One of the things I like about the newer nanos, minis and the 2nd gen iPod shuffle is the hardiness and durability of the anodized aluminum casing. My video iPod is scratched all to hell, and is in need of serious plastic (acrylic) surgery; either that, or a good rub-down with some expensive restoring cream. Now I take care in bringing it with me so I don’t make the condition worse.

On the other hand, my shuffle goes with me everywhere. Since I am not as afraid of it getting scratched up like a vinyl record at the beach, it gets a good workout, jangling along with the junk in my pocket, swinging around on a lanyard or just bopping around with the owner the whole day just clipped to his shirt front. All in all it’s a tough little bugger; I’ve heard of stories from shuffle-owning friends where the pods inadvertently go through the laundry and come working like new, and sparkling clean to boot.

Sad to say, it’s apparently not that durable, cosmetically speaking - while the case seems tough as nails, after a few months of heavy use, it’s the label on the back of the clip with the Apple logo that starts to look bedraggled first. Since it’s just painted or layered on, this isn’t surprising. It’s bound to get scratched off eventually, but it’s a bit depressing to see when it starts happening:

It doesn’t look too horrible in the picture - the lighting washed out the scratches a bit too much - in real life the scratches look a lot worse, believe me. I bought a set of rubber casings for it soon after I got the shuffle, but while it covers the main body of the little iPod, it leaves the whole clip bare and wide open to nasty shirt buttons, coins and keys in pockets and to the elements in general. Apple, take note.

Just a little reminder to take care of your 2G iPod shuffle a little better if you have one or get one in the near future. It’s not that indestructible.

True. At lease the case was.

The Apple I, circa 1976, was made and designed by Steve Wozniak in Palo Alto, California. Only 200 were made, and sold for US$600 fully assembled as a circuit board, but to get it to work you needed to purchase a case, power supply, keyboard and display. Its CPU was a MOS 6502 running at 1kHz. It came standard with 4kb memory. It was discontinued a year later when the Apple ][ came out.

Today, maybe 30 to 50 units still exist. At an auction in 1999, one sold for US$50,000.

Humble beginnings, and the start of something good.

Yesterday Apple released the fourth security patch for Mac OS X, making it one patch per month for the year. This new patch, Security Update 2007-004, fixes 25 security holes, although only three of them are critical ones. It’s a 10mb download through Software Update.

I know this is important stuff, but I can’t seem to get worked up over something that seems distant to the Mac user experience. Still, you can never be too careful. Or, as is popular to say these days, you can never can tell.

In related news, Apple at the same time also issued an update to Aperture, the photo post-production tool that some folk say Apple has abandoned. Apparently not. Aperture 1.5.3 improves performance and reliability, and fixes some niggles. This one is a bigger suck-down: 129.5 megs. Available via Software Update or directly from Apple.

Aperture 1.5.3 addresses issues related to overall reliability and performance in a number of areas, including:
- Generation of thumbnails for adjusted images
- Entering and exiting Full Screen mode
- Working with large sets of keywords in the Keywords HUD
- Restoring from a vault

Among the specific issues that have been addressed:
- Previews now update properly when images are sent to an external editor.
- Leaf Aptus 22 and Aptus 75 images are now imported with the correct orientation.
- When folders are imported as projects, the folder structure is now correctly preserved when identically named subfolders are included in the hierarchy.
- Reconnecting referenced images that have been externally edited now works more reliably.
- Setting the ColorSync profile in the Aperture Print dialog now correctly suppresses color management settings in the Mac OS X Print dialog.

I think it’s an indication of the level of heat being generated by Apple’s forthcoming iPhone that accessories are coming out this early even if the product is still essentially vaporware. Engadget and Akihabara News are reporting that phone cases are already appearing in Hong Kong, Singapore and other outlets in the region, third party accessories created based on published specs from the Apple site. It’s mind boggling that anyone would buy one even without actually owning a unit, other than with the express intention of getting an obvious conversation piece (as if the iPhone itself isn’t one on its own). I don’t think even the most dedicated fanboy can justify this purchase. Tech lunacy, if you ask me.

(Photo from akihabaranews.com; crossposted in m-ph.com)

Apple came out last week with a statement that the company has sold one hundred million iPods since they introduced it five-and-a-half years ago in 2001. Man, that’s a big-ass number! Write it out longhand and it looks even more impressive: 100,000,000 iPods. So if each one had a pair of earphones that came with it, that’s 200,000,000 single earbuds! And 100,000,000 mini-stereo plugs! And 100,000,000 free stickers! And…

Meanwhile Microsoft predicts they’ll sell one million Zunes by June, six months after release.  Judging by that rate, in the same amount of time (June 2012) they’d have sold 11 million of them brown things.