Following a presumably unintentional disclosure in the terms of service for the iTunes Store, Apple has released Apple TV 3.0, as well as a corresponding update for iTunes.

As previously reported, Apple TV 3.0 supports iTunes LP and iTunes Extras, and does so with a new look. According to Eddy Cue, Apple VP of Internet Services, the new interface “gives you instant access to your favorite content.” The new interface continues an evolution away from Apple’s other media software, Front Row.

In addition to the “widescreen” interface, Apple TV 3.0 also includes Genius Mixes, Internet radio, and photo enhancements. For the latter, users can now flip through photos grouped by event, while face recognition software similar to iPhoto puts “snapshots” of each person named on a corkboard background. It’s sort of like wanted ads at the Post Office.

As for iTunes, besides supporting Apple TV 3.0, the 90 MB update adds “an option for a dark background for Grid View, and improves support for accessibility.” What’s not mentioned in the support note is that iTunes has once again been fixed to keep Palm from leeching off Apple via the Pre syncing with iTunes. Get a life, Palm.

That would probably be good advice for the Apple TV, too. While additional features are always good, features people really want are even better. Is the Apple TV really going to be the last one in the living room to support Netflix without hacks like XBMC?

Apple recently introduced two new formats, iTunes LP and iTunes Extras, which deliver additional content to album and movie purchases, respectively. Apple also only just updated the iTunes Store Terms and Conditions agreement, and AppleInsider spotted some key changes in that document that point to an upcoming Apple TV update that will support the new formats.

It seems inevitable that the new bonus material featured in LP and Extra releases, which includes things like photos, videos, mini-documentaries and commentary, would become accessible on Apple’s home theater device, but this is the first official confirmation that it is in fact on the way. It would seem to suggest that we’ll see the update sooner rather than later, too.

Both iTunes LP and iTunes Extras are based on the TuneKit JavaScript format, which uses HTML, CSS and other open web standards. It’s designed for a 1280×720 pixel resolution, which fits perfectly with HD TV sets and the HD output resolution of the Apple TV.

While it may not come as a surprise, a new major update for the Apple TV firmware would be the first big one since the “Take Two” 2.0 update that came at Macworld Expo in January 2008. Other things expected to arrive with it include Quicktime X and the HTTP Live Streaming protocol, both of which were recently introduced as features of OS X Snow Leopard.

It sounds like it’s shaping up to be a decent little upgrade for Apple’s main foray into the living room, but it doesn’t really sound like anything that’s going to turn heads among people who are on the fence about buying the device. Apple has recently taken some steps to increase Apple TV sales, including getting rid of the 40 GB model altogether and dropping the price of the 160 GB version. Which is great, but there’s still a lot more Apple should be doing to make the device viable.

Like the Mac mini, the Apple TV seems to be lagging behind other Apple offerings in terms of the tech behind it and its software capabilities. Many new TVs coming to market now offer built-in functionality comparable to a lot of what Apple TV brings to the table, beyond access to the iTunes Store and all of its associated content. And HD-capable nettops from companies like Asus offer a fully functional home theater PC at a comparable price, with better storage options and more.

A software update is great, but Apple needs to do more than just what’s expected to breathe some life back into its least exciting device.

Apple’s powerhouse configurable tower desktop aimed mostly at semi-pro and pro users could be getting some update love in the near future, according to the latest rumblings coming out of the rumor mill today. Hardmac.com is reporting that one of its sources has solid information on the new Mac Pro, which should appear sometime in early 2009 2010.

The new Mac Pro will feature a brand new Xeon CPU from Intel, if the rumors are accurate, which it will offer exclusively for a short time until the second quarter of 2009. The CPU, code-named Gulftown, boasts a huge six processing cores, which beats the current single core total by two. With two processors, like the more expensively configured Mac Pro has, that would result in a total of 12 cores of processing power.

The Gulftown processor also sports 12MB of shared cache, instead of the 8MB on current models, uses 32-nm engraving instead of 45, and will feature slightly lower power consumption than the current generation Xeon. Also, even though it’s a true successor to the Xeon line currently found in Mac Pros, rumor has it that it will be ditching that moniker in favor of the “Core i9″ namesake.

Hardmac.com speculates that the new six-core Core i9 processor might not immediately be put to work across the Mac Pro line, instead suggesting that Apple may want to extend its line in that category by continuing to offer the quad core version in an entry-level Pro. It’s a nice thought, but without any real basis, so I’d file this one under wishful thinking for the time being. Hardmac believes a lower-priced, entry-level Pro might attract some mini customers, but I doubt that’s something Apple really wants to do.

They do have other info directly from the source, who remains anonymous, as per usual. The motherboard will sport some major changes that should allow it to increase performance exponentially. There will be an Ethernet 10Gbits/s port, and a bump up in the RAM module capacity for 8 and 16GB units, which would mean that the future Mac Pro could theoretically support up to 128GB of RAM at once.

