More evidence that Motorola only expects to sell Droids to D&D playing nerd boys who never get laid.

The latest ad, as described in this article on AppleInsider, mocks the iPhone as a feminine beauty pageant winner, a mirror for women to fix their lipstick, rather than a serious computing tool.

Without going into the obvious ridiculousness of that statement, or the all-too-easy shortcomings of the Droid that make it far less serious than an iPhone at real-world hard-core computing tasks (Like, say, being able to load more than ten or eleven apps before running out of space, or being able to talk to someone on the phone while using the Internet simultaneously), I can easily dismiss the effectiveness of this commercial as a selling tool with a much simpler statement:

Yeah. So what’s your point?

Since when is selling a consumer device that has appeal to women a bad thing? One of the reasons Apple has succeeded where many, many other computer companies have failed with the iPod, the iPhone, and now even the Mac, is that its design is curvy, friendly, and yes, feminine enough not to turn off women, while still being cool enough to attract men who don’t spend all their time working out hexadecimal code in their mother’s basement.

This ad, like all the others before it, seems to be an admission that the Droid has an extremely limited audience. Hello? More than 50 percent of the cell-phone carrying world is female. You just told them all that 1) you’re all Prada-wearing, vapid shopaholics, obsessed with appearances, and 2) the last thing you want to do is buy a Droid. Get an iPhone instead.

Does Motorola not have 1 woman in its marketing department?

I think Motorola fails to understand that while the nerd sentiment may have taken over the universe of pop culture in the last ten years, it’s not the true nerds who run the show. Looking and talking like a nerd is cool. Being a nerd is still being a nerd. (Weezer is cool. Bill Gates still gets wedgies every day.) It’s cool to wear glasses, be super-skinny, play fantasy football instead of real football, and even carry around a personal pocket computer with you everywhere you go.

But Dungeons and Dragons is still lame, guys. And dissing women in your ad isn’t even a good way to inspire men to buy your product.

Take a lesson from beer commercials. Have your guy with the phone, surrounded by women falling all over him to get to his Droid. THAT’s how you get shallow men to buy your product.

And, for god sake, if you want to be taken seriously, stop mentioning the iPhone in your ads. You’re helping Apple, not hurting it.

The problem is I just don’t buy into Google’s obsession with the browser. Wave has so much potential to kill IM and email. As a collaborative tool, especially, it’s quite impressive, though slow and buggy in its current iteration. I have no doubt Google will fix that.

What Google can’t fix is the fact that I’m not a complete nerd who sits around with a browser tab open at all times, checking every few minutes to see if anyone has made any updates to my waves.

This is exactly the same reason why I don’t run email in a browser window, either. Unless I have to for some strange reason. A separate email application gives me a simple and clear notification whenever a new email arrives. Even better, I get a notification on my iPhone when an email arrives, as well. So I don’t have to keep checking the page over and over again to figure out if there are any updates.

I wouldn’t dream of using the Twitter or Facebook web pages, either. I have excellent iPhone clients for both of those. (And a great desktop client for Twitter, as well, in Tweetie.) There’s no way I would have ever started using Twitter without a decent client app.

The same will most likely be true for me and Wave. Until someone comes up with a decent standalone app, one that notifies me of updates, has a companion iPhone app that syncs up as well, and maybe tosses in a few other bells an whistles, I’m afraid Wave will remain little more than a toy to play around with occasionally for me.

Here we go again. Remember what I said before about watching the money when it comes to Apple news?

The analysts are pulling numbers out of their butts again. Let’s see where Apple’s stock goes this morning, shall we? Right now, it’s already down $1.53. http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/11/30/apples_black_friday_mac_sales_forecast_to_decrease.html

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/11/30/another_take_apples_black_friday_sales_seen_as_strong.html

Again, not a single word of any of this is based on anything you could consider scientific evidence. But someone’s going to get rich off it before the day is over.

At what point are we going to start arresting people for this sort of thing?

So it’s now official. Apple has made tools freely available for creating iTunes LPs, and is encouraging groups to create their own.

All that panic a few months back for nothing, as usual. It never ceases to amaze me how wrong the media is about Apple on a regular basis.

Read the full article here: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/11/26/apple_posts_tools_for_building_tunekit_itunes_lps_and_extras.html

Time for everyone to take a deep breath and use common sense about the latest Apple tablet rumors.

Let’s start with a reality check. There is no Apple tablet. No one at Apple, speaking for Apple, has ever made any mention whatsoever of such a product in any way. Not as a future product, not as an idea for a product. Not even as a denial of the product. Anyone who would have deep inside knowledge of such a project is locked away in a room somewhere in Cupertino. Sure, there may be some outsiders who were brought in on the manufacturing side, or to consult about concurrent software offerings, but none of those people is going to have any clue about release schedules or product details.

So when you read an article that says “reliable sources” have revealed that Apple has delayed the release of the tablet, you have to wonder exactly how that’s possible. How can a company delay the release of a product that doesn’t exist? And even if it does exist, until Apple announces a release date, they can’t miss that release date, delay that release date, etc.

I remember the good old days, when crazy Apple speculation was all coming from the fans, who just wanted to be excited about the next big product, or who wanted to show off their “inside” knowledge. The rumors were nuts, but at least they were made in good fun.
Nowadays few, if any, of the rumors are coming from there. Today, if you want to get to the bottom of the Apple rumor mill, you just need to follow the money.

Watch the stock price rise and fall. And then remember why these rumors exist.

http://gizmodo.com/5169230/jon-stewart-vs-jim-cramer-on-manipulating-apple-stock

I’m as excited as anyone to find out where Apple will go next. And I have no doubt that at the most basic tenant of the rumor (Apple is almost ready to release some sort of tablet computer) is true. But anyone claiming any sort of details beyond that is either grasping at straws from a fourth-hand source, or simply pulling the whole thing out of their ass. So let Wall Street play its games, and sit back and wait for the real news sometime next year. And for god’s sake, stop calling it the iTablet. Apple is a lot more creative than that.