Did it strike you as kind of odd that Apple would announce new Macs one week before the Macworld Expo? The more I think about it, the more it has me wondering. What is Apple thinking releasing the most powerful Mac and most powerful Xserve ever a week before the Expo?

The last Expo I attended seemed to be dominated by iPods, and last year's Expo was dominated by the iPhone. Even with the big hoopla about the Intel transition, the Mac seems to have taken a back seat at the Macworld Expo.

One possibility is that Apple has something so new and so different that they want to get the new Macs out of the way in advance...

That's one possibility, that Apple is going to embrace digital video and make the DVR another component in the digital hub, allowing users to record programs, port them to their computers and iPods, and who knows what else....

That's a possibility - a very real one - but I think the reason Apple unveiled the new Mac Pro and Xserve on Tuesday is so they won't steal the thunder from other new Macintosh computers.

Apple yesterday announced significant updates to their Mac Pro and Xserve lines featuring Intel's "Harpertown" processor–but what's in a name?

Intel's quad-core Xeon 5400-series "Harpertown" processors run at up to 3.2GHz and are based on the new 45-nm Intel Core microarchitecture. The new chips are known for high performance and energy efficiency.

Last month, after a couple of eggnogs at the office, I drenched my keyboard in a cup of coffee. Kind readers suggested running it through the dishwasher. Of course, putting keyboards in dishwashers is the kind of thing you read on the internet all the time, but never believe it actually works.

So, skeptical that it would work, I tried it myself.I'm happy to report that running a filthy, coffee-stained keyboard through the dishwasher works great. The keyboard is spotless, and it works perfectly.

As Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster walked the floors of the 2008 Consumer Electronics show he, like many other attendees, found himself thinking about Apple and Steve Jobs.

"While Apple was not at the show," he writes today in a report to clients, "the company's impact is felt at CES.".....

As Munster puts it:

"We expect Apple's Macworld announcements (1/15) to set the bar for CES '09 — in other words, we see Apple as effectively one year ahead of its competition."

If you're like me, there's no month left at the end of your money. Of course, if you're like me then you're also nine and a half months pregnant.

Since all I can do is sit around and wait (and do a cute waddle towards the bathroom), I decided to see what's new and what's free in Mac software.

Guess what? I see a problem on the horizon. It's not that there are no free applications and utilities for the Mac. There's plenty. But relative to the number of software titles that we have to pay for, it seems that some free software is going commercial.

David Pogue, New York Times technology columnist and CBS news correspondent, just posted an entry on his blog letting us know that a reader's brand new MacBook shipped with a keyboard sans the Num Lock key and the numeric keypad (the tiny digits on some keys towards the left side of the keyboard that allow you to enter those numbers if Num Lock is switched on).

So quiet was this change that even support personnel that man the AppleCare telephone support lines were befuddled when Mr. Pogue contacted them. They had received no information about Apple planning to put this change into effect.

Apple rarely lets any product sit still for long, so when something in Apple's lineup goes untouched for a while, it prompts speculation about Apple's commitment to it. Consider Xserve. I do, and sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who does. Apple's Xserve went Intel with the rest of the Mac line, but instead of keeping pace with x86 rack server competitors and keeping up with Intel's latest silicon like its Mac client kin, Xserve hung back. It's been a two socket, four-core server in an eight-core world. Ever since the Intel transition, Apple's been quiet on the marketing front for Xserve, too. It looked like Apple might have relegated its server to the back burner, but that didn't jibe with the proud noise that Apple has made over OS X Server Leopard, its first true UNIX server OS. A shiny new OS on server hardware that had lost pace with the market? Perhaps Apple was quietly thinking what I've been quietly advising curious buyers to do: Use Mac Pro as a server instead. An eight-core Mac Pro makes a nice home for OS X Leopard Server.

Most of our readers did not follow the recent released in the GPU world. So we decided to bring some information about the 3 new graphic cards available with the new Mac Pro:

Leading up to it's release, Leopard (Mac OS X, 10.5) was not seen as a huge upgrade like some of the previous releases, but it did contain some cool new features. While Apple touted over 300 new features, upgrades like Path Bar and the New Airport Menu are hardly features to be crowing about. While many have upgraded smooth and seamlessly, some have downgraded to 10.4 or have stuck with the issues, hoping Apple will release an update to ease their woes. So why should anybody upgrade to the new system? Good question!

Many of the people that I know who upgraded have had little to no problems with Leopard. The rest however, have suffered nightmare after nightmare with this new system. I thought I got off scot-free after I installed and everything seemed to be working, then I got into it and I have not been happy since....

....It really seems they are making it more PC centric to try and woo the ignorant Windows users who have ignored and slandered Apple for years. I say screw them, let them figure out the OS by themselves, it's really not that hard, millions of Mac users have done it before them, there is no reason Apple should cater to them now.

