Macintosh - page 10

Greatest of all time.
I just got back from visiting a friend in San Luis Obispo, California, and he pointed me towards the Mac Superstore. I’d never heard of the place, and Apple has so thoroughly eradicated all unofficial Mac retailers that I didn’t think there were many left (sadly). But I decided to give the place a close look from the inside. What follows, here and on the jump, is a photo-tour to the coolest Apple store that the company doesn’t own – and maybe ever.

Best Doorstops Ever.
The experience at the MacSuperstore, founded in 1998 by Shane Williams, a graduate of Cal-Poly San Luis Obispo, begins before you even walk in the door. Since the weather is almost always sunny and calm in SLO, Williams and staff use vintage all-in-one Macs to hold the doors open to the faithful. I checked closely, and one door is propped by a Mac Plus while the others are SE/30s. The effect is inviting – and a bit disturbing. I last used an SE/30 in mid-1999, and it seemed pretty far from a doorstop then.

All the most interesting stuff is inside, however, so please read on.

Picture: Malabooboo

The tech press is missing the boat with the MacBook Air.

All the grumbling about the price, the absence of an optical drive, the irreplaceable battery, shows that the technical minded misunderstand the machine.

Of course it’s not practical, it’s a fashion computer.

But it seems the target audience — fashionistas — are taking note. A quick Google shows that fashion blogs are raving about the Air.

Coquette, a blog about ‘digital fashion and style by natalie zee drieu, raves about the Air’s potential as an accessory: “This little thing is ready to tote around in your Balenciaga or Gucci bag,” it says. “I’m so getting one!!!!!”

Judging from the comments on those blogs, lots of their readers are bonkers for it too.

Compared to a $1,800 Prada handbag, the MacBook Air is a steal.

Expect long lines at the NYC Soho and Meatpacking stores.

Via Carl Howe at Blackfriars: The MacBook Air is an ideal product — in the right market

In case you don’t speak Geeky Acronym, the gibberish above means that someone (in this case, Ryan Block of Engadget) has dropped a 64-gigabyte solid-state drive into a MacBook Pro. The incredible drives, which are still extremely expensive compared to conventional hard drives, use flash, not platters for storage, and as a result, have no noticeably moving parts. They’re virtually silent, and they’ve been claimed to up battery life to unheard of levels (I’ve heard 11 hours on a Toshiba subnotebook). Block hasn’t provided a battery life figure yet, but I’m kind of drooling. In two years, virtually all laptops will have moved in this direction…

Via Digg.

Technorati Tags: macbookpro, ssd

Pic: A lab at the school’s library with a sea of new iMacs. At front is the display of a Mac mini running Windows.

To “diversify” its technology, the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University in Dallas is switching to Macs from PCs.

By switching to Macs, the school can now offer students Mac OS X as well as Windows XP — the machines are all dual boot.

Cox joins several schools switching to the Mac, including Wilkes University Wilkes-Barr in PA, and St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia. A few years ago, it was the opposite story. Schools were abandoning the Mac in droves, including long-time, all-Mac schools like Dartmouth.

At Cox, the school has installed about 100 iMacs in labs, and there’s dual-boot Mac minis (OS X and XP) at the head of about 30 classrooms.
“We’re enhancing and diversifying our computer platforms by keeping Windows XP while adding OS X,” said Allen Gwinn, the school’s technical director, in a statement. “Upgrading to Apple platforms is the only way to do this.”

Update: As noted in the comments, I bungled the headline, transposing PCs and Macs. But there’s no strikethrough in heds, so I just corrected it. Thanks for the heads up.

Updated: Ah, John Siracusa. Is anyone else capable of such sublime operating system reviews? His Leopard manifesto (17 action-packed pages) is sublime:

That’s the Downloads folder on the left, and the disk image file on the right. It’s slightly bigger.

If you are not shaking your head, uttering something profane, or taking some deity’s name in vain right about now, congratulations, Apple may have a position for you in their user interface design group.

He’s complimentary where Apple got it right, mean where it got it wrong, and always insightful and funny.

