Cult of Mac

Steve Jobs has just come on stage with his “one more thing”… and as predicted, it’s a new MacBook Air, in both 11.6 and 13.3-inch versions.

Steve explains that with the new MacBook Air, they wanted to leverage the advantages of the iPad to a real laptop, including instant on, great battery life, amazing standby time, solid state storage, no movie parts and thin and light.

That’s the design philosophy that led to the new MacBook Air. It’s a completely unibody design, 0.11 inches thick at its thinnest, and 0.68 inches at its thickest. Overall, it’s 90% smaller and lighter, with completely silent operation.

The 13.3-incher is running 1440×900 pixels, which makes it a higher pixel density than even the 15-inch MacBook Pro. It features a 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo Processor, a max of 2GB of RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics, a full size multitouch trackpad, one USB port, an SD card slot and a FaceTime camera.

It’s the battery life that astounds, though. It’s a holy crap moment: the new 13.3-inch MacBook Air will supposedly have a 30 day standby time and seven hours of wireless web usage. This thing is basically all battery inside.

The 11.6-inch is mostly the same specs, but has a woeful 1.4Ghz Core 2 Duo Processor, a smaller 1366×768 resolution and only 5 hours on wireless web… presumably because they had to shrink the battery packs.

So what’ll these cost? Well, the 11.6-inch starts at $999 for 64GB SSD space, while a bump to $1199 will double your storage. The 13.3-inch starts at $1299 for a 128GB hard drive, and jumps to $1599 for a 256GB hard drive.

Honestly? This is pretty underwhelming: even accounting for the major performance bumps you see when you go SSD, that’s a wimpy computer for the price. We’re not sure we’re sold. What do you think?

Steve Jobs has just announced the release date for OS X 10.7. It’ll be coming in summer of 2011.

But what about that new App Store? Do developers really have to wait almost a year for it? Nope. The Mac App Store will be released within Snow Leopard within the next ninety days, with App Submissions in November from developers.

That’s amazing. I wasn’t expecting the Mac App Store this generation of OS X, but here it is, coming down the pipe. I only wonder how worth using it’ll be without OS X 10.7 specific new features to make the most of apps within OS X.

With OS X 10.7 Lion, Apple’s also bringing a new element to Macs: the Launchpad.

In launchpad, all of your apps neatly arranged in rows. Thinks stacks for app icons, but instead of flying out of your dock, they are neatly arranged — complete with pages — on your desktop. You can even create folders, just like in iOS.

Essentially, Launchpad is an iOS interface layer for OS X for apps. Just another way in which OS X is becoming more iOS-like.

Apple is bringing the App Store to Macs, and while it won’t be the same as the iOS App Store, it’ll leverage some of their benefits.

It makes sense: there have been 7 billion downloads from the App Store, and Apple wants that money on the Mac side of things. According to Steve, it’ll be ““the best place to discover apps. It won’t be the only place, but be the best place.”

Apps will automatically install on the Mac app store, as well as updated, and will be licensed across all of your personal Macs.

Sounds like great news for app developers, and there’ll be the same 70/30 split. Let’s hope the approval process isn’t as absurd as it is on iOS.

Introducing what Steve humorously termed as the “entree for today,” Apple has just unveiled OS X 10.7, Lion, which they are, as rumored, describing as iOS meets OS X.

What are we getting? Multitouch gestures, an App Store, App Home Screens, full screen apps, auto save and apps that resume when launched… just like in iOS, although how much like in iOS remains to be seen.

First up, multitouch.

FaceTime’s been a huge success on the iPhone and iPod Touch. You knew it was coming to the Mac, and guess what? Now it has.

Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller demonstrated the new functionality, calling between an iPhone 4 and a Mac. When Steve rotates his iPhone, it rotates on Phil’s computer as well. It even does fullscreen.

Wonder how long you’ll have to wait? Barely any time at all: Apple will be releasing FaceTime for Mac in beta form today.

[image via Gizmodo]

iLife ’11 has made its showing, and it’s plenty impressive between the substantial improvements to iPhoto, iMovie and Garageband. But when it’ll be available?

Well, now. If you buy a new Mac today, it’ll be free, as always. Got an existing Mac? It’ll cost $49.

Expect to see our reviews as soon as we can get our grubby hands on it.

The final piece of the iLife ’11 puzzle? GarageBand ’11, which according to Steve, features some great new features to help fix timing in your music, some more guitar amps and effects, piano and guitar lessons built-in and an in-program “How Did I Play?” feature.

The next program in the iLife ’11 suite that Apple will be talking about today is iMovie ’11.

