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Hands-on: The 17-in. MacBook Pro gets the Core 2 Duo treatment
SHOOTOUT:Two MacBook Pros - Core Duo versus Core 2 Duo
Measuring the iPod effect
Studios Push Anti-piracy Rules On Apple
Universal Music may seek royalty deal with iPod
Apple closes in on $100, almost doubling in share price since summer
Windows vs. Linux vs. OS X
Queen's U. offers multimedia files on iTunes
Vote: TIME’s Gadget of the year
10 Classic Features to ‘Bring Back’ to OS X
Juicier Apple iPod By 2012
Tabblo A Blow To iPhoto
The Death of Tape is much exaggerated
eWEEK: Apple Mega-Patch Fixes 22 Flaws
The Mac Night Owl: Is the Press Biased Against Apple?
eWEEK: Inside the Mind of a Hacker
PC Mag: Holiday Robot-Buying Guide
Hands-on: The 17-in. MacBook Pro gets the Core 2 Duo treatment
Computerworld's Ken Mingis reports:
It has been said that buyers should generally avoid the first year of a new model car, Version 1.0 of just about any application and most Rev. A computers -- especially Rev. A computers.
Well, if you held off buying the first Intel-based versions of Apple Computer Inc.'s MacBook Pro laptops, you can safely venture forth to the nearest computer store and take one home. I base that on my hands-on experience with Apple's latest updated consumer MacBook lineup, the recently revamped 15-in. MacBook Pro and -- now, finally -- the 17-in. variation of Apple's professional laptop line. (This particular model was also chosen for Computerworld's 2006 Cool Stuff gift guide.)
To paraphrase Victor Kiam, the late Remington CEO, I liked the latest 17-in. MacBook Pro so much that I bought my own. And I'd like to note that it is the first time I've bought an Apple laptop that I didn't have to immediately upgrade with more RAM, a faster hard drive or some other extra. Out of the box, the 17-in. model comes completely stocked. About the only thing you can add is extra RAM (for 3GB max) or a different hard drive.
For the full review click here.
SHOOTOUT:Two MacBook Pros - Core Duo versus Core 2 Duo
Bare Feats' Rob-ART Morgan reports:
We have a 15" MacBook Pro 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo in the lab. Though we expect a 17" MacBook Pro 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo to arrive soon, we went ahead and tested this one against our 17" MacBook Pro 2.16GHz Core Duo....
The MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo's advantage over the Core Duo version ranged from 9% to 60% depending on what app we ran. The faster core clock speed should provide an 8% advantage, so everything beyond that is "gravy." Most surprising were the significant gains with Aperture 1.5 and Photoshop CS2.
For the full report visit here:
http://www.barefeats.com/mbcd6.html#mem
Measuring the iPod effect
CNET News.com's Michael Kanellos says:
According to popular consensus, the much beloved iPod has boosted Apple Computer's Mac sales and may ultimately help the company get into phones.
But five years of PC sales data paint a far more complicated picture than conventional wisdom would have it.
Did the arrival and popularity of the iPod coincide with a reversal of an ominous slide in sales of personal computers at Apple? Yes. But sales at many other PC makers grew as well. And some, like Acer, which doesn't even have a digital music player, gained market share at a much quicker pace than Apple.
In fact, industry experts say other factors, such as lower prices and new technology, may have as much to do with the slow reversal of the Mac's fortunes as the iPod...
For the full commentary visit here:
http://news.com.com/2100-1041_3-6138711.html?part=rss&tag=2547-1_3-0-20&subj=news
Studios Push Anti-piracy Rules On Apple
FT.com's Matthew Garrahan and Jonathan Birchall report:
Apple Computer is coming under pressure from some of Hollywood's biggest movie studios to change the operating environment of its popular iTunes platform, amid growing concern about digital piracy.
The studios - Universal, 20th Century Fox, Paramount and Warner Bros - are in talks with Apple about making their films available for digital download on iTunes.
After months of discussion, a sticking point has emerged over the studios' demand that Apple limit the number of devices that can use a film downloaded from iTunes.
For the full report visit here:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/6c6aa286-7f08-11db-b193-0000779e2340.html
Universal Music may seek royalty deal with iPod
Reuters reports:
Universal Music Group Chief Executive Doug Morris said on Tuesday he may try to fashion an iPod royalty fee with Apple Computer Inc. in the next round of negotiations in early 2007.
