Well here we are 10 months after the beginning of the great “No More Cable” experiment.

Since we aren’t mindlessly gorging ourselves on the fixed-cost TV all-the-time spigot that is cable television, we are spending less money and also able to extract information about our viewing habits. Below is a chart of the number of hours of television viewed, broken down by source.

Average Minutes of Television Watched per day: 55
(We’re probably over-counting here because TV shows without commercials are 42 minutes long. And we’ve assumed for the sake of simplicity that movies are 2 hours long.)

Now, let’s compare the costs. Netflix is a fixed per-month cost at $16.99. iTunes is flexible based on usage. See below:

Apparently, where we live, you cannot get basic cable. The cheapest plan is a digital plan for $57 per month. If you upgrade to a fancy plan with premium channels, you’re paying $109 per month. That’s off our chart so I didn’t even include it.

Quick Netflix queue update:
In May (when the last post was done) our Netflix queue stood at 70 DVDs. Now we’ve got 130 DVDs. That means that after watching 223 hours of DVDs, our backlog increased by 60 DVDs.

Update 2:
Looks like Hulu just came out of beta. This is the service that NBC and others created as a ad-based competitor to the iTunes Store TV Show section. I haven’t used it yet but have read good things about this service. It seems like a non-starter for most people though because I imagine that less than 1% of the population has a computer hooked up directly to their TV. Luckily, we do.

When I switched from using Microsoft Office to iWork last semester, I too was disappointed when I couldn’t find a built-in transpose in Numbers, the spreadsheet program. But then I realized it’s not so bad, if you just use the index function.

For example, here are the food preferences of our household for a sample of foods.

I should do further calculations to figure out which two are the most similar. (=

The transpose cells all contain this:

Not sure why people were writing complicated scripts for that. Maybe it was before the INDEX function?

Anyway, I still love iWork. It’s just so pretty, and it doesn’t hang on stuff randomly like Excel for Mac did (to be fair though, I only had Microsoft Office X, this was before Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, which might be better.) My only complaint - I would like a little more fine-grained control over the graphs/charts features; Apple does a good job making lovely defaults but they ought to let us tweak things a bit more. Hopefully it’s coming. I’ve also seen complaints about it being slow for larger spreadsheets, but I haven’t had any real problems so far. Except for sort. Optimizing that one clearly wasn’t a priority. It’s also missing the formulas views feature which was occasionally useful in Excel (cntrl-`). So I guess that’s 3 complaints. But all fairly minor.

Oh so many whiners out there about the Macbook Air.

“It doesn’t have a user-replaceable battery!”
“It doesn’t have a CD drive!”
“It’s too expensive!”

C’mon, if these are your complaints, I think you want one of those big fat Dell’s with all sorts of dongles and crap hanging off of it.

Don’t kid yourself.

Ok, so I think I have you totally stumped here. What game is this?

There’s only one more screenshot left, coming tomorrow. So if you’re sick of this, it’s almost over. Also, let me apologize that today’s screen is in color — at least its early 256 color and awesomely vector-generated to save space.

Ralph Baer wishes he got royalties!

glidden

The stakes are higher today. Can you name the game?

And she converted this chart for me with glee.

See here..

This is great news. Everyone agrees that using Webkit sucks, especially on an EDGE connection.

WeatherPop with Radar for iPhone, no?

I wanted to make a quick note on the iPhone price cut. I have always believed that Apple planned the price cut from the beginning. I think the iPhone marketing plan is revolutionary in that it has been so effective in drumming up interest around the world even in markets where it’s not yet available. Lisa and I got iPhones on the launch date (for $599 each) and when traveling in Japan and Canada they were quite the conversation piece. Lisa’s 60-year-old aunt in Japan knew about the iPhone and saw it as an exciting development. (And we communicated this to each other without speaking the same language!).

In any case, I think the plan is about iterative information release about the iPhone, each step causing people to talk about it amongst themselves and get used to the idea, starting with the initial announcement in January, to the lines of people in June, to the eventual price cut in September and the $100 rebate. I think its pretty obvious that the price cut was planned and my proof of that is Apple’s summer earnings call where investors saw an issue with Apple’s profit margin — wondering why it was projected to be so low and Apple just had to tell them, you’ll see… The reason was that the $200 price cut was planned all along. (At the time I misinterpreted this to mean that the iPod would be replaced wholesale by a lower-margin iPod touch style device.)

The other reason is that price cuts are just how the mobile phone market works. Providers cut the price and add rebates every quarter after a phone is released until it’s old news. As proof of that, here’s a chart of European prices for the RAZR v3 the phone prior to the iPhone that people saw as a driver of the cell phone market.

click the image to see it full size

You can see that over the lifespan of the RAZR, the price decreased nearly every week. At some points in its lifespan, it dropped very quickly. I suspect that there will be continuing price drops for the iPhone to stoke interest post-Christmas season. And in January, the new iPhone 2.0 with 3G will be announced. It’s all part of the plan — it’s not a misstep. I think this whole thing is to give columnists something to write about and to give customers more time to consider an iPhone… maybe I would buy one at $299, maybe $199, etc etc…

Anyway, I love mine.