http://ecamm.com/mac/phoneview/

Once again, I’m going to suggest my wish list, and probably be disappointed again.

Prices

All prices across the line will be the same, with the current iPod touch demoted to the $199/8GB price point.

iPod Touch

- ‘Retina Display’ 90% certain: I mean, how could they not do this one, given the economies of scale of having the same display for iPhone 4?

- Still + video camera. 75% certain: I was shocked when they didn’t launch this last year. The biggest problem, IMO, is that they insisted on making the iPod case thinner than the iPhone. Which they may still want to do, which I think would kill the camera.

- Front-facing camera. 90% certain: it’s actually more likely than the back camera. I think Apple wants Facetime across a wide range of devices. This is the make or break for me: if the iPod touch has this feature, I will buy one. If not, I won’t.

- 3G & GPS option: 25% certain: since Apple went through all the trouble to negotiate a simple pay-as-you-go 3G deal with AT&T for iPad, why wouldn’t they extend this to iPod? It just makes huge sense for location services and itunes stores. And ibookstore. The big sticking point is that 3G+GPS is a $130 option for iPad, and it seems like too big a premium on a $300-400 device. And AT&T might (rightly) view an iPod with 3G data only as a trojan horse for Skype.

- physical dimensions: same as iPhone 4: 10% certain. I’d personally much rather have an iPod with huge battery life and 64GB storage that is the same thickness as an iPhone 4, than one that is arbitrarily 20% thinner or whatever. But I think Apple likes to make iPhone and iPod visually distinct.

- no stainless steel band: 60% certain. A clean way to make the iPod look different and keep the same dimension would be use a different materal for the superstructure: aluminum; chromed steel; or maybe a metal with a bonded color surface like the last generation of nano. Then you could order your iPod touch in different colors: silver, pink, purple, blue.

iPod Nano

- tiny touch screen. Wild speculation: the nano will shrink to be just the size of the screen on the current nano, or maybe just that size + a border on one side for your fingers to grip. Still metal unibody, but not rounded off like current nano. More of a pancake form, like the iPhone 4.

iPod shuffle

- unchanged

iPod Classic

- dropped. RIP iPod Classic.

I turned off comments for this site. If you read something here, and have something to say about it, please write it on your own blog and link back. Or send me email, twitter, facebook or other message.

It’s not that I don’t care what you think (most people who leave comments have very interesting and/or kind things to say), it’s just that I don’t feel like continuing the fight against spam comments.

Love,

billo

It mostly worked, but it ran into some weird problems on some rewrite rules. Fortunately, I never write anything interesting enough to get Dugg or Fireballed. This site is for me to read, and for the occasional person Googling for the answer to some obscure question that I may have answered.

Anyhoo, I gave WP Super Cache another shot, because I’m supposedly some kind of real techno-nerd and should be able to make that shit work. So, it’s working apparently, and isn’t borking my rewrite rules. Yay, Super Cache, I might have to make a donation.

download here

It’s a good question. After all, a loaded up iMac (especially with an SSD) is going to be very nearly as fast for doing a whole lot of things as a Mac Pro. One of his main reasons choosing a Mac Pro is disks.

At KAYAK, we give all engineers who choose Mac as their platform (ubuntu is the other popular choice) Mac Pros. The main reason is disks.

1. if a disk drive dies, we can swap in a new one in 2 minutes and have the programmer back to work within minutes; it might take hours in the case of a really bad failure. (This happened to me last week when BOTH drives in my RAID 1 config died. WTF.)

2. It’s very easy and clean to have two RAID 1 pairs, one for OS/apps and the other for data. It’s messy and expensive to have external enclosures for this kind of thing, and too many Mac apps just don’t work with network shares of any kind. (Which is something that I find mystifying and annoying.)

At home, I’m on much more of a budget, and I don’t have the worry of lost productivity. I have two iMacs at home, so worst case I’ll have to go into the office vs. the family room to get something done. The disk drive thing is very annoying still; I wish Apple had a cleaner solution for external storage than ‘buy random crappy enclosures and have cables everywhere.’

(Hint: an aluminum box with 4 drives and iSCSI: solve the cable problem and solves the iphoto-aperture-whatever-don’t-work-on-network-shares problem)

Remedy #1: scotch tape. Does not help.

Remedy #2: putting leather slip case between hand and phone. Works but awkward.

Remedy #3: a 0.25″ x 1.5″ piece of gaffers tape on the lower left corner, from the speaker edge up, solves the problem. Ah, gaffers tape, you miracle of technology!

Update: I can’t make the problem happen at work. Signal probably is much stronger than at home.

Most recently a Linksys/Cisco small business router totally died on me and I had to run into the office in the middle of the night to replace.

Also, Mac/iPhone/iPad now support Cisco ipsec VPN as a base feature, so OpenSSL, which is a pain to maintain and support (and impossible to do so on iPhone) has no real future.

So I picked up a Cisco 1811 integrated services router which I *think* has everything I need. But you really kind of have to get SMARTnet, which is Cisco’s software maintenance, if you want to get upgrades and have someone to call for help.

The problem is that it’s very hard to figure out how to buy SMARTnet. You have to find a VAR, there’s no simple signup on Cisco’s site. Which is bizarre, since it’s purely a software item.

I finally found this site, which looks promising, because they’ve done little more than make a shopping cart do you can buy the right thing.

http://www.ciscohardwaremaintenance.com/catalog/smartnet.php