This idea has come up before, but I was reminded of it when I read a Nieman Journalism Lab post about some research being done by Lee Humphreys, looking at the way that communication — and particularly personal communication, through letters and diaries and other pre-digital tools of expression. Although this doesn’t seem to have much to do with how we use ultra-modern services like Twitter or Facebook, there is a lot more to it than you might think.

Media has always been personal and social

As Humphreys describes it, her research shows that if you look at human communication over a longer period than just the past generation or two, it becomes obvious that one-way, broadcast-style “mass media” isn’t the norm at all — instead, the norm is interpersonal or multi-directional communication that shares a lot more with social media such as blogs, Twitter and Facebook. Rather than creating a new communication style, we are actually returning to one.

“Humphreys said one of the early conclusions from her research is the possibility that the mass media of the 20th century was in fact a blip, a historical aberration, and that, through platforms like Twitter, we are gradually returning to a communication network that indulges, without guilt, the individual’s desire to record his existence.”

For example, Humphreys says that the idea of diaries or journals as private things — which their owners hide underneath a mattress or keep in a secret place under lock and key — is a fairly new one. As recently as the late 19th century, it was common for people to read each other’s journals as a way of catching up with what they had been doing, and in many cases this was done with the author of the journal taking part in the discussion. In that sense, journals were a mix of private and public, in much the same way that social media is.

Although the Nieman Lab post doesn’t mention it, there was also the idea of a “commonplace book,” which was a kind of paper version of a blog, a place where people would keep snatches of text or ideas that they came across, and then share that with others. Famous writers such as John Milton and Ralph Waldo Emerson kept commonplace books, and the phenomenon is seen by many as a prelude to what would become the “remix culture” of today.

The era of mass media is over

The idea that mass media was a kind of historical accident has been raised by others as well, including Tom Standage of The Economist — both in his upcoming book, called “Writing on the Wall,” and in a series of pieces in the magazine about the nature of digital media. The latter described how the interconnected qualities of social media and “networked journalism” mirrored the way that media used to function before newspapers were invented, when the local tavern or coffee house was the center of the information ecosystem. The title of his book, Standage says, also refers to:

“The ominous implications of the rebirth of social media for mass-media companies that arose in the industrial era, predicated on the high cost of delivering information to large audiences. The conclusion of the book is that the mass-media era was a historical anomaly… indeed, it might better be termed the ‘mass-media parenthesis.’”

If this is in fact what we are experiencing — that is, the unbundling or dismantling of a mass-media infrastructure that was constructed to serve the needs of readers (and advertisers) at a specific time in history — then what can we expect? Among other things, probably further downsizing and layoffs and bankruptcies of media companies whose size and cost structure and print focus no longer corresponds to the needs of the marketplace.

And on the positive side, we are also likely to see the growth of new entities that take advantage of the networked, social and smaller-scale nature of the media ecosystem — startups like Circa, for example, or algorithmic players like Prismatic, along with larger entities like The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed. In a very real sense, it is both the best of times and the worst of times.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Feng Yu and Flickr user Rosaura Ochoa

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The Prime Instant Video website shows 446 A&E seasons available, largely reality shows like “Dance Moms,” “Hoarders,” “Project Runway,” “Storage Wars” and “Pawn Stars.” Most of them aren’t available through Netflix streaming, though Netflix retains some older Biography shows.

Amazon Prime Instant Video is available to Prime members who pay $79 a year for unlimited two-day shipping and other perks. The company says Prime Instant Video now includes over 33,000 movies and TV episodes, while Netflix has an estimated 60,000 streaming movies and episodes.

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(Click to enlarge)

Update: This infographic has been updated to fix the errors in the original version.

Infographic courtesy of Column Five Media. This graphic originally appeared at

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In a couple of weeks, the world will reach a milestone: the passing of a decade since the September 11, 2001, attacks that hit New York and Washington, left thousands dead and sparked war around the globe. In advance of that sad anniversary, on Wednesday, San Francisco’s Internet Archive — the nonprofit preservation project run by online pioneer Brewster Kahle — is launching a website that captures the events for posterity.

The Understanding 9/11 site — which features a library of footage taken from a broad range of TV news channels on and after September 11, 2001 — is what the organization calls “a resource for scholars, journalists, and the public.” It’s a comprehensive archive of material, much of it available online for the first time.

