Mac

AnandTech review of the new Mac Pro

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This is the review I’ve been waiting for. When I am in the market for a new camera, I always make my way to dpreview.com. Anand Lal Shimpi brings the same level of geeky goodness to his reviews.

Hands on with the new Mac Pro

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David Pierce gives a nice little tour of Apple’s newest superstar.

It cuts a striking figure, despite its relatively small stature. It’s also incredibly dense, far heavier than I expected. Ten inches tall, 6 inches around, and about weighing in at around 11 pounds, it’s definitely meant to be held by its bottom instead of its top lip.

Mac Pro is now live on Apple site

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I think I’m more excited about the Mac Pro than I was about the iPad Air. Both the base and high end models show US shipping dates of December 30th.

Copy text from the Finder’s Quick Look preview

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If you select a file in the Finder, then hit the space bar, the Finder will pop up a window displaying the contents of the file, known as a Quick Look preview. Not every app supports Quick Look, but most do.

By default, the Finder does not allow you to copy text from a Quick Look. Turns out there’s a setting you can tweak to enable text copy.

The real story behind tablet market share reporting

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This is some incredible compelling analysis. I would urge anyone interested in the methodology behind PC/tablet/phone market share “reporting” (and I do use that term loosely) to read this top-to-bottom.

Things start off with a bit of history.

Following a routine that began in the 1990s, Gartner and IDC spent the 2000s noting that Apple’s Mac market share was virtually irrelevant, afloat in an ocean of PC sales without giving much regard to the fact that Apple enjoyed very high share in some market segments (such as education and graphic design) and essentially none in others (such as enterprise sales, kiosks and cash registers).

Then came the iPod, then the iPhone, then the iPad, with Mac sales rising as the Mac-iOS ecosystem evolved and expanded.

And that’s when this article really gets interesting. In a nutshell, a case is made that IDC, Gartner, and Strategy Analytics (the big three) set out to torpedo Apple’s perceived market share.

There’s little mystery of who shot down the iPad’s market share or what weapon they’re using: all three major market research firms rapidly fire off headline bullets clearly aimed at wounding the perception of Apple’s tablet. One can, generally, only speculate about why this is occurring.

However, Strategy Analytics has offered some unusual transparency regarding its motive for carving out a very specific market and then stuffing the pie chart with “tier two” volume to the point where the world’s best selling tablet is crushed down into an embarrassing statistical sliver of shrinking “share.”

Read the article. Fantastic.

Review of new Retina MacBook Pro

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The new MacBook Pro could easily be mistaken for its predecessor. That said, there are definitely some significant differences.

Like the Airs, the Retina MacBook Pro has given up its wired Ethernet port, but it comes with a few others to help earn it that “Pro” label. In addition to two USB 3.0 ports, an SD card reader, and a combination headphone/input jack, it includes a full-size HDMI port and two Thunderbolt ports that power users can count on to get their wired Ethernet and FireWire ports back if they really need them.

These are the first Macs shipping with Thunderbolt 2 ports. Great if you plan on buying a 4K display.

Those two ports have been upgraded to Thunderbolt 2 courtesy of Intel’s DSL5520 controller, and this is the first shipping Mac that uses the new version of the high-speed interface. The controller includes four Thunderbolt channels, which can provide data bandwidth of up to 20Gbps to each port (or 10Gbps per channel).

The original Thunderbolt used four 10Gbps channels too, but they were separated differently—the controllers provided two sets of 10Gbps channels, and the new ones provide one set of 20Gbps channels. Thunderbolt 2 additionally adds support for the DisplayPort 1.2 spec, which is necessary to support 4K output, though according to Apple’s spec sheet each Thunderbolt port can only support a single 2560×1600 display at once (for a total of three displays, including the laptop’s). The Retina MacBook Pro provides 4K video output through HDMI—that port supports 3840×2160 displays at 30Hz and 4096×2160 displays at 24Hz.

The biggest issue is the Retina display. Most of the mainstream apps support retina graphics, but outside that core, there are many that do not. Most web sites fit that latter category as well.

The biggest problem at this point is actually the Web itself. Having Chrome, Firefox, and Safari Retina-optimized means that text looks smooth and sharp regardless of the browser you’re using, but most sites still use lower-resolution images that look soft and vaguely blurry on a Retina screen. This situation should continue to improve now that high-density displays are proliferating in Windows laptops and Web standards are catching up, but for now browsing is still the least consistent thing about using a Retina Mac.

Lots more good stuff in this review.

If you are considering the highest-end Retina MacBook Pro, you might want to take a read of this review from The Verge.

Thoughts on the Apple Event

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I’ve been asked quite a few times today which Apple announcement I thought was the biggest—the blockbuster release that people would be talking about for days and weeks to come. That’s actually a very difficult question to answer, given the scope of the announcements. […]

Apple announces special event for Oct 22

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Apple on Tuesday announced a special event for October 22. The event will be held at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco and will begin at 10:00 am PT.

