Warning... This is a major anti-Apple post. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Okay, I made a point of not paying attention to the recent Apple developments, because, frankly, those Mac conventions give me a stomach ache, but, of course, since Digg is so biased for Apple, I get to read things even in articles that aren't supposed to pertain to Apple... So after I'd heard some things, I decided to see if such things were true, and, lo! They were! Now, I want to point and laugh at them:

1. This new MacBook Air thing? No optical drive. Sure, you can buy an external one (for extra), but there's not one built in anymore. Am I the only one who sees this as "reason not to buy #1"? I use my optical drive every single day! (Games, movies, etc!) I don't know about you, but I don't have the expenses to buy 3 million terabytes of hard drive space to store images of everything I own. (I guess if you can afford an Apple device, you could afford 3 million terabytes of storage, hoho.) I have literally hundreds of CDs and DVDs of stuff that I've burned and purchased and use quite frequently. Even DVD movies! This MacBook isn't going to be able to play movies without plugging in an external drive? What... the... heck... Oh, I see. You can wirelessly access another drive from a computer with some special Apple software installed! (Yes, as if I want the brilliant programming engineering that brought me iTunes to be messing directly with my hardware? I don't even have wireless because, frankly, it's immensely slow and I constantly copy very large files from computer to computer and I've considering upgrading to gigabit Ethernet, just because I don't like waiting half an hour to copy stuff!) So whenever you want to watch a movie on your latest Apple gizmo, just be sure your wireless is in range, and just be sure that the movie is in your desktop's drive before you get all settled in for 2 hours.

2. On the subject of wireless, that's the only thing you can use with a MacBook Air to access a network! Why? Because they completely got rid of the built in Ethernet port! Uhm... Actually, I think this is "reason not to buy #1". Whenever I go to someone's house, I usually have the option of picking between wireless or wired connectivity, and I always, always, always pick wired. Why? Because wireless is slow, usually not properly configured, and we sit there yelling the password letters to each other several times because something went wrong and we have to do it all over again. I always take a spare Ethernet cable with me because I can just plug and chug, so to speak. Securely, I might add. (It also lacks a Firewire port...) You can, however, buy ANOTHER device that converts a USB port to Ethernet. Yes... Let's pay Apple more money to get something that everyone else still adds to their laptop.

3. Zero user-replaceable parts. That means you have to send it in to an Apple store to replace anything and everything that breaks. Monitor, keyboard, battery... hard drive... RAM... everything. Why? Because it's sealed up tight, exactly like an iPod and everything's fused together even if you got the thing open. Oh, but don't worry. You can have the battery replaced for a very low price of $129

Actually, you don't have to worry about any of these things, because the MacBook Air is environmentally friendly! Mercury free, circuit boards without nasty chemicals that can damage the poor Earth. Yes, Sir, this is the laptop for all you global warming advocates! (By the way, it's going to be 9 degrees this weekend. That's awfully cold, you know.)

And let's not forget that Apple claimed this was the thinnest notebook in the world! Even though, uhm... They lied, and it's not: Thinnest Notebook Crown Belongs to Sharp But, hey. Let's just completely overlook the fact that Steve Jobs lies, because this is Apple! And Apple made something cool again! Even though there are thinner laptops out there. Poor Apple. There goes another selling point.

Can you imagine what would happen if Microsoft made anything like this? Can you imagine the uproar that would occur if you had to send in your laptop to Microsoft simply to replace a battery? To have it's RAM upgraded? To add a larger hard drive? Can you imagine the uproar if Microsoft was forcing you to buy adapters for things that should be built in anyway?

And don't take my word for it, here are all the references. Everyone likes to tell me how awesome Wikipedia is, and everyone enjoys asking me where I got all my information, so here you go! A single link to appease both parties! Now that I have references AND Wikipedia, I must be right. There'll be someone who comes along and will feel it's their duty to tell me that if I don't like Apple, I don't have to buy from them, and that such a thing is the wonder of the modern market! That I can choose what I want to buy! Yes, well, let me save you the trouble and say: You're completely right, and I'm not going to buy one of these Airs. Ever.

