McPhee

I'm not on an iPhone tariff. Neither are a lot of iPhone users. Apple get a cut of the line rental on every iPhone tariff. This means Apple are losing out on money from me and everyone else who is dodging iPhone-specific tariffs. The cynic in me thinks that Micro-SIMs will only be issued to users on iPhone tariffs, being used as a way to stop users "stealing" Apple's revenue. Still, I could be pleasantly surprised...

The papers will smear the Lib Dems as much as possible over the coming weeks. Most of them see the election as an investment and most of them have 'invested' in the Conservatives. They will do everything they can to protect that investment. I've got to say, so far they're doing a pretty poor job :p I'm sure there's probably some real dirt out there though, they've just got to find it.

Add me to the 3G owners looking to upgrade. Sadly though I suspect it won't be possible for some of us. I'd be willing to bet money that the whole Micro-SIM thing is a way to force people to only use the handset on iPhone contracts (which Apple gets a cut from). I fully expect to phone Vodafone in June to be told that either they can't supply me with a Micro-SIM as they don't do them, or that they can't supply me with a Micro-SIM because they only come with iPhone and iPad contracts.

How many people would buy Mephisto or Super Skrull though? Any how many people would buy Thor or Fantastic Four DLC? :p You know it's true...

I guess that's fair enough. Though I'm still sure the chassis thing will have been quite a large factor in the decision. A tad disappointed that I'll have to either wait for Acer/Asus to get their machines out, go for the Alienware M11x or shell out for the Vaio Z (which is a rip-off over here, I could fly to the states and buy one for the UK price :p). The 13" MBP would have been ideal priced between £1000 and £1200 if it had the specs of the 15" model.

It's not a tech problem - it's lazyness. Sony have a 13" machine that's smaller and lighter than the 13" MBP and higher spec'd than the top configuration 17" MBP. OK, it's Sony. From an engineering front they're always months - if not years - ahead of everyone else. However, all the other major players are following suit starting with Acer who should have a 13" machine packing an i7 and an ATi 5650m out in the next month. The reason for not redoing the case to accommodate the same spec as the other machines is purely financial, unless I'm overestimating the capability of Apple's engineers.

If it's launching in July then they'll have settled on the final design long before now. It takes a while to manufacture both the parts needed and the final handset in the sort of quantities that Apple will be looking to ship. This might not be the final design, but I really doubt it'll be much different.

I was reading an explanation earlier as to why the 13" MBP is still using a Core2 Duo. It's down to disagreements between Intel and NVidia. They had an agreement allowing NVidia to produce chipsets for Intel processors. Intel say the agreement ended with the Core2 architecture, NVidia say it didn't. Anyway, long story short, NVidia can't produce chipsets for Corei processors. The MBP 13" design doesn't have room for a dedicated card. Apple had three choices; go Corei and use Intel's integrated graphics, stay with Core2 Duo and use NVidia's new GT320m graphics or redesign the whole MBP 13" model to accommodate a dedicated graphics card. They chose the second option. A 13" MBP with a Corei processor might turn up in a future refresh, but it won't be until they redesign the whole unit.

Having the least seats matters little in a hung parliament. Each bit of legislation will require the co-operation of two parties and the chances of Labour and the Tories getting on enough to push through legislation together are incredibly remote. It'll be the Lib Dem seats that they'll both be looking to recruit. They'll hold the balance of power in parliament, whoever they side with will get their way. It's not quite like actually having a decent number of seats, they'll struggle to get their own proposals through, but it's still a lot more power than they've had in almost 100 years. Also, an interesting little read; http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/18/clegg-media-elite-murdoch-lib-dem An ex-editor of The Sun describing the relationship between government and media and why the Liberal Democrats will have certain papers worried.

Saw this earlier. Looks cracking! I think I'll be quite tempted to upgrade come July, iPhones tend to hold their value pretty well so it'll tide me over until decent WP7 handsets launch.

Heh. That'll teach me to believe stuff I read on Trusted Reviews. I should know by now, they rarely edit their articles/admit they're wrong/made a mistake so if it seems too good to be true it probably is Ah well, I'll just continue to use next doors WiFi instead

I've got to laugh. How much work went in to the Digital Economy Bill? How much time and money did it cost? It's all been for nothing; ender SeedFucker. It's a new coding project that's been set up, feeding off a Bit Torrent exploit found a few months ago. When it finally matures (shouldn't be much longer now) it will make it impossible for even your ISP to identify that you're downloading files off Bit Torrent. It's the hacking community's direct reply to the Digital Economy Bill and it's taking weeks, not the months or maybe even years that it took to form the DEBill. I'm not condoning piracy here, just highlighting how futile this whole thing is. Rights holders need to make legal use more appealing than illegal use if they want to kill piracy. Music is a prime example imo, Spotify, Last.FM, Pandora, Zune Pass, Napster, Amazon all have the right idea.