Being way more hardware-savvy than myself, Hardmac sums up with the tantalizing prediction that the combination of Snow Leopard, the Core i9 processor, and top-of-the-line graphics cards from either NVIDIA or ATI could provide more than enough power for real-time rendering in Final Cut Studio 3.0. Speaking for my friends who work in television editing, who’ve spent many a late night waiting for a render to finish, this is very good news indeed.

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, or spend much less to upgrade a few select parts that will help bring your aging ‘Book back closer to contemporary standards of performance — is it worth upgrading an existing Apple notebook with more RAM and a new hard drive — or more sensible to simply buy a new one?

I would say it depends on the individual machine. I’m typing this post on a nine-year-old Pismo PowerBook that’s been considerably breathed-on, with processor, hard drive, optical drive, RAM, and wireless upgrades, and I even have a FireWire 400 PC Card adapter for it. But on the other hand, I have a six month old unibody PowerBook, with an up-front upgrade to 4GB of RAM, and it’s many magnitudes superior to the Pismo in objective terms.

Maxer says he tends to buy a new PowerBook, iBook, or MacBook every two years or so, usually around the 16-month point. I provisionally shoot for three year system upgrade intervals, but this Pismo is well outside that envelope, and still my second-most-used computer. Despite being more than a bit power challenged, and limited to OS X 10.4 Tiger, it’s such a likable tool that I’m unmotivated to move on to using, say, my 17″ PowerBook G4 as my number two laptop.

I am somewhat puzzled by Maxcer’s suggestion that, while the new MacBook Pro models are fantastic, they don’t seem quite worth the cost just yet. My contention would be the diametric contrary — the current low end 13″ and 15″ unibody MacBook Pros are the most rip-roaring value-for-the-money bargains Apple has ever produced.

However, Maxcer says he still likes his black 2.4GHz MacBook, notwithstanding its poky Intel GMA X3100 integrated graphic chipset that pales by comparison with the powerful Nvidia 9400M integrated graphics chipsets in the new MacBook Pros, but is finding the 250 GB hard drive way to cramped for his needs, and 2GB of RAM isn’t quite enough either.

Good on Chris. I’m all for squeezing every bit of useful service life out of a Mac before upgrading to a new system, so long as one isn’t terribly compromised by performance limitations for things one wants to do. So if I were in Chris’s shoes with a nice black MacBook that I was fond of, I’d buy a bigger hard drive and double the RAM — both easy and relatively inexpensive upgrades for that machine — and hang on to it for a while. The only semi-specialized tool you’ll need for these upgrades is a Torx T8 screwdriver, which can be hard to track down on short notice (I have a nice one I got from Wegener Media) and some very small Philips screwdrivers.

I’d love to have a new 13″ MacBook Pro with FireWire and a SD Card slot, but my plan is to still go to early 2012 with my current MacBook, although a new inexpensive polycarbonate MacBook, provided it has those features, could test my holdout resolve.

Chris decided to proceed with a mid-life upgrade for the old MacBook, going with a Western Digital Scorpio Black 320GB 7,200RPM drive, with 16MB of cache, and bumping the RAM spec. with a $54 Kingston 4GB kit, which was considerably cheaper than I paid for a 4GB upgrade kit from Other World Computing (currently $87.99) for my MacBook last spring. The BlackBook would need DDR2 RAM, while my unibody machine uses DDR3, but a 4GB DDR2 kit at OWC is still $78.97.

With the great deal he got on the Kingston RAM, Chris’s memory and storage upgrade of the BlackBook came to a pretty digestible $130, which seems like good value to me, although Chris says performance gains realized are not as dramatic as he’d anticipated, and he thinks if he was doing it over, he’d opt for a 500GB 5,400RPM drive instead, noting that the 7,200RPM Scorpio’s speed causes a minor but annoying vibration. He also says that upgrading the OS to Snow Leopard provided a more substantial performance boost than the new hardware bits did.

I also expect he may notice more subtle and welcome improvements down the road. With its stock 2GB of RAM, my MacBook was a decent performer, but it’s even better with 4GB, and while pre-upgrade I had to restart the laptop every two weeks or so to freshen the memory heap, with 4GB I can go for a month or more between restarts.

Frankly, with new (or even better, refurbished late model) Mac laptop prices plumbing historical lows, and the extreme desirability of the unibody notebooks in particular, it’s harder to make a compelling argument for upgrading an older Mac rather than applying the cost of that to a new purchase, especially if you can sell your present machine for a respectable price.

What do you think? Better to hang on to a spruced-up known quantity, or go new/refurb with a fresh warranty and the latest feature set?

Snow Leopard is selling like hotcakes. It’s selling  much better than Tiger, and a lot better than Leopard, too. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say those strong sales numbers had something to do with price. Microsoft appears to think so, too.

For a limited time, Microsoft is offering students the opportunity to grab one Windows 7 upgrade to either the Home Premium or Professional versions of the upcoming operating system for only $29.99, the same price that the single-user version of Snow Leopard retails for.

That’s $90 cheaper than the Home Premium upgrade costs at regular retail prices, and $170 off the price of the Professional version. There is a catch, though. You need to have a valid student email address from a U.S. educational institution (college or university) in order to qualify.