Based on conversations with Best Buy executives at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, UBS analysts said the retail giant plans to expand its Mac sales to 500 stores in the coming year. Best Buy currently sells Macs in about 270 stores and is a leading seller of iPods in all 900 of its stores, according to UBS.

NBC has formed a coalition of companies including AT&T, Microsoft, Philips and SanDisk who will co-operate on the development of DRM technologies such as fingerprinting to prevent the swapping of copyright material.

According to the Financial Times, NBC invited Apple to discuss measures for preventing the copying of content to its various media players, notably iPods, an invitation that the FT says Apple rejected.

I have been using Windows now for nearly 20 years and PCs for over 25. This October my Dell refused to come out of standby mode, which forces me to reboot every single time I leave the building with my laptop. After all those years of blue screens, hanging on large PowerPoint presentations, hanging on network connections, waiting for the laptop to come up when I press the On button, I finally gave up. I ordered a Mac.

I would say half of Alfresco now have Macs. Matt Asay must own Apple shares as he has been the key sales person for all those Macs. The sales organization in the US all have Macs and a lot of the developers are now transitioning to Macs. A lot of our customers are also using Macs. When you look at the pain of transitioning to Vista versus just leaving Microsoft behind, it becomes a much easier decision.

I must say the transition hasn't been too difficult. The first thing you notice is how much faster the Mac is for doing all sorts of things. Coming out of sleep is so instantaneous that it seems like it was on all the time. The user interface takes a little getting use to, but it doesn't look as bad as moving to Vista. Transferring files is much faster....

SWsoft has issued the sort of anticipated beta release of a hypervisor-style server virtualization product - Parallels Server.

We say sort of anticipated because it's not at all clear how SWsoft's latest play will be received by the market. To date, the company has focused on selling server virtualization software (Virtuozzo) that relied on so-called containers where a customer can run many virtual systems on top of a single copy of an operating system. Now, SWsoft hopes to play in the more mainstream hypervisor-based part of the virtualization market already packed full of options from companies such as VMware, Citrix (XenSource) and Virtual Iron. (Microsoft will soon ship a hypervisor-based product as well.)

SWsoft - which plans to change its name to Parallels - has tried to separate itself from competitors with the beta version of Parallels Server by emphasizing support for systems running Mac OS X and the ability to pick from a pair of hypervisor models.

USB 3.0, the upcoming version of the universal add-on standard re-engineered for the HD era, made a small appearance at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). It wasn't demonstrated in operation, but we did get to see what the new connectors look like.

Music downloads in the UK will be cheaper within six months

Apple has announced that it will cut the price it charges for music downloads in the UK from its iTunes music store within the next six months.

The European Commission has ended its antitrust investigation into Apple after the computing giant agreed to cut the price UK consumers pay to download music for their iPods.

Apple said it would cut UK prices to bring them into line with the rest of Europe. But it warned record labels:

Apple currently must pay some record labels more to distribute their music in the UK than it pays them to distribute the same music elsewhere in Europe. Apple will reconsider its continuing relationship in the UK with any record label that does not lower its wholesale prices in the UK to the pan-European level within six months.

The news this morning that the European Commission has dropped its unfair pricing case against Apple raises the question about how the company got into this mess in the first place.

The issue stems from a basic discrepancy: British customers have been paying 79 pence per song on iTunes (about $1.63 in today's currency market) while the rest of Europe was paying .99 euros — roughly 20% less.

That would seem to be the logical conclusion, given reports (first broken by the Financial Times on Dec. 27) that Apple has agreed to let 20th Century Fox include a Fairplay-compliant copy of its movies on its DVDs. The idea is that people who buy the DVDs would be able to rip them to iTunes, without having to monkey with often-illegal third party tools. Evidently, if this image posted at macrumors.com is legit, this will indeed be among Apple's announcements at Macworld next week (Read more on this at Wired's Epicenter blog, here).

The fact is, you don't need all of the services that Windows starts automatically when it boots. Disabling the non-essential services frees up memory and processor cycles for more important tasks. The trick is knowing which of Windows' automatic services you can do without: disabling the wrong service can render your system unusable. If you're careful, you can figure out which automatically enabled services your PC can do without.

Things would be so much simpler if I could just list which services to disable, but each Windows configuration is unique, so there's no way to predict which ones are required on your system. That's why I rely on sites such as Charles Sparks' BlackViper.com.

Next Article: At Last! - Adobe Unveils Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac [UPDATED with more info]

Previous Article: iStopMotion workshop for teachers at ZEUM

	Print this page is sponsored by www.MyMacStore.com For all your iPod, iPhone and Mac Gear