Kyle LeBoeuf

I’m currently writing this from inside the Apple Store (as a side note, since when did they start offering free wi-fi here?). I’ve been having some issues with my iPhone and since I was going to be in the Baton Rouge area I scheduled an appointment. While I had a happy outcome and walked out with a new fully functional phone, I did have some musings about the experience that I wanted to share.

For starters, no one really greeted me or asked if I needed help when I walked in the store. To Apple’s credit, it is pretty busy in here, but someone could at least acknowledge me. But I’ll give them that one. Having worked in retail, I understand.

When I did get to speak with someone, they told me to find this particular employee. Described as “the guy the over there in the red fleece”. Not sure if anyone here has been in an Apple Store recently, but they are ALL wearing red fleece. Nice. She did give me a name, so I managed to find the guy. I got checked in and hung around for 20 mins waiting for my appointment (I was early), keeping up with the Saints score. Here’s where it becomes a great experience.

I explained my situation to the Genius, and he swapped out my phone. No questions asked. THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is great service.

So, aside from a few hiccups that were more entertaining then they were annoying, I would chalk up this experience as a success. Go Apple.

I’ve always considered myself as one to be on the bleeding edge of various software trends. That being said, I’ve always been hesistant to move to different browsers beyond that of the current stable build of Firefox.

That all ended a few days ago. I decided to start running the Dev build of Google Chrome for Mac as my full-time web browser. Why?

It’s wickedly fast and surprisingly stable. I love it.

A few days ago, Google dropped a new dev build that turned on extension support. I now have adblocking and notifiers for Gmail and Google Reader. Nice.

A beta is supposed to drop in December. Can’t wait.

Kyle

This website is a little over a year old, and most of its life, it’s been run on WordPress, but I’ve been looking for simpler platform that doesn’t require so much upkeep.

One of the candidates for my new platform is Tumblr. Its a pretty interesting service. I created a Tumblr blog today and will be posting some of my content onto it. You can check it out here:

http://stuffkylelikes.tumblr.com

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.