Picture by Manntar

Dave Horrigan, a tech columnist who lives in San Diego, just sent a note from Southern California’s fire-scorched front lines. He writes:

“I’m about 1 mile downwind of one of the fires in San Diego and as such have been watching the news closely. I see images of many people evacuating with their iMacs but I’ve seen no one evacuating with a PC in their arms. Of course its Rancho Santa Fe, but surely there is some rich guy here with a PC he wants to save?”

Can you guys keep a secret? This is the first post I’ve written in more than a month that I created on my Mac. Right at the end of August, I opened my faithful 12″ Powerbook only to be greeted by the unwelcome sound of the Click of Death.

If you’ve never had a hard drive die, you might have never encountered the Click of Death. Count yourself lucky. It’s a sad sound. A heart-breaking sound. The sound of things falling apart. A tap, a skip, a whir and failure. Over and over and on into the future. And so, part way through a major writing project, my computer was beloved Mac and constant companion was rendered utterly unusable. Not immediately equipped to pay for the repair, I had to hold off until this last week to get a new drive.

I have walked in the valley of darkness, oh my brothers, and I am more convinced of the Mac’s superiority than ever. Fitted with a new drive, my little Mac feels dozens of times faster than the year-old ThinkPad I have to use at work. It just feels like being home. To make it more like home, over the course of the weekend, I’ve been restoring my Mac to just how I like it. I have five easy steps for doing it yourself, so click through to learn how.

For years now, conventional wisdom has held that Apple’s halo strategy — using iPod marketshare to pump up Mac shipments — will take off any day now, and the company will leap from 3 percent marketshare to much, much more.

A post at Apple 2.0 suggests that this expected growth has already arrived and might be reaching its limits. For the first half of the 2007 fiscal year, Berstein Research reports, Apple carries nearly 30 percent of the high-end laptop market — the 20 percent of laptop computers sold that fetched the highest prices. This is an increase from 7.8 percent only three years ago. The switch to Intel has obvious made the MacBook and MacBook Pro into runaway hits. When removing business sales from the equation, Apple has almost 50 percent of the high-end laptop market. Which is great, except that it means that Apple’s gotten its boost.

Where’s the new growth going to come from in the computer business?

A guide to what’s new in the Mac OS X Leopard Finder (AppleInsider, pictured)
Man Files Class-Action Lawsuit Over iPhone Bricking (ArsTechnica)
Other Man Claims iPod nano Set His Pants on Fire (NetworkWorld)
Apple Stock Hits $167 a Share — For No Reason (Daring Fireball)
Why I Won’t Buy an iPhone (BusinessWeek)
Apple Classifies Windows a Virus (Flickr)
Leopard Could Add $240 Million in Revenue in Q4 (Fortune)
Anti-Caps Lock Feature in new Apple Keyboards is Hardware-Based (Rentzsch)

It’s like that dream I’m always having. Only it’s come true…

Photo via GadgetLab via Fark via Newlaunches (let the chain grow!)

Macs are quite famous for holding their value and lasting longer than Windows PCs. The resale value of an Apple machine is higher both for its style and its durability. This is especially true for Mac product lines that have no true replacements. For a few years after they were discontinued, Power Mac Cubes consistently fetched higher-than-expected prices on Ebay.

What does that mean in light of this week’s renewed rumors of an amazing thin, light, aluminum and tiny Macbook? Take your 12″ Powerbooks and unload them now. I’m an owner of such a machine (and will be selling it as soon as I replace the hard drive), and the market is great right now — $400-plus for four-year-old Powerbooks. The machines have special cachet, because they were significantly lighter than any current Mac portables. I know a lot of people who have been refusing to upgrade because there just isn’t a machine that meets their needs.

But if the rumors popping up all over 9to5Mac are even close to right — especially if there are new MacBooks announced the day of Leopards release — the market for those glorious Baby Powerbooks is going to deflate as soon as the new machines get announced. There’s still plenty of doubt for the time-being — some think the new machines won’t even have DVD drives. What do fear, uncertainty and doubt lead to? Higher resale prices for the existing and reliable. Gentlemen, start your auctions!

Image via LowEndMac.

In case we had all lost track of the Macintosh with such fascinating news popping in the world of iTunes, the iPhone and the iPod, ThinkSecret emerges to remind us that Leopard, the next major update to Mac OS X is dropping in less than a month, on Oct. 7. The gallery has some more of the gorgeous icons Apple is unleashing for the OS, as well as screenshots of some details that haven’t previously been available.

