Apple Archive

"They started queueing at 2.30am. By 8.30am the line continued for hundreds of yards, snaking down an escalator, under a road, up another escalator and along the other side of the street. The first MacWorld Expo of the year had arrived at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. And chief executive Steve Jobs' keynote speech was the hottest ticket in town." Read Guardian's and Ars' report from MacWorld.

I was reading this morning an editorial at BusinessWeek regarding Apple being "too cool" but not delivering new PowerMacs. I have heard that the G4 CPUs are already close to their limit regarding the speeds they can deliver. In the past I wrote an editorial regarding Apple creating "Macs based on x86/Opteron" but seeing Apple staying faithful to the Motorola CPUs, could the development of multi-CPU Macs could be a (temporary) answer to the G4 speed limit (especially when the G5 is nowhere to be seen)?

"The Apple booth staff 'freaked' when I tried to plug my FWDepot Cutie FireWire test drive into the new 17" and 12" PowerBooks with Photoshop, Quake3, and other real world test apps. But I knew you wanted some idea of the performance, right? So since the demo units were connected to the 'Net, I downloaded Xbench beta and ran it on the two new PowerBooks... along with a few others." Take a look at the benchmarks over at Bare Feats.

"Macworld Expo in San Francisco is more than a technology convention. It is a personality litmus test, too. By contrast, Apple inspires rave reviews. And accounts for only 2.3% of the worldwide computer market, according to research firm IDC. The company blazes forth, but few answer the call." Read the editorial at C|Net.

Steve Jobs just announced in his Macworld Keynote that Apple is releasing its own browser, called Safari. Its claim to fame is extremely fast performance on the Mac. The Mac platform has struggled from sluggish browser performance with IE (the old default browser). Update: According to Jobs, Safari is open source and based on khtml. It only runs on Mac OS X and will be available for download today.

"Apple Computer next week will announce a plan to charge for upgrades to some of the company’s highly acclaimed "digital hub" software, a move that could anger customers accustomed to receiving free updates." Read on at CNet News.com.

The Mac maker would love to corner the hot market for software that syncs up PCs with cell phones and other gadgets. But then there's Microsoft--and its pesky bundling habit. Read the article at ZDNews.

There are certain perennial debates amongst the technical community, constantly revisited with differing outcomes for each person. Linux vs. Windows, KDE vs. Gnome, Mac vs. PC - they are unwinnable arguments, and although the outcome varies overtime with each successive release or new piece of hardware, they consistently gain our attention. When presented with the opportunity to borrow a Macintosh for a little over a month, I jumped at the chance to resolve one of these debates for myself. The question was: Can the Mac replace my PC?

Apple has released a SDK for Sherlock 3, the company's Web Services tool. "Everything required to develop a channel is provided in the Sherlock 3 Channel SDK. The SDK includes technical documentation, a sample channel, a Project Builder template, and an Interface Builder Sherlock palette," according to Apple. In the meantime, Watson 1.6 was released and includes integration with the EyeTV DVR, iCal, and the MacOSX Address Book. On other important for the Mac platform releases, WebObjects 5.2 and BBEdit 7.0 was released. Get more OSX software from VersionTracker.

"Once again, the buzz says its end is nigh. Too bad Jobs & Co. is too busy satisfying consumers to go along with the doomsayers". Read the article at BusinessWeek. "Until recently, very few users and essentially no enterprises would give any thought to Apple as a server vendor. Small wonder, since Apple hadn't been trying to compete seriously in the server market. Things have changed." Read the article at ZDNews. Also, Apple Computer on Wednesday updated its entire portable line, most notably adding its first PowerBook capable of burning DVDs and a faster iBook.

A new program lets buyers of the Mac OS X Server sign on for three years of unlimited access to software upgrades for the same price Apple charges for a single, onetime upgrade.

Jordan Hubbard, formerly head of FreeBSD development, and now of Apple MacOS X/Darwin fame, talks frankly about UNIX, Apple's MacOS X, BSD, and the business of competing in the consumer computer world in this MacCentral article. In it, we see some of his impressions on the present and future of MacOS X, opinions on Motorola's CPU's in Apple products, and what it takes to get ISV support.

Beginning Tuesday, buyers of new Macs can pick up the full version of Office v. X for $199, or about $200 less than the full purchase price. Read the story at C|Net News.com.

"A deluge of reader mail has opened my eyes to some very sound reasons why the Motorola PowerPC chip's days may be numbered I love nothing better than stirring up a hornet's nest. And that's just what I did with my recent column about whether Apple should abandon its current PowerPC microprocessor for a Pentium-family chip, like those that power most Windows PCs (see BW Online, 9/11/02, "Mac and PC: Ne'er the Twain Will Meet")." Read the new editorial at BusinessWeek. Update: iSync beta!