AppleGazette’s Kevin Whipps addresses the quandary over how to choose between a MacBook and a MacBook Pro, noting that it used to be that if you wanted a 13-inch Mac laptop (excluding the MacBook Air), the only option was the original MacBook. Now with a 13-inch aluminum MacBook Pro on the market, the decision has [...]
The new plastic unibody MacBook is arguably the second-best MacBook model Apple has produced yet (trumped only by the late 2008 aluminum unibody MacBook). So why am I finding myself unexpectedly underwhelmed and disappointed with it?
When rumors began circulating in late summer about an imminent new unibody MacBook in polycarbonate plastic. Being a consummate Apple [...]
Apple is putting a lot of emphasis on its “green” initiatives lately. But is it the real deal?
For example, Apple’s new energy efficiency page says that because 53 percent of Apple’s greenhouse gas emissions are a result of the power its products consume, it’s designing these products to be as energy efficient as possible employing [...]
ChannelWeb’s Steven Burke says that in the manifold comparisons of Windows 7 with Snow Leopard burning up the Web, what all the reviewers and pundits seem to be forgetting is that it’s not about the operating system, which he maintains is simply the engine that runs the PC. As Burke puts it, you don’t go [...]
I usually have at least three browsers open at any time. One will be a Mozilla Gecko app (Firefox, Camino, or SeaMonkey) and one an Apple WebKit based program (Stainless, Cruz, iCab, Shiira, OmniWeb, or especially since Safari 4 was released, Safari itself). Interestingly, I find I like Safari 4 better on my old Pismo [...]
MacNewsWorld’s Chris Maxcer addresses the abiding conundrum of whether to upgrade one’s existing system or buy a new Mac, noting that when you’ve had your Mac long enough, it’s only natural to start thinking about more speed and more memory.
So the operative question is whether to dig deep and go with a full hardware upgrade, [...]
Writing on Fast Company, Farhad Manjoo says that not long ago, he got his hands on “one of the slowest, ugliest, and least-user-friendly Macintosh laptops the world has ever seen” — and he loves it, since it sports a couple of features that others can’t match. It’s tinier and lighter than Apple’s pricey MacBook Air, [...]
Today marks the 20th anniversary of the original release of the Macintosh Portable — the first truly untethered Mac, thanks to its internal battery.
There’s a quote attributed to Steve Jobs: “Do not trust a computer that you cannot lift.” The original compact desktop Macs were offered with an optional carrying case, and some pioneer Mac-users [...]
Now that Snow Leopard is on the prowl, thoughts turn to what Mac OS 10.7 might be called.
When it was announced that Mac OS 10.6 would be christened “Snow Leopard,” there was some speculation that Apple was running out of big cat names for its OS X versions. OS X 10.1 was Puma, 10.2 Jaguar, [...]
Right on schedule, Opera released Opera 10 for download last week, and, as expected, it’s a solid and lively performer — no major visible changes from the late betas and release candidate builds I’ve been reporting regularly. Opera 10 has been my default browser on all three of my production Macs for the past six [...]
Do you disguise your MacBook as a security measure? A couple of computer case makers think it’s an effective strategy.
Mitemite’s Newspaper MacBook Sleeve is a computer bag made from plasticized fabric and designed to thwart computer theft by camouflaging your MacBook Pro as a folded newspaper. The sleeve measures 37.7cm x 27.5cm x 3.4cm and [...]
iPhoto is OK, especially if you like lots of automation when managing your image files, but it’s not as likely to appeal to pros or serious amateurs. Some will use Apple’s Aperture or Adobe’s Lightroom, but there’s another photo management solution you may already have on your hard drive.
I’m talking about Adobe’s Bridge utility, a [...]
PC Mag’s Sascha Segan posed an intriguing question the other day: “If you put a smartphone in a dock, it could replace a netbook. So why hasn’t anyone succeeded at doing that?”
Good question.
Now that I’ve been thinking about it, the idea of a dock into which you could pop an iPhone or an iPod touch, [...]
My friend and Low End Mac’s publisher, Dan Knight, posted a nearly 3000-word essay recently positing a “what’s the perfect Mac” conundrum: MacBook Pro or iMac. I share Dan’s enthusiasm for examining and debating such hypothetical questions, and I thoroughly enjoyed the piece, but for me, the matter is much more open-and-shut.
I’ve been advocating for [...]
There’s more evidence that Apple is missing the boat on a substantial market opportunity due to its stubborn stonewall of the small, inexpensive netbook phenomenon. Steve Jobs may have expressed his dismissal of the device category last fall, and acting Apple CEO Tim Cook took the same line by contending that the netbook experience suffers [...]
Techdirt’s Derek Kerton says “iPhone haters” are “stick-shifters in an automatic world” when they complain about the iPhone’s limited manual user control of function and configuration.
Kerton analogizes iPhone critics’ attitudes to those of manual gearbox holdouts in the automotive world. He notes that the stick-shift versus automatic transmission debate kind of petered out decades ago [...]
How long should a Mac last? Mac360’s Alexis Kayhill posed the question recently, and it got me thinking on the topic, especially since Alexis framed her column around the experience of a co-worker who had purchased a new unibody MacBook (on her recommendation) only to have Apple upgrade the 13″ unibody to Pro status with [...]
I’ve been looking for an up-to-date, Gecko-based browser to replace the discontinued Netscape Navigator 9 on my old G4 Pismo PowerBook running OS 10.4 Tiger. Navigato still works well, is based on the now-ancient Firefox 2 and probably has some security vulnerabilities. Firefox 3.5 and Camino 1.6 are great on my Intel Mac, but kinda [...]
I have a love-hate relationship with Spotlight, OS X’s convenient and useful, but immensely frustrating search utility. Apple introduced Spotlight with OS X 10.4 Tiger, and tweaked it considerably in OS 10.5 Leopard.
Having a search engine ready and waiting all the time is seductive, and Spotlight is nice to have, but falls short of Apple’s [...]
Microsoft Word was one of my favorite and most-used applications back in the early days. I started Mac word processing first with Word 4 and upgraded to Word 5.1 in 1993. Amazingly, that old application still starts up and works fine in Classic Mode on my G4 PowerBook.
However, the disastrous Word 6 broke my Word [...]
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