Well I finally bit the bullet and purchased a MacBook, though with some hesitation. Don't mention the fact that Apple charges outrageous premium pricing for the black model or I will drop into a fetal position and throw a tantrum. But I have to admit the white motif is growing on me, and the design is simply beautiful.

Enjoy the MacBook pR0n. Visit my Flickr gallery for more photos.

Just when you thought your three month old Mac Pro was safe from obsolescence, Apple pulls the rug out from under your workstation. Today the company announced its long awaited dual quad-core system based on Intel's new "Clovertown" Xeon processors. That's four cores on a single die, totalling eight cores, for those of you whom are math challenged. I barely use the full potential my single quad core Mac Pro offers, let alone 8 bloody cores! Still, I can see real world applications for video professionals and science fields.

If you want one be prepared for sticker shock. The "entry level" 8-core model starts at $3,298. Fortunately standard dual-core models based on Intel "Woodcrest" Xeon remains available starting at a reasonable $2,200.

Jump to the link.

Apple.co.uk has inadvertantly listed the upcoming 8–core Xeon Mac Pro. We’ve heard rumors to this product’s impending release, but this is the first confirmation, coming from Apple no less.

Somewhere in the halls of Apple UK, an employee’s ass is being handed to him, along with a pink slip.

An Australian MacBook owner got an unwelcome surprise – his beloved ivory white portable suddenly began emitting a hissing sound, and moments later spontaneously combusted. Leaving his MacBook char-broiled and blackened.

Poor little bastard. The MacBook I mean. View more photos of the deceased here.

Who can forget this charming ad from a red-eyed pothead Ellen Feiss, endorsing Macs, as part of Apple's ill fated "Switch" campaign. I've seen this ad so many times and yet it continues to make me laugh each time. *sigh*

Ah, Sweet memories of advertising gone wrong.

Believe it or not, I don't own a laptop. I generally have little need for a portable, as most of my work in done primarily in front of a workstation (actually two in fact). But on the odd occasion a laptop would be a welcome accessory. So I began researching various PC laptop models on the market today, notably Apple, and came away surprised. Apple is really behind the market. Dell and other PC vendors are offering portables for as low as $599, which include a 15.4" widescreen display, while Apple is charging $1,099 for its consumer portable (MacBook) that only offers a confined 13.3" widescreen. Now, I wouldn't buy a Dell Inspiron or HP Pavilion notebook to save my life...they're junk! But a gulf exists between these two products that leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

Granted, Apple's products have always been premium priced. So this is nothing new. And historically you get much higher quality components in Apple's machines which makes the higher sticker price worth the premium. But in this case it is the weak specs that have me alarmed. If Apple is charging me over a grand for a MacBook, so be it. But at least give me the same 15" widescreen display that I would normally get from a bargain basement PC laptop for crying out loud!

At this point I can't justify spending so much for so little, and intend to hold off for a while before making a purchase. Hopefully Apple will revamp its portable line soon, bringing it to more competitive terms.

Technorati Tags: MacBook, MacBook Pro

Nothing fills me with greater joy than watching one company pull the rug out from under its competitor the moment that adversary is about to step into the spotlight. That's exactly what Apple is about to do to Microsoft on the eve of Vista's launch. Now, keep in mind that Apple, or rather Steve Jobs, has stated publically that its next operating system (OSX Leopard) will ship sometime in the second quarter of next year. Microsoft meanwhile will ship Windows Vista to consumers in January. Well guess what? Apple is going to sucker punch Microsoft by launching OSX Leopard early in January at Macworld San Francisco. How do I know this? A few reasons.

• Steve Jobs loves to surprise the industry with his legendary "One more thing" product announcements. And nothing will give him greater pleasure than trumping Redmond by stealing publicity away from Microsoft with a surprise launch of Leopard.
• Apple is running out of dot releases. The latest system update to OSX Tiger is version 10.4.8. Now unless Apple plans on adding further incremental digits onto its builds, I don't see how they can protract one further dot release another 7-9 months.
  


