John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
Transferring the contents of one Mac to another is wonderfully elegant, like a lashing spermatoza slipping its way into a warm, virgin egg. All you do is connect your two Macs together, either through a FireWire or Ethernet cable, or by telling them to talk to each other over WiFi. Then you load up Migration Assistant. A couple of hours later, your new Mac will be imprinted with the last generation’s DNA. It’s as beautifully simple as the circle of life.
Unfortunately, for most PC users, switching to their first Mac isn’t anywhere near as elegant, and is largely a manual affair of backing up files higgledy-piggledy to an external drive, then manually copying them over.
That mess of a process will change with Lion, though: PC users will now be able to migrate their PC data to their Mac through Migration Assistant, just like Mac users, by simply booting up the MigrationAssistantSetup.exe program. Soon enough, the only real hurdle about switching from a PC to Mac will be the psychological one.
“Is this Apple’s next iPad?” Boy Genius Report asks, then supply their own answer in an update mere hours: no, it jolly well isn’t. At least not technically. But when March 2nd rolls around, it’ll probably end up being something pretty close.
This morning, Boy Genius Report was sent the image of the iPad 2 you see above, featuring a thinner design, flattened back, a visible rear speaker and a rear-mounted web cam. Unfortunately, they were punk’d: it was just a high-quality render of the iPad 2 by the Apple fan.
That said, we’d be willing to put money down that on Wednesday, you’re going to see an iPad 2 very like the above render. The case-manufacturers all agree upon the broad outlines of the iPad 2’s external redesigns. So we probably will see an iPad 2 that looks identical to this come Wednesday, with the only real question mark being that rear-mounted webcam. Everyone agrees the iPad 2 will come with FaceTime, but that only depends upon a forward-looking webcam.
This is awesome: an iPhone 5 front panel that its leakers swear confirms that the next generation of Apple’s handset will have a larger, 4-inch display. Of course, who could tell without any point of reference?
This is either the most inept leak ever, or one of the best gags of the week. They should do a whole series of these leaks: the large iPhone 5 display next to, say, an equally “large” radioactive ant, or the world’s longest index finger.
To be fair, it does seem to confirm the iPhone 5 might have a thinner bezel at the sides…. but with the iPhone 5 still months away, this might just be an idea Apple’s toying with.
Curious about the changes in OS X Lion? Starting at noon PST or 3pm EST, our own Jose Guitierrez will be doing a live screencast of OS X Lion, in which he’ll field questions, demonstrate features and even test software suggested to him by Cult of Mac’s readers.
If you’d like to take part, see Lion in action and ask Jose some questions, the screencast is embedded above, or you can go to the Livestream directly by clicking here.
According to Jose, the show will last at least an hour, but will probably last until he’s fielded all questions. Why not join us and see Lion in all its glory on this slow Friday afternoon?
If you prefer a tactile sensation closer to leather than ice cold aluminum, Dodocase’s Bookback self-adhesive skins will allow you to coat the back of your iPhone or iPad in a Moleskine-like shell. The iPad version will cost you $20, while the iPhone version is just $9.
We loved Sparrow for Mac when we reviewed it a couple of weeks ago for treating your inbox more like Twitter, describing it as “the equivalent of skipping stones, not piloting a submarine.”
Much as we loved it, though, that approach to email isn’t for everyone, especially power users. If you’d like to give Sparrow a try without paying, though, you now can: Sparrow Lite is now available on the Mac App Store, allowing you to use Sparrow to drive a single Gmail account for free, if you don’t mind an advert subsidizing the experience.
Give it a shot. You can download Sparrow Lite for free by clicking here, or searching for it on the Mac App Store.
This is welcome: OS X 10.7 Lion adds support for the TRIM command. The addition of this deep little function will mostly be of interest to new MacBook Air owners, as it’s essential to the long-term performance of an SSD drive.
Engadget’s now reporting that “engineering issues” have led Apple to make last-minute design changes to the iPad 2 that will cause it to launch without a Retina Diplay. What a load of total crap.
As is their wont, the boys and girls over at iFixIt rushed out to the Apple Store and picked themselves up a new 15-inch MacBook Pro to spill its guts for all of us to see.
Although externally not much has changed, internally, there’s some nice design revisions that have led iFixIt to bump the MacBook Pro up a notch on their repairability scale. It now rates a 7 out of 10, which makes the new Pros one of the more self-repairable Apple computers of recent memory: Cupertino’s engineers chose to eschew their new pentalobe torx screws entirely in the 2011 Pros.
The RAM of the new Pros has been upgraded to PC3-10600, which is the same RAM used in the 2010 revision of the iMac line, and a welcome speed boost over earlier models. The wireless card has also gotten a bit of a bump and now includes four antennas instead of three, so it might hold onto your wifi connection a little bit better.
