Category Archive

First impressions, having just read the spec.

For the record, I like small laptops. And I mean, I REALLY like small laptops. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a sub-notebook I’d actually consider purchasing, be it Mac or PC.

And I can’t see that changing with the announcement of the MacBook Air.

I’m using a 1.83ghz Core2 MacBook with 1.5gb RAM at the moment.

An entry level MacBook Air is running at 1.63ghz and shipping with 2gb RAM.

While there’s not a lot of difference here, it is worth noting that the Air has 4mb of L2 cache on the chip (versus 2mb on the MacBook) and an 800mhz FSB (versus 667mhz on the MacBook). I’m unsure as to how much of a performance increase we’ll see from this. Have to wait and see.

Interesting to see a PATA instead of a SATA hard disk in the Air.

Multi-touch trackpad is a nice feature too. Looking forward to playing with that!

The Air certainly looks the part. It’s small, it’s light, spec is pretty good, looks amazing. Couldn’t ask for more.

Until…….

A: No Firewire.
B: No removal/upgradeable memory.
C: No optical drive as standard (available as an option)
D: No removable battery.
E: Hefty price tag

Any one (or maybe even two or three (at a push!)) of these would be acceptable, but all five really makes me shy away a bit, which is a real shame.

I was really hoping Apple would release a sub-notebook and not the iPhone-esque tablet thing that everyone’s been praying for, so I was really excited to see the MacBook Air release news.

I’m a little disappointed on initial inspection. That may change when I actually have one in front of me.

I’ll let you know when that happens.

More cool Wii remote stuff!

Awesome!

There’s been a lot of press about the hits and misses in Leopard. But my two fave features seem to be quite low on the list!

1: Airport in the menu bar.
Yes I know it’s been there forever, but it sucked before, and now it doesn’t! Proper realtime updating of available networks, including security status. It should have been sorted a long time ago. Thankfully, now it is!

2: Finder and mounted shares.
This was my most loathed part of all previous incarnations of OS X. Mount a remote volume, put your Mac to sleep and wander to another location. Open it up and watch and wait for the spinning beachball of doom to do it’s thing.
If you’re lucky, you may get a “volume disconnected” message, albeit eventually. You may however have to forcefully reboot your machine to sort it.
This behaviour is now no more, and it’s a joy! In fact, I really like the way Leopard deals with remote servers. Authenticate to the machine, and you instantly have access to all the shares on the machine. No more multiple ‘Command-K’ing to connect to the same server.

It may seem like small fry against the behemoth Time Machine or the instantly cool Quick Look, but in terms of usability, it’s the little things that make all the difference.

I really hate reviews that misinform, and while the Macworld review of Leopard is mostly accurate, there are some gross inaccuracies!

First, if the Dock is on the bottom of the screen (where a lot of people tend to keep it), a stack will display as a curving column of icons or as a rectangular grid, depending on how many items are in the folder.

While this is true of the default behavior, it is easily rectified with a right click -> view as -> grid. Problem solved.
Interestingly, this choice is not available if the dock is positioned on the side. It’s grid or nothing!

For folders where the number of items changes regularly (such as Downloads), you never know which display you’re going to get.

Wrong again. Once again, right click invoked context menu has the answer, which happens to be the same as above!

Furthermore, stacks displayed as columns sort items alphabetically beginning at the bottom of the stack, while stacks displaying as a grid sort items alphabetically beginning at the top left.

Someone really ought to invest in a two button mouse. Context menus are a wonderful thing.

You open a Finder window in Cover Flow mode, then drag the lower-right corner of the window down to see more files. Oops! Watch instead as the Cover Flow icons grow to gargantuan size while the list of files you’re actually trying to expand remains the same size.

And you can then reduce the size of the icons by dragging the bar below them up, thus revealing more icons.

For those who are a couple of generations behind in their hardware, the prospect of a Leopard world is bleak. For one, any Mac with a G3 chip is automatically left out. This includes all of the original translucent iMacs; you know, the ones that helped get Apple back on its feet.

Do what now?!

Other G4s that Leopard doesn’t support include Quicksilver and earlier Power Macs and Cubes released before January 2002; eMacs sold before October 2003; Titanium PowerBooks older than November 2002.

So, machines about as old as G3 hardware then…..

We were able to get an unsupported mini working that way, albeit slowly.

Which is possibly why they’re considered “unsupported”?

There are always going to be casualties in the bleeding edge market. Dropping support for the G3 was an inevitability. It struggled to run Tiger without loads of ram, and Leopard is a whole ‘nother beast.

