U.S. Mac sales up 39% in Jan. and Feb. - iPod sales Also Up
Year of the Mac, Indeed: Apple Headed for a 2.9 Million Mac Quarter
Not Breaking Up With Windows, But Seeing Other People
The Case For Standing While You Work
Why Run Leopard on Slow G4 Macs?
Researchers Develop A Lithium Battery That Can't Explode
The Apple Patient - 12" PowerBook With 17" Apple Display
Dell Mini 5's (Streak) To Be Headache For The Next iPod touch?
Netbooks Keep It Light



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U.S. Mac sales up 39% in Jan. and Feb. - iPod sales Also Up

Fortune's Philip Elmer-DeWitt says:

In a report to clients issued Monday afternoon, Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster - a long-time Apple booster - found much to cheer about in the NPD Group's U.S. retail sales data for January and February.

"We are buyers of AAPL based on Feb. NPD data," he writes. He points to two trends in particular:
Mac unit sales are up. An average of 39% year over year for the first two months of the March quarter, which according to Munster translates into sales of somewhere between 2.8 and 2.9 million Macs for the full quarter. The Street, he says, is looking for Mac sales to be up only about 22%.

For the full report visit here:
http://bit.ly/czlzzk






Year of the Mac, Indeed: Apple Headed for a 2.9 Million Mac Quarter

Digital Daily's John Paczkowski reports:

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster has declared 2010 the Year of the Mac, and it s hard to disagree when looking over the latest retail sales data from the NPD Group: Mac sales during February were up 43 percent for the month this after a 36 percent spike in sales during January.

For the full report visit here:
http://bit.ly/bEoJG6






Not Breaking Up With Windows, But Seeing Other People

TechRepublic's Jason Hiner says that for many enterprises, 2010 is going to be the year they decide whether or not to jump on board with Windows 7, or stick with Windows XP indefinitely until there s a compelling reason to migrate to something new. As TechRepublic s CIO Jury showed, it s still a 50/50 tossup.

Personally, Jason says he's going through the same thing, albeit, on a much smaller scale, testing lots of different machines and using multiple operating systems - last week, for example, using five different operating systems on eight different computers - but that for a decade, all of his primary computers have run Windows. However, that's about to change with Jason's decision to avoid Windows 7, whenever possible, and rely on Mac and Linux to power his primary systems.

Noting that while from a technological standpoint, Windows 7 isn't too bad, Jason's issues with Windows 7 are mostly bigger concerns with Microsoft such as that it still badly overcharges customers for Windows and should have made Windows 7 a free upgrade for Vista owners; that Windows 7 does very little to innovate on the OS; that Microsoft refuses to change the default installation of Windows for better reliability, and that after so many versions, Windows 7 feels like the Weasley's house in Harry Potter, with stuff bolted on all over the place

To read more, click here.
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/hiner/?p=3917







The Case For Standing While You Work

Tired of sitting around all day? Perhaps it's time to ditch that desk chair suggests Macworld's Lex Friedman, who says he's read one too many articles about how leading an overly-sedentary life can have negative long-term health implications, noting that for years he's spent long days sitting in front of his trusty iMac, now wondering if his professional life could be shortening his actual one, and relating that

"After looking at yet another study with scary statistics ( Sedentary living is responsible for about one-third of deaths due to coronary heart disease, colon cancer, and diabetes ), I made an impulsive decision to convert my workstation to a standing desk a couple months ago."

For the full commentary visit here:
http://www.macworld.com/article/146950/2010/03/standingdesk.html?lsrc=top_1






Why Run Leopard on Slow G4 Macs?

My Low End Mac coleague Simon Royal says that Low End Mac, we try to get the most out of our machines, and that nearly a year-and-a-half ago, he wrote an article about running Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on a 400 MHz Sawtooth Power Mac and recently shared his experience using OS X 10.4 Tiger on a 500 MHz G3 iBook, but suggests it's time to revisit the options for low-end G4 users and observing that depending on your needs and depending on your level of expertise, you will choose either Tiger or Leopard.

Simon notes that the biggest stumbling block to opting for 10.5 - and the reason Leopard has such high hardware requirements - is graphics. OS X 10.5 is a very graphically intense operating system. If you are using a G4 Power Mac, you can add a newer, more powerful AGP graphics card - one that supports Quartz Extreme - to give your machine a smoother ride, but that isn't necessary to get Leopard installed and running -- unfortunately not an option for users of older Mac laptops like my venerable but beloved Pismos with their puny 8 MB of video RAM and RAGE Mobillity 128 GPUs.

So Why would you want to run Leopard on an unsupported G4, sacrificing the speed of Tiger for the higher demands of Leopard?

Well, Tiger is now two major revisions old. It is slowly being dropped by software makers, Firefox being the biggest blow to Tiger users, recently dropping Tiger support from its next version, 3.7, while Leopard opens a whole new world of software (not to mention cool features like Spaces and QuickLook).

For the full commentary visit here:
http://lowendmac.com/ed/royal/10sr/unsupported-leopard.html






Researchers Develop A Lithium Battery That Can't Explode

The Register's Tony Smith reports:

Scientists from Stanford University in the US have worked out how to build a lithium-sulphur battery that doesn't require a lithium metal electrode. That, they say, will make it free from the "serious safety issues" that have been holding the technology back.

For the full report visit here:
http://bit.ly/cAAMyU






The Apple Patient - 12" PowerBook With 17" Apple Display

Low End Mac's John Hatchett's current project is an attempt to bring a 12" PowerBook G4 back to life. The PowerBook's internal display is dead, but there's nothing wrong with the video card, so it can drive an external display, has a DVD burner and an 80 GB hard drive, but currently only 256 MB of RAM so will require a memory transfusion in order to run Leopard.

For the full report visit here:
http://lowendmac.com/ed/hatchett/10jh/the-apple-patient.html






Dell Mini 5's (Streak) To Be Headache For The Next iPod touch?

9To5Mac's Seth Weintraub says that Dell's new Android-based Mini 5 (Streak) details were leaked to Engadget last week and seem to have some of the features desired on future iPod touch devices. Specifically: cameras, a better screen both in size and resolution and 3G data. These look like they could be very popular devices if priced low -- which Dell is known for.

For the full report visit here:
http://www.9to5mac.com/Dell-mini-5-streak-ipod-competitor-4536533






Netbooks Keep It Light

PC Mag's Natalie Shoemaker says:

Tired of schlepping a heavy laptop around? Then take a load off with a netbook.

Whether you commute by bus, train, car, or on foot, lugging a laptop around can get cumbersome Natalie observes, so short of hiring someone else to carry your laptop, consider a netbook - lightweight, inexpensive relative to other laptops, and able to handle day-to-day computing on the go.

The article goes on to profile some of PC Mag's editors' netbook favorites.

You can check it out at:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2361313,00.asp