AppleInsider claims that there are similar deals in place in the UK, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Korea and Mexico, though I could only find a “Coming Soon” notice when I tried to change the country using a drop down menu at the top of the order page. Entering a valid Canadian university email address also got me nowhere.

Microsoft is very much aware that Apple’s student market share is one of the company’s most consistent strengths, despite recent incursions by low-cost netbook machines into that demographic. This deep discounting, and the accompanying 741.com micro-site on which it can be found show that Redmond is willing to go to great lengths to try to recapture some of the youth market.

If you’re planning on taking advantage of this deal using yours or a relative’s student email address to install Windows 7 on your Boot Camp partition, remember that the deal only applies to upgrades, not full versions, so you’ll already need either Vista or XP installed for it to work.

For a while the blogosphere has been running its mouth off about how “Snow Leopard is just a service pack Apple has the gall to charge for.”

TechRadar.com reports, “Despite all of the necessary ‘under the hood’ improvements in Snow Leopard, this release has the inescapable air of a service pack about it.”

Gina Trapani says, “Even though David Pogue says this is an ‘uninformed wisecrack,’ I’m still calling Snow Leopard a service pack. ‘Snow Leopard Fixes Leopard’s Bugs’ is not the headline you’re going to see in the NYT or WSJ.”

Merlin Mann snarks in this tweet, “Wow. 10.6. If some of these ‘refinements’ were any more ’subtle,’ they’d seem kinda like ‘bug fixes.’”

To a certain degree I can see their point. We’re used to Steve Jobs getting on stage and touting an OS upgrade with 300+ new features as well as moving any purchaser to the front of a liver transplant line. Frankly, the parts of Snow Leopard the average user would notice are incredibly pedestrian. Boring, even. Apple priced it a boring, $29 price point to make it a no-brainer.

I’m going to go through some of the marquee features and break them down into areas I think would be in a service pack, could be in a service pack, and are too invasive for a service pack.

Service Pack Candidates

Just to show some partisanship, I’m going to reach across the aisle and tell you the features I think Apple could have released in a 10.5.x update: the new Exposé and Stacks, signal-strength meters in Airport, quicker Time Machine, QuickTime X, hi-res iChat and improved disk eject. All of these could have been added into the eight sub-releases of Leopard. Maybe there’s something to the theory that Apple held them back just to have something to sell users on. Maybe there were two gunmen in Dallas, too.

Borderline Candidates

Built-in support for Exchange: I know Microsoft dot-released the new Exchange features into Entourage, but I’m labeling this one borderline because I’m not sure the underlying code in Mail, Address Book and iCal would have been feasible for a .x release.

Rewrite of Finder: For the same reasons above, I’m not sure the Finder rewrite could have been done in a service pack. I’m erring on the side of caution and theorizing as a central part of the OS, it needed to be done in an upgrade.

Not Service Pack-able

The 64 bit transition, Grand Central Dispatch, and Open CL: I believe these could not have been done as a service pack. They are too central, too invasive, and are also key parts that require the Intel chipset to work. Since Snow Leopard will not run on Power PC machines, and I doubt Apple would have ever released a dot upgrade to Leopard that didn’t work on both platforms, to me these are the features that required an upgrade.

The perception problem is while these are likely to be the most important parts of Snow Leopard long term (once developers upgrade their apps), to the average user they are seriously unsexy because we don’t see them.

I think Bertrand Serlet’s comment at WWDC ’90 “[Snow Leopard] is a better Leopard” has been misinterpreted as Apple’s way of saying Leopard had some issues and needed some serious love. I don’t read it that way. I think Apple is fairly happy with how Leopard turned out — at least once it got a lot of the Spaces issues worked out. I do agree that Leopard was released too early, but by 10.5.5 or so it was in fine form.

With Snow Leopard, Apple wanted to refine some of the user interface elements while building an underlying architecture that will continue to take advantage of Core Duo 2 (and better) chipsets and decent video chipsets. When you look at the enhancements Open CL can give, it’s no mystery why Apple got away from the crappy integrated chips in even the low-end products — it wanted all Apple products to be able to take advantage of it.

People claiming that Snow Leopard is just a service pack need to look past the handful of interface improvements and focus on the underlying architecture. It may not be a sexy upgrade, but I think it will be a very important upgrade as apps are upgraded to take advantage of its features.

Poor NVIDIA — it looks like your honeymoon with Apple is over. There hasn’t been an official announcement from Cupertino yet, but a glance at the customization options for high-end iMacs (the ones that use discrete graphics) and Mac Pros reveals that ATI Radeon HD 4000-series cards are already available as new configurable alternatives to NVIDIA products.

ATI was shown the door at Apple when the computer maker introduced notebooks and desktops that feature integrated NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics cards. Many suspect that things turned rocky between Apple and NVIDIA, thanks to the faulty GeForce 8600M GT cards that resulted in the Mac maker offering customers an unprecedented warranty extension for problems related to that component.

