Erroneous MacBook Pro Mock-Up Courtesy Ars Technica
This has been a gangbuster summer for Apple. First came the iPhone 3G announcement in June, alongside OS X iPhone 2.0 with the AppStore, Mobile Me, and HD video in iTunes, then came a new round of incremental but strong new iPods, and amazing news about a major uptick in Mac sales during a down economy. In spite of some software issues, Apple is coming out with huge new gains in multiple markets and is healthier than just about any other tech company.
And yet, unless Apple rolls out rumored new Macs next Tuesday, all of that will start to look suspect. To find out why, click through!The latest scuttlebutt holds that, going on three months after every other computer company on the planet has introduced laptops based on the Montevina platform from Intel, Apple will finally bring out updated MacBooks regular and Pro on Tuesday, Sept. 23. These are faster, lower-power, and mature chips. And they’re really late.
There are plenty of good reasons why Apple didn’t bring out new MacBooks this summer. The iPhone is Apple’s most important single initiative right now. Then bringing out new iPods as Back to School ended was the top priority, which Apple tackled last week. Get a nice two-week buffer, and you have Tuesday. The company’s biggest annual updates are wrapped up, and now it’s high time for Apple to maintain its core business. If, for some reason, Apple can’t deliver, I’m really concerned.
That’s because waiting until two weeks after new iPods makes sense. It’s planned marketing to maximize impact of each launch. Being later than that suggests a resource challenge that Apple isn’t prepared to meet, which raises major questions about the sustainability of the company’s long boom of late. We’ve seen this before. The original iPhone’s software needed so much work that lots of developers were pulled off of Mac OS X Leopard in order to make the device ship on time. And when Leopard emerged, it was noticeably lacking in the polish Apple typically delivers.
But that was just software — Apple’s hardware outside of handhelds was still shipping on time and on the cutting edge. If hardware is getting slowed down, too, it starts to look like Apple is growing to quickly to maintain its core business as it ought to. And that couldn’t happen at a worse time. Mac sales are through the roof right now. Apple is a bigger and bigger force in computers. And Apple’s not keeping pace, even though they’re working off of the same chips as the rest of the market. Over the long term, that could prove poisonous to the brand.
Written by Pete Mortensen on September 19th, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on Apple and Macintosh and Rumors.
Apple released the OS X 10.5.5 update in the US on Monday afternoon to immediate acclaim as an all-out assault on bugs. Despite initial skepticism, even TUAW, which was first to the tape, acknowledged the release notes are “quite detailed.”
Gizmodo provided a laundry list of items addresed in the update, with MacWorld shortly touting 30 bugs fixed in the new software. Not six hours later, ComputerWorld upped the ante to 70 bugs fixed.
Security experts are finally satisfied the “Dan Kaminski exploit,” referring to the researcher who disclosed a critical flaw in DNS that made it much easier than originally thought to “poison” the cache of DNS servers, or insert bogus information into the Internet’s routing infrastructure, has been fixed.
Apple also updated Mac OS X’s implementation of BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain), the open-source DNS software maintained by the Internet Software Consortium (ISC), to keep it current with an early-August version that ISC released to solve performance issues that had shipped in the original fix for Kaminsky’s vulnerability.
The update also fixes a number of non-security flaws, according to the release notes. iCal and Mail both received more than half a dozen fixes, Time Machine got slapped around a bit, and MobileMe even came in for some love.
See the complete list of adjustments after the jump. (more…)
Written by Lonnie Lazar on September 16th, 2008 with no comments.
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A film that looks at the evolution and culture surrounding the Macintosh has been selected to the shortlist of the 2008 Naperville Independent Film Festival which takes place next week.
This is the first time the film, a documentary called, ‘Welcome to Machintosh’, has been screened in the US since new interview footage with original Apple co-founder Ron Wayne was added to the movie. Click here to watch the trailer on YouTube.
That exclusive interview was added just before the movie’s European premiere at the Globians Documentary Film Festival in August. The documentary mixes history, criticism and Apple idolatory into an exploration of the early years of Apple as seen through the eyes of Apple employees, engineers, resellers and supporters.
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Written by Jonny Evans on September 15th, 2008 with no comments.
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The cult of Mac is growing as Apple emerges as the key computer for US consumers, amongst which it is now the fourth-ranked computer manufacturer, according to new research from MetaFacts.
Brand loyalty, the report claims, is at an all-time high with Apple’s chain of retail stores pulling customers through the doors - and selling Macs, MacBooks, MacBook Airs and MacBook Pros in particular, the researchers claim in their latest Apple Profile Report 2008.
It gets better, “Like the camel slipping its nose under the tent, Apple is reaching into American households as the second or third Home PC,” said Dan Ness, Principal Analyst at MetaFacts. “Where Apple shines is
as the third PC, ranking fifth with 8 per cent of third Home PCs, and ranking fourth in notebook PCs, also at 8 per cent of the installed base.”
And whether that Mac is a first, second or third home computer, what households do with their machine is very different. They’re used to make websites, create graphics and “personal activities”, the report explains - probably while the Windows box gets used for checking email, playing games, and cranking up peoples scores in MMORPG games online. Or something.
Mac users are public, too, this report explains. Seems 21 per cent of Macs are used in public - double the public usage of your WIndows machine - and potentially marking Apple’s ascendancy as a laptop maker.
“If you look around at a Starbucks or cybercafé, you might think the whole world’s gone to Apple,” said Ness, “Mac users are very active and use their notebooks in more locations than Windows notebook users.”
Wait, there’s more - brand loyalty, “More than four in five (81%) of households with Apple as their primary Home PC plan to buy the same brand - Apple - for their next Home PC,” said Ness.
All this action in the consumer market, is it any surprise that the long tail effect Apple executives hoped for four or five years ago when they began visualising it has now begun taking place?
The company gets put down a lot for not focusing sufficient attention on the enterprise markets. Perhaps it didn’t - once - but for the last few years of Apple market expansion, the company’s executives have known that consumer demand would eventually become an enterprise market driver.
Think about it - do you recall when you moved jobs and were once excited about the technology you got to use because it would be better than what you could afford at home? Nowadays when you start a new job its not uncommon to live in abject fear (OK, slight trepidation) of the dated system you’ll end up working with…it’s not at all uncommon for workplace technology to be less advanced than the tech company workers have at home.
And as Apple’s consumer market share grows, so too does the demand made on enterprises to offer workers the equipment they are already familiar with.
And that’s the long tail Apple execs set in motion with the iMac in 1998.
Written by Jonny Evans on September 11th, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on Apple and Hardware and Macintosh and News Coverage.
Writer Scott Gilbertson has a very cool Mac netbook that cost him only $550.
It’s got a slick black case, weighs nothing, gets hours of battery life and runs Leopard, the latest version of Mac OS X. It’s not a MacBook Air.
It’s a hacked EeePC — a tiny liliputer , as they’re now called, fresh from Asus, a Tawainese manufacturer best known for PC motherboards.
Gilbertson’s netbook is the device Mac fans have wanted for years: A low-cost cousin to the beautiful but pricey MacBook Air.
It runs like a champ but has a couple of quirks (one big one) and may not be strictly legal, though Apple’s never going to prosecute unless these machines are sold commercially. Hit the jump for details.
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Written by Leander Kahney on September 6th, 2008 with no comments.
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