mac

Apple's Mac division was able to withstand recessionary pressures last quarter by neutralizing a decline in desktop sales with a sharp rise in notebook sales. Will it continue?

A new survey released by ChangeWave Wednesday makes it clear that despite a relatively strong first quarter, Apple is not out of the woods yet. Of respondents planning to buy a notebook in the next 90 days, the percentage of those planning to buy an Apple notebook fell six percentage points to 28 percent, as compared with November's survey.

The overall percentage of respondents planning to buy a notebook fell from 8 percent in November to 6 percent, so it's not just Apple that's feeling the pinch. And consumer electronics spending is on the wane as well, with the percentage of those planning to spend more on consumer tech over the next 90 days falling to a two-and-a-half-year low.

But Changewave says that decline is being partially offset by an increase in demand for Netbooks, a category where Apple is taking a wait-and-see approach. The research firm concludes its report by opining that Apple could be in trouble without a Netbook, because the PC market is growing increasingly price-sensitive as the recession takes hold.… Read more

In a sign that Apple's Mac OS X operating system has gone truly mainstream, computer science programs like that at the University of Utah have formally announced classes like "Mac OS X Deployment v10.5" focused on administering Mac OS X.

While a quick scan of computer science courses at Harvard and Stanford doesn't reveal any Mac OS X-centric courses, and a quick Google search doesn't reveal much more, it's possible that the University of Utah, which has several OS X classes, is the vanguard for OS X's classroom uptake and a clear signal of enterprise adoption.… Read more

Last Friday, Ina Fried detailed an interesting report from blogger Long Zheng, who "is drawing attention to an apparent shortcoming" in Microsoft's desire to make Windows 7 less annoying.

According to the report, Zheng believes that because Windows 7's User Account Control isn't as annoying as it was in Windows Vista, Microsoft is leaving its users open to more threats by third parties trying to exploit vulnerabilities. Zheng contends that due to changes in UAC, "malicious code could turn off alerts entirely with the user getting little notice that such a change had been made."

Zheng said in a blog post that he and a fellow blogger, Rafael Rivera, have designed a proof-of-concept code to prove his theory. He believes, "at a minimum, that Microsoft's default setting (should) also warn users if a change is being made to UAC itself."

In Windows Vista, a UAC prompt popped up each time any major change was made to the system. Some users found that annoying. Realizing that, Microsoft decided that in Windows 7, users would be able to decide how often they want to be notified. The default setting in the beta release of the OS only notifies users when a third-party application is making a change.

It should be noted that Zheng's contention is based on the Windows 7 beta, which means practically nothing until the final build hits store shelves. Microsoft can change that setting at any time and make this issue go away. More importantly, it can be changed by the administrator, so the issue, while present, shouldn't be blown out of proportion.

But it's because of that setting that Windows 7 is less annoying. But should we accept annoyance anyway, if it means more security? I think we should.… Read more

Rather than choosing between dual-core or quad-core processors for an expected revision to the iMac, Apple may have decided to use both.

Shaw Wu of Kaufman Brothers, who just last week opined that an iMac refresh was around the corner, thinks Apple has resolved its dilemma over using quad-core or dual-core processors for the new systems by creating two tiers in the iMac line: a high-end version with a quad-core chip, and a low-end version with a dual-core chip. Apple currently offers two different screen sizes (20-inch and 24-inch) for the all-in-one iMac, and offers two different configurations for each … Read more

I spent most of Friday fiddling with iPhoto '09, and you can read my first impressions here. On Saturday, I spent some major quality time with iMovie '09, and I have to say it's pretty easy to grasp. I'm no professional, and I'll admit that I preferred iMovie HD (or the '06 version) to iMovie '08, but it's not too bad. In fact, I created this short little video of the public pillow fight in San Francisco on Valentine's Day 2007 in about three hours (It could've been shorter, but I spent most of the time finding the source material).