We didn’t see the effects right away, because Apple’s supply chain is likely structured in such a way that its product line was probably in place long before any of the hardware problems began to surface. Adding the Radeon HD 4850 to the iMac line and HD 4870 to the Mac Pro as configurable options may not seem like much in the way of retaliation, but it was probably the first option available to Apple short of overhauling its product line.

Both new ATI options are easy single component swap-outs. If Apple intends to get rid of the integrated GeForce 9400M cards, it will have to wait until the computers themselves receive a major update.

ATI is touting the ability of the new cards to fully utilize and benefit from Apple’s implementation of Open CL Version 1.0 in Snow Leopard, which developers can incorporate into their software to allow a sharing of processor load between CPU and GPU. The HD 4850 is a $50 upgrade, available on the 2.93GHz and 3.06GHz 24-inch iMac models, and the HD 4870 is a $200 upgrade for the Mac Pro.

Naturally, as a contributor to this blog, I purchased a Snow Leopard family pack the first possible day. Some people may have pre-ordered on Amazon, but they missed out on the in-store experience. My mother lives close to an Apple store, so I decided to stop by and upgrade my Macbook Pro while catching up with her.

Soon after arriving she asked, “Do I need that?”

Silence.

I honestly had no idea what to say. Sure it’s a cheap and quick upgrade, but does she really need Snow Leopard on the 20 inch iMac she bought last year? Her entire computer life at home revolves around Safari, Mail, and Microsoft Word. She networks, reads, and writes. I, however, consider myself an über power user: Netbeans, Adobe CS3, and tinkerer extraordinaire. I can’t refuse an OS upgrade.

Let’s take a look at Apple’s Snow Leopard page.

The only item I see here that is actually appealing to my mother is “faster.” One can never say no to speed in the computer world. The rest sounds like under the hood features. Fortunately, the UI changes in Snow Leopard are miniscule enough to not terrify the average Mac user. I guess it’s safe to upgrade her. After all, the Apple coolness factor always entertains.

What about all of you? Planning on upgrading your parents’ computers?

While many of us had suspected it to be the case, Walt Mossberg of All Things Digital in his review of Snow Leopard has confirmed it: The 10.6 upgrade will work with 10.4 Tiger. Which means that if you’re not keen on iLife or iWork ‘09, you can skip the full version included in the box set and save yourself a cool $140.

Of course, while Tiger users are probably pleased as punch, it’s unclear how Apple’s going to feel about this. On the one hand, Mossberg has let the cat out of the bag, so to speak, and advised users of a course of action that could deprive the company of a lot of potential revenue. Not to mention that those who do use this upgrade method will be in clear violation of Apple’s licensing agreement.

On the other hand, Walt’s exact words are:

[H]ere’s a tip: Apple concedes that the $29 Snow Leopard upgrade will work properly on these Tiger-equipped Macs, so you can save the extra $140.

That “Apple concedes” bit makes it sound like Cupertino had a hand in this particular revelation, which could mean the company expects to make more off of Tiger users buying the upgrade at a discounted price than it would from straight-up sales of the box set. Which makes sense, since why would you pay $169 for an update when your machine is humming along fine without it? A $30 price point, by contrast, will convince an awful lot of fence-sitters.

It remains unclear whether the $29 Snow Leopard upgrade disc (or $49 family pack) will work for standalone (ie. clean slate) installations, though it seems likely that it will, at least according to Lifehacker’s review of the software. Snow Leopard goes on sale tomorrow, Aug. 28th; the NYT and USA Today have interesting reviews as well.

Snow Leopard’s release is just around the corner, so here are some quick and easy steps to make sure that you are ready to upgrade.

Turn On Time Machine

If you haven’t already, now is a great time to turn on the Time Machine built in backup. It’s not perfect, but it’s a great first line of defense against data loss.

Make a Bootable External Drive

Use Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper to clone your Mac’s hard drive to an external USB drive as an emergency backup, in case both the upgrade and the Time Machine backup both go south. The real point of both this step and the Time Machine step are to backup, backup, backup! Get your data off of your computer and onto something else that can be saved in case of the worst.

Get Rid of Haxies

Haxies are unsupported hacks that alter the appearance or functionality of OS X. While they can be cool, and nothing against Unsanity, anything that’s done under the covers or outside of what Apple says is OK to play with is easily broken during a major OS upgrade. Application Enhancer has been a known culprit in the past, and some developers will ask that it be removed before support or ignore crash reports that involve it all together.

Disable Bundles

Bundles like SIMBL are also a sort of hack that can cause problems during an upgrade. As I said before, they are a good hack, but a hack nonetheless, and can cause unforeseen problems during an upgrade.

Sync Up

iPods, iPhones, MobileMe, any third-party devices or syncing that you have set up…make sure they are all synced and up to date before starting the upgrade procedure.

Update Your Apps

This shouldn’t be that big of a deal as long as you are already running Leopard, but it’s still a good idea to check and make sure that you are running the latest released version of your apps. Developers who joined the Apple Developer Connection as a premier member have had access to Snow Leopard for a while now, and have hopefully worked out the bugs in running their app. That being said, upgrade your apps, just to make sure. I’ve found that it’s also a good practice to download updated installers for your favorite apps and burn them to a CD or DVD for quick access.

