It’s not an easy time for Microsoft — with Steve Ballmer having to field questions about being “buffoons” and an “evil empire” at the shareholder’s meeting (.doc) — so when they get together “the world’s most influential technology pundits and online writers” (nb: we weren’t invited) for Mobius to discuss super-secret mobile tech you’d think [...]
Here’s a guide for finding the best bargains on Apple-related gear during the infamous Black Friday sales on November 27. We’ve compiled a comprehensive list of gear from leaked photos of sales flyers and descriptions of sales.
The bargains include a 2.26 GHz MacBook + $150 gift card at Best Buy for $999.99 ; a 32GB [...]
New on the App Store is Voices from the clever folk at Tap Tap Tap. You can guess what it does.
Open it up, pick a silly voice. Helium is pretty silly. A microphone appears and the app even clears your throat for you (try it, you’ll see what I mean). Now speak your brains, and [...]
Press releases, you will hardly be surprised to hear, are rarely very interesting. But one arrived in my inbox a couple of weeks ago that made me double-take.
“Sony’s S Series Walkman,” it chattered, “is a serious challenger to the iPod Nano.” Gosh, really? Perhaps the Cult had better have a look at one, then, despite [...]
11:55 pm, May 21st, 2009, Leander Kahney
My friend Jeffy picked up this pack of stickers at a Macworld past. Do Mac users have a sense of humor ? Should they be printed up as stickers for MacBooks?
Posted by Leander Kahney in Advertising, Apple, Humor, Macworld, Top stories | Comment on this article
Leander Kahney is senior editor of Cult of Mac, editor of two books about technology culture, Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, and has written for Wired, MacWeek, Scientific American, and The Observer in London. Follow Leander on Twitter @lkahney and Facebook.
Email the author | Read more posts by Leander Kahney.
Ninja Assassin the movie is an anticipated Hollywood swords and sandals epic from James McTeigue, director of V for Vendetta, with a story from J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of Babylon 5 and the only Spider-Man comic in which Dr. Doom cries (though the artist allegedly came up with that last bit).
It’s also now an [...]
This is what you’re about to ask: Is Star Wars: Trench Run so good that it’ll have you wondering how magically your iPhone becomes an X-wing fighter? Answer: No. It’s better — it’s actually so good, you’ll be trying to figure out why your X-wing looks suspiciously like an iPhone.
Hit the game’s icon and you’re [...]
New on the App Store is Voices from the clever folk at Tap Tap Tap. You can guess what it does.
Open it up, pick a silly voice. Helium is pretty silly. A microphone appears and the app even clears your throat for you (try it, you’ll see what I mean). Now speak your brains, and [...]
Press releases, you will hardly be surprised to hear, are rarely very interesting. But one arrived in my inbox a couple of weeks ago that made me double-take.
“Sony’s S Series Walkman,” it chattered, “is a serious challenger to the iPod Nano.” Gosh, really? Perhaps the Cult had better have a look at one, then, despite [...]
If you jailbreak your iPhone, the first thing you ABSOLUTELY MUST DO is change the default filesystem password.
When you jailbreak, the filesystem’s password is set to the common password “alpine.” As people usually don’t bother changing this password after performing a jailbreak, it’s really easy for hackers to get access to any jailbroken iPhone/iPod Touch [...]
Convert your mild-mannered Mac Pro into a hard drive speed demon. Stuff it with drives fast enough to work with full-quality, uncompressed video. Get more than 300 MB/s on your internal drives! It’s so easy even I can do it!
I’ve been working in video production for the last 20+ years. When you’re working with video [...]
Some readers might remember the fuss a few weeks ago, when Snow Leopard came out and people noticed that it did something screwy to the way files behave.
By removing support for Creator Codes in 10.6, Apple also removed the system’s hitherto built-in ability to distinguish which application created a file, and re-open it in that [...]
George Hotz a.k.a GeoHot has released blackra1n RC3, which is an update to a 1-click jailbreak that adds activation options and an add-on blacksn0w, which unlocks latest iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS baseband version 05.11.07. To use blacksn0w, make sure you have this new baseband (check under Settings –> General –> About –> Modem Firmware) [...]
i don’t get it. Mac’s have intel inside as well. What’s the deal? Is it because of stickers on every PC?
Eimantas, on May 22nd, 2009 at 4:37 am
Since Macs and PCs use the exact same processors, I don’t see the point.
Don Pope, on May 22nd, 2009 at 5:10 am
LOL. Well, the fact that I can laugh at this is what I hope makes the difference between a fanboy and a plain ol’ mac-luva.
TheBrew, on May 22nd, 2009 at 5:15 am
The real irony is that while these stickers were being printed, Apple was probably also working on Marklar – the Intel version of OS X.
