posts

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that President Obama will nominate Julius Genachowski to head the Federal Communications Commission:

If confirmed, Mr. Genachowski will take over an agency that has had rocky relations with Congress and major companies in the telecommunications industry under current FCC Chairman Kevin Martin. The agency may also still be coping with the U.S.’s transition to digital-only television, which is scheduled to take place Feb. 17 but could be pushed back to the summer.

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With the updates this morning, I read over this sentence and didn’t even really stop to think about it:

AirPort Extreme now operates in the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands simultaneously to ensure top performance for all your devices.

Here’s what that really means - that a single base station can broadcast the faster 802.11N signal for N-equipped computers (including ever Macintosh computer, including the just-updated Mac mini) and the slower 802.11G signal for devices like iPhones, iPod Touch devices, and older computers.

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Apple updated both the Time Capsule and the Airport base station today. From Apple:

You can now access all the files on your Time Capsule drive over the Internet. Simply register your Time Capsule with your MobileMe account, and its drive appears in the Finder sidebar of your Mac just like any other attached drive. It’s like having your own personal file server wherever you go.

Mac Rumors has more:

…now offering simultaneous 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz dual-band networking “for optimal performance, range and compatibility.” The new models also offer the ability to set up a secondary Internet-only Wi-Fi network to allow family and friends to access the Internet without giving them the password to the primary network or allowing them access to networked drives and other peripherals.

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Seems I was wrong about the date, but right that Apple would drop new models across the line all at once. Here are some highlights:

1. The Mac mini now sports an NVIDIA chipset, a Firewire 800 port, 5 USB ports, 2 video ports and runs on less power than before. Same case as before, however. The starting price - $599.

2. The iMac got better graphics, and now only the low-end model has the 20-inch display - all the other models are 24 inches. They all come with more RAM out of the box, and the 24-inch can take 8GB of RAM. The 20-inch model is $1199, the 24-inchers start at $1499, and they are still wrapped in aluminum and glass, just like before.

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I replaced a ton of white and black batteries for Apple’s MacBook series during my time behind the Genius Bar, and saw several battery firmware updates to help the issues. Today, Apple released yet another update that “improves the ability of MacBook batteries to maintain a charge if you shut the system down and do not use it for an extended period of time.”

As with any updates, read the directions, folks.

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Mac Rumors:

The big story circulating around the internet this weekend was the possibility of a March 24th Apple Media event. The date was based on a couple of anonymous reports from World of Apple and My Apple Guide. While the date seems plausible, neither site has any particular track record for accurately predicting Apple’s future plans.

[…]

Of the releases, the iMac and Mac mini are expected to be smaller bumps that may not warrant a full media event. The Mac Pro, however, is expected to incorporate a major architectual jump with the adoption of Intel’s Nehalem processors. Intel is also conveniently launching Mac Pro suitable Nehalem processors at the end of March. And in a final piece of related news, the latest Mac OS X 10.5.7 developer seeds has been revealed to already “fully” support the Nehalem processors.

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The New York Times has posted a story about Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of Search Product and User Experience. Here’s a bit from it:

“It used to be people would come over to my apartment and say, ‘Does your apartment look like Google or does Google look like your apartment?’ ” she says with a staccato laugh that has earned a following of its own in Silicon Valley. “I can’t articulate it anymore. I really love color. I’m not very knick-knacky or cluttery. My place has very clean, simple lines. There are some elements of fun and whimsy. That has always appealed to me.”

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Photocritic.org has put together a collection of 100 great shots taken with Apple’s iPhone.

Needless to say, I was surprised to see one of mine on the list:

The shot was like many I’ve taken with my iPhone: I simply didn’t have one of my cameras with me (I normally shoot with a Canon Powershot G9 or a Canon Digital Rebel XT) and hoped that the rather wimpy iPhone camera would get the job done. On this shot, it did.

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This is a little old, but here’s why Daring Fireball doesn’t have comments:

I wanted to write a site for someone it’s meant for. That reader I write for is a second version of me. I’m writing for him. He’s interested in the exact same things I’m interested in; he reads the exact same websites I read. I want him to like this website so much that he reads it from the top to the bottom, and he reads everything. Every single word. The copyright statement, what software I use, he’s read it all.

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The MacOS iPhone Project is (according to their site) an attempt to get Mac System 7 running on an iPhone. Details are sketchy, but they do have photos. Here’s a blurb:

This is where we ran into one of our biggest issues, the cursor, it sound simple, but Apple didnt make it easy for us.

I have a feeling this will require jail-breaking the device, but time will tell.

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Wired:

But here’s the catch: Most of the time, we do almost nothing. Our most common tasks—email, Web surfing, watching streamed videos—require very little processing power. Only a few people, like graphic designers and hardcore gamers, actually need heavy-duty hardware. For years now, without anyone really noticing, the PC industry has functioned like a car company selling SUVs: It pushed absurdly powerful machines because the profit margins were high, while customers lapped up the fantasy that they could go off-roading, even though they never did. So coders took advantage of that surplus power to write ever-bulkier applications and operating systems.

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Gizmodo spent some time with Apple’s new 17-inch MacBook Pro and has posted a nice review of the machine:

Apple will tell you that the MBP17 is the thinnest, lightest 17-inch notebook in the world. We’ll tell you that for a monster of a laptop, it manages to not be too monstrous. The 17-inch (1920x1200) screen is a sharp, contrasty and colorful panorama, but it’s the little touches that make the MBP17 manageable: The system’s near-silent operation (using a 256GB SSD instead of a hard drive) is almost unnerving. Its underside gets warm, but never hot. And the unibody design makes particularly good sense in this larger size, as the wide chassis does not flex to your grip as you might expect.

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