If you are feeling daring, you may want to give AppFresh a look and see about having it update all of your apps for you.

Clean House

Have a ton of old apps laying around that you don’t need anymore? Now is the best time to AppZap them! I seriously do not understand why AppZapper, or some similar functionality is not built into OS X. Both Cocktail and Onyx have functions to clean out temporary files, check permissions, and ensure that the OS is in good operating order.

Watch the Clock

Snow Leopard is set to be released in September 2009, which as the writing of this happens is just around one month away. Snow Leopard brings with it the opportunity to make your Mac “Better, Faster, Easier,” than ever before.

Have a favorite OS X upgrade tradition? Sound off in the comments!

One detail that escaped mention during the keynote presentation at Apple’s WWDC earlier this week likely does not sit well with users still clutching their beloved G4 machines, namely that OS X 10.6, also know as Snow Leopard, will finally drop PowerPC support and only run on Intel Macs. It’s unfortunate for people attached to their eMacs and 12-inch Powerbooks, especially given that Snow Leopard appears to be more resource-efficient than Leopard ever was.

Yes, it’s unfortunate, but it also makes sense from Apple’s perspective. The company hasn’t released a PowerPC computer since October 2005, which will be nearly four years ago when Snow Leopard is released in September. Four years might not be a long time to own a car or a refrigerator, but with computers, it’s a lifetime. Just think about the difference between the original MacBook and the 13-inch MacBook Pro announced this past Tuesday.

A lot of what Snow Leopard brings to the table won’t be all that applicable to a computer with PowerPC architecture, either, such as multicore processing improvements with Grand Central Dispatch, and OpenCL tech that leverages graphics processor capabilities for general computing tasks. Not to mention that the whole thing runs in 64-bit mode, which probably wouldn’t play all that nice on older Macs.

Macs have always been notable for their value proposition in the long term. I was only recently shopping for a PowerPC G4 12-inch PowerBook as a gift for my girlfriend, thinking I could pick one up for a song at this point. In fact, for a decently spec’d machine with a newish battery, I was looking at paying at least $550-$600. Many people were unblinkingly asking $750 and up for their cherished machines, and weren’t open to being talked down at all.

Does a lack of continued OS support hurt the value proposition of those machines? Sure it does, but probably not as much as one might think. Anyone looking to buy an older Mac, for instance, probably doesn’t have technological currency at the forefront of their mind. In fact, whether they find Tiger, Leopard, or Snow Leopard on the computer in question probably won’t make much difference in terms of their usage.

Maybe Apple is leaving a lot of people out to dry when it comes to Snow Leopard’s backwards compatibility, but at the same time, you have to remember that Apple is a hardware company first and foremost. Yes, it makes a lot of software, too, but that’s not its primary source of revenue. Snow Leopard is really just another reason to buy a new machine, and you can’t really blame Apple for wanting people to do that.

Apple announced a slew of hardware updates today, including a number of upgrades to its notebook lineup.

For me, the most notable among these was the upwards shift of the 13-inch aluminum MacBook into the MacBook Pro category, alongside the 15- and 17-inch models, both of which also got their own feature and hardware improvements. The white, plastic polycarbonate MacBook is looking mighty lonely down at the low end of the scale.

Alongside the name change, the 13-inch MacBook Pro (I’m glad I no longer have to specify “unibody” or anything else to distinguish it from the regular white MacBook anymore) gets an SD card slot, up to 8GB (if you’re partial to a $1,000 upgrade) of memory, a max hard drive size of 500GB (or 256GB SSD), and a backlit keyboard, standard.

Also, making a triumphant return, is FireWire thanks to an FW800 port, as is standard for the Pro line of computers. All this at a new entry-level price point of $1,199, which comes standard with a 2.26GHz processor, 2GB of RAM, and a 160GB HDD. Another higher-priced option with a 2.53GHz processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 250GB HDD goes for $1,499.

The price drop, combined with the spec upgrade, makes this one of Apple’s most appealing machines to those of us who are cost-conscious Mac addicts. Add in the inclusion of the same battery tech that was first introduced in the 17-inch MacBook Pro, with a reported battery life of seven hours (likely exaggerated), and I’m sold. If you’re an education customer, you get another $100 off, bringing the total price of the laptop to $1,099 before taxes. Someone’s going shopping later today, and I’ll let you in on a little secret: It’s me.

I’d wait for Snow Leopard to come out in September, but with $29 upgrade pricing, and a $49 family pack (I have three Macs), there’s not really any cause to wait. One might argue that not enough has changed with this upgrade to justify slapping the “Pro” moniker onto the end of the name, but honestly, the company cut the price along with the title rather than raising it, so I’m not complaining. I seriously believe that this is the best value proposition in Apple’s lineup as it stands, especially given that it’s still relatively easy to upgrade RAM and hard disk (compared with the Mac mini) on your own — much cheaper than it would cost to do so with Apple-installed components.

