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In honor of our political race yesterday, I would like to present the, iJam. No, it is not that i-jam like we'd say it in English, but actually, iJam with the 'h' sound for the 'j' in Spanish because it is from Spain. For those who don't know, jamón is basically Spanish ham. Sometimes those uninformed compare it to prosciutto, but that's dead flat out wrong since prosciutto is not only Italian, but nothing like jamón.       I have officially begun my descent in to Spanish transformation as upon leaving Spain at the end of summer last year, I began to pine for jamón. It is extremely hard to get in the US (inversely prosciutto is quite easy to get making it suspiciously inferior to jamón.) Maybe it's for the better as I'd just eat it all the time if it was here and get fat(ter). Anyways, because of this, I found iJam site to be incredibly funny as it spoofs Apple and jamón and does it very well.       This rather brilliant advertising firm in Spain called, Shacketon put the whole thing together with little other reason it seems than to have a laugh. Obviously they want to start up some kind of viral marketing to draw attention to themselves, which I'm more than happy to point their way. I saw it when it was still just in Spanish which caused a good deal of the jokes to be lost on me until Number One Fan did some translation. I was even ready to translate the whole thing out in this post so that it could be shared, when lo and behold they put English subtitles on the demonstration video you see a link to from the home page in the lower left. Good stuff. Check it out. If you're ever in Spain, don't taste the jamón unless you want to be hooked.

First and foremost, my issue is not, as Borat profoundly says it, that, "Everybody know it for girls!" I am quite happy with the form factor and if that reduces my overall outward sexuality, so be it. I carried with me around Europe for almost four months and am quite okay with it, even the fact that it's green.       No, the big problem with my iPod Mini is that it still works very well and plays music. These are the two things that I need out of such a device. For the last three years that I've had this thing, The Jobs keeps coming out with supposedly newer and better devices. He even did away with the Mini. But, I still got mine and since I doubt I could get anything for it on Ebay at this point (couple of dings from dropping it once or twice) there really is no point but to hold on to it until it completely dies.       So, Apple keeps trying to tempt me with new devices because I am one of those people that they want to see upgrading all the time. I'm younger than 35. I live in San Francisco. I have a decent income. And of course, I'm a programmer by profession. I am supposed to upgrade. I am supposed to be buying The New. But yet, I don't. A good deal of this is because I believe in better buying and don't want to generate more E-waste in the world. The other reason behind this is that beyond playing music, keeping a charge, and being small, Apple hasn't really convinced me to upgrade. But, let's look at some of the things they've attempted to ply me with and why I didn't like them:              iPod Shuffle - Too little storage. No Screen.       iPod Nano - First generation was really bad. Second generation was better, but does nothing above and beyond what my Mini did. Third generation is much more interesting, but I don't really care about video all the much and I don't care about it on that small a screen.       iPod (Classic) - Whatever the version, while they've always had better storage than my Mini they were just too big and the video feature was really uninteresting given that screen format.       iPhone - Way, way too much stuff in a phone. Bad battery life. Only slightly more storage than my Mini. Too expensive. Locked in with AT&T who I really dislike.       iPod Touch - Now this is interesting. It provides everything that I have, plus some new features that I like, such as viewing horizontal. But like the iPhone, the price is just too much for 16 gigs of storage. You can buy almost terabytes of external storage for that price! It's also still kind of new and they're getting the kinks worked out. Once again, I really just like to play music and it doesn't do anything more than my Mini in that category and even a little less, since I can't tap the controls in my pocket like I do with my Mini.              Moral of the story? The iPod Mini was probably the best basic music player that Apple ever made and they killed it at the height of its popularity. Some saw that as a bold move. I just saw it as backwards, since the beat goes on for me in Mini style and it seems that many are getting unhappy with the new Apple Greed system.

