david-winograd
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iPad launch: Buying at the Walt Whitman Mall in Huntington Station, NY
I got to the Apple Store at Walt Whitman Mall at about 8:30 AM and the mall doors were open. There were already about 150 people waiting for their iPad, and the Apple Store folks had two lines set up: one for advance reservations and one for walk-ins. As a pre-order customer, I gave my name to a blue-shirted Apple person and was told to wait on the reservation line. For each 10 people with a reservation they would let in one person without, so perhaps they had something of a handle on inventory. There was coffee and water to be had while waiting and a quick look inside the store showed so many Apple workers that I couldn't imagine how any customers would fit. At ten minutes to opening, a huge crowd of blue shirts ran up and down the mall screaming at the top of their lungs to pump up the crowd, but we didn't need pumping up. Everyone was really psyched already. I talked to a few people while waiting to get in, and I met someone named Theo who had a real reason for buying an iPad: He's a DJ and wanted to use it to kick off videos while performing. Most everyone else had vague answers about why they were there, ranging from, "it just seems really cool," to "I don't know what I'm going to do with it, but I need one."
Macworld 2010: TUAW goes to the mothership
No Macworld is complete without at least one pilgrimage to the mothership in Cupertino, and so yesterday, before the meetings and interviews we're planning today, David Winograd, Dave Caolo, and myself made the trip to the Apple Campus. In the gallery below, you can see what we saw, from the boxed versions of Mac software -- Popcap games boxed! Pixelmator boxed! -- to the endless souvenirs and trinkets for sale in the company store ("There are quite a few of us who know your site," winked the unnamed cashier to us as we checked out), to the original iPod box sitting in the office window, and the office desks full of multiple 30" Cinemas. It was glorious, all of it. Yes, even the woman who shooed us away with a "No pictures!" warning when we tried to take shots of the multiple basketball courts and volleyball court on campus. Check out all of the sights of our walk all the way around the Infinite Loop in the gallery below. %Gallery-85064%
Greetings from 30,000 feet
I'm typing this somewhere in the skies over Utah using a fast wireless connection on an 8 GB MacBook Pro killing time while flying to Las Vegas. When I started with computers this experience would have been considered somewhere between science fiction and magic.Hi, I'm David Winograd and although I've been writing for TUAW for a couple of months, all of us new arrivals have been asked to write an introduction to give all of you an idea of just who is writing this stuff.Steve Sande introduced himself as the old guy in a piece he did when coming on board. Well, I'm the new old guy. I beat out Steve by a couple of years, but we both have gray beards and wear safari-looking hats from time to time.I got started with my first Apple ][+ in 1979 after overdosing on Creative Computing, a long defunct hobbyist magazine. I was in awe of all the neat (albeit amazingly pointless and even more amazingly expensive) things that could be done with what seemed to me as the best toy since the Betamax.Eventually I saved enough to buy the Apple ][+ at a franchise called ComputerLand (also defunct, there's a pattern to this), where for $1795 I bought a 48k processor, a bunch of expansion slots and a yellow on black, decidedly non-graphics capable monitor. No disk drive of course since Apple hadn't made them yet, so programs were sold in hobby store racks in baggies containing a cassette tape and a mimeographed instruction sheet. Getting the volume level just right was critical for computing since one mistake and you needed to go back to the start of the tape. When playing a game,when you lost, the tape would rewind and reload taking another 20 minutes. Ah -- Good times!Since then I started what was arguably the first themed BBS (Bulletin Board Service) in New Jersey, called 'David's Place' which was themed like a restaurant that read like Zork. After signing on and getting my first monthly CompuServe bill, which was over $2,000, I wheedled a decade-long CompuServe gig checking Apple ][ downloads and later running their Macintosh Community Club Forum. I also wrote for the long dead Apple ][ GS Buyers Guide.
