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Apple Updates iMac, iLife, .Mac
Apple just announced new iMacs. They are aluminum and come in 20" (two models) and 24". There's a new view called "Events" in iPhoto that should make it easier to deal with large photo libraries. Apple's .Mac service is enhanced with .Mac Web Gallery, which integrates with the new iTunes and also the iPhone. It's a Web 2.0 app now. And iMovie is being replaced by a completely new app of the same name. Steve Jobs claimed that with it you can put together a 5-minute movie in 30 minutes, and he demo'ed that from the stage. iWeb, iDVD, and GarageBand get new features too. And .Mac subscribers get 10 GB of storage. Here is Engadget's blow-by-blow coverage, and Wired's.
In case someone's wondering, the Mac mini will be refreshed today. This was mentioned during their Q & A. But there was no mention of any specs.
The new iMacs are underneath the black cloth. Steve just covered them up after he showed them off.
While I don't disagree with you for the most part, they have opened up lately.
Check out Newegg and Microcenter. You can buy Macs at both places. Dunno if there are others, I don't go looking to buy Macs typically.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
Yeah. I have a Macbook pro, almost a $3000 computer; and the keyboard is terrible. As is the one-button trackpad. I love OSX, but I'm afraid the physical design of the Mac keyboards is just pitiful, totally focused on looks and not usability. I've got a full-size Mac keyboard at my desktop on my Mac Mini, that's a much better keyboard — full numeric keypad, better key travel — but it still isn't even close to the best keyboards out there which have positive tactile feedback, illumination (though my MBP has KB illumination, which I appreciate), and ergonomic curves. Hey, but my Mac keyboard is white. [cough].
This is compounded by the OS's taking over all the function keys. For a *nix-based OS, this is a pretty inconvenient and poorly thought-out choice. And it isn't all that easy to get the FKeys to behave properly in a terminal; I'm not sure why, but some keys just don't want to come "unstuck" from the OS.
Oh well. There are some third-party Mac keyboards out there already; hopefully this latest back-to-the-chiclet-past effort from Apple will encourage others to make some really good Mac keyboards.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If you want the same security, stability, and lack of choice in software you had on your Mac, you can run Linux!
But here's the best part...
We don't have to beg for anything! In fact, they beg us to buy their products, because PC manufacturers actually have something called "competition"! What a novel concept!
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
And a lot of people, on the other hand, love laptop keyboards in general for the very reasons you listed. Furthermore, a lot of people spend much of their young life with a laptop as their primary rig, so they're actually more used to it than a traditional keyboard. It's kind of a moot point. Some people will be excited by the keyboards. Some people will hate them. And for many, the keyboard will not have a large net effect on their purchasing decisions.
I do give them props for doing something different (or, if it's been done already, making it standard). I just wish they'd also have an option which brings ergonomics into play, even if it might end up looking like Gaudi made it.
Jobs talks fast. Much info to convey, little time. Drop most possible words w/o losing meaning. Called "liveblogging".
Unless, of course, you can read/write stenographer's shorthand. Otherwise, I see no other way of of relaying the Stevenote, given that live audio and video wasn't an option.
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein
Fry's Electronics, located all over Dallas and other regions of Texas sells macs and ipods of every type and variety. I believe the agreement here is that they stick with prices which are dictated by apple. No more, no less than exactly what Apple dictates. And I don't believe they can be serviced in the stores PC service department, but do offer the Apple Care program.
Well, first, Apple isn't a monopoly. They have viable competitors in every market in which they compete, and insofar as that is the case, the behaviors you describe (which are called "vertical integration", or "anti-competitive practices" if and only if you already have a monopoly) aren't "brutal" so much as "a business and design choice".
They destroyed the Mac clone market and reseller market because those things were destroying Apple. At that time (the late 90's), Linux wasn't nearly as mature or widely-adopted as it is today and the destruction of Apple would have, as far as almost everyone could predict, led to a total Microsoft monopoly. Microsoft was already starting to displace commercial UNIX in some segments. Other companies had licenses to manufacture Apple hardware designs with Apple software, including the Apple ROM that (at the time) was necessary for the OS to run. Those license payments weren't enough to allow Apple to continue existing and developing their OS, so Apple refused to extend those licenses to future technology (the CHRP common hardware platform, Mac OS 8) and purchased back the licenses it had already granted.
The real question is whether it's acceptable to sell integrated systems that are capable of working together above and beyond the interoperability offered by open standards. When I look across the fence at the hardware support issues Linux and Windows are struggling with, I'm pretty happy with how green the grass is over here. And if I wasn't, I'm still perfectly able to get a new OS and new hardware. That's the difference between a monopoly and a competitor who offers a significantly different solution.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
There is also a new updated mini also with Core 2 duo processor, however it seems to only have firewire 400, not firewire 800.
http://www.apple.com/macmini/specs.html
I'm waiting for Leopard in october, so I hope to see if the Core-2-Duo processor bugs will be problematic with the updated mini before I buy it.
'stuck with a g4' kl
with all the RAM you get in normal PCs now days (4gigabytes not unusual) is this not a little strange?
AFAIK, Window's PC manaufacturers usually put in 1 GB now with an option to get 2 GB or more. Usually 2GB costs you an extra $100-200 and 4GB cost you an extra arm, leg, and testicle.
Even if you give up a 'nad for the 4GB, Windows PC's will only use 3 GB when 4 GB is installed unless you're willing to do a lot of extra configuration and you buy the correct hardware. We got a bunch of new Dells at work a couple months ago. All of them came with 4 GB. But when you boot into Windows XP Pro, only 3 GB is visible. I tried all the hacks to get more -- with certain MB and hardware configs, it is possible to get up to 3.5GB with a bit of hacking your OS configuration but 3GB is the most you can get unless you know all your hardware components will memory map into the top 0.5 GB (and unfortunately the Dells we got only do 3GB on 32-bit Windows). There is no way to get an ACTUAL USABLE 4GB in Windows without going to one of the 64-bit versions of Windows and with all the memory and driver issues there, you're not gaining anything on a consumer machine.