• Apple has recently been turning up the heat on Mac developers in an attempt to cajole them into getting their apps released for Leopard at the earliest possible date. I've received two emails from Apple's Developer Connection program over the last couple weeks that boasted the benefits of supporting Leopard, and encouraging me to learn more about the new OS. This coincides with recent preview builds of Leopard to developers. Coincidence? Maybe.
  

Technorati Tags: Apple, Leopard, OSX

Apple keeps finding more ways to drive me into bankruptcy. First they nickel and dime me with repeated assualts from iPod rollouts. Then they introduce the Mac Pro. Now comes a beefed up MacBook Pro running Intel's latest mobile processor; Core 2 Duo. This release seems to be watered down as upgrades come; aside from a new processor under the hood, nothing significant has changed over the previous models. Even pricing remains the same.

My biggest concern is the much maligned heat issue that some users complain to be so hot, the laptop can literally be used as a portable grill top. If these machines run cooler and more reliably than its predecessor, then I might bite the bullet. As it is now I don't own a Mac portable at all, in no small part to issues I keep reading about. We'll see

Check out the new MacBook Pros here.

Technorati Tags: Intel, MacBook, MacBook Pro, Core 2 Duo

Apple has begun emailing .Mac subscribers (myself included) announcing a soon to be released makeover that will transform the tired .Mac mail interface, as we know it, into a Web 2.0 clone of OSX Mail (based on AJAX of course). I'm not sure a desktop UI is well suited as an embedded interface, but we shall soon find out. Considering I access my .Mac account through Mail as an IMAP account it really makes little difference to me. But hey, you do it your way...I'll do it mine.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mail, .Mac

*Movie announcer voice*
"In a world...where one web browser looks and works just like any other...a small company with big ideas challenges an industry with a browser unlike any before."

Ok, with that dramatic opening out of the way I'd like to introduce you to a product that I am crazy about...OmniWeb. Not excited by web browsers, you say? This browser may have you singing a different tune. OmniWeb has a few advantages over its contemporaries. Like its blazing speed, for starters. OmniWeb 5.5 actually renders web pages much faster than either Apple's own Safari browser, or Mozilla derivatives like Camino and Firefox. Even more so on Intel Macs.

But what really appeals to me is this product is geared towards power users whereas the aforementioned browsers are designed solely for mainstream usage. For example, when visiting any web site, OmniWeb offers a Preferences feature that enables you to tweak and customize any personal settings related to that site such as cookie caching, pop-up blocking, scripting options, etc. This makes OmniWeb the perfect tool for web designers. It has proven to be a handy tool for me on many occasions.

Another feature I love is the sidebar tab viewer that replaces the venerable tabbed browser interface we are all accustomed to. Instead of a row of anonymous looking tabs that appear at the top of your browser window, OmniWeb displays tiny thumbnail images or snapshots of the web page you visit and displays them in order of retrieval. You can easily move these thumbnails around, placing visited sites in any order you choose.

Granted these aren't world changing features. But they are done is such a way that is both innovative and useful to the end user. I encourage you to experience OmniWeb for yourself. It's free to use unlicensed, and $29.95 for a fully supported license.

Technorati Tags: OmniWeb, OSX, Safari

iTunes 7 is with little doubt the best "new" application Apple has released in quite some time. But as early adopters (like yours truly) soon discovered, this release is a roach motel of bugs and software glitches. Some of which can be downright critical. One issue in particular struck a blow below the belt to any iPod user; after installing iTunes 7, podcasts can no longer be played back on your iPod. Any attempt to play recently downloaded podcast in your playlists results in crashing the iPod. The only workaround to this problem is to pre-play the track within iTunes on your Mac or PC. Then and only then will the audio file successfully playback without failure. Imagine having to do that with every audio file in a podcast playlist that contains nearly 50 feeds? Yeah, lots of fun that is.

Another issue I experienced deals with iTunes best new feature: Coverflow. Coverflow, for those of you that don't know, is a new way to view and interact with your music library; displaying a horizontal animated side-scrolling CD cover interface that works much like a Roldex. With this visual interface, one can navigate through their music library in much the same metaphor as a bookshelf filled with Vinyl records. After using this feature for a few weeks now I am completely hooked! I often find myself thumbing through music I haven't played in a long time or nearly forgotten about. Best of all, iTunes will grab album art for any albums you've burned off of CD. Well, most albums anyway. Coverflow is ingenious!