So I was wallowing in boredom and sadness at the lack of any good fantasy films of any kind that I haven't already watched to death... And then I remembered that I have The 10th Kingdom! It's easy to spoil, because it's so huge (it's a mini-series), so I'll just say that it's a story of a father and daughter who accidentally get pulled into a crazy world where fairy tales are real. Makes it sound kind of dumb, I realize, but it's like a parallel world that you can cross over to. It's been around 200 years since the events of the fairy tales that we know, so what we know is considered real history in that world. So you've got funky magic and riddles and poisoned apples and the whole nine yards! The coolest part is what they cooked up for the Magic Mirrors. (You know, the ones Snow White's stepmother used to see who the fairest one of all was?) One of the mirrors allows for passage between their world and ours... Really cool. Really loooong, too.

I'd seen it before, but I'd completely forgotten about it... And thusly completely forgotten about this little clip that I just had to get posted on YouTube. Bit of a rough cut, but I didn't want to actually recompress the entire audio and video, so I just used the original key-frames, so there's a few ghost images... But this is the spirit of the entire show! Incredibly funny and well-thought:

iTunes crashed last night. Just froze, right out of the blue. Vista was perfectly functional underneath it, and I was able to use the desktop and the Start Menu like normal, but iTunes just sat there, frozen in time, eating 100% of my CPU when everything was idle. A process termination was in order. Just thought I'd throw that out...

Anyway, today, I start it back up? (Because it is the player I've organized my music for, sadly.) Up pops the good ol' 'A new version of iTunes (7.6) is available. Would you like to download it now?' I laugh at it and say 'heck, no! I'll take your little upgrade warning, but let you download it? You can't even do it properly!' So then I go 'you know, I want to read a changelog before I actually do any upgrading. With all the pointless iPhone crap and Leopard GUI updates you're rolling out, I probably don't want anything you have to offer.' I mean, I'm used to reading changelogs all the time... World of Warcraft pushes out a new patch? I read the entire thing because it's fun to do, and it's useful to know! Heck, even Windows Update tell you what it's patching and why, or at least gives you a link to a more in-depth discussion on it. What does Apple do? Absolutely nothing.

"Here's an update! Trust us, it's for your own good."

No changelog in the iTunes folder, no list of what's been changed on the website, nothing in About iTunes menu option or the file of the same name in the folder. Absolutely no reference to what they've done to their little piece of software that you rely on so much. Are they going to automatically detect whether or not you have an iPhone and disable the helper service accordingly? Are they going to give me some more control over how my playlists can be sorted? They're not going to tell me? Fool me twice, shame on me. There's some rudimentary changelog on Wikipedia, but it's nothing more than you can get off their site sometimes. "Improvement for the iPhone", sure... Yeah, I noticed that myself. I grew up playing Myst and Riven remember? I can notice the little Ringtones options that showed up during my last update. Precious little good it does me, though.

I think I'll pass... You know, I played with a latest generation Zune a few weeks ago and it was simply amazing. The interface was actually NOT annoying, with that inaccurate little spin-wheel that whizzes past whatever song entry you're trying to play, and the interface actually looks GOOD. (Have you seen the interfaces on the latest generation iPods? Ew, ew, ew, ew, ew... I certainly hope you can change the effect of having your screen split in half, showing song information on the left and album art on the right. That's just convoluted and distracting, I'm sorry.) Plus, and get this! The Zune/Windows Media Player/Windows Media Center combination works with my Xbox 360, with some of the coolest visualizations I've seen before. (Namely because all the visualizations on my computers are compromised by me always multitasking and robbing power from the rendering and slowing it down to being pointless...)

When my iPod dies... Hello, Microsoft Zune! I'm sick of Apple leading me around by the collar.