And yet more Apple news...
 
At today's WWDC, Apple announced upgrades to the MacBook line. The Aluminum 13" MacBook will be now considered a MacBook Pro (the white plastic MacBook is the only version in the MacBook line, now) and will have a bump in processor power, hard drive space, and a slightly better screen resolution. Other goodies include SD card slot and FireWire 800 port. There were also upgrades to the 15" and 17" MacBook Pros and also the MacBook Air (won't list them here but you can check them out on the Apple website).
 
The bigger news is that prices were reduced anywhere from $100 to $700 across the line. Still doesn't make them on par with Windows based laptops but at least they're making an effort to be more affordable. I'll probably pick up a new 13" MacBook Pro in a few months and pass my current MacBook on to the wife. By then, there should be enough froth in the secondary market to snag one at slightly below retail and with no sales tax.

It's a big Apple news day...

Having been a Windows user for the majority of my computing life, I've been trained to expect every subsequent new version of Windows to be larger than the version it succeeds. I made the switch to Mac a little over a year ago and kinda had the same expectation of the new OS 10.6 release. Stronger, faster, but maybe a little more bloated which I don't have an issue with given that hard drive prices continually get pushed down. However, I come to find that when upgrading to the new Mac OS build, you actually free up 6GB of space. That's definitely a refreshing revelation.
 
It made me think of a tech documentary (one of the best, in my opinion) called Triumph of the Nerds on PBS. One particular line was from Steve Ballmer who was describing how in the early days of Microsoft, they were bucking the trend of building big bloated software. Here's the quote:

"In IBM there's a religion in software that says you have to count K-LOCs, and a K-LOC is a thousand line of code. How big a project is it? Oh, it's sort of a 10K-LOC project. This is a 20K-LOCer. And this is 50K-LOCs. And IBM wanted to sort of make it the religion about how we got paid. How much money we made off OS 2, how much they did. How many K-LOCs did you do? And we kept trying to convince them - hey, if we have - a developer's got a good idea and he can get something done in 4K-LOCs instead of 20K-LOCs, should we make less money? Because he's made something smaller and faster, less KLOC. K-LOCs, K-LOCs, that's the methodology. Ugh anyway, that always makes my back just crinkle up at the thought of the whole thing."

The really ironic part is that Microsoft doesn't seem to invest money in actually making its OS more streamlined. Windows just seems to get bigger and bigger. Given all the advances in coding and technology, why can't someone make an OS more powerful yet slimmer? The short answer is that they never had to. CPUs got more powerful and memory (hard drives, RAM) got bigger/cheaper. Still, it's nice to see that someone actually decided to take a step back and say, "Hey, I can make this software perform better AND reduce its overall size."

New iPhone 3GS was released today. But that's not the reason that Palm and Sprint are screwed. The iPhone 3G 8GB model is now $99 - a full $100 less than the Pre. When both phones were still $199, I could see a fair amount of people giving the Pre a try. Now, I just don't see many people paying an additional $100 to get a phone that hasn't blown the iPhone out of the water, as many pundits predicted.

 
A nice follow-up to my Microsoft Bing.com post earlier. Slowly and surely, Google Maps has become the best online map service to date. When they first started out, they were no better than MapQuest, Yahoo Maps, or even Microsoft's MapPoint. But just like the turtle, they've made slow and steady progress. Their latest addition is the "pancake" feature of the Street View tool which makes navigating through Street View so much easier.
 
I don't "root" for Google. I have no vested interest in whether they do well or not. In fact, I've argued that the overall web ecosystem would benefit from them losing a little search market share and Yahoo/Microsoft gaining a little more. However, it's tough to argue when one company is churning out great products while the other two flounder or put out irrelevant commercials.