What the Internet Archive has achieved is astounding. There are more than 3,000 hours of footage taken from news stations in America and around the world, covering the morning of the attacks and the subsequent week. That includes not only CNN and CBS, CNN, NBC, ABC and Fox but also stations from the UK, Mexico, Iraq, China and beyond.

The site has also compiled a list of analysis pieces that examine the coverage and the events and a video summary of the key moments during the day.

It’s a huge volume of information, but the size isn’t overwhelming; the material is presented in an easy-to-navigate visual style, with each block of programming cut into 10-minute and then 30-second chunks. It makes it easy to sift through to see what actually happened and when.

However easy it is to get around the archive, though, it’s also worth pointing out that this is definitely not easy stuff to watch.

In fact, it’s incredibly difficult to take a look through any of the footage without crying — even for somebody like me, who wasn’t personally affected by the attacks. I didn’t lose any friends, family or colleagues that day, but it’s still dizzying and sickening to be transported backward through the archived programming. Skimming through the timeline of significant events, I alternated between being horrified, dazed, solemn and depressed.

Why now? Why ever?

Given how hard it is to watch, you might ask why this should happen at all. After all, what’s the point of releasing all of this footage and letting people relive those terrible hours all over again?

First, it’s worth pointing out that this initiative is not entirely new. Previous attempts to collate have been published; the Television Archive went live in October 2001; in 2007 the Internet Archive released a limited version of what we see today called the September 11 TV archive.

But the new version is much broader and more ambitious — and in the site’s introduction, the archive explains why it has taken the unprecedented step of compiling this third attempt:

Television is our pre-eminent medium of information, entertainment and persuasion, but until now it has not been a medium of record. This Archive attempts to address this gap by making TV news coverage of this critical week in September 2001 available to those studying these events and their treatment in the media.

Today we may think of the web as the main information medium — or at least one with a sort of permanent accessibility — but 9/11 was an experience that was largely shared through television or in person. A decade ago, the Internet was still fairly young, and many popular websites collapsed under the weight of traffic. While the web was useful in helping people cope with their fear and grief (in fact, I wrote about the way things panned out online at the time), it was television that told the big story.

But in spite of television’s important role, the ephemeral nature of television news means that the public is rarely given the chance to go back and examine what actually happened during a major event. Most of the archive footage we see are just tiny glimpses of history: a few snatched seconds of Walter Cronkite announcing the assassination of President Kennedy, Neil Armstrong stepping foot on the moon, or film of the lone protester at Tiananmen Square, waving his shopping bags at tanks.

So the Internet Archive is trying to use the web as a way of establishing television as a medium of public record — something not just for the broadcasters to dip into but also for ordinary people or observers who want to access living history. It explains more in a blog post.

That means if you are interested in how history unfolds, then it is valuable and important to watch those moments again and understand, remember, what actually happened. It’s important to remember the scale of the panic and see how the immediate response to the events unfolding in the skies of America varied so wildly — both in the moments that they were taking place and in the days afterward as the drumbeat of war began to pound.

Sometimes we forget how dramatically those few days changed the course of history and how rapidly the desire to react was. And as you can see from the footage, it was not just the likes of Bill O’Reilly on Fox News (who declared that America should “bomb the Afghan infrastructure to rubble”). The archive is a way of digging into that reaction, which is itself a way of digging into where we are today.

But sometimes it’s just as important to remember the sheer confusion that took hold. The most grim moments come when comparing live coverage of the attacks themselves. For example on ABC, at 9:02 a.m., you hear the mangled yelps of staff in the studio as they (and you) watch the second plane strike the World Trade Center. At the same moment on CNN, meanwhile, they didn’t even spot what had happened until a minute or two later. It’s a brief interlude of innocence that nobody will ever have again.

Understanding 9/11 is raw and unpalatable and terrifying. But what the Internet Archive has done is create an important and lasting monument to the events of a decade ago. It might not feel like a traditional tribute to those who died, but I think it is one that — for all of its difficulties — is utterly necessary.

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As expected, the masses began speculating as to what this exciting announcement from the House Of Jobs would be. Of course many predicted what we now know as true, but many others hoped for something else, believing that such news didn’t warrant such a bold ‘unforgettable’ statement.

Either way, excited or not, Apple’s battle with The Beatles has been a long one. Ever since the iTunes store appeared back in 2003, folks have been asking for digital versions of the Fab Four’s music. But the story of Apple and The Beatles starts a long time before the days of iPods and iTunes.

