Al Gore’s American Mac
Check out this photo from the Al Gore’s American Life photo essay by Time shows Gore’s insane Mac setup, complete with three 30-inch displays. It almost looks like he could keep tabs on Global Warming from there. Yowza.
I Heart DealMac
As whiz-bang and gizmo’ed as Web sites may continue to become, you’ve got to appreciate that, at least nine times of out ten, hard work is what wins the day for a successful site or blog. (Did that sound like your grandpa wrote it? Eh? Ya derned whippersnapper?!)
If you’ve got a gift for bringing together useful information and a niche to serve well, you’ve got a nice little formula for a successful Web site.
That’s why I’ve enjoyed DealMac for years. (Their sister site, DealWeb is a fun ride, too.) By doing some heavy lifting, DealMac has made itself a one-stop stop for finding the best price of Mac-compatible peripherals –and slightly unrelated but no less interesting HiDef TVs. (And I dig their writing voice and the semi-famous, “with the mail-in rebate, it’s the lowest price we’ve seen by $12.)
It’s a good lesson for bloggers, too, to take something you’re really obsessed with (in a good way, hopefully) and then be willing to do some hard work to make the information useful for others. If you find a niche like this and can bring a certain passion to the work, it’s a great way to build some traffic for your blog.
Apple Speed Bumps MacBook
Apple announced new specs for the Apple MacBook, shipping today, including slightly higher processor speeds and a base RAM level of 1GB across the lineup. The new models also ship with larger hard drives (starting at 80GB), with pre-install options up to 200GB in storage.
The base Apple MacBook remains priced at $1099 with a DVD/CD-R combo drive; the base Black model is still $1499, but includes a 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, SuperDrive and a 160GB hard disk. All MacBook models still sport the (speed-challenged) Intel GMA 950 graphics processor that shares 64MB of RAM with system memory.
Whenever a new Mac ships, I like to take a look at the impact on the Refurbished models available in the Apple Store. The immediate effect — a white Apple MacBook 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo, 80GB drive, SuperDrive and 1GB of RAM is $999, down from $1299. After the previous speed bump, black Apple MacBooks dropped under $1000 on the Refurb list briefly; I’ll be watching for that this time, too. We’ll see. 
Stranger Than Fiction – Fun Flick
I watched Stranger Than Fiction last night and thoroughly enjoyed it…great cast, wonderful set design and photography, and the film had a great supernatural-comedy feel to it — something like a cross between Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich) and Woody Allen comedies of the 70s (Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know About Sex) with a dash of “Oh God!” and “Heaven Can Wait” tossed in for good measure. Will Ferrell does a great job in an understated straight-man lead, Emma Thompson plays a darkly comedic role very nicely, Maggie Gyllenhaal is compelling in the tattooed-girl-next-door love interest, and both Dustin Hoffman and Queen Latifah send home their supporting parts. It’s certainly stylized and a touch slim in places (Kaufman’s “Eternal Sunshine” is certainly a deeper film) but overall very entertaining and well directed by Mark Foster (Finding Neverland, Monster’s Ball).
Apple: The 10 Percent Solution
This is big news from AppleInsider: Apple snags 10 percent of U.S. retail notebook sales in March. And it speaks to something that I’ve said in the past in my blogging (and, it seems, have lost forever to the ether, thanks to my habit of changing blog software too often). 10 percent is the sweet spot for Apple. And you can see it in their numbers — this past quarter, Apple went over $7 billion in revenue for the quarter — a number that’s a little higher than the company’s annual revenues back when Steve Jobs took over the company in 1997.
That’s an annualized revenue level of an extraordinary $28 billion — a number I derive by looking up the Q1 2007 results of over $7 billion and then cleverly “annualize” by multiplying it by 4.
Microsoft’s revenue last year: $44 billion. Sony’s: $66 billion. Apple is gaining.
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