How many Mac Laptop owners ever swap a battery? How many own two batteries? I used to religiously carry a second laptop battery; I finally realized that I was using it maybe once a quarter (even though I also religiously swapped batteries every couple of weeks so they both stayed charged and fresh. do you? No, dind’t think so).

It’s easy to predict that there will be a group of people who are very upset about the lack of a swappable battery, and that they will be very vocal. They will also be few in number. It’s the same group that has knocked the iPhone for the same reason. They make a disproportionate amount of noise, and Apple generally ignores them. Sorry folks, Apple knows that features like this hardly get used at all.

I’ve had a few 17″ Apple notebooks, and i’ve never had a second battery. I spend little time on the road with my computer. I think hardcore road warrior MacBook users are a small minority. And of those,  a very small percentage use a 17″ as their travel machine. It’s just not a practical size for taking on trips, where you’ll need to lug it around for hours and use it in small places, such as airplanes.

If this rumor pans out, I don’t know if Apple will go this route with the entire line or not, but it makes sense for them to start with the 17″ version.

My main beef with HAML is that it’s completely unnecessary. In order to write HAML, you have to have written HTML (either in your head or in code). Then you write HAML. Which outputs HTML. This is absurd.

Actually, what’s absurd is claiming that you have to write it first in HTML, even in your head. Once you use it, and not even for that long, it exceedingly easy to drop all the brackets and attributes, and just write the HAML. I don’t find myself thinking, “Now, I want a div here, so in HAML that would be, %div… Oh, wait, I don’t need the actual div if I have a class or id…” It’s really not that hard.

To me, HAML and Ruby/Rails is like chocolate and peanut butter: they go great together. In fact, it’s like really good dark chocolate, and all natural organic peanut butter. That’s how good it is. Now, there are people who don’t like chocolate and peanut butter together. That’s fine. But to say chocolate and peanut butter are “unnecessary”, well, that’s just asking for it.

The KEY to maximizing iPhone profit is to create very high switching costs for users, just as they did for the iPod via the iTunes Music Store.

To me, this is a weak leg to stand on. Apple, if we are to take them at their word, never wanted DRM for iTunes music. DRM is what creates lock-in for the iPod/iTMS ecosystem. So take away DRM and what you have left is the hardware with a bunch of tracks you can put on any device. In this scenario, Apple must compete on the strength of the platform (hardware and software) user experience. I think this has always been the main focus for Apple

I think Occam’s razor would lead us to a slightly different conclusion: creating the entire application platform for OS X Touch (SDK and App Store) was hard, and was accomplished in very little time. It may be too much to assume Apple is exercising such control over the marketplace and intentionally shaping the pricing structure and kind of apps being sold.

That said, I don’t doubt that since they are making a ton of money, and they have a runaway success, that they’ll deploy changes to the system very carefully. Why make a major change to the current structure when they’re seeing such incredible sales? At the same time, I think they want to improve the service and get it right, since they know as well as anyone that major shifts in the marketplace can occur very quickly.

Maximization? Absolutley. Lock-in? Not so much.

i called around and got quotes, and considering that the recent accident was my fault i was ready for our premiums to take a big jump. fortunately, there’s actual competition for insurance companies in the nutmeg state, so the prices weren’t too far out of line with what we were already paying. the other nice thing is that i was able to get prices from the big names that claim to save you a lot on your insurance. geico sounded like a good deal at first, but once i called and got a detailed quote it wasn’t that great. our homeowners policy is with nationwide, and even with the multi-line discount the price wasn’t as good as i had hoped. so i called progressive and was very pleasantly surprised at the low rate, especially considering the positive things i’ve read about the company. so i got our policy set up and was pleased with myself for actually saving us money compared to our old policy in massachusetts.

you can imagine my annoyance when i got a notice saying the policy had been updated and the premium had increased. so i called to find out what was going on, and it turns out they had received our previous policy info, which i had to provide, and changed our current policy to reflect that. apparently, there had been some miscommunication about what we had for coverage before. it seriously dented my good feelings about progressive, and my first instinct was to assume there had been a bait-and-switch pulled on me by the agent i spoke to on the phone originally. he was super friendly, even a big red sox fan, and had put me at ease and recommended some coverage changes to save money.

i spoke with a customer rep first, who tried to explain what happened, but couldn’t see the specific changes that had been made to my policy, so he passed me on to a licensed agent. she did her best to explain to me what happened, saying i must have told the original agent that i had higher coverage than i actually did, since that’s what their records said. after i insisted several times that i did not give him that information, since i was looking at the policy info when i spoke with him, she put me on hold for a few minutes. when she came back she said she had received a clearance for us to pay the original premium on the policy.

i call that doing the right thing, and i give progressive a big thumbs up for it. by giving the customer the benefit of the doubt a company can display that they actually do value their customers, and a few (hundred) dollars is worth less to them than a happy, loyal customer. and that’s what i will certainly be if the trend continues.

on top of this good customer service i’ve been pleased with their online account tools, even though they have some issues with not yet supporting non-ie browsers. i emailed support about that and they responded promptly and told me they are in the process of updating their site. and the initial experience of setting up the policy was smooth and pleasant. so progressive gets high marks from me, at least so far, as a company that is, of all things, progressive. these days it seems that such old-fashioned things as good customer service and doing the right thing are progressive.

Okay, it’s possible there are enough Apple religious people to buy a lot of them at first, but even the most diehard Mac fans who buy one of these will secretly carry two phones. One to prove how loyal and “cool” they are, and the other to actually make and receive calls.

come on richard, you really think people are carrying two phones? my iphone is the best cell phone i’ve ever had, and it doesn’t do one or two things my last phone did. even so, it’s such a leap forward in terms of usability that i’m very happy, and carrying another phone would be silly. i don’t have anything to prove, i just want something that works well.
richard claims inside knowledge, in a pretty vague fashion, to back up his prediction.

One of my friends at T-Mobile, who knows the business extremely well, thinks they’ll have a tough time selling 3M in the first year.

the problem with friends who work at t-mobile and know the business extremely well is the fact that they work at t-mobile and know the business extremely well. the cell phone industry is as messed up as they come in telecom. they deliver fairly poor service in general, they charge a lot, and they work like mad to lock customers in with some of the worst tactics.

the whole point of the iphone, as far as i can tell, is to change the game. apple did a deal with the devil, in essence, in order to get the handset out there and prove what’s possible. i don’t think they particularly like working with at&t, but i guess they figured they weren’t ready to go it alone. at least not if they wanted to sell 10 million iphones. that said, buying and setting up the iphone was the best cell phone experience i’ve ever had, and i think apple would like to design as much of the user experience as possible.

will they hit the 10 million mark? i don’t know, i’m not a betting man, but i’m guessing they will.

Where IM used to be more an occasional means of communication for catching up with a friend I no longer worked with, or saying hi to my brother, it’s now a regular and habitual part of my day. I use it constantly throughout the day to communicate with my co-workers, who are in the same room or the next room over. It may seem silly, but I find that when I’m in the flow at work it’s smoother to send a quick IM saying, “Please update the dev server”, than it is to call over to someone or get up and go to the next room. Is it just laziness? Perhaps, but I still get up from my desk frequently. I think that the nature of my work is just very collaborative, and so quick and cheap (in terms of energy and attention) communication facilitates this.

Anyway, I know I’m not unique in this regard, and lots of people work this way, but until my current job I hadn’t been in an environment where it was the norm. Now it’s second-nature, and it just sort of crept up on me. I guess our tools shape us as much as we shape them. Sometimes for better, and for worse if we’re not careful.