Mac - page 86

I want to like MobileMe.  It’s the Apple-sanctioned slice of cloud computing, integrated with the Mac and iOS operating systems.  The setup is simple, the price is reasonable, and despite the unprofessional name and lack of phone support, when all is humming along things just work.

Except MobileMe doesn’t keep working.  It stops syncing.  It loses data.  And Apple provides little or no advance warning of potential problems, nor easy ways to fix issues that occur.  Apple TV may have moved on to a professional product stage with the latest iteration, but from a business perspective MobileMe is still a “hobby” for Apple.

Apple’s new 11-inch MacBook Air is astonishing. It’s unbelievable. It’s the most exciting consumer PC that’s come out for years. It’s a netbook, but it’s not a PoS. It’s blazing fast. It’s unbelievably light and thin. It’s beautifully made. Really beautifully made.

It has an older CPU and skimpy RAM, but it is NOT underpowered. For users like me, who aren’t editing Hollywood movies, it’s more than adequate. Heck, it’s a huge leap forward. Like Jobs said at the launch, this is the future of notebooks. Extremely thin and light, yet capable of running dozens of applications without bogging down. There are compromises, of course, but the most important things — portability, durability and functionality — are very much in place.

Last year, I bought a 13-inch MacBook Pro, which I loved. But in comparison to the 11-inch Air, it looks like a bloated old relic. It’s positively primitive: a porky throwback to a previous computing era.

I know what you’re thinking, “Cult of Mac. This guy’s a zealot. He’ll buy anything Steve Jobs tells him too.” I admit, I’m a fan. But the Air is important. It’s different. It’s right up there with the iPad and the iPhone. This is a breakthrough product.

Cult of Mac members and fans of Bloom County, a long lost friend has returned.  Straight from the labs of the RetroMacCast and brainchild of RMC co-host John, the Banana Junior 9000 Fully Portable Personal Computer has been reborn!  It Computes, Sorts, Prints, Draws, Figures, Doodles, Slices, Dices, Whistles, Whimpers, Dances, Prances… and most important of all… It Turns ON!

Holy Mackerel this thing is fast! 46 tabs in Safari and 21 in Chrome; 18 open applications, including hogs like Safari, Mail and iTunes.

No spinning beachballs!

There’s no slowdown whatsoever. It’s amazing. This thing flies. It’s the $999 11-inch MacBook with only 2GBytes of RAM — the machine people said would be underpowered. But it’s not. Not by a long shot.

It’s the fastest laptop I’ve used in years, and Apple is going to sell boatloads of them. It’s very exciting.

I’ve got to go on a scout trip with my son. Full review on Monday, and more pictures after the jump.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ifrXlloH9s

Cult of Mac was asked by CNBC’s Street Signs to contribute our thoughts on the current market debate of whether it’s wiser to invest in Gold or Apple. Even though we don’t masquerade as financial advisors, the debate in the short-term seems fairly straightforward to us, and here are a few of the major points:

Steve Jobs is reportedly having a one-on-one meeting with President Obama.

Jobs is meeting the president just before Obama speaks at the Palo Alto home of Google executive Marissa Mayer’s this evening.

The meeting with Steve Jobs is not on the president’s official calendar, but a White House official confirmed the meeting will occur.

Jobs is no stranger to meeting presidents. In June, he hung out with Russian president Dimitry Medvedev (who is an iPad user), and has had President Clinton over for dinner. Jobs and his wife are Democratic party contributors; and Obama is a famous Mac user.

Obama’s speech at Marissa’s Mayer’s house is at 7PM PST/10PM EST.

Silicon Alley Insider: President Obama Meeting With Steve Jobs This Afternoon

Steve Jobs has a penchant for ruthlessly killing off old technology. Throughout his career, Jobs has been celebrated for ditching dying technologies in favor of new: the command line (first Mac), the Floppy Disk (first iMac), SCSI drives, serial ports, dial-up modems, and FireWire on hard drives and iPods.

With Apple’s event yesterday Steve Jobs, went on a killing spree. Here’s eight technologies he gave the kiss of death to:

I hate to crow, I really do, but we nailed it on the MacBook Air rumors.

