Update on the Time 100 Most Influential People post:

The votes are in, and Team Apple did ok, although it just missed getting into the Top 10 by a hair.

Steve Jobs came in at #11, after Bono and before Jon Stewart. Another Jon, Jonathan Ive, came in at #30. Not bad.

Then again, I don’t know about the credibility of a list that puts Sanjaya Malakar at #3, and Korean R&B band Rain at #1. Huh? For reference, game designer Shigeru Miyamoto was #9, and Borat, AKA Sacha Baron Cohen, was #25.

Bill Gates was #35.

Full list here.

I posted something before about wacky Taiwanese, Japanese and Asian suppliers creating cases for the forthcoming iPhone this early. That was weird but kind of expected, but now it seems some of the bigger players are starting to get into the act, a month and a half before the alleged impending release of the much-awaited mobile phone from Apple.

First up is EBcases, a moderately successful creator of accessories, with their eNovo iPhone r/clip shown here. It comes in black, pink, red, blue, orange, and brown. It’s got a “magnetic closure” feature, a “next generation” removable lid (with a “low profile connector”), removable belt clip system and - get this - a slot for carrying a Mini SD card.

Hmm. Do they know something we don’t?

Probably not. In the “About Us” section of the EBcases website, they also go:

“Over the years we have had the pleasure to ship products to many celebrities all over the world, including:

• Former US-Vice President Al Gore
• CIA (but we cannot talk about it)“

Hrm.

Just to get you up to speed if you didn’t read the posting that explains this series, this dyed-in-the-wool Mac loyalist is currently using an IBM/ Lenovo Thinkpad T43 with Windows XP Professional as his office laptop. *shudder*. (The original post is here, if you’re at all interested.)

This series is being written to chronicle my experiences using Windows again, extensively, from a standpoint of a Mac fanboy. I realize there are thousands of you used to working on both (particularly the MacIntel crowd), but this series is for those breast-fed and weaned exclusively on Macs, or former PC users who dropped Windows years ago and haven’t looked back since (or those few impenetrable Mac bigots - you know who you are). A lot of us fanboys tend to snipe and shoot gleefully at the Windows world, often from an uninformed, knee-jerk canned response because we feel that is normally what is expected of us. I have to admit my personal bias sometimes clouds my judgment and it was a great struggle especially in my line of work as a tech review editor.

That said, I was pleasantly surprised most of the time during my first week using the Thinkpad. Let me say right off, those of you looking for smug confirmation of your worst fears won’t get it here. At least not for now.

I guess using a good quality, branded high-end laptop with licensed software colors my impressions greatly. If I had been using a heavy, clunky budget laptop with pirateware I figure my experience would have turned out very differently.

The day I got it, I loaded up the included software from the dedicated partition in the hard disk. It went without a hitch. There were a few tedious configuration hurdles and the inevitable reboots to get the thing running. This included enrolling some of my fingers for the biometric security software that was a novelty at first. (More on this in a bit.) The first sign that I was in for a long and drawn out process was when the upgrading of the system software started.

This being a year-old model, the built-in software was of course behind the times, and the machine made me go through hoops through numerous upgrades and updates, which was for some reason not packaged in one ginormous update but doled out in bits and pieces, some big, some small, and most of them requiring me to restart the system. For the platform rebooting ad nauseam was par for the course even until now; nothing had changed. This was made a bit more unbearable by the fact that the biometric system had me scan my finger in before it could reboot, and back then I was still getting the hang of it; I must have have scraped off several layers of skin from my fingers on the sensor by the time I was through.

[Read the rest of this entry »]

How much money do you earn in a day?

If you were Steve Jobs, you’d take home the equivalent of a little over P85,000,000 a day.  Every day. That’s including weekends and holidays.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs makes US$647,000,000 a year, according to Forbes Magazine, making him the highest paid CEO of 2006, and Number One in their list of the top 200 folk with the fattest paychecks. Although on paper Jobs just earns one dollar a year as a salary, he makes more in exercised stock options.

Not bad for a college dropout.

Something to think about every 15th and 30th.

The IncipioBud for the 2nd Gen iPod shuffle.  Now this is cool. And simple. So simple no words are needed. Comes with a lanyard loop. And it allows charging the thing too. Me wantss it.

US$7.99 from the site. US$9.99 retail.