As you might recall, when iMovie '08 first debuted, there was quite a substantial outcry in the Mac community. iMovie '08 was drastically different when compared with its predecessors, without a lot of the depth and advanced features to which most Mac users have become accustomed. So much so that Apple made it a point that you could download iMovie '06 (also known as iMovie HD) for free if you missed all the functionality you lost with iMovie '08.… Read more

January was a good month for both the emerging Windows 7 and the venerable Mac OS, according to Web metrics company Net Applications.

The Mac OS is now hovering around the 10 percent mark among operating systems accessing the Web.

In its Operating System Market Share report for January, Net Applications showed the Mac OS at 9.93 percent, up from 9.63 percent in December. The iPhone also trended upward to 0.48 percent in January, from 0.44 percent in December.

In its recap of the Net Applications numbers, Fortune highlighted the ground gained by Apple's iPod … Read more

Though Apple has yet to offer built-in 3G on MacBooks, pairing them up with phones like the Blackberry Storm provides a decent wireless workaround.

In December, I took the MacBook Air (i.e., the designers of the Air) to task for what I thought was a serious technological gaffe: not building 3G into the Air. At the very least, I thought 3G should have been included in the October refresh of the Air.

But I'm not going to rehash those gripes here (or repeat Apple's likely reasons for not including 3G). This time I bring good tidings.

After … Read more

Jasmine posted her brief sneak peek at iLife '09 yesterday with a slide show, and it's pretty clear that major improvements have come to Apple's suite of lifestyle applications, most notably iPhoto '09, iMovie '09, and GarageBand '09. Since I'm an amateur photography nerd with aspirations of rock stardom, I'm most interested in iPhoto and GarageBand, though the new iMovie may be enough for me to whip out my Flip camcorder and record more than just dogs riding on skateboards. Of course, iWeb '09 has a few updates, too. I have just got through the iPhoto '09 face recognition hurdle, and am just starting on the rest of the iLife suite. So here's an in-depth look at the facial recognition bit of iPhoto, with more to come later.

iPhoto '09 Lets start with the belle of the ball, iPhoto '09. Why do I say that? Because the new Faces and Places feature on iPhoto '09 was definitely one of the biggest news out of Phil Schiller's Macworld keynote. While iPhoto '08 introduced Events, which lets you group photos based on the dates they were taken, iPhoto '09 introduced three new features that got the Mac community buzzing--facial recognition, geotagging, and social network support. For the facial recognition, you don't have to tag every single photo you have with a name and a face; the idea is that iPhoto '09 will be smart enough to do the facial recognition for you. However, it will only work after you do the necessary legwork to make it all happen.

Assuming you don't have photos in your iPhoto library already, you'll have to import them. Me, I have about 3,500 photos sitting in my Aperture library on the laptop, and that's not even counting the more than 10,000 photos I have in my external hard drive at home. So if you're a big photography dork like me, it'll take some time for all the photos to import over. Once that happens, you can immediately start identifying faces and names. Sometimes iPhoto will be smart enough to detect faces for you, and sometimes it won't be. If it does detect a face, it'll display a square over what it thinks is a face, with a placeholder name "unknown face" underneath it. If it doesn't detect a face, you'll have to hit the "Add Missing Face" button on the bottom left, select the face, and add a name. Once you identify a face with a name, you can go to the Faces corkboard, select a face, and iPhoto '09 will scout out your entire library to find photos with a similar face. Once it does, it's up to you to go through the results to confirm or not confirm if the photos really do show that person. This is how the facial recognition training works.

… Read more

Our resident nasal storage expert Rafe Needleman is on the show to explain some quantum physics to you. Rafe also schools me in why latency doesn't matter to bandwidth but he still won't admit that he need 60 Gbps. And we realize that the only way to save the world is by drinking more whiskey. Time to get to it.

Charter gets bragging rights with new 60Mbps broadband tier http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2009/01/charter-gets-bragging-rights-with-new-60mbps-broadband-tier.ars

iPod / iPhone CES pavilion sells out in record time, quadruples to include … Read more