A lot of common sense from Monday Notes on what the rumours related to an Apple Car could actually refer to and what Apple could, or could not, be up to.

Reality quickly kills the warm feeling. There’s trouble with the autonomous part of the dream: Sober people (see last two weeks’ Monday Notes) agree that full “Level 5” automation — no need ever for human intervention, from arbitrary point A to point B, in any weather — is decades away. Like anyone else’s EV the Apple Car will feature a mix of driver assistance services with no clear way to get to full autonomy, particularly when compared to Waymo and Tesla with their millions of test miles and mountains of real world data.

Both myself and Jacqui have been considering getting new laptops for a while - her because her iBook G4 is ancient and she has worn all the letters off the keys, and me because the maximum 2GB RAM my Macbook Pro just isn’t enough when I’m working.

I had planned to buy a few months ago, but knew Apple were doing an update, so decided to wait until the new versions came out to see what was on offer. Unfortunately, a week or two before the new machines were announced, the Aussie dollar started a slide from US0.98 to US0.63, so the new machines ended up being priced a few hundred dollars more expensive than the old ones. I’d now need $4300 for a new laptop, and Jacqui would need another $1800 for hers. Given that we’re saving for an apartment, $6100 was a bit too much to shell out, so upgrade plans went on the back-burner.

Late last week I realised that since I work from home while Jacqui’s in the office, we could get an iMac between us, and I could keep my laptop for those occasions when Jacqui needs to work at home as well. She agreed, so it was onto the Apple Store to get a 24” 2.8GHz iMac. I noticed also that Apple had a refurbished version for $1979, so I went for that instead. I ordered it at 6:35am yesterday morning, got an email at 2:27pm saying it had shipped, and it arrived on my doorstep at 10am this morning.

I’d also ordered 2 x 2GB DIMMs from epowermac.com to upgrade the RAM to 4GB and they arrived this morning shortly after the iMac. It’s midday now and I’m typing this on the new machine, having already migrated all my data and installed the new RAM, all for a bargain price of $2145.50, saving nearly $4000. Gotta be happy with that!

The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that Apple has submitted a planning application for an Apple Store on King St.

Apple’s secretive plans for an official retail store in Sydney – understood to be the first in the southern hemisphere – have been revealed in council documents, which suggest it’s unlikely the store will open for business before mid-2008.

How thoughtful. It’s just in time for me to get back from Canada and upgrade my laptop!

I’ve been thinking of buying an iPod Shuffle for a long time now, ever since the new clip-style design came out in fact. Although I already have an 80GB 5th Gen iPod, it’s just too big for taking running, using in the gym, etc.

With the weather taking a turn for the worse here in Vancouver, outdoor running is going to take a back seat, so I’ll be on the treadmill or the rowing machine in our gym. There are a number of podcasts which will be perfect for the gym, such as CBC’s Quirks and Quarks and NPR’s Science Friday so I figured now would be a perfect time to stop procrastinating.

Last night I took the plunge, went down to London Drugs and picked up a green one, mainly because Nathan already has a silver one, which would have been the logical choice. Once home, I left it charging overnight, then loaded two podcasts for the walk in to work this morning. I was a bit worried when it refused to play the podcasts, claiming there were no ‘songs’ available, so I left it at home.

A quick check of Apple’s support site revealed that it doesn’t play podcasts in ‘shuffle’ mode, so once I’d set the slider accordingly all was well. The only downside is that the headphone cord is quite a bit shorter than the one on my regular iPod, so I can’t plug it into my desktop at work and kick back in my chair. However, that will be an advantage in the gym, which is what I bought it for anyway, so I can’t complain.