Category: Apple

Ars on their new 24-inch Apple LED Cinema Display:

The real nicety of the display is that Mac OS X knows when you have attached the display to use its integrated devices. That is, when you’ve hooked it all up, it will use the iSight in the display instead of the notebook’s, and it will use the USB audio on the display and disable the output on the notebook. That is, until you plug a set of headphones into the port on the notebook, at which time the display’s speakers will disable and route the audio directly to your ears automatically.

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AppleInsider:

Reporting back to investors, Needham Co. analyst Charlie Wolf notes that Apple moved from selling just 61,000 Macs to small businesses in the spring to 188,000 in the three months of Apple’s summer quarter ended in September.

The gain boosted Apple’s share of the field from a modest 1.9 percent during the earlier season to a significant 5.6 percent in summer. It was enough to not only give Apple a new level of influence but also to carry the company through a tough period: where Mac shipments to regular home buyers suddenly cooled in growth from 53.6 percent quarter-to-quarter from the spring to just 9.1 percent in the summer, the small business spike represented nearly all of Apple’s Mac growth at about 97 percent of systems leaving warehouses and shelves.

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I took some pictures of my Color Classic today:

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TUAW turned up Apple’s “Xserve Field Guide.” This guide is design to assist on-site technicians with Xserve hardware issues. It’s good, but not heavy duty on the high-end information.

Click here to see some screenshots of the guide. On the left, the desktop version (as rendered on the iPhone), and on the right the iPhone-optimized version.

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James and John of the RetroMacCast mentioned on their show this week a document titled “Inside Macintosh” they found. Here’s a bit from the preface:

I nside Macintosh is a three-volume set of manuals that tells you what you need to know to write software for the Apple® Macintosh™ 128K, 512K, or XL (or a Lisa® running MacWorks™ XL). Although directed mainly toward programmers writing standard Macintosh applications, Inside Macintosh also contains the information needed to write simple utility programs, desk accessories, device drivers, or any other Macintosh software. It includes: - the user interface guidelines for applications on the Macintosh - a complete description of the routines available for your program to call (both those built into the Macintosh and others on disk), along with related concepts and background information - a description of the Macintosh 128K and 512K hardware

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Touch Arcade, on why some games are faster on a Touch:

The most clear difference is that fact that the iPod Touch’s processor was quietly boosted to 532MHz (up from 412MHz) with the 2nd generation model introduced in September. Meanwhile, the iPhone 3G, Original iPhone and 1st Generation iPod Touch continue to run at the original 412MHz.

I can’t decided what I think about this. The Touch has been pushed as Apple’s gaming device, but the iPhone is the flagship product, and does a lot more than it’s touch-based iPod cousin.

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AppleInsider:

The Cupertino-based firm is conscious that any retail layoffs would give a negative impression of its health and hurt its share value, and instead plans to scale back the hours worked by its part-time Mac Specialists that greet customers and promote products. This would keep them on the store floors while trimming employment costs, those aware of the changes say.

To compensate for the shortfall, Geniuses normally assigned to servicing products and answering questions will be asked to spend four of their weekly hours in the Mac Specialist role. Creatives manning the Studio sections of some stores will be asked to work as many as eight hours selling products.

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The NY Times on Google’s failed “ Lively” services:

Google portrayed the move away from user frivolity as a sound business move. “It has been a tough decision, but we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business,” the company said on a blog post.

In the past Google has shown a willingness to let projects linger with a “beta” tag for months and months. But the virtual experiment was apparently not worth even that effort.

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Nvidia’s Neil Trevett on OpenCL, part of Snow Leopard that will allow the OS (and apps) have greater access to the GPU:

“If Apple ends up following through on the plans they stated on building this specification into Snow Leopard, I think you could see opportunity for imaging applications vendors, video application vendors to tap into the goodness of GPU hardware. Everyone has a supercomputer locked away in their Mac, but it’s hard to get at it. And OpenCL will unlock the potential of that supercomputer.”

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MacRumors has a forum thread about a reader who just bought a used MacBook Air on eBay:

I recently picked up a used Macbook Air 1.6 The bottom case is black without any markings on it. Computer does boot up, but the battery has swollen and distorted the case. I removed the bottom of the case and pulled the battery with thoughts of purchasing a replacement battery. When looking at the connections they are different from the disassembly pictures on the web, and then most of the other internals are slightly different than on the various disassembly sites as well.

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Jonathan ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch, a well-known developer has created OpenRadar.app, an OS X application designed to help developers keep track of bugs that they submit to Apple’s internal (private, locked-away, secret) bug-tracking system called Radar.

First, little on Radar:

Radar is Apple’s internal bug tracking system. How Apple views Radar and how external third-party developers view Radar causes a bit of a conflict…

Apple encourages developers to file bugs, even those we know are probably duplicates, in order to “vote up” individual bugs and hopefully give them more priority when it comes time decide schedules.

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David Pogue of the NY Times has re-released a review of the iPod Mini. If you haven’t seen his videos before, here’s a spoiler: he’s a major dork.

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