Apple just announced its new laptop lineup, including a newly styled 13″ Macbook, a couple new Macbook Pros and Macbook Airs. Since these things are so damn expensive, the only one I’ll ever have a hope in hell of affording is the Macbook. I would really love a light 13″ laptop, and this one’s just a beauty:

New 13

Apple just announced its new laptop lineup, including a newly styled 13″ Macbook, a couple new Macbook Pros and Macbook Airs. Since these things are so damn expensive, the only one I’ll ever have a hope in hell of affording is the Macbook. I would really love a light 13″ laptop, and this one’s just a beauty:

New 13" Macbook

MadTV making fun of Steve Jobs, Apple, and Bush’s war policy in one skit. Brilliant!

MadTV making fun of Steve Jobs, Apple, and Bush’s war policy in one skit. Brilliant!

Bet you do now…

Bet you do now…

I’ve always loved these commercials that Apple started but these parody ones are even better. Check out Paul Thurrott’s blog for more.

I’ve always loved these commercials that Apple started but these parody ones are even better. Check out Paul Thurrott’s blog for more.

Screw all the other ones (Fuck Steve Jobs too – hate that guy) but I do want this…

Capping literally years of speculation on perhaps the most intensely followed unconfirmed product in Apple’s history — and that’s saying a lot — the iPhone has been announced today. Yeah, we said it: “iPhone,” the name the entire free world had all but unanimously christened it from the time it’d been nothing more than a twinkle in Stevie J’s eye (comments, Cisco?). Sweet, glorious specs of the 11.6 millimeter device (that’s frickin’ thin, by the way) include a 3.5-inch wide touchscreen display with multi-touch support and a proximity sensor to turn off the sensor when it’s close to your face, 2 megapixel cam, 8 GB of storage, Bluetooth with EDR, WiFi that automatically engages when in range, and quadband GSM radio with EDGE. Perhaps most amazingly, though, it somehow runs OS X with support for Widgets, Google Maps, and Safari, and iTunes (of course) with CoverFlow out of the gate. A partnership with Yahoo will allow all iPhone customers to hook up with free push IMAP email.

More Images | Official Website

Screw all the other ones (Fuck Steve Jobs too – hate that guy) but I do want this…

Capping literally years of speculation on perhaps the most intensely followed unconfirmed product in Apple’s history — and that’s saying a lot — the iPhone has been announced today. Yeah, we said it: “iPhone,” the name the entire free world had all but unanimously christened it from the time it’d been nothing more than a twinkle in Stevie J’s eye (comments, Cisco?). Sweet, glorious specs of the 11.6 millimeter device (that’s frickin’ thin, by the way) include a 3.5-inch wide touchscreen display with multi-touch support and a proximity sensor to turn off the sensor when it’s close to your face, 2 megapixel cam, 8 GB of storage, Bluetooth with EDR, WiFi that automatically engages when in range, and quadband GSM radio with EDGE. Perhaps most amazingly, though, it somehow runs OS X with support for Widgets, Google Maps, and Safari, and iTunes (of course) with CoverFlow out of the gate. A partnership with Yahoo will allow all iPhone customers to hook up with free push IMAP email.

More Images | Official Website

The Ultra Mobile PC, Microsoft’s new ultra-ultra-portable personal computer, apparently has a few new tricks up its sleeve that Microsoft neglected to tell anyone. In their testing of a prototype UMPC, UMPCOrigami found that Samsung’s engineers, awaiting the “official†operating system from Microsoft, had taken matters into their own hands and installed Linux in Windows’ place. Refusing to name the distribution used in the test, the team managed to proudly display Tux at 800 x 400 and loaded up the GNOME Desktop Environment with no trouble. These new UMPCs will contain a 1 GHz Celeron M, Pentium M, or VIA C7-M x86 processor with 256MB RAM and a 30 or 60 GB hard drive.

read more | digg story

The Ultra Mobile PC, Microsoft’s new ultra-ultra-portable personal computer, apparently has a few new tricks up its sleeve that Microsoft neglected to tell anyone. In their testing of a prototype UMPC, UMPCOrigami found that Samsung’s engineers, awaiting the “official” operating system from Microsoft, had taken matters into their own hands and installed Linux in Windows’ place. Refusing to name the distribution used in the test, the team managed to proudly display Tux at 800 x 400 and loaded up the GNOME Desktop Environment with no trouble. These new UMPCs will contain a 1 GHz Celeron M, Pentium M, or VIA C7-M x86 processor with 256MB RAM and a 30 or 60 GB hard drive.

read more | digg story

FireAnt is my new application for synchronizing podcasts and video casts. The nicest thing about it is its channel directory and its built-in media player.

FireAnt delivers a rich media experience through a simple to use, unified viewer that lets you watch all types of content without having to worry about which format it is (Quicktime, Windows Media, Real, Flash, MP3, and more).

FireAnt connects your favorite media to a wide variety of portable video players (Sony PSP, Apple iPod, Creative Zen Vision and more!) which gives you the power and flexibility to get media content right onto your portable devices! FireAnt also supports HTTP, Streaming, and BitTorrent downloads, bringing you an easy and efficient way of getting what you want when you want it.

