Though the mood is probably going to be on the negative side on today’s antenna-centric event.
Archive of posts filed under the apple category.
Finland not in the two first waves of iPad rollout
Sad but true, but picking one up in Germany in June is a credible proposition.
iPad, the first reviews
Apple’s wonderslate is just about to hit the streets. Jason Kottke has collected the first reviews. Most of which are almost gushingly positive.
No stopping the fruit company
The Fifth Avenue Apple Store is now the fifth most photographed building in New York.
Sudden steaminess on the horizon
According to RockPaperShotgun Valve Corporation’s Steam content delivery system is about to arrive on OS X. Or on the iPhone/Touch/iPad. Or it might be just a red herring in the ongoing alternate reality game that centers on Portal 2.
Considering the rather poor state of game offerings in local stores, even with a vastly shorter list of Steamed games with Mac versions available than on the windows box, this is a very welcome piece of news indeed.
And the arrival of Portal and/or Half-life 2 at the same time would not be raising too many eyebrows either.
Prediction for tomorrow's launch
For Apple’s tablet, that is:
Yes (duh), yes, yes ($899 for the lower-spec device), yes, yes, yes (Xcode 4), yes (the model’s been a rousing success), yes (at least a subset, with non-scaled resolution), yes, no, yes, yes, yes (itunes all the way), yes, yes, no (USB only), no (no haptics yet), yes, no (though eventually yes), yes (this is a killer platform for flash games), no (not yet, but definitely by the time next school year kicks off), yes (none of this i* stuff any longer), no, no, no, no, no, no, yes (yay Verizon), yes (especially if the screen has pressure-sensitive elements), no, yes (see previous), no, no, no, yes, no.
Scored tomorrow after the event.
Battery troubles
Meh, Lynch the Macbook Pro has undergone a drastic decrease in battery power lately.
Charging is slow, but consumption quick, even when sleeping.
This is no good.
And neither is the price that Apple offers – 140€ is on the steep side.
Your company? There’s an app for that. How Apple competes with EVERYBODY.
No Sno, Leppard
Snow Leopard seems to be worthwhile. So worthwhile that the downtown retailers seem to be sold out. Oh well, didn’t have any immediate need to update.
Next week's double/triple Beatles-treat
Exhibit A: The entire discography is to be re-released on 9.9.
Exhibit B: The Beatles: Rock Band is released on 9.9.
Exhibit C: Apple organizes a large ipod-related press conference on 9.9.
A+B+C = Beatles back catalogue to appear in iTunes?
Perhaps not, since the tagline for the conference is straight out of a classic Rolling Stones song.
Then again, the boys in Cupertino have proven themselves to be wily indeed.
My only Beatles-record is a wobbly russian vinyl edition of the White Album, so I’m pretty much settled on the idea of buying at least some of the albums. Perhaps the entire set, if a properly priced deal on the collection is available. And the Rock Band game, definitely the game.
To tablet, or not to tablet?
We’ll see for sure in a couple of months, but this lengthy analysis in intomobile is a pretty convincing story for the “no, there will not be an Apple tablet”-side.
Sno Leppard
Bummer, Amazon’s cheap $29 upgrade for OS X “can only be shipped within the US”.
No official release date either.
Snow Leopard – a bargain
Apple’s WWDC keynote is in progress – the biggest item thus far: the 10.6 version of OS X, codenamed Snow Leopard will clock in at a mere $29 in September.
NIN vs. Appstore, round 2
Following Apple’s surprise banning of the Nine Inch Nails application from the Appstore, Trent Reznor takes off on warpath.
And quite rightly so – the objectionable bit in the application, access to the 1994 Downward Spiral album, is available in iTunes.
But apparently less offensive as a plain download than through the application.
Round 2.5 is the interview in Radar.
Touched (maybe)
Apple and a big batch of touchscreens, five scenarios derived from the leaked news. The big screened ipod is by far the most credible alternative – a wholesale move to a pure touch-interface seems too farfetched for the company’s mainstream computers. Then again, this might be something completely different, it’s not as if Apple’s moves in the last years have been predictable at all.
Disillusionment trumps arbitrary C&D-orders: fake Steve Jobs quits.
New iPods
The reality distortion field has been parted once again. This time the Apple event concentrated on music-related products (and a note about an emergency firmware patch to the ailing 3G iPhone).
While the storage capacities of the new players are indeed big, and billions of songs have been sold throughout the years – the most telling statistic of iPod’s absolute dominance over competition is the fact that 90% of cars sold in the US feature an integrated dock for the device.
I’m pretty happy with my current 8GB nano, but am seriously tempted by the second generation of iPod touches. Considering that the price drop is substantial, the threshold to buy is definitely getting lower. And the new version of iTunes will be rolled in in a couple of days.
iPhone, take 2
With less than a week to the impending release of the 3G-variant of Apple’s iPhone, the rumor mills of the net are rolling at full speed. MobileCrunch provides a convenient roundup and evaluation of a good bunch.
Mac clone for real! For how long?
In an unexpected turn of events, Psystar, the alleged supplier of cloned Macintosh computers has been proven legit.
Legit in the sense that someone’s been able to capture a machine on video, not to the extent of being legal in any way.
Bets on Apple suing the proverbial socks off the company are taken at the usual bookies.
