I recently wrote a post on my old blog about my predictions for “the new iPad” that was released in March. Let’s look and see how accurate my predictions were: New Retina display. Completely correct, down to the resolution. Pretty much a no-brainer. Faster processor but not the A6. Also correct. Instead of an A6, Apple went with a new version of the A5 with a faster GPU. 1080p video / iPhone 4S camera.

Well, the big news outlets haven’t picked up on it yet but new (and existing) phone activations are completely and totally hosed up. Every store in every country and every user at home is getting the same experience: no go on activation. Apple maybe should have consulted with the guys who put on the Victoria’s Secret Superbowl half time runway show about how to handle massive spikes in traffic. Too late…gonna be a lot of unhappy people.

The iPhone 3G has launched!!! There are lines of people everywhere waiting to buy their new iPhone. Unfortunately, this time around things are going more slowly. Activation of the phone must occur in the store before leaving so it is taking 10 minutes on the low end and 30 minutes on the high end to get a new phone. That’s bad news in Chicago where humidity is over 60% now and temperatures are expected to top 93 degrees yielding a heat index of almost 105 degrees by this afternoon.

Apple reported today two little items of interest: They are getting a subsidy of $325 per iPhone from AT&T. This is a premium of approximately $125 over what is normally paid for a phone by a telco. The also sold their 5 billionth song and are now serving up 50,000 movies per day. That makes them the #1 online music store and the #1 online MOVIE store! Add this into the mix with the iPhone 3G going into 72 countries, the massive improvements in Mac OS X, and the huge numbers of new Mac owners, and it is easy to see that 2008 is going to be an amazing year for Apple.

Sounds like Adobe has got Flash running in the Simulator but not on the device itself. Could it be that Apple has yet to accept Adobe into the iPhone Developer Program? Yikes.

I recently decided to start using source control for my Mac software development. Yes, yes, I use source control - Subversion - all day long at work but had not gotten around to using it at home for other projects. One of the reasons is that I simply don’t want the hassle of setting everything up. I want to code, not fool around with the administrative tedium of doing backups, maintaining a repository, setting up SSL and securing the server, etc.

I have been resisting the urge to spend any time using Twitter. However, I have recently conceived of a few areas of my life where it might be interesting to do some real-time micro-posting. So I’ll be testing out the service over the next couple of weeks. In particular, I am aiming to do some real-time posting from the WWDC next week. I’ll be arriving in San Fran on Sunday, leaving on Friday.

AT&T Purportedly Nixes Retail Employee Vacations Between June 15 and July 12: “ Leaked memo states they wish to ensure sufficient staffing for ‘an exciting Summer Promotional Launch.’ They did the same thing last year for the original iPhone debut. So, question: Will there be tens of thousands of people across the country lined up all day waiting to buy the new iPhones, just like last year? I say yes.

Vodafone to Offer Apple’s iPhone in Ten Markets: “ On the newswire today: Vodafone today announced it has signed an agreement with Apple to sell the iPhone in ten of its markets around the globe. Later this year, Vodafone customers in Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey will be able to purchase the iPhone for use on the Vodafone network.

Turns out LaCie makes an excellent portable FireWire bus-powered 7200 rpm hard disk which implements a RAID 0 solution. The LaCie Little Big Disk Quadra does it all. This, my friends, is the ultimate drive for running a VM from an external drive to a MacBook Pro. It’s 7200 rpm, RAID 0, FireWire 800 and has 400 GB of total storage space. Perfect.