As I noodle about the thing further, I think Tam has the right of it:

Fearless Prediction of the trajectory of “$Apple Product” (where “$Apple Product” != “Newton”):

1) Product is hyped to the sky before anybody’s seen one.
2) Product is released. Mac Fanboys line up to get raped at Apple stores worldwide.
3) Cutting edge Linux-using nerds mock it mercilessly for missing features and/or compromised functionality.
4) Mac Fanboys make tearful “Leave Britney Alone!” videos, defending their overpriced, underfunctioning tchotchkes.
5) Six to twelve months later, Apple releases “”$Apple Product G2“, with its deficiencies corrected and the price slashed by half.
6) Mac Fanboys howl bloody murder.
7) Everyone buys one, or a clone of one, as another industry gets altered for good.

And yet every time the loyal faithful can be found outside the Apple store on opening day, slightly dazed-looking, bowlegged, and holding large sums of crumpled bills in one sweaty hand and a tube of KY in the other, ready to do it all again…

So it’s “wait for the second-generation version,” then.

If nothing else, one has to admire President Obama’s sheer chutzpah.  Today he made an appearance at a House Republican retreat, giving a short speech and then taking questions.  Congressman Steve King (R-IA) tweets:

President Obama just told us that most of Healthcare negotiations took place on CSPAN and that he’s a centrist and not an idealog.

Oooo-kay.  I mean, how do you even respond to that, other than to ask,  “What color is the sky on your planet, Mr. President?”

I am not susceptible to Steve Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field.  Apple’s recipe for computing and consumer electronics is to wrap mediocre-to-decent technology in fantastic industrial design, promote its products as a lifestyle choice for the discerning consumer, and then charge said discerning consumers a small fortune for the privilege of owning an Apple product (and being subject to platform lock-in that’s arguably even worse than what one experiences with Microsoft).  So while I own a 3G iPhone I have no illusions about it: sure, it’s one of the better smartphones on the market, but the Droid kicks its ass in a number of significant ways.  Similarly, while I enjoy Justin Long’s work, I’m not likely to be in the market for a Mac anytime soon.

This all said, I’m guardedly interested in the iPad notwithstanding the epic product marketing fail that is the gadget’s name.  Here’s why: in mid-2008 I bought what was then a pretty high-end Dell widescreen gaming laptop because my desktop machine was getting long in the tooth.  Even now, almost two years old, it’s a fairly adequate desktop replacement.  Last year, though, I bought a new desktop and actually tried using the laptop as a portable, first during the California Bar Exam and then bringing it on flights from San Francisco to Boston and back again.  It’s an absolute boat anchor: my shoulders still haven’t recovered, I don’t think.  As a result, over the last few months I’ve been quietly eyeing netbooks, the Kindle, the Nook, and Sony’s eReader to see if any of these platforms offered the combination of portability and function that the laptop just plain lacks.

“What about your iPhone?”  someone inevitably asks at this point.  Well, as I said above, it’s certainly one of the better smartphones on the market.  The problem is that there’s a fair bit of connected functionality that’s compromised by trying to scale it down to a handheld form factor.  Web surfing and eBook-reading are good examples: Safari and the Kindle reader app are fine and all, but anybody who doesn’t get serious eyestrain after about ten minutes of staring at the 3½” screen is a mutant from the planet Zyrgon.  The iPhone, like all smartphones, is a phone, contact manager, and music player first and foremost; extensible, sure, but portable computing solutions of last resort.

I’ve been similarly unenthused about the various e-reader gizmos.  They’re all perfectly nifty, but they’re dedicated devices and that leaves me cold.  Can’t, for example, watch streaming video on or blog from a Kindle.

So that leaves me in Netbookville, for all intents and purposes.  But for whatever reason I just haven’t been able to fall sufficiently in like with a netbook to bring myself to buy one.  They’re so small as to feel like kiddie laptops, and when you’re dealing with a 9″ LCD screen there’s something to be said for tall and narrow (like an e-reader) rather than short and wide (like a laptop).  Tablet PC manufacturers were, I think, onto something, even if the category never quite took off the way they hoped.

Thus, the iPad.  Ignoring the Kool-Aid guzzling clowns who’re claiming this heralds the end of the PC era, it seems to be a pretty good, though not perfect, solution.  It’s small and light.  While manufacturer propaganda about battery life is an open joke in the industry, if the iPad’s good for even half of what Apple claims it’ll be competitive with netbooks and have enough juice for a cross-continental plane flight.  It’ll run everything the iPhone can.  Though I’m skeptical about the iPad’s backlit screen being as easy on the eyes as the e-ink on a Kindle, the iBook store seems like another way for Jobs to part me from my hard-earned quatloos.