Last week Apple quietly upgraded the entry-level white MacBook’s Core 2 Duo processor clock speed from 2.0 GHz to 2.13 GHz, added an additional 40GB of standard hard disk capacity, and upgraded its RAM specification to 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM. Obviously, additional speed and capacity is a plus, but as The Mac Observer’s Ted Landau questions, why upgrade this long-in-the-tooth laptop at all?

Significant Value-Added

To recap recent developments in the MacBook world, the unibody aluminum machines, released October 2008, mostly replaced the preceding white-and-black polycarbonate models, with the entry-level unibody model featuring a 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor, which remains the current spec at this writing (although reportedly there has been an unheralded upgrade of display quality).

Meanwhile, Apple continued selling one, last, lonely representative of the previous MacBook form factor — a white MacBook model, initially with a 2.1 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. However, the “WhiteBook” received a substantial upgrade on January 21, 2009 with the addition of an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M integrated graphics chipset replacing the older and much slower Intel GMA X3100 graphics of the previous model. The standard RAM allotment doubled from 1GB to 2GB, and its system bus speed was increased from 800 MHz to 1066 MHz, but the processor speed dropped slightly to 2.0 GHz, matching the base unibody MacBook spec. With the price remaining steady at $999, this obviously represented significant value-added, and presumably the last revision of this machine.

But Apple wasn’t finished with the WhiteBook yet, and last week, as noted, it gave that machine a nice little spec bump — still at a price $300 less than the base unibody MacBook.

Not Dead Yet

Since around Christmas, many pundits have been predicting that Apple would soon drop the polycarbonate-bodied MacBook, possibly replacing it with a bare-bones version of the unibody MacBook at the $999 price point. But that hasn’t happened, and this latest refresh seems to indicate that Cupertino intends to carry on selling the WhiteBook for quite some time, which is good news for budget-conscious Apple laptop purchasers who have been dismayed with Apple’s decision to drop FireWire support from the unibody MacBooks. (The WhiteBook still has a FireWire 400 port.)

Landau speculates that Apple hasn’t yet found a way to make selling a $999 unibody profitable, which is a reasonable surmise, and with development and tooling costs for the plastic MacBook long since amortized, it’s probably able to turn a tidy profit on the white MacBooks at that price point, even with the two value-added revisions this year keeping it current and competitive in terms of power.

The Education Market Factor

Another factor cited by Landau is the WhiteBook’s popularity in the education market, where its relatively modest price (it sells for $949) and scuff and bump-resistant ruggedness of its polycarbonate housing make it especially attractive, as do its FireWire 400 port and mini-DVI connector (as opposed to the unibodies’ Mini DisplayPort connector). Again, I think that’s a reasonable assumption.

The value of the $999 MacBook has again been significantly enhanced without a price increase, and while the WhiteBook still sells for twice as much or more than a typical PC netbook, it’s more than arguable that you get more than twice the computer.

Apple must be trying to throw us off with its erratic update schedule. First, it released iPhone OS 3.0 beta 5 only one week after beta 4, and it hasn’t released one since, and now it surreptitiously updates the entry-level white plastic MacBook model like a thief in the night, instead of during Tuesday Apple Store downtime, as is tradition.

Whether Apple just wants to keep us guessing, or the update wasn’t deemed significant enough for the standard procedure and its attendant fanfare, the company did indeed post a slightly upgraded version of its remaining plastic-body notebook early this a.m. Maybe the better internals are a way of increasing the value proposition of its only sub-$1,000 laptop offering as students mull a computer purchase for the fall, or as parents select choice graduation gifts for those who’ve already come through the gauntlet. It becomes an even better deal when you throw in the education discount, which drops the price to $949.

Changes include a new 2.13GHz processor (up from 2.0GHz), 40GB more storage with a 160GB HDD, and faster 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM (vs. 667MHz in the previous version). The new hard drive definitely brings the computer more in line with the times, as does the RAM speed bump, though PC enthusiasts will be quick to point out that these specs still lag far behind comparably priced Windows-laptop offerings. The polycarbonate MacBook also retains the same NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics card that is now standard fare among Apple’s lower-priced notebooks and desktops.

Apple arguably could do a better job of educating their non–tech oriented customers about the advisability and desirability of periodic software — especially OS version — upgrades.

That epiphany dawned on me during a telephone conversation last weekend with a friend I don’t see or talk to very often. This individual bought a G5 iMac several years ago, partly on my recommendation, and it has served him well, but he said he recently discovered his favorite tax software wouldn’t work on his own Mac anymore, and was perplexed that it still seem to run fine on his niece’s newer Mac.

When Did You Last Upgrade Your OS?

“When did you last upgrade your operating system?” I asked. The concept seemed new to him. My friend is a college professor, but a complete tech naif, and as far as he knew, he’d never upgraded his Mac’s OS.

“What version of OS X are you using?” I queried. He had no idea, so I explained to him how to check out “About This Mac” from the Apple Menu. It turned out that the iMac was still running OS 10.3.9, probably updated to the ultimate version of Panther via Software Update in the background, but no further. I expressed surprise that the tax application was the first software support issue he had encountered. He then mentioned that there had been issues with browsers as well.

