Free iPod Touch For College Students

Buy a Mac for college and get a free iPod. That’s the deal that Apple is offering students, faculty, and staff at American universities this summer. VentureBeat thinks this is a huge deal and marks the beginning of the end of desktop computing.

Apple can get students started using their free iPod Touches. Then perhaps they opt to upgrade to an iPhone. Then maybe they’ll buy a new Mac Tablet or Newton-type device if and when it comes out. You can kiss the desktop computer goodbye. It’s time to start training the young minds of today about the future of computing: mobile.

I think VentureBeat is getting a little overexcited here. The deal is a great one, and the college campus, with its potentially ubiquitous Wi-Fi, is one of the only places where having an iPod Touch makes sense to me (otherwise, why not just get an iPhone?), but you have to take into account that, on certain university campuses, like the one I work on, the iPod Touch doesn’t work, thanks to VPN or other security software that’s in place.

A device that relies on Wi-Fi alone is never going to make a big splash, in my opinion, because free Wi-Fi isn’t as easy to find as Apple’s PR department would have us believe. And mobile computing on handhelds (in concert with affordable laptops) might kill the desktop, but it’s never going to kill the laptop. People still need keyboards, and most of us still want screens bigger than 3.5 inches to do any seriously involved work on.

Comment on this article here.

Obama and Firefox vs. Clinton and Safari

I’ve been using Safari as my primary Web browser for quite a while now, on both my iMac at home and on my Dell laptop on the road and at my office. Aside from some rendering issues that I’ve experienced while browsing Google Analytics, I’ve been entirely pleased with my experience. Safari is a great browser. It’s elegant, it’s simple, and it’s pretty darned fast. And, most importantly for me, I have enjoyed having the same program available to me on both of my computers. It has definitely lessened the mental workload involved in switching between platforms every day.

However, with the recent news of a Safari bug that, in combination with an Internet Explorer bug, could do significant damage to a Windows computer, I’ve had to reconsider my options. I’m not going to use IE on a daily basis, because its ugly and it renders Webpages like crap. So, I’ve decided to go back to Firefox (release candidate 1 of FF3, to be exact).

I’m about as thrilled to be going back to Firefox as I am about Barack Obama becoming the Democratic nominee for president, which is to say I’m not very thrilled about it at all. I’ll go along with Obama, and with Firefox, because the cool kids think that each is what’s good for me, but I’m not going to like it.

I guess, when I get right down to it, it’s not so much about disliking Firefox or about disliking Obama (though I still don’t see what everyone else finds so compelling about him). Instead, it’s about me wishing that the candidate (Clinton) and the browser (Safari) that I’ve been supporting were the ones that were coming out on top.

Call me a sore loser, if you wish, or a contrarian, if you must. I just think that there are better options out there than what we’re going to end up with. It’s just that the people behind those options can’t get there heads out of their asses long enough to come up with a winning strategy. Apple refuses to take the Safari bug seriously enough. Clinton’s strategists ran an old-school attack-centric campaign in a year when people were already bummed out enough as it was, in a year when all people really wanted was a little hope and a little bit of positive energy, instead of all the old bullshit.

It bums me out that the people and the companies I support are stupid sometimes, but them’s the breaks, as the saying goes. Dem’s da breaks.

Comment on this article here.

iPhone 3G Pricing Information

Rumors are flying over at Mac Rumors about pricing information for the new iPhone, which is due to be announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference next week. Citing “unconfirmed whispers,” Mac Rumors is saying that the new iPhone will be priced at $499 or $699, depending on the size of the hard drive inside. That $499 price-point for the low-end model is $100 higher than the price-point of the current iPhone, and it will officially put the device out of my price range (if the rumors are true).

I can only hope that the rumor Kevin Rose is hearing, the one about a $200 low-end model, is closer to the truth than what Mac Rumors is reporting.

Comment on this article here.

Beautiful iTunes Ad Featuring Coldplay

I happen to be of the opinion that the advertising campaigns Apple has used to promote iPod and iTunes are genius. And lately they’ve been taking the classic silhouette concept and evolving it by leaps and bounds. The latest ad, which features the band Coldplay, also happens to thematically resemble the packaging and advertising campaign used to promote the release of Leopard, the latest version of Mac OS X. The Unofficial Apple Weblog calls this theme space-esqe, and I suppose that’s a pretty accurate description, but I’ll just stick to calling it beautiful.

And kudos to Apple and their advertising agency for subtly trying to influence potential switchers even in ads for their platform-agnostic products.

Comment on this article here.

3G iPhone Arrives June 9?!?

Maybe it’s a good thing that I haven’t yet found the money for an iPhone. Mac Rumors, Electronista, and The Unofficial Apple Weblog are all reporting on a rumor originally posted by Gizmodo that says Apple’s new 3G iPhone will be available on or soon after the WWDC Keynote on June 9. The first-generation iPhone is no longer available via Apple’s Website and is in short supply at retail outlets across the country. Many other signs in recent weeks have pointed to the imminent release of a new model, but Gizmodo is the first to claim that at June 9 launch has been “confirmed”.

I’ve been living with a third-generation iPod for four years now, and the thing is doing its best not to give up the ghost, but its time may be almost up. It regularly forgets that it has battery power nowadays, resetting itself at random intervals, and it refuses to play podcasts or high-quality audio files at all. If I had the money a couple of weeks ago, I would have bought an iPhone straight away. But now I’m glad that things have worked out the way that they have. I might be positioned just right to be one of the first to get his hands on the new device, instead of one of the last to pick up the old and out-of-date one. That would be a new experience for me—I bought my iMac last year two months or so before the newer, slicker version came out—and a most welcome one, to boot.

Comment on this article here.