[Macworld]

Post your comments for The Macalope Weekly: CEO chatter here

[lwdesign]

"... if you were to put the articles written on Forbes’s website end-to-end, you could walk across this great nation of ours touching nothing but stupid."

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Oh Macalope, this is one of your best. Probably second only to calling stupid pundits "Nostradumbasses". You nearly made my morning coffee come out my nose.

I am so happy you are there to fight the good fight in print (pixels?) for me. It's delightful to have a voice of reason in a world seemingly populated with "journalists" who are more like "urinalists".

[brianvictor7]

May favorite for the morning coffee, "What customers want is a no-compromises, unholy tablet/PC hybrid that OH, GOD, IT’S ALIVE, IT JUST KILLED A SCIENTIST"

I will say that it is a laudable goal to offer a plethora of options to consumers, but not at the expense of system speed and ease of use. When Surface actually shows up some place that I can touch it, I'll be interested to see if it has managed to accomplish this for a change.

I loved the comment about MS Office users. Since I came into using Apple only in 2009, I had to learn MS Office and I found the learning curve for iWork and MS Office to be about the same. Both are very robust and useful productivity suites, but the business world I live in is stuck with MS. Oh well.

I would like to see a piece about Siri vs Google's voice recognition software. Apple would do well to catch up there quickly. While Siri is getting much better at recognizing my voice, I noticed that Google slightly edges her out and has the added bonuses of showing me each words it thinks I said just after I say them. Siri makes me wait until I've stopped talking, so I have to wait to proof-read. Also, Google launches its search immediately while Siri requires a few extra taps. I'm sure Apple will get this solved sooner than later, but I don't like conceding wins to Google.

[JakeRich]

"[The Macalope merely stares dumbfounded at the screen of his MacBook Air (which, coincidentally, does not have an SD card), unable to form words, his brain attempting to crawl out of his furry ears in an effort to escape the dumb.]

Simply brilliant. But I blew my morning beverage all over my MBP screen and now I have to clean it all up...

[tacollins]

Congrats, Macalope, this is perhaps your best column ever. I'm still laughing so hard I can hardly type this.

Of course you did have some amazing materials to work with this week, but you certainly made the most of it.

[leicaman]

Excellent article, as usual. What strikes me about Microsoft talking about how Windows 8 is one OS for no compromise devices is, why do they have to have two tiers of Surface computers then? Why can't one do it all?

Oh, right, either they can't run well, and compete for price, or they can run well but are Forbes* expensive. Now i understand Microsoft's argument about nobody making a device people want.

* - stupid

This post has been edited by leicaman: 03 November 2012 - 07:18 AM

[fibercut]

"Don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out" was classic and I am really getting tired of these journalists acting like bloggers. The so-called 'fandroids' are coming more true every article these hacks push out.

[Droid]

Hmm, everyone else seems to like it but I'm getting a little bored with the Macalope.

2/3rd's of the article is about the writings for a company 'not good enough to link to'.
How about getting of the pedestal & finding some stories you do want to link to instead of taking their Apple bashing link bait. You're smarter than that Macalope.

[Crow]

A quick scan of the memory banks revealed an interesting fact: When Steve Jobs was alive, the pundits talked derisively about his "reality distortion field" that caused all the Apple sheeple to buy substandard products. Now that Mr. Jobs has departed this plane of existence, the pundits talk about how Steve would never allow substandard products to come out of Cupertino, and Apple is DOOOOMED. Anybody else notice this?

[brianvictor7]

Just had a most unpleasant encounter with Adobe on my Mac. I had spent about an hour filling out an application last week in a saveable PDF doc. I then took my 3 year old iMac to have the HDD replaced due to its fan spinning up inexplicably (turns out this was a long but little known issue and was due to the firmware for the drive having never been updated at the factory from the previous model iMac). So, I get back and reinstall my software. I didn't catch that Preview was opening the PDF. Where had my data gone?! In a huff, I begin filling out the form again and noticed that unlike the first time round, I could tab to the next field without getting beach-ball time. Then to be sure things were working I saved and closed the file, reopened and realized then that it was working in Preview. I changed the open options to default to Adobe for PDFs. Again, my data was gone! Well, turned out that Preview had indeed saved it. If I clicked on a field, it would appear. Soon as I clicked out of the field elsewhere it disappeared! Eventually I figured out that I could make the data stick if I just typed a character in the data field. Annoying, but it saved from re-entering the data for a THIRD time. Oh, and the quality beach-ball time had come back every time I hit the tab button.

What is the lesson learned here? Third party applications which, unfortunately, most of us have to use, do not "just work" so well with Apple. This is not an issue with Windows because that is the ecosystem they're designed for. But imagine having an Aunt Maude trying to figure this out! I am not giving up my nice shiny apple computer but the unfortunately reality is that it doesn't play so nice with business world apps, crappy as those apps may be and yes I understand that it is adobe's fault for not making their software work with Apple. Knowing that, however, doesn't reduce the frustration level much. <sigh>.

[harviej]

Two points
1 The Macalope has misunderstood Steve Balmer. Steve was being literal when he said "…really re-imagined Windows end to end." They have imagined it doesn't suck. They have imagined it can be simple AND complex. They have imagined it is always going to be relevant. They have imagined a lot of other things that cannot be mentioned politely.

2 His otherwise spot on bit on Ed Conway was deeply insulting to me. As someone who dates a Matt Damon impersonator I resent the implication that this is an inferior experience. She is a wonderful woman with many fine qualities.

[liqardliquer]

Concerning the Fire by Amazon... To me, it seems like it is more the 21st Century Sears Catalog than a true tablet. When the whole focus is on buying then isn't it just a update?
And the Surface???? A tablet that needs a TABLE to function???? And what happens to that keyboard when not in use or used as a tablet??? The best that it can be is a netbook for the NOW of Microsoft.
To me the iPad that I have is my Skateboard as to my desktop(Tacoma) and laptop(Corolla). What is the Surface? Sort of like the TurDuChick that is sold for the holidays for those grommets that haven't eaten out in a while. Or? maybe the butt of that Johnny Cash song about working on the assembly line and took parts that ended up going together in a FrankenCar form.

[dannyo152]

"'…the final straw was when you decided to replace the dock on the bottom of all your iPhones and iPads with the new “lightening dock”'"

Well, is "lightening" a typo on Mr. Conway's part, a clever, being very charitable, joke on how the Lightning Connector enables a thinner, thus, lighter device, an unclever allusion to how 30 pin adapters will lighten one's wallet, or an indicator that, as he goes, Mr. Conway may lighten his rucksack by leaving his underused dictionary? Or perhaps thuneder and lightening is what the coole kids saye, I mean spelle.

[RacingFerret]

"I’m addicted to cough syrup."

Ha ha, love it. Keep up the good work.