Give A Mac

I’ve spent quite a lot of time on this campaign and all I got is some money from some close friends (thank you all, pals) and some visits from weird places by leechers looking for weird things — mostly when I self-digged my posts. Plus I got hordes of spam and not very much intelligent comments — if any. I designed t-shirts, bags and gizmos with an attractive logo (thanks to ideas from skay and manfroze). I proposed some fun ideas, such as the etch-a-mac thing, which I surely know is not an original idea and that led some tens of visits from people looking for ways to etch their own laptop.

Keeping the website open for another year is a thing I can absolutely afford (in a monetary sense) but my main goal was not having a web site (I already have one) but raising money for a computer to actually (and effectively) work with — and I’ve never pretended that it wasn’t my main goal.

When I talk to a Mac-lover, fan-boy, Mac-head or anything else what I get is tons and tons of “how my Mac is better than you”, “how PC sucks”, “how I am cool with my shiny little aluminum thing on my lap in the middle of the park”, “how MacOS is better than anything else in the World and beyond”, “high quality demands high expenses” and “how much I do like to masturbate on stare at the stand-by light which flicks high and low when my MacBook is sleeping — it seems it breathes, how sweeeeeet”. What I was expecting was something like this: if you Mac-lovers are so fond of the Mac and so proud and so sure it is the best thing in the World and Steve Jobs created God Ye Almighty (not the converse) I was expecting some of you would be glad to give some bucks to help me get in the Whitish Shiny Mac World.

In the end, I think that this web site will just sit here until its natural death unless some response from the community will convince me (and at this time I’m pretty hard to convince) to keep it up and running.

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I’ve heard that there is a lot of talking about the so called Newton 2.0, but what is it, in the first place? And why am I saying it is already here?

The Newton was one of the first PDAs in the world¹ and it was pretty advanced for the time, featuring a really good writing recognition system. In addition to that, the Newton integrated several outstanding technologies for the time like a powerful user interface, a bunch of extremely good applications, a really modern operating system, infrared connectivity and one² PC Card expansion slots allowing the use of modems, Ethernet cards and, in recent times, WLAN adapters, flash card readers and Bluetooth support. So we can say that the Newton was much more like a modern tablet PC than a small PDA³. So what about today?

The iPhone is a mobile phone, a pocket wireless Internet terminal, and a multimedia player in one device — that is pretty much what most of the mobile phones are these days — with an astonishing and powerful user interface. With the landing of the iPod touch (together with the infamous firmware upgrade) one may think that the Newton 2.0 is pretty much replaced by these two devices but there’s one thing these devices are not.

As we said the Newton was the ante litteram concept of the tablet PC. A tablet MacBook has been subject of rumors since a long time and finally there have been evidence of the product being designed and prototyped. Now we have the MacBook Air which was hoped by many of us to be a tablet and not that — still pretty nice — ultra light laptop that it was revealed to be.

In the end: given that the MacBook tablet is under development — and we can only hope it’ll have a multi touch interface⁴ — and the iPhone+iPod touch just rock (besides the price), do we really need a Newton 2.0 except for the nostalgia evoked by the name? I don’t think so.

1. in a time when the term PDA wasn’t yet invented [↩]
2. or two, depending on the model [↩]
3. an interesting article I found that is absolutely worth a reading is “Apple Newton vs Samsung Q1 UMPC“ [↩]
4. a real multitouch interface, not just a twotouch one [↩]

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It seems that the iPhone is soon to be confirmed in Italy sold by TIM. My fellow blogger Marco says that a friend of his friend that works in TIM unofficially confirmed the rumor and said that the announce will be given soon.

There’s one more interesting thing to note. He says:

«… a low price plan will be available to encourage a large diffusion “because TIM really cares about the iPhone”.»

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As I said some days ago, if this rumor will be confirmed¹, it may be the first signal of a trend that will probably continue at least until this late spring or summer.

Good news, uhu?

1. Ars Technica thinks it is likely to be [↩]

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There it comes, the 32 GB iPod Touch for $499 as well as its counterpart 16 GB iPhone for the same price!

Now, if I had the money I’d be placing my order right now. If Toshiba’s prediction is true¹ we may be seeing a rebate this summer. Unlikely, you say? Yes, me too.

1. 50% cut down for NAND flash memories in Q1 08 [↩]

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