A week ago, I received the following email which I (obviously) thought was an hoax – I even had to look through my Trash to find it back:
Dear Joel,
We stumbled upon your “Linux Photography” blog a few months ago and have been following your posts for some time. While your attempts are valiant, they are also somewhat pathetic – or so we feel.
We at Apple, don’t sit around criticizing others. Rather we deliver solutions. Therefore, we have shipped to your place a brand new MacBook Pro with the latest Mac OS X. It comes loaded with Apple Aperture and (as a special treat from our partner Adobe) Photoshop CS4. This will show you what state of the art operating system / photographic software can do for photographic work.
We hope you will appreciate this gift and look forward to your next blog entries.
Best regards,
XXX, Apple Marketing
Now today (and to my complete astonishment), the UPS man rang at my door and brought me a huge box shipped from Cupertino… after unpacking and plugging in, all I can say is “Wow!” – the hardware, the OS and the photography functionalities just look stunning.
At that stage, I am not too sure when I’ll reboot one of my Linux computers…
April 1, 2009 at 12:19 am |
You got me! I really felt betrayed !!
And then, I remembered… 1er avril…
April 1, 2009 at 12:24 am |
Dang. And to think that I just switched back to the dark side for photo editing.
April 1, 2009 at 12:25 am |
Double dang. I didn’t notice that it was the 1st where you live.
April 1, 2009 at 12:51 am |
“…they are also somewhat pathetic – or so we feel.”
I don’t think so. It got you brand new fully loaded notebook.
Good luck with the new toy,
Joel.
April 1, 2009 at 1:11 am |
From those of us who don’t blog on Linux Photography, but find it very useful, and cannot afford the $3k system you got, please keep this blog going. We may stop hating you
)
April 1, 2009 at 1:15 am |
Did it come with Vista?
April 1, 2009 at 1:43 am |
You got me, because here, it isn’t April so far… good job.
April 1, 2009 at 5:01 am |
Careful. You might just find a worm in that Apple that was given to you today!
April 1, 2009 at 6:49 am |
Very well executed, and you had the luck of being the first one today, so I wasn’t aware of the date yet…
April 1, 2009 at 7:11 am |
Got me too, made my day.
April 1, 2009 at 7:26 am |
Haha! Excellent! j’y ai presque cru
il faut dire que moi, je tourne sur OS X (pour plein de raison), mais toute mes photos passent par des softs open sources (à part l’os): UFRaw, Gimp, etc.
April 1, 2009 at 7:51 am |
For a moment you got me
Happy april 1st!
cheers,
PJ
April 1, 2009 at 8:19 am |
Jojojo…
Happy Fools’ Day!
Here, in Spain, we have to wait for December’28 for our mac’s rain.
Luis M.
April 1, 2009 at 8:22 am |
Hey Joel!
In Spain we don’t have the April’s fools day, and you took me with my guard off completely.
Couldn’t believe that!
But then I started to read people’s comments
Happy April 1st!
April 1, 2009 at 8:26 am |
If the picture had shown a NEW (unibody) MacBookPro, I would have bought it from the spot
April 1, 2009 at 9:21 am |
You would just need to install linux on the mac. I’m running linux on my macbook pro, it works pretty well.
April 1, 2009 at 11:12 am |
Hi Joel!
(From you permament reader and one of old Linux lover)
Really glad for you!
I think it is very good that your activity to linux society has paid back.
PS: BTW, do you know, that Mac computers are originally the best to run Linux on? So just dual-boot it!
Pavel.
April 1, 2009 at 2:34 pm |
You almost got me, but the photo is not of a “brand new MacBook Pro”
In any case, if the ever do you a gift, Ubuntu runs pretty well on the MacBook Pro…
April 1, 2009 at 5:30 pm |
Alors ce nouveau mac du 1er avril, il marche bien?
)
Ps.(Si jamais tu ne sais pas quoi m’offrir pour mon anni, moi, je voudrais un VRAI.
April 2, 2009 at 6:35 am |
Hi!
Something more serious: anyone has any clue what is happening with CinePaint?
0.25 was supposed to be released long ago…I asked on the ml and got no reply
Sincerely,
Gour
April 2, 2009 at 8:39 am |
aaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAArrrrrrrrrggggggghhhhhhh!
…bien joué….
April 2, 2009 at 8:43 am |
…stay with us Joël….
please ?
April 2, 2009 at 6:41 pm |
Cher Joel,
Moi aussi je me suis d’abord senti trahi ! Car c’est grâce a ton blog que j’ai été convaincu de la puissance du libre en photographie.
Puis j’ai lu le premier post !
Merci pour cette belle farce !
Amicalement,
Bile.