A Tale of Two Apples

During the late sixties The Beatles formed the company Apple Corps. Their new company was a conglomerate consisting of several divisions, including Apple Records — the company even had its very own Apple Store.

Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne founded Apple Computer in 1976. Just two years later, in 1978, The Beatles’ Apple Corps warned the then Apple Computer (now Apple Inc) to get back, by suing the younger company for trademark infringement.

Rumor has it that the late George Harrison spotted an advertisement for an Apple Computer in a magazine, prompting The Beatles to take action. With both companies bearing a similar name and logo, the battle resulted in a court case over trademark violation, which was settled in 1981. Apple Computer agreed that it would never enter the music industry, paying Apple Corps $80,000. The Beatles agreed only to use their brand within the entertainment industry.

Apple Computer Gets More Musical

However, despite both parties settling, the fight between the two companies was far from over. During the 1980s Apple’s computers, such as the Mac Plus and the Mac II, began incorporating musical features. The computers were capable of both creating and playing music (MIDI files) — something The Beatles saw as an infringement on the original settlement.

A second round of court action again concluded with a settlement, reached in October of 1991. The altered agreement allowed Apple Computer to sell and market “computers, microprocessors and microprocessor controlled devices, telecommunications equipment, data processing equipment, ancillary and peripheral equipment, and computer software of any kind on any medium”. However, this arrangement, which cost Apple Computer $26.5 million, still gave Apple Corps the right to sue if Apple Computer started selling “creative works whose principal content is music.”

Apple Computer Becomes a Music Seller

Of course, this wasn’t the end. At the turn of the century Apple Computer began development on an MP3 player, along with a store to accompany it. These developments resulted in the release of the iPod and the iTunes Store, arriving in 2001 and 2002 respectively. Apple Corps deemed the iTunes Music Store as a direct violation of the 1991 arrangement. From 2003 to 2007 Apple Computer battled it out with Apple Corps. Various settlements fell through, including one in which Apple Computer offered The Beatles’ Apple Corps just $1 million to exercise the Apple name within the music industry.

Eventually judgement came down in favor Apple Computer, defending the company’s sale of music. The ruling concluded that Apple’s sale of music was fine, because although the iTunes Store was branded, the music that the store sold was not. This was despite Apple Corps’ best efforts to demonstrate just how many times Apple Computer’s similar logo appeared during a typical download session. Apple Corps manager Neil Aspinall disagreed with the court’s decision — “with great respect to the trial judge, we consider he has reached the wrong conclusion.”

With the case settled, Steve Jobs extended the olive branch, inviting the The Beatles’ record label to sell their music on the ever-growing store. Jobs said, “We have always loved The Beatles, and hopefully we can now work together to get them on the iTunes Music Store”. From that point, the speculation as to when the boys from Liverpool would arrive on the digital store has been ever-present.

After iPod conferences, years, rumors, hints, songs from The Beatles are finally available for purchase in the iTunes store, and I for one am glad it’s happened, and the speculation can finally end.

Will you buying any Beatles music on iTunes? Let us know in the comments.

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Why Are Apple and Microsoft Keyboards So Different?

The disparity is a little deeper than a simple case of Apple and Microsoft just not being able to get along. It’s actually rooted in the core of Apple’s engineering principles of thinking things through and getting it right the first time. Apple started from a proven and well accepted principle, whereas Microsoft saw value in a ‘feature’, didn’t bother to understand it, and screwed it up. Human nature being what it is, since more people grew up PC than Mac, PC had it “right”, and Mac had it “wrong.”

Controlling Teletype Machines

The use of control key sequences date back to teletype systems, where certain commands were mapped into the American Standard Code for Information Interchange
(ASCII) character set. Teletype systems basically replaced the telegraph and were used to send typed messages over long distances. The ASCII was created in part to standardize the communication protocols between teletype machines. These teletype systems would send commands to control non-printing functions like movement of the printing cartridge.

This is where the “control” key originally got its name, since it controlled the mechanics of the machine it was sending instructions to. By holding down the control key when striking another character on the keyboard, you actually applied a sort of offset to the ASCII code, sending a different signal and producing an effect not related to actual typing.

Communicating to Unix Computers

Enter the age of computers. Early computer input worked in a very similar way as two teletype systems communicating with one another. In fact, the protocol that Unix uses to map keyboards as devices comes from teletype. Modern day Macs running OS X are based on Unix, and therefore, still support this paradigm. The Terminal application found in Utilities could actually be considered a software version of an old teletype system, sending commands to the computer to be executed.