It is widely expected that Apple will update its iPad and iPad mini products during the event, although we could see the introduction of OS X Mavericks and other Mac products as well.

Apple updates iMac

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Apple on Tuesday released an update to its iMac desktop computer. In the past, I may have said “Apple’s consumer desktop,” and while it technically is, these are powerful computers.

According to Apple, the entry-level 21.5-inch iMac features a 2.7GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 processor and new Iris Pro integrated graphics. The high-end 21.5-inch model and both 27-inch models feature quad-core Intel Core i5 processors up to 3.4GHz and NVIDIA GeForce 700 series graphics with twice the video memory and up to 40 percent faster performance than the previous generation.

If you want a bit more power, you can upgrade to the quad-core Intel Core i7 processors up to 3.5GHz and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M series graphics with up to 4GB of video memory.

iMac also now supports next generation 802.11ac Wi-Fi.

Apple said the iMac comes standard with 8GB of memory and a 1TB hard drive—that is configurable up to 32GB of memory and up to a 3TB hard drive. iMac also comes with two Thunderbolt and four USB 3.0 ports for connecting to external storage and other high performance peripherals.

The incredible horsepower under the iPhone 5S hood

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The iPhone 5S ships is based on the Apple’s own 64-bit ARM A7 System on a Chip (SoC). This is a major step up in raw processing power.

Biometric authentication requires a significant amount of CPU horsepower to pull off without being sluggish, as would strong end-to-end VPN encryption, both of which are likely necessary for the iPhone to continue to attract corporate attention.

The inclusion of so much horsepower is more than just a nice win for the iPhone line. It’s also a win for the next iPad, as well as a sign that iOS platforms are stepping up in class, rivaling desktop machines and game consoles. More fodder for the folks who champion the opinion that we’ll someday see a convergence of the iOS and Mac OS X platforms. Personally, I don’t see that happening any time soon. I love my MacBook Pro and can’t imagine using my iPad or iPhone in the same way. But I do see the possibility of that changing over time.

Google Chromecast: No thanks

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Dan Nosowitz for Popular Science:

The Apple TV costs $95 on Amazon–a lot more money, sure. But you get a lot more for your money (great interface, stellar hardware, support for the enormously popular Apple store, the combination of apps and a slinging feature), and it’s also important to remember that these gadgets can help you get rid of cable entirely. An Apple TV costs about as much as one month’s worth of cable. Suck it up, guys. It’s not that expensive.

This isn’t to say that I’m not excited by Chromecast; I think slinging is exceptionally cool, and I think it’s great that this hardware so cheap and small. But I don’t necessarily think that a device that does exclusively slinging, no matter how cheap it is, is a viable option for most people. It’s best as part of a larger whole.

I agree with Dan. Google basically implemented Apple’s AirPlay, but that’s all Chromecast does. People expect more from an entertainment device in their home and this doesn’t give it to them. That’s not to say Google won’t sell a lot of them—they will, but that initial interest will fade because it doesn’t solve the problem we have with cable TV using a simplistic solution that everyone can use.

Apple TV’s market share

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Interesting chart from Philip Elmer-Dewitt. So Apple’s hobby device is doing better than most people thought. Roku is doing very well too, but they make some great products.

A week with Mavericks

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Ben Bajarin has some thoughts on Mavericks after spending a week with the forthcoming OS X revision.

Mavericks Finder Tags

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Many of the problems with common folder-based hierarchies are solved by the use of tags in the sense that no document has a single location with which it is associated. Instead, tags allow documents to exist in any number of locations based on its specific categorizations.

This is a very good point and one I didn’t bring up in my first look of Mavericks.

First Look: OS X Mavericks

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After Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference ended, Apple supplied me with a 13-inch MacBook Pro and a copy of OS X Mavericks to evaluate and post my thoughts on The Loop. The version of Mavericks I tested was newer than the one released at WWDC, but not as new as the one released on Monday.

What makes a good QA person

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Brent Simmons on his QA person Nick:

Nick does excellent work.

Which means that when I’m busy and have a lot to do, I curse his name, the air he breathes, and everybody who’s ever been nice to him. I suspect his heart is black and terrible and full of hatred toward me personally.

Which is just to say, again: Nick does excellent work.

Perfect.

All the apps have been written

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I want to take a time machine back to when I was 20 and Gibbs-slap myself… hard.

A great story from Kevin Hoctor about writing software and a wonderful bit of advice for writing an app.

Samsung closing desktop business

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It makes sense for Samsung — the money is in the mobile markets and with the exception of the Mac Pro, nobody has really innovated in the desktop space in a long time.

Guy English on the new Mac Pro

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A lot of people are probably going through this same type of thinking. Of course, there are others that will just grab the Mac Pro as soon as it’s released.