I’ve had a half dozen or so longer posts about Apple brewing in my head the past couple of weeks. There is no shortage of controversy surrounding the company right now thanks largely to the hugely popular and hugely unpopular aspects of the iPhone. But Jason Calacanis’ post yesterday entitled “The Case Against Apple-in Five Parts” serves as a great springboard for bringing up a lot of it.
The Backstory
While my story with computers doesn’t go back quite as far as Calacanis’, our stories are pretty similar. He said that 6 years ago he made the switch to Apple products after a 20-year affair with Microsoft. I made the same switch 5 years ago after a roughly 15-year affair with Microsoft.
Regular readers may have heard this already, so forgive me if I’m repeating myself, but in the 1990s I loved Microsoft products and hated Apple stuff. I grew up on DOS, installed Windows For Workgroups because I thought it was cooler than regular Windows 3.1, bought Windows Bob, made my dad take me to the midnight launch of Windows 95, bought Windows 98 the day it came out, actually bought and used Windows ME, and bought Windows XP the day it came out. I could fill that timeline in with many other pro-Microsoft details, but let’s just say I was hooked. → Read More
Years ago, I read an article in 2600 describing a system that would track down your stolen laptop. Presumably it was all open source software, I can’t remember. GadgetTrak, which is a company that can track down your stolen gadgets, including Mac/PC, iPhone, BlackBerry, and WinMo phone, has a fun success story that’ll kill a few minutes. → Read More
Launching in September for the Wii, DS, PC and Mac is a childhood favorite of mine, Waldo. Yes, the striped sweater wearing dope is making his triumphant return to the world in the form of a videogame. The question is: where the hell has he been for the last 21 years? I’d like to buy him a beer. → Read More
No, it’s not ready yet. But it does at least look like the Mac release of Chrome is getting ready for prime time.
Now, let me be clear: I am not testing out that rather bogus “Developer Release” of Chrome that Google announced to placate users last month, I’m testing out the daily builds of Chromium, which you can find for the Mac here. How different are they? Well, in look in and feel, a lot.
Just look at the difference in the start pages. The Developer Release of Chrome for Mac has a ho-hum old-style history overview page. The new builds of Chromium feature the new, sexy layout. This includes thumbnails of pages that you can move around and pin down. And because the build also includes favicons (which the Developer Release only does in certain places), it also includes the ability to switch to “list view.” → Read More
Here’s a quick tip for you Mac users who are going to be downloading Firefox 3.5 today. Give this optimized version, named Shiretoko, a try. It’s only for Intel Macs, but it’s supposed to speed up boot time and whatnot. I don’t know, I use it (along with this icon pack) and, all things being equal, I think it works just swell. So give it a shot! → Read More
Because Mac users need hard drives more than Windows users. Seagate announced some brand spankin’ new external drives today that include the FreeAgent Go Drive for Mac w/ USB, FreeAgent Go Pro for Mac, a 2TB FreeAgent Desk for Mac and the FreeAgent Go Dock+. The dock is actually really cool. → Read More
Seeing as though Snow Leopard is only $29, this just-announced $9.95 update program doesn’t have quite the same impact that it might otherwise have. Still! The deal is that if you buy a Mac on or after June 8, Apple will send you a Snow Leopard DVD when the operating system comes out this fall. → Read More
Well done to Sophos, an anti-virus company (to simplify things a bit). Apparently there’s a new round of malware floating around out there that can infect your Mac. Observe! → Read More
Panic, the maker of shockingly good Mac software, is having itself a nice little sale that you may want to take advantage of. From now until 11:59 PM PDT on May 29 (so, a little over a day) you can buy Transmist, Coda, Candy Bar and Unison for 50 percent off. → Read More
Here’s a random software recommendation for your Friday afternoon enjoyment. It’s Vox, it’s for Mac OS X, and it’s a lightweight music player. No, it’s not going to replace iTunes on your system—there’s no library feature, for one thing—but it’ll play some of the more obscure formats out there. → Read More
This is probably the easiest review I’ve ever had to write. It’s about the Clickfree Traveler, an automated backup solution that works with both Windows and Mac; it’s the size of a credit card, as the video here tries to show! (Presumably Linux folk have all written, in raw machine code, their own backup applications.) Literally, you plug it into the USB port of your computer, a small window pops up with a countdown timer, and then it automatically backs up your home directory—/users/ndeleon/ in my case. Provided there’s enough space on the Traveler for your data, it’s all over in a matter of seconds. It’s pretty darn painless. → Read More
Again with the Plex. I know, I know. But! Today’s news is legitimately interesting: Netflix is now fully functional within Plex, the best damn Mac media player out there. → Read More
Earlier this evening we saw a new ad come out of the Microsoft hive mind showing Lauren, a charming everywoman, purchasing an HP laptop for $699 after finding that the lowest-priced Mac matching her meagre requirements would cost her nearly double. The resulting commercial is effective in these lean times but isn’t it a bit disingenuous? I’ve often spoken of the PC industry’s race to the bottom. A $699 laptop – along with a $200 LCD monitor – would have been unthinkable a few years ago but it is now commonplace. At that price, however, you get a machine that wouldn’t get a second look, spec for spec, a few years ago. These would have been called barebones machines – a little memory, a hard drive, and a processor are all you’d get. But with the advent of high design, it’s easy to put lipstick on that particular pig and make Lauren happy. → Read More
They’ve got a point on the cost to feature ratio of Macs v. Windows machines in this new Microsoft ad. I have to say, these things are getting a lot better over time. And the price difference is the key weak point in the Apple product lineup. Mac fanatics couldn’t care less. But to a recession-beaten regular computer user, this message is right on the money. “I’m just not cool enough to be a Mac person,” the actress says after visiting an Apple store and not finding any laptops in her price range.
See our coverage of other recent Microsoft ads here, here, here. → Read More
So these might not be for everyone, but Iogear announced a 2-port USB 2.0 printer switch and a 4-port USB “Net ShareStation.” The printer switch allows you to plug in one Mac and one PC into a single printer and it automatically detects which one is sending print jobs. The Net ShareStation allows you to hook up four different doodads via USB and share that amongst your fellow co-workers or home inhabitants. If you plug it into your wireless router than it puts everything over the network wirelessly. Did you get that last part? Wirelessly. → Read More
The latest Mac mini is barely a day old and already we are getting the first look inside the updated computer. Apple kept to the original design though which still requires the use of a putty knife and a bit of patience to open her up. It would be nice if Apple adapted a similar easy swap-out design that the new notebooks sport, but whatya going to do. Inside, there isn’t that much different besides the obvious new parts. Click through for a bit of circuit board pr0n. → Read More
Two new Mac Pros today with some pretty serious power configurations and very-serious price tags. There’s a quad-core version that starts at $2499 and an eight-core version that starts at $3299. → Read More
Is it still called “PC gaming” when it’s done on a Mac? I’d ask Ubisoft, which just announced that Prince of Persia and that Shaun White snowboarding game will be available on the Mac in March, but it seems my Internet connection is being censored by The Man right now. Censorship makes the Internet Jesus cry. → Read More
Last month at Macworld, FastMac showed me their upcoming external Blu-ray drives, which I was excited about, and it appears they’ve made their way onto the site. → Read More
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