“You need to install Mac OS 10.5,” I ventured.

Can I Do That?

“Oh, can I do that?” he asked. I explained that Leopard should work very well on his G5, but that he would need to purchase an installation disk. Again, the entire concept seemed quite foreign and exotic to my friend, and I suspect he’s not alone in that among Mac users.

I hazily recall reading somewhere that an astonishingly large percentage of Mac users never upgrade their operating systems from whatever version comes installed on them between purchasing new CPUs, which at least, in some instances, would be analogous to trading your car in because the tires were worn out.

Macs Just Chug Along

I suppose this issue is more common with Macs because PC users are obliged by the Windows malware siege to pay attention to patching and upgrading their operating systems. Macs just typically keep chugging along obliviously.

I appreciate that Apple likes to keep things as simple as possible for general, non-enthusiast users, and that low-hassle is one of the Mac’s most attractive selling points, but it would still be desirable to gently inform purchasers that in order to keep getting the best performance and software compatibility from their Mac, they need to upgrade the operating system once in awhile.

Unfair Assessment

There is still an unfortunate tendency to identify issues like my friend being unable to run the latest edition of his tax software on his middle-aged Mac as “Mac problems,” his logic being that he can run the Windows version on his IT department-maintained PC at work. That’s, of course, an unfair assessment, but it’s of a sort that is likely quite frequent and not helpful in retention of return customers. A bit more customer education is in order at the sales end.

This photo has been making the rounds since yesterday, after having originally popped up in the MacRumors forums. The photo’s poster claims that it is the business end of the new, redesigned Mac mini, which he was apparently shown by a friend. No word on who that friend might have been, but “Monthy,” the original poster, does claim the new machines will be on store shelves in about a month or so, which is convenient given his name.

At first glance, the specs on this device seem preposterous, since it has five USB ports, which is unheard of outside of the Mac Pro line-up, and a FireWire 800 port, which seems bizarre considering the price range and its absence on Apple’s MacBook line of products. Plus, support for both Mini DisplayPort and Mini-DVI appears to be present, which, though I love Apple dearly, seems far too kind a gesture to be in character for the Cupertino-based computer company.

Monthy goes on to describe the internal specs of the new hardware, which include a 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with a 3MB L2 Cache and 2GB of DDR3 RAM at 1066MHz, and a SATA HD (no word on base size). While not totally unthinkable, these do conflict with earlier reports that Apple would be moving to an Atom-based platform, with recent rumors even pointing to a device built around NVIDIA’s upcoming Ion platform.

While it may conflict with some rumors, it also agrees perfectly with some others, including predictions made much earlier by AppleInsider based on reports by “people familiar with the matter.” It is hard to deny that the picture, bearing exactly the hardware details outlined by AppleInsider in their January articles, doesn’t strike one as just a bit more genuine as a result. For what it’s worth, AppleInsider also claims the new photo depicts the exact same device as they had seen in a previous picture, which they were compelled not to share with the public.

I’m skeptical, because this seems to be a departure from the Apple-NVIDIA partnership that was meant to set the course of future hardware, but at the same time I’m hopeful, because this seems like an ideal machine for home theatre integration, especially if both of those video out ports can be used simultaneously. Add in a USB TV Tuner, replace the optical drive with a second HD, and you’ve got yourself one mean media server/DVR that can also hook up to a second monitor so that I can browse and watch without interruption or switching. Pardon my drooling.

They didn’t cry it from the mountain, but Apple this week did indeed update some hardware. Specifically, the 13-inch white MacBook, a holdover from previous models, now ships with the same NVIDIA GeForce 9400M of its bigger, aluminum unibody siblings. Not only that, but it also gets a processor bump up to the 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 1,066MHz frontside bus that’s found in the next model up, and a boost in the base ram up to 2GB of 667MHz DDR2 instead of just one.

Since Apple upgraded the optical drive to an 8x SuperDrive when they originally refreshed the line, the entry-level white MacBook now packs a lot more bang for your buck compared to older models, especially considering the unchanged, $999 price tag. It does still come standard with a 120GB hard drive, which is what you’ll see on a lot of netbooks if you don’t opt for SSD, but a DIY upgrade to a 320GB drive won’t set you back much more than $100, so it doesn’t detract much from the overall value.

Two things that remain in the white MacBook that people may be happy about are the FireWire 400 and Mini-DVI ports. Many users complained about the lack of FireWire in the new aluminum unibody line. The cable standard is useful in transfers that require a steady transfer speed, as from a video camera. Buyers wanting to updgrade from their existing plastic case MacBook will appreciate the use of Mini-DVI, as well, since they won’t have to pay $40 each for new display adapters.

Apple’s decision to upgrade the white MacBook may be related to the difficult selling market, representing a desire to offer consumers a better value proposition. It might also be that they actually listened to the excessive groaning at the launch of the new MacBooks and are trying to reach out to customers who weren’t thrilled about some of the changes. Either way, it’s a good move, and a good deal for those who were holding out for something more affordable.

