Apple drops prices, boosts MacBook Pro lines

Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla Adding faster processors, larger memory capacities (up to 8GB), FireWire 800 plus a SD Card Slot, Apple refreshed its MacBook Pro line by formally inviting the unibody 13’ inch MacBook to the fold. More after the break. Available in Canada this week, the new MacBook Pro 13 starts at $1,399, offers a backlit keyboard, a 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of RAM, 160GB HD and most surprisingly a built in 7-hour battery (non-user removable). A 2.56GHz model is available for $1,749 and offers a 250GB hard drive and 4GB of RAM. The entire Macbook Pro line now has improved battery life, thanks to an innovative but non-user replaceable battery that was introduced in last year’s MacBook Air. The addition of a Firewire 800 port on the 13’ inch MacBook is also a welcome addition that many users were clamoring for. For the 15-inch MacBook Pro, a new 7-hour battery (built-in), a 3.53GHz, 2.66GHz or a 2.8GHz processor with 4GB RAM (upgradeable to 8GB), up to 500GB hard drive capacities. NVDIA GeForce 9400M is standard on the base model. You can still get the white polycarbonate MacBook, which is a great value at $1149.00 and offers a 2.13Ghz processor, 2GB RAM and a 160GB Hard Drive. Apple also announced the availability of Snow Leopard for a surprising price of $29.00. $100 less than previous OS X updates. Snow Leopard will be available in September. One month before Microsoft’s Windows 7 is released. Snow Leopard is an evolutionary upgrade to the Mac OS and will be faster to install than the previous version and will also reclaim around 6GB of disk space. Offering reduced prices on its most popular hardware and its operating system shows that Apple Inc. is seriously challenging the perception that they are expensive and out of reach.

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One Billion iPhone Apps : Analysis

Countdown to Ecstasy: Apple prepares the confetti and balloons for its big Billionth By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla You can always tell a new Apple iPhone owner from the glassy-eyed excitement they have as they share and compare the applications they have downloaded and tried. The first few days with an iPhone are usually spent downloading any app that is cheap and interesting. This downloading behaviour usually tapers off as users settle into the apps they most use. Part of the iPhone's appeal is its ability to morph into any of thousands of devices and deliver a whole new way to do things within the interface. It is also the availability of inexpensive applications and while a lot of them are rubbish, there are some very useful apps that have helped cement this success. The iPhone is a serious product that has not only built a steady market share, it has grown a blossoming ecosystem of third party accessories, cases and peripherals and developed a bona-fide mobile computing platform for itself that has thrived despite the shortcomings of the operating system. The inability to multitask, the lack of cut-copy and paste as well as the limits of the touch interface have not at all diminished the iPhone's appeal or usefulness. Now that these shortcomings are to be addressed by a major software upgrade come June 2009, there will be little in the way of the iPhone reaching its full potential. The new OS brings a whole spectrum of new features and the ability to work directly with third-party hardware as well as greater freedom for developers to create killer apps. Developers, Developers, Developers The Apple iPhone has really helped bring developers into the Apple fold. Developers, who in the past may have shunned away from Apple's desktop OS, have embraced and profited from creating smart, small and exciting programs for the iPhone. Prior to the release of the iPhone OS SDK, people were Jailbreaking the iPhone like crazy just to get more out of it and run illicit applications because they could see the potential. Back then, the only legally sanctioned iPhone apps were limited to web applications which relied on the built-in Safari browser. This changed dramatically with the availability of the iTunes App store and enabling users to purchase new applications on the fly. Apple's App-specific TV ad spots brought the mobile platform to the mainstream, an unprecedented move. Never has a mobile computing platform focused on specific applications. Now there is a higher global demand for iPhone developers than there is for Facebook developers. iPhonefootprint Blog explains how this growth has recently boomed. "The trend at the international job site oDesk shows that the demand for iPhone application programming has jumped by a whopping 500% in a period between March 2008 and September 2008. The listing has increased from 30 to over 140 and the jobs span around various aspects emerging from the twin platform of iPhone (and iPod touch) and the App Store. Another trend shown by this site is that this demand is not only USA specific. The oDesk list shows a stiff demand for iPhone programmers and consultants across the globe, including India, Russia, China, Ukraine and a number of other countries. The types of jobs range from iPhone App developers to iPhone SDK engineers and various other iPhone programming and consulting jobs" The App store makes spending easy Apple's success at cultivating developers for its mobile platform has allowed them to focus primarily on what the hardware can do and let the community provide the programs. Aside from the initial bundled iPhone applications and the Remote app (which can control Macs via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth), Apple really hasn't created any new apps itself. As amazing as one billion downloaded app sounds, and it is quite an achievement on any computing platform, mobile or desktop, things can only get better once iPhone 3.0 rolls out midyear. Expect more flexibility, better application selection and more money going Apple's way.

