Oh, well. Apple's big event for the fall has come and gone and there's not a single goddamn thing there that I was hoping for. No netbook. No touchscreens. No design apps. No "student" or notebook optimized apps. Just more shiny for folks with deep pockets and more crowing about how much money they're making. I guess that if I eventually buy a MacBook some of that stuff will help me out but it wasn't exactly a list of my hit parade. Or, for that matter, the hit parade of any of us in the fastest growing segment of the computer industry - those who have already bought netbooks and folks like me who will soon.
I can guarantee that now literally millions of people will be buying devices form somebody else who would have preferred to buy Macs. But we just can't wait any longer. So now it's down to either buying a 7" screen Sylvania and get used to "gOS" or go back to Liliputing and figure out one last time the best compromise between a good, small, inexpensive device and the one that best can be converted to run the Mac OS. I may give in and buy one of those pokey but ungawdly sweet HPs that are being phased out right now. The price is right and the non-silicon aspects of it are the best around. In theory I should probably consider getting a Gigabyte and converting it. Such a beautiful prospect. But I just don't want to lay out over a thousand bucks (all told) and something like three days of work at this point. Better to be something less pricey and plan to think again in six months or so.
Anybody care to take bets on the size of the sales bumps the various netbook vendors will see in the next few days as all this pent-up demand gets released?
Anyway, obviously I'm rambling here. The only reason that I've considered this worth an entry is that I'm pretty damn sure, as I said above, that at least hundreds of thousands of others are having these same thoughts and making very similar plans as I write this. Maybe Apple has some great sophisticated plan that we're not being told about but I can tell you right now that they're forgoing at least several hundred million dollars worth of sales by leaving us all high and dry like this. And, frankly, having waited so long, a lot of us will now make other decisions and start, reluctantly but even so, to migrate away from the Mac OS to Linux. These are not just sales that are delayed. These are folks many of whom will simply move on. The window of opportunity has just closed and Apple has passed it by without acknowledging that it was ever there.
Oh, well. Nothing to do but move on. We're probably better off in the long run moving away from a proprietary OS anyway.
-Rustin
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