Just look at our mockup above, which we published on Monday, and the real deal. It’s pretty uncanny, especially as the designer, Don Draper, mocked it up based on a description from a source. Of course, Apple is very consistent with its design language, which makes things easier. We got the color of the screen bezel wrong and forgot to include the headphone jack. But still — just look at it.

We got most of the specs right too.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6M1r-xsFw0Q

We’ve been playing around with the new beta release of FaceTime, and while it’s slim on features, we’re fairly pleased with the app considering it’s still in the beta phase. So far FaceTime for Mac is a simple replication of FaceTime from iOS, but it’s simplicity is what I like about it so far.

This is the software reinstall disk for the new MacBook Air. Cool eh?

Here’s the details of what’s on it, according to Apple’s knowledgebase article:

Professional post-production photo effects software complete with hundreds of detailed, fine-grained controls to create virtually unlimited artistic styles for under a hundred bucks?

No way, you say.

Way.

PostworkShop is software from Xycod, a small Hungarian company that has built creative artists — of whom a number use Macs, apparently — a tool that so exceeds its cost in value, it’s nearly as breathtaking as some of the work it can be used to create.

Just as they did for September’s iPod Event, Apple will be live streaming Steve Jobs’ ‘Back To Mac’ announcements later today, starting at 10:00AM PDT. You can find the official link here.

Like last time, the live stream is only open to people using Mac products. Here are the compatible devices:

• OSX 10.6 Mac running Safari
• iPhone running a minimum of iOS 3.0
• iPod touch running a minimum of iOS 3.0
• iPad

Don’t worry if you’re stuck on an office PC: we’ll be live blogging the event, as usual.

This marks the second time in recent years that Apple has live streamed their own event, supposedly to test their new data centers, although Apple did experiment with live streaming earlier in the decade… only for the whole site to keel over under the strain of just 50,000 viewers.

This Wednesday, Apple holds a media event in Cupertino entitled “Back To The Mac.” As soon as they sent out the invitations, the internet started frothing with rumors. What will OS X 10.7 look like? Will there be a new MacBook Air? Will my iPad finally make coffee? The list of apple rumors is tremendous. Vegas odds makers are even taking bets on what Apple will unveil during the announcement.

I think the New York Times bits blog described the frantic Apple rumor mongering best:

When Apple makes an announcement about a coming press event it can sometimes feel like the National Hurricane Center has identified a new hurricane.

There is usually rampant speculation surrounding the importance and impact of the event: Will it be a Category 5 announcement with a revolutionary device, or a less-important Category 1, with basic updates to operating systems or gadgets?

Keeping with this tradition, the blogosphere was in full swing on Friday as technology experts and Apple fans tried to guess what Apple’s chief executive will announce next Wednesday when the company hosts “a sneak peek of the next major version of Mac OS X,” and other new products.

And this isn’t a new phenomenon. This happens Every. Single. Time.

I wanted to know why. How can a computer company create such a frenzied pitch about a routine product announcement? And what can other companies learn from the Apple method? After looking at Apple product launch and product development strategies, I have come up with a few deductions. Here are some of the secrets that make Apple fans incredibly loyal and the press keenly interested in Mac product updates.

During his anti-Google diatribe this afternoon, Steve Jobs said the Google-versus-Apple, open-versus-closed debate is a smokescreen. It makes no sense to say Apple is closed while Google is open when the real issue is fragmentation versus integration.

Jobs said Google’s Android platform is fragmented. There are too many different versions of the operating system and too many devices, making it a headache for consumers and developers. Apple’s iOS devices, on the other hand, aren’t fragmented — they are “vertically integrated.” Apple closely integrates software and hardware, and they “just work” together.

But what does he mean exactly by “vertical integration?” And why is it so important?

I wrote about this at length in my book, Inside Steve’s Brain. In fact, I think it’s critical to understanding why Jobs and Apple are killing it in consumer electronics right now.

So here’s chapter eight of Inside Steve’s Brain — “Total Control: The Whole Widget” — in its entirety.

Continue reading

Check out the great graphic below from designer Spencer Caldwell. It shows the screen sizes of Apple’s full lineup of machines — and where the rumored 11-inch MacBook Air will slot in.

Look how neatly it slots into the lineup. It’s pretty stunning. It’s almost like there was a hole just begging to be filled with a 11.6-inch machine.

