Tomor­row is the infa­mous Mac­world keynote. More than likely a new Mac will be intro­duced. As the date slowly approaches, the rumor mill has been buzzing about a poten­tial prod­uct name called Air—Mac­book Air, AirBook, what have you. Of note, is that there was con­fir­ma­tion that Apple had ordered a bunch of 13″ screens. Now, 13″ screens are cer­tainly on the large side when it comes to screen real estate even if a note­book comes in under 4 lbs. Per­son­ally I think it needs to have small dimen­sions, not just be light­weight to be con­sid­ered an ultra­portable. You can’t exactly slip a 13″ note­book as eas­ily as a eeePC into your (man) purse. There’s also the fact that the stan­dard Mac­Book looks so out of place with its brethren right now, even if it got a token hard­ware refresh a few months ago. Per­son­ally, I’m hedg­ing my bets that the new Mac­book will most likely be just a redesigned Mac­book and will be a step­ping stone for design queues to move up into the Pro line. I’m not the only one who thinks this. (Oth­ers spec­u­late that it may turn out to be an iTouch-esque tablet.) It’ll cer­tainly be lighter, faster, and every inch as beau­ti­ful as the other alu­minum SKUs, but cer­tainly no eeePC matchup. Imag­ine Apple putting out a $500–600 sub­note­book. Would that can­ni­bal­ize Mini sales? Prob­a­bly not. As the eeePC has shown, niche mar­kets can work. But still, would Apple even shoot for that price point? And if you can’t wait for Apple to come out with a sub­note­book (assum­ing one isn’t announced tomor­row), you could always hack your eeePC to run Mac OS X.

My com­par­i­son of AT&T’s post-paid ver­sus pre­paid call­ing plans gave me some insight into how wire­less ser­vice providers make their money. Based on this empir­i­cal evi­dence, the bot­tom line is that, just as peo­ple thought, we’re being overcharged.

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My TDMA ser­vice through AT&T Wire­less is num­bered. More so now since they’re upping the main­te­nance charge from $5 to $10 next month, giv­ing me an even greater incen­tive to switch plans. The rea­son I’ve been hold­ing back on upgrad­ing, despite hav­ing an ancient brick of a phone (Nokia 5165), is because even with the main­te­nance charge, my bill is $10 less than the cheap­est con­tract avail­able from AT&T. Now that the price gap is smaller, this gave me the moti­va­tion to ana­lyze my usage and com­pare rate plans.

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So I went test dri­ving cars this past week­end. One of the cars I sam­pled was a Honda Civic. The 2006 redesign is one slick puppy I must admit. Accel­er­a­tion, han­dling, and respon­sive­ness are top notch for a car in this class. Unbe­liev­ably, my tall frame can actu­ally fit in the back­seat. Plus it sips gas, an all impor­tant con­sid­er­a­tion, now more so given ris­ing gas prices. It has an impres­sive list of stan­dard fea­tures and it pretty much comes down to not which pack­age but which trim you want—whether it be the one of the three stan­dard trims, the eco-friendly hybrid (though the Prius is still the reign­ing king in this class), or the sporty Si. There are avail­able options for cus­tomiz­ing the trim even fur­ther, but other than fog lights, many are sim­ply super­flu­ous. Yet, since I’ve been con­sid­er­ing the Mazda3, the MazdaSpeed3 and the Sub­aru WRX, I found it rather odd that a 5-door Civic was lack­ing in Honda’s line-up. I cer­tainly recall a 5-door being avail­able in past iter­a­tions. It’s not that Honda doesn’t make them, it’s that they don’t sell them to North Amer­ica. WTF, Honda?!

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