• The Progress bar has square corners.

So yeah, this article is not really ready yet. But that’s not stopping me from posting it! There’s a certain something about the cusp, the moments between leaving and arriving, that captivates the imagination. The trepidation of leaving behind a world you understand and the excitement of coming somewhere new, the fear that you’ll crash and burn somewhere in between. All these meet and are best expressed in the form of, well, a progress bar.

More insight later. Assuming my computer doesn’t crash and burn¹

1. Wait, how am I writing this article if my computer’s all tied up installing things?

The late date is at Mobile Me’s personal request, if request it was. “I was always terrible at remembering dates,” Me said from his hospital server in Apple’s data center. he then laughed feebly. “the first day of the new year, it’s got a nice feel to it, doesn’t it?”

Mobile Me will be survived by iOS, OSX, and of iCloud, who stands to inherit Mobile Me’s domain name and email addresses.

“What to say about Mobile Me? Wow, we go way back,” said an aging Snow Leopard. “We grew up together, really. He started reaching out to the iPad though, and I think that’s what did for ‘im. All that stretching, trying to keep all those things in line this late in the game, well, it’s just not what he was made for is it? he shoulda stuck to the iDisk, I told ‘im. ‘Course, I’m one to talk, ain’t I? He’ll probably hang around long enough to see me in the grave and that new long head OSX 10.7 swaggering all over the place. Ah well.”

“I’m grateful to Mobile Me for everything he’s done,” said the iPad. “Without him my Calendar App would have been just another toy for people with access to Exchange servers, but Mobile Me helped families keep track of each other, and that’s a good feeling. I’m sure iCloud will pick up where his dad left off, but he can’t ever fill his shoes. For one thing, web services don’t wear shoes, and for another, well, iCloud’s just a little too free, if you know what I mean. I mean, Mobile Me didn’t just let anybody ride, he had some class. But it’s a new day, so we move on I guess. Rest well, Mobile Me, and thanks.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy hanging out with other people talking on their iPhon 4’s, while tweeting on their iPads, but it’s different this time,” said a young man wearing glasses that would have been in vogue in the late 50’s and a hairstyle that looked like somebody stuck his hair in a blender with a bunch of used motor oil and turned it on. “But if we all get together and try to download Lion at the same time it’ll slow all of us down. Sure, Apple may have a huge new data center in North Carolina, but we’ve got a 5Mbps connection on this end, and you can only pass so many downloads over that at a time.”

Several Apple Sophisticates have suggested having “Apres Load” where everyone brings their newly lionized MacBooks to a party and discuss how awesome the world is now that their trackpads do neat tricks, but “it’s just not the same” moaned a person of indeterminate gender into their faux-martini.

Several of the more seasoned apple faithful were also somewhat at a loss as to how to celebrate the new OS in a manner that truly commemorated one of the most economical and at the same time most graphically inhanced versions of OSX without crowding each other bandwidth-wise. “If we could set up some sort of AppleTalk protocol to share the file from system to system it would be different, but this new Mac App Store doesn’t really work that way.” Said a person who drew blank stares from the hipster graphic design community when he said AppleTalk. “Is that like, networking stuff? Like, an airport?” one of them timidly suggested. “My IT guys take care of all that stuff for me.”

One person in the back made a wizard of Oz joke, but nobody thought it was funny.

Apple was unlikely to comment.

“It’s like they don’t even care about us any more,” Said W. H. Iner, president of MOWERS³ . We happily moved over to the new Intel chips as quick as possible, and six months later Apple replaced our beloved “Core Duo” chips with “Core 2 Duo” chips. That name doesn’t even make sense, by the way. How does the “2” in the middle of “Core” and “Duo” mean 64-bit instead of 32-bit?”

Neither Apple nor Intel deigned to respond, but mathematicians were quick to point out that 32*2 does indeed equal 64.

“It’s like they want us to all buy new Apples every five years or something,” Iner continued.