The exact same control sequences used in early Unix-based systems are still supported on modern Macs.  The original Control+C keyboard sequence once used to stop teletype printing is being used today by the Terminal Application to instruct the computer to cancel or stop an operation. Apple has chosen to maintain the integrity of its systems by choosing not to change the way the control key works.

Open Apple on a Swedish Campground

The command key, on the other hand, is an Apple original. Given that Apple was into selling hardware, and not just licensing software, adding a key to the keyboard was just part of the engineering process when creating new products.

The existence of an additional command key on Apple hardware dates back to the original Apple IIe. The first Macintosh computers also had a need to create specialized command key sequences and kept the Apple key.

Mapping menu functions to keyboard shortcuts were emphasized in part because the graphical interface of the Macintosh could actually display complex images like the Apple Logo on screen.

Rather than devalue the brand image by littering the menu system with an orchard of Apple logos all over the place, the Apple Icon was replaced by a symbol used in Sweden to indicate an interesting feature at a campground.  Thus the Command Key as we know it today was born.

Disk-Based, not Terminal-Based Operating System

At the same time, Microsoft was growing up from its roots on DOS. Microsoft was not in the business of manufacturing and selling hardware, and had to deal with what was readily available on the market. Since early PC keyboards were born from older terminal based computer keyboards, and those keyboards have origins rooted in teletype systems, there was an extra control key just waiting for a disk-based OS to abuse.

Almost every MS-DOS application had a different mapping of keyboard sequences for common functions like open, close, cut, copy and paste.  And they all abused the control key. When Windows first came around, Microsoft also wanted to map the menu actions to keyboard shortcuts in exactly the same way that Apple did. Rather than add a new key as Apple did, the control key was adopted as Microsoft’s command key, and Windows strong-armed its software vendors to follow the new shortcut convention.

It wasn’t until Windows 95 that Microsoft decided that it really needed its own true command key, but by that time, it was too late, and users had already formed habits and burned their favorite shortcuts into their brains.

Online Keyboard Mapping Resources

Now that you know why the two operating systems look at keyboards differently, how do you adjust smoothly?  There are actually some great online resources from both Apple and Microsoft that map all of the keyboard shortcuts and even show some of the PC to Mac equivalents. It may take keeping a browser window open with these resources on hand for a while, but trust me, you’ll get there, and you’ll be glad you did.

• Apple Support Article ID: HT1343 - Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts
• Apple Support Article ID: HT2514 - Switch 101: On Windows, I used to…
• Mac OSX Reference Library – Apple Human Interface Guidelines - Keyboard Shortcuts Quick Reference
• Microsoft Support Article ID: 970299 - Keyboard mappings using a PC keyboard on a Macintosh

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I wish meaningless facts like the viewing angle of Apple’s 23″ Apple Cinema Display and the price of the Dual 500Mhz PowerMac G4 were just stuck in my head, but they’re not. I cheat quite a bit, but not by running all over the web trying to find wiki pages and old press releases. Instead, I use Mactracker.

This donation-ware application that’s available for Mac and iPhone is a tool I fire up before starting a blog post about Apple or Macintosh products. In addition to price and technical specs, Mactracker also contains history of models, their code names, and the startup chime associated with that machine. As a blogger and fanboy, this application can keep me entertained for hours, and I’m never caught wondering what stock hard drive came on the 600Mhz iBook G3 (it was 20GB).

I hope you’ll download this great application and send a nice little donation off to the developer. I discovered Mactracker in 2004, but the developer has been updating it with info since 2001, which is quite the commitment from one guy.

“Make no mistake about it,” Dan says, “the era of the familiar PC mouse is coming to an end. It may not be a 2012-style apocalypse (and the mouse will surely hang on in some form for many years to come), but the door is slowly shutting on the universal acceptance of this single iconic piece of hardware that we have equated with personal computing for decades….”

I beg to differ.

Dan suggests that the mouse will be replaced by an array of touch input devices and icon-focused operating systems built (not always for the better, I congratulate him for acknowledging) around expediency over flexibility, noting that touchscreen tablet PCs have been around for years but never generated more than niche-level consumer interest until Apple’s iPhone, followed by the iPod touch, changed that, finally popularizing one-to-one touch among the masses. At least to a point.