I'm going to go on the record right now and say what some others are finally starting to say in that, Apple has hit a point where it has stopped innovating and is attempting to take over the markets that others have firmly established. This may sound slightly familiar because of a company you may have heard of that does just this tactic called, Microsoft.       I believe that the pinnacle for Apple really was the iPod. All of the success to date is stemming from this one little consumer device. This device I might add really hasn't changed all that much from from the days it was first introduced. Yes, it's gotten bigger in storage, smaller in size, longer in battery life, able to work on a Windows machine, and able to play video, but really, these were not innovations. All of the things that have happened since the introduction of this little device and have helped to increase market share, but let's be honest, they were all inevitable if Apple wanted to stay in the market. So, to call the new features in the iPod innovative or far-thinking is ridiculous. What's happened to the iPod is that it's become the Microsoft Windows of the digital music player world. There are other music players out there that are just as good with the same feature set, but iPod stays on top just because it gained the most market share first, much like Windows, which isn't necessarily the best, just the most dispersed.       Now we see the Apple TV coming out. Innovative? No, not really. They've just copied the features of other devices that are similar and as many pundits have pointed out, this is a very, very crowded market that Apple is entering against folks with much deeper pockets. So, why is Apple going there? Simple. Much like Cringley pointed out with the Microsoft Zune, Apple really can't afford not to. There is already a competitor in the field that's using Apple's iTunes to do what the Apple TV will do. So, Apple simple has to make a device or they're going to get crowded out of this field and someone else might create a proper competitor to the iPod (Microsoft? Sony?) that will gain entry in their market through a set top box. But will the Apple TV do what it does better than the others? Eh, maybe. From what I've heard from friends, things like the Tivo are pretty damned fantastic and it's going to take a lot to get them to change to the Apple TV.       Then we have the Apple iPhone. I will lovingly admit that there are a great many features on this device that will warrant attention. But, are there really enough to bat it out of the park like the iPod did so many years ago? No. And when you toss in the price tag, doubly no. Folks everywhere are already starting to debate the rather large cons of this device and rightly so. It's overpriced. It's too limited and it's something that most of us simply don't need. A little one gig MP3 player for $80? Sure, I'll buy that, but a $600 phone that I can only use with Cingular (whom I truly despise) no way, I don't need that. Most folks don't. That $30 or even free phone you can get is more than adequate for the general public. I also don't see this phone working perfectly out of the box. It's going to take at least another iteration for this thing to work and by then, the Sony Ericssons, Motorolas, or the Nokias of the world will have longer out-thought it, since this is their market. They've dealt with challengers left and right, yet remained on top.       I think that the iPhone is just a luxury item to round out the iPod lineup. In August or September when Apple do their big iPod holiday push, we'll see that video iPod we've all been longing for. The one that would make me actually start to think about updating from my two year old iPod Mini. So, then you'll have the range from sub-$100 iPod to $600 top of the line iPhone. It all brings me back to my original point in that this is not innovation, just tacking on new features to an old product to push it along more. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with this, it's just ludicrous to call a company 'genius' for doing it because all companies do it. No one makes a big deal with Dell offers a laptop with a bigger harddrive or a faster processor, but when Apple does it, it's this huge thing. I suppose it's just part of the Cult of Mac.       One last note and I purely blame Jobs for this, what's up with the names these days? Talk about lame. It started with the renaming of the PowerBook to the MacBook which was lame. Apple TV and what will inevitably be just the Apple Phone are pretty lazy names. Get with it. iPod was a great name. iMac was a great name. PowerBook was a fantastic name. Did these days die once Jobs had a life-threatening illness or something? I don't get it, but the marketing people at Apple are vastly overpaid.

So, Apple updated iTunes again which is good, since version 7 has been buggy as all smackout. I just don't get why it has to erase my preferences when it installs though. I also don't get why Apple had it install this Apple Updating Software which looks a lot like the one on OSX, but yet it doesn't update anything. I had to grab this update manually. And while we're on the topic of this update, why is there no patched version? Why do I always have to download what is basically a complete install every time there is an update? And it's the same thing on the Mac with the exception of the OS patches. Get with it Cupertino.              On a completely different topic, yet still under the same heading, it looks like The Onion picked up on my red is crap bit I posted. Great, so now everyone is gonna thing I copied The Onion instead of the fact it's the other way around!

So... this whole Red Campaign has kicked off. This article sums up a bit more of it.       I gotta say, is it just me or is this a bunch of crap? I mean, it's great that companies are going to donate to the fight against AIDS in Africa and I believe this to be an extremely worthy cause, but isn't it kinda a joke with the companies that are doing it?       Let's start with The GAP. This multi-billion dollar company makes all of its clothing in sweatshops. While groups like, Global Exchange seem to be turning the tide, the fact is, people are still working horrid conditions to make your fucking khakis.       Okay, so what about Apple? Uh, yeah. They've been using Foxconn to make their iPods for years now and I'm not even going to link to these articles, since they were all the rage for awhile and really, I doubt much has changed. People are still working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, to bring you the most fashionable portable music player that they can't even afford to buy with one month's wages.       I'm not really going to go much further with this list, since you kinda get the point. Overall, yes, this is doing good, but the irony is blatant and it seems (like most charitable causes) it has been hijacked by marketing twats who see it is a "be the first to get onbaord and reap the reward" kind of thing. I could hardly see parallel retailers joining once one company in their market has joined, which would really suck, but unfortunately emphasize my point.       I mean, sure, go out and buy these RED items and feel like you're doing a little good, since you'd buy many of them anyways. But, whatever you do, don't think you're some holy savior like Gwenneth Paltrow. You're still doing bad and if it feels like you can't win, then stop buying this crap altogether and donate directly to charities who are working to stop problems like this. Afterall, there is a vested interest by companies at large to have a healthy Africa, since at some point, they may need a new third world point of production if the Asian currencies are revaluated at some point...