Hunter Davies tries out a MacBook
Bit of fun for Saturday morning. Head on over to The Guardian’s often-excellent ‘dork talk’ column, currently guest-written by various tech (and non-tech) luminaries whilst Stephen Fry gets back in action following some nasty injury or other, for a great piece by Hunter Davies on giving up his Amstrad PCW9512 (I had one of those!!!!) for an Apple MacBook laptop.
As a Mac user who came from PCs I think it’s really easy to get complacent and assume Mac OS X is the near-pinnacle of UI design. As Hunter points out in his piece, what could be easier than a button labelled ‘exit’ on the keyboard to get out of a program, or another button to ‘print’ just like that? My favourite bit is the idea of calling up your daughter to ask her to Google something for you - awesome.
Apple retail stores named in top 100
A recent Retail Week article announces the top 100 retail stores in the world (although naturally with something of a UK bias), and Apple has two entries in the listing compiled by other leading retailers.
Apple’s Regent Street store in London is named alongside the iconic glass cube on New York’s 5th Avenue. The Regent Street store is pretty darned impressive when you visit, spread across two capacious floors and overflowing with Apple folk just trying to help. Worth it if you’re in the area and have 10 minutes to kill.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak interviewed on BBC
The Unofficial Apple Weblog points out a fun 10-minute interview with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, talking all things early-hi-tech. As TUAW notes it’s probably nothing you haven’t read somewhere before if you’re an Apple afficionado, but for those new to the company who want an insight into those early exploratory (and occasionally mercenary) days of widespread personal computing, ‘Woz’ is a great speaker on the subject.
b.tween 08 Mac invasion
Forgive this mini-post it’s inherent brevity, but I had to share an observation from the floor of this year’s b.tween digital media festival being held in Manchester - an observation I also made at the Thinking Digital conference in Gateshead a few weeks back.
The observation is this: that of the many, many laptops snuggling on delegates’ knees during the run of presentations, the vast majority are Macs. Not just half - I mean really, the vast majority. The number of PC laptops are countable on one hand at times.
What’s the deal? Is the technorati of UK digital media industry more inclined to Apple’s platform? A room full of evangelists smugly parading their wares as some kind of status symbol? I was reassured that all was well with the world when one presenter, a self-confessed ‘Mac illiterate’, tried to open a link from a PowerPoint only for Safari to implode on itself in a blaze of glory. Remember, they’re still just computers, and they still go wrong. (Just not as often…!)
Bryan Appleyard: Barack Obama the MacBook Pro?
Those following these humble early days on TWA will probably already detect that amongst my travels on the web, I frequent the BBC’s many and various blogs quite regularly. Imagine my surprise, then, when browsing Justin Webb’s (excellent, by the way) ramblings about all things stateside, I should come across this witty and insightful appraisal of US presidential candidate Barack Obama - the Apple Mac of US politics.
Apparently, Hillary is a Windows laptop - and when you see Bryan’s excellent justifications for this argument, you’ll probably chuckle as much as I did.