Unfortunately, as iTunes 7 was clearly a release that was rushed out the door, Coverflow doesn't work very well. It's slow to navigate, and more often than not CD album art fails to load in system cache without reading from disk. Scroll quickly from left to right, or vice versa, and the only music you'll hear is the sound of your hard drive crunching away as it fights like hell to keep up with Coverflow's demands. Sigh.

Thankfully Apple seems to have addressed most of these issues with the release of iTunes 7.0.1, available as of today. Coverflow is still a bit sluggish at times, but at least in a more tolerable state than before. So far I can report no problems.

Download iTunes 7.0.1 from within System Update (Mac) or click here (Windows)

Apple unveils new Intel Core 2 Duo (Conroe) based iMacs, including a new 24" widescreen whopper that retails for $1,999. In addition, prices have been slashed across the product line, and the entry level model can now be had for a mere $999. Not a bad deal.

Learn more.

Over the Labor Day weekend I and a fellow Mac fanboy decided to pay a visit to our nearest Mecca to all things Apple...the Apple Store located at Keystone, in Indianapolis. The store was oddly vacant when we first arrived at around 10:00 AM on Monday, but a couple hours later we returned after some shopping and a bite to eat. The store had suddenly become packed with customers during our absence. It was a madhouse!

My friend (actually a client of mine) purchased a Mac Pro with 23" Cinema Display, which is an upgrade to his existing G5 iMac. I think he was jealous of my Mac Pro with 20" Cinema and thought he would upstage me by getting a larger display. Curse him!

I will say this about the staff at this Apple store; they are absolutely well trained and on the stick in customer relations.

View my photos on Flickr.

Some spy photos taken from the floor of the Moscone Center, where workers are setting up for next weeks World Wide Developers Conference, are quickly circulating around the web. The image reveals a banner depicting a 64bit processor icon. This could be further evidence that Apple will announce the much anticipated Intel-based professional workstation at the event. Not that any further verification is needed, as we know almost for certain the Mac Pro (the official name for Apple's PowerMac successor) will be unveiled. The reference to 64bit could also have something to do with OSX 10.5, codenamed leopard. We shall soon see.

Apple has quietly added three new TV spots to its current nationwide ad campaign called "Get a Mac". As before the ads show the same two characters who symbolically represent a PC and Mac, played by actors John Hodgman and Justin Long, respectively. These particular ads I find much more humorous than the previous roll, especially the Out of the Box sketch. Funny stuff. See the ads here.

Ever since Apple ported OSX to the Intel x86 architecture, bootleg copies of the PC-compatible OS have flowed through peer 2 peer networks like a pandemic virus. In fact, an entire community of PC "Mac users" was born almost overnight, devoted to the cause of running OSX on mainstream PC hardware.

Being the curious lad that I am, I have longed to experience first hand how OSX 10.4 Tiger performs on generic PC hardware. All in the name of research of course. As I'm sure you have already figured out, I'm quite a Mac fan. However I still remain largely a PC user. Much as I love Apple and Macintosh platform as a whole, I still have a parallel affinity for the PC side of the computing market. Windows XP, despite its numerous flaws, is a viable and fairly reliable platform that I use daily, right alongside my Mac. It's not politically correct to endorse Windows or Microsoft, but then again I've never been politically correct.

(Behold...the ancient Dell Dimension 8100...in all its...uh, glory?)

Apple is offering a special thirty-day money back guarantee on its popular Mac Mini system, allowing anyone to "test drive" a Mac...worry free. If you don't like the Mini, you can return it at the end of the 30 day trial period for a full refund. How about that?

This is another smart move by Apple. As cheap as the Mini is, there are still those who fear the unknown. Many PC users I speak with that are Mac curious always voice the same concern..."What if I don't like it?" This should resolve one more hurdle. Of course, once the new Intel-Macs start arriving, the entire Mac vs. Windows argument will be gone forever, as those systems will be able to dual boot both operating systems.

