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I’m writing down some of my initial reaction to the new Apple iPad for posterity.

- I liken the iPad to the 1st Gen iPhone.  If you think back to how the 1st Gen iPhone was and what the 3GS is now, there was a ton of growth both from Apple and from 3rd party developers.  I think the iPad has a ton of room to grow as far as productivity and usability.

- They hit it right on with the price.  $499 entry for this device silenced a lot of the haters.  Usually it’s the innovation and design that drives Apple to sell units but this time it’s going to be the price.

- The iPad won’t replace your computer.  Hell it won’t even replace a laptop.  Unless you own a desktop and have no laptop, I can’t see the iPad replacing my Macbook Pro.  You still have to sync this to a computer to get the full functionality of it.

- The iPad would be amazing for photographers and videographers to bring around to client meetings.  Being able to show your portfolio on this beautiful device would add to the selling of your services.

- I think the hackintosh community will end up making the OS even better for techies to use.  Let the competition begin for who can make the best 3rd party iPad OS.

- The iPad would make a great travel companion.  If you’re going on a trip you can just activate the $30/month 3G plan just for that month then deactivate it when you’re done traveling.  They even offer a SD card reader to dock connector adapter so you can upload your camera’s photos onto your iPad and then onto Flickr.  Probably won’t be able to read RAW files just yet though.

- The Amazon Kindle is in a world of hurt right now.  $260 for a monocrome E-book reader?  Or $499 for something that can do infinitely more.

In addition to announcing the new 3G iPhone, Apple announce an upgrade to .Mac which they’re now calling “Mobile Me.” I’m actually seriously considering purchasing the service and forwarding all my email addresses to it. Right now I have 5 different email address that I check. I could consolidate it down to 2 with Mobile Me with just a work exchange account and then have all my other personal addresses forward to enoch@me.com. The only downside would be having to pay another annual fee, but I feel the service just might be worth it.

Someone tried to insert a mini DVD into the slot loading tray of an iMac. I had to take it apart to get it out.

Setting up a Mac Mini Test Server environment to test out Leopard Server.

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Originally uploaded by speedye.

A new 8 core Mac Pro came out this morning. Since a lot of people ask me for advice about when to buy a Mac, I found this site to be very useful. It has the previous release dates of all the Apple hardware products and whether or not it is a favorable time to buy that product. It also has data on average days between new product releases. I’m looking to upgrade my Macbook Pro and according to the site, it’s been 162 days since the last Macbook Pro update and 182 day average between updates. Hopefully they’ll release one 20 days from now .

iPhone

Originally uploaded by marinaro500.

June can’t come fast enough. I’ve been waiting for this to come out for a while now. Hopefully the camera phone has good optics. Thanks Apple.

People have been asking me what I think of the new Intel Macs so I thought I would throw up a rant about some random things I’ve been thinking of.

Personally I’m not going to switch to an Intel Mac til they get the Pro Applications (Final Cut Pro, Motion, Aperture) all ready to run natively on Intel. Supposedly that will not come til March which is fine by me. My prediction about the performance of these programs is that they will run beautifully on the new Intel Core Duos. With an upgraded video card and dual core processors, Motion will run very well and Final Cut Pro render times will shrink.

From a work standpoint, this switch to Intel is a nightmare waiting to happen. I can just see a proud professor holding his shiny new MacBook Pro and asking me to set up everything just like he had it on his Powerbook, only to find that his File Maker Pro and his specialized statistics software won’t run well in Rosetta. He’ll curse at me and rant and rave about how much he paid for this thing and why won’t it run the programs he needs. Blah blah blah….sigh. I really hope all the companies release their universal binaries soon. For the sake of my job.

All in all, I think the switch to Intel was needed and will be vital in growing Apple’s market share. I just feel this transition year will not be as fun for me as it should be.

[/rant]

I’m gonna have to go into the Apple Store to see what the hell this is about. Apple’s new Mighty Mouse, a multi-button mouse.