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First up, I have to apologise for the mactard thing.  I just liked the word….  Many of my good friends are mac users and many of them politely laughed but I could hear them muttering “wanker” as they pretended to cough…  So – sorry about that.  You can call me a freetard in return if you’d like

Anyhoo.  One of the things I really like about Apple is the seamlessness of everything.  The Time Machine particularly impresses me as one of the myriad of must have devices that Apple make.  I know that Tom has been having some awful trouble with backing up his Mac (while trying to get his Time Machine working, natch).  I was therefore pretty disturbed to read Simon Brunning’s problems with his Time Machine.

Is the seamlessness a myth? Is my back up strategy of rsyncing to a remote machine the only real way to ensure no data loss (at home at least)? Or are the economics of home back up still too skewed for anyone with ‘real’ amounts of data (photos, video, music)?

Tom, over at theOTHERblog, makes some interesting points about what is and what isn’t mis-selling.  While I have little sympathy for mactards in general (it is, after all, just another shiny cog in the “Apple are the new Fox” machine, people) even those poor souls shouldn’t suffer the Carphone Warehouse Scam.

Yes

Has Apple considered the effect the ultra thin MacBookAir will have on other laptops?

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQkdVymW8C8]

And (sorry for utterly geeking out here, but) an 8080 plays Portal’s Still Alive:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLS35kyYlOU]

Fake Steve Jobs Twittering live from the Stevenote.

Fake Steve Jobs (who, strangely, I was only turned on to by this post slating him over Technology Evangelist) has a fantastic write up about the “Universal doesn’t renew iTunes contract” story.  What the man says is true.

The music industry nobs have finally worked out what we’re doing

Rather obvious when you think about it…  Apple embeds your account information in its un-DRMed downloads.

In the office we’ve been debating the iPhone probably more than we should. The thing that we thought would save it was 3rd party apps. But no. It’s going to be locked down.

Apparently it’s not safe to say anything nasty about the iPhone. Ooops. People, remove the implant and see sense.

Yes yes, everyone’s blogging about the iPhone, and yes, my opinion isn’t entirely useful, but still, here it is….

• Only 8GB? The minute I watch video or listen to music I’m going to need to carry my iPod with me anyway…
• No GPS? Why on earth not?
• 2Megapixel camera? Really? Is that all?
• Touchscreen? No portable device with a touch screen that I’ve ever used has lasted that long. For business devices (I’m thinking Blackberry, for example), regular replacement is not such an issue, but not a lot of corporates are going to be giving out iPhones. If people are buying them personally and the screen is as bad as every other one I’ve used it will come back to bite Apple pretty hard.
• …and finally… I really don’t like the look. It’s not quite Apple, and that’s a mistake too. Maybe not in the first flush of take up, but in the long run I think the divergence of design will be a problem for those of us that buy on style rather than features…

That said, I’m not a Mac fanboy, so I might have all this wrong