The latest Intel Core 2 Duo processors have made it into Apple's line of portables. The 15" MacBook Pro with a 2.5GHz processor, 2GB RAM, and a 250GB hard drive is $2500.

The 17 incher runs about $2800.

The regular 13" MacBook, which really does look cool in Black, with a 2.4GHZ processor, 250GB hard drive, is $1500.

Oh, and just an aside, based on a couple of things I've seen on the web, get ready for the MacBook Air to start getting released in goofy anodized colors like pink.

MacBook Air in pink? Pink? Oh happy day! Now I no longer need to put off my purchasing decision.

Oh, and just an aside, based on a couple of things I've seen on the web, get ready for the MacBook Air to start getting released in goofy anodized colors like pink.

I always thought of the MacBook Air as being gay.

Oh Gad! Can it get much worse? It looks like anyone who buys that thing is going to need to buy a black miniskirt to go with it. You know, to wear on Saturday night.

Apple has always done goofy crap like this to appeal to certain demographics. Remember the rainbow of iMacs followed by the FLOWER POWER iMac? Pink for cellphones and such is all the rage for the burgeoning Paris Hilton set. Steve Jobs himself is quoted as saying "thin is the new pink."

I figure what the hell, color doesn't hurt anything. If a teen wants to look cool with a pink laptop, it doesn't impact me. What DOES impact me, however, is when Apple can command huge prices for its products, BECAUSE of goofy fashionista eye candy crap, and therefore never really is forced to make hardware or software that has to perform well... yeah, that bothers me. When all a laptop has to be is hot pink, and all the software has to be is a few showoffy genie-sucking cube spinning spaces-type things, without really being fast or reliable, then I worry.

Oh Gad! Can it get much worse?

LOL. Yes. I can imagine worse. Funny that Apple offers the choice of computers in pink but won't allow the user the choice of something far more understated and useful -- Geneva in the Finder.

Geneva in the Finder? Geneva in the Finder? What are you -- an anarchist?

I'm definitely an anarchist, HH. I'm one of those who finds a good bit-mapped font to be much easier on the eyes than one with blurred edges. When I'm reading Shakespeare, I don't care how purty the type looks according to some farcical hip standard of absurdity. Shakespeare doesn't need some nose-picker's help to come across as better, thank you. Legibility is the point of type on screen, just like communication is the point of good writing.

Anti-aliasing is a wonderful thing. It's just people need to realize it's better on larger fonts than it is on smaller ones. And it ain't that it CAN'T work on smaller fonts, it's just that it has to be done judiciously.

I've said this about a billion times, but the reason Apple's aliasing is so bad, is that it's grounded in the inflated importance of the shrink/grow effects which make OS X so "cool" to digikids. To keep fonts looking slick at a VARIETY of sizes, while the whole interface gets zoomed and shrunk and pulled like taffy, concessions had to be made with crispness. And consequently readability.

Lucida Grande is not an awful face. It's just that in order for it to look good, it has to be used at a size much larger than we legacy Mac users are used to. Big, horsey fonts to us seem kiddy or senior-citizen-large type. My position is that they gobble screen real estate from pros, who would be better served to pack as much textual information onscreen as possible, especially with something like Finder lists. Pros have more crap, and therefore it's better for us to SEE more of it at-a-glance in any kind of a list view.

Now there are those who'd argue that bigger EQUALS more readable, and there's truth in that. The large "E" on an eye chart is more readable than the line of smaller type at 20/20. But it takes up more space on the chart.

A good pro computer interface makes better use of the screen space. The more economically the text is displayed on screen in an interface, the more room we have for our work.

There's a hierarchy of importance that Mac interface designers seem to have forgotten totally, and that is, the interface is not as important visually as the work you're doing at any given time.

The reason OS X is such a piece of shit, is that the interface TAKES OVER much of the screen. Like goofy crawls and eye-candy score boxes and animated ads have taken over watching a football game on TV (until people started complaining). Have you seen the backlash start? Football coverage is getting more less-is-more, because there's a fundamental ridiculousness that happens when most of your TV is taken up with bullshit that's not the game itself.

Have you ever been watching a foreign film, or a foreign actor speak or the news where the interviewee is speaking another language, something with subtitles...AND THEY STILL DO THE ANIMATED AD BULLSHIT? I swear to God, I'm trying to read some subtitles, and fucking Knight Rider drives right on top of them, totally blocking them. And the foreign person I was watching was saying important shit. A Knight Rider ad is not as important as what I had tuned in to watch.