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Apple TV - What it is and what it could be.

Apple TV gives YouTube for Free By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla The self-proclaimed "hobby" device in the Apple product line is neither iPod nor Macintosh, yet it is actually a bit of both. The Apple TV can be a wonderful device that easily extends your music, movies, TV shows and photos from your computer to your LCD or Plasma TV. Having been around for two years, the Apple TV now at version 2.0 is in actuality a very pared down Mac Mini (yes people have hacked it to run OS X Leopard, but it is dog slow) that integrates into the iTunes environment. More on Apple TV after the jump. Weighing 2.4 pounds and 1.1 inches high, the Apple TV can fit into anyone’s existing home theatre setup and can hook-up into most flat screen TVs via HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface) cable to handle video and audio. As an amateur photographer, one of my favorite applications of the Apple TV is how it takes your shots in iPhoto and pushes them to your TV for spectacular and fluid slideshows. The Apple TV is more a large capacity video iPod than a desktop computer as it can’t browse the web, do email or messaging. In fact, outside of Apple’s integrated operating system, the Apple TV can’t do much. We did find a lot of ways to keep ourselves entertained with it. In the US and in Canada, the iTunes store offers online rentals and sales of movies and TV shows and a lot of these are available in high definition. Purchasing these movies is easy provided you have an existing account; in fact we would say that it is too easy to be renting movies left and right. Standard definition versions are rented for between US$ 1.00 to US$ 5.00 depending on how new they are – movies can also be purchased for roughly $10.00. The selection isn't bad but the library is being added on to on a constant basis. It sure beats having to toggle with that awful Rogers On Demand feature or take the TTC to the closest Blockbuster Video just to find out the movie you want has been rented out. On Demand all the time Once you have given your credit card information to Apple and have established an account, buying movies and TV shows from the Apple TV through wired Ethernet or Wi-Fi is dead easy. Pick the movie and once your credit card is charged it will begin to download and will be viewable within two minutes. On a well set-up HDTV, movie sound and playback is just as good as Blu-Ray for the most part although there are artifacts and pixelation that can occur during high energy action scenes and specially scenes with explosions. TV shows are equally easy to load and you can get the whole season of your favourite show and watch it at your leisure. There is, unfortunately, no way to back up these movies or TV shows to DVDs so they will take up space in your Apple TV’s hard drive. This is unfortunate as it would be a big hassle for users to have to re-download the movies should anything happen to the Apple TV that would require reformatting it. We've had the device for a month and we've gone and had to start everything from scratch twice already. What the Apple TV isn’t is a DVR (Digital Video Recorder) that is a shame considering its small footprint and the capacity of its hard drive. I wish TV Tuner producers like El Gato Users have found creative ways to extend the functionality of this device. Great workarounds all around Content for the Apple TV is not limited to what Apple offers. Industrious users have been able to re-encode DVDs to the required MP4 video format that will work on the Apple TV. Another workaround is installing Boxee (www.boxee.tv), which can stream additional web-video services and offer access to free TV. Since Apple TV also gives you access to YouTube and Flickr you have a lot of options on how to entertain yourself. One workaround that does not exist is a reset button on the Apple TV. Here is where the device’s minimalist design fails. We ran into some problems with the Apple TV and had no option but to simply unplug the power to reset the device. This would be the biggest chink in the armor of an otherwise amazing and promising entertainment device. We hope to see Apple focus more of its energy in improving the Apple TV and for Canadians, we need more content in the Apple TV Store to keep us interested.

