“When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and you’re life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life.
Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”
- Steve Jobs
Clamcase: a bluetooth iPad Keyboard Case.
Very interesting. Over $100 for a case seems a bit crazy, but given most good cases for the iPad are half that and don’t offer nearly the same utility…it’s interesting. I think I’d want to see some reviews of it before ever having on, but I like the concept in theory.
edit: I realize it’s a tablet and not a laptop. But I’m not an Apple fanboy. It’s the first and only Apple product I’ve ever owned, so I don’t believe it’s the most amazing device in the world.
I like it, but I’m not really a touch partisan and there are still limits. For me, the iPad is easier than carrying around my laptop but that gap for me is borne out of the fact that I can’t really type on a touch screen as well as I type on a tactical keyboard and so, it renders doing “real things” on my iPad still a bit useless at least how I’d like. This would close that gap a bit for me, because while it would “turn my iPad into a psuedo laptop” I don’t really see it like that. I’d see it as a “super useful case that gets more utility than just protecting it.”
So it’s really about how I use it. Still, I’d be curious to see this thing in the wild before dropping that much on one. I’m just glad to know things like it are starting to exist. Hooray options.
Apple Logo Is an Agnostic's Crucifix, Star of David: Study
As it’s stated in the book of Jobs: Thou shalt not worship false iPhones.
Or so goes the thinking in a new study from Duke University, which concludes: “The brand name logo on a laptop or a shirt pocket may do the same thing for some people that a pendant of a crucifix or Star of David does for others.” In fact, the more religious a person is, the less brand expression appears to matter.
Researchers at Duke ran several experiments to determine this disconnection between brand importance and religiosity. In one, the team analyzed geographic areas for the number of Apple, Macy’s, and Gap stores per million people. These statistics were compared with brand-discount stores. “Then they compared these rough measures of brand reliance against the number of congregations per thousand and self-reported attendance in church or synagogue, controlling for income, education and urbanization differences,” the report says. “In every analysis, they found a negative relationship between brand reliance and religiosity.”
An Apple skeptic’s review of the iPad
You have to understand that I’m on my 3rd Zune rather than ever own an iPod. There are all sorts of philosophical reasons for not owning Apple products, but mine were more simple. They just don’t really serve my purpose. I like subscription services and iTunes doesn’t offer one for music.
Then the iPad gets released. I’ve wanted a tablet computer for a long time, but could never justify the purchase even when I could actually afford one. But I felt that my laptop was often too bulky for meetings, but my Blackberry was limited at best in it’s usefulness for tasks beyond the odd thing. So when my laptop was on the fritz, I thought rather than replace it that I ought to check out an iPad to see if it’d be able to serve as the wedge tool that I’d need to fill the space when I needed a computer-like tool. I also ditched the Blackberry to save money and rationalized the iPad purchase in the summer.
I hate paper and don’t really care notebooks anywhere because I’d have a hard time translating my own handwriting and I type faster than I write. So it’s just easier for me to have something I can email my notes to. The iPad serves this purpose and then some. Does it replace my laptop? No. I still have too hard a time typing on a touch screen (yes, I know there’s a keyboard) for it to really do that. Also, I have some apps that I can only run on my PC laptop because they’re made by small indie developers and are pretty central to my random habits and hobbies that I’d be loathe to give them up.
The one thing I didn’t expect is how much it’s made me more apt to read. It doesn’t replace hardcover books or the usefulness of the public library for me, but it does increase the likelihood that I’ll plop down money to buy a book that I might have been on the fence about. Too many of the books I want still aren’t available in iBooks/Kindle/Nook app format, but I suppose that’ll improve over time. It’s mostly about convenience, especially for someone who has been carrying his music collection digitally for nearly a decade.
Battery life is good, finding apps that keep me productive on the go has been easy and I find myself apt to leave the laptop home in a way that I wouldn’t have in the past. That alone says a lot about what it’s managed to do for me. I didn’t opt for 3G, because I trying to justify the expense, but I can see where it’d be handy as I’ve discovered it’s a lot easier than you’d think to end up in places without free wifi when you need it. But I can count those situations on one hand over the past few months.
The point though? The gap is narrowing. I’m quite happy with my iPad and believe it’ll increase it’s usefulness over time as the professional need for it increases, not to mention all of the non-professional ones.
I never thought I’d say that.
Clearly, the once bright dead star that is the Murdoch-owned MySpace may seem the most obvious parallel for a music-centred community but a lot of the functionality, of presenting personal charts and sharing your loves, has been done incredibly well by Last.fm. A lot of the feed functionality also looks a lot like the somewhat clunky, flog-it-to-your-friends pyramid scheme-ish mFlow and quite blatantly like Facebook, which doesn’t limit your sharing and loves to “just” music. These “social” bells and whistles, feels a bit like Apple awkwardly following the class of ‘06, rather than boldly leading the way.
I guess the main problem (for people like me, which I accept isn’t their core target market) is that this wasn’t iTunes launching a Netflix for music. This wasn’t “buy an iPod, pay a tenner a month and fill yer boots!”
Pretty much what I was thinking about it. Except, the only downside to subscription music is when the subscription runs out and for some folks, that can be difficult to go from having music in your possession to renting it. One of the things I will say has eroded my music allegiances is the fact that I have so much access to a bevy of bands. But the flip side is, I’ve been introduce to a ton of bands I’d never have loved as much as I do, if it weren’t for the ability to pick ‘n mix whatever I want to hear whenever rather than being constrained by buying only whatever I could afford.
I don’t have the budget for say, 10 albums a month. But an album a month for access to everything? That’s a deal that usually works and indeed the wave of some kind of future. I’ve seen more concerts in the past five years as a result of this than I had prior to that, when I was mostly a consumer of physical music products.
I haven’t opted into Ping yet and while I’m curious to see how it works, I don’t really want another service that takes information that’s already somewhere else and shares it with g-d knows who, in the interest of “sharing.”
