I have a new friend sitting on my desk this week: a working Powerbook 160. I don’t know why this particular model struck my fancy—I suppose it was always something I wished I could afford back in my poverty days. Manufactured in 1992, it originally listed for $2,430, or about two months’ salary at the time. Last week, it cost me $10 in postage and a DOA powerbook gathering dust on my shelf.

It’s not small. It doesn’t have a battery, and still weighs quite a bit. The screen is tiny. But it feels solid—something my fancy color 520 never did. It boots up in about 10 seconds, running System 7.1. The keyboard is springy and tight. The trackball (remember those?) is smooth and fast.

There are applications for modern Macs which are supposed to aid in productivity—going so far as to black out the entire screen so that the writer isn’t tempted to check email, surf the internet, etc. My solution? I installed a copy of Word 5.1 and was writing within minutes. I can’t get the machine on the internet without a dial-up account and a lot of patience, so there’s no temptation to fool around reading the IMDB. I’ve already used it to produce some writing for work, which means it’s paid for itself already. Sometimes the simple solutions really are the best ones.

If I am hearing the news correctly, Apple (among other cool things) just lowered the price of the 8GB iPhone to $399. Which means when I get the next big check in for my Orlando trip, I’m going straight to the Apple Store and buying one.

Update: Ok, so let’s analyze the backlash here a little bit. Jobs writes a letter and says, in effect, Whoops. Sorry I pissed you off, fanboys early adopters, so here’s what we’re going to do: I’ll give you each $100 back in credit at the Apple Store, and I hope that makes you feel a little better.

Gadget-blogs, whose sole purpose on God’s green earth is to salivate over grainy camera-phone pictures of techie shit only available in Japan, are heaping on the abuse, crying foul over this development. “$100 doesn’t go a long way in Apple land… Either way, the money’s going back to Apple.”

Well, guess what, asshats? You stood on line to buy the phone. You had to be the guy with the shiniest toy on the block, the guy who just threw your last latest-and-greatest wonderphone in a shoebox in the closet with the scores of other phones you’ve had since you got a cell plan. Now you’re upset ’cause they dropped the price? Did you scream and cry this loud when your Xbox went on sale or the price on your RAZR dropped $300? Nobody made you buy the iPhone when it was $600—you did that yourself.

I happened to read a fantastic essay buy a guy who was an editor at Gizmodo, then left, then came back, wrote said essay, and got fired for it. (Now he’s the gadget editor at Boingboing.) In essence, it says something like this: knock it off. Quit spending your time, money and energy buying every brand-new techie piece of hardware out there to fill the empty void in your lives.

It’s pretty sobering reading, because I lust after the unobtainable shiny gadgets as much as the next guy. I want a 42″ LCD TV, a TiVo, a PDA, a tablet PC, a robot that does my laundry, my own unmanned surveillance plane, and a supercomputer whirring quietly in my basement.

But I don’t have any of that stuff. I have a 15-year-old TV and a three-year old Motorola phone that I can’t wait to throw in a lake. I am a fan of Apple, I believe in their products, and I try to be an evangelist without being an annoying fanboy. I’m going to buy an iPhone in a month or two, not because I need to show it off, but because my current phone sucks, I already have an AT&T plan, I use a Mac daily, and I think it would help me do business. If I’d gone out and dropped $600 for the iPhone two months ago, and then found out they were giving me $100 back in credit, I think I’d have to be pretty happy—show me another company who’s publicly admitted a mistake and taken immediate action like that in the last year.

I have deliberately shunned social networking sites for years now. Actually, I’ve shunned pretty much everything about the social networking scene ever since the first chat clients came out years ago. I don’t have a ready explanation for this aversion, other than the slimy feeling I get whenever I ask someone to link to my site or for their chat name: I feel like it’s high school all over again. I don’t keep IM up and running a whole lot, nor do I just randomly IM people for the hell of it. I look at it sort of like making a phone call: I need to have something good to say in order to take the time out of someone’s day.

I’ve dipped my toes in the pool a few times, through Flickr (where my linked friends number in the teens) and through IM (begrudgingly; some people conduct the entirety of their business on IM, but I find it distracting) but I’ve never gotten over that feeling of wheedling supplicance, as if I was the freshman asking a senior if I could come to their party. I suppose this attitude throughout life has meant I haven’t been to many parties, but I have to look at the people with 900+ buddies and wonder if it’s just another game of collection and posturing. How can I be expected to maintain relationships with 900 buddies on a daily basis when I’m bad at maintaining flesh-and-blood relationships with actual people I know and love? Oh, and stay married, run a business, and spend at least a half-hour of waking time away from the computer?

