A Danged Good Point

Paul Boutin in Slate reviews the new MacBook Air and notes that "in many ways, phones are now more powerful than laptops":

Phone and laptop technology is converging. The iPhone and other smartphones have as much processing power as the desktop workstations of five years ago, and laptops are getting smaller and more portable. It's only natural to expect that the advances seen in laptops would come to phones, and vice versa. So, why has Apple failed to make foolproof, always-on Web access—the iPhone's killer feature—a standard component of its next generation of computers?

It's not like Apple is hesitant about getting its suppliers to engineer new parts—after all, the company coerced Intel to build a special, extra-small version of its Core 2 Duo processor that would fit inside the MacBook Air. It's possible that putting a cell phone inside the Air would mean lots of regulatory hurdles before the device could come to market. But it isn't a new idea. Lenovo, for one, has offered the option for years. And Apple has stuffed AT&T wireless access into 5 million iPhones, all of which are slimmer than the new MacBook. Would it really have been that hard to put a cell card inside the Air?

The new notebook is touted as the first computer designed from the ground up to be used wirelessly; but without 3G cellular or WiMax last-mile access, it's really just the first computer designed from the ground up to be used over Wi-Fi. Which makes it the ultraportable equivalent of the iPod touch.

That said, I doubt these limitations will last terribly long, and I also don't think the MacBook Air is really the ultraportable solution. I bet that in a few years, as the processor speeds at that size catch up, the MacBook Air -- or its innovations, like flash HD and a drop of the optical drive -- will simply replace the MacBook. There will be a different Pro desktop replacement laptop, and maybe some kind of third less expensive, portable device.

What am I saying? Steve Jobs is giving up on reading. Screw Apple.

Oh, You Disappointing Bastard

I like Steve Jobs, and I love Apple, but the guy sometimes just makes no sense at all.

Today he had a wide range of observations on the industry, including the Amazon Kindle book reader, which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading.

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

Huh? What share of that forty percent are Apple users? Apple has to have some market research on their customers' broader media consumption, and I'm willing to bet that Mac owners are on the upper end of books read and purchased. Read and purchased from Amazon, mind you -- whose users also are more likely than average to read a bunch of books. What percentage of people in the U.S. used software to give a PowerPoint-style presentation last year, or used video conferencing? That doesn't stop Apple from selling that experience to users.

You may not be able to sell as many Kindles as you can iPods, or to put one in every household, but that doesn't mean that "the whole conception" of an electronic reader is flawed. I would rather say: "The problem with the Kindle is that people don't read the way that they used to; they read and view lots of documents, including web pages and email and photographs and movies, and they're used to a much more integrated and interactive experience. So if your goal is to try to recreate the book or the newspaper to the letter, you're fighting the wrong fight."

At any rate, if Jobs' vision of Apple is to make an increasingly large number of devices on which we can watch Zoolander, I find myself much less enthusiastic about that vision or that world.

Portrait of the Artist

Rambling Speculation about Macworld

Okay, wild guess stuff. My dream of dreams would be for a 8.5 by 5.5 iBook, a touchscreen subnotebook running a similar version of OS X to the iPhone that would work as a general document viewer and light editor -- email, video, audio, books, web, RSS, etc. You would be able to buy or subscribe to books, movies, music, podcasts, feeds, all wirelessly. It would sync with your PC like an iPod/iPhone, but it would also be usable as an ultraportable standalone device.

Since this is what I want, I will assume that it will be so. (This seems to be everyone else's working method.)

So what's this "something in the Air" business? Okay, this is what I think. The portable iBook will have a dock, just like the other Apple portables. But this dock will be different. For one thing, it'll be huge, about as big as an AirPort Extreme Base Station.

Hey...

What if the new iBook's dock were also an Airport station -- with an ethernet in and out, USB and Firewire ports to connect to an external drive, another Mac, a keyboard, a printer, or a larger display? The goal, eventually, would be to phase out all wired connections in favor of wireless ones; so you have an AirPort hub where next to nothing actually "plugs in."

Essentially, then, you have a fully portable Mac that can, in turn, function as a full-featured, stand alone machine, without the need for an additional computer.