Disruptive Success

Dan predicts “disruptive success” for the iPad in building a larger touch environment that has so far received almost universal praise, noting that while it may not be as productivity-friendly as your ThinkPad or MacBook (to say the least), he thinks adding a Bluetooth keyboard and Apple’s iWork apps will give you a reasonable approximation of a laptop experience.

I disagree. One of my biggest gripes about the iPad is its lack of support for the very device Dan Ackerman seems enthusiastic about shoveling dirt on the coffin of — the mouse. Even with an external keyboard, you still have to poke around on the too-easily-smeared-with-finger-grease touchscreen for pointing, clicking, and dragging, the body-English associated with which, even when the iPad is mounted on a stand or dock, can most charitably be described as awkward and non-intuitive, involving reaching past the keyboard at a clumsy angle.

Touchpads a Touchscreen Trojan Horse?

Ackerman, suggests that multitouch touchpads have served as a Trojan Horse for touchscreens for some years now, with laptops outselling desktop PCs and the portables’ ubiquitous touchpads acclimating people to touch control, Apple again leading the way, incorporating multitouch gestures into its oversized trackpads, observing that nowadays it’s hard to find a laptop touchpad that doesn’t support some kind of swiping, zooming, or flipping with two or more fingers.

Well, yes, but…I’m a dyed-in-the-wool laptop computer aficionado, and I own an aluminum unibody MacBook that supports Apple’s latest gesture-supporting multitouch trackpad technology, but guess what? I virtually never make use of it, with my MacBook spending most of its runtime mounted on a stand hooked up to an external keyboard, and not only one conventional mouse, but also a rollerbar, a foot mouse, and from time to time trackballs, freestanding touchpads, or a graphics tablet — all input modes that appeal to me a great deal more than pawing the display screen.

Even on my other laptops that I use in mobile mode, I almost always hook up an external mouse if I’m going to be using the machine for more than a few minutes at a time, and I always carry a mouse in my laptop case or backpack.

Touch Migrating Beyond Tablets and Smartphones

Ackerman concedes that the laptop-to-iPad comparison may not be a one-to-one match, and that the tablet device is not a fully workable replacement for even a netbook for on-the-go computing, but remains adamant that icon-driven touch interfaces will continue to migrate into more-traditional laptops and netbooks, with OS desktop interfaces increasingly presented in a manner supporting different input methods, such as touch, instead of being primarily mouse-driven.

That view is, regrettably, corroborated by a recent Gartner Group report that predicts more than 50 percent of PCs purchased for users under the age of 15 will have touchscreens by 2015. “What we’re going to see is the younger generation beginning to use touchscreen computers ahead of enterprises,” comments Leslie Fiering, Gartner research vice president. “By 2015, we expect more than 50 percent of PCs purchased for users under the age of 15 will have touchscreens, up from fewer than 2 percent in 2009.”

Schism Developing Between Touch Aficionados and Professional Traditionalists

However, Gartner also perceives a developing schism between younger consumer users and serious workers in the enterprise, projecting that fewer than 10 percent of PCs sold to enterprises for mainstream knowledge workers in 2015 will have touchscreens.

Gartner predicts the overwhelming majority of slate, tablet and touch-enabled convertible devices planned for 2010 will have a consumer focus, and that resistance to touch-enabled devices’ adoption by serious workers in the enterprise can be attributed to heavy requirements for typing and text input, the “muscle memory” of mouse users, and the potential problems of moving a user’s hands from the keyboard to the touchscreen creating particular adoption barriers for knowledge workers. It will be consumers and education users who will form the preponderance of earliest adopters for touch-enabled PCs and notebooks.

“As with many recent technology advances, touch adoption will be led by consumers and only gradually get accepted by the enterprise,” says Ms. Fiering. “What will be different here is the expected widespread adoption of touch by education, so that an entire generation will graduate within the next 10 to 15 years for whom touch input is totally natural.”

Even Dan Ackerman admits computer mice are not going to disappear overnight, despite the premature obituary in his column’s title, but he still contends that like New York Times obits for aging celebrities, the computer mouse has already been written and filed away, and it may not be that long before it gets to run. I suggest and hope it will be a good long time yet before that becomes necessary.

Image courtesy of Flickr user raneko

Icon Garden

Any discussion of Apple’s icon design should begin with a discussion of some of Apple’s most infamous 8-bit icons from its original GUI. Apple used to feature large versions of these in its icon garden at 1 Infinite Loop, however at some point around 1998, Apple removed the icons. Featured amongst the garden were classic icons, such as the eraser, hand, stopwatch, and even Clarus the Dogcow. (Moof!)

