Apple is the new Nintendo (which is the new Apple!)
Somedays it is easy to believe that I have waken up in Bizarro-world. Apple recently decided that the iPod Touch was going to be a game machine. Nintendo turned the DS into a music player with the DSi, (using Apple’s codec, of all things!) In addition, Nintendo announced the DS XL not even a year after the DSi’s release.
What’s next, a new version of Windows that actually works?
Oh…
I have thought of Nintendo as being the “Apple” of the video game industry for some time. Much like Apple, they march to their own beat and don’t worry about what “the other guys” are doing. Sometimes it works out great, sometimes they trip over their own innovations, and sometimes they are just too far ahead of the curve for their own good. At the end of the day, they make lots of money and have lots of die-hard fans.
Apple, of course, has long been known for “thinking different,” as well as for Steve Jobs, overpriced hardware, constantly re-releasing new iterations of said hardware with minor updates, and not being very interested in gaming. At the end of the day, they also make lots of money and have lots of die-hard fans.
Thus, it came as a surprise to see Apple take a page out of Nintendo’s book, as they touted the iPod Touch as their new portable “game machine.” Apple was also pretty blatant in promoting their device as being superior to Nintendo and Sony’s portable offerings. The beauty of Apple’s approach is that Apple itself does not have to make any of the games themselves.
Nintendo, for its part, recently announced the DS XL, a curious move which defies traditional gadget logic. After all, things are supposed to get smaller over time, not bigger! In fact, the 4-inch screen of the XL nearly brings it to par with Sony’s PSP.
Speaking of Sony, Lord only knows what they’re thinking…I mean, seriously, $250 for the PSPgo?
For all of the hype, I don’t see games being a big part of Apple’s overall strategy; instead they will be another revenue stream just like apps and music. The games themselves have been mostly casual affairs, the ‘big budget’ titles have come from EA and their ilk…as if they needed another platform to release Madden onto.
It remains to be seen whether Nintendo will be adding other multimedia functions to take advantage of the DS XL’s bigger screen. While a video player would be much appreciated by DS users, it won’t contribute to Nintendo’s bottom line, so I doubt we will see that happening anytime soon.
While Nintendo and Apple have taken pages out of each other’s business plans, the fundamental core of what both companies will remain the same, so long as the DS and iPod continue to be money-makers.
I suppose Bizarro-world isn’t such a bad place to be after all.
RANDOM REVIEW – HP Mini 1000
WHO NEEDS A LAPTOP?
For all the yakking I have been doing about my iMac, it has been easy to forget that I also recently acquired an HP Mini 1000 (just prior to the Great Gateway Crash of 2009). It is also the second portable computer I have ever owned. The first was a “luggable” 386 that I had back in college that also happened to be my first PC (my first-ever computer was a Commodore 64). Eventually, it went to binary heaven and all of my PCs before purchasing the Mini since have been desktops.
I never gave any thought to owning another portable computer, having rarely lugged my luggable anywhere. It was nice to be able to take it home during long holidays, but it was bulky enough to where I really didn’t want to take it anywhere else. My advice to friends regarding laptops was always the same: “Be 200% certain you need one before you buy one.”
I held to that philosophy for quite a few years. At the time, laptops were expensive and easily broken. To me, they only made sense for students and businesspeople, but not really for anyone else. Prices eventually went down, but even then, I was uncertain of the quality of the less-expensive models. I was also unwilling to spend enough to purchase one of decent quality; I figured that even the best laptop wouldn’t last very long. That mindset kept me from even considering a laptop. I would occasionally flirt with the idea, but would never follow through on it.
ENTER THE NETBOOK
I was intrigued by Netbooks when they first came onto the scene, but I initially turned my nose up at them. They had limited storage space, cramped keyboards, underpowered processors, small screens, no CD/DVD drives (admittedly, not as big a deal as it used to be) and just plain could not do all of the things that a full-powered notebook could. Also, my T-Mobile Dash was good enough to get by when I was “off the grid.” I could check my email and do some light web browsing with my Dash, and that was all I needed.
