If you are a geek, you have heard about Apple’s new Macbook air. Essentially, Apple got Intel to make them a much smaller package for their Core processors, made a really small motherboard, used an ipod hard drive, included just about nothing else, and came up with the Macbook air. It is the thinnest laptop, just about ever… but its not small.

The Macbook air is about three pounds, has a 13 inch screen, in the size of a 14 inch laptop. Not to mention, I had a 1 inch thick Sony VAIO 505 laptop almost a decade ago which was… wait for it… 3 lbs. 233 mhz Pentium II baby!

What is different about the new Macbook air, is that it thinner, and by every other dimension, bigger.

I don’t get it. Sure its thin, but it does not really provide anything else new or interesting. Its not really all that light, its not really all that good looking, and its not even small. Whats up with that bezel? You could fit another inch or so of screen real estate easily in that form factor!

So what does being thinner give you? Nothing really. I havent looked at a single Apple laptop in the last generation and thought to myself, wow thats great, but can you make it thinner? Nope. I have thought…

1. Can you make it faster?
2. Can you give me better battery life?
3. Can you make it more durable?
4. Can you make it smaller?

I have not thought, can you make it thinner, at the expense of everything else?

Apple, enough with the bling, give me a 12-13 inch macbook pro. The single coolest laptop you ever made was the 12inch powerbook g4. It was perfectly sized, durable, sexy, light, and thin enough.

If you are looking for an ultra portable notebook, go take a look at the Sony TZ.

Its smaller, lighter, gets stellar battery life, and is fast enough. If you are looking at the Macbook air over the Macbook Pro, then the TZ is fast enough for you. Hey, it has built in 3g wireless too!

Or, even better, if you are looking for a 13 inch apple… get a Macbook. More power, half the money, just as portable in my opinion… just less bling… which to me means less pretentious. A Macbook is only 1.08 inches thick anyway. I would also be willing to bet the polycarbonate case is going to be more durable over time.

-The Digital Kitty

Kevin Rose, poster boy of 20 something geeks everywhere, face of Revision3, digg.com, and now pownce.com, former Tech TV personality, and Apple fanboy… has just bought a Falcon Northwest gaming rig.

I am not an obsessive fan of Rose’s, but defiantly a fan of his many endeavors. I would love to go out with him for a beer sometime when I get back to San Francisco should that ever be in the cards, but yeah, no marriage proposals coming form this geek girl. However, now I can up him a notch in coolness, because he has admitted on digg nation to buying a new gaming PC to run Crysis on.

That is cool news.

Its not because I care that he uses Apples, its because I get sick of seeing so many geeks out there in IPTV and Podcast world drinking the cool aid and pushing Apple like Stevie J’s farts smell like rosebuds. Yeah, they make some great products, but other people throw down just as hardcore in many sectors, and other even harder. I enjoy it when somebody is willing to play the field and indulge in a little forbidden fruit now and then.

I predict a trend in the future of the geek nation…

1. Apple sales will increase for laptops, tablets, and media devices.
2. Power user desktop sales will decrease.

The specs on Rose’s new system are.

Intel Quad Core 3.0 ghz
4 Gigabytes of Ram
32 Meg Cache Terabyte Hard Drive
2x Geforce 768 meg 8800 GTX cards setup in SLI. Thats 1.5 gigs of video memory.

Yeah thats about four times faster than my own home system, but whatever, eat me. I can dream.

you can watch the digg nation episode yourself here. Maybe I should start embedding TV shows I like here…. hmm… thats an idea.

Oh, and Alex Albrect, World of Warcraft Was never in style! But yeah, you can show me your crazy staff any time.

… and Kevin… no girls are into tree men.

-The Digital Kitty

Okay okay, I know you may be getting sick of me always talking about user experience and quality, well get used to it, because I believe that they are the most important ingredients in a tech product. While sometimes features can make up for a lack of build quality and design ingenuity, there is one field where no amount of features can make up for a shoddily built interface devices.

I have had a few non-standard peripherals in the past for game consoles. When I was younger, I actually played console games, and I loved racing games, so it only made sense to me to try to find a better solution to driving on a console. I was given a plastic racing wheel, which promptly blew chunks. It did not have enough rotation, flopped all over the place, and generally was unpleasant to use.

Later I had a pair of original Playstation dual sticks, which were pretty darned awesome and had some metal construction in them, but few games supported them. A shame, because they really were quite good.

I also had the original Time Crisis game, with the “guncon” light gun, fun, accurate, and good enough. It really could have used some more heft to it and would have been spectacular had it been given an internal pancake solenoid to give a bit more tactile feedback, but oh well, you cant have it all.

There were a few other driving wheels and joysticks, but one thing is common, they were all constructed out of plastic and felt like toys. This may have been acceptable back when video games were considered a children’s toys, but its time to up the game. I am not only talking about game peripherals, computer input devices really need an update too. Have you seen the new Apple keyboard with the brushed aluminum? That’s how its done boys and girls.

So lets talk quality. Check out the Logitech G25 racing wheel. Lets get out of the way the fact that it costs 300 bones. Yeah, that’s right, 300. Yes its a lot, yes its too much for anyone who doesn’t play racing games often, and yes most people don’t need a racing wheel, but stay with me on this. We are talking about quality. I think that monitors and input devices should be seen as investments that will outlive many generations of your other hardware. If you are looking to buy a wheel, this is one of the only ones worth buying, and here is why.

1. Metal
2. Leather
3. 900 degree rotation
4. Actual H pattern 6 gear shifting
5. Weighted controls
6. Strong force feedback

Oh wait… whats that? Do we hear quality? Do we hear TACTILE?! Your damned right we do, and that’s how we roll up in this bitch. Take notes builders.

Here is a video

Consumers will not tolerate cheap toy like construction in their automobile interior… so why should they tolerate it in the construction of their computers where they spend far more of their time?

-The Digital Kitty

According to two articles on Digg today, Google has let out two new services into the wild.

The first new feature, is the ability to chat with friends who use chat services other than googletalk, from within g-mail. Check out this link to the Official Google Blog.

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/gmail-chat-aim-crazy-delicious.html

Yawn.

Good feature, I guess, but who cares. Googletalk is just another protocol added onto the giant pile of chat protocols out in the wild. While I do enjoy Google programs, I dislike having to use many of their services though a web browser. The times that I am able to use their programs via a client, the experience has been somewhat underwhelming, for example… the googletalk client.

I have thus been driven by the sheer nebulous nature of the instant-message-o-sphere to use Pidgin for all of my instant messaging needs. Its free, expandable, fast, reliable, versatile, works with all of the major IM protocols, and I have no complaints after using it. Google talk simply doesn’t compete.

It is sort of like adding a nice set of new modern seats into a Ford Model-T. Sure it may be more comfortable to use, but its so uncompetitive, it is still not practical for daily use. Google, you can do better. Hey, you could even just buy Pidgin…

Next Google has released a new web interface for the iPhone that makes it much easier to use Google programs and services. Here are some pictures taken from a blog on techcrunch.com, which I found on Digg.

I don’t know about you, but this looks to me like a fantastically simple GUI to use, and particularly suited to one handed phone operation. This is what innovation should provide increasingly more power out of an increasingly intuitive interface. Again, rather than being a client it is accessed via a web browser, but that at the moment is just the nature of the locked down Apple beast.

- The Digital Kitty