There were several minor injuries and one person was taken to a hospital with a leg injury, fire Battalion Chief Steve Wood said during a 1 p.m. news conference. In all, 17 people were treated, the majority for heat- or diabetic-related problems, he said. Thousands of Henrico County residents and/or taxpayers stood in a half-mile-long line as dawn broke while others waited in cars parked nearby or milled about not far from the entrance to RIR. One official estimate put the crowd at 5,500. Other observers estimated more than twice that. Many had come prepared with books, snacks, umbrellas and chairs. The first car arrived at 1:30 a.m. By 6:30 vehicles were backed up on Laburnum Avenue about a half mile to Carolina Avenue.

A few years ago Apple struck a rather large deal with the Henrico County school district in Virginia to provide iBooks to all Middle-school students. The district decided to sell off 1,500 of these aging iBooks at a blowout price of just $50 per unit. The people you see in the photo were waiting in line to buy them as soon at the gates opened. The line was more than a half mile long!

By the way...is that Dale Coffing in the foreground?

"At its Worldwide Developer Conference today, Apple® announced plans to deliver models of its Macintosh® computers using Intel® microprocessors by this time next year, and to transition all of its Macs to using Intel microprocessors by the end of 2007. Apple previewed a version of its critically acclaimed operating system, Mac OS® X Tiger, running on an Intel-based Mac® to the over 3,800 developers attending CEO Steve Jobs’ keynote address. Apple also announced the availability of a Developer Transition Kit, consisting of an Intel-based Mac development system along with preview versions of Apple’s software, which will allow developers to prepare versions of their applications which will run on both PowerPC and Intel-based Macs."

So there you have it...the rumors were true. Can't wait to see how this story unfolds.

This rumor seems to come up before every "Stevenote" within recent memory, so take it with a grain of salt. However, C|Net is reporting thar Apple is planning to make the transition to x86-based processors within the next few years. C|NET also reports the Steveinator will officially announce this tomorrow...

"I have no less than 5 sources saying an Apple Tablet announcement is due soon. Or something, as some of these press people (Apple diehards at that), who normally cared not about Tablets, and thought it was all just Microsoft vaporware, are suddenly so interested in the Tablet PC concept, and asking tons of questions. Pretty easy to read those tea leaves, so somethings up."

Apple and rumors go hand in hand, but this one actually has legs to stand on since the company recently patended a concept device descibed as a tablet computing device. So it's clear Apple really does have something up its sleeve, though we have no way of know what that is.

Apple has been granted a patent for something the company vaguely describes as an "electronic device". Nothing beyond that is outlined, but the device is compared to the HP Tablet PC, the illustrations clearly depict a tablet-like device. Now..the big question that remains is; what is this thing? Is it simply a Tablet PC clone running OSX, or something more.

Amazon has blown Apple's cover by prematurely listing one of the new upcoming Dual processor PowerMac G5 models. According to the listed specs, this particular model will feature Dual 2.7Ghz processors, 512MB RAM, 250GB Hard drive, 16x Dual Layer SuperDrive (CD/DVD+RW), and of course..everyone's favorite kitty OS...Tiger!

Think Secret has the scoop (once again) on Apple's upcoming product line refresh due to be announced soon.

According to sources the PowerMac G5 line will come in three new dual-core PowerPC 970MP processor configurations, available in 2.0, 2.3, and 2.7GHZ respectively. Each will feature 512MB L2 cache (per processor), 512MB PC3200 DDR SDRAM, running ATI Radeon 9600 or 9650 video cards. Yummy!

A new iMac G5 will offer three new configs with 1.9, 2.0GHZ featuring 512MB DDR SDRAM, and 160GB Serial ATA Hard Drives (250 on the high-end model). Both the mid-range and high-end models will offer SuperDrives while the low-end model comes with just a Combo drive.

The eMac will also get updated as well with two new G4 models speed bumped to 1.25GHz to 1.42GHz

According to AppleInsider, Best Buy is now carrying Mac minis at several retail outlets, and is expected to carry the product nationwide. This is a good move by Apple. The more retail venues that offer the Mac mini, the more likely Apple can grow its share of the market. Hopefully they can regain lost share and return to their 5% glory days.

Daren Smith over at NeoWin has posted a rather interesting, if disturbing, picture about Apple's latest line Cinema displays. I had been lusting after the 20" model...until I read this.