It soon occurred to me that if the only things that I were doing on the road were email and web browsing, why not do them on a bigger screen using an actual computer that could also do a few other things? After all, whenever I was on the road, I was doing little things like email and web. The desktop was for all the big nasty stuff. I figured that spending $300 on a quality Netbook was a better idea than spending $400-600 on a cheap notebook, so I picked up a HP Mini 1116NR at Ye Olde Best Buy.
INITIAL IMPRESSIONS
The first thing that impressed me about the Mini was its size. The length and width are about equal to a comic book and it is only one inch tall. The 8.9-inch screen is nice, but I should have spent the extra fifty bucks for the 10. The keyboard is easily one of the best things about the Mini. According to HP, the keyboard is about 92% the size of a laptop keyboard, and quickly took to it. Incidentally, the iMac’s keyboard is just a bit larger, the difference being a little additional space in between the keys. Unlike the iMac’s keyboard, though, the Mini’s keyboard also has all the keys I need to get around Windows. The touch pad took a little getting used to, and I eventualy started carrying my iMac’s Mighty Mouse around for extended computing.
I was a little disappointed with the Mini’s performance at first; there were noticeable lags when running Firefox, and occasionally the system would stutter as if waiting for something. It also seemed to take awhile to get going after I turned it on.
After doing some research I found that the main bottleneck is the hard drive. The Mini has a new-fangled Solid State Drive which is basically some flash memory chips with a hard drive controller attached. The benefits are durability and reduced power usage, but they come at the cost of speed and performance. After doing some searching online, I found some Windows tweaks that improved performance somewhat, and tossed in an extra gigabyte of memory for good measure. The Mini takes a little while to get up to speed, but once it gets going, the performance is acceptable for web browsing and running Microsoft Word. I have also been able to do some light audio editing using Audacity. Frankly, I think this could be a pretty capable PC if it had a regular hard drive.
Speaking of the hard drive, the 1116NR has a 16GB hard drive, about half of which is taken up by Windows and the (thankfully small) amount of crapware installed on the machine. Expansion options are available (see below) and an SD card slot provides an easyway to transfer files.
ON THE ROAD
The first “road trip” I took with the Mini was to my parents’ house for Easter. Everyone oohed and aaahed at the Mini’s size and I was pleased to find that I could tether it to my cell phone and surf the Net at a whopping 10 mb/sec on T-Mobile’s crappy 2G cell phone network. The connection would get flaky at times, and T-Mobile’s 3G coverage is way behind their competitors. I think I’ll be looking for a new cell phone provider when my contract ends in December.
I soon bought a small case for the Mini, and while I’m pretty sure carrying it around costs me a few Man Points, the utility of having everything I need (and a few things I don’t) is worth it.
DICK MOVES
Ironically, the HP Mini’s biggest problem is HP. I know that they have mouths to feed at home, and stockholders that need to be kept happy, but there are some pretty blatant design decisions that appear to have been made for the sake of squeezing more money out of customers. It might be good business, but certain things come off as outright “dick moves” when compared to other Netbooks.
Many Netbooks have standard VGA connectors, which are identical to those found on full-sized notebooks. These are used to connect the Netbook to a monitor, which can be used as a secondary display. You simply plug the monitor’s cable into the connector and press the appropriate button. Instead of a standard VGA connector, though, the HP Mini uses a custom connector, which, of course, requires a custom cable, which, of course, can be bought from HP. Shortly after I purchased the Mini, I went to HP’s website to see how much the cable was going to cost. Initially, the cable was priced at $20…and was out of stock. A few weeks later, the cable was available, but priced at $35. While I certainly now have no intention of using the Mini’s VGA-out functionality, I would be pretty upset if I needed to.
The HP Mini also “features” a recessed USB port on the right side to the back. This connector is for HP’s “Mini Mobile” expansion drive, which can be had for $25 and bumps up the Mini’s internal storage capacity by an additional 4GB. Some smart guy figured out that the “Mini Mobile” drive was actually a thin Transcend USB drive attached to a cover…the same cover that is included with the HP Mini. I picked up a 8GB drive for $30 from Amazon, attached the cover, snapped it into place, and got twice the storage capacity for only a few dollars more.
