay for. What you get in affordability and portabilty, you lose in usability.

I’m not just talking about raw computing power. While the computing power in these little machines is laughable, you don’t really need a lot of computing power to surf the web, check email, and maybe type a small paper in Microsoft Word. I’m talking about being able to use the computer for long periods of time, or actually get any serious work done.

I understand the need for small computers. I have owned and used a small 12″ Dell notebook for the past year-and-a-half, but that computer had a full sized keyboard (meaning actual keysizes); I didn’t get hand cramps when typing big papers.

With all that in mind, it intrigued me a bit whenever I read this article today talking about the popularity of netbooks over Apple’s portables among students purchasing computers for this upcoming school year. While I understand the idea behind spending only a few $100 on a computer, I don’t agreee with it.

I work for an Apple reseller, so I am well aware of the cost of Apple’s portable computers when compared to what competitors have on their shelves and websites. But at the same time, having worked with both sides of the market (PC and Mac) in the past 4 years, I also understand the benefits gained when using Apple products as opposed to PC products, including the low-price netbooks that have gained so much popularity today.

I am currently typing this post on a 13″ white Macbook. I love this thing. It always works and I never have any problems with it. Its worth about $1000 and it may seem expensive for being the cheapest portable Mac, but its way more functional than the netbooks out there today will ever be.

I am waiting for a company to come out with some kind of ground breaking product in that market before I change my sentiments on it and actually break down and buy one of the stupid things.

I have a strong feeling that such a ground-breaking, industry-changing product can only come from one place.

I’ll give you a hint, their offices reside in Cupertino, California.

In case you didn’t know, I’m currently doing some mission work in Alaska and I haven’t had time to keep up with tech topics. Keep yourself up-to-date with my goings-on here in Alaska at http://blog.kyleleboeuf.com

Kyle

Lately I’ve been thinking about moving the website to a new host (MediaTemple). It’s expensive, but I think it will be worth it in the long run. I’ve been wanting to leave 1and1 for a long time, but back when I setup my web space, they were running a decent package at an extremely cheap price, so I made the switch.

But lately, I’ve been having a lot of problems with 1and1. Every now and then when I make changes to the website, my entire web space will go down (that includes other domains which I own). Its an annoyance nuance thats been driving me crazy for the past two months, and I’m tired of it. MediaTemple hosts quite a bit of big name websites and I have heard nothing but good things from the people who use MediaTemple.

But, like I said, the only caveat I have is the price…yuck.

Kyle

Logged into Gmail this afternoon and decided to switch on Gmail Offline. Shortly after it started syncing, a link popped up under the status bar saying “Go into Flaky Connection Mode”.

With most software and services you usually see official-sounding terms and it all looks boring, but Google, in typical Google-fashion, thankfully speaks to us in easily understandable terms.

Screenshot:

I wish every company would do this.

Kyle [at] kyleleboeuf.com