July 29, 2011
Macworld:
“As you might expect, the slower processor on the base 11-inch model provided more room for overall performance gains than the slightly faster 13-inch model. So here’s what happens when you spend $150 to upgrade the 11-inch MacBook Air to the Core i7 processor: Our Cinebench CPU and file compression tests ran 21 percent faster, our iTunes encode went 19 percent faster, and our HandBrake test went 14 percent faster.”
Choosing a Configure-to-Order (CTO) upgrade with the Core i7 processor certain offers you a measurable improvement in overall performance, but there’s a significant cost increase too. Take a close look at Macworld’s benchmarks to find out if it’s worth it.
Softpress has released an update to its Web design software Freeway. Version 5.6, a free update for version 5.5 users, is ready for download for both Freeway Express and Freeway Pro. (more…)
As reported on Thursday by 9to5Mac, AT&T on Friday confirmed plans to throttle the data transfer speeds of smartphone users still on “unlimited” data plans. (more…)
Matt Richman:
I think Apple will sell 36.89 million iPads during the first and second quarters of next year. If I’m right, then Apple will sell 100 million iPads in 2.25 years — 55% faster than it took the iPhone, and 144% faster than the iPod.
Apple’s sales are crazy these days. They are dominating every market they enter.
Washington Post:
The same goes for a myriad of mobilized gestures that can get confusing, even for power users. Do I use the three-finger double-tap or the two-finger double-tap to zoom? (It’s the latter — a three-finger double-tap pulls up the dictionary.) After playing around with the system for a while, I found myself regularly going back to System Preferences to disable new touchpad features because I simply couldn’t keep them straight.
Hayley Tsukayama is going through some of the same things I did with Lion. I turned off “natural” scrolling too, but turned it back on and forced myself to use it for week. It’s making more sense to me now, so I’m leaving it on. This is a good overview of how some of Lion’s changes affect how we interact with the OS.
Macworld:
“…if you haven’t yet gotten around to upgrading to iLife ’11, buying a new Mac mini or MacBook Air essentially gets you iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand for all your Macs running OS X 10.6.6 or later (since you need at least that version of Snow Leopard to run the Mac App Store). And this isn’t sneaky or dishonest—it’s right there in the Mac App Store’s software license.”
It’s efforts like this that make it plain to see that Apple is very intent on eliminating physical software distribution as much as it can – at least for its own products – and emphasizing the Mac App Store as the preferred delivery method for its users.
Florian Mueller at FOSS Patents:
There was some speculation on Twitter about it in light of the fact that I’m vocal about the intellectual property issues facing Android and WebM — just like I’m vocal about issues involving and concerning various other companies. All of my concerns are based on my convictions, and such concerns have repeatedly been proven right. It’s certainly not implausible at all that someone who disagrees with me (who could be employed by whichever company) might have attempted to hack my account and thereby triggered the suspension of my account and all of my Google services, including this blog. Since I frequently change my password and use very long (in this case, more than 40 characters) and safe (a random mix of lower-case letters, upper-case letters, numbers and symbols) passwords, brute-force algorithms that try out huge numbers of passwords in a short period of time wouldn’t realistically succeed in actually getting access. However, it appears that such activity then triggers a suspension.
Good to have Florian back online. He gives some of the best patent perspective on the Web.
Adobe’s John Nack:
Using an Android tablet for creative work? Let’s talk.If you use an Android tablet and use it (or would like to use it) for creative imaging, photography, etc., please drop me a line. We can’t let the iPad kids have all the fun. 🙂
There was no doubt that it was going to happen, but speaking for the iPad kids, we will still have more fun.
Matt Rosoff:
A research firm posted an IQ test on its Web site and then compiled the results from more than 100,000 users. It found that there was no substantial difference between users of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. But Internet Explorer users had IQs below average.
Yes IQ tests are kind of stupid, but I couldn’t pass this up.
