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New PowerBooks, Bluetooth Keyboard and Mouse
no_demons writes "This morning Apple iCEO Steve Jobs gave the keynote at the Apple Expo in Paris. The whole PowerBook line up got an upgrade, with the 15" model now sporting the much rumoured goods (1.25GHz, backlit keyboard, bluetooth, Airport Extreme), available from today. Apple also announced a new wireless keyboard and mouse."
2... b. attrib. as a keynote address or speech, orig. U.S., a speech usually as an opening address, designed to state the main concerns or to set the prevailing tone for a conference or the like; often used at political rallies merely to arouse enthusiasm or promote unity; so key-note speaker, one who gives a key-note speech.
From OED 2nd Ed.
And yes, it is originally a term applied to music (and is still used the way.) It is the lowest note of a scale, thus setting the tonality or transposition of the scale, or mode.
Now, basically as you can see, a keynoter is merely supposed to mainly be fluff. A bit that is fun to listen to if you agree with the speaker, and gets you in the mood for the rest of the show. Unfortunately Apple is like many other corporations these days, and nearly all fluff and no pudding. The keynote speech is not supposed to be the beginning and the end. So what we end up getting is nothing. A bunch of wild ranting and raving with no substance. That's what Jobs is good at.
V
Get off it with your elitism. 'The market decided...' is a weak arguement, but you can and should offer a better counter-arguement than some snobby comparison to Beta and Windows.
I just recently started liking the Macintosh, now that reasonable useful Power Macs are almost free at auction (I'm using MacOS 8.1 on a 200 MHz 603 that I paid less than a dollar for right now) and it still bugs the hell out of me that the mouse has that big stupid single button. It's one of the few things I'm still disliking.
Apple could make an expensive (they love that sort of thing) pop-out/pop-in modular mouse button thing as a 'two button' option on Mac laptops, but they won't because of arrogance. Come on, Jobs: you gave up on the no-fan dogma (hell, Mac Plus users were spending two hundred bucks and more for a drop in muffin fan that pushed into the handle hole to counteract that dogma ages ago...), it's time to give on the button issue, for Laptops if not for the desktop models (where an easy replacement mouse can be obtained).
A Good Intro to NetBS
While I know plenty of people content with the Apple mice/keyboard, many aren't. Having them as an option would be a very good idea. That ought to drop about $100 from the price of any system.
To be fair though at least the keyboard/mice are better than those useless things from a couple of years ago. The keyboard with the small keys and that puck mouse. Damn those sucked.