There’s been a lot of smack talk going on about the 13” MacBook Pro recently, and Thomas Brand has gotten sick of it:
The 13 inch MacBook Pro is more than a pound lighter than the 15 inch model. Its smaller dimensions mean it is usable on an economy class airplane tray table. If I am going to have to carry a computer to and from work, all over the hospital, and around the world on business trips I am going to want to have the lightest computer possible to do my job.
The Mac OS vulnerability relates to user login passwords that are stored in the system memory even if the computer is locked or put into a sleep mode. Passware’s software captures live Mac computer memory over FireWire and analyzes it, extracting these passwords, a process that the company says takes just a few minutes–regardless of password strength and use of a FileVault encryption.
While this is an issue, once physical security has been breached, it is game over anyways.
I love Mac OS X. I really believe it is the best way to get work done on a computer in the 21st century. For the most part, I like OS X Lion — just check out my review. Lion is fast, stable and brings several great features to the table — especially when it comes to security.
Loving any Apple product is like being in an roller coaster relationship, though. Apple — unlike most companies — is not afraid to break things, change direction or piss off its users. But at the same time, it just wants everyone to be happy and hugging each other.
Impressive. Most impressive.
Wait, that’s not right:
We saw that there were some questions today related to Flash Player 11 support for Mac OS X Lion (10.7) related to hardware video acceleration. To avoid any more confusion, we wanted to clarify:
The final release of Mac OS X Lion (10.7) provides the same support for Flash hardware video acceleration as Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6). The previous “Known Issue” described in a tech note suggesting that video hardware acceleration was disabled in Lion was incorrect and based on tests with a pre-release version of Mac OS X Lion that related to only one particular Mac GPU configuration. We continue to work closely with Apple to provide Flash Player users with a high quality experience on Mac computers.
Upgrading to OS X Lion (10.7) costs $30. I don’t say that to comment on the “bang for buck” element. It’s more like a coded transmission from Apple: this OS is an experiment, a departure, a transition. When Apple priced Snow Leopard (10.6) at $30 it was because the OS had very few user-facing tweaks — most of the changes were under the hood. But this time it almost feels like Apple is apologizing for the abundance of experience-altering changes: “look, we know this is a lot to swallow, but at least it’s only $30!”
I was digging around in the System Library folder in Lion this afternoon, and found the linen graphic Apple uses heavily in the new OS. It was inside the Dock.app bundle, if you’re curious. I’ve also copied it here, if you can get enough of the new texture. It actually make a pretty decent minimalistic wallpaper when tiled.
This is the first thing I did today after Lion was downloaded. I have noticed that on some of my machines, Lion will delete the Install app at the end of installation, so I’d create this in Snow Leopard first.
Notably, this same method can be used to create a Lion DVD, but since any machine that can run Lion can boot from USB, I just don’t see the point.
I printed it out this time around. It clocked in at 112 pages from Safari Reader. I can’t wait to dive into it this evening. If you are a Mac nerd by any stretch of the imagination, this is the review to read.
This is why you don’t ever upgrade your production machine on Day One.
While the fact that Lion installs a recovery partition is fairly common knowledge at this point, a lack of physical media could leave users with a blank hard drive stranded without an OS. Thankfully, for some Mac users, there’s a solution
If your Mac problem is a little less common — your hard drive has failed or you’ve installed a hard drive without OS X, for example — Internet Recovery takes over automatically. It downloads and starts Lion Recovery directly from Apple servers over a broadband Internet connection. And your Mac has access to the same Lion Recovery features online. Internet Recovery is built into every newly-released Mac starting with the Mac mini and MacBook Air.