AppleInsider:
New figures from the U.S. Treasury Department indicate that the government has a total operating cash balance of $73.768 billion, less than Apple’s own war chest of $75.876 billion.
Steve is just going to buy his own galaxy and make his products there.
July 28, 2011
Market research firm IDC released its latest phone data, which shows the worldwide mobile phone market grew 11.3 percent in the second quarter of 2011. This growth was, in part, due to Apple, which more than doubled its market share over this time last year. (more…)
9to5 Mac:
A new change for AT&T Wireless’ Unlimited Data subscribers will soon be taking place. Rumored to be starting in the first week of October, we’ve heard that AT&T will start throttling the data speeds of the network’s top data hogs. As Verizon (PDF) and Virgin have recently done, AT&T will be adopting a similar plan to try to curb the problem of data congestion and overall network issues that have hurt its 3G network’s performance since the onset of the iPhone.
It doesn’t come as a big surprise that AT&T would start doing this, but I can’t figure out how people use 2GB-4GB of data a month. This is the rumored limit before throttling will start. I know this for sure — if that’s the limit I have to reach, I’ll never have to worry about throttling.
Spiderweb Software has announced the forthcoming release of Avernum: Escape from the Pit, a reboot of their popular “classic”-style role playing game series. The game is coming to Mac OS X, Windows and iPad. (more…)
ZDNet:
“But the cut in price, while welcome, still fails to solve the single most fundamental issue with the 3DS as of July 2011: There are no damn games. The last legitimate hit was The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time 3D, but even that wasn’t enough to move a sizable number of consoles. Throughout the history of game consoles, one thing has remained true above all others: A game console without games is no game console at all.”
Ricardo Bilton’s absolutely right. A fair number of Apple pundits have used the price cut to crow about how this is a sign that Apple is superior to Nintendo, and that the iPad and iPhone are better gaming systems – that’s misguided, at best. The 3DS is a fine game system in terms of hardware, but Nintendo’s major failure here has been to get a good library together out the gate. And that’s somewhere Apple has succeeded greatly – in getting together a huge software ecosystem for its iOS hardware.
Groove Coaster is a cool new game from Square Enix subsidiary Taito. The game is available until August 7, 2011 for 99 cents – after that it goes up to $2.99. (more…)
Time:
Once upon a time, products that were labeled as betas were indeed undergoing beta testing. They were works in progress, and nobody dreamed of sharing them with the general public. The Internet changed that by making it easy to distribute pre-releases to millions of people. And then Google rendered the “beta” moniker largely meaningless by applying it indefinitely to massively popular services such as Gmail. (The company has since largely backed away from beta gimmickry — among other reasons, it discovered that big corporate customers aren’t so excited by products that claim to be unfinished.)
Making products “just work” has been the secret to Apple’s success over the last decade.
Macworld:
Nearly nine of 10 Hulu subscribers watch streaming TV shows and movies on a computer, but only 42 percent of Netflix users do, according to a recent Nielsen survey. And while nearly three-fourths of Hulu subscribers watch mostly TV shows, only 11 percent of Netflix users say the same.
Again, I will say it — I love Netflix.
Peter Kirn:
The most apparent change is a new user interface with dockable, tabbed panels. The design borrows heavily from Microsoft’s Office Ribbon, though a more subdued appearance makes it look just as comfortable on the Mac. My guess is that power users may just hide the whole thing and stick to keyboard shortcuts, but it should do wonders for discoverability for new users or more casual users not comfortable with that.
I don’t know how to read music and probably never will, so I’ll leave this one to Peter, who I respect a lot.
Oomph on Thursday released a new version of Sidekick (formerly Network Location), with a new user interface and many other features that will automatically change your Mac’s settings based on your location. (more…)
A new report released by Nielsen on Thursday shows that Apple is the top smartphone manufacturer in the United States. (more…)
July 27, 2011
I was talking to a friend today about my Taylor guitar and after raving about how good it is, he’s going to get one. This is the best acoustic guitar I’ve ever played.