What’s new? According to Steve, iMovie ’11 has all new audio editing for mere mortals who don’t want to invest in Final Cut Pro, as well as one step effects, a people finder, news and sports themes and the ability to create movie trailers.

Steve Jobs has just taken things back from Tim Cook, and now he’s announcing the first new product of the Back to Mac event. As predicted, it’s iLife ’11.

“I’d like to talk about iLife. It’s widely regarded as the best suite of digital lifestyle apps in the world. You can’t do this on any other computer. We improve it every year or two, coming out with new version.”

First up, he details the changes to iPhoto, which is gaining vastly expanded fullscreen support, as well as gobs of Facebook enhancements, easier emailing functionality and some new slideshows. There’s more though… and it only gets more impressive as the presentation goes on.

Now Tim Cook is talking a bit about the vibrant development side of things when it comes to the Mac.

“Now, with the share rising and the units rising much faster than the industry, we have a very vibrant dev community. We have 600k registered Mac devs. They’re growing at 30k per month,” he says.

Cook calls out game developers specifically, an area OS X has always been weak in, largely due to bad driver support.

“We have new devs like Valve. They’re bringing titles simultaneously to the Mac and PC. Like Half Life. This is great for the Mac, and a great shot in the arm for gaming on Macs.”

Even Microsoft is making money developing for the Mac. AutoCAD’s also coming back. OS X isn’t going anywhere.

As is his wont, and despite his appearance at an earnings call earlier this week, Apple is starting off the Back to Mac event with some earnings, this time putting the Mac business in context.

Last year, the Mac side of Apple’s empire account for $22 billion, or 33% of their revenue. So Mac is still big business for Apple, despite iOS’ huge success.

“To put this in some context, the mac company, if it were standalone… and we have no plans to do that… would be #110 on the Fortune 500.”

Apple is making three times what they did on OS X five years ago. They have 50 million users world wide. One in five PCs sold at retail is over 20%, and last quarter, the Mac grew two and a half fold.

That’s a lot of Macs sold. OS X might be second tier to iOS right now, but it’s still huge business.

With his usual fanfare, Steve Jobs has just strutted onto the stage at Apple’s own Cupertino headquarters for today’s Back to the Mac event.

Steve’s looking confident, and he has every reason to be with $50 billion in the bank. The big question is, what will Apple be announcing today to add to the corporate coffers? iLife ’11 and OS X 10.7 are definites, as is a new MacBook Air… but could we also see a Verizon iPhone, refreshed MacBooks and maybe the slam dunk of a totally new product that Apple has somehow managed to keep completely secret by the end of the next hour and a half?

Place your bets in the comments, but best do it quick: Steve’s about to open his mouth, and that’s when the bets begin to close, one by one.

[image via Engadget]

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.

It’s either a dream or nightmare job: Microsoft taps you to come up with a campaign for the 2011 edition of Microsoft Office for Mac.

How do you make it cool? Avoid ridicule?

Director Dennis Liu took that challenge. The resulting teaser for the documentary series called “id3a01ogy” definitely answers the first question but may not be able to sidestep the latter.

Tweetie for Mac is still my go-to Twitter client on OS X… but man, is it getting long in the tooth. In fact, short of mere habit, I don’t know why I stick with it. It’s painfully behind the times when it comes to the features of more modern and well developed Twitter clients, it doesn’t handle stock Twitter functionality like retweets right… and the long promised updated, Tweetie 2, is still nowhere to be seen, despite Twitter itself acquiring Tweetie’s mobile versions. Is Tweetie for Mac vaporware?

For a little while, it certainly seemed so, as no lesser person than Twitter founder Evan Williams himself said that Twitter was not “actively investing” in Tweetie for Mac at this time.

That was pretty astonishing news… particularly to MacHeist director John Casanta, who says he’s been in contact with Tweetie dev Loren Brichter. Brichter was quick to allay fears: Tweetie 2 for Mac is still being worked upon, albeit less actively due to Twitter’s acquisition of their mobile products.

Great news… but when is Tweetie 2 coming out? I’m not really sure I can hold out much longer.

[via TUAW]

Okay, it’s not coming in a few weeks like it was originally rumored, but if you’re a long time fanatic for Sid Meier’s Civilization series, good news: we now have official confirmation that Civilization V is coming to the Mac in time for Christmas.

The port is being handled by one of the biggest names in OS X game ports, Aspyr Media, who also handled porting Civilization IV and its expansions to the Mac. Hopefully that means Civilization V will also be be available through Steam for Mac, just like its predecessor… and also like its predecessor, we hope that means Civilization V will be a Steam Play game, entitling the owner of the PC version to download and play the Mac version for free, and vice versa.