Last year I was invited to join a business-oriented social networking site, and I considered the offer for a while before acting. Perhaps this would be different from the other sites I’ve poked around on (it was better-looking, for one thing), and perhaps it might help me from a business perspective, I thought. With reservation, I signed up and created a profile, entered some employment information, and then poked around to see who else was signed up. The results were pretty slim at that point—a few people on the margins of companies I’d worked for, but nobody I’d actually consider contacting.

At that point, I decided my criteria for linking to other people would be twofold: I would have to had direct working contact with them, and I would have to be reasonably certain they’d link back to me.

Over time, I got a few invites from friends I knew, but the account lay mostly dormant for a year until recently, when I got an invite from a friend at a company I’d not listed in my history, which I accepted. After I updated my profile, suddenly I got three more invites from people I didn’t remember and two that I did. I noticed that certain people had contacts in the upper two digits (and sometimes three) while others had numbers like mine.

Asking around with some connected friends, I found that several of the people asking me for links were people we couldn’t remember—the names were familiar, but the faces and roles were mysterious.

Also, with reservation, I took the larger step of inviting several people I’d worked with for links, feeling sheepishly like a freshman again. Thankfully, the people I invited all linked back to me, which was affirming. I guess it’s something that I need to just get over, because there are millions of people out there linking and inviting and connecting and buddying who have the faintest connection with each other, and they don’t seem to have a problem with it. For me, though, I look at it like the friends I’ve got—it’s not the numbers, it’s the quality.

Oh, yeah, nothing brings me back to the great Wild West days of hand-coding HTML for the internets like connecting through a VPN and using Remote Desktop (accurately replicating the joy of working with Windows NT on a slow workstation) to edit ASP files with WordPad.

I almost forgot—there’s a launch over at Cape Canaveral tomorrow, something I’ve never seen in person. I’m picking Jen up from the airport somewhere around 5, and then we’re gonna haul ass out there to see if we can see anything. Southwest, please, please, please be on time.

The Apple Store called yesterday to inform me that IdiotCentral, my MacBook Pro, was finished and ready to be picked up. “We didn’t even need to replace the logic board,” the Genius told me. “It was the LCD.”

I stopped in this morning, weaved past the consumers ogling the iPhone display, and a nice tattooed associate brought my baby back to me. Within two minutes I had signed the paperwork and was ready to leave—with a gentle reminder that AppleCare might be a good idea for a portable.

My new screen is bright and clean, and the hinge is actually a little tighter now. After a failed attempt to migrate my data back onto the machine this afternoon, I rooted out the cause (permission issues) and I’m now 2 minutes away from restarting into my old work environment—not a day too soon. At the client site where I worked on Friday, the guys helping me get up to speed (and the IT guy they sent over) looked at my battered eight year old stunt laptop and shook their heads in amazement. (Apart from a failure to be able to connect to their wireless network, my eight year old laptop worked fine, thank you.)

Overall, besides a week’s wait to have the unit repaired, my customer experience was flawless and professional, something I’ve come to expect from Apple, and something I always recommend to friends.

Our power blinked out at a little before 2PM this afternoon. I hope this is not a common occurrence this summer, because handling conference calls at the local Panera with my backup laptop is not optimal.

Last week, after six months of faithful service, the screen on my MacBook Pro started acting up. The lower half of the LCD displayed thousands of vertical lines from the middle of the screen to the bottom, obscuring everything underneath it. No amount of cajoling, adjusting the display, or resetting the PRAM would fix the problem, so I made an appointment at the local Apple Store and spent the better part of yesterday getting my laptop ready for its journey.

The first thing I did was to repair permissions and purchase a large external backup drive: a 250GB Seagate I dropped in an enclosure I had laying around. Next, I used Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable clone of the laptop drive, and tested it by booting from it successfully. Then, I wiped the internal hard drive clean by doing a seven-pass erase, and reinstalled 10.4.6 from the factory disks.

The Genius at the Apple Store took one look at the screen and said, “Whoa.” He didn’t blink, though, and within ten minutes I had a work authorization for a new LCD and logic board, all covered under warranty. I should have my laptop back within seven days, although the iPhone launch may back things up a little.

While I was at the store, I got my first hands-on look at the iPhone, and it’s official: I’m going to buy one. Probably not this month, but within the next couple of months to be sure. It’s light, sexy, responsive, and the UI is a thing of beauty.

Yeah, well, even though I’ve bitched at Cingular here before, I’m glad I still have the service, ’cause now it’s AT&T again, and they have the iPhone. I’ll have to wait a month or so before I can actually afford one, but if the commercials are to be believed, it’s the single appliance I’ve been waiting for to finally replace my iPod, long-deceased Palm, and Motorola 551.