International Mac Podcast

Computers themselves have evolved drastically since the turn of the millennia, back in 2000 a single gigahertz was a lot, and a gigabyte of RAM was considered overkill. The Playstation 2 and XBox were still vaporware, Cellphones just made calls and PDA’s just remembered data, and neither WiFi nor Cellular Data Networks had really caught on.

This decade brought HUGE advances in the hardware side of computing, and yet the way we interact with our computers is nearly identical to how it was back then. In fact, the way we use computers hasn’t significantly changed since 1984, back when color screens were a novelty and the internet was only for the geekiest of geeks. Modern UI’s are often still based around the limitations and capabilities of 26 year old computers, and though we don’t really think about it, are now just a huge inconvenience in almost every situation. We’ve already seen some very successful attempts at getting rid of these vestigial interfaces (chances are you’ve got one in your pocket right now), and I think that by the end of this decade the software that we use now will be just as obsolete as the hardware of 10 years ago is today. (more…)

[EDIT: Will everyone PLEASE stop calling it the MacPod - Stu]

My prediction for the magical flying unicorn of a product that is the Apple Tablet is as follows; almost everything everybody, including me, has predicted so far will be partially to totally wrong. Obvious paradox aside, the build up to this iUnicorn mirrors that of the iPhone almost perfectly; hundreds of tech blogs speculating wildly different things about a product, agreeing only on a name (well, usually) and a few basic ideas about what it is. So yes, I could spend the next 3-4 paragraphs analyzing the exact position and length of every one of the few hairs remaining on Steve Jobs’s head looking for any clues to what this iFlyingNarwhal is, but that would be stupid, unhelpful, repetitious, and take longer than the 45 minutes I have allotted myself to write this before Chuck starts, so instead I’m just gonna write about what I’d like to see, and what I wouldn’t. (more…)