FireAnt is my new application for synchronizing podcasts and video casts. The nicest thing about it is its channel directory and its built-in media player.

FireAnt delivers a rich media experience through a simple to use, unified viewer that lets you watch all types of content without having to worry about which format it is (Quicktime, Windows Media, Real, Flash, MP3, and more).

FireAnt connects your favorite media to a wide variety of portable video players (Sony PSP, Apple iPod, Creative Zen Vision and more!) which gives you the power and flexibility to get media content right onto your portable devices! FireAnt also supports HTTP, Streaming, and BitTorrent downloads, bringing you an easy and efficient way of getting what you want when you want it.

Column from PC Magazine: Will Apple Adopt Windows?

This story sounds pretty incredible but John makes some decent arguments. It’d be pretty tempting to buy one of those cool looking Macs and be able to play all the latest games on it. I’m not a huge fan of the Windows OS, nor have I ever used Mac OSX, but I do prefer the style of Apple’s hardware over the usual Windows boxes.

Apple has always said it was a hardware company, not a software company. Now with the cash cow iPod line, it can afford to drop expensive OS development and just make jazzy, high-margin Windows computers to finally get beyond that five-percent market share and compete directly with Dell, HP, and the stodgy Chinese makers.

Column from PC Magazine: Will Apple Adopt Windows?

This story sounds pretty incredible but John makes some decent arguments. It’d be pretty tempting to buy one of those cool looking Macs and be able to play all the latest games on it. I’m not a huge fan of the Windows OS, nor have I ever used Mac OSX, but I do prefer the style of Apple‘s hardware over the usual Windows boxes.

Apple has always said it was a hardware company, not a software company. Now with the cash cow iPod line, it can afford to drop expensive OS development and just make jazzy, high-margin Windows computers to finally get beyond that five-percent market share and compete directly with Dell, HP, and the stodgy Chinese makers.

It was twenty years ago this month that George Lucas sold Pixar to Steve Jobs. This short story explains why.

Mr. Lucas, of Star Wars fame, needed to raise cash to settle the divorce and decided to sell a smallish piece of his Lucas Film empire. Steve Jobs was interested but deemed Lucas’ original asking price 30 million dollars, too high. Faced with the aforementioned need for liquidity, Lucas decided to let the company go at fire sale prices. Fire sale prices were exactly what Steve Jobs was looking for, so he traded ten million greenbacks for the company that would later be named Pixar.

read more | digg story

It was twenty years ago this month that George Lucas sold Pixar to Steve Jobs. This short story explains why.

Mr. Lucas, of Star Wars fame, needed to raise cash to settle the divorce and decided to sell a smallish piece of his Lucas Film empire. Steve Jobs was interested but deemed Lucas’ original asking price 30 million dollars, too high. Faced with the aforementioned need for liquidity, Lucas decided to let the company go at fire sale prices. Fire sale prices were exactly what Steve Jobs was looking for, so he traded ten million greenbacks for the company that would later be named Pixar.

read more | digg story

Juice, the cross-platform podcast receiver.

After using iTunes for a while and getting annoyed by its resource usage, I came across Juice. Previously known as iPodderX this app is much smaller, more light-weight, and cross-platform. Not to mention open source software. It’s much more responsive and quite frankly better at synchronizing Podcasts. I’m very pleased with it and promise you will be, too. If you listen to Podcasts, give this a squeeze.

Juice, the cross-platform podcast receiver.

After using iTunes for a while and getting annoyed by its resource usage, I came across Juice. Previously known as iPodderX this app is much smaller, more light-weight, and cross-platform. Not to mention open source software. It’s much more responsive and quite frankly better at synchronizing Podcasts. I’m very pleased with it and promise you will be, too. If you listen to Podcasts, give this a squeeze.

This is seriously ridiculous:

A German tech company has found itself on the receiving end of legal action by Apple over the word ‘spod’.

The company behind iTunes has filed a preliminary action in a Hamburg court against Liquid Air Tab, the company behind Spodradio, a service which allows users to download podcasts to their Nokia mobiles.

Apple’s suit concerns the rights to both ‘Spodradio’ and ‘spod’, which are used as dot-com URLs by Liquid Air Tab.

The injunction states that the company must stop marketing its services under the brand Spodradio, alleging the inclusion of the word ‘pod’ infringes Apple’s trademark.

I vote that the apple orchards of the world rise up and sue the hell out of Apple for infringing on their fruit’s name…

This is seriously ridiculous:

A German tech company has found itself on the receiving end of legal action by Apple over the word ‘spod’.

The company behind iTunes has filed a preliminary action in a Hamburg court against Liquid Air Tab, the company behind Spodradio, a service which allows users to download podcasts to their Nokia mobiles.

Apple’s suit concerns the rights to both ‘Spodradio’ and ‘spod’, which are used as dot-com URLs by Liquid Air Tab.

The injunction states that the company must stop marketing its services under the brand Spodradio, alleging the inclusion of the word ‘pod’ infringes Apple’s trademark.

I vote that the apple orchards of the world rise up and sue the hell out of Apple for infringing on their fruit’s name…