Saturday, March 10, 2007

Yikes

The bike messengers in DC are pretty fearless. I've come close to nailing a couple over the years, and watched from my office window a decade ago when one ran smack into the side of a taxi.

But the NYC cyclists are truly insane. Check this out... (warning: Adult lyrics)

Friday, March 09, 2007

Holy war

We're not sure, but most of my college buddies seemed to agree that I was the first person at Mary Washington to have a computer in his room. Not a terminal -- lots of folks had those -- but a fully operational computer. It was a Commoder VIC-20, with a cassette tape drive and an old TV for a monitor. The display was 22 characters wide and I think it had about 3,500 bytes of memory. Not megs. Not kilobytes. Bytes.

Not long after, my Dad got a Commodore 64, which orders of magnitude more powerful. But Commodore was an evolutionary dead end, and even before I graduated I could tell that the MS-DOS world was going to be king.

My first personal computer was bought an XT Turbo clone by a local company called Win Labs. 7 MHz processor. Woohoo.

Bought an AT clone a few years later, 486DX/50. Actually I still have it, down in the garage.

Next was a Gateway Pentium, about 400 MHz.

Another Gateway was purchased a few years ago, 1.6GHz.

A Toshiba laptop came onto the scene in 2003. A year later, a very fast, very heavy, and incredibly hot Compaq laptop was added to the fold. That marked 19 years of Intel/Microsoft machines.

Until last year.

The first Mac was a dual 2.7GHz G5. I use it as an editing platform; I'd been running Avid on the Gateway, but wanted to move into Final Cut Pro. Apple has not yet ported FCP to Windows (and probably never will). The machine is amazing. It's even a joy to look at, with a case that looks like it was sculpted out of a solid chunk of aluminum. So a few months ago, when I needed a new laptop, not for video editing but for general purpose work... email, web, writing screenplays, writing my blog... I bought a MacBook.

Apple has done an amazing job of branding, at every step of the process. From their stores, to their web site, to their industrial design, even their tv ads, there is a clean, uncluttered, sensible look. Nothing is left to chance. Consider my old Compaq: A decent-looking case, packed to the gills with processing power and a nice graphics card. But it sounds like a diesel engine. The power supply is an enormous, big black ugly device; Apple, in contrast, recognized that the brick for a laptop is something people deal with every day. It's an odd little white cube, with feet that fold out. The feet allow you to wrap the cord around the brick. And at the end of the cord? A little plastic tab that hooks onto the wire. No clutter. My Compaq has a short in the power connection port. Unless it's held perfectly straight, the power plug will slip out. The apple plug is magnetic. It grabs onto the side of the computer and holds snugly, but if you accidentally trip over the wire, it pulls harmlessly out.

There are so many little design touches. Heck last week I discovered that it has an accelerometer built in, and if it detects that it is falling, it automatically parks the heads on the hard drive to help prevent damage. Incredible.

I am reminded of a Saab I owned a few years ago, a 1996 900S. The last of the truly Swedish Saabs, designed before GM ruined the company. Every detail of the car was thought out. The shape of the buttons on the dash. The typeface used on the gauges. The exterior door handles were made of a non-conductive material, so when you touched the car on a cold day, you didn't get an electric static shock. Ever wonder why Saabs have the ignition switch on the center console? It's not just to be weird, it's because studies show that drivers suffer injuries to their right knees from hitting the key in a crash. So. Put it in the middle, out of the range of a flailing body. Sensible.

Of course, the analogy is similar in many ways: Saab sold something like 25,000 units in the US back in the 90s. That's about two weeks worth of Ford F-150 sales in the US. Likewise, Apple remains a tiny niche market. Sure, the company is doing well, but that is largely because of iPod and iTunes.

Is there a market for good design? Will consumers pay a little more for it? Or does the price at the BestBuy trump everything...

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