Roundup

Did anyone else see the MSU men’s and women’s basketball teams get trounced this weekend? No? Good. Moving on.
Good to see Cal Ripken and Tony Gwynn get into the Hall of Fame. And only those two. They are among the last of an era, guys who played their entire careers with the same team. Both are worthy entries. But really, who were the 8 guys who DIDN’T vote for Cal Ripken? The newspaper this morning said there were two blank ballots turned in, including the guy who said he wouldn’t vote for anyone who played anywhere between 1993-2004 (the “steroid era”). So who were the other 6 guys that basically voted against Cal? Ridiculous.
Switching gears a bit, you may have heard a wild cheer from the San Francisco area yesterday as Apple announced its new iPhone. I admit to being a fanboy in the past, and I think that out of everyone, Apple has the best chance of making a “smartphone” like this work. But damn, $500 WITH a two-year contract on Cingular/AT&T. That’s steep. According to this morning’s Washington Post, there are only 6 million smartphones in use in the US today, and Jobs pegged 10 million iPhones as his target number. Hard to see that happening, but then again, people were dropping $500 on the RAZR when it first came out, and it was nowhere near as revolutionary or feature packed as this.
The bigger disappointment came with the Apple TV. It’s essentially a dumb box that outputs content stored on your computer to your TV. I’m still hoping they introduce some kind of PVR functionality in the next version of OS X, because the stuff they offer at the iTunes store isn’t cutting it. They sell movies and TV shows at 640×480 resolution, while touting the Apple TV’s ability to output 720p HD. Hello? A bit of a disconnect there. Especially when I can go out now and buy a Windows Media Center PC with an HD tuner card and a huge hard drive for cheap, add an XBox 360 for $299 to use as a media extender, plus even the new HD-DVD add-on ($199) if you’re so inclined, and get a lot more out of the fancy HDTV in the living room than Apple can give. In short, I guess I’ve tired of waiting till Apple’s next big announcement to see if they bring it all together in a package I can love, while other companies and devices can do the job nearly as well for a lot cheaper, today.