Woahey!
After last week's successful "talk like a pirate" beginning, I
thought today we'd celebrate "talk like a neurosurgeon" day.
Notice any difference?
Exactly.
But on to more challenging things. Over here in a country that no
proper American neo-conservative would ever mention without the
addition of the lovely term "cheese eating surrender monkeys," an Apple
Expo was held (An American company seeking a European audience in
that country? Bloody traitors!) and new PowerBooks were given a
first airing. Even smarter, more powerful, and more desirable, these
babies are already infiltrating the few Apple retailers the UK has
left, so the opportunity was opportune (ha!) to go out shopping to hunt
down last week's model of the nice and shiny PBs at a significant lower
price than only a couple of weeks ago.
Due to a new financial restraint found in myself I actually wanted
to get the 12" Combo
drive, but today, strolling through Dixons (a large electronics chain
in the UK) in Terminal 1 of London Heathrow, gazing at the tax free
gadgets, I saw an offer for the 17" with Combo drive: 1,870
pounds bloody sterling!!!
I gasped, as that was exactly 700 pounds less than last week on the
highstreets of London (currently under siege by some weird so called
magician who put himself in a glass box strapped in the air next to the
Tower Bridge, apparently enjoying being pelted with eggs, hamburgers,
paintballs, and insults by your average Londoner). That's it, I
thought: I went to the terminal restaurant, drank a glass of
Pinot Gris to encourage myself, and went, credit card
wielding, to the next helpful looking sales assistant and offered to
leave 1,870 pounds in the store, in exchange for a shiny new 17"
PB.
The gentleman went behind his computerised till (running something
that looked like MS-DOS), checked his stock, and declared that they
were out of G4s - but that he would be able to give me a good price on
the machine currently on their shelves. Now this poor thing must have
been standing there for a couple of weeks, as it was rather dirty, the
screen had a couple of rather ugly fingerprints on it, and it looked
just a bit battered.
Well, I thought, even better. Haggle a bit and get the machine even
cheaper. Eventually the manager was called to give me an offer, and
looking at me he gracefully gave me a rebate of 50 pounds on that
secondhand thingie. That's 2.673797 percent. I told them in no
uncertain terms that for a crap looking thing like that 10% would be
the bare minimum, but there was no budging on either side, so I leave
tonight to Germany again without a new PB - and the shop without my
money thanks to the manager of Dixons of Terminal 1 at Heathrow.
If you read this, please feel foolish.
I needed that.
Aaaaaanyway, there is more. The Frankfurter Allgemeine
Sonntagszeitung, Germany's biggest and bestest Sunday
broadsheet, had an interview with our top guru, the ever so cool Steve
Jobs. Most of the questions and answers were pretty standard, but two
things stood out: Jobs predicted the immediate demise of Gateway and
the slow demise off all other big American PC-makers and - even better
- answering the question whether he would be satisfied with 5% of
market share, said that 5% would be better than BMW's share of car
sales.
I feel much better now. 
