Misc Thoughts

I haven't had anything too significant worth writing a blog about lately, as such I am just going to post some minor throughts and comments about the past couple of weeks...


iPod Localization... or the Lack Thereof

My family got my brother-in-law a nice 20GB iPod Video as a combined Birthday/Christmas present this year and although the unit is pretty sweet I was a bit miffed at Apple's lack of localization options to it.

For example, we live in Edmonton, a city that is well over a million people, the capital of the province of Alberta and was once home to Apples Western Canada HQ back in the early glory years of the 80s. As such you would think that Edmonton would be one of the major cities that you can localize your iPod to? Ha fat chance! The nearest city that you can localize your iPod to is about 400KM away and although it does have the same size of population it is also a much hated southern rival.

I am sure there are plenty other of examples of the lackluster localization efforts that Apple has put into the iPod and I am sure that other people will agree that this is a slap in the face. Its a sign that one of the coolest pieces of technology on the market today has a few missing parts and its a sign that Apple really doesn't care about ensuring that your iPod is something that you can personalize and make it yours. And yes I know this is probably silly to some of you, but it is a reason why I will not buy an iPod (and sadly enough I was fully planning on it).


Awful NHL Officiating

I probably sound like every other "homer" fan of any sports team but my god are the officials in the NHL awful this year. A perfect example of this is the Oiler-Rangers game that was one last night, there were lots of missed calls on both teams and even more BS calls that were made. My only hope is that someone at the league seriously reviews that game and brings the smack down onto those refs because it is sorely needed this year.


Apple & Intel

The first new Apple products with Intel based CPUs are on the market finally and Apple has its best spin doctors pushing the hype and marketing machine into full blast with what I would at best call "Dirty Marketing". Here is a sample...

Apple's television ads for its new Macs boast that for years, Intel's chips have been "trapped inside PCs--dull little boxes, dutifully performing dull little tasks." Now, the voiceover proclaims, the Intel processor will finally be set free

I just love how Apple's guys give PC users a back handed complement. Who knew that 95% of the computing world was doing "dull little tasks" like making games, doing complext graphics, VFX for movies, running the web servers of the world and so on and so forth. In fact I believe that for the past, oh ten years (or longer), the PC has been bitch slapping Mac based computers in every market. But leave it up to the spin doctors at Apples to ensure that there are idiots out there who still think that the Mac is best for markets like education or graphics, completely ignoring the fact that its not 1984 and the rest of the market doesn't use command line OSes like DOS. God if Microsoft has the marketing team from Apple the whole world would be singing the priases of Windows as if it was the second coming.

My last thought on this creative marketing from Apple comes from Steve Jobs way back in the day when he introduced the G3 line of Macs at Macworld. At the time Jobs stood up before the crowd and told everyone about how the PowerPC chip will smoke the Intel based x86 CPU, how its the greatest thing for video editing and graphics. I find it funny now that Apple is forced to eat crow because the PowerPC really wasn't that great, but then I have to question whether this is another one of those bold statements by Apple that will never really live up to the hype too.