Check out how the paint bucket is "filling" the grass with green and the paint brush and pencil have just finished "creating" the flowers.

Whoa! The eraser is erasing the flowers!

Similar Colors

Depending on how cluttered your Dock is, you may or may not have noticed that the most prominent colors chosen by Apple for its icons is from the blue family. This trend was originally favored in Apple’s hardware (the original Bondi blue iMac, for instance). Associated with the sky or the ocean (a la OS X’s original UI codename Aqua), the blue also evokes a sense of stability, trust and calmness. (It really does make the infamous Blue Screen of Death a lot less harsh than if it were red.) It wasn’t until the release of Leopard that Apple shipped with a default desktop background that wasn’t blue.

Evolution of Icons

Some icons in OS X have evolved over time. Occasionally there may be some rhyme and reason to changing icons, such as the inclusion of the video camera for when iChat AV was originally launched, or the major redesign of iMovie between iMovie HD and iMovie ’08.

Other times, icons are seemingly changed sporadically, like the evolution of the iTunes icons. Originally every new version came with a new icon, but even that trend has wavered.

Other applications have also seen different icons with new versions, such as Backup, iDVD, iPhoto and Keynote. Though the Keynote icon has not seen a drastic change since Keynote ’08, the version that ships with iWork ’09 updates the date of the fourth-quarter report on the icon to Q4 2009.

Alternative Uses

Some icons depict their contents, such as the icon for a photo or a typeface. Other icons present users with dynamically updating information, such as the iCal icon which changes to reflect the current date. Other icons “change” by badges that indicate various information (unread emails, download speeds, etc.).

Another example are icons for exported vCards. If you have set them up in Address Book, they will export with their photo in the icon.

With the introduction of Snow Leopard this fall, users will once again begin to find new uses for icons, as the operating system allows users to preview media directly on the icon itself.

Bonus iPhone Icon

If you haven’t had a chance yet to take your iPhone or iPod touch into Starbucks, when you do, you’ll notice a new icon in your iTunes Store app. Specifically the Starbucks icon, and it is the only navbar icon on the device that exists in full color and not the usual masked blue color as typically seen.

Have you noticed any other unique or interesting icon changes or features?

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He also mentions there’s “more sniffing from people who love Macs about how inadequate the current crop are.”

I believe there’s some truth to that statement. The gist of his article is that netbooks are great, and people who don’t get that may be missing something.

People who don’t think these are great computers must not have a sense of history. My first personal computer, purchased in 1979, cost $10,000, had two small floppy drives, 64K of memory and ran a very bare-bones OS.

True enough but, unlike David, it’s the sense of history that has me uninterested in netbooks, not enamored of them.

First of all, the argument should be about today’s netbook stacked up to today’s laptop. After all, that’s the choice the consumer is making. However, if I use the perspective of history, consider the $700 Radio Shack laptop I bought circa ’89. It was text-based with a Tandy “easy to use” text front-end. It stored everything on a floppy. I bought it to write on the road, then I’d import the text into Word 4.0 on my Mac SE/30 to format it. Worked like a charm. I consider that somewhat analogous to what a netbook does for people today (i.e., supplement their desktop PC).

But in ’89 I could not get desktop performance in my lap. The average laptop cost way more, with way less power, than the average desktop. Both gaps have closed tremendously since then. Especially in the last half-decade, where chips and laptop design have received the engineering attention necessary as the market demanded more portable solutions. The trade-off now in performance between laptops and desktops is almost trivial, and the price delta is much smaller as well. No, I’m not talking about a monster desktop video editing station with three video cards, a 2TB RAID array, and six monitors. But then, neither is David. The 2.4GHz unibody MacBook I’m using right now runs neck and neck with the 2.8GHz iMac I bought only a year earlier — including graphic-intensive apps — yet it cost nearly half as much. That’s a price/performance delta unimaginable even 10 years ago, let alone 30.

I do not “sniff” at netbooks. If someone wants a machine analogous to what I bought 20 years ago — in terms of price/performance — go for it. Everyone has their own needs. But back then, we chose between “good” performance (desktop) and “bad” performance but with portability (laptop). Today’s buyer can choose portability with “good” performance (laptop) or “bad” performance (netbook). For maybe 25 years we lived with much weaker performance on portable machines because we had to; that’s no longer true. That Tandy served me well, but I’ll pass on taking a step backwards for something similar today.

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