The Trojan Macs

For mac aficionados there is something more important than Christmas and that is Macworld San Francisco in January. The rumor mills are running rampant on predictions for this macworld with intel iBooks topping the list of predictions but I am wishing for some other things from Apple. What I would call the trojan macs.

The first is what I would call the Mac mini TV, this would be a modified version on the mini specially designed to fit under the large plasma and LCD HD television sets that all the people have been buying themselves for Christmas. Compared to the current mini it should have an added TV tuner card and much bigger hard disk, it should still be as silent as the mini but it would not need to be as small as the current mini. Of course it will also require a PVR capable version of Front Row. It should be mainly marketed as a PVR with a mac under the hood

The second machine I would like to see apple release, I even hesitate to call a mac, would be a hybrid of an ibook and the Nokia 770. Think of it as a ibook with the keyboard replaced by a touch screen and a added infrared port. It should be marketed primarily as a kind of ebook/web reader/itunes controler but again in reality there is a mac under the hood.

The nice thing with both these machines are that they are not primarily macs and therefore can be marketed more like appliances negating a lot of the windows arguments nor will they require all the third party software to be ported to Intel on day one. But they will both put OSX in the hands of a lot of people, expanding the OSX user base in a trojan way.

filed in: Internet, Mac - 28 Dec 2005 18:03 - #

Richard Dawkins on Creationism etc.

There is a short interview with Richard Dawkins over on beliefnet where of course he talks about evolution, creationism, god and atheism. I thought this part was particularly telling:

...I feel elated. My book, "Unweaving the Rainbow," is an attempt to elevate science to the level of poetry and to show how one can be—in a funny sort of way—rather spiritual about science. Not in a supernatural sense, but there are uplifting mysteries to be solved. The contemplation of the size and scale of the universe, of the depth of geological time, of the complexity of life--these all, to me, have an inspirational quality. ...

This touches a nerve with me. I often get annoyed by people that think that one can not marvel at nature if one tries to understand it. In my opinion understanding almost always ends up enhancing the beauty of what one observes.

filed in: Culture, Politics, Science - via Kottke - 15 Dec 2005 23:02 - #

Parody the sincerest form of flattery?

Frederik Samuel noticed something strange with these two ads.

What is TBWA trying to do here? It's not a spoof becuase a Golf is hardly in the same class as the 300Z. Everything is the same except that this time the cops are protecting the car except being protected by it.

Parody is great when you know what is being parodied and that is what makes this TBWA Nissan parody of the VW ad so strange, nobody outside the advertising world will ever understand the joke on the polo ad but still they have gone through a lot of expense to almost clone the Polo ad, if you look carefully you will notice the cars are very similar but not the same, the location is exactly the same or is the sidewalk and wall just photoshoped back in? In any case it seems like a lot of expense for a parody that very few will ever understand. Now the strange thing is that there are a bunch of other copies of the Polo ad.

filed in: Culture, Design - via Reklamfeber.se - 02 Dec 2005 18:48 - #