I sold my laptop yesterday. I can honestly say that when I put it into perspective I got teary eyed. It’s very common for tech people to exchange out computers at a faster rate than common people. Most typical users can hold onto a laptop for 4-5 years without major issue, this is especially true with Macs. A tech person (read, someone that uses a computer for more than 9 hours a day) will cycle through a laptop at a much faster pace, probably around the 2 year mark.
My Black Revision 1 MacBook traveled the world with me. Our first trip together was to Germany, Austria, and Italy. It’s WiFi reception exceeded my expectations when WiFi was not prevalent and open hotspots were few and far between. It took a fall that trip, on concrete no less, and kept on ticking. I was able to edit photos at night while driving through the alps as navigator, and prepare files for testing. This was just one trip of many that we took together. My MacBook helped me in ways that are hard to quantify. It helped me create presentations, record The Benchmarks, create the ferrari color website, it even got me laid from time to time with it’s excellent taste in music. As the years went on and technology became faster, it still hummed along as best it could. It may have gotten a little banged up due to a poor latch design, but it still smiled and kept a positive attitude. Even in the face of defeat it accepted a new hard drive with open arms and treated it like it’s own. I will miss you MacBook, you were a great friend for a long time.
I’m gonna go back to school in the spring of 2010… the end.
Phil Schiller is the Wordwide VP of Product Marketing at Apple Inc. I’ve needed a new laptop for a bit now and was holding off hoping apple would pull a rabbit out of a hat (despite the rumors that said otherwise). I’m moving to a Lenovo T400 for many reasons, but here are a few…
Me: Hey Phil, heard you guys came out with new laptops
Phil: Yup Chris, You’re going to love them, they’re absolutely beautiful
Me: That’s great news, I’m ready to upgrade, my laptop is about 2 years old now, and I need more screen real estate and some other things.
Phil: So what are you thinking this time, MacBook Pro?
Me: Well, you know I still use my computer on airplanes and on coffee shop tables so I still need the small screen of a regular MacBook
Phil: That makes sense, we’ve got a great new update for the MacBook, it’s machined out of solid aluminum!
Me: So how much do they start at now, I bought a house about a year ago and have been watching my finances.
Phil: They start at $1299 and are beautiful.
Me: Hmmm, OK, so what’s the specs lookin like these days?
Phil: We’ve got 2 USB Ports, a brand new Mini Display Port, they come with 2GB of RAM, 160GB Hard Drives, and they are running all new Nvidia video cards on new LED GLASS displays.
Me: Hmm, couple of questions… How many FireWire Ports? What’s the resolution on the new LED monitor? Is the glass screen matte somehow? I tried your last glossy screen and it sucked. Will my $100 worth of Mini DVI adapters work with the new DisplayPort?
Phil: Woah, slow down with the questions! You will love the new display, it’s made of glass, it’s even more glossy and it supports a resolution of 1280×800. It’s brighter too!
Me: Is it brighter than the sun? Cause I use my laptop on my lap in daylight and I can’t see anything now! It’s still 1280×800 too? I thought there were advances in pixel density due to the iPhone.
Phil: Well, customers love the new display.
Me: How do you let customers see them when your company is surrounded in such secrecy?
Phil: Ummm… well if you want a matte display with more resolution you can still buy our old 17" laptop, it’s only $2799
Me: Remember the plane trips? Coffee shops? Price point?
Phil: Ok, moving on… DisplayPort is this amazing new technology that is not compatible with your old adapters. Not only is the DisplayPort standard really small, we decided to make it even smaller to facilitate the need for a NEW adapter directly from us… just like we did with Mini DVI. With that, we decided to get rid of Firewire on the normal MacBook models… it took up too much space, and no one used it.
Me: Um, so my adapters are now worthless, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say you don’t include any of the new ones like you used to with your PowerBooks. You also no longer allow me to edit video, let alone like Peter Petrelli did in 2001. To top it off, I still wont be able to hangout outside with my laptop.
Phil: Did I mention they are beautiful?
Me: Yeah, but I can’t use your new laptop… at all. Apple has stopped making a laptop that I can even consider using… by a long shot.
Phil: Did I mention they have gorgeous glossy glass displays?
Me: Thanks Phil, take it easy and say hi to Steve for me.
I needed a new project. I needed a reason to learn WPF. I needed a Windows twitter client that didn’t take up a taskbar’s worth of room and looked better than a standard Windows App. Enter my friend Josh, Visual Studio, and lots of googling.
In 2002 I was the only one of everyone I knew that used a Mac regularly, most of my family and friends used PCs. Now as all my friends and family have moved to Macs I find myself migrating back to Windows and being interested in the Windows development community.
There are basically three reasons why… 1) Choice 2) Lack of good apps 3) Influence. The first one is pretty straight forward, if you want a Mac, you don’t have a lot of casing style options, it’s whatever Apple wants to make, and you hope that it’s something you like. The second reason is that the OS X community has created a plethora of great looking and functioning apps. On the windows side you can’t even find a decent GTD app to save your life… on the mac you have Things, OmniFocus, and iGTD to name a few. The last reason basically boils down to my friend Josh and his influence over my development career. It started out designing a little Windows Forms app to tie into our MRP database, then it was diving into styling and modifying a .NET web application, and finally this week I was permanently hooked when he sat me down and we built a Windows Twitter application together (he did most the heavy lifting). Between these three projects I’ve been hooked and I’m so excited to be learning WPF, XAML and all these other Windows technologies.
I’ve created a page for Twittle and made it available to download. It’s still very much a work in progress and it’s feature set is very much constrained to the knowledge I understand and can implement. So without further ado I give you Twittle, a Windows Twitter client written in WPF…
