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The One-Finger Salute (11/7/02)
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Of course, today Microsoft plans to upstage Apple's latest round of portable product updates and price drops by launching a new portable innovation of its own: the Tablet PC. For now, we'll spare you the predictable rant about how we really loved the Tablet PC the first time we saw it (back when it was called the Newton), and instead we'll force ourselves to focus on just one teensy little aspect of Redmond's "Look, Ma, We're Innovating" desperate cry for attention. Deal?
Okay, here goes: faithful viewer Scott Bradford was dutifully educating himself about the Top 10 Benefits of Tablet PC and was struck by something interesting about Microsoft's Number 10, "Get High Levels of Protection for Critical Data." No, it wasn't the surreal notion that Tablet PC's inheritance of "all of the protection features of Windows XP Professional" is touted as if it's somehow a good thing-- "Gee, my spiffy new Tablet PC is 100% compatible with the same viruses and security holes that make my desktop PC a veritable fount of entertainment value!" It was, instead, discovering Microsoft's one true innovation in the Tablet PC spec: "a single CTRL+ALT+DEL hardware button."
At last, customers need no longer overexert themselves by employing three whole fingers during system crashes! Microsoft's implementation of a single hardware button that emulates all three keystrokes represents a whopping 67% improvement in ease of use. It's a shame that it took the company this long to come up with the idea, since it would have been immensely helpful to its customer base before the advent of Windows XP, back when crashes were a rather more frequent aspect of the Windows user experience. Microsoft could have added its groundbreaking single CTRL+ALT+DEL button to its line of keyboards and saved the world countless man-hours of effort expended while rebooting, thus freeing up enough time and energy for mankind to implement a foolproof plan to end world hunger while simultaneously discovering cures for all known diseases.
Oh, well... still, better late than never, right? We hereby propose that the age-old "three-finger salute" be officially and appropriately renamed the "one-finger salute." In fact, we're doing our own one-finger salute to Microsoft right now. Guess which finger?
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SceneLink (3827)
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 11/7/02 episode: November 7, 2002: Apple did indeed introduce new PowerBooks, and they do indeed include a slot-loading SuperDrive. Meanwhile, the iBook gets a significant price cut that sends the base model into sub-$1000 territory, and Microsoft's real innovation with the Tablet PC actually comes a couple of years too late...
Other scenes from that episode: 3825: Ahead Drool Factor Ten (11/7/02) Well, shave an ape and call it Ballmer-- the kid was right! November 6th has come and gone, and as was widely anticipated, it left shiny new PowerBooks in its wake. That's not the groovy bit, though. The groovy bit, as faithful viewer Michael Brendler kindly pointed out, is that Apple's new top-of-the-line PowerBook indeed boasts an incredibly sexy slot-loading SuperDrive, just as our own six-month-old intern and goddess-in-training apparently predicted... 3826: Far Too Good To Pass Up (11/7/02) Meanwhile, there was far less debate over what fate had in store for the humble iBook, and pretty much everything that people expected came true: speeds were bumped up an extra hundred megahertz, the graphics subsystem was updated to the Mobility Radeon 7500 that used to be in the PowerBook line (thus bringing Quartz Extreme capability to Apple's consumer portables), and most importantly, two hundred clams were shaved right off the price tags...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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