Ian Betteridge, on May 22nd, 2009 at 5:24 am
The point is, that one can still have an Intel Mac (because these days you simply cannot get a new Mac without Intel proc) and at the same time be aware of the PowerPC story — an architecture that has always been superior to x86, but had to be abandoned by Apple because there simply ceased to be companies that were interested in R&D of desktop PPC procs (and had enough steam to do that), because Apple needed to be able to offer Windows support to attract switchers and finaly because Intel’s Megahertz Myth marketing frontal assault was extreme and worked (people around me still regularly refer to processor’s frequency as “speed”, which really infuriates me). Thats it.
What if Windows ran on PPC and there was a company with an Intel-like budget interested in PPC desktop chips R&D…? x86 chips would sit in technical museums all over the world, reminding us of one technological blind alley…
Daniel, on May 22nd, 2009 at 10:45 am
To those confused about the stickers: Back when they were printed there was no such thing as a Mac with an Intel processor.
shMerker, on May 22nd, 2009 at 2:43 pm
@Daniel lol…no. The fact that the powerpc ended up falling into the same trap that the P4 did (too hot/clockspeed for power) was not because of poor R&D budgets… Also, the MHz Myth was clearly handled by AMD’s superior (for the time) architecture which intel then reacted to, creating the Core2Duo and now the Corei7. The fact of the matter is that market consolidation and the shift at IBM (itself a very large company, that once invested capital like intel) away from that kind of chip prodcution/design (itself a byproduct of market forces) created an ecosphere where Apple could not keep up with a speed race not based on MHz but Flops. It was wonderfully inevitable.
Also, I’m pretty damn certain there is a version of windows that runs on PPC… sure it was NT 3.5, but what the hell right?
Ted, on May 22nd, 2009 at 2:53 pm
The processor wars seems so silly, in retrospect. A processor is only as good as the software that runs on it, which is why my Aluminum MacBook runs faster on a slower Core2 Duo than my work ThinkPad with 2.53 Ghz Core 2 does.
And what doomed the PPC architecture is that we reframed performance totally about five years ago. Steve’s whole performance per watt metric? It’s absolutely true. You can get a whole lot more power out of an Intel Core-family processor by watt than you can PPC. For our mobile future, PPC took itself out of the game.
I would totally plaster that on my machine — maybe over the Apple logo…
Pete Mortensen, on May 22nd, 2009 at 3:15 pm
Ooh, Can I have some for my G5. It’s slooow when compared to my Macbook.
Nate MC, on May 22nd, 2009 at 4:06 pm
@Ted: well, yeah, that’s what I’m saying
there was no company interested in desktop PPC (that’s the case of IBM — was not interested, just agreed to build G5 and clearly had no motivation to push the dev, which is why it was such a junk when talking performance per watt — maybe Apple already knew they were going Intel when they asked IBM to build G5) and the second thing — not enought steam (and not interested at the same time, actually) — that’s the case of Freescale. G4 was clearly superior to x86 in it’s times. But the pressure from Intel and AMD was more and more intense and Freescale simply couldn’t compete. But that has nothing to do with the architectue itself.
The P4 (one of the worst processor lines ever, actually) was a product of just The Megahertz Myth I’m talking about… “look, people, it runs at 3 GHz! sooo fast! omg!” …performance per watt, performance per hertz… who cared about that?
Yes, NT ran on PPC, but the decision to discontinue that was all about marketing and business. What x86 chip could compete with PowerPC in the times of NT?
Daniel, on May 23rd, 2009 at 2:08 am
[...] pt PC users http://cultofmac.com/think-irony/11051 [...]
boioglu pe twitter | boio.ro, on May 23rd, 2009 at 11:01 am
I want one for my macbook.
sworm, on May 24th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
These were secretly put out by the guys at Apple. They were for us to go around to various retailers and sticking them over the “Intel Inside” stickers as a joke. I have mint condition ones and might sell them by the sheet if the price is right. They are a collector’s item and a fun part of Apple’s history when Apple’s PowerPC processor was faster than the Intel processor.
Steven M. Spiegel, on May 25th, 2009 at 12:01 am
Others will disagree, but being able to dualboot windows and OSX was probably the biggest thing in Intel’s favor. Everything else could be done on PPC, which hasn’t gone away, try to buy a game console with x86.
Tim, on May 25th, 2009 at 6:20 am
@Tim – game console with x86? i think they call it the xbox. in fact its “PC” architecture had a lot to do with some of the software exploits discovered for it. (rehash old hacks) fun times.
jdoe, on May 25th, 2009 at 9:48 pm
First, the power pc always was and still is a superior architecture for power consumption and also heat dissipation.. You compare the battery life and heat of todays intel macbooks and the older power pc ones, you can really see the difference. Apple’s and Steve Job’s argument that that the power pcs are too slow was exposed as bogus after it was found that OSX was compiled for size and not speed. At one time, Apple could boast about having the best hardware with their power pc offerings. Now, they can just boast about having the best advertisements.
vernon, on May 25th, 2009 at 9:57 pm
Judging by these comments, Mac users mostly don’t.
Charlie, on May 26th, 2009 at 6:44 am