While Apple was still silent on this point, economists would be forced to conclude that, being a company that sells computer hardware, it would be in Apple’s best interest for their customers to replace their computer hardware on a regular basis.

“After all, how hard can it be to just sort of translate all their precious 64-bit code into 32-bit code for us to use? It wouldn’t run that much slower, and then we could use all the shiny new features like Launchpad and that new Expose thingy.”

Apple has yet to provide a reply to this claim, but several Computer Scientists brains exploded before they were able to provide a coherent reply. Jumbled statements about “exponential complexity” and “blazingly stupid people” were amongst their final words. One was able to calmly address the second point, noting that the video cards in these systems would now be considered underpowered even by Apple’s fairly lax standards, and the fancy new graphical thingies in Lion would look “incredibly terrible” on the six year old hardware.

“I just don’t know how Apple can expect to keep growing if they ignore their user’s needs after just six years,” Iner concluded.

While we are still awaiting a response from Apple on this point, but economists mildly reminded us that Apple is one the largest and fastest-growing companies on the planet at this point. How the lack of sales to the members of MOWERS would affect this statistic has yet to be seen.

1. two
2. well, recent-ish
3. Mac Owners Who Eschew RISC-based Systems

And what have I learned? What treasures do I bring from my sojourns? Treasures of knowledge? Rich spices from Idaho? Alligator teeth and knowledge of the fountain of youth from Florida? Red Dirt from Moab? Well, yes to the last one. LOTS of red dirt. So much red dirt. Seriously, half of southern Utah is still in my wife’s Suburban. But rich spices from Idaho? What do you want? Beet sugar? Potatoes? They have those. But I was in Boise, where all they have is a mall and lots of suburbs. And Trees. And a river. No spices though, is my point. Not a spice-laden region of earth.

But, I have just invented one treasure that I bring to you, a genuine, made up letter from Steve Jobs to all Apple employees, titled “Some Thoughts On Being the Best”

Some Thoughts on Being the Best

Heed me, O Minions,

The great day is soon upon us. The war that started with the humble iPod has seen its killing stroke in the iPad. We now rule the mobile world. Let us therefore celebrate! Make glad! Feast we now on ambrosia and drink we deep the mead of victory!

In your case this means you get an extra fifteen minutes on your lunch break this Tuesday. Being drunk on work time is still a firing offense.

But we must not stop now. There are still those who have sought to cast aspersions on our rise, magnifying our few flaws into “gates”, seeking to embarrass us. This shall not stand.

Also, Phil Schiller shall no longer stand next to me. He’s too tall. But I digress. Elegantly, intelligently, perhaps, but it’s digression nonetheless.

Many of you have wondered at the new campus, and indeed you should, for it is a wonder of the modern world. But why? Why have we put the time into making this round wonder, and what inspired its design?

Well, the click wheel of course. But there’s more to it than that.

Soon, our masterpiece will be finished, then shall the chosen employees be taken up in our new Campus to the true new campus: The moon.

Yes, in order that we may escape the slings and arrows of outrageous Windows users, all key Apple employees will be lifted to Apple Luna, our new campus on the near side of the moon. This position will give us many advantages, not least of which is the fact that on the moon I can expect to live a good thirty or forty more years, and by that time I expect that we’ll have some kind of immortality treatment. But again, I digress.

From our inaccessible fortress we will watch them fight each other, Windows vs. Linux and periodically we shall send down our blessings upon them in the form of new mobile operating systems and Jony’s latest thinking in industrial design.

He’s really into pleather lately, so expect some interesting new iPads, by the way.

Apple Luna will be ecologically sound, as there is currently no plant or animal life on the moon. Our terraforming efforts will begin immediately, and we expect that in a few years we will be ready to open the houses on One Lunar Loop. Until then you’ll all be basically living at your desks. But the cafeteria will be cheaper, in recognition of the unique situation you’ve been put in, which is to say, fully dependent on Apple for all food and housing and everything.