The same things that Troy Wolverton mentions are giving me pause, though: the inability of the OS to multitask is barely excusable on the iPhone, and it’s completely inexcusable in something that’s being positioned to compete with netbooks.  Even the crappiest netbook will let me run an email client and a web browser at the same time.  Similarly, the fact that the iPad doesn’t support Flash media is a ball of suck (though I’m pleased to see that unlike the current iPhone OS the iPad will finally — finally! — support .vcf files).  Wolverton’s also cranky about the absence of a front-facing digital camera for videoconferencing applications, but that doesn’t bother me so much; it’s not like I do a lot of videoconferencing.

Here’s what I’d love to have: an iPad app that’s a visual client for Westlaw.  Any takers?

Excellent, excellent stuff.  Ten minutes of awesome.

As with last year’s February address, I have some thoughts on the President’s State of the Union speech, in no particular order:

Read More

Mindboggling.  As I discussed yesterday, many on the left are in an uproar about Mr. Obama’s idea for a spending freeze because it flies in the face of Keynesian articles of faith prescribing government spending to prop up aggregate demand as a policy response to economic recession.  They’re, in other words, captive to the broken window fallacy and believe, urgently, that the U.S. economy remains moribund because government hasn’t spend lavishly enough on economic stimulus.

Enter Nancy Pelosi, who’s critical of the freeze not on the economic merits, but because it exempts defense spending.  In other words, if there’s to be a freeze, she wants to freeze more, not less.

Two possibilities present themselves.  Either:

(1) Madame Speaker is ignorant of economics and has been going along with the administration’s policies for the last year out of political tribalism and because they tickled her ideological erogenous zones.  Freezing non-defense discretionary spending without also taking a whack at those warmongering bubbas at the Pentagon was, for her, simply a bridge too far, notwithstanding the views of her base; or,

(2) Madame Speaker has completely misunderstood her base’s complaints about the freeze idea as being unrequited peacenikkery rather than unrequited Keynesianism, and accordingly, as she attempts to pander, is tripping over her own shoelaces.

What is this woman thinking?  Is she thinking?  Help me out, here.

(Hat tip: Hot Air)

I’ve been reluctant to open up comments on the blog, principally because I’ve been skeptical of policing comment-thread pissing matches and/or dealing with trolls and spam.  But I’m going to start enabling comments and trackbacks on new posts on an experimental basis, to see if doing so enlivens the blog at all.

Participation in the comment threads is subject to a zero-tolerance “don’t be an ass” policy enforced at the sole discretion of the management (me).

“In other words, as a result of the Watergate-era campaign finance restrictions, it is now settled law that congressmen are sufficiently corruptible that they can’t be trusted with campaign donations of more than a few thousand dollars.

Which raises the question: How can they be trusted with our tax dollars?“

Um.  Apple?  Serious product marketing fail.

UPDATE: FailBlog provides a visual aid.

In an apparent effort to come to grips with the fiscal angst that helped to propel Scott Brown to victory in Massachusetts last week, the Obama administration is floating the idea of a net spending freeze on non-defense discretionary spending for the next three years.

This news has been greeted by large segments of the port side of the political spectrum with a predictable amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth.  Ezra Klein, for example, is sobbing into his sippy cup both that the president is tacitly conceding the argment on spending and that he didn’t use the gesture to extract any policy concessions from either the Blue Dogs or Republicans.  (How Ezra imagines that, after the Massachusetts debacle, Mr. Obama has any political leverage on spending issues is beyond me.)

Nor has the starboard side of the political spectrum been particularly impressed by the move.  House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) criticized the idea as like unto “announcing that you’re going on a diet after winning a pie-eating contest,” and John McCain is presumably savoring the irony of Mr. Obama embracing an idea that he ridiculed during the presidential campaign.

My own take on this is, shall we say, nuanced.  It’s true that non-defense discretionary spending is a comparatively small portion of the federal budget (about 17%), and that it does not include the portions of the budget (principally entitlement spending) that are at the center of the country’s fiscal problems.  It’s also true that a spending freeze simply arrests the growth of government; this isn’t a true spending cut.  Next year’s budget will only be about one half of one percent smaller than it would have been otherwise, and the freeze would thus do virtually nothing to put the country back on stable fiscal footing.  So it would be easy to take Mr. Boehner’s view of things.

Instead, though, I’m inclined to give Mr. Obama the benefit of the doubt.  While I can hardly expect the man to repudiate Keynesian idiocy and embrace Austrian economic theory, if the looming prospect of an electoral repudiation has resulted in him having a mini-come-to-Jesus moment on spending, that’s something to be celebrated and encouraged.  What is it that they tell addicts?  The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem, and something that’s going to save a little taxpayer money and restrain the growth of government even a little bit is better than the big fat nothing that we’ve been getting for far too long from Democrats and Republicans alike.