Today is the day Macfags were waiting for. Apple finally announcing what their secret new product is. It’s called the iPad.

iPad, more important than Haiti

iPad, funny name isn’t it. Kind of makes you think of a pad, you know for periods. In fact, MadTV did a sketch about this already. So getting around the horrible name we can move on to the design of it. Apple clearly didn’t spend a lot of time on this one. It looks like they just stretched an iPhone. Also, please note the large black frame. How large is it? Let’s do some calculations.

 Area of whole phone: 7.47 x 9.56 = 71.4132
Area of screen: 5.67 x 7.86= 44.5662
Area of phone – area of screen = 25.842 / area of whole phone
~ 35% of the phone is the black frame.

My eyes, I’m seeing doubles.

Before announcing the iPad, Apple showed a picture of a missing gap between the phone and the laptop. What could fill this gap? Maybe a regular fucking tablet computer? How about the Newton you guys forgot about? Could the missing link be a netbook? No those things are slow with a poor display, and PC software. When Apple went into announcing the specs of the iPad, I couldn’t help but laugh. “The slow netbook” was facing off against a fucking 1ghz A4 processor. Great job there Apple, my 1.8ghz Atom is so much slower than your 1ghz. Furthermore the aspect ratio on it is a 4:3 1024×768. So much for playing YoutubeHD in 720 (1280×720).

Netbooks are slow. iPad is slower.
Image from Engadget

Apple claimed to be the number 1 mobile company in the world. According to Apple, China must be on another fucking planet. They claimed to have beat Sony and Samsung in the mobile industry. For some reason I find that hard to believe. In cellphone sales alone I would agree, but Apple decided to include laptops, mp3 players in there too. Sony has what? Phones, PSP, ebook readers, mp3 players, laptops… Apple also said “And by revenue… it’s even bigger than Nokia.” Which translates into one thing: Apple crap is fucking expensive.

As soon as Apple showed off the book store I quickly went over to Amazon to compare prices. A book called “True Compass: A Memoir” sells for $11.99 on the Amazon store while on the iBook store, it sells for $14.99. Personally I don’t get why Apple doesn’t release a iBook app on the iPhone and not make people buy a brand new device to do that.

It’s a large improvement over the iPhone in some places, I can give it that much. A faster processor and larger screen res can really help out with functionality. You really saw it with the pop-up menus which looked good actually. The best thing about the iPad is the fact that it can support a physical keyboard. Dear god what an age we live in. However Apple still has its huge flaws. No Flash support and no multitasking. You think it’s new fucking 1ghz processor can handle that.

One huge problem I have with the thing is that it runs a modified version of the iPhone OS. On a screen that large and processor that good they could have done something a lot better. The home screen looks terrible, the icons are oddly spaced out. Running the old iPhone apps on the iPad look horrible. Either it’s stretched like mad, or you have an even larger black border. Something in the 85% area.

Check out that fucking icon spacing.

iPhone’s resolution compared to the iPad.
Image from Engadget

That’s when they showed the rip off of Halo. Apple, you used to have Bungie creating games for you. But then you decided LOL GAMES AREN’T IMPORTANT. And now Apple is really trying with the gaming market. They seem to be doing good…

No this game doesn’t look familiar at all…
Image from Engadget

Now with all this technology, you would assume Apple would put a massive price tag on it The iPhone 3GS without contract costs about $780CND here with Rogers so the iPad must be more right? Well to be honest, it’s a pretty fair price. $499 for the base model. $830 for the highest end. While the price point isn’t low like a netbook, it is affordable. But I guess price doesn’t matter to Macfags, they’ll buy anything with the Apple logo on it.

Don’t give me bullshit how it costs $299

I’ve recently read an article on CNN talking about Macfags. Below are some excerpts:

 Xavier Yaffar says he will buy it. Whatever the cost.
Big surprise there…

“I don’t even have to look at it,” the 48-year-old said.
I’m sure the design team at Apple will be thrilled to hear that they don’t have to work hard for you to buy their crap.

“I bought the iPod when it was announced. I didn’t know what it was going to do when I bought it,”
You bought something without knowing what it does?

Greenbaum met his husband at an Apple fan group in the mid-90s. When they started dating, the couple hung out in Mac computer labs together
Now that’s what I call a Macfag!

“It’s a part of your identity,” he said. “People are going to recognize you more by the computer you use and the phone you carry than by the car you drive.”
So you will isolate everyone that doesn’t have a Mac right?

So that’s about it for this week. Be sure to click all the links in the article for more lols.

And gaymen.

So yesterday Apple announced that they are going to be having a press conference on the 27th. So Engadget was flooded with stupid ass comments (as with any Apple post)

“The Motorola Driod or the Nexus One wouldn’t exist without the iPhone”
Now this can be true. But I see it another way. Back in 2003, Sony released a shitty phone called the P900. However, it was revolutionary for the time. It had it all, a touch screen, keyboard, calendar. You name it. The iPhone didn’t introduce anything new to the world, but it did do a lot correctly (eventually.)