Whipping up a fury
It’s mid-january, it’s time for Macworld, the regular parting of the reality distortion field, when Steve Jobs shows which products are going to line his pockets with cash.
The show did not disappoint this time around either.
This time the star of the show was the next-generation laptop, MacBook Air. Whose most remarkable feature is its positively anorectic depth – at its thickest the laptop is less than two centimeters thick, and correspondingly, its weight. Software-wise, the biggest innovation is probably the introduction of iPhone-originated multi-touch gestures via an over-sized trackpad.
The new features come surprisingly cheap, and the battery life (at five hours) isn’t anything to scoff at either.
As a recent buyer of a new laptop, the excuses not to utterly covet this baby are few, but not insignificant. It’s brand-new technology, and Apple has had serious release1.0-issues in the past, so stability might be an issue. The lack of software that’s aware of the multi-touch capabilities will take a while to arrive. The sales volumes will overwhelm production, and the availability will be an issue. On-board HD-capacity is really expensive. There, there. Feel better already. A little.
Concrete threats from an imaginary person
Someone at Apple seems to have had a very bad december thus far:
Exhibit A: first thinksecret shuts down following a settlement.
Exhibit B: then Fake Steve Jobs is hit with a second suit, the company hoping to silence another voice with money. And in a truly Kafka-esque moment, the plaintiff is threatened with loss of assets unless three bad entries in the blog are retracted, each one of them being more or less obvious (the “just a single button in the iPhone” hovering even near a real issue).
I’m betting on zealous lawyers, not company policy.
Lawyers whose bumbling actions will probably end up in the doghouse on account of massive amounts of bad publicity.
Introducing lynch
Bought a new computer the other week, and got it delivered tuesday evening. Apple’s web store proved to be efficient, and hit the delivery schedule spot on in the estimation.
I moved into the mac camp more than two years ago, and had no intention of straying from Steve’s disciples. lynch, the replacement of gromit the iBook, is a Powerbook Pro. Sleek and metallic, and hopefully powerful enough to last the next few years as the generic computation device of choice in the HQ.
Leopard, which was supposed to come pre-installed, wasn’t. But with the provided dvd that was quickly taken care of. Though not without a hitch, as the admin password for the Tiger-installation proved to be more significant than assumed (yeah, to be able to upgrade the operating system you have to remember said password).
While the iBook had a decent screen, the LED-powered screen the new laptop has is leaps and bounds ahead. And the extra real estate and brightness does not come at the expense of battery life either. Quite the opposite, as a fully charged battery clocks in at unexpectedly above four hours.
The keyboard is less plastic than that of the iBook, but sizewise there is no significant change. The illumination in low-light conditions has yet to prove its worth. As has the automagical brightness adjustment of the screen. Disabled both on account of occasionally triggering them accidentally in normal sofa conditions. And first worrying whether my flu medicine has kicked in an extra gear in surrealism.
The famed new release of OS X, Leopard has been stable and not too changed from the Tiger. Which is to say that I haven’t been playing with the Spaces or the Timemachine yet. The latter supposedly kicks in uncomfortably when an external drive is connected, something bound to happen when bringing in music and photographs from gromit.
Installed lots of mandatory applications instead of fiddling with the operating system. No firefox 3 yet, it’s too early in the cycle for that. Safari 3, on the other hand, seems to work well, and doesn’t go on memory consumption binges like firefox recently has every now and then. Though its lack of “where this link points to”-info field is more than a cosmetic demerit. Canon’s site was spectacularly slow, so camera software has to wait (and iPhoto may be able to pull the images out anyway). Nokia’s brand spanking new PC-Suite Light for the Mac shows some definitely interesting tools as well.
No games yet (apart from ScummVM and a multi-talented interactive fiction interpreter). Lynch ought to pack enough power to facilitate gaming natively (I’m dreading my first step into the inevitable MMORPG addiction), with a bootcamped Windows XP (as soon as I find an SP2-equipped XP installation disk) and virtualization. With both VMWare and Parallels bringing circa-2003 XP on the desktop with ease, and there’s no disrespecting DosBox emulator either. One of the three alternatives will, sooner or later, provide the ability to finish classics such as Planescape:Torment and Fallout 2 comfortably on the sofa.
Leopard looks pretty schwell
As noted in the extremely thorough Ars Technica review, OS X 10.5 looks good indeed.
Sadly there’s no mention what’s going on with Xcode. Or whether Dashcode is included in the baseline.
Something to report on when the new laptop shows up, clearly.
Leopard pounces tomorrow
Tomorrow Apple launches Leopard, the sixth incarnation of OS X, which ought to line the company’s pockets even further (not that they’re already brimming from the sales of ipods and iphones).
Gromit the iBook has been a faithful servant for years (entry called whoopsie tells the story of the purchase), but the time’s come to upgrade.
I’m definitely settled on a laptop, but undecided between the regular and pro version of the Macbook. The former is a bit cheaper, but the latter boasts a bit funkier looks and a non-integrated graphics card. Which might actually come in handy, when the machine contains means to run windows (and games) natively. Nope, I don’t harbour any illusions on being able to kick it with the likes of Alan Wake, but Civilization 4 would be good indeed…
There’s been no indication of any serious upcoming hardware upgrades, though the extended touchpad for iPhone-like multi-touch would be a nice addition.