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.

In just a few hours, Apple will announce a new version of OS X, and will almost certainly unveil new MacBook Airs and new versions of iLife/iWork. But we’re wondering if they won’t reveal one more thing: a social media network with the goal of creating millions of home-based Apple Genii at its core.

We’ve seen it in PC versus Mac sales, now a new report claims businesses are opting to buy more Macs than PCs. A quarter of all computers added in the enterprise in 2011 will be Macs, according to the Enterprise Desktop Alliance. Additionally, by next year, 70 percent of businesses will have Macs at the workplace.

“Much of the growth in Macs will happen in organizations that already have Macs installed,” the organization announced in a report. IT managers point to Macs being less expensive to manage, easier to configure and requiring less training and troubleshooting than Windows-based systems.

In just two and a half hours, we can all expect Steve Jobs to strut on stage and orgiastically unburden himself of the many new secret products and developments kept a lid upon in Cupertino for the past few months… but thanks to some too-eager web monkey’s blunder over on the official Apple support forums, we have semi-official confirmation of several new products that we now know to expect later today.

Apparently, the official Apple forums have already been setup with new sections dedicated to iMovie ’11, iPhoto ’11 and GarageBand ’11… all of which are applications to be found in the rumored iLife ’11 software suite that is expected to be announced today.

There’s more juicy gossip than that though: the Polish geeks who found the new product sections also found one for the new MacBook Air, as well as a “Reserved 2010” section, which could be just about anything. Does Steve have a surprise announcement up his sleeve, or will that Reserved 2010 sub-forum turn into an official section for Mac OS X 10.7 or even the CDMA iPhone?

If you mostly play around with Macs, you’ve probably never heard of Cool Master: the company usually dedicates itself to the task of making the sorts of outrageous, glowing computer cases favored by the sort of mouth breathing PC uber-nerds who list their Counterstrike stats on their curriculum vitaes.

It’s interesting, then, to see Cool Master release a product that can be used by Apple fans, even if it is as bog standard a gadget as an external battery pack.

Called the Choiix Power Fort 5.5 Whr, this battery pack is about the same size as an iPhone and has a single charge port on the bottom that will allow it to juice up any gadget under the sun capable of sucking down electricity through the USB standard.

For Apple-only households, this means you can juice your iPod Touch or iPhone up for an additional eight hours. iPods can expect another 48 hours of on-the-road battery life. Even the iPad should get a few extra hours from the Choiix, and Cool Master says that the 5.5Whr can be recharged up to 300 times while retaining 85% of its total capacity.

Is it worth buying? If you’re looking to recharge a variety of devices, it might be a good deal, but it’s hard to tell, given how cagey Cool Master is being about the price.

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There’s plenty of Twitter clients on the App Store, from Twitter’s official software to power apps like TweetDeck, but watch this peaceful and somnolent video for the somewhat regrettably named Super Twario and you’ll have discovered one of the most pleasant Twitter clients around.

iBooks is plenty impressive, but despite Apple’s own leap into the realm of e-books, Amazon is going strong with the Kindle platform. They’ve managed to price the Kindle affordably enough at this point that few who only want an e-reader are likely to spend another few hundred on an iPad, and they’ve successfully managed to leverage their real strength against iBooks time and time again: if you buy a book through Amazon, you will not only be able to read it on every gadget out there, whether you have a Kindle, an Android smartphone, or a Mac… but thanks to their Whispersync technology, you’ll even be able to keep your bookmarks and annotations synced across every platform forever.

It’s nice to see Amazon fighting so ably against the competition of iBooks to their empire, and even nicer to see a new update to their Kindle for Mac software come down the pipeline which adds improved Whispersync functionality, which will allow you to keep your notes and highlighted passages synced across all your devices. There’s also a refreshed interface which looks much more Mac-like than previously.

If you buy Kindle over iBooks — and there’s absolutely no shame in that — go grab the latest update now.

The conventional hard disk drive may be going the way of the floppy disk, a retirement accelerated by Apple’s increasing use of flash memory in such popular devices as the iPad. Hard drive maker Western Digital could see shipments for netbooks and inexpensive laptops fall by 10 to 20 percent, the company CEO told reporters Tuesday.

CEO John Coyne told analysts investors should take a longer view about his industry in words meant to reassure a nervous Wall Street. “What I would say to investors is to look at the long-term demand for storage, the fact is the most appropriate solution for mass volume storage is hard drives and to look at the long-term progress the industry has made over the last 10 years,” he said in a call.