Hopefully Benjamin Disraeli will posthumously forgive me for the major abuse of his quote (made famous by Mark Twain), but the fine folks over at the Omni Group gave us all a sneak peek into some very interesting data they’ve been allowed by users to collect on various details of the operating system their applications run on.

Even though this is a very rough snapshot of the Apple landscape — OS X users who have at least one installed Omni Group application that has checked for updates and allowed data to be collected — it does provide some fodder for discussion and analysis.

Which Cat Rules?

The Omni folks seem to have an even spread of Tiger and Leopard users. While we do not have hard numbers to go with the data, it would seem that any developer who makes a calculated decision to develop a Leopard-only application needs to realize they are targeting a fraction of those who upgrade or just those who have purchased new systems.

The most reliable and recent official information I could find (quickly) noted that Apple’s Leopard update penetration was at 19% by end of March 2008. Since the chart does not distinguish between upgraded systems and newly purchased ones with OS X Leopard pre-installed, it is interesting to see that there is a convergence, which would lead me to believe that we are seeing a slowdown in Leopard migration and an small, steady increase in new systems with Leopard.

This next chart was very encouraging (as I tend to care more about security than anything else) since it shows that Mac users are pretty good at updating their systems within a small delta of minor versions being published by Apple (at least when it comes to Leopard).

What’s Inside?

If there is any indication of whether the Omni data is more skewed to a certain part of the Mac user-base, it was this next chart. I am not ready to believe that 50% or more of all Macs are now Intel-based, however Apple has had great sales data to report quarter-after-quarter. Even if we take the 50% at face value, I think it shows that the Universal Binary is not going away any time soon and that makers of Intel-only software have to fully understand their market or have legitimate constraints for such a decision (e.g. VMware or Parallels). It also stresses the need for developers to test their creations on as diverse of a platform spread as possible.

I was surprised to learn that the majority of users in this subset of Omni customers also works with only one display and this makes me wonder if the data takes into account the built-in display on Apple’s mobile systems when collecting the statistics.

There Has To Be A Better Way

Atomic Bird, makers of (among other utilities) Macaroni – a handy system maintenance utility — has also published some other statistics compiled from their use of the data collected via the Sparkle auto-update framework. There is some correlation and some divergence in the data as their information shows a clear migration from Tiger to Leopard. It may be that their user-base is just more likely to have updated, especially since they are likely to care about things like that given the types of products Atomic Bird makes.

Because both examples are skewed to a particular software vendor, it would be very interesting to see more aggregated statistics from Sparkle or even the new Google Update Engine (once use of it takes off in the OS X developer community). Either project could allow for application-specific information to be stripped and system/component information to be forwarded to a central collector. Either service could then give some information away for free and possibly monetize their service by providing more thorough data to developers who want to make serious decisions as to how to proceed with development choices.

There would definitely be security and privacy concerns with an aggregated service, but with proper code review/auditing it should be easy to verifiably allay consumer and developer fears. Ultimately, the availability of such information would mean the creation of better software and be a significant help to many independent Apple developers.

The long-awaited day came and I headed down to my local Apple Store to get a new iMac and a 16GB iPod Touch to take advantage of Apple’s back-to-school promo. (It might be a sign that I have been waiting so long for this that my daughter’s first word was Apple.) Many of you, like myself, have been waiting to buy an iPod Touch until the iPhone 3G was released in the hopes that the software 2.0 update would be free as it was with the January software update. I didn’t want to buy a new iPod Touch a couple weeks ago and have to pay $10 for the update this last weekend.

As I carefully unwrapped the iPod and synced it to my computer, I found out that I was gravely mistaken. Software update 2.0 was not installed. iTunes said that I needed to update it, and that I would have to pay. Believe me, I didn’t want to add even ten bucks to the $2000 I had already spent today. I called Apple to see if I needed to still pay for it, and three employees told me I did (well, actually, one person told me that it was absolutely a free upgrade, until I told her that I already had iTunes 7.7: she didn’t know the difference).

So, I resigned myself to purchase the upgrade. But there is a happy ending, for me. It turns out that by upgrading my wife’s iPod Touch this weekend using my account iTunes said that I had already purchased it and could download it for free. So, if you have two iPod Touches, then you can possibly get one updated for free, otherwise, add another $10 to your iPod Touch App budget.

The even better news out of this whole story is that I bought the Mac and iPod Touch on Monday, and the rebate showed up in the mail today! In just five business days Apple turned around a rebate and had the check at my house. Anyone who has used a rebate before knows that they usually come at a time when the money is a nice surprise. Way to go Apple.

Apple is on a software-release roll. Yesterday they released Leopard 10.5.2 and today they have released Aperture 2.

Aperture is Apple’s pro-level photograph editing and management software that has been picking up a lot of steam in the past couple of years.

There are over 100 new features in Aperture 2, some of which are:

• Updated user interface
• Quick preview mode
• Larger project management
• .Mac Web Gallery integration
• Tethered shooting support
• Duplicate detection

You can see the full list of updates here.

Also worth noting is the price as now dropped from $299 to just $199 for a full version and $99 to upgrade.