The biggest eyebrow archer about the new MacBook Pros is this observation from iFixIt:
We uncovered gobs of thermal paste on the CPU and GPU when we removed the main heat sink. The excess paste may cause overheating issues down the road, but only time will tell.
This alarms me. The original MacBook Pros similarly used too much thermal paste, and their consequent overheating issues are now legendary. As iFixIt says, only time will tell, but it’s enough to be wary about.
Ever since Apple purchased Lala back in 2009, it’s been assumed that iTunes was going to make a leap into the cloud with a streaming music on demand service pretty much any minute now.
According to a new report by the Financial Times, though, Apple’s just been messing with us: Apple has no intention of undermining the market for paid music downloads that it absolutely dominates.
Instead, Apple keeps its plans for the cloud and its Lala acquisition as a form of insurance. An ace up their sleeve, in case the likes of Spotify, Rhapsody or Last.fm looks posed to become an industry-shaking juggernaut, similar to the way Netflix is changing the home video market.
The new MacBook Pros are seemingly superior to the last generation in every possible way, one notable downgrade seemingly lies in battery life: while old MacBook Pros were rated between eight and ten hours of battery life, the new models only get “up to 7 hours” across the board.
What’s the story? You might think it’s because of the bump to Sandy Bridge: after all, faster processors often suck up more juice. In fact, that may be part of the cause, but overall, the reason the battery life has “decreased” is because Apple is now reporting it more honestly.
It’s extremely common for computer manufacturers to wildly exaggerate battery life. That laptop you bought with ten hours of battery life might be lab tested as such just by leaving it open, idle, with the WiFi off and the display notched down to quarter brightness.
Apple’s now using a more honest testing method to arrive at battery life. Called Wireless Web protocol testing, they take each device, set the display to 50 percent brightness and then surf the 25 most popular websites, performing the main function of those sites over and over again, including playing Flash video.
So when the new MacBook Pros say they get up to 7 hours of battery life, it’s not really a downgrade: unlike the ten hours of battery life you were supposed to get last gen, but would be lucky to get half of, you can really bank on that 7 hours.
Apple has just dropped the first developer preview of OS X 10.7 Lion and is now pumping it out to applicable devs through the Mac App Store. At the same time, they’ve updated their Mac OS X Lion page, revealing some new features including universal auto save, a possible new version of Safari, some new multitouch gestures, a new way to wirelessly transfer files between other Mac users, and much more.
Apple has just update their official website with an overview of Thunderbolt, which they all-but-confirm is Light Peak and designed in collaboration with Intel Labs (who has their own press conference scheduled for later this morning).
Thunderbolt is up to 20 times faster than USB 2.0 and twice as fast as USB 3.0. It’s a single cable that consolidates almost all existing ports, from FireWire to USB to miniDisplay to eSATA. This is one cable to rule them all.
And even though the new MacBook Pros come with only one Thunderbolt port, it shouldn’t matter for end users: two 10Gbps channels on the same connector mean you can daisy chain multiple high-speed, data-intensive devices and multiple displays to the same port without using a hub… and without reducing performance.
Forget everything else about the new MacBook Pros: this is the most important Apple announcement of the week. Apple and Intel’s reticence to adopt USB 3 now makes sense: they were out to kill it and every other connector out there once and for all.
Preparation is underway at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, with workers busy slinging up a massive Apple banner heralding next week’s iPad 2 event.
Apple’s invite made no bones about the fact that the March 2nd event was all about the iPad 2, but the murals fronting the Yueba Buena conference center tend to foreshadow the content of the event pretty accurately. For example, the September 1st iPod event featured a guitar with an Apple logo.
So here’s the question: what do all of those colored dots foreshadow, given that this is an iPad 2 event? They could be touchpoints, but that would only seem to foreshadow the iPad 2 upping the previous generation’s display’s capacity for ten simultaneous touch points, which seems unlikely unless Apple envisions a rise in polydactylysm.
So what is it? The March 2nd invite does prominently feature an iPad, but says “Come see what 2011 will be the year of.” That means this is going to be about a lot more than the iPad 2 (which we know will be a modest update anyway). This is about what 2011 will hold for iOS.
Here’s my best guess: the dots represent nodes in the cloud, and on March 2nd, Apple’s finally going to unveil some of their cloud aspirations, starting with a radical overhaul of MobileMe.
What do you guys think? It’s a lot to take from a bunch of little dots, I know, but Apple never does anything without a reason. Those dots mean something. Leave us a comment with your best guess.
Although buyers of new MacBook Pros should have it come preinstalled on their machines, if you want FaceTime on your existing Mac, it’s going to cost you some bread, or beans, or shekels, or whatever your preferred pecuniary vernacular.
