Technically Incorrect

Social crises come upon us like paparazzi down the alleyways of Hollywood. In what seems like a flash, we turn around, smile, and see what we have become.

So it is imperative that I warn you of a deeply concerning trend that may well be sweeping the world: the use of laptops and mobile devices in bed.

A company called Credant Technologies, which appears to specialize in something called endpoint data protection, suspected that the world was heading toward something untoward between the sheets. So it commissioned a survey to discover whether workaholia was causing melancholia.

The results will numb.

It appears that 57 percent of those who said they worked in bed (more than a quarter of those surveyed) said they whipped out their devices between 2 and 6 hours a week. Eight percent said they spent more evening time on their devices than talking with their partners.

Does she seem happy to you?

(Credit: CC Riot Jane/Flickr)

I am sure your first thought (after counting the number of hours you are mobile while prostrate) is to consider the effect this must have on these poor people's loved ones.

Do they screech and howl in frustration? Do they scour the bars, the health clubs, and the monasteries for new lovers, ones who are less inclined to connect with others while reclined? Or do they, perhaps, have makeovers that cause them to look slightly more like something designed by Apple, BlackBerry, or Dell?

While you consider the possibilities, might I attempt to ease your involuntary eyelid-twitch by describing a little of the methodology of this survey.

A mere 300 people were asked about their digital proclivities. And all 300 were employed in the City of London, where it is perhaps inevitable that workers need to use their laptops just before snoring, being a city with a proclivity for more than few afterwork pints.

However, I would be interested to hear from those whose relationships; television viewing; trashy novel reading; hygiene of the hands, feet, nose, or other bodily areas; oh, and sex lives have been affected by a deep and lasting need to be connected to work, when they should be connected to their reason for living.

People, if you don't put your Apple or BlackBerry away...your gadgets may be the only things joining you in bed.

Through its Laptop Hunter campaign, Microsoft has proved there are so many people in Los Angeles looking for a laptop that I am surprised Apple has not responded with an exclusively LA version of its own ads.

You know, 60 seconds of people just talking about themselves and eating wheatgrass, while Justin Long looks on, mesmerized.

So let us celebrate Redmond's takeover of America's cleanest-living city by meeting another Lauren.

Yes, there is more than one Lauren in LA who needs a laptop and scours Craigslist for acting opportunities. This Lauren is about to be a law student. She therefore wants "speed, portability, and battery life". For under $1,700.

Lawyers, you see, must take their vast, fast, infernal brains with them at all times and expect them to sock it to a jury without a socket.

Lauren's mom, with a stern face that suggests she might favor hanging and flogging, becomes most concerned when Lauren wafts over to those enticingly evil Apple laptops. Lauren gingerly fingers a Mac that costs $2,000, even before you add anything on it.

Mom cross-examines Lauren: "Why would you pay twice the price?" Lauren, who has clearly not been coached for the witness stand, replies: "I wouldn't."

So we lurch towards the happy ending, already sensing that this movie, featuring the blonde, bubbly Lauren's quest for student satisfaction, will be entitled "For Whom the Dell Tolls."

And the toll is so cheap for this Dell XPS 13: $972. That's less than the cost of all the law books she'll have to buy in college.

Thankfully, there is still one left in the store. These things are popular. Who amongst you knew that?

Lauren gets exactly what she (and the highly neutral market research company for whom she thinks she is filming the ad) wants. Mom smiles as she tells us that her little girl usually gets what she wants. I am sure her future college sorority sisters are looking forward to meeting Lauren.

In this case, what Lauren wanted was for the Mac to get six months in solitary (at Best Buy) for price gouging, as she takes the first, important step towards her rightful place on the Supreme Court.

And may I just make it entirely clear that there is nothing funny at all in the fact that Lauren's mom is called Sue.

I did hear a rumor that this may be the last of these beguiling Laptop Hunter ads. I'm not so sure. Now that we are being aggressively informed just how cheap PCs are (and especially now that Apple has been moved to respond), I can see more LA demographics being plundered in order to keep the fun going.

I wonder if we soon might see "Lauren Bacall, Laptop Hunter". I'm not sure she'd be quite so easy to please.

When it comes to "Dancing with the Stars," Steve Wozniak has already proved his legs are limber, not timber. They may not be the longest limbs in the competition, but they have not disintegrated like a C-list ego.

In the limp-up to Monday night's big event (ABC, 8 o'clock, as if you didn't know), Nancy O'Dell, who smiles a lot on some entertainment show or other, has bowed out with a knee that couldn't pasa the doble. And Jewel, a singer who used to live in a car or a truck or a truck stop or something like that, fractured, well, a couple of tibias.

This means the show has had to scramble like a new social networking site trying to get funding in order to find last-minute replacements.

Because I know so many of you live, breathe, and obsessively google "Dancing with the Stars," I can tell you that one replacement is former Playboy model and number one girlfriend of Hugh Hefner, Holly Madison.

The other is the woman whom America has been hugging so close to its bosom that I'm amazed she has managed to draw breath since last week. Yes, it's Melissa SomethingOrOther, the sad, sad girl who was dumped on television last week by the Bachelor with the most untrustworthy face since the car dealer who sold you a Pontiac with no engine.

Boris? Isn't he Karina's bodyguard?

(Credit: CC Irina Slutsky)

For those of you who missed it because you were having open heart surgery, the Bachelor first proposed to her, then changed his mind a few weeks later and snogged some other store assistant or Avon saleslady or whatever.

The Woz (surely he now always deserves a "The" before his moniker) has been training hard, getting used to wearing heels every day as opposed to only occasionally and testing the patience of Karina Smirnoff. She is his partner, a professional with a harder derriere than a corpse well into rigor mortis.

