When you listen, they will buy

I love it when the penny finally drops.

PC manufacturers have known for some time that there was a demand for a light weight laptop. And by light weight I mean under-powered - by modern standards - as well as the literal sense.

Building a machine that is less sophisticated than a modern laptop brings with it many benefits - size and battery life being two of the three you might expect. Unfortunately for PC manufacturers, they never did crack the third - price - until now, in the form of the Asus EEE PC.

And it is not like they didn't take a while to learn the lesson. Psion was the first to take a crack at a such a device with the Series 5 and then - perhaps for fear of causing carpal tunnel on a mass scale - the larger Series 7. The Series 7 in particular most closely resembled the EEE PC with one glaring exception - a price that rivaled fully fledged laptops of the day. I don't have the stats to hand, but as best I recall the Series 7 reviewed fairly well in the press but did not set the sales world on fire.

Compaq , HP, IBM, NEC and Sharp must have thought that Psion were onto something as all jumped on this particular bandwagon at the back end of the nineties with their somewhat euphemistically named Windows CE Handheld PC Professional ranges. Based around the Windows CE operating systems but sporting full sized keyboards, again their functionality reviewed fairly well but a prohibitive pricing strategy again strangled sales numbers (Though I must confess to having picked up a used HP Jornada 820 via eBay for a rather more reasonable $400 AUD and fell victim to the charms of its diminutive dimensions and almost instant startup).

But concept of the sub-notebook-lite almost died a permanent death with the Palm Foleo. Designed as a companion to other Palm products, it was too big and too heavy and justify its moderate abilities. Palm pulled the pin on the Foleo before it was released.

This might have been enough to scare off most prospective builders of the light weight, light ability almost-laptop but hindsight tells us it did not. Not quite.

Enter, Asus.

With a super small form factor and brandishing a good sized (actually, slight on the just-too-small side of good) keyboard, the Asus EEE PC has sold in droves. It is not perfect - the 7-odd inch screen and never-updated Linux operating system had some people squinting and cursing - but it still sold and sold and sold and sold due to a staggeringly good price which was somewhere between half the price of a low end laptop and one-fifth the price of a sub-notebook.

And the fun in the light weight, light function laptop market is not due to stop there. With the nine inch screen EEE PC just released and a flurry of copycats due for release soon competition in this space should rise and prices, with any luck, will fall from their already reasonable levels. Which should boost sales in this sector again.

The penny has dropped; price, above all, matters.asus, eee pc, linux, notebook, psion, jornada

OS X Leopard - don't believe the hype

How does it go: The devil's biggest trick was convincing the world that he did not exist?

Perhaps Apple's biggest trick is convincing the world that their products 'just work'. Slick ads, clever product placement and their own website explicitly tell us that 'It just works'. If my experience as a recent switcher from Windows and Ubuntu is anything to go by, this simply is not true.

I previously wrote about my experience with OS X Tiger on my girlfriend's Mac Mini. To summarise, it was far easier for me to play proprietary (yes, Windows based) media on Ubuntu Feisty than OS X. I vigorously questioned how an operating system that cost quite a pretty penny could be out performed on an ease-of-use basis by an operating system that cost nada. Judging by the number of you who read and left comments on that post, many of you vigorously agreed.

Despite my scorn, I still bought a MacBook. Seduced by the beautiful form factor, the growing body of positive industry reviews and the value of the dollar against the pound (I took advantage of a trip to the states to snaffle what I thought to be a minor bargain) I took the plunge. And to be fair, I still find the hardware to be, in isolation, exquisite.

I also looked at the current state of Windows and Ubuntu (and wider Linux) and found them to be wanting. And I was not going to purchase a lovely new piece of hardware only to have it host the tried and true but old-aged and less than venerable XP.

Soon after my purchase, however, the OS X bugs set in. Let's have a look at them, in no particular order:

• When Leopard first came out, the keyboard would randomly stop working and would only start working again after I hit the tab key. Whispers on the Internet thought this was a hardware problem but Apple fixed it on the release of the 10.5.2 update. So if they fixed it why am I complaining, I hear you ask. Because for months I thought I had a dud and Apple did nothing to address my concerns or the concerns of the myriad people expressed across the Internet
• The 10.5.2 update fixed my keyboard, which was great. But now my wifi does not work, Specifically, my wifi works in just one room in my house (the kitchen, for the record, which is by no means the room that is closest to my wifi router). Now, you might be inclined to blame the router (a Billion product, FYI), but not only did I update the router firmware but if I put a laptop running Windows, a Mac Mini running Tiger, a Nokia N800 running ... whatever Linux it runs, and my my problematic MacBook into the same room as my router all of the other machines work just fine but my MacBook loses the wifi signal. If I turn off all electrics in the room bar the MacBook and the router things are no different. Turning off my cordless phone makes no difference. Nor does trying every wifi channel available to me. This did not happen prior to the 10.5.2 update.
• Both Firefox and Safari crash far more often than I have experienced on both Windows and Ubuntu
• Software updates occasionally cause OS X to crash. I don't recall this happening in Windows ever and rather less regularly in Ubuntu

Much is made about the tight integration of Apple software and hardware. Given my experience I have to question the implied synergies.

Further, I have to question why not more is made of this. Type in any of the abovementioned issues into Google and you will find my problems are not isolated ones. Not by some margin.

Yes, Apple have pulled off a handy trick indeed.apple, macbook, os x, ubuntu, windows, leopard

The price of an ad

I am not sure this is fair.

Check out the bottom right hand corner of this page from the respected Melbourne newspaper, The Age. It is an advertisement, but can you really tell? Or does it look like a story?


If the pre-election polls are anything to go by, the majority of Australians think it is time for a change in Government and Lil Johnny will be ousted. And it is not that I am unhappy about that. Leading up to that day, though, why don't we make sure that fact is well and truly separated from paid political advertising.