The Next Web:
“The iPad iPlayer app launched in the UK in February. The US, Canadian and Australian launches will follow before the year’s end. For now, users in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, The Republic of Ireland, The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland will be able to access the app.”
iPlayer is BBC’s video-on-demand service; it’ll be good news for anglophiles and fans of BBC’s program(me)s once it’s available in former colonies like the US, Canada and Australia.
Shawn King:
One of the biggest frustrations I have is seeing so much bad, erroneous, poorly written and just plain “woolly-headed” information that often passes for news in the Mac Community. Any number of rumor sites have sprung up, any number of “journalists” pontificate, any number of online “sources” spew tidbits of information out to the masses, journalistic and otherwise, who gobble it up whole with no thought to whether it’s even true.
Your Mac Life host Shawn King has a new project he’s calling “Stupid Apple Rumors.” King’s goal is track Apple rumors and record, over time, how accurate the rumor is. That’s not all — he will also track how accurate a particular site and individual authors are in reporting rumors. To top it off, King has a section for sites that “ride the coattails” of a story. In other words, sites that parrot a rumor without adding anything to the story.
This, my friends, is going to be interesting.
Bloomberg:
Macs that have Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) graphics processing units have an implied license to the patents, the judge said. Gildea found that two other S3 patents were invalid, as were aspects of the two patents found to be infringed.
Bloomberg says OS X infringes on patents “related to graphics chips.” Is that only Nvidia graphics, because all of Apple’s computers have switched to either Intel or AMD graphics chips.
With the release of the latest 13-inch MacBook, Apple has once again reduced the number of factors users have to consider when purchasing a laptop computer. (more…)
Macworld:
“The results for the new $999 entry-level 11-inch MacBook Air with a 1.6GHz Core i5 processor, 2GB of RAM, 64GB flash storage, and the integrated Intel HD Graphics 3000 (which is found across the new MacBook Air lineup), show the system to be more than twice as fast at many processing tasks than the previous entry-level 11-inch MacBook Air with a 1.4GHz Core 2 Duo processor.”
Macworld found the new MacBook Airs – which come equipped with Intel integrated graphics – perform slower on graphics-intensive tests than last year’s models, which used speedier integrated graphics from Nvidia. But performance tests that emphasize the CPU were quite speedier, across the board.
IndustryGamers:
“We [EA] have a new hardware platform and we’re putting out software every 90 days. Our fastest growing platform is the iPad right now and that didn’t exist 18 months ago.”
The comment comes from Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello. He noted that in 2000, 80 percent of the game industry’s revenue came from consoles; in 2011, it’s 40 percent. That’s a major change, and Apple is center-stage in that transformation.
(Hat tip: TouchArcade)
John Paczkowski:
Now, with new MacBook Airs and Mac minis on the shelves and the Mac App Store serving up one million downloads of Lion in a single day, Apple is poised to reap the benefits of what up until last week was pent-up demand for those products, particularly the MacBook Air. According to Barclays analyst Ben Reitzes, Apple’s latest ultraslim laptops will give the company a nice little financial bump for the remainder of the year.
I agree. Rumors of the new MacBook Air were around for many weeks before they were released and I think people held off buying because of that. Couple that with the release of Lion and the flood gates opened on release day.
July 26, 2011
Passware, a computer forensics and password discovery company, on Tuesday said it discovered a way to get passwords from a Mac running OS X Lion. However, it may not be as dire as it seems. (more…)
Bloomeberg:
HTC Corp., the Taiwanese smartphone maker locked in a patent battle with Apple Inc. (AAPL), says it’s willing to negotiate with the iPhone maker after both sides scored victories at the U.S. International Trade Commission.“We have to sit down and figure it out,” Winston Yung, chief financial officer of the Taoyuan, Taiwan-based company, said by phone today. “We’re open to having discussions.”
Perhaps HTC believes its purchase of S3 Graphics gives it a better bargaining position.
