David Correll Studio, Brooklyn, NY

Well, over the past 36 hours, I have read a lot of analysis on Apple’s newest announcement, Boot Camp. Not owning a McBook (hat tip to Clint for the term), I have yet to play around with it myself, but the reports I’ve read have so far consistantly been good. Considering my own need to test websites in IE, my first reaction was “sweet!,” though, with the recent hacked version, I wasn’t suprised at all.

However, no matter how much I love the idea, I hate the idea of having to re-boot every time I need it.¹ I’ve already thought through the idea buying a Mac just to run Windows, which seems kind of silly. Khoi Vinh also voiced these concerns in his excellent post on the topic.

There has been a lot of debate on the question of why, and what does this mean. Some of the common answers are:

• To eak out a few more points of market share by getting a few fence-sitters to switch
• A full frontal assault on MicroSoft (i.e., who would want a PC that can only boot one OS)
• To take over the world

With the exception of Khoi’s, all of the reviews and analysis I have read have missed a couple things on Apple’s Boot Camp page that particularly cought my attention:

Wow, you catch that attitude?? There’s something bigger going on here. There’s a mental game afoot.

Well, while staying up way too late tonight (again) catching up with my RSS, I ran into the best analysis I have seen yet on the always excellent Daring Fireball:

Apple is confident that most Windows users who give Mac OS X a shot are going to prefer it — again, much in the same way that most long-time Mac users preferred Mac OS X to the old Mac OS.

…everything about Boot Camp is calibrated to position Windows-on-Mac as the next Classic-style ghetto — a compatibility layer that you might need but that you wish you didn’t.

That pretty much sums it up. DF’s analysis covers everything from the wording on Apple’s page to their bastardization of the Windows logo.

I can’t really say anything better than he did, so go read it for yourself. And let me know what you think.

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1. This has of course already been addressed by Parallels

OK, seriously: I swear the next time I hear “Web 2.0” I’m gonna throw up. I’m so sick of hearing that. It’s not 2.0, people. Some people are making some incredible new web-based apps, no question about it. Unfortunately, they’re getting buried in their own hype. Enough with the “Web 2.0” already! It’s hype, it’s spin. It’s as bad a Fox “News.” (ok, ok, that was too probably far.)

I was relieved tonight to realize that I’m not the only person who feels this way. (And he puts it much more eloquently than I do, so go read it.)

Update: Wow, since posting this, I’ve discovered that I’m far from alone in feeling this way. Seems a whole lot of other people feel the same way. I’m a particular fan of Eightface’s commentary on the subject, (which, it was just pointed out to me, was posted back in August 2005) and his suggest alternate name: “Xtreme Web 2005 Mega Enterprise Edition!”
(hat tip to Clint for the link)

I’m writing this entry in the brand spankin’ new Firefox 1.5, released tonight, and so far, it is wonderful. Notable improvements include dragable tab reordering, automatic updating for Firefox as well as your extensions and themes (and of course, you can turn it off if you desire), re-organized preferences with some wonderful new options (I can finally have my download window automatically close when the download is complete), and "find" as soon as you start typing. They say there are some speed improvements and other goodies, so we’ll see if those are noticable as well. AdBlock and Chris Pedrick’s WebDev extensions are working file, thankfully.

So far, my only complaints are that it broke my Furl extension (hopefully that won’t take long to get fixed), and that clicking in the location field no longer automatically selects the entire url. That annoyed me to no end when I first switched from Safari, but now that I’ve gotten used to it, I love it. Guess it’s time to get un-used to it (unless I overlooked that in the preferences…) But that’s a pretty small complaint.

Toss in a brand new (to me, at least) Grapple theme, and I’m a happy man!

Spread the word!

Update 1: Furl has a bookmarklet which should keep me happy until the extension gets updated.

Update 2: I’ve had some weird behavior with pop-ups and contextual menus (right-clicks). Anyone else been having this?

Well, here I sit, on my couch, writing from my shiny new PowerBook G4. I’ve been working on an aging blue & white G3 since, well, I think since 1999. About a month after I bought it, the G4s were announced. While I was originally (and understandably) frustrated, I soon learned better.

That old G3 was a workhorse — I love it. The thing is rock-solid. Over the past couple years, I’ve had to give it some love to keep it going — an extra 640MB of RAM, a new internal CD/DVD drive, and two additional hard drives. It is currently choking under the weight of Adobe CS (’course, so is my dual processor G5 at work, but that’s for another post), but it’s still a great, solid computer.

It may not the most trendy way to work, but I strongly believe in buying late models (if not the very last, as my G3 was), rather than the newest thing. I’ve had enough experience through school, work and friends (and friends of friends) to see that the first few rounds of any new Apple model are lemons. I love Apple, but their early models crap. Ask anyone who owns a G5 iMac. Or an early G4 iBook.

The G3 will stay in use, probably as a file server of sorts, seeing as it has 240GB of hard drive space to my laptop’s 80, but this probably marks the end of it as my primary machine. So thank you, old G3. Thank you for a few years of rock-solid computing and companionship. And here’s to what will hopefully be an equally good computer.

Out with the old,

in with the new!