| Tuesday, January 15, 2008 |
10:46 - One of these men is crazy
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Okay, this sounds like an Oscars™ Moment in the Making or something.
Randy Newman took the stage at the end of the Stevenote and started singing... well, I'll repeat what Jason Chen of Gizmodo said:
10:32 AM ON JAN 15 2008
And for the entertainment at Today’s keynote, Randy Newman.
10:34 AM ON JAN 15 2008
Randy’s singing a song about America, the president, and comparing them to Hitler and Stalin. USA! USA! USA!!!!!
10:36 AM ON JAN 15 2008
“It pisses me off a little that the Supreme Court is going to outlive me.” What the crap is he singing about? We have no idea. We think he’s gone nuts.
10:39 AM ON JAN 15 2008
The first song’s over, but now Randy Newman’s just riffing about random stuff. The next song is from Toy Story. Randy says he wrote another song to go with the love scene between Buzz and Woody, but the scene was cut. This guy is blowing our minds right now.
10:41 AM ON JAN 15 2008
Aaaand it’s over. Holy crap. Who knew Randy Newman, the guy who makes the songs your kids play over and over and over again, would sing such crazy crap about our government?
Oh, I don't know, it's pretty hard to find any song or artist in the modern age who doesn't indulge in America's Favorite Pastime. But what I want to know is, did Steve know in advance that Randy was going to go off like that about Toy Story and such? Did he see this as his Michael Moore spotlight time? Is Steve going to have to give him a talking-to? Has Randy finally lost it entirely?
Or was this all part of the plan?
I don't know about these people sometimes...
Particularly when we're talking about stuff like this:
Is it just me, or is this a ridiculously overpriced, feature-poor, and generally useless pig of an idea? Who would pay $3000 for a laptop with far fewer features than a regular MacBook?
It's not like you're going to be able to stick it in your pocket or something. You'll always be conscious of a computer being there. There will be a huge market for slipcovers and bags and stuff. It's never going to be something that's any less a weight on the mind when you carry it around.
In other words, it's all the cost and all the drawbacks of a large laptop, plus some extra drawbacks in the form of no optical drive or FireWire or hard drive space... and the benefits? Lightness? Thinness? Dude, being able to fit a computer into an envelope isn't worth $1000 to me even if you don't reduce its feature set. You'd have to pay me to use a computer like this.
But that's just me, I guess.
UPDATE: Okay, well, the share-a-nearby-desktop-computer's-optical-drive feature is pretty frickin' cool.
UPDATE: Gizmodo's hands-on from the show floor.
UPDATE: Yeah, you'd have to be a humorless Bush supporter in order to not enjoy this.
What's funny is that in the YouTube comments, it appears that European listeners are taking his diatribe as not being anti-Bush and anti-patriotic enough, in that he frames the whole thing as "Well, our leaders are the worst we've ever had, but at least they're not as bad as all these European leaders in history!" To which the Euros in the audience react by saying, "Hey, come on now, you're judging us based on Hitler and Stalin and Caligula? C'mon, that's not a way to solicit friendship!" Ha. I chortle.
Though I've got to admit that at least the "song" was actually more coherent than the random babbling he followed it with.
Dude. What the hell.
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Brian Tiemann
1. DaveD - 11:27 Tue 1/15/2008 ( email )
(1) Drive space - MacBook came with 100G (which I immediately upgraded to a 7200rpm, 250G drive for under $300, "the Air" comes with either 80G or 64G.
(2) CPU - Both have a Core 2 Duo, but where "the Air" is either a 1.6GHz (or for a cost, 1.8GHz), my MacBook is 2.16GHz.
(3) Optical drive - My MB has one, but it'll cost you another $300 for an external one to attach to "the Air".
(4) Remote? Not that I care, but my MB got one for free, but "the Air" requires that you fork up another $19 for it.
(5) Battery life - We finally have something where my MB isn't better. But hey, at around $2000 difference, you gotta find SOMETHING that matters.
But what really bites are all those other things. The lack of 10.5.2. No mention (except to acknowledge it) of the iPhone SDK. Finding out that if I would have waited 2 more months I would have gotten 5 extra apps on my iPod Touch but not paid a penny more. (For me I can get them, but for $20.) Finding out that my AppleTV now retail for $70 less - but hey, at least THAT update is available for free. All kinds of iTunes movie rentals, but absolutely no word of anything new to purchase.
Yeah, I'm just a bit underwhelmed. There's something in the air alright - but I'm feeling like I don't like the smell of it.