Well kinda……
Porn sites that offer free movies, but you have to install a “codec” to view them.
Sound familiar? All those setup.exe files are back but with a Mac flavour.
Once installed the trojan hijacks DNS and redirects popular purchase sites to sites controlled by the hijacker to extract credit card details.
Now I hardly think this constitutes “open season” on the Mac as Wired would have you believe. Fair enough it’s a development in the “viruses on the Mac” department, but, currently, you would have to be a bit of a muppet to get duped. Macs are not invincible, and they never have been. There’s been plenty of dodgy apps that do dodgy things once authentication has been given. This is nothing new.
And as for this pearl of wisdom from “security researcher” (?) Gadi Evron:

Apple’s day has finally come, and Apple users are going to get hit hard. OS X is the new Windows 98.

Ahuh……

Even the BBC are getting excited about this game.
It does look awesome though!

From pcworld.com.

Along with its new look, Vista is introducing a new Microsoft document format, XPS (XML Paper Specification). Documents created with XPS can be shared with people who don’t have the originating application but do have an XPS viewer; Microsoft showed an XPS document being viewed in Internet Explorer. While not nearly as full featured as Adobe’s popular PDF format, XPS is intended primarily to speed up and improve the quality of printing.

So what exaclty is wrong with PDFs?
I reckon “Portable Document Format” inspires a little more confidence than the roll-of-the-tongue-tastic “XML Paper Specification”!

Technorati Tags: pdf, vista, windows, xps

From Apple’s PR website:

Nike and Apple® today announced a partnership bringing the worlds of sports and music together like never before with the launch of innovative Nike+iPod products. The first product developed through this partnership is the Nike+iPod Sport Kit, a wireless system that allows Nike+ footwear to talk with your iPod® nano to connect you to the ultimate personal running and workout experience.

This is a partnership I imagine most people won’t have seen coming, and I for one wish it hadn’t. Nike’s track record is dubious to say the least. It’s not too difficult to find information regarding their use of sweatshops in various parts of the world.
Apple itself have not been immune to some rather negative commentary, notably from Naomi Klein in her book “No Logo”, a discussion about branding and it’s impact on society.
In relation to this, an article on igorinternational.com states:

The company projects a humanistic corporate culture and a strong corporate ethic, characterized by volunteerism, support of good causes or involvement in the community. Nike blundered here. Apple, on the other hand, comes across as profoundly humanist.

Until now. Or maybe the ‘magic curtain’ has just been lifted, and I’ve seen a side to Apple that I did not want to see before. Maybe we’ll have Apple powered Starbucks WIFI spots next, or maybe even a range of Gapple clothing…….

I may not go as far as some people I know who are actually considering SELLING all their Apple equipment following the announcement of this “partnership”. I will have to think long and hard about my next Apple purchase though. The branding inbreeding is becoming too much to take.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Branding, Nike, iPod

Sorry. Couldn’t resist the title!

Regarding the new glossy screen on the Macbook (optional on 15″ Macbook Pros), John Sircusa offers the following:

Glossy displays have effectively taken over the entire laptop market. Why are they so popular? Here are three possible reasons.

They are better than matte-finish displays.
They are cheaper than matte-finish displays.
People are idiots.

Sounds fair to me.

The guys at Macserendipity disagree:

I have a Sony TFT at home with an Xblack glossy screen and I love it. The colors look vibrant and deep and switching to my Belina screen at work is frankly painful.
…
So maybe not having a choice is bad. People ( that are not idiots) should have a choice as some may not like the Glossy Screen. However some do. Those people including myself are not idiots they just have a preference.

Before I begin, I will say that I am NOT a fan of glossy screens. These “more vibrant colours” that are being spoken about and “higher contrast” make the screen almost unusable for getting an ACCURATE colour representation and are therefore fairly useless to anyone wanting to attempt some colour matching. Admittedly, this is something I do only rarely and is something that most people would not have any want or need to do, but it still annoys me! :-p

Anyway.
I’m sure a Sony XBlack TFT screen would look great in a lot of rooms. After all, indoors in a environment where you can control lighting conditions, a situation which is perfect (nay essential?) for these screens. Most showrooms, for example, are just such environments.

But the Macbook is PORTABLE computer. Thus, it would be preferrable to be able to use the laptop the conditions I happen to find myself, be it on a train, in the park having lunch, whatever…..
I should dictate where I use a portable computer, not the other way around.

