The Macalope

InfoWorld’s Neil McAllister gives netbooks a serious fluffing in his piece called “The shape of the coming netbook revolution”.
For example, did you know that netbooks are…
Cheap, portable and packed with features that cater to Net-savvy consumers…
“Packed with features”? Ah, like email and a web browser and… a screen… and, er… that other thing.
And “Net-savvy”? [...]

This week’s piece at Macworld looks at the tablet thingamajiggy that is surely coming soon because everyone says so.

Glenn Fleishman noted this on Twitter yesterday, but Apple is no longer sending reminder emails to sign up for AppleCare. This burned the Macalope as well, who had planned to sign up at the end of the one year of warranty coverage, expected to be reminded then missed the date.
The horny one can only [...]

A bit more on the Microsoft ad.

He actually agrees with ZDNet’s Larry Dignan is about the Mac mini.
Not completely, of course (there’s no real comparison between the mini and a netbook, for example), but at the price point the mini is at — even with nine gajillion ports in the back — it just doesn’t seem to cut it. OK, [...]

Not.

Michael Gartenberg, quoted in this Macworld piece by Jim Dalrymple, provides a good tonic to the nonsense in the previous pieces:
“Economic slowdowns don’t stop spending, but it means people will be more careful what they spend their money on,” Michael Gartenberg, vice president of market research firm JupiterMedia and editor of the MobileDevicesToday blog, told [...]

Guess who!

Speaking of professional trolls, ZDNet’s Robin Harris provides a veritable omnibus of stupid. An omnishortbus, if you will.
The title?
Apple’s new MacBooks: flop or fiasco?
What prompts this bon mot? What appears to be an unattributed report saying Apple has cut MacBook orders by 20-30% in DigiTimes, the outfit that said Apple would offer an AMD-powered [...]

Wired’s news feed teases Adam DuVander’s Webmonkey piece on the so-called “Apple tax” thusly:
It’s no secret that Apple’s computers cost more than PCs with similar specs.
Well, when you put it like that, it must be true!
But Apple’s disclosure of its sales figures and estimated market share at a press event Tuesday raises new questions about [...]