As I’ve opened up my newsreader over the last week, there’s been nothing but screaming about the iPhone, whose imminent release on Friday is causing a media frenzy, and is frankly changing the crap out of AT&T’s business model.

In preparation for the release at 6pm local time Friday night, it’s my understanding that all brick and mortar Apple stores will shutdown around 2pm to prepare for crush of the masses. Not only are the Apple stores losing four hours of customer traffic, but so are the AT&T stores, as they are taking a siesta in advance of the release. Now that’s some influence on a partner! Add to that that AT&T is having to go from a somewhat blasé data offering for their customers to a pretty competitive all-you-can-eat plan for the iPhone, and the impact Apple is having on the business of AT&T is pretty obvious. It’s been a fun dance to watch.

In fact, there are already stories popping up about folks camping out to get the iPhone. In fact, there’s a guy in New York, Greg Packer, who sorta makes a name for himself by showing up for these things. The crazy thing is that he’s actually asking for PayPal donations through his site (which was put up specfically to trumpet his firstiness for the iPhone) to help make his “experience sitting in line more comfortable”. Wow. He’ll probably get enough to pay for his iPhone several times over.

I guess I’m just not smart enough to try something like that, or maybe I have more integrity, or a life, but I just can’t think like that.

And my spin on the iPhone? Well, I’ll be glad when the screaming is through. And once the moths have left the bright flame of the Apple and AT&T stores over the next week or two, I might go look at one, just to see what the hype is about. Right now though, I just don’t have a huge hankerin’ to get one of the new toys.

Earlier this week, Moose posted something on his blog about putting some shiny new Crucial memory in his machine. As chance would have it, I’m doing the same thing.

My Little Black MacBook will be getting an overhaul tonight, going from 1GB to 2GB RAM from OWC. I pined MUCHO over 2GB vs 3GB, but at the end of the day, decided to take the less expensive route, and will wait for 2GB SO-DIMMs to come down below $250/pc. OWC’s got a neat deal where I can send my old memory to them for a rebate — that keeps me from having to squirrel around with finding a buyer for my old sticks. Kinda cool.

So tonight, I’ll be doing some Photoshop testing with CS2 (under Rosetta) on the new real estate, and see how things work. I can’t wait to see how (and if) it helps. It’s certainly a step on my move toward a mobile Apple environment for me, and toward obsoleting the Quad.

Over the last few days, I’ve been pondering My World According to Apple (MWAA), and whether it makes sense to rid myself of the Quad G5, orienting myself to a more mobile, agile and reactive computing experience. That’s a lot of words that basically add up to:

• making my stuff at home accessible from anywhere
• lightening the load of my home office on the power grid, pocketbook and environment
• taking my show on the road easier, and…..
• SHOOTING MORE!

That’s not too much to ask, is it? 😉

So, in an effort to get my little world more mobile, I picked up a Mini-DVI to DVI cable over the weekend, and strapped my 20″ ACD to the MacBook, and was able to make it all work the way I wanted. One victory!

However, in trying to work with some images from a friend — large images, >200MB — in Photoshop and Bridge, I was drowning the poor little MacBook. Two things might play in this: only 1GB of RAM, and CS2.

OWC claims they have taken the MacBooks to 3GB, and have proven demonstratable performance gains moving from 2GB to 3GB, despite the worries that Apple has about doing that. More memory is better, and their charts seem to prove that.

And then there’s CS2. On the MacBook, it’s running with Rosetta, and that’s a swineful way to go about business. More memory’ll help that, but CS3 running native Intel code will probably be the bigger benefit.

So, will more RAM and native code help with my choking the Little MacBook That Could on large images? Maybe. Until I prove it some way or another though, the jury’s still out. And that leaves me with a quandry……

To G5, or not to G5 — that is the question.

It’s kinda like buying an Ferrari, but only really needing its performance every once in a while, so you end up driving the Jetta more often. That’s sorta where I am with my MacBook and my Quaddy. So I end up straddling the fence about moving in the direction I wanna go — mobile, agile, compute/shoot/edit anywhere — and the beauty, mystery and seductiveness of this gargantuan box sitting under my desk at home.

In truth, I think I have to be true to the vision of myself and where/how I wanna work. That means moving towards my mobile experience, and continue the plans to move off the Quad G5 as best I can.

In that vein, there’s been a couple of posts brought to my attention today that really address that. TUAW did a piece on mobile broadband on the Mac, and brought everything out of the woodwork — EVDO (which I’m on right now), satellite, etc. Good article, and did nothing to sway me away from the choice I made to go with Sprint’s network for my EVDO connection. It’s rock solid, has worked everytime I’ve fired it up, and has been nothing but speedy.

The other article ponders a Bedouin workforce. The premise here is that the workers of this kind of office are very mobile, and can really work just about anywhere, both individually and in teams. Greg Olsen’s musing goes on to ponder some of the very same issues I’m noodling over. His may be more source code centric, but the problem’s the same — how do I access, protect and utilize a datastore of images from afar? How do I make changes, additions and sales from that repository while sitting nowhere near it? It’s a great problem to think about.

I’m not the only one thinking like this, and that’s a good thing. It surely means that others have some miles on these kinds of solutions, with some nice answers out there. Perhaps I can come up with additional ideas to help further my solution, and maybe help someone else along the way.

Watch out! The road from here may get a little bumpy!

After having a couple of shows already where there was a bunch of downtime, I tried to figure out how to better use that downtime, and perhaps keep connected for orders, etc. About that same time, I discovered an e-mail at work about a deal I could get with Sprint for wireless broadband.

For those who haven’t heard of it, wireless broadband is broadband-like speeds, but over the cellular networks. I was skeptical about the speeds, but there were enough folks out there raving about the speeds, that I decided to give it a whirl.

I ordered a USB version — my MacBook doesn’t have slots for any of the card-based formats, and frankly, a USB cell-modem gives me a lot of flexibility to move it around in the future.

But, for Mac users, there’s an inconvenient truth: You have to unlock the device on a Windows machine. Once it’s unlocked, you can install the Apple WWAN update and the Sprint software, and the thing just works. All this is documented on Sprint’s site, and seems to work as documented.

So how good is it?

St. Louis currently is only EVDO — the EVDO Rev A stuff arrives here in a couple of months — so the fastest speeds are yet to come. However, the current incarnation is faster than my first broadband connection was not that many years ago. From the office (where I’m writing this right now on my MacBook over the connection), I get over 1200bps down and 130bps up. When Rev A hits, the uplink speeds will be even better.

Sprint also has an all-you-can-eat data plan for the thing that’s not too terribly expensive — again cheaper than any broadband plan I’ve owned.

In theory, I should be able to update galleries, and do some advanced work in the field, as long as there’s a cell tower close by. Very, very cool!