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Windows 7 - Promise of a New Day

Windows 7: Loading soon in a PC near youMicrosoft is still reeling from the fiasco that was Windows Vista. 2008 for them was really all about dodging the backlash from customers and PC manufacturers who turned to Linux or offered, “upgrades” to Windows XP on new Vista machines. The Mac vs. PC advertisements, which poked fun at Vista’s shortcomings, eventually led to Microsoft’s rebuttal in the form of the “I am a PC” ads, which gave a more human face to PC users. This didn’t really ease the sting from unhappy Vista users or computer resellers but it showed the software company was aware of the perception that Vista had fallen short of expectations. Rather than continue beating a dead horse, Microsoft wisely gave advance notice of a successor to Windows Vista. Redesigned from the ground up, the new version made it to public beta recently. More on Windows 7 after the jump. A New Hope Windows 7, which is supposed to make it to market late this year, carries with it the hopes of millions of users. It is supposed to be the breakthrough OS that patches all of Vista’s flaws and offers what Microsoft is calling, “a major Windows release.” Will 2009 be the year of redemption for Windows, it remains to be seen but for now we can gloss over the features and improvements that lucky 7, Windows that is, will be bringing to market. Multi-touch technology, currently making waves in iPods, tablets and some smartphones, will be integrated into Windows 7; we see this as a handy feature for Tablet PC users or for touch screen enabled notebooks. Multi-touch is a great party trick and does have some uses but for most mainstream users it isn’t a big deal. Users will see more of the new Windows Shell with a new taskbar, a spiffy home networking system called HomeGroup and performance improvements. A lot of the applications that Microsoft used to include in Vista, will be cast away from the system to trim the fat and give users a more solid OS that requires less storage space. Fans of Windows Mail, Windows Movie Maker and Windows Photo Gallery might miss these built-in apps but the rest of us can rejoice their departure. You will still be able to get them separately as part of the Windows Live Essentials suite, part of Microsoft’s cloud computing initiative of offering applications online. Windows 7 users will also see updated versions of Paint and WordPad plus more things to tweak in the Control Panel including Accelerators, ClearType text tuner, Display Color Calibration, Gadgets, Infrared, Recovery, Troubleshooting, Workspaces Center, Location and Other Sensors. Expect upgraded functionality on the Start Menu and the rest of the taskbar that will now be called the Superbar and will feature Jump Lists that is a way of accessing common tasks. Lean and Able Microsoft wants to make sure that Windows 7 is as lean an operating system as it can possibly be. Aside from ditching all the add-ons which users don’t really need, they are supposedly streamlining the code to trim out the bloat that has swelled up since the days of Windows 3.1. The result is that Windows 7 will run well in machines that Windows Vista could not. It remains to be seen if Windows 7 will have as many versions as Windows Vista did, hopefully Microsoft will just offer a home and a professional (business) version like they did with Windows XP. This is exceptional news for the netbook crowd who are stuck in XP land simply because Vista is too bloated to function on stripped down systems. Newer PCs like Sony's new VAIO P have been proven to run Windows 7 quite well despite choking on Windows Vista Home. One thing is certain, Microsoft has learned their lesson and won’t be shipping a product that is premature and still buggy. If it has learned anything about the painful Windows Vista experience, it is that the extra time taken to refine a product can only make things better. Shipping something that “just works,” is less expensive than constantly patching unfinished and buggy software. Users will finally be getting the efficient and stable OS they deserve.

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