AI, Mobile, and Eveything Around the Cloud

I struck out again this morning at the Pasadena Apple Store. I take comfort in the fact that the iPad I ordered from AT&T is here. But given the demand among my family, I will probably relinquish it. I've got a favorite aunt who I want to surprise on Sunday. Meanwhile, I checked around local area Apple stores in LA. Quite a few of them still have iPads in stock as of this writing. I don't want to give you hope because the quantities are limited and I encourage you to call around. For instance, the Glendale store has the 16GB White Verizon model but nothing else. The Target on Colorado Blvd near Lake has the 64GB Black Verizon models. None of them are the 16 GB white AT&T one that I want. Still, if you're more open to other offerings, a little leg work and you should be able to get your hands on one. But you'll have to be quick.

Has anyone discussed this on the blog or anywhere else? Here I am at the Apple Store in Pasadena hope to even get a glimpse of the 16 GB ATT white iPad 2 that I have yet to be able to get for myself. What is interesting about waiting in line today is that I have been seeing a stream of Apple employees walking by and into the store. And the sheer numbers is amazing. I estimated about thirty people walking past us and into the store. I don't even pretend to know how many folks it takes to run a successful retail operation like an Apple storebut that is an awful lot of people. Not only that, there is an air about them that is vastly different from the other employees just arriving at the other retail stores. It's not arrogance. I've dealt with many of these Apple people in the past. And they are some of the nicest people who has not only a job to do but an strong desire to do their tasks well and provide the customers with the best help possible. And it became pretty easy to ...

I bought my aluminum 1Ghz Powerbook eons ago and it has not been on my lap for more than two years since I bought the late-2008 unibody Macbook back in December of 2008. And guess what? It still rocks. See, one of the reason I went with the Macbook was that it had a great screen that the LCD on the Powerbook just could not keep up through over the years of being used and abused as a productivity device and media device. Still, it has a lot of uses that cannot be matched in ways that an aging Windows machine cannot. First, the keyboard on this particular line of the Powerbook is still second to none. The keys are responsive and is, depending on your opinion, a starkly different from the chicklet forms on the newer Macbooks. And that's say that the current keyboards on the Macbook are also excellent. I imagine that many of you out there in Apple land has more than a few Powerbooks still up and running at home. So you know what I am talking about. Whether you've p...

iPad isn't for biz  Well, if Dell, HP, and Microsoft says it, it must be true... I'm gonna take a guess and say that the PC market, san the Mac part of it, isn't doing too well.  The sudden chorus of chatter in the media against the iPad only solidifies Steve Jobs' claim that we are approaching the post-PC era.   A comprehensive mobile experience for computing with a viable ecosystem is something that is difficult to create and these guys are late to the game. More here .

Here is a great post from Seeking Alpha  about why I don't deal with rumors on my blogs (but I love reading them).   The thing is that I think bloggers now should be held accountable for stuff they report as rumors.   In the wild wild West of the blogosphere, rumors are treated as news   The media has gotten lazy and fact checking, let alone, facts are no longer something people in the press are interested in.   It's now the fast pace of here and now.   That means clicks, eyeballs, and impressions.   More often and often, I see some lazy ass writer from traditional media, especially, CNBC, start with "according to Apple blog, X, Apple will be (delaying, releasing)…"   Seriously, talk about lame…   Oh, and for disclosure, I've got Apple positions…long.   As in long long term.   I don't know what its stock price is on a daily basis.   While I do love rumors, let's keep them in perspective.   They're fun to read a...

I love this rumor which is why I'm breaking my own rules to talk about it but I'll explain why this particular rumor makes a lot of sense.  And hopefully, you will too. The World Wide Developer Conference is about developers and software.  In the past, Apple had used it as a launch pad for the new iPhone hardware in the June.  And now, people completely expects that whenever June rolls around, it means new iPhone.   Word was put out, probably by Apple, that we will not see this behavior repeated this year.  I've long suspected that Apple might do this eventually.  And this is especially true this year.   We have Lion coming in the summer as well as the expected iOS 5. That's a lot of software.  Let's not forget that an updated iWork is still missing.  On top of that, there is the comprehensive mobile, computing, and entertainment vision that Apple will try to convey to the world.  It's difficult to do that with an iPhone launch in the mi...

While tech giants work out how they want to incorporate near field communication capability to allow mobile devices ranging from regular cell phones to high-end devices like iPhones and who has the final control over data, some folks just are not going to wait around until that day comes. The Girl Scouts in Ohio are now accepting credit card payments via GoPayment from Intuit, the folks who brought us Quicken And TurboTax, a dongle that can be attached to the the iPhone. This is just the beginning.  I wonder what'll happen once more devices like the iPhones become NFC-capable? More at Greenjava .