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Resexcellence Reviews Old-School Apple MacBook Pro 15.4-inch - "Still One Of The Best Laptops You Can Buy"
Mac Sales Predicted To Rebound From 'Astonishingly' Poor Quarter
MWC: Dropbox CEO Criticises Apple's iCloud Lock-in
How to Customize and Maintain Your Mac with Free Maintenance And Configuration App. Onyx
OS X: Adobe Flash Player Web Plug-in Blocked
Macs Staking Out Turf As Standard Business PCs
Webmail war: Gmail vs. Outlook.com vs. Yahoo Mail
Are Microsoft's Free Office Web Apps Good Enough For You?
Evolving on Windows 7 - More User-Friendly Than Mountain Lion?
Mac Died; Google Chromebook To The Rescue - Sort Of
Life In The Cloud With Google's Chromebook Pixel
Logitech Realigns Organization with Strategic Priorities; Expected Incremental Cost Savings of $16 to $18 Million for FY 2014
Resexcellence Reviews Old-School Apple MacBook Pro 15.4-inch - "Still One Of The Best Laptops You Can Buy"
Resexcellence's Joshua Coventry takes a fresh look and the latest MacBook Pro 15.4-inch revision released in June 2012 and quite likely the last update of that model. The mid-2012 revision got Intel Ivy Bridge Core i processors and more powerful discrete graphics from NVIDIAas well as USB 3.0 connectivity,
Coventry says the MacBook Pro without Retina Display is still one of the best laptops you can buy in this price range - the hardware quality and software features far exceeding anything in the Windows PC market. He bought one himself and says it's by far the best computer he's ever owned, and the best Mac he's ever owned. Also, configured with a 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7 processor, it's the most powerful Mac he's ever used, rendering tasks such as video production, photo editing, sound production, illustration, simulations, 3D rendering, and gamingall a breeze.
Coventry has upgraded to a 7200RPM 750GB Western Digital Scorpio Black hard drive, and 16 GB or RAM, and notes that while it isn't removable by the user, the battery can be replaced as it is not glued in but simply held in by a few screws and a connecting cable, although tampering with the battery while your MacBook Pro is under warranty will void the warranty. He rates the Pro's trackpad the best of any laptop available on the market today. He also opted for the Hi-Res Antiglare Display option, and says the brightness, contrast, viewing angle, and color accuracy are all fantastic.
A big advantage of theon-Retina MacBook Pro is that it can be upgraded quite easily, as long as you're confident with a screwdriver and are sensible enough to remove the power source, and ground yourself properly, before doing so. The bottom panel can be removed, and upgrading the hard drive and memory yourself does not void Apple's warranty.
For the full review visit here:
http://goo.gl/YML1M
Mac Sales Predicted To Rebound From 'Astonishingly' Poor Quarter
Appleinsider's Neil Hughes says Mac sales outgrew the overall PC market for 26 consecutive quarters until December, but Apple is expected to see sales improve in the current quarter, with the Mac's sudden collapse in the December quarter described as "astonishing" by analyst Charlie Wolf of Needham & Co. last Friday, Wolf noting that Mac shipments fell below PC shipment growth in all geographic regions and segments in the quarter, and there being "absolutely not one iota of positive news in the Mac shipment numbers," which fell by 22.1 percent year over year.
Apple blamed availability holdups for the new iMac, and Apple has still not yet caught up with demand, but Hughes notes that there are signs of iMac availability improving, with NPD Group reporting last week that January domestic Mac sales were up 31 percent year over year, and Wolf believes Apple could be in a position to surpass the overall PC market again in the current March quarter, which may not even require year over year growth.
However, Wolf concedes that Microsoft's new Windows 8 operating system will present "a major test" to the Mac, particularly in the business market, if users can get past the steep learning curve.
For the full report visit here:
http://goo.gl/yQDPu
MWC: Dropbox CEO Criticises Apple's iCloud Lock-in
Techworld's Sophie Curtis reports that Dropbox CEO Drew Houston has sounded a warning against buying into Cloud services offered by mobile device manufacturers and network operators, claiming that consumers and businesses can easily become locked into proprietary systems imposing arbitrary content restrictions and minimum hardware demands.
Speaking at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Houston said
current examples of proprietary Cloud services that impose bizarre limitations on what users can do include the fact that anyone owning both an Apple iPad and an Android phone can't easily share music and files between the two devices using Apple iCloud online service, contending that you shouldn't have to care about the logo on the back of your phone or computer, and it should just work with everything you have. Like Dropbox does.