It won’t cost you much, though. Coming out of public beta, FaceTime for Mac has just hit the Mac App Store for just $0.99.
Changes over the beta aren’t significant… but explicit mention is made that 720p video calling is supported. Considering the fact that today’s MacBook Pros ship with “FaceTime HD” cameras, it looks like Apple has finally embraced the full capabilities of their 1280×1024 FaceTime nee iSight webcams.
iLounge is posting a pair of rumors, one which is a pretty obvious extrapolation of what we know about the 2011 MacBook Pros, but the other one a gossipy little number about the iPad 2.
In regards to the MacBook Pros, iLounge says that the 2011 MacBook Pros will be a modest upgrade, and won’t boast a new redesign. I think that’s less a rumor than fact at this point, as we’ve seen glimpses of promotional materials that indicate the new Pros’ only real difference physically from the previous models is a larger trackpad.
So when iLounge goes on to say that 2012’s MacBook Pros will be a new “milestone” and boast a radical chassis redesign, I say “ho-hum.” Of course it will. If they didn’t do it this year, they have to do it next year, since it’ll be three years at that point since they first rolled-out the unibody aluminum design. More MacBook Air like Pros should be par for the course in 2011.
More interesting, though, iLounge claims that the iPad 2 will be a more modest update than we were expecting, thanks to the production bottlenecks we heard tell about on Tuesday. Considering the fact that few expected a radical reinvention of the iPad this generation, that’s a pretty bold statement, and it implies that Apple might pull a last-minute switcheroo on case makers, as they did with the third-generation iPod Touch (which was heavily tipped as having a camera before launch). Or it could simply mean that while Apple will announce the iPad 2 next week, it won’t ship for quite some time.
I don’t see the latter being likely: Apple’s not going to pull the same boner as the mob of Android tablet makers, revealing products months ahead of time. The iPad 2 will be available within a month of announcement, even if it means Apple has to downgrade functionality behind the scenes.
The question is, though, if the iPad 2 is more modest an update than expected, how? All we’re really expecting from the iPad 2 is a routine processor and RAM bump, the addition of FaceTime, a new speaker and possibly dual GSM/CDMA functionality. With the exception of the latter feature, that’s hardly mountain shaking. What would Apple possibly ditch to get over the hump?
In an otherwise routine disgorgement of recently awarded design patents for extant Apple products, one notable little slip: an E-Wallet icon tattooed in at the bottom of a pen-and-ink lithograph representing the familiar iOS home screen of every new iPhone.
That E-Wallet icon could betray Apple’s ambitions for near-field communications with a future NFC-capable iPhone 5. Near-field communications would not only allow future iPhones to be used for mobile credit card payments just by waving the device with Obi-Wan-style nonchalance in front of a teller or kiosk, but also are rumored to enable Apple’s ambitious remote computing strategy by allowing Mac users to effectively carry their most critical Mac files and settings around with them.
Presumably, E-Wallet would be the iOS app giving user access to NFC data. Not that it will necessarily be called that: as Patently Apple points out, E-Wallet is trademarked to someone else, and trademark trolls are already sitting on three seaerate iWallet trademarks, hoping to get Cupertino to write them a check.
The Apple Store is down, and new MacBook Pros are on their way. We saw the 13-inch yesterday: now we’ve got the details on one of the 15-inchers and 17-inchers, respectively.
Here’s what we’re looking at for the 15-inch and 17-inch:
• An Intel Core 2.0 GHz i7 quad-core processor with a 6MB cache (15-inch)
• An Intel Core 2.2 GHz i7 quad-core processor with a 6MB cache (17-inch)
• 4GB of DDR RAM at 1333 MHz (both)
• 500GB hard drive (15-inch)
• 750GB hard drive (17-inch)
• 15.4-inch LED backlit screen with 1440×900 resolution (15-inch)
• a 17-inch LED backlit display with a 1920 x 1200 resolution (17-inch)
• Intel HD Graphics 3000
• AMD Radeon HD 6490M GPU with 256MB of memory (15-inch)
• AMD Radeon HD 6750M with 1GB GDDR5 memory (17-inch)
• FaceTime HD camera
• 8x SuperDrive
• Thunderbolt and Mini DisplayPort
• SDXC slot, FireWire 800 port and two USB 2.0 ports
• Audio and Ethernet ports
• Wi-Fi and Bluetooth
Like the 13-inch we saw yesterday, these are more modest updates to the MacBook Pro line than we anticipated, boasting no LiquidMetal design or ubiquitous SSDs. The only notable update is the adoption of Light Peak, branded by Apple as Thunderbolt.