I can't imagine calling anything else an "AirBook" or "MacBook Air."

Just a thought. If I'm right, anyone who wants to can buy me drinks.

As Education, It Might Beat Movies At Least

Matthew Phillips at Newsweek:

In the $10 billion videogame industry, war has always been marketable. But one war in particular has captured the imaginations of gamers: World War II. More than 100 titles are dedicated to the struggle between the Axis and the Allies, at least 70 of which have been made in the past five years. Medal of Honor: Airborne, the latest installment in Electronic Arts' WWII franchise, focuses on the close-range infantry combat of Operation Market Garden, part of the Allies' 11-month campaign across Europe to Berlin. It was "to a significant extent a rifleman's war," says historian Niall Ferguson. Soldiers "had to do a lot of ditch-to-ditch, house-to-house fighting—the perfect setting for first-person shooter games." Operation Market Garden features in at least 12 videogames, including four of the 14 Medal of Honor titles, and will be the focus of Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway, due out early this year on the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. "More than any other conflict, World War II is an example of good conquering evil," says Col. John Antal, a retired Army specialist and consultant to the Brothers games. For many kids, the games may now be primary source material on the war.

Now we need a good game critic/historian to tell us just how accurate these games are -- not just to the first-person experience and moral sensibility, but to the details! There's no reason that these kids can't know the maps of Europe and Asia, and the history of what happened there, as well as buffs know the battles of the Civil War or kids from generation knew the world maps of Zelda or Metroid. Get some learn on when you get your game on!

Also -- why not a World War II game where you fight from all sides? Be a Russian soldier forced to retreat to Moscow or Leningrad, then a French general who defeats the Germans in a battle but watches the rest of the line crumble, then a North African soldier invading Italy. Games where perspectives suddenly shift, where you win battles but lose the war -- this might actually introduce some historical complexity into students' thoughts about the world.

Grand Vitesse

From Der Spiegel: High-Speed Trains Erode Europe's Borders.

The Eurostar now carries more than 70 percent of passenger traffic between London and Paris. And air service between Paris and Brussels has ended altogether now that trains connect those cities in 1 hour and 20 minutes.

It's faster (and cheaper, despite the dollar) to ride coach from London to Paris than from New York to Washington. And Europe's Railteam is making it easier to cross national borders and switch between rail systems, with the goal of seamless travel from Paris to Bratislava.

This, more than a common currency or labor market, could make Europe Europe.

The Movie Critics Forgot, Then Remembered

Has anyone noticed the surge of interest paid by movie critics to David Fincher's spring-release film Zodiac?  First there was Manohla Dargis's subtle reading of the film in the New York Times, which headlines their Oscar Preview section. Now comes Elbert Ventura's analysis in Slate.

Zodiac really is a remarkable movie, one I've frequently recommended to friends as smart, stylish, and (at least until now) totally underrated. But now it almost seems as though the movie critics, sick and tired of hearing the TV critics extol the return of the also-great, also-underwatched police drama The Wire, wanted to write their own take on the subversive nature of a genuinely realistic, genuinely obsessive police procedural.

The Kids

Jon Favreau (not the actor) is Barack Obama's speechwriting partner. He's a veteran of the Kerry campaign, who was drafted into speechwriting before the Iowa caucus, when Kerry was running out of money, and everyone thought they would lose to Howard Dean.

He's 26 years old.

Favreau and Obama rapidly found a relatively direct way to work with one another. "What I do is to sit with him for half an hour," Favreau explains. "He talks and I type everything he says. I reshape it, I write. He writes, he reshapes it. That's how we get a
finished product.

"It's a great way to write speeches. A lot of times, you write something, you hand it in, it gets hacked by advisors, it gets to the candidate and then it gets sent back to you. This is a much more intimate way to work."

Some speeches are much more the product of the candidate himself. Obama emailed Favreau his draft of his announcement speech in Springfield, Illinois, at 4 a.m. on the morning of the campaign launch last February.

Now Favreau has his own team: Adam Frankel, a 26-year-old who worked with Ted Sorensen on his memoirs, and Ben Rhodes, a 30-year-old who worked with Lee Hamilton on the 9/11 commission's report.