Ms. Curtis also notes that Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth at MWC highlighted the need for greater convergence between mobile platforms to enable better interoperability between devices.
For the full report visit here:
http://goo.gl/O8TnH
How to Customize and Maintain Your Mac with Free Maintenance And Configuration App. Onyx
MacTuts+'s Jordan Merrick says:
OnyX is a powerful freeware utility for OS X that provides maintenance and customization options for your Mac. In this screencast, we take a tour of OnyX and many of its options and features as well as showing you how it can clean up your Mac, making it work even better.
You can check it out at:
http://goo.gl/BHzhH
OS X: Adobe Flash Player Web Plug-in Blocked
Apple has updated the Safari web plug-in-blocking mechanism to disable the web plug-in for Adobe Flash Player.
Products Affected:
• Mac OS X 10.6
• OS X Lion
• OS X Mountain Lion
To help protect users from a recent vulnerability, Apple has updated the web plug-in-blocking mechanism to disable older versions of the web plug-in: Adobe Flash Player.
When attempting to view Flash content in Safari, you may see the alert: "Blocked Plug-in"
Selecting it will display this alert:
"Adobe Flash Player" is out of date.
• Click "Download Flash" to have Safari open the Adobe Flash Player installer website.
• Download the latest Adobe Flash Player installer--click the "Download now" button.
• Open the downloaded disk image.
• Open the installer and follow the onscreen instructions.
See this article for details:
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht5655
For more information, visit:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5660
Macs Staking Out Turf As Standard Business PCs
Infoworld's Galen Gruman says that over the past year he's witnessed a sea change in Macs' acceptance in business, with MacBook Airs having became senior execs' preferred status-symbol PCs for the past couple years ago, and research firm Gartner predicting that IT will consider Macs to be as valid as Windows PCs next year, withtools to enable that already coming.
Gruman cites Acronis's enterprises backup tool and its newfound support this week for OS X as an example, with its Time Machine backups, letting IT integrate OS X's native (and free) backups into an enterprisewide workflow, noting that now Macs can be backed up at enterprise scale. Others are mobile management vendors AirWatch and MobileIron having been able to extend their mobile device management (MDM) tools to Macs, enabling IT departments to manage everything from app permissions to encryption and password requirements using the tools they already have for iPhones and other mobile devices, and Mac management plug-ins for Microsoft's System Center PC management server from JAMF and Dell (Quest), as well as multipatform management tools from Centrify, Dell (Kace), LANDesk, and Symantec (Altiris).
For the full report visit here:
http://goo.gl/7G58A
Webmail war: Gmail vs. Outlook.com vs. Yahoo Mail
Computerworld's Serdar Yegulalp has posted an excellent overview and guide to the three top Webmail services, noting that there's little question Web-based email has captured a major portion of the user base, and that the conveniences of Webmail - all your messages in one place, few or no practical limits on storage, access from almost any client device - make it all the more appealing to generations of users for whom client apps like Outlook are clunky relics.
Included are mini-tutorials on:
• How to switch email accounts
• Moving email
• Moving contacts
You can check it out at:
http://goo.gl/yWBu1
Are Microsoft's Free Office Web Apps Good Enough For You?
ZNet's Ed Bott says in the kerfuffle over the pricing and licensing for Office 2013 and Office 365, a lot of people seem to have overlooked one salient fact: over the past few years, Microsoft has steadily improved its free Office Web Apps to the point where they represent a credible threat to ... Microsoft Office.
Bott takes a fresh look at the Office Web Apps, as well as revisiting his Google Drive and Google Docs account, noting that people choose a free online productivity suite for two reasons:
It's free.
It can be used on any PC or Mac (and on many mobile devices) with any modern browser.
For the full report visit here:
http://goo.gl/mj0lJ
Evolving on Windows 7 - More User-Friendly Than Mountain Lion?
Blogger Jeff Soyer says he'd been a confirmed Mac user for many years (partly because the company he worked at for 10+ years used them) and when his Mac 'Book died a couple years ago, he wasnt happy at having to settle for a Windows computer.
He's now back at that company, and they're still Mac-based but he says using one with Mountain Lion has left me singularly unimpressed, noting that Apple has removed much of the customization that was previously possible. And, it's kind of buggy.
Soyer says he has to admit he now prefers Windows 7, and overall he's finding Windows (believe it or not) a bit more user friendly these days
For the full commentary visit here:
http://www.alphecca.com/?p=2054
Mac Died; Google Chromebook To The Rescue - Sort Of
Motley Fool's Tim Beyers says he'd been having trouble with his nearly three-year-old MacBook Pro since the holidays, and last week, the problem escalated from occasional to frequent as his writing days were suddenly overrun with kernel panics.
A visit to his local Apple Store confirmed his fears that he'd need to leave the machine for repair, with the likely fix either a new hard drive, new logic board, or both. Thus a two-year-old Samsung 500 series Chromebook with 2GB of memory and 16GB of storage, given to him at Google's early 2011 developer conference, became his primary tool for getting work done in the interim, and two reasonably productive days later, he deems it fair to say that the Chromebook is a useful machine but a lousy Mac substitute, although comparing it with a full-fledged MacBook Pro was always going to be unfair.
However, he says Google begged comparisons when it introduced the Pixel and priced it as if it were a Mac substitute, even though its dual-core 1.8 GHz processor clocks in much slower than newer Macs.
He concludes that the Chromebook is a decent alternative but not a substitute for a Mac, and he would have been lost if he didn't store most of his work in the Cloud using a combination of Google Drive and Dropbox. He predicts that there will be a day when the Chromebook is every bit as good as the laptops it hopes to displace, but we're not there yet, and it probably won't be for a few years.
For the full report visit here:
http://goo.gl/ylm6j
Life In The Cloud With Google's Chromebook Pixel
The Register's Iain Thomson notes that it's been well over two years years since Google released its first Chromebook, the CR-48, and set off on a quest to convince the world of the benefits of living in the browser. Last week, the company unveiled its latest attempt to seduce the public the luxury touchscreen Chromebook Pixel and gave The Reg a $1,449 LTE-equipped version to try out.
Thompson observes that at that kind of money, Google is taking direct aim at Intel Ultrabooks and Apple's 13-inch MacBook Pro and Air, and notes that after a week of lugging the Pixel around, using it for day-to-day work and trying it out in a variety of locales, he prefers its hardware to an Ultrabook, the MacBook Pro, and in some ways the Air, in terms of design, build-quality, and specifications, calling the Pixel's screen quality "fantastic," and its speaker quality "amazing."
But that's far from the whole story...... Thompson notes that for many of us an Internet connection can be a tenuous thing, and the Pixel is a frustratingly dysfunctional device without one, while for the same price as the Pixel you can get an Apple MacBook or PC Ultrabook with an Internet-independent operating system that gives you many more options, and there are also serious shortfalls in the amount of software that's available for the Pixel, all making it simply too expensive for what it is for, and predicting that at the Pixel's premium price, it'll be a tough sell.
For the full review visit here:
http://goo.gl/hkFwD
Logitech Realigns Organization with Strategic Priorities; Expected Incremental Cost Savings of $16 to $18 Million for FY 2014
Logitech International has announced an organizational alignment to the strategic priorities outlined by newly appointed CEO Bracken P. Darrell last month. These priorities include increasing focus on mobility products, improving profitability in PC-related products and enhancing global operational efficiencies. This alignment to the strategic priorities creates incremental cost savings of approximately $16 to $18 million in operating expenses in Fiscal Year 2014, a result of a workforce reduction. This is in addition to the previously announced $80 million savings in annual operating costs (operating expenses plus costs of goods sold) for Fiscal Year 2014 related to the company's April 2012 restructuring.
"As we align the organization with our strategy to become a faster, more profitable company, we have also created opportunities to become more focused, improve operational effectiveness and even deliver additional cost savings that will contribute to improved profitability," says Bracken P. Darrell, Logitech president and chief executive officer. "These actions support our goals to develop outstanding mobility and PC-related products, streamline our cost structure and achieve faster times to market."
Logitech anticipates recording a pre-tax, cash charge of approximately $12 to $14 million in the fourth quarter of Fiscal Year 2013. The charge is related primarily to personnel reductions, with the Company eliminating approximately 140 positions, or 5 percent of its worldwide non-direct-labor workforce.
Additional information regarding the restructuring charges is provided in Logitech's Current Report on Form 8-K being filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on March 1, 2013 and made available on Logitech's website at:
http://ir.logitech.com
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