There’s still two new MacBook Pros (a 15-incher and 17-incher) to be revealed, but expect them to be variations of these two. We’ll let you know price when the Apple Store comes back up.
Given how wildly popular the Photo Booth software that ships on every new Mac is amongst trout-lipped, mall-loitering teenagers from sea to shining sea, it’s amazing to me that Apple’s gone four years without bringing Photo Booth to iOS. Recent plist references in iOS 4.3 beta firmware suggest, however, that Apple is soon to remedy that omission as soon as the iPad 2 drops… implying that Apple’s simply been waiting for the whole family of iOS devices to have a front-facing webcam. In addition to Photo Booth, iPhone users can also take advantage of various iPhone photo edit settings formula to enhance their selfies and images. Learn more about editing selfies like TikTok on iPhone.
Now a new patent has been found by Jack Purcher over at Patently Apple, not only confirming that Cupertino’s engineers have been working on bringing Photo Booth to iPhones, but also suggesting that it might be a more radical revision than first expected, taking advantage of the gamut of iOS hardware, including mic, GPS and accelerometer.
Panic, the makers of popular Mac FTP client Transmit, quip about Dell’s outright theft of their official logo: “If only Dell charged the Apple Tax, they could afford to draw their own truck.”
But at least the Dell Tax was enough to cover Photoshopping in one of their monitors!
You won’t find a Mac sitting on the desk of 30 percent of Americans, or an iPhone in the pockets of 30 percent of movie-goers, but in the world of Hollywoodland, Apple products rule the roost, appearing in almost thirty percent of all top movies at the YU.S. box office in 2010.
Apple products popped up in a surprising number of movies last year, including Iron Man 2,Toy Story 3, The Other Guys and the utterly execrable Kick Ass. All together, Apple soundly managed to beat out Chevrolet, Ford and Nike on the list of top product-placing companies.
Heralded as a revolution in the way companies advertised their products in-app, iAds has instead ended up being a bit of a dud, with Apple struggling to fill advertising spaces even as developers clamor to embrace the service.
To rectify the situation, Apple’s just rolled out an uncharacteristic drop in asking price: they’ve cut the minimum required spending for iAds from a heady $1 million to a more reasonable $500,000.
The move is meant to attract smaller business to iAds who couldn’t otherwise afford it. It should be a good thing, although once Apple starts allowing business to spend smaller, I wonder if iAd’s perfect 100% ad renewal rate will hold up.
What does this mean to you as an end user? Not a thing, except maybe you’ll be seeing an influx of new iAds to replace the tired old ones you’ve already seen to death.
“Stay tuned and buckled up.” According to sources speaking to Techcrunch, Apple has far from abandoned their premier Final Cut Pro software after more than a year without updates. It’s coming, and is supposedly slated to be the “biggest overhaul to Final Cut Pro since the original version was created over 10 years ago.” Yowza.
Although details are scant on what will be new, one of Techcrunch’s sources say that Final Cut Pro has been built back up from its marrow, with the changes encompassing everything from low-level architecture to a complete redesign of the user interface (a resdesign which will hopefully go over better than Apple’s redesign of iMovie’s interface a few years back).
The changes are reportedly “dramatic and ambitious,” and will answer all concerns that Apple’s abandoned the pros in their grab for consumers. If Techcrunch is right, Final Cut Pro will be hitting in Spring 2011, possibly to coincide with the National Association of Broadcasters conference on April 9th through 14th.
Fscklog has just posted a photo of what they believe are the specs to the new 13-inch MacBook Pro, which should be due out any day now.
Here are the specs, translated from German
• 2.3Ghz Sandy Bridge Dual-Core Intel Core i5 Processor with a 3MB L3 Cache
• 4GB of DDR3 RAM clocked at 1333MHz
• A 320GB hard drive
• a 13.3-inch diagonal LED backlit display with a 1280×800 pixel resolution.
• Intel HD Graphics 3000 with 384MB of DDR3 RAM.
• An integrated FaceTime-HD camera
• An 8x Superdrive
• Two USB 2 ports, an SD card reader, FireWire 800, a MiniDisplay Port, Ethernet and, most interestingly, Thunderbolt port (this is very possibly the Apple-branded implementation of Light Peak we’ve been hearing about).
Overall? It seems the 13-inch model is not the radical re-imagining we’ve been hearing about for the last few days. It’s not made of Liquid Metal, there’s no SSD and the new MBP has an identical chassis design to the old model. Short of the new Thunderbolt port and the leap to Sandy Bridge, these aren’t markedly different than the last generation of 13-inch MBPs. That said, the 13-incher is the entry-level MBP model. Perhaps Apple has something more radical afoot for the 15- and 17-inch models.
After the jump, a look at the new MacBook Pro’s marketing materials and a close-up view of the Thunderbolt port.
