Mac notebook and other portable computing is covered in The 'Book Review. iPad, iPod, iPhone, and
Apple TV news is covered in iOS News
Review. All prices are in US dollars unless otherwise noted.
News & Opinion
Tech Trends
Products & Services
Software
News & Opinion
Apple Adds Community Discussions Links to Online
Store
Apple has also added links to community discussions from the product
pages in the Apple Store. Users have the options of searching
questions, answering those listed, browsing through questions by
category and sorting them by various criteria.
Questions addressed in threads include:
- iPad or MacBook Pro 13" for a college student?
- What are the differences between MacBook Pro and MacBook Air?
- Can I run Office on a Mac?
- What can I do on a Mac?
- Compatibility with PC Files & Peripherals
- Photos, Movies & Music
- Windows & Microsoft Office
- Mac OS
- WiFi & Networking
- Which Mac is right for me?
- Comparing Macs
- Portability & Battery Life
- Customizing Your Mac
- Software & Accessories
Link: Mac Questions and
Answers
Is Apple Product Quality Slipping?
MIT Technology Review contributing editor Simson L. Garfinkel
contends that as Apple caters less to the demands of artists and other
creative professionals, the quality of its products is slipping, noting
that in the "Think Different" era, the implicit message was that Apple
products were for quirky rebels who would one day dominate the
world.
However, Garfinkel maintains that today's Apple is turning its back
on that creative class and no longer designs for creators of digital
media, who tend to be demanding about product quality. Instead, he
says, Apple is building mass market products for consumers in at least
two senses of the word: people who spend their own money, rather than
their companies', and people who consume digital media, as opposed to
people who produce it. He notes that while this reorientation has made
Apple wildly profitable, its products have trended downwards in
quality, flexibility, and even reliability.
Link: Review: Bad
Apple
Addressing OS X Lion Recovery Partition
Problems
MacFixIt's Topher Kessler says if your OS X Lion Recovery HD
partition is missing or not working, then it may be easy to get working
with just a few steps, noting that unlike previous versions of OS X
that came on a separate installation disk, which could be used as a
recovery and diagnostics tool, Lion is distributed through the Mac App
Store and therefore does not have the option of a separate boot medium.
To give people a similar option, the Lion installer creates a small
"Recovery HD" partition that you can boot to by holding Command-R at
startup. However, he says some users may have problems with their
systems either missing this partition, or having multiple ones after a
reinstallation.
Link: Addressing OS X
Lion Recovery Partition Problems
Tech Trends
IDC: PC Shipments Expected to Have Strong Second
Half of 2012
PR: Worldwide PC shipment growth for 2011 ended on a slightly
positive note, growing to 1.8% on the year, according to the
International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker.
While the first half of 2012 is expected to see only modest shipment
growth, launch of Windows 8 and the excitement generated by ultrabooks
and other ultrathin notebooks should drive second half sales in a much
stronger way, IDC projects.
For much of 2011, vendors struggled to maintain consumer interest in
a market beset by a tenuous economic recovery and disrupted by emerging
computing devices. Lack of interest was evidenced by a lackluster
Christmas season, and mature markets like the United States and Western
Europe, in particular, had a rough year, with PC shipments in 2011
shrinking a substantial 9% compared to 2010.
Looking ahead, IDC expects the PC market to still enjoy pockets
of growth, particularly in emerging markets, with overall PC growth to
be a modest 5.0% for the 2012, with most of that occurring in the
latter half of the year. "Many consumers are holding off making PC
purchases at the moment because tablet devices like Apple's iPad are
proving to be a powerful distraction," Bob O'Donnell, vice president of
Clients and Displays at IDC, says in a release. "However, end user
surveys tell us that few people consider media tablets as replacements
for their PCs, so later this year when there is a new Microsoft
operating system, available in sleek new PC form factors, we believe
consumer interest in PCs will begin to rebound."
Although emerging markets have continued to show good uptake, IDC
has slightly reduced its outlook in some regions. The 2012 forecast for
China has been lowered to 9%, the first time a year of single-digit
growth has been forecast for there in recent memory. Part of the
downward adjustment for emerging markets id due to the shortage of disk
drives, which greatly impacts white box PC manufacturers who play a
prevalent role in emerging markets. Secondly, the prospect of slowing
exports will also likely affect PC spending as both consumers and SMBs
in developing countries scale back.
