(Now that's a real pseudonym, ain't it!)THE
iBOOK IS HERE. Long Live the iBook!
It's a cute little thing, for sure, and promises
to be a runaway best seller all over again, just like the
iMac. Oh yes, it has its drawbacks, but on the whole it's
just great. My kids will love to have one each. ($1,599-times-two
is bit more than I can afford right now, though, getting two
iBooks, one each for Arthur and Cyrus, aged 10 and 12 -- and
that's not even counting the AirPort, or for that matter an
extra iBook for myself.)
But great as the iBook is, it could be greater
couldn't it? I mean, couldn't it?
Remember my article FeatherMac
from a couple months ago? All the iBook needs to make it almost
as seductive as I had envisaged it is to have a few things taken
away! (At least I got the color right; well, nearly.)
The iBook as it stands is a computer for someone
-- someone young, obviously! -- who will use it as
his (or even more likely, her) only computer. But as I asked
in my FeatherMac article, what about those of us who
already have a desktop?
For us, those of us with a G3 or even an iMac sitting proudly
on the desk at home, the iBook has a lot that we just don't
need!
For starters, take away that built-in
CD-ROM drive. If I have one at home -- or better still, if
like you, I have a DVD drive -- why duplicate? Taking it out
should shave a few C-notes off the iBook's price, not to mention
a few pounds off its weight.
And a hard drive that big. If all my files are at home, comfortably
lodged on my iMac's 4-Gig hard drive, do I really need another
3.2 Gigs (with all those duplicated files, and no telling which
one is the most recent)? Replace the hard drive with a few solid-state
storage devices, like Sony's chewing-gum-sized Memory Sticks
or industry-standard CompactFlash
cards for a total of, say 200 MB storage (hey, do you really
need more, just for the road? If you do, buy a PowerBook!).
At only 1/8 of an inch thick and a mere 2.2 ounces in weight
each, Memory Sticks could shave another pound or two
off the weight of the iBook as well, not to mention an inch
and a half off its thickness.
And dump that lousy mono speaker. Provide a decent
pair of retractable stereo headphones instead. That, too,
should slim down the iBook, not to mention making downloaded
MP3 files sound the way God intended them to.
So: with no drives or speakers to power, you can have a smaller
battery, right? Reduce it by half, thickness-wise, and you've
got yourself a deal, Cupertino!
The resulting
iBook Lite should be about half the weight -- and half
the thickness -- of the iBook Hevi, and cost considerably
less: maybe even under a grand. (It'll need a bit of redesign,
of course, to tell which is which: stick with the white, cut
down on the blueberry or tangerine, and of course make it
thinner and maybe not quite so well rounded -- ha, ha.) Now
tell me: how many of us with a Blue-and-White G3 Tower or
even an iMac at home, would pass up the opportunity to take
our work on the road for a measly $998, not to mention lugging
around only a few ounces over a kilo?
Heck, at that price, maybe even I could afford one each for
Cy and Arthur, and a third for myself too. (Oh well, one
can always dream.)
... (not his real name -- but you figured that out already,
right?) ... calls himself a "Thinker", especially about the
future. He thinks that's where he'll be spending the rest of
his life (but who's he kidding, eh? Doesn't he realize
it's always going to be now?)
Most people say to him
"You can't be serious" -- and they're right, he can't. (But
then, who can be serious about the future, seeing as
how anything can happen in it, and usually does ... er, will?)
His best book -- indeed his only book -- is entitled The
Seventh Generation, and its shareware version in Adobe
Acrobatformat is available for download from his alter-ego's
web site (under construction right now) at http://cpu2308.adsl.bellglobal.com.
It's all about the next 150 years or so, and where technology
might take us in that amount of time. (Just $5.00 -- cheap!
And well worth it, though he says so himself). Check it out.
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