Tips From Tony Blog

There are already pictures floating around the Internet, showing folks who are lining up to be among the first to own a snazzy new iPhone.
I, myself, had even made specific plans to do something quite similar, but I’ve changed my mind, after receiving new information:
I plan to stay at home, waiting until 6PM this Friday, at which point I’m going to visit the Apple Store website (using my own Tony-specific link so that I can get credit for the sale), and then I will order the phone, along with some custom engraving on the back (at no extra charge). It’ll say “If Found, Please Call”, followed by my home phone number. As I’m getting older, I tend to keep leaving things behind… And embarrassingly often, too.
I WAS planning to try to elbow my way in to a local AT&T store and go through the hassle of setting up my new AT&T account (I’m switching my whole family from Verizon). Now, I know that the mere act of hooking up an iPhone to my Mac will cause iTunes to start up and to guide me through the process automatically. I can’t imagine why I’d want to stress out, dealing with store employees who always know less than I do.
I’ve been a busy, busy man, getting ready for the arrival of the iPhone. Many of my clients are asking me questions on a daily basis, and nerds everywhere are collaring me in public, trying to get the inside angle. I’ll be glad when things start to settle down again after Friday.
For my own part, I have been busy converting DVD’s and other movie files to the native format that iPhones love so much. I now have every episode of 51 different TV series ready for viewing on the iPhone’s sharp, wide screen, plus around 800 nature/history/educational documentaries. The entire first season of Ugly Betty (all 22 episodes) takes up around 3/4 of the storage in the 8-gigabyte iPhone. Will I truly WATCH all of that stuff? Probably not, but 1) I’m compulsive and 2) I’ve been a reader since age four. I grew up with a large family library (all of which I had read by age eight, including the encyclopedia). I like having lots of choices!
My favorite part about the iPhone is that I won’t have to carry multiple devices any more. I’ve got a big, clunky iPod with the 40-gigabyte hard drive the size of a quarter. I treat that iPod as if it were filled with nitroglycerin. It has been repaired or replaced many times! I had an iPod shuffle that I dearly loved, but it was so tiny that it just plain disappeared on me one day. My current phone is a Treo 650, and I won’t miss it a bit. It has a zillion features, none of which function at better than ten percent of what I would expect in terms of plain usefulness. It’s a heavy, fat bag of awkwardness and poorly-planned ideas. Good riddance!

These look very, very nice - no wonder Apple is selling more laptops than desktop computers, and the rate is increasing.

I like these new laptops because they can handle more RAM, FINALLY. The new “Santa Rosa” 64-bit motherboard design allows owners of these new MacBook Pros to keep shoveling in bigger RAM chips as they get cheaper. Right now, Apple claims that you can put “up to 4 gigabytes” of RAM inside, but I suspect that that number is just representative of what Apple is currently offering. When chips get cheaper and more capacious, I wouldn’t be surprised to see thirty-two gigabytes or more (as is now offered for the Mac Pro towers), as the years go by. Let’s say that you buy one with one gigabyte of RAM - In theory, the new MacBook Pro and the Mac Pro towers (and G5 towers) can recognize and deal with ten billion times as much!

I’m holding off on any opinion concerning the newest, flagship 17″ MacBook Pro, with the same, 1080p high-definition resolution as a 24″ screen. That’s a lot of pixels, and they’re awfully small and packed tightly together! I suspect that it will be a lot more appealing once Leopard (OS X 10.5) comes out, with its resolution-independent interface. This means that you can re-size everything that you deal with on your Mac, as small or as big as you want, and never see any gritty pixels in your menus, windows, icons or text. I’ll wait until I see Leopard and the new high-definition screen before I get too excited. My middle-aged eyes are having issues with the screen that I have!