As for John Siracusa’s argument about people being idiots, once you eliminate the first two options:
A: Glossy screens are better - Um, no they’re not.
B: Glossy screens are cheaper - Unsure, but can’t imagine there’s much in it. As far as I’m aware it’s only the finish that differs?

there aren’t many options left.
To say that people PREFER a glossy screen is to say that they prefer an inferior product (given A and B above), which isn’t unusual these days. As I’m oft reminded, people are entitled to their opinion, but then again, I happen to think most people are idiots anyway! :-p

It is widely known that the Airport card that ships with a MacBook Pro supports 802.11b and 802.11g wireless networks. It also has support 802.11a networks, though this feature is undocumented and is not supported by Apple or Applecare.

Technorati Tags: apple, mac, macbook pro, network, undulattice

Apple have announced the addition of the 17″ MacBook Pro to their Intel based range.
Specs include Firewire 800 and a Double Layer 8x Superdrive, which were both missing in the 15″ MacBook Pro. It also has an additional USB 2.0 port.

You also get the option of up(down)grading from a 120gb 5400rpm hard drive to a 100gb 7200rpm hard drive. Personally I’d go for speed over space!

It’s expensive though, about £200 more expensive than a 17″ Powerbook (which have been discontinued and are no longer available from the Apple Store)

Technorati Tags: apple, mac, macbook pro, undulattice

Having just read a recent post on Daring Fireball regarding how Boot Camp will start an exodus to Windows, I have to go one step further than John Gruber’s “Jackass of the Week” description and label USA Today’s Andrew Kantor a complete idiot!
Firstly we have this……

Boot Camp isn’t going to propel the Mac into the mainstream. If anything, it will get Mac users to switch to Windows. Sure, it’ll be terrific for Mac fans not wanting to give up their machine of choice but find more and more they need to use Windows. But Boot Camp doesn’t offer any kind of compelling argument for PC users to buy Mac hardware.

From experience, I have found the exact opposite to be true. Since switching to Mac a few years ago, I have found it LESS AND LESS that I need to use Windows, to the degree that I no longer own a machine that is even capable of running Windows. Boot Camp offers PC users the chance to try OS X and still revert to Windows if they don’t like it. So why wouldn’t you?!

Followed by……

The Macs that can currently run Boot Camp are the Mac Mini, the iMac, and the MacBook Pro notebook. Price-wise, they can’t compete with PCs.

The Mini will set you back about $1100 for a machine with 512 MB of RAM and a 60-GB hard drive — that’s when you add in a keyboard, mouse, midrange monitor ($150), and a full copy of Windows XP.

The iMac is about $1600 (with 512 MB RAM, a 160-GB hard drive, and Windows). The MacBook Pro, with an 80-GB hard drive, is about $2000 with Windows.(All these prices come from the Apple Store. I mention the hard drive sizes in particular because you’d need the space to load two operating systems and two sets of software.)

I don’t know which “Apple Store” he’s been looking at, but iMacs currently start at $1299 and MacBook Pros at $1999. Prices exclude a copy of Windows which we can safely assume most “switchers” already own.

And “two sets of software”? Surely the idea is to only use the other operating system when it’s absolutely necessary, so the second “set of software” is most likely going to be fairly minimal.

In contrast, a 3 GHz Gateway DX210 PC with 1 GB of RAM, a 160 GB hard drive, and the same monitor I suggested for the Mac Mini — that’ll be only $900.

In contrast, a 3GHz Gateway DX210 PC has a single core, single processor Pentium 4, no Superdrive, crap video card, and ships with Windows Media Center Edition. GREAT! Way to compare like with like!

Oh, and the whole “no viruses on the Mac” business? Besides the fact that it’s no longer true, you can get this neat stuff called anti-virus software.

Now I want to punch him. If we’re gonna be pedantic about it, let’s rephrase.
“No viruses on OS X”. Better?
And given that Windows can’t read the Mac filesystem, I think the “spreading” argument is effectively null and void.

The folks at Parallels.com, however, released “virtualization software” that they say allows OS X to run any operating system, including Windows, within OS X — no rebooting required. So that’s a step above Boot Camp right off, even if it costs $50.

Rumour has it that Leopard will have this feature built in. Certainly wouldn’t surprise me. Though it would be funny if Apple treats Windows the same way they treated Classic environment.

It may not be so bad — they might even enjoy the convenience of sharing a common platform with the other 97% of the world, brought to them courtesy of Boot Camp.

A million people are not smarter than one.

Technorati Tags: apple, boot camp, mac, OS X, PC, technology, windows

From the BBC News Website

The organic light-emitting diode (OLED) emits a brilliant white light when attached to an electricity supply.

The OLEDs do not heat up like today’s light bulbs and so are far more energy efficient and should last longer.

They also produce a light that is more akin to natural daylight than traditional bulbs.

Technorati Tags: technology