"2012 and 2013 will bring significant challenges
for Microsoft and the PC community," says Worldwide PC Tracker senior
research analyst Jay Chou. "The Wintel platform must evolve to
accommodate user expectations of ubiquitous computing on a multitude of
devices and physical settings. Windows 8 and ultrabooks are a
definitive step in the right direction to recapturing the relevance of
the PC, but its promise of meshing a tablet experience in a PC body
will likely entail a period of trial and error, thus the market will
likely see modest growth in the near term."
A graphic illustrating desktop and portable PC shipments for both
mature and emerging markets during the 2011-2016 forecast period is
available at IDC.com. Instructions on how to embed this graphic into
online news articles and social media can be found by viewing this
press release on IDC.com.
IDC's Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker gathers PC market data in 80
countries by vendor, form factor, brand, processor brand and speed,
sales channel and user segment. The research includes historical and
forecast trend analysis as well as price band and installed base
data.
Link: PC Shipments
Expected to Have Strong Second Half of 2012, but Long-Term PC Growth
Capped Within Single Digits, According to IDC
Thunderbolt May Become Standard on PCs in 2013
DigiTimes' Monica Chen and Jessie Shen report that as Thunderbolt
makes the shift from copper wire to optical cables at the end of 2012,
adoption is expected to increase, with the technology likely to become
a standard I/O specification for PCs and related products in 2013,
according to sources at PC manufacturers.
Chen and Shen note that Lenovo, Asustek, and a number of motherboard
makers are set to launch products based on Intel's upcoming Ivy Bridge
platform, which will come with Thunderbolt ports that utilize optical
cables, their sources indicated.
Intel's current Thunderbolt cable technology for Sandy Bridge chips
is based on copper, and the shift to optical cables for the forthcoming
Ivy Bridge could bring higher bandwidth for data throughput and longer
cable lengths, the sources noted.
Thunderbolt, developed by Intel and first brought to market with
technical collaboration from Apple in February 2011 in a MacBook Pro
refresh, is a high-speed PC connection technology that supports and
consolidates both high-speed data transfers and high-definition (HD)
displays in a single cable. Running at 10 Gbps, Thunderbolt can
transfer a full-length HD movie in less than 30 seconds.
Link: Thunderbolt May
Become Standard for PCs in 2013 (subscription required)
Products & Services
Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Lion
Edition
PR: There's never been a better
time to switch to Mac OS X maintains David Pogue, whose newly released
Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Lion Edition
(O'Reilly, $29.99) is now available to help you do it.
"Who ever thought, in the days when Mac owners were an oppressed
minority, that Macs would represent 20 percent of the world's
new-computer sales?" asks Pogue, a weekly personal-technology columnist
for the New York Times and an Emmy award-winning tech correspondent for
CBS News. "An incredible number of these people are refugees from the
Windows world who could use a hand crossing the great divide into the
Mac world. This book is for them: the oppressed majority."
Important stuff you need to know about Switching to the Mac: The
Missing Manual, Lion Edition:
- Transferring your stuff. Moving files from a PC to a Mac by cable,
network, or disk is the easy part. But how do you extract your email,
address book, calendar, Web bookmarks, buddy list, desktop pictures,
and MP3 files? Now you'll know.
- Recreating your software suite. This book identifies the Mac
equivalents of your favorite Windows programs.
- Learning Lion. Apple's latest operating system is faster, smarter,
and more iPaddish - but you still have to learn it. iCloud. Gestures.
Mission Control. Launchpad. AirDrop. App Store. AutoSave.
Indeed, If Apple wrote it, this new book covers it.
David Pogue, with 3 million books in print, is one of the world's
best-selling how-to authors. In 1999, he launched the Missing Manuals
series, which now includes 100 titles.
- Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Lion Edition
- Publisher: O'Reilly Media
- By David Pogue
- Print ISBN: 9781449398538
- Pages: 712
- Print Price: $29.99
- order@oreilly.com
- 1-800-998-9938
- 1-707-827-7000
Link: Switching to
the Mac: The Missing Manual, Lion Edition (available from
Amazon.com
for $19.39; Kindle
edition, $9.99;
Apple iBooks edition, $14.99)
Software
Photoshop CS6 Beta Available
PR: Adobe Systems Incorporated has announced that a new Adobe
Photoshop CS6 beta, a preview of what's to come in the next release of
the industry standard in digital imaging, its first major update since
April 2010, is available as a free download from Adobe Labs. Customers
can download the beta, try out the experience and provide feedback to
the product team. Packed with groundbreaking new innovations, features
and incredible performance enhancements, Photoshop CS6 beta is
available for the Mac OS and Microsoft Windows platforms. The final
release is expected in the first half of 2012.