The Mini’s 3-cell battery life clocks in at about two and a half to three hours. I have read that is good for a Netbook, but I find myself looking for an outlet quicker than I would like to at the coffee shop. HP is more than happy to sell an extended life battery for over a hundred dollars which makes zero sense to me considering that it raises the Mini’s cost of ownership into cheap-laptop territory, which, in my opinion, defeats the purpose of a Netbook!
CONCLUSION
Overall, the Mini does its job well, has a great keyboard and screen, and is highly portable.
If I could go back and do it again, though, I would have gone with the 10-inch screen, as well as purchasing a Mini with a standard hard drive instead of the SSD. In my opinion, the performance hit that comes from using a SSD is too high, and mars what is an otherwise nice portable computer. Also, while I can easily live with 16GB of storage, I know I am in the minority.
Despite the performance issues and HP’s over-reliance on add-ons, I have enjoyed my Mini so far, and hope to continue to do so for some time. I may try to install Windows 7 out of morbid curiosity, XP is growing a little long in the tooth, and I hear 7 has some SSD optimizations that just might give the Mini a performance boost.
The decision to get a Netbook rests on whether you can live with the compromises that come with owning one. The HP Mini is not meant for power users or gamers, but for those who would like an inexpensive computer to handle light duties while on the road, it hits the spot.
Mac and Me – Not Quite A Mighty Mouse
I like buttons. They’re fun to push, and they usually make something that I want to happen, happen! Heck, a standard keyboard (a standard PC keyboard anyway) has over 100 of them, whee! Apple, on the other hand, does not like buttons.
Seriously; the one button on the iMac is hidden in the back, the mouse that came with it does not appear to have any at all, and I’m sure that somewhere within the bowels of Apple, some engineer is scratching their head trying to figure out a way to get rid of the single button on the iPhone’s face.
As I mentioned last week, the Mac’s Mighty Mouse (seriously, that’s what Apple calls it) is the one part of the Mac experience that irritates me the most. It lacks a distinct right click button and refuses to acknowledge my futile attempts at right-clicking. After another week of missed right-clicks and re-right-clicks I finally replaced it with a $20 Logitech wireless mouse. Its colored black, so it ruins the aesthetic of my workspace somewhat, but I’ll gladly take functionality over fashion. Actually, I’ll take anything over fashion, but that’s a discussion for another day.
I tossed the Mighty Mouse into my netbook bag where it will ruin the aesthetic of my HP Mini 1000, and thus, the balance of the universe is maintained!
Once I adjusted to the Logitech’s heft, all was well. Now if I could just figure out a way to get my keyboard shortcuts back, everything would be PERFECT. I may also give Safari another shot, I’m hearing good things about the beta.
It has been two weeks since I took the plunge and my Mac has been treating me pretty good so far. I’ll boot into Vista occasionally to play a game or work with Microsoft Money, but otherwise all is well with Mac and Me!
Mac and Me – One Week Later
It has been a week since I took the Apple plunge, and I my iMac/OS X experience has been pretty good so far (the one big fark-up was my fault). I moved the files from my PC’s old hard drive last night, so its time to “move in” to the Mac for good. My thoughts so far:
SCREEN
I have to start by talking about the iMac’s screen, it is gorgeous. I’m not sure what is different about it, but everything just looks better; more sharper, more vibrant. The 24″ of real estate is a dream to work on. Why have multiple monitors cluttering the desk when one honkin’ HUGE one will do? I have yet to use the camera and mic as of yet, but I’m looking forward to trying them out.
The DVD drive is a located a little farther back than I would like, I’ve already dropped a disc trying to find the slot, and the occasional not-quite-perfectly-flat disc can get a little noisy, but that’s true for all DVD drives, so I can’t knock it too much for that.
The built-in speakers are the worst part of the screen/CPU/whatever Apple calls it. I’m no audiophile, but they sound pretty bad to me, I quickly plugged in my basic 3-piece Altec Lansing set and Huey Lewis sounds just as good as he did on my PC.
