Monthly Archive for January, 2008

Page 2 of 2

Nostradamnyoualltohell

Published on 08/01/2008 in everything. 0 Comments

In the run up to every Apple press event since they birthed the MacBook Pro line the rumour ecosystem has been predicting with absolute certainty an Intel-powered replacement for the 12″ Powerbook G4.

MacBook Mini, MacBook Thin, MacBook Nano, sub-macbook, ultra-portable mac, call it what you will but like disparate middle-eastern religions they all point to roughly the same idea. Namely, some laptop that is smaller than any current offering. It is also widely believed to be about to be the first mac without an internal optical drive since they became standard in the 90s.

After that is when it all goes sideways. Some say it will be a multi-touch tablet, or have an extra-wide multi-touch trackpad. It might have an 11″ screen, a 12″, a 13″. It might have a solid-state hard disk, or an iPod-esque 1.8″ spinner, or just a plain old 2.5″. It might be a pro spec machine to make your wallet weep, or a moderately priced secondary machine. It has a LED backlight. No, an OLED screen. It could slide into a dock, or have an external DVD drive. It might fly you to the goddamn moon. 

Without touching on exactly what I think it’ll be*, It is my firm belief that Apple have had this thing built since the rumours first appeared. The screen, the terribly thin casing, the minimal battery, all of it built well over a year ago and ready to ship, awaiting just the right brain. For this reason, every so often the MacBook R&D team get a fresh batch of Intel’s latest and greatest notebook chips and has a play around. Does it run cool enough? For long enough? Fast enough? Yonah and Merom have both failed to pass muster: in all their standard, low and ultra-low voltage incarnations nothing has hit that sweet-spot.

So this time Penryn steps up. It’s fabricated at a miniscule, energy-saving, cool-running 45nm, making it harder, better, faster and stronger. With several laptop-makers showing off their Penryn-based machines at CES it’s certainly ready for prime time – I guess we’ll find out if it passed Apple’s tests next week.

 

* Oh OK then. I’m expecting a 12″ screen, 2.5″ HD, about the same price as a BlackBook and so terribly, terribly tiny that Steve has no choice but to say “this is the smallest notebook, no the smallest computer we have ever shipped”. Or possibly “it’s so small, so teensy weensy, so… perfectly minute. Back off!”

impending doom

Published on 06/01/2008 in everything. 2 Comments

U keyMy keyboard is once again whole, so expect more U’s than normal today.

I suppose you’ve heard of the norovirus by now? It is a sickness whose sole purpose is to confine a grown man to the bathroom for endless hours of shitting, vomiting and weeping and apparently it’s really doing the rounds this year, driven by the annual congregation of people from all over the country as they go home for christmas and weaken the shit out of their immune systems with booze and over-eating.

Well, starting tomorrow I’m signed up for two weeks of bi-annual congregation with people from all over the country whose immune systems are weakened by stress and staying up all night on pro-plus. That’s right, it’s January exam time.

The fact that this is the very last January in which I will have to bother myself with exams is small comfort. Essentially I’m committed to spending five separate occasions stuck in a hall of 200+ plus snivelling, coughing, potentially infectious undergrads hailing from far and wide, and I have to ride a goddamn commuter coach at peak times to even get there.

U key, I key, we all key for QWERTY~

Published on 02/01/2008 in everything and geek. 2 Comments

As anyone who’s ever bought an engagement ring or dated a high-maintenance midget will tell you, little things can cost a great deal.

Last night the cat yanked the U and I keys off my laptop. Of the two, only the U key won’t go back in properly – turns out the wee mechanism underneath (pictured right, not to scale) is broken in the most tiny, delicate and unreasonable of ways. You see the little right-angled legs at the top? That isn’t a photo of mine, on mine one of the legs is broken, just one tiny little sub-millimetre protrusion is no longer where it ought be, meaning I have had to finger a little plastic nub in place of an actual key no fewer than 14 times so far while writing this post.

And a replacement? Three sodding pounds! It’s worth more per gram than most narcotics! No wonder laptops are so expensive: this keyboard alone comprises £240 worth of these little buggers, to say nothing of the keys themselves.

Rargh!