"Photoshop CS6 will be a milestone release that pushes the
boundaries of imaging innovation with incredible speed and
performance," says Winston Hendrickson, vice president products,
Creative Media Solutions, Adobe. "We couldn't wait to share this beta
of Photoshop CS6 with our customers and are looking forward to hearing
from them and seeing the ways they are incorporating the beta into
their daily creative workflows."
New Features in Photoshop CS6 Beta
Photoshop CS6 beta demonstrates Adobe's focus on performance
enhancements, imaging magic and creativity tools to offer customers a
new experience in digital imaging. Key features include new additions
to the Content-Aware tools: Content-Aware Patch allows greater control
by letting users select and duplicate an area of an image to fill in or
"patch" another. Content-Aware Move lets users select and magically
move an object to a new place in the image.
Customers will experience enhanced performance, powered by the new
Adobe Mercury Graphics Engine, enabling claimed near-instant results
from popular editing tools including Liquify, Puppet Warp, Transform
and Lighting Effects; and a refined, modern interface featuring dark UI
options to make images pop. New and reengineered design tools make
creating designs faster and more efficient. Vector layers allow users
to apply dashed lines and gradient strokes, searchable layers help
quickly zero in on any layer you need, and new type styles let
designers quickly apply type treatments to their designs.
In addition, the Photoshop CS6 beta offers all the features of Adobe
Photoshop CS6 and Adobe Photoshop CS6 Extended, such as new 3D editing
features and quantitative imaging analysis capabilities. These features
will be included in the shipping version of Photoshop CS6 Extended when
it becomes available.
The Photoshop CS6 beta is available immediately as a free download
in English and Japanese. At installation, users will be required to
provide an Adobe ID to complete a one-time login and online product
activation.
Link: Photoshop CS6 Beta
LibreOffice 3.5.1 Released
PR: LibreOffice is a free and open source personal
productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh, and GNU/Linux, that gives
you six application modules for document production and data processing
needs: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math, and Base. Support and
documentation is free from a large, dedicated community of users,
contributors, and developers.
New in LibreOffice 3.5.1 Final
This is the second release from the 3.5 branch of LibreOffice.
It contains many new features, and is the recommended version for
private users.
The following notes apply:
- This release is bit-for-bit identical to the 3.5.1 Release
Candidate 2, so you don't need to download or reinstall if you have
that version already.
- The distribution for Windows is an international build, so you can
choose the user interface language that you prefer. Help content is
available via an online service, or alternatively as a separate
install.
- For Windows users that have LibreOffice prior to version 3.4.5
installed, either uninstall that beforehand, or upgrade to 3.4.5.
Otherwise, the upgrade to 3.5.1 may fail.
- For Windows users that have OpenOffice.org installed, the
developers advise uninstalling that beforehand, because it registers
the same file type associations.
- If you run Windows 2000, you may require this update before being
able to install LibreOffice.
- If you run Linux, the GCJ Java variant has known issues with
LibreOffice, we advise to e.g. use OpenJDK instead.
- LibreOffice contains all the security fixes from OpenOffice.org in
3.3.0, and perhaps more as a side-effect of the code cleanups.
Microsoft Office 2010 will complain that ODF 1.2 and extended
documents written by LibreOffice 3.5 are invalid (but opens them
still). This is a shortcoming in MSO2010 only supporting ODF 1.1,
please see here for further details.
Link: LibreOffice
Desktop Mac
Deals
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For deals on current and discontinued 'Books, see our 13" MacBook and MacBook Pro,
MacBook Air, 13" MacBook Pro, 15" MacBook Pro, 17" MacBook Pro, 12" PowerBook G4, 15" PowerBook G4, 17" PowerBook G4, titanium PowerBook G4,
iBook G4, PowerBook G3, and iBook G3 deals.
We also track iPad,
iPhone, iPod touch, iPod classic, iPod nano, and iPod shuffle deals.