KEYBOARD
The small keyboard freaked me out at first, especially since I like using the numeric keypad. It is just bigger than the keyboard on my HP Mini 1000 netbook, with more space inbetween the keys. The action on the keyboard is nice and typing is pretty quiet. I’ve had to re-learn typing shortcuts, due to the lack of HOME/END and PGUP/PGDN keys, but it hasn’t been too painful. That cord is just too damned short, though. I was taught that it was a bad idea to be sitting so close to a computer screen. A USB extension cord fixed that problem easily enough, and I placed a USB hub on the end of it, because you can never have too many ports.
MIGHTY MOUSE
The mouse took some getting used to, particularly due to the lack of distinct buttons. The Mighty Mouse is not Apple’s worst mouse ever (that distinction goes to the “hockey puck”) but the right-click is pretty finicky, and the “4th button” (pressed by squeezing the indentations you see on the sides) all but drove me bonkers. I don’t exactly have basketball-player sized hands, but I am accustomed to having my hand covering up the entire mouse. At random intervals this would activate the 4th button and I would be yanked out of whatever I was doing and taken into Expose, which shows you all open windows at once. Very distracting, especially when I’m trying to beat my Bejeweled Blitz high score. Disabling Expose fixed that problem, and I’m not sure how useful I’m really going to find the 4th button. Much to my surprise, I have had no problems with the teeny scroll ball. If worse comes to worse, I’ll drop $20 on a new Logitech mouse.
PERFORMANCE
I haven’t really put the iMac through its paces yet (i.e. video editing) but so far it seems to handle multitasking quite well. As I type this into Firefox, CDs are being ripped into iTunes and I am also IMing a friend. Everything runs without any hesitations or hiccups so I guess that’s pretty good.
OVERALL EXPERIENCE
I have to say, the Mac life is pretty good. I have yet to experience any of the frustrations that I have long considered to be the “facts of life” of using computers:
No more defragging, no more anti-virus, no more anti-spyware, no more hunting for old driver CDs, no more wondering why the CPU fan is still spinning even though the computer is in sleep mode, no more long boot times, no more waiting for that last program to close when I’m shutting down, no more wondering why flash drives and memory cards won’t unmount even though they aren’t being used, no more wondering if removing that startup program or changing that Registry entry is going to blow the whole thing up, and no more farking annual re-installations of Windows!
I plug in my camera, and up comes iPhoto. I plug in my printer, and a minute later, I can print. I drag an external drive to the Trash to eject it, and it unmounts. Stuff just works! Heck, even Windows Vista works well now that I have enough horsepower to make it happy.
While I’m not sure I will do everything “The Mac Way” I’m looking forward to spending less time maintaining my computer, and more time actually DOING stuff.
After all, isn’t that the whole point of having a computer?
Mac and Me – VistaMac!
As it turned out, I had screwed up my Mac by trying to install a version of Windows that could not “see” the newly created Boot Camp partition. Thus, my retail boxed copy of XP was pretty much useless; I would need an XP Service Pack 2 disc.
Fortunately, I had one handy that I “borrowed” from one of my previous employers *evil grin* Sadly, it would not accept the retail license key I had, so I had to punt and install Vista instead.
My previous experiences with Vista were less than pleasant, but then again I was installing it on a two-year old machine. Vista just was not happy running on my Gateway’s single-core CPU and 1GB of RAM. Even after I bumped up the machine’s RAM to 2GB it plodded along, and I could hear the hard drive constantly crunching away while I computed.
I hoped that running it on more capable hardware would provide a better experience. I figured it should be happy running on a 2.66Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM. Sure enough, everything went well except for having to sit for about two hours downloading and installing various updates.
I wonder if at some point does it just become cheaper to mail everyone update CDs? Bandwidth ain’t cheap!
Anyways, once the updates were done and the Mac drivers (and the anti-virus…sigh) were installed, Vista ran like a dream. After I got Vista up and running, it was really late, so I couldn’t do much else. Next, I will transfer my PC files over from the Gateway’s old hard drive onto the Mac.
That’s when things should get really interesting!