Yeah. I have a Macbook pro, almost a $3000 computer; and the keyboard is terrible.
Uhm. You're talking about different keyboards. The MacBook Pro has a "normal" notebook keyboard, while the MacBook (without Pro) has the "new style" keyboard, which is very similar to the one being used in this new Apple keyboard, from the looks of it.
Idrive will give you 150G of storage for $49.95/year
http://www.idrive.com/pricing.htm
Other than that, the subject of this post answers any remaining salient points you made. The rest are mere trolling drivel.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Don't forget, you can download a free trial here: http://www.apple.com/iwork/trial/
Have you considered OS X with X11 and KDE?
If you want both Aqua/OS X & KDE, that's the way to go, as it means nearly zero overhead for your Mac compared to some virtualisation or dual-boot solution. Don't forget that OS X is a full-blown Unix (bash Terminal, GNU Toolkit and all) that can easyly provide all the Linux goodies you want. It's even got this OSS project called Fink which offers a full apt-get (as in Debian Package Management) enviroment including a usefull GUI tool (Fink Commander) to operate it. Here's a post on KDE support in Fink
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I've been using Vmware Fusion + Ubuntu for about 2 months and it seems very stable, even with some pretty intensive applications (Matlab number crunching). There was a USB issue, but it was fixed before I even figured out there was a problem. The only thing I haven't been able to get working is getting a folder to sharing folders between OS X and Ubuntu, but I haven't tried very hard.
iTunes Compatible Players
Chances are that most USB MP3 players will work with iTunes if they follow the standards set for such devices. If you have an MP3 player give it a try and see if it works with iTunes, it probably will.
You might want to do a bit more research the next time you make false, blanket statements like that.
Sapere aude!
They did update the Mini. As of today, the only 32-bit computer that Apple's selling is the iPhone.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Unless everyone you work for and with does the same, I doubt it. There are a few things a file-translator just can't quite nail when you're importing someone else's stuff. (I know Apple's got built-in exporters to Office, but I've learned not to put 100% faith in those either.) Come on now. Office 2008 for Mac will be dropping VBA macro support so even the mac version of Office will not be compatible with Office for Windows. Your best bet for compatibility in a macro heavy environment would be Neo Office or Open Office as they support Office 2007 formats and VBA macros. Macros aside, previous versions of Office for Mac were not 100% compatible with their windows counterparts.
If iWork provide higher compatibility (outside of macros), then that should be good enough for most people.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Wireless versions of the new keyboard (without USB ports) and the mighty mouse are available for about $150 total. See the Apple Store for details.
They've got wireless and wired versions. The wireless ones look even MORE like Macbook keyboards.
I wonder how well it will do against InDesign because, both previous versions of Pages have produced horrendous PDFs that only print well on newer local printers from within Preview when using transparency. Transparency lets you fade things in and out and do drop shadows. Previous versions would befuddle some printers (not to mention RIPS or DocuTech machines) because of the way Pages (and Apple PDF subsystem?) poorly embeds fonts so that a font can be embedded multiple times, or is missing some critical information. Previous version would even show all these problems in this simple test: use several OpenType Adobe fonts in various sizes--fonts not installed by default--a drop shadow, and transparency somewhere, then have Staples print your document. Making the same document in InDesign--even with incorrect PDF settings on export--would yield a much more predictable, and usually accurate printout.
This isn't much of a problem because, well, Pages is for those who want to print at home. But, this becomes problematic in situations where you need to print documents in other places. One must find what the target printer and program (Adobe Reader vs. Preview) can handle, and one can even forget submitting such documents to most boutique online presses because most reject PDFs made with the Apple subsystem.
If the PDF export is much improved, I will be very happy because I love the simplicity of Pages. (For promo documents, I often create mockups in Pages, then finalize the work in InDesign.)
In my experience Pages loads faster than Word and is much more responsive and uses a lot fewer resources than Word. I just opened a .doc file in both programs and it took Word approximately 50% more time to open it and it is consuming twice as much RAM. When opening a native file for each program, Pages loads about 300% faster than Word.
You can claim both are bloated, but one is clearly better than the other. What word processor would you consider to be not bloated?
They're talking a *MacBook* keyboard, not a MBP - the two are fundamentally different. I prefer the MBP keyboard to the MB's myself.
If Bill Gates had a dime for every time a Windows box crashed...oh, wait a minute - he already does.
They did update the Mini. As of today, the only 32-bit computer that Apple's selling is the iPhone.
*COUGH*AppleTV*COUGH*
No.
With the tremendous amount of physical real estate that the button takes up, there's no reason why splitting it into two would make things worse for virtually any user.I take it you've never done phone support, then. In my opinion, the second mouse button is one of the single worst physical interfaces ever invented for computers. Your main input device has two unlabelled buttons which can only be discerned by whether they are on the right or on the left of the device? This is just stupid. An astonishing number of people aren't even capable of reliably telling you which side right is, and which side left is (as I find out time and time again when telling somebody where to drive - "to the right. no, the other right").
Not to mention the bad influence the right mouse button has on UI design.
I've been using the two-button "right click" for nearly a year now and do it instinctively, but still think that a right button would be significantly more effective, and less limiting (I do occasionally need right-click+drag, or right-click+very very quick move)Yes, as I've said, it would be, but it would still make it worse for the majority of all users.