Those of you who have not been assigned desks in the new complex probably don’t need to worry about packing. After all, we need a few people here planetside to keep things on track.

Steve.

1. Except for my wife, kids, and friends
2. see above exception
3. Idaho and Alaska mostly
4. Also I got a new job, but that’s no big deal

The point is, Time-stamped hilarity is coming your way later today. I’m not dead. I think I’ll go for a walk.

3rd Year in a row!

Just so you all know. Thank you as always for your support! regular¹ posts resume Monday.

1. well, more or less

Thanks for letting me know?

from http://www.macworld.com/appguide/app.html?id=89351

- The iPad is pretty big.
- It really is very fast, which shouldn’t be a surprise, because everything it’s running was designed for it.
- The multitouch and the keyboard are fine. I’m typing this on the new WordPad app for iPad.
- People who just dropped hundreds of dollars for a device rarely complain about said device.
- Stephen Fry was right: Douglas Adams would have loved this thing.

I'm only paying for one of those!

This week we cover Pandora|One, the music service that

This Just In!

Q: Wait, so I get preempted before I get so much as one line? What gives?

Breaking News!

Q: I guess so.

The Crazy Apple News Site’s top News Analyst & Team Enthusiast (“NATE”) is being sent by their top secret employer to some top-secret training (the training is so secret that it requires a hyphen!)

In Mountain. View. California.

Q: So? What’s so special about Mountain View?

Home of Google, only seven minutes from 1 Infinite Loop, it’s like finally going to MacWorld or WWDC, only without all the other people there or anything remotely Apple-related going on. Stay tuned for some Crazy On The Road posts soon!

Q: And it’s not even a long post, either. Really? Really? That’s all we get?

We would normally return you to our iFAQ already in progress at this point, but we’re too excited. Also this week’s “Q” is kind of a jerk.

Q: Oh, now that’s just cold.

I'm glad they made it simple this year.

Crazy Apple News posts start again on Monday!  Thank you all for your support! It means a lot to me.

-Nate Dickson

If you need a more immediate fix, download Hordes of Orcs, then re-read this classic iFAQ written by Grug the Orc from Hordes of Orcs.

Okay, back into the breach!

• 13-inch MacBook is now a MacBook Pro. It feels special.
• After ripping on Windows 7 for being Windows Vista 2.0, Apple tries to keep you from noticing that all they did was add the word “Snow” to the preexisting leopard.
• The MacBook Pro line gains SD card slots. “This is the digital card format of the future!” proclaims an excited audience
• It’s revealed that the MacBook lineup is so “green” that they all go out and plant trees when you aren’t using them. PC laptops, for contrast, signal a special machine in Redmond that cuts down a tree every time Windows boots up.
• something called Dock Expose gets touted as the best feature ever ever ever.  It looks kinda complex, but we’re sure that’s just because we don’t yet understand it.
• QuickTime X has a new “creepy techno-eye” icon
• At one point, they claim that Snow Leopard will “blow up your thumbnails”, which sounds like an “enhanced inerrogation” technique to us.
• New motherboards can have 16 billion gigabytes of RAM.  Java apps will still be dog slow, however.
• the new iPhone OS will take the iPhone in a completely new direction: GAMES! Okay, it’s an old direction, but boy did they ever demo the heck out of new games today!
• iPhone OS 3.0 will have features that were included in Android 1.0, Pre 1.0, and for that matter, the OS that runs the Motorola RAZR
• If you lose your phone, Mobile ME will go out and tell you where it is, then tell whoever has it that it’s yours and you want it back please. Also, MM will wipe your phone clean, so they can’t steal your. *ahem* passwords.
• Not one but two feature demos failed. This never would have happened if Steve had been in charge.
• Oh, right, there’s a new iPhone. It’s got a compass. You should buy it.  Also, apparently Apple hired MacHeist to make the commercial for it.

And that’s all folks!  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go get some sleep.