hardware

You are currently browsing articles tagged hardware.

We’re within sight of upgrading the main machine at home from a Mac Mini, purchased in December 2006, to a new 24″ iMac. Unlike some of the other Apple products we’ve purchased – products that were upgraded within weeks after the purchase – it seems that our timing may be right on this one.

In the past few weeks, I’ve seen several articles indicating a new iMac line in March. The features vary, but most of the speculation includes quad-core processors and higher-quality Nvidia graphics. From my limited Apple experience, that seems consistent with previous Apple hardware upgrades.

In any event, this purchase may happen sometime in late March or early April – after any new iMacs have started shipping. Our Mac Mini purchase came toward the end of the Core Duo line, processors that were replaced with the Core 2 Duo. My first Shuffle was, within weeks, replaced by a new design. The purchase of my 30 GB iPod (my fourth iPod, at that time) was quickly overshadowed by upgrades to the iPod line and, a bit later, by the initial iPhone release. For a bleeding-edge guy like myself, that was pretty frustrating. I did wait for the 3G iPhone and will likely get a good year of use before the inevitable Apple upgrade.

So, maybe just a few years into our Apple use, we’re finally syncing with the Apple release schedule. If so, it’ll be nice to have a machine that I know is the current state of the art for that model for longer than just a few months.

Update I’ve activated the WP-Polls plugin. Vote now in the sidebar for the features you most expect to see in the new iMacs.

Tags: , ,

I’ll excuse the one hour of battery life I seem to be able to get out of my iPhone. An arrangement of extra power cords (USB, car, wall) and external batteries gets me through the day. I’ll also excuse the fact that iTunes seems hell bent on not syncing applications from my desktop to my iPhone, and inexplicably removing apps from my phone without any notice. I love that damn phone, and it will take a lot more than lost apps and dropped calls to get it out of my hands.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: , , , ,

Six short months ago David Alison bought a little white MacBook as a complimentary machine to his menagerie of Windows and Linux machines. Little did he know what the impact of that purchase would have on his approach to computers. In today’s blog post David reviews what’s transpired since buying that first Mac.

Tags: , ,

Apple’s famous iMac turns 10 years old today, marking an important milestone. The computer — which first began shipping on August 15th, 1998 — helped usher in the modern Mac era, distancing Apple from an era of Performas and Quadras. It was also the first major new product from the company following the return of co-founder Steve Jobs, and brok…

Tags: ,

Pixar has been traditionally big on using using Linux servers for their RenderMan Pro Server software. Even though the company was developed by Steve Jobs and later sold to Disney, Mac servers as cluster nodes are not widely used, according to Computerworld on Friday. There are multiple reasons for…

Tags: , , ,

(Via Macworld.)

Macworld Lab ran the three new standard iMacs through our customary suite of tests to gauge performance improvements on the previous generation. The new 2.8GHz 24-inch iMac showed a 30-point (13 percent) Speedmark improvement on the previous high-end model, a 24-inch 2.4GHz iMac. However, this new high-end iMac posted the same Speedmark score as the previous build-to-order model, a 2.8GHz 24-inch model. The new low-end iMac, a 2.4GHz 20-inch model, had a Speedmark score that was 26 points higher (13 percent faster) than the previous low-end model, a 2GHz 20-inch iMac. Also, the new 2.4GHz 20-inch iMac scored 9 points lower than the older midrange iMac, a 2.4GHz 20-inch model. But as we pointed out in our earlier Macworld Lab benchmark report of the new iMacs, the older 2.4GHz 20-inch iMac that we tested had a larger hard drive and a better graphics card than the new entry-level model, which explains the speed difference.

Full story here.

Tags: , ,

(Via MacNN.)

Apple today released its MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.5.1, which it says provides fixes several issues to improve the stability of MacBook Pro computers. The update revises a recently-issued MBP firmware update that came alongside similar updates for most of its other Mac families, including the MacBook, MacBook Air, and iMac computers — as well as a specific MacBook Air Bluetooth update — and also comes with updated version of the Firmware Restoration CD 1.7. “After the firmware is successfully applied to your Mac, your Boot ROM Version will be:
 MBP21.00A5.B08 or MBP31.0070.B07,” the company notes.

The version of the Boot ROM installed on your computer can be confirmed using System Profiler. To complete the firmware update process, users must follow the instructions in the updater application (/Applications/Utilities/MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update.app), which will launch automatically when the Installer closes.

Tags: , , , ,

(Via MacDailyNews.)

“Psystar is back online selling ‘white-box’ Macs with a few subtle changes, and one employee has already played the monopoly card,” Tom Krazit writes for CNET.

“Since they brought it up, let’s review the basic definition of a monopoly, shall we? And remember, there’s nothing illegal about having a monopoly, it’s only when you use that monopoly for nefarious purposes do you get pinched,” Krazit writes.

MacDailyNews Take: Thank Jobs that somebody else is out there explaining that a monopoly is not illegal, but abusing it is. Right, Microsoft?

Krazit continues, “The business section of Answers.com says, ‘A monopoly is a market condition in which a single seller controls the entire output of a particular good or service. A firm is a monopoly if it is the sole seller of its product and if its product has no close substitutes. Close substitutes are those goods that could closely take the place of a particular good; for example, a Pepsi soft drink would be a close substitute for a Coke drink, but a juice drink would not.’”

“Debate the aesthetics all you want, but I’d argue that Windows and Linux are, for the purposes of personal computing, close substitutes to Mac OS X. They can run a personal computer. They can connect you to the Internet. They can run a basic suite of productivity applications,” Krazit writes. “You may prefer Mac OS X for a variety of reasons, but Apple’s requirement that you can only run Mac OS X on Apple hardware doesn’t prevent you from using a personal computer.”

Full story here.

Tags: , ,

« Older entries