Universal, the world's largest music company, owned by French media giant Vivendi, was the first major record label to strike an agreement with Microsoft Corp. to receive a fee for every Zune digital media player sold.
For the full report visit here:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061128/wr_nm/media_summit_universalmusic_ipod_dc
Apple closes in on $100, almost doubling in share price since summer
bloggingstocks' Tobias Buckell reports:
Apple Computer, Inc. has had an incredible run over the last several months. This has been a trend that has been strong since early August, when it started moving from the $50s to the low $90s today. Is Apple poised to have doubled it's price within two quarters if it passes the $100 mark? It looks likely if Apple has a strong winter retail season.
For the full report click here.
Windows vs. Linux vs. OS X
cio.com's Meridith Levinson reports:
John Halamka has a penchant for experiments with new technologies. In 2004, the now 44-year-old CIO of the Harvard Medical School and CareGroup, which runs the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, who is also a practicing emergency room physician, was one of the first people to have an RFID chip containing a link to his medical records implanted in his body (it's near his right triceps.)...
But as a health-care administrator, he's not solely interested in testing the cutting-edge, Orwellian technologies that make headlines. The PCs inside the hospital have to work too. So when Halamka's laptop running Windows XP interrupted several presentations with inopportune antivirus and application updates, he decided his next big initiative would be to determine which desktop operating system - Windows XP, Apple's OS X or Linux—is the most secure, most reliable and easiest to use in a corporate environment.
For three months, Halamka ditched his Windows laptop. He replaced it first with a MacBook running OS X. Then he spent a month using a Lenovo ThinkPad X41 running a dual-boot configuration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation and Red Hat Fedora Core. Finally, he took up a Dell D420 subnotebook running Microsoft's Windows XP. After evaluating all three to determine which worked best for him, he plans to begin testing his preferred setup with users, most of whose desktops currently run Windows.
For the full report visit here:
http://www.cio.com/advice_opinion/infrastructure/operating_systems/halamka_os_review_1.html
Queen's U. offers multimedia files on iTunes
The Canadian Press reports:
Prospective Queen's University students and nostalgic alumni can now sample life on the Kingston, Ont., campus without actually travelling there.
On Monday, the school launched Queen's iTunes U, an initiative that offers free downloadable multimedia files from the school via the iTunes music store.
iTunes U, hosted by Apple, is already employed by some American universities, including Stanford, Duke and Berkeley. Queen's is the first Canadian university to jump on the trend.
For the full report click here.
You can check it out at:
http://www.queensu.ca/itunesu
Vote: TIME’s Gadget of the year
The Apple Core's Jason D. O'Grady says:
Among eight selected products, TIME magazine nominated the MacBook Pro and Nike + iPod Sport Kit as the 2006 Gadget of the Year.
Voting is still open.....
More details at:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=341
10 Classic Features to ‘Bring Back’ to OS X
The Apple Blog says:
Classic Icon When Apple created Mac OS X, they didn’t build on the creaky foundation of the Classic Mac operating system. So when OS X was first released, there were a number of features that long-term Mac users considered missing. Over the course of four major upgrades, Apple added a number of those features to OS X and trumpeted their return: Spring-Loaded Folders, Labels, Desktop Printers, USB Printer Sharing, Software Base Station (Internet Sharing). However, there are still a number of features from Mac OS 9, 8 and even System 7 and 6 that deserve to be resurrected for OS X. Here are my Top 10 (in no particular order):
1. WindowShade
2. Trash Features: Put Away, Total Size Equals
3. Map any application or file to any F-key
4. Ejecting one partition of a disk
5. Internet Helper preferences
6. Tabbed folders
7. Appearance themes
8. Print Finder window
9. Put URL of downloaded files in Get Info’s Comments field
10. Flash menubar on alert when sound is muted
[Editor's note: Agreed on all counts. I particularly miss Windowshading being built into the OS. Apple should license WindowShade X from Insanity Software. CM]
Full discussion at:
http://theappleblog.com/2006/11/27/10-classic-features-to-bring-back-to-os-x/
Juicier Apple iPod By 2012
WebProNews's Autumn Davis says:
It was only five years ago that consumers had not even heard of the Apple iPod MP3 player; now you would be hard-pressed to find someone who does not own the device. At a recent conference, one Google executive said that iPod would expand their reach in the media field over the next decade.