That's how I feel with OS X. What I'm DOING on the computer is more important than the distracting bullshit of an over-designed interface. It gets IN THE WAY. Imagine if the command-tab array suddenly came up without you invoking it, while you were trying to read an email. You'd flip out: HEY, I'm trying to read here!

Something is wrong when you're in an app with 2000 palettes and no room to work. Or when any interface element is BIGGER THAN IT NEEDS TO BE. If you're one of those people who sets your Dock fairly large, so you can actually SEE those lush 3-D icons, and you set your Dock to never hide itself, it takes up a strip of your screen--FOREVER--that's about 1/10-12 of the total vertical dimension.

You have to ask yourself things like, is that interface element WORTH giving permanent residence for THAT MUCH of my screen. And the answer for me is a resounding nyet. I set my dock as small as it will go, AND hide it.

The idea of pulldown menus was brilliant. If all choices were available all the time, they'd cover the screen. But no, they collapse, get out of the way, when not in use. That's a very important interface idea. Another important one is, HOW do things "get out of the way"... is it manual or automatic? After you click "OK" on a dialog box (which by nature has to call attention to itself and cover up something), if it didn't dismiss, you'd flip again.

A great interface would be like a HUD (Heads Up Display) in a fighter jet. Giving pertinent information to the pilot, WITHOUT obscuring his or her view of the battle. If all kinds of STUPID information was all over the windshield, covering up the MIG heading right at the plane, it wouls be a hazard.

To be smart, a Graphical Interface has to know what you're doing, and give you options for what to do NEXT, without getting in your way of MAKING that next move. It shouldn't be an impediment to that next move, but rather an assist.

OS X flies in the face of this. It's more worried about the power of the interface as a marketing vehicle to sell people on some retarded idea of the cool Apple digikid lifestyle, than it is actually trying to give them controls that do important things in an efficient and logical manner. Apple would rather you sit there and twiddle something and go WHEEE! WHEEE! Than consider the interface element the BEST way to direct the software to perform a task.

Remember how long it took for them to fix the RESIZE widget? It was one of the most unresponsive things ever. Why? Because the special effect of window contents adapting to window size, was more important than the interface being responsive. So your cursor would be over HERE, and the window you were trying to resize, would be way over THERE. Fucking unbelievable.

Cool eye candy is never going to be cool enough that it's worth fucking up what you're trying to do on a computer. The most successful interfaces in OS X now, are the most minimal, the ones with streamlined, collapsing palettes, that are customizable or easy to hide with a keystroke, and which help, rather than hurt, workflows.

With text, if a user decides he or she wants dense, small text in a certain area, I KNOW there are times where the old-school crisp pixelated monospaced typefaces are going to be more readable. And yet this option is not provided in the Mac interface. So worried is Apple about making things 3-D and atmospheric, they're forgetting that flat 2-D black and white monochrome is sometimes way easier on the eyes for mission critical stuff. Not everything has to be sexy. If a computer is fast, and its GUI is intuitive and powerful, THAT'S sexy.

Anti-aliasing is a wonderful thing. It's just people need to realize it's better on larger fonts than it is on smaller ones. And it ain't that it CAN'T work on smaller fonts, it's just that it has to be done judiciously.

And maybe people should realize that anti-aliasing is a stopgap thing...at least until 300 dpi monitors (or higher) become the norm.

Something is wrong when you're in an app with 2000 palettes and no room to work.

Palette hell is why I initially went to a two-monitor setup several years ago. But now those wide 20" screens I'm betting function well for holding palettes off to the side. But there comes a point that you surely feel like taking a machete and hacking your way to the usable work space.

The idea of pulldown menus was brilliant. If all choices were available all the time, they'd cover the screen. But no, they collapse, get out of the way, when not in use. That's a very important interface idea.

Microsoft Word (and probably other programs, from them and others) take this idea to an extreme. Instead of "hiding" commands in menus (and it's a legitimate problem that some functions can be so hidden that they become de fact unusable), they create so many visible buttons that the functions are lost once more, but this time in a riot of buttons. One of the problems is that people won't tend to pay for upgrades unless new features are obvious. This creates not only feature creep but interface creep. Give me the Steve Jobs who comes in all fire-brand and ready to take on useless bloat and complication. I'll join that army. But, geez, the army he has gathered now is just adding to this problem. Doesn't he ever wake up in the morning and measure brilliance in something other than a new color?