Word: ibooks
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...soon as I got the iBook, by the way, I knew the Irish-pub idea was out. The machine turned out to be more feminine than I expected. It's a zippy little laptop, but the rubberized blueberry-and-white clamshell design looks like something Barbie would use. I'm still willing to consider that experiment as soon as Apple makes a wireless machine that looks good next to a pint of Guinness...
...because I invest so much love and hope in Apple, it maddens me when the company falls short of its plug-and-play promise. And too often it does. Take the AirPort and iBook setup I tested. The idea behind it is deliciously simple; the setup was another story...
...AirPort base station, a little UFO-like device that plugs into your phone line, acts as an Internet radio transmitter. Your iBook, iMac or G4 PowerMac loaded with an AirPort card can be online (or hooked together) anywhere in your home, without wires, at 56k connection speeds (AirPort also supports superspeedy cable modems or DSL). Since normal wireless connections creep along at 9,600 bps, this is nothing short of revolutionary...
...Carried by its long fold-out handle, the iBook could be a sleek, flat fourth-grader's lunch-box. It is a laptop with a sense of humor--almost ridiculous in its rejection of more serious stereotypes of computer. Designed to live in someone's backpack, it can be handled with relative impunity. Colored like a pre-school toy, it can be considered with a modicum of flippancy and easy camaraderie...
...housed within Ive's "emotional human forms" packaging they could lose some of that alien aloofness. We could be more natural around computers. Perhaps instead of worrying that we will become too much like computers--too unemotional and uninvolved--we should work on making computers more like us. The iBook, at least, is a small step in the right direction...