April 2, 2009 at 8:59 pm |
Hi guys
Sorry for the folks who found my joke before April 1st (their time). I was so proud of it that I scheduled the post for 00.10 on April 1st…
So don’t worry, Apple is not that generous – or I am not that famous. Anyway, staying with open source and very happy about it
Take care,
Joel
April 3, 2009 at 6:08 pm |
Joel,
Good one. I was getting ready to start a blog to score gear til I realized the date!
Believe it or not, I did just end up buying a white Macbook for my daughter. She’s in college now, leaning towards the graphic arts, and needed a laptop. She’s been using a hand-me-down PC I was given from some family friends which is currently running Ubuntu 8.04 with ArgyllCMS, Cinepaint, GIMP 2.6 and a couple of other graphics goodies I installed/compiled. I just calibrated the monitor and now it needs a new home. It’s just an old Athlon 1.2 GHz with 750 M of memory, an Nvidia FX5200 graphics card and a 17 inch CRT monitor, but it still runs better than my daughter’s friend’s brand new laptops loaded with Vista.
I have already tried out the built-in screen calibration routine on the Macbook. It seems to come from the factory pretty well calibrated at it’s default setting (1.8 gamma) at least according to their software. I hopefully will have ArgyllCMS and dispcalGUI running on it shortly and give it a proper calibration soon. As far as what I see now, it runs well and, the screen looks pretty good (the Macbook Pros have much nicer screens).
I’ve already loaded my daughter’s Mac up with open source such as Open Office, the GIMP, and I’ll be adding ArgyllCMS, dispcalGUI and Cinepaint. The sales guy in the Apple store was trying to sell us more software, but was pretty nice about admitting that “you Linux guys” normally just use the open source stuff on the Macs.
Yours,
Glen
April 3, 2009 at 6:21 pm |
Gour,
I have cinepaint 0.25-0, and it works quite well. You have to build cinepaint from CVS in order to get it. I think Robin’s working pretty hard to get the release out and just needs more people working to debug it. I reported one bug while using Cinepaint in debug mode with Oyranos, but I don’t normally use Oyranos plus it’s pretty hard to find the time to do serious software work while working full time already.
You can get 0.25 and help with the debugging by just using it, and sending in crash reports. Just follow the instructions to build the software from CVS.
Glen
April 5, 2009 at 9:43 pm |
Oh, you completely got me!!!
I was about to post something like “Farewell, Linux friend… It was great having you with us for a while…” but noticed the date.
Good one!
April 7, 2009 at 4:17 am |
Hey dude
this is so funny, read all comments again:)))
You got me:))
Ciao,
Claudiu
April 22, 2009 at 5:05 am |
Wow… just saw this. I totally bought it and was going to comment. It was the comments that showed me it was posted on April Fools. I need to check this site more often or see if there is a mailing list or something to see articles as they come out.
April 22, 2009 at 10:37 am |
lol, same here. one certainly falls for it when you don’t read it on 1st April
It was the last blog to expect one 
(since there is overall quite low post count)
nice prank
May 2, 2009 at 3:52 am |
Please give us a new story (to knock the April Fools one off the top), because when I came across this, it was well beyond 1st of April, and I thought that I shouldn’t come back again. It wasn’t until someone else pointed out the date on the post… did I look up the link again and bookmark this site.
June 1, 2009 at 5:38 am |
Pure awesomeness.
Great April Fool’s gag – even though I found it late.
Keep up the great work and the fight.
July 12, 2009 at 2:01 pm |
Hm..
Maybe next year will be my turn for an apple.
September 23, 2009 at 2:48 am |
well…that’s partially what i was hoping when my g5 dual died in june and apple offered to fix it for $2000 and i decided after having been an apple booster/user for decades and tens of thousands of dollars and treated like a moron by apple, which i am, to never buy another apple product and crusade to keep people from buying apple because they will not support their newer products – i am still regularly using 2 g4s and 2 pismo laptops…until they die.
so i jumped in with both feet into linux. i bought an hp m9500t and have installed jaunty. it’s not a cakewalk. in fact, it’s a pain in the ass to try to get the kind of [general] ease of use i had with my g5 and osx 10.4…but that’s no longer an option…and ease of use is a whore come-on when the hardware goes to hell, and you’ve got a dead-end 90 day warranty solution processor replacement for a bad structural design that lasts 6 months past the apple care [i paid the freight for the additional customer-care warranty, and got f**ked for those dollars].
My next blog posting is using the G5 chassis as a grill for my hamburgers as the processor overheats.
How about a new laptop apple marketing?
I will not stop, I promise. I’ve just started.
Cordially,
Larry Darnell