On Wednesday, Steve Jobs will likely introduce a redesigned 13.3-inch MacBook Air with a bigger battery and more ports — yet thinner and lighter — than the current model, CultofMac.com has independently confirmed.

Apple will probably also add a second, smaller 11.6-inch “Netbook” version, according to our well-placed source.

Our information independently corroborates recent reports by AppleInsider, and Engadget, which ran a picture of a purported prototype over the weekend.

The new model is also apparently much snappier than its underpowered predecessor. “It boots so fast, it’s unbelievable,” our source says. “It’s amazing how fast it boots up.”

There may be a new smaller, cheaper MacBook Air in the air, according to rumor reports:

• 11.6-inch screen
• Significantly cheaper than current $1,499 starting price
• Unibody case with carbon fiber — may weigh less than 2.7lbs
• Intel Core 2 Duo CPU and Nvidia MCP89 graphics (but may have first AMD CPU used in a Mac)
• Solid State hard drive

MacRumors: Apple to Introduce 11.6-Inch MacBook Air With ‘SSD Card’ Integrated Storage Next Week?

AppleInsider: Sources: Apple to unveil revamped 11.6-inch MacBook Air next week

CNET: Source: Smaller MacBook Air on Apple’s agenda

Hot on the heels of our interview with John Sculley, Bloomberg has posted its 50-minute Game Changers documentary about Steve Jobs, which also features Sculley. I’m in it too, making dumb comments about Afghan goat farmers. It airs tonight on TV at 9pm and 11pm ET.

UPDATE: Lots of reports that the video isn’t working in Safari. Try Firefox of Chrome.

Comment of the Week comes from @Ron regarding our interview with John Sculley about Steve Jobs. Going against the common wisdom that ex-CEO John Sculley was bad for Apple, @Ron has a different take on Sculley, who I feel has been unfairly demonized for his decade-long stint at Apple’s helm.

Great article. I worked with John occasionally in his last years at Apple. I didn’t realize at the time how burnt out he was, but it make sense now in retrospect. He was shy and seemed withdrawn.

John was a great CEO for the first few years. It’s easy to forget that Steve left Apple in complete disarray – it’s safe to say that he hadn’t developed his management or relationships skills at that point. Sculley held things together and got the place to run as a business. It’s only later when his lack of product vision caught up with him.

Here’s a full transcript of my interview with John Sculley on the subject of Steve Jobs.

It’s long but worth reading because there are some awesome insights into how Jobs does things.

It’s also one of the frankest CEO interviews you’ll ever read. Sculley talks openly about Jobs and Apple. He also admits it was a mistake to hire him to run the company (and that he knows little about computers). It’s rare for anyone, never mind a big-time CEO, to make such a frank assessment of their career in public.

Update: Here’s an audio version of the entire interview made by reader Rick Mansfield using OS X’s text-to-speech system. It’s a bit robotic (Rick used the “Alex” voice, which he says is “more than tolerable to listen to”), but you might enjoy it while commuting or at the gym. The audio is 52 minutes long and it’s a 45MB download. It’s in .m4a format, which will play on any iPod/iPhone, etc. Download it here (Option-Click the link or right-click and choose “Save Linked File…”).

It seems a little nutty, but Steve Jobs deemed that the team developing the original Macintosh couldn’t exceed more than 100 people. Here’s why.

What did Steve Jobs do when Sony founder Akio Morito do gave him one of the first Sony Walkmans off the production line?

It’s commonly believed that Apple wouldn’t have nearly gone out of business if it had only licensed the Mac operting system to other computer makers, like Microsoft did. But John Sculley explains why that was impossible:

With the invention of the Macintosh in 1984, Steve Jobs commercialized modern graphical computing. But he oversaw another invention from that era that was just as brilliant but no one mentions these days.

There’s a great scene at the end of Bridge on the River Kwai when Alec Guinness’ character assess his career in the British Army and admits it’s been a disappointment. Ex-Apple CEO John Sculley takes a similar look at his stint at the top of Apple, and says the company made a big mistake when it hired him as CEO. It’s the most surprisingly frank admission I’ve ever heard anyone make about their career.

Here’s what he said: