Applelinks Tech Web Reader - Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Apple Design in the MacBook Air Era
The Most Beautiful Computers of all Time
Macintosh Plus - 22 Years Later
Apple's Growth Engine Is The Mac, Report Says
Fujitsu Rolls Out Fanless 500GB Hard Drive
Fujitsu Shows 500GB Laptop Drive
File Sharing In Leopard
MetaRAM quadruples DDR2 DIMM capacities, launches 8GB DIMMs
Adobe Ships AIR, Flex 3 Open-source Development Tools
MacBook Air Diary: Lovin' the F8 key
John Stewart's iPhone: Product placement or pop culture?
1984 Quote Hidden In Apple Keyboard Update
Judge Greenlights Lawsuit Against Microsoft
The Mac Night Owl: Be Very Careful About Troubleshooting Sites
Apple Design in the MacBook Air Era
Low End Mac's John Muir says:
Macworld San Francisco in January 2006 was an intriguing time. The Intel transition was the talk of the Mac Web - and much of the media beyond. Expectations had risen that we would see the first models of the new platform that very show, despite Apple's earlier promise they would arrive by summer.
Expectations were right. Steve Jobs unveiled with typical panache the first Intel powered desktop and notebook Apple had ever made and dared to call a Mac! He showed off their performance before an eager audience. There was just one strange surprise: the Intel Macs looked eerily similar to their PowerPC predecessors.....
Then, on the second anniversary of the first Intel Macs at Macworld 2008, Steve Jobs unveiled the MacBook Air, causing a storm of interest and debate which clearly carries on today. The Air was clearly a new class of portable for Apple with no direct ancestors at all. Its industrial design made this very clear: It looks quite unlike any other computer.
So much has been written about the MacBook Air - controversies rage about its many tradeoffs and where precisely it fits among its MacBook siblings - so much that I needn't add any more to it. Instead, I'd like to compare the external design of the Air to Apple's other recent changes as I've listed above.
Perhaps we can get a sneak peak of the future?
You can check it out at:
http://lowendmac.com/myturn/0801my/design-in-the-age-of-intel.html
The Most Beautiful Computers of all Time
Wired's Rob Beschizza says:
Some are classy. Some are trashy. But scant few transcend such barriers to become works of art.
[Editor's Note: Four Macs make the cut: Apple MacBook Air, Mac G4 Cube (and NeXT Cube), the G4 iMac, and the 20th Anniversary Mac.....
The latter I take issue with.....]
For the full commentary visit here:
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/02/the-most-beauti.html
Macintosh Plus - 22 Years Later
AppleTell's Adam Fisher-Cox says:
Every couple of years, I take out my old Macintosh Plus to boot it up and play with it. It is, quite frankly, amazing how many things are exactly the same in OS X today as they were in System 6. For instance, I couldn't find an OS X Finder keyboard shortcut that didn't work in System 6, barring of course, those that pertain to technologies no availble in the mid-80s. I just realized that it is amazing that this computer is now 22 years old, and still works......
[Editor's Note: I'll second that. I still have my Mac Plus too, and it still works, and....... System 6 remains my all-time favorite Mac OS version, at least its user interface. Soooooo simple and clean. If there was a System 6 skin for OS X, I'd use it.]
For the full commentary visit here:
http://www.appletell.com/apple/comment/macintosh-plus-22-years-later/
Apple's Growth Engine Is The Mac, Report Says
MarketWatch Rex Crum,
The Mac might just be about to become even more important for Apple Inc.'s future growth plans.
BMO Capital Markets analyst Keith Bachman on Monday cut his price target on Apple's stock to $140 a share from $160, and said in a research note that "Apple's three growth drivers [iPods, iPhones and Macs] has now turned to one," that being the company's line of Macintosh PCs.
For the full report click here.
Fujitsu Rolls Out Fanless 500GB Hard Drive
Computerworld's Brian Fonseca reports:
Fujitsu Ltd. today upgraded its 2.5-in. SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) disk drive line with the addition of the new MHZ2 BT-series offering that offers up to 500GB storage capacity in a three-platter design.
Fujitsu said the new offering will be available in 400GB and 500GB packages and will ship in May. The company's previous 2.5-in. SATA device offered capacities of 160GB, 200GB and 300GB.
For the full report click here.
Fujitsu Shows 500GB Laptop Drive
IDG News Service's Martyn Williams reports:
Laptop computer storage is racing fast towards the 500G-byte level with Fujitsu becoming the third hard-disk drive maker to announce a drive at that capacity.
Fujitsu is accomplishing this capacity by combining three disk platters-- the magnetically-coated disks on which data is stored - each with a 170G-byte capacity inside the drive. Hitachi, the first company to announce a 500G-byte drive, and Samsung Electronics are also using three platter designs.
For the full report visit here:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20080225/tc_pcworld/142787
File Sharing In Leopard
Macworld's Glenn Fleishman says:
If you want to share files with other people (and who doesn't these days?), you can always send the files via e-mail or iChat. But it's far more efficient just to give your collaborators shared access to the files, folders, and volumes on your Mac and let them get the files themselves.
Unfortunately, OS X hasn't always made file sharing easy. Tiger and preceding versions of Mac OS X lacked some file-sharing features - such as the ability to share folders as networked volumes - found even in Mac OS 9; plus the tools you used to configure file sharing weren't always as straightforward as they should have been.....
The good news is that in Mac OS X 10.5, Apple has dramatically improved the tools you use to share all kinds of resources from your Mac across local networks and the Internet. And some of the biggest - and handiest - of these improvements are in the ways Leopard lets you share files, folders, and volumes.
For the full report visit here:
http://www.macworld.com/article/132002/2008/02/mobilemac2503.html
MetaRAM quadruples DDR2 DIMM capacities, launches 8GB DIMMs
Ars Technica's Jon Stokes reports:
Since its launch in January 2006, the only thing that has been publicly known about former AMD CTO Fred Weber's new venture is its name: MetaRAM. Clearly, the stealth-mode company was working on something to do with RAM, but what? As of today, MetaRAM is finally ready to talk about its technology, and it appears to be a pretty solid evolutionary step for the tried-and-true SDRAM DIMM module. In short, MetaRAM's technology enables DIMM capacity increases of two or four times, so that a single DDR2 MetaSDRAM DIMM can hold 4GB or 8GB of memory while still being a drop-in replacement for a normal DIMM.
For the full report click here.
Adobe Ships AIR, Flex 3 Open-source Development Tools
Computerworld's Heather Havenstein reports:
Adobe also released Flex 3, an open-source development tool set aimed at helping developers build RIAs.
AIR is a runtime environment for building RIAs in Adobe Flash, HTML and AJAX. The product includes the Safari WebKit browser engine, SQLite local database functionality, and APIs that support desktop features such as native drag and drop and network awareness.
For the full report click here.
MacBook Air Diary: Lovin' the F8 key
The Apple Core's Jason D. O'Grady says:
Apple's new, low-throw, "chiclet" style keyboard arrived to great controversy. First in the MacBook, then again when it was adopted as the defacto standard USB keyboard for all Macs, replacing the clear lucite and white 109-key keyboard...
I have to admit to being critical of the new Apple keyboard when it came out, but after a little getting used to it's not bad. In fact, I've actually become quite attached to it since they added backlighting to the MacBook Air keyboard.....
For the full commentary visit here:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1332
John Stewart's iPhone: Product placement or pop culture?
The Apple Core's Jason D. O'Grady says:
Last night I was watching the Oscars (go Ratatouille!) frantically adding movies to my Netflix queue when host John Stewart did a bit about his iPhone.
It occurred during a long reel of previous Oscar winners (I think), when the camera cut back to Stewart he joked about how great technology was while he watched Lawrence of Arabia on his iPhone. He even made a joke about how it was better in wide screen.
For the full commentary visit here:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1338
1984 Quote Hidden In Apple Keyboard Update
Wired's Charlie Sorrel reports:
It looks like Apple's programmers might have a little time on their hands after going all-out to finish the iPhone and OS X 10.5 Leopard. First we saw a speech from ex-president Lincoln in an iPod Touch software update, and now there is a quote from George Orwell's 1984 in a keyboard update.
For the full report visit here:
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/02/1984-quote-hidd.html
Judge Greenlights Lawsuit Against Microsoft
The Register's Kelly Fiveash reports:
A US judge has given the go-ahead for consumers to file a class action lawsuit against Microsoft for providing misleading information about Windows XP computers being able to run Vista.
Redmond's "Windows Vista Capable" labels first appeared on computers in April 2006, even though the firm's latest operating system didn't get a general release until January last year.
For the full report visit here:
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2008/02/25/microsoft_vista_capable_lawsuit/
The Mac Night Owl: Be Very Careful About Troubleshooting Sites
Imagine this scene: You set up your new Mac and, like millions of your fellow Mac users, everything works fine, or the problems that you do have are easily solved. Now would you post a message to a troubleshooting site or one of Apple's forums and say everything is just peachy?
For the full commentary visit here:
http://macnightowl.com/2008/02/25/be-very-careful-about-troubleshooting-sites/
Notes: You can also access our RSS feed, available at:
http://www.macnightowl.com/rss
Or our Atom feed at:
http://www.macnightowl.com/atom
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
|
|
|
|
| |