“After this thing comes out the market is going to be flooded with the ‘iTablet’ killers which will never kill the iPhone”
Oh yeah, definitely gonna be flooded with “copycats” (which came out before the iTablet). The reason they won’t sell as well because everyone already fucking bought an iTablet so they’re not going to be buying another fucking tablet.

“The reason we saw all those tablets at CES as because those companies were scared of Apple”
Yeah, bullshit. I guess companies back in 2003 were scared of Apple as well.

Even more stupidity is the rumour that the new iTablet will run the iPhone OS. What the fuck is the point of it. According to the same source, the iTablet has a 1.8ghz dualcore processor. Just fucking run Snow Leopard. It’s so much more productive.

Anyways, I can’t really complain about the device itself until it’s out, next Wednesday. Perfect timing for my blog.

Lately, Facebook has been flooded with a whole wave of requests to create a “dislike button.” Now I see where this is all coming from. You “like” a status and you should be able to “dislike” a status. But the reality of it is, if you dislike a status, why would you even comment on it?

And no, joining a group that says “If 1,000,000 people join this group Facebook will add a dislike button” won’t make there be one.

2010 is among us, we can no longer wear cool glasses with the two zeros as the eyes. (Unless in 2010 you put a one at the nose and use the other two zeros as the eyes, hmm)

Anyways, it’s been a while since I posted about a movie. Dark Knight was the last one, I complained about it because of Heath Ledger, remember? Well it’s happening again: A movie is becoming insanely popular for no reason at all. The movie I am referring to is obviously Avatar. James Cameron is at it again, he did it with Titanic; make over a billion dollars on a movie. Now I can’t really compare it to Titanic because I never watched it. But all I can say is Avatar sucked.

The story began in a future far, far away. It was some planet with some blue fuckers that live like the natives used to (haha, spoiler.) The movie was basically a microcosm of the real world. The earth people found a mineral on this planet that is fucking valuable. Naturally they can’t just take it so they have to start a war to get it. So it goes into a whole battle of stealing land (like the white people did to the natives) and grabbing some minerals (Iraq war). At first the army tries to take the land peacefully, by sending “Avatars” in to communicate with the natives.

Jake (the main character) was a crippled dude. When he first got to pilot one of these Avatars and suddenly he can walk again. Hallelujah. He was excited, jumping around and not having a care in the world. This made it very suprising when Jake chose to be an Avatar forever instead of being a human. But that’s a spoiler isn’t it? Anyways, Jake meets this one blue bitch and fucks her. He falls in love and no longer wants to help out the army trying to get rid of the natives. The army then destroys their fucking central tree hub and that’s when the movie gets fucking interesting. (This is 2 hours into the movie). Jake then gathers all the natives and fights the army. They win. Liberation at last, one problem. Jake didn’t want to be human anymore. The natives then do some crazy ass ritual to put his soul from his human body into the Avatar. It works. Moral of the story: Native technology fucking works.

There is a huge part of the movie where it attempts to build character. You are supposed to feel sorry for the natives when they got their home nuked. I however didn’t care. The only characters they build on was Jake and his bitch. Then they also showed how wonderful the world was. Full of colours and lights that every stoner would fucking enjoy. Infact, I bet you 90% of the audience was high when I went to go see it. I could hear the people behind me saying “oh man, it’s so trippy. Oh fuck man. Oh. OH SHIT” And all I say to that is, SHUT THE FUCK UP. Anyways, the world did look good, but it wasn’t anything that a Final Fantasy game didn’t already have. That’s actually what the movie would be better as. A game. Because the whole point of the movie was to show a wonderful world. You can’t get the same sense of exploration in a movie as you can with a game.

The majority of people I know went to see the movie “to see the effects.” To be fair, they were pretty good, but they could have been better. The movie basically separates the characters from the background and has the characters in a different “layer” if you will. This means that the characters appear to be standing out, and it looks pretty cool. But there are some points of the movie where they repeat an effect way too much. There was this one effect where it showed this drawer like effect. Where the camera was inside the drawer and someone pushed it in. Basically it looks as this thing is coming towards you. They used that effect about 3 times in the movie. Then later at the end of the movie it shows a bunch of flying bird things throwing helicopters. I swear they use reused the same animation 4 times at different angles.

To be fair, it was a decent movie. But it in no way deserves all this attention it’s getting. The 3D is decent, not great. (Apperantly they didn’t even use a high enough framerate). The story was predictable, and had many cliche elements.

On a side note, why the fuck is Heath Ledger in movies again? DAMN DEAD GUY!