Hands up, who’s upgrading on day one?

Interesting Apple analysis in the Sunday Times this week from the always-provocative Randall Stross. His thesis: That Apple has an unprecedented opportunity to gain on Windows while Vista is stinking up the joint — and they’re blowing it.

If you’re the owner of a Windows PC who is looking for a replacement computer, the choices are grim. You can step into the world of hurt that is Vista, the latest version of Microsoft Windows that was released in January. Or you can seek out a new machine that still comes loaded with the comparatively ancient Windows XP.

Maybe, you might say, the moment has arrived to take a look at the Mac. You can easily order one online, of course. But if you’d like to take a test-drive before you commit, odds are that you’ll have to look far and wide for a store that sells it. The Mac’s presence in the retail world remains limited, a shame given the rare opportunity for Apple to gain market share that opened up when Vista arrived.

In a lot of ways, this is a golden era to be a Mac owner and for Apple. With 185 fantastic retail stores worldwide, we can just walk in the door and see every product and service for Mac, iPod and iPhone in one place. But on the other hand, if you walk into any computer store in America, you’re way more likely to see HP, Sony, Toshiba, Lenovo and Acer machines on displays than anything from Apple other than the iPod. Mac sales are up right now — considerably so — but Macs are still niche and seem poised to remain there. It’s a terribly tricky problem, though. Part of Apple’s problems in the mid-’90s happened because of the company’s prominent place in mainstream stores — and thoroughly mediocre product and sales methods to match.

Is there an answer here that makes the Mac mainstream? I can’t see it. What say you?

Everyone who joking referred to the keynote Steve Jobs gave in January as the critical moment of the iPhoneWorld conference just got a lot more ammunition, as a large number of Mac-related expected announcements that never surfaced back then just dropped together: Sexy aluminum, thin, iMacs; a new version of iLife; a new version of iWork; and some new features for .Mac. A random August product launch is the new MacWorld.

Many of the rumor-mongers were right on the money about the iMacs. They’re thin as could be, they use the exact keyboard that leaked to the web the other week, and their fronts recall almost exactly the back face of the iPhone. It’s a clever design move, extending the iMac as big brother of the iPod metaphor to a new iMac as big brother to the iPhone. That said, it’s hard to describe these as being a radical leap forward. They’re virtually the same design as the last generation, only thinner, hotter, faster. The desktop market is ripe for disruption.

The additions to iLife are similarly unexciting. As excited as I am that iPhoto now has event-organized cataloging, and the Magic GarageBand feature that can turn music played on a guitar into a trumpet or otherwise. But the new Web Gallery features on .Mac aren’t that different from what came before — they’re just much more appealing and creative than what came before. Definitely not a big enough shift.

iWork has finally been fleshed out into a real office suite, offering Numbers, a spreadsheet program that has been rumored at least since Columbus landed in the Caribbean. It looks very appealing, and I think I’m finally going to invest in it. I love Keynote, and Pages looks improved (hey, Apple realized that people want to write, not just lay out text!).

Apple will bring multitouch technology from the iPhone to the mainstream Mac OS X. That much is a foregone conclusion. The technology is too powerful to restrict to just mobile platforms. The only question becomes what multitouch might look like on a full-size computer compared to on an iPhone.

One initial possibility is shown in a patent filing uncovered yesterday for a backlit trackpad that would light up differently based on how many fingers the user applies to the device. In a lot of ways, this is no more than an enhancement to current MacBook and MB Pro trackpads, which are capable of two-finger scrolling, but by highlighting this functionality, Apple could start to drive adoption of the technology. The more people get used to the idea that they should be ready to deliver a variety of interactions, the more ready they’ll be for a wholesale replacement of the mouse or traditional trackpads.

This is an interesting concept, but I would guess this won’t actually come to market exactly as depicted. Patents usually trail implementation a bit these days, and I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a product based directly on one of these patents ship after the patent approval. Typically, it’s at best a good way to learn about the thinking behind a technology after it ships.

Either way, hope for true multitouch on a laptop is keeping me from upgrading right now. This just sustains my hopes.

Via MacRumors.