The world's top-selling MP3 player, Apple iPod, already holds the monopoly on the market, having already sold over 70 million devices since it's release five years ago....
If the iPod has only been on the market for five years and has already changed the face of media so vastly, imagine what it will be capable of in ten years.
Google's Vice President of European Operations, Nikesh Arora, recently spoke at the FT World Communications Conference and told attendees that iPod will have almost unlimited storage potential for music and video in the near future.
For the full report visit here:
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/topnews/wpn-60-20061128JuicierAppleiPodBy2012.html
Tabblo A Blow To iPhoto
InformationWeek's Thomas Claburn reports:
Content-creation applications continue to move online, a migration that threatens to topple the dominant computing platforms from Apple and Microsoft, not to mention Adobe.
Borrowing one of the most appealing features of Apple's desktop photo management and printing application, iPhoto, Internet photo startup Tabblo on Tuesday released its own browser-based book editor that offers the ability to collaboratively assemble and print photo books online....
It's a trend that analyst Rob Enderle says "is particularly scary for Apple because it's a hardware company. It's one of the difficulties you face with a vertically integrated market model."
When applications live online, hardware hardly matters. To some extent, the same can be said about operating systems.
For the full commentary visit here:
http://www.informationweek.com/internet/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=196513801
The Death of Tape is much exaggerated
The Register's Bryan Betts reports:
Disk-based backup has become hugely popular in the last couple of years, to the extent that some suppliers have started talking about the "death of tape".
That's not going to happen though, for a host of reasons - tape cartridges are still cheaper for a start, even though high capacity SATA drives have slashed the cost per GB of disk storage. They are more portable too, which is important when you want to store backups off-site to keep them safe from fire or flood.
But increasingly tape is moving to become the medium of choice only for long-term archiving, and its place in the day to day business of recovering files or even whole servers is being taken over by disk.
For the full report visit here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/28/storage_briefing_tape/
eWEEK: Apple Mega-Patch Fixes 22 Flaws
"Apple Computer has shipped a monster security update to correct a total of 22 vulnerabilities in its Mac OS X operating system.
The Cupertino, Calif, company's patch batch includes a fix for a critical Wi-Fi flaw affecting eMac, iBook, iMac, PowerBook G3, PowerBook G4 and Power Mac G4 systems."
To read more, go to:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2064969,00.asp
The Mac Night Owl: Is the Press Biased Against Apple?
It1s easy to be lazy in the news business, and hard to be fair. Consider how tech writers treated Apple over the years; well, most of them at any rate. Apple was 3beleaguered,2 only had a tiny percentage of the PC market, and couldn1t possibly survive. When the name Microsoft came up, you were told repeatedly how over 90% of the world1s desktops used Windows. You couldn1t forget any of these facts, because the same words and phrases would be trotted out time and time again.
Here's the URL for today's commentary:
http://www.macnightowl.com/2006/11/29/is-the-press-biased-against-apple/
Notes: You can also access our RSS newsletter feed, available at:
http://www.macnightowl.com/rss
Or our Atom newsletter feed at:
http://www.macnightowl.com/atom
eWEEK: Inside the Mind of a Hacker
"It may sound contradictory, but the hacker behind the Month of Kernel Bugs, or MOKB, project actually said he believes in responsible disclosure. Throughout November, the man known as LMH has been releasing daily exploits for unpatched kernel-level flaws in operating systems-including Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris and FreeBSD. In an interview with Senior Editor Ryan Naraine, LMH explains the motivation for the project, weighs in on vulnerability disclosure ethics and rips software vendors that downplay security flaws."
To read more, go to:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2064648,00.asp
PC Mag: Holiday Robot-Buying Guide
"Welcome to my first annual Consumer Robot Buying Guide! We're living in the golden age of robotics, which means the choices are...Wait. I can't do it. Not without setting the record straight.
We're supposed to be living in the golden age of robotics and for some sectors-medicine, industrial automation, warfare-we are. Consumer robotics is another matter. That part of the market has stalled, and I don't know what it will take to get it going again."
To read more, go to:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,2064904,00.asp
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