Karina and the Woz will be performing the cha-cha to that memorable tune to which you yourself may have, on occasion, tripped the heavy fantastic, "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet" by Bachman Turner Overdrive.

By surviving the training where others have fallen to the floor, the Woz's chances have unquestionably increased. By at least 0.2 percent.

The early favorite is, so very surprisingly, Olympic gymnast Shawn Johnson. And the Woz's first target (after staying upright) will be to do better than Mark Cuban.

I know so many of you will be wishing him luck, watching the show with a very twitchy posture, while not gaming the voting system using your consummate, brilliant, underused and deeply underestimated hacking prowess.

I only mention it because Mark Cuban apparently calculated that if the Woz gets zero marks from the judges and everyone else gets a perfect 300, he only needs to get 6 percent more of the viewers' vote to win anyway.

But please don't let that influence you at all. At all. This is a serious show. And I know you will treat it seriously.

I will be posting action updates live--well, live PST version--tonight. Bet you can hardly wait.

There is something vaguely timber-shivering about every new Apple announcement. Especially for those Isaac Newtons whose head didn't just absorb the apple's bump, but the whole fruit, core and all.

The latest and most exciting rumor is that Cupertino's finest will, in a beautifully timed nod at the fact that most people have very little cash and even less credit, launch an $800 laptop.

This might cause certain elements at Dell and HP to scuttle off to the nearest executive restroom. Although perhaps the most surprising thing is that they would be surprised.

Of course there are those who fear that Apple might suddenly debase its image by pandering to the masses. But just as Target got into design to raise its brand image above the mass of the masses, Mercedes decided to stoop (but not really) into the runaround arena, by getting into Smart cars, A-Class cars. These were products people liked and then appreciated, regardless of their price.

Big Apple, Little Apple--they can all be pretty.

(Credit: CC ShielNiak)

It's not about moving below or above your price point. It's about how you do it.

Appearing at a price point at which you've rarely been seen before (yes, there's Mac Mini, but I think we're talking laptops here) isn't going to suddenly devalue your brand. What is important is not that Apple might launch an $800 laptop, but whether the little thing will be cute.

Apple strokes people's feely bits like few other brands in the world.

And its brand has arguably never been stronger than it is today. No other laptop manufacturer has ever really successfully competed with Apple on design.

Please don't be cross with me, but it seems like every other laptop around looks like the portable equivalent of most General Motors' automobiles. Circa 1992.

So with no real threat at the core of its brand, Apple can tiptoe through its competitors' tulips and check out the undersoil.

I imagine an $800 Apple laptop may have fewer of those function thingies that the more refined devotee might enjoy. Perhaps not. But those who want to pay $800 for an Apple laptop may well be happy with a little less ringing and whistling. Many won't even hear the silence.

Especially given that most of them know that Apple products function in a simple, engaging and human way. That, plus looks, is the real definition of great design.

What is vital, though, to much of the target is Arm Candy Quality: what the new laptop will look like, how it will feel you're using it, and what it will be like to be seen with. Yes, that may sound frustrating for those who regard a laptop's capabilities as the tech equivalent of the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

But if Apple gets the feely parts right (and who can imagine it won't?) then the laundry bills around Austin, Texas, and other centers of laptop manufacture might just rise quite considerably.

According to Network World, a Dell-sponsored Ponemon Institute report discovered that 10,000 laptops are lost or stolen every week at US airports.

Unlike the British Government, whose laptops appear to disappear from the parked Ford Tauruses of junior employees, many corporate warriors leave their laptops on the security screening belts and somehow never reunite with them.

As always when it comes to surveys, I poke this one with a very long stick. And at the end of the stick is disinfectant.

The suggestion seems to be that 50% of the disappearing laptops contain confidential corporate information yet, in the case of the 36 larger airports, 65% of the laptops are simply never reclaimed.

(Credit: ingorr)

In fact, the survey declares that 77% of the people surveyed said that they had "no hope" of ever recovering their laptops.

Which surely would suggest that the majority of American business would appear on the fabulous FOX show Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader? and embarrass themselves.

If Senator Larry Craig can find a lapdance at an airport as dull as Minneapolis, what prevents our corporate wizards from failing to find a laptop?

I have left my MacBook twice on the screening belt at Newark.

Twice, my redoubtable former assistant, Chris McDonald, who has just (I hope) finished directing a movie with Heather Graham, made one phone call to the TSA, and lo, I beheld my laptop within hours.

Why does this possibility not cross the mind of all those who are directing the nation's business future?

And do you really get the impression, as you stagger through those infernal security lines, that the people in front of you are waiting to steal your laptop the minute your eyes deviate from it?

Call me an IQ number lower than the average Bachelor contestant, but doesn't everyone in front of you in the line already have a laptop? And, quite often, a fancier one than you?

Or is the survey's suggestion that it is TSA employees who are fencing these laptops in exchange for, say, yachts in the Florida Keys?

I am touched by Network World's sensitivity in attempting to help our forlorn corporate brethren by suggesting that they should place their laptops in the first bin on the belt or that they should mark their laptops.

May I make my own suggestion?

Ritalin. Lots of it. Plus Xanax, Lunesta and Johnny Walker.

The Ritalin, naturally, would work on this egregious attention deficit disorder.

However, as a former girlfriend once said to me, one must look deeper into the causes.

Let us accept that some of these losses are due to stress.

So corporations that are already blocking access to certain deleterious websites, should also inveigh directly upon their warriors' deeper mental health.

Xanax for a little more peace. And Lunesta for a little more sleep.

The Johnny Walker?

Ah, well, that might help them tell the truth when they answer surveys.