.mac

Okay, okay, I'll get an iPhone 3G!

My very first meaningful blog post here (after an introduction), from June 23, 2007, was titled "Why I'm not getting an iPhone".

Let me review my reasons at the time:

The original iPhone couldn't really do any more for me than my Palm Treo 650. The iPhone couldn't be used to connect my laptop to the Internet. No voice-memo support. No 3G networking. Not enough storage capacity. No native apps from third-party developers. No high-res screen.

Okay, what's changed?

Well, the iPhone 3G still… Read more

Windows XP a hot item on Amazon

Although Microsoft officially stopped selling Windows XP as of June 30, retailers can keep selling it as long as they have copies.

Perhaps as a result of its potentially impending scarcity, XP is near the top of Amazon.com's software list, with the full version of XP Home at No. 15 and the full version of XP Pro at No. 21.

The highest ranked Vista edition doesn't crack the top 25, although it does come on nearly all new PCs these days so most people don't need a boxed copy.

For those keeping score, Apple's Mac … Read more

Stanford goes with Zimbra over Microsoft and Google

Is Zimbra enterprise-ready? Yes, it is.

At least, that's the news from Stanford, which today announced that it is replacing its campus-wide email system with Zimbra. TechCrunch outs the competition on the deal, too: Google's Gmail and Microsoft Exchange.

This is the latest in a series of victories for Zimbra, which includes Georgia Tech, University of Wisconsin, Texas A&M, Cal Poly, and University of Pennsylvania. Zimbra powers the email systems for over 300 universities worldwide. That comes in around an impressive 1.5 million email addresses ending in ".edu."

I use Zimbra on a … Read more

Introducing the Linux user interface

A few days ago, Walter Mossberg, writing in the Wall Street Journal, offered a verbal peek at the Mac user interface (see Some General Tips for Switch to Mac From Windows) intended as heads-up for Windows XP users thinking of switching.

I'm not a Mac user, but from reading the article, it seems that the initial learning curve for switching from Windows XP to Linux, is less than that for switching to Macs. Both Macs and Linux are immune to the vast majority of malicious software, so from a Defensive Computing standpoint, each is good choice.

One advantage Mac … Read more

My MacBook Air dies while Google Docs is offline

I've been a proponent of the Cloud and hosted applications for quite some time but today I am dramatically feeling the effects of having zero control over my infrastructure and the inability to get anything when a Cloud provider has issues.

My MacBook Air is clearly in it's death-throes just six months after purchase and today Google Docs was down for over an hour. I basically have no way to do any real work at this point as I can't use most of my applications and can't get to my documents on Google. I'm a … Read more

Google Gears to run *only* on Mac OSX 14

The Register spots an error in Google's Gears documentation, which suggests that Google Gears will run on OSX 14 and ""Mac OSX 13.9 and below."

Google may be the future, but it's not that far into the future just yet. :-)

Nice to see Googlers can make mistakes, too. I mean, besides Froogle.

Shuttleworth: Desktop Linux can be better than the Mac

Mark Shuttleworth addresses a range of interesting things in a recent interview, but there are two, in particular, that strike me. First, Mark acknowledges the obvious: The Mac is a superior usability experience. Second, however, while placating his upstream developer communities, he also notes that improving on their work is going to be critical to beating the Mac:

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has historically been very, very deferential to what we call our upstream communities - GNOME, KDE, and so on - in the definition of the desktop experience. Our view, very strongly, is that they hold the real … Read more

Apple's MobileMe service set to debut

Update at 10:08 a.m. PDT, with clarification on how users' e-mail will be handled.

Apple's MobileMe service is primed to be relaunched this week, ahead of the Friday launch of the iPhone 3G. That means subscribers to .Mac will find the service taken offline for a six-hour stretch as Apple makes the transition, according to a post in MacRumors.com.

The www.mac.com site will go down on Wednesday from 6 p.m. to 12 a.m. PDT, leaving .Mac subscribers unable to access the site or use .Mac services, except for .MacMail via their desktop … Read more

Battle of the breeze: MSI Wind vs. MacBook Air

Remember back in the day when we went nuts and compared a Samsung Q1 Ultra to an Apple Newton? We've been eating the crazy pills again. Today, we woke up and decided we'd do another mental comparison--the MSI Wind versus the similarly gusty MacBook Air.

Despite the price disparity, they're both laptops, they're both ultraportable, they both have keyboards and screens, and they're both so gorgeous they cause random strangers to accost you in the street, demanding to know where you got them from. So which is best? The great silver hope from Apple, or … Read more