Three guys on a speechwriting team, two of whom were born after 1980; the oldest was born in 1977. Is there any surprise that Obama is resonating with young people? Or that he talks so often about his disinterest in the political discourse of the past?

Forget the Sixties, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, even Clinton. The first time his speechwriters could vote for president, it was for Al Gore.

(Unless they voted Nader. Eep!)

Anyways, that group of guys might even be as smart and precocious as this one:

Borges and the Absence of Context

The New York Times Books section has a story in today's paper by Noam Cohen titled "Borges and the Forseeable Future", which summarizes claims by Umberto Eco, Perla Sassón-Henry, and William Gibson that Borges's stories predicted the advent of the World Wide Web.

The trouble is that instead of including excerpts from and analyses of each author's argument, Cohen applies a method that should be even better: excerpts from three of Borges's stories (“Funes the Memorious,” “The Library of Babel” and “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”) juxtaposed with Web 2.0 examples of Borgesian "prophecies fulfilled." These parallels are sometimes so tangential to the texts they describe, and invariably so distorting of the contexts from which Borges's quotes are taken, that the naive picture they give borders on uselessness.

For example, Borges's story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” does describe an encyclopedia that is hypothesized to have been written by many authors. This is vaguely like Wikipedia, but also vaguely like most print encyclopedias in Borges's day and ours. The reason why the fictional speculation that the text was penned not by a single author but by a secret society is that the encyclopedia entries are an elaborate hoax, and that Tlön is a planet that does not exist. This fact is not mentioned in Cohen's article. It's repeatedly mentioned in the Wikipedia entry on the story.

Ditto "The Library of Babel." Borges's imagined library does indeed imply that there is "no personal problem, no world problem, whose eloquent solution did not exist" in the library. The trouble, however -- as Wikipedia again nicely reminds us -- is that

because there are by definition all books, there are certainly also books of lies and falsehoods. For each copy of the codex to the library, there will be many copies of false codices, claiming some false books to be true and some true books to be false. In short, any room in the library could be the crimson hexagon.

Maybe there's a way to save all of this, by saying that Borges was prophetic not just of the web's possibilities, but also its shortcomings, especially the difficulty (as in all media) of distinguishing signal from noise. But maybe we should just let Borges be Borges, with his own decidedly pre-web preoccupations, and try to do our own thinking for ourselves.

iBook, iPlay, iSlate

Andy Ihnatko makes a prediction in Macworld:

Apple’s new platform: Look at the puzzle pieces. A sophisticated, gesture-based user interface. OS X running on nontraditional devices. A new developer environment and API for iDevices that was so tricky that Apple couldn’t release it or even hint at it until three months after the iPhone was released… and even then, only under duress. Features embedded in Mac OS that help you invisibly tether two OS X devices’ resources together, whether they’re in the same room or merely on the same planet. A movement from Apple to put the bulk of its energy into consumer products and not computer products.

I’m fairly sure that 2008 will see an entire new platform. The iPhone is a phone, and the iPod touch is an iPhone without the phone stuff. The next i-Suffix will be a totally new thing. Not a Mac… not really. An iPhone, kind of, but sort of not. Take the screen off a MacBook and slice it in two vertically. That’s the device. It’ll play media—including Office documents, PDFs, and e-books—from its 16GB of flash storage. It’ll have Wi-Fi and the Safari browser… maybe even 3G or EDGE, as with an iPhone. It will secure-tunnel back to your home Mac or PC, and you’ll be able to use this thing to access any resources you might have left behind. It will put every digital resource you have at your fingertips, in one compact black slate.

It will run native software, too. Curious, isn’t it, that in October Steve Jobs announced that Apple wouldn’t be taking the wrapper off the iPhone developers’ kit until February? It’s almost as if the resources that are plainly available in the SDK would have spilled the beans on the device Steve intends to unveil during his Macworld Expo keynote in January.

Maybe I’m spot-on with this. Maybe not. But I’ll make one prediction about Apple’s hot new product of 2008 that I’ll stand behind without any waffling: whatever it is, people will complain that it costs way too much money, and they’ll happily stand in line for a minimum of 18 hours to get one.