Looking at news sites today, it's starting. The Tories are turning their campaign of slander and fear on the LibDems. Conservative bloggers, columnists and reporters have started declaring that a vote for the Lib Dems is a vote for Brown. Good job guys, just keep rounding up those protest voters for another few weeks, showing them that all other roads lead to Brown and you'll be in power! Slightly unrelated; I wonder how much of the electorate are actually voting 'for' a party they like rather than just voting 'against' a party they dislike? Almost impossible. Even the most optimistic of polls only has them with 34% of the electoral vote. For that the LibDems would get around 116 seats out of the 650 available. They're still going to be the smallest party unless they can push 37%+ (where the big seat gains will start to kick in) and won't get a majority unless they can gain as much as 50% of the electoral vote. When it comes to the day I'd be surprised if they gain more than 20 seats to be honest. The rumours say that they'll be running for victory in the next election, not this one. At the present time they're just trying to force a hung parliament so that they can try and influence a change in the voting system that we have here in the UK. Hung parliaments, minority and coalition governments don't last long here in the UK, the reigning Prime Minister tends to get fed up quickly and call a fresh election with the hope of securing a majority. When this happens they'll start fighting for the top spot, the system is too biased against them for it to be achievable now.

Gaming mice aren't really anything special. If your mouse works and is comfortable there's not much point splashing out.

Plants vs Zombies Scrabble To be honest I've not really found iPhone games to be very good. There's a lot of fuss over stuff like Angry Birds and Doodle Jump but personally I don't really get them, I got bored of both after about half an hour. My most used app is probably Reeder. It's an RSS reader that syncs to Google Reader. Cracking app, best of the RSS ones that I've tried!

Trident costs us between £9.7bn and £10.97bn a year to run (figures from a Guardian article, gonna assume they checked em). Gonna leave it there though. I can see your point, and I don't see us agreeing.

I wasn't trying to say that anyone would tell us that they plan to nuke us, but we're not going to be in peace-time one day and then looking at a nuclear wasteland the next day. Can you name a single nation that has the capability and the stupidity to do such a thing? And would anyone who actually is that stupid be put off by Trident? I doubt it. So what use is Trident? We don't need it, we just need the capability to field and manufacture nuclear weapons at short notice. A smaller nuclear deterrent would fulfil this need.

I dunno, it fits the times really. We can't go with no nukes because that sends a strong message to our allies that if cold war round 2 ever happens we'll be relying on them for protection. However, having a round the clock, ready-to-fire nuclear deterrent is a gross waste of money. It's not needed until we have some enemies capable of fielding nuclear missles. Personally I'm not even sure we need two armed subs. If we've got one along with the capability to quickly produce more then we have everything we need. A nuclear attack isn't likely to happen out of the blue unless it's (for example) a Pakistani missile stolen by extremists (in which case I'm not sure we could retaliate with a nuke anyway). We'll have months, if not years, of escalation before anyone would even consider firing a missile.

They don't think we need a constant nuclear deterrent. They'd replace Trident with at most two nuclear-armed submarines. They would also modify some Astute class submarines to carry (when necessary) nuclear warheads on Tomahawk missles and keep a stock-pile of weapons-grade fissile material. Japan uses a similar system already.

Footballers earn a shit wage. It's the very few at the top of the game that earn £100,000+ per week and even that is low compared to high fliers in other industries. That's the sort of thing that happens when your government is born of a political party that has had a lot of investment from very rich people. They have to keep them happy. It's one of the many reasons why we need just one term of somebody other than the Conservatives or Labour. We need someone who is able to remove some of the shackles from our political system and allow it to be more open (along with getting rid of this crappy "first past the post" system which has kept us in this endless swing).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/apr/14/liberal-democrats-tax-avoidance-crackdown There's one answer for you

This election is beginning to annoy me. It seems that the general consensus among a lot of people is that Labour cannot be allowed to get back in and therefore they MUST vote Conservative because voting for anyone else means Labour get back in. I've been told repeatedly over the past few days that I'm an idiot for wanting to vote LibDem by people who have been brainwashed in to actually believing that their only salvation relies in protest voting Cameron in to office. Last I checked I was voting LibDem because their policies (and as of today, their Manifesto) are the best. If I was voting for Labour I'd be ticking a different box at the polls.

Very disappointing on price. Everyone else is going down on price, even with the increase to 'Core i' series processors so it baffles me why Apple have chosen to up their prices. Maybe they're planning to bring the Macbook line back in to focus? Low priced Pros have kinda overshadowed it. £1620 for a 15" Macbook with a Core i5, Switchable Geforce 330m, 4GB RAM and a matte-finish screen? Acer and Asus are rolling out similar machines (Acer with switchable ATi graphics and Asus with NVidia Optimus technology) this month at half that price and Sony have had i5 machines with good graphics, full HD screens and Blu-Ray drives on the market for months at under £700 (but without the switchable graphics bit). There's the 'Apple Tax' and then there's taxing the piss.

Don't take the tube. Walk or bus it. There's nothing wrong with the underground, but you miss so much by taking it and a lot of the time (certainly in central London) it can take longer than walking. It can be great for getting across long distances quickly across the less interesting parts of the city (like from the train stations in to the centre, or from the centre out to Camden, Canary Warf, Wimbledon etc.) but in the area from Hyde Park across to Tower Bridge, and from South Bank up to Oxford Street I'd go above ground whenever possible.

I wasn't saying they should be killed because they kill for fun. I was making the point that them only killing for food isn't a defence because it simply isn't true. Anyhow, isn't this a bit of a minor matter? Surely there's more important topics for the election?