Archive for: February, 2008
February 29th, 2008
Wintel Vista conspiracy screws customers: Another win for Apple
The latest PC market scandal - that Microsoft, Intel and some PC makers knew that the “Vista Capable” logo certification program was a lie and that some chipsets for popular machines couldn’t support the new Aero interface stuff - must be music in the executive suites down in Cupertino. The story provides more evidence to PC users that there’s a good reason to join the switcher movement to the Mac.
This amazing story continues to unfold. Microsoft officials gave the green light to Vista certification for an older Intel chipset with integrated graphics that wouldn’t support Aero. According to reports, back in 2006, Intel decided that it might not be able to ramp up production for its 945 chipset (or ramp up its marketing program for the new chipset), the one that could run Vista, so it asked Redmond to grandfather in the older chipset. And it seems that lots of important people knew about this.
Beyond all the complaints online, the internal details have come to the light because of a lawsuit. Recently, the court released more than 150 pages of redacted memos from the companies. You can just click a random page or two and come up with something interesting (The pages in the PDF are images rather than text and that makes searching difficult.)
For example, the November 2005 list of “context” from Brad Goldberg, then general manger with Microsoft’s Windows Client Product group (page 153). He said that customers didn’t want “detailed documentation” on the capabilities of their machine to handle the important new features in Vista such as Aero Glass, Windows Defender and Flip3D.
Of course, these would be the very features that they would hype for the upgrade.
February 29th, 2008
Running naked (with hard drives)
Earlier in the week my cohort here at The Apple Core, David Morgenstern, wrote about living a bare drive lifestyle where “professional Mac users often use hard disk mechanisms like floppies.” Count me in that group. I keep a lot of (non-traveling) hard drives in my office, most in silver anti-static bags, and swap them in and out of use with great frequency. I also change notebook hard drives more often than some people change their underwear, but I digress.
If you only have one or two external drives, then keeping them in an enclosure is best. It keeps the hard drive mechanism out of harms way and (sometimes) cools it with a fan. Hard drives also stand a better chance at surviving a fall than naked drives do. Also, I wouldn’t recommend keeping your primary data backup on a bare drive under any circumstances or handling bare drives if you’ve every been described as “klutzy” or your house if very dry and you get a shock any time you touch anything metal.
With those disclaimers aside, there are tons of benefits to using raw drives. Drive enclosures can be expensive if you need a lot of storage or have a lot of small mechanisms laying around (especially if you need a lot of interfaces, i.e. FireWire). If you only access certain archival data periodically or don’t need all your drives to be online simultaneously, then using raw drives can be beneficial.
February 28th, 2008
Nicewear: SmartSleep
Apple added a hibernate feature called Safe Sleep to their notebook starting with the PowerBook G4 (Double-Layer SD). Safe Sleep saves the notebook’s state to disk and is handy if you run completely out of juice while sleeping with unsaved documents or windows open.
It’s that dimmed, grey screen that you may have seen after plugging in your machine after an extended MacBook nappy session:
Hibernate/Safe Sleep an undoubted lifesaver – unless, of course, you have a MacBook Air and can’t afford the 2GB of disk space that it requires. The default behavior on all MacBooks is to sleep and hibernate but that can take a long time while the contents of the memory are saved to disk.
Enter SmartSleep, a freeware preference pane that dynamically sets the sleep state of your machine. SmartSleep lets your notebook sleep (without hibernating) when the battery is above a user-defined level. If your battery level drops below that threshold (the default is less then 20 percent or 20 minutes) it will switch to sleep and hibernate mode. So, it’s essentially the best of both worlds.
Thanks TUAW.
Loading …February 28th, 2008
Living a bare drive lifestyle
With the increasing demand for storage — video content and disk-based backups — professional Mac users often use hard disk mechanisms like floppies. Now storage vendors are enabling this bare drive workflow with a variety of disk adapters and protectors.
On the desk and bookshelves in my office, I have stacks of drives in enclosures and others bare. But going bare is not without its risks: hard disk mechanisms aren’t floppies no matter how much we want them to be.
When placed inside an enclosure or inside your desktop machine, the drive’s electronics are protected from coffee spills and depending on the drive, cooled by a fan. And even short drops can be terminal for a disk. I can see bent pins on a 2.5-inch disk sticking partially out from under a monitor stand on my desk here.
(Flashback: As content creators, Mac users have always been big external drive and removable media users. Of course, this affection for storage was encourages with the SCSI interface that came standard on the Mac Plus back in 1986 and all subsequent models until the interface was replaced by FireWire. I remember spending about $1,000 for a 300MB (yes, megabyte) SuperDrive back in those days. It was big, made of metal and solid. It sounded like an airplane at times. Those were the days.)
Sure, many vendors offer easy-to-use, screwless trays for JBOD storage units or arrays that would be safer. But even that is sometimes too much trouble.
February 27th, 2008
Apple to make iPhone SDK ‘roadmap’ announcement next week
Apple on Wednesday mailed out its invitation to a Cupertino campus event next Thursday about its iPhone SDK. The intriguing part of the invitation is the promise of a roadmap for developers and for customers in the enterprise space. This is something different from Apple.
Please join us to learn about the iPhone software roadmap, including the iPhone SDK andsome exciting new enterprise features.
Now, some other Apple watchers are reminding us that this is a week later than Steve Jobs promised in an open letter back in October. And this was is in a month with an extra day for the leap year yet!
Still, a week late isn’t really late (maybe that’s because I live in a university neighborhood where everyone expects a grace period of a few minutes for a class).
This is just over a week after Apple abruptly pulled the plug on the Xserve RAID product line and passed its server storage over to a third-party developer.
A storage professional told me last week that if Apple has any expectation of making any kind of penetration into the business or enterprise market, it must be more open with its coprporate clients.
“Sun and HP have certain terms and conditions for this kind of product. They announce the end of life 30 days in advance [of the new product release] and then allow orders for up to 6 months after that announcement. What [Apple] has happening this week, is a whole bunch of people who are ready to buy XRAIDs today and can’t buy them,” he said.
Apple usually puts its software developers under strict NDAs at its developer conference. While I doubt we will see much of the iPhone roadmap next week, perhaps we will see more of the developer roadmap made public.
On the developer front, I also note that Apple on Monday posted Adobe Systems’ AIR download for Tiger or Leopard. It lets users run rich Internet applications on the desktop.
February 27th, 2008
The SSD failure debate
To listen to some people talk about it, Solid State Drives (SSDs) – like the 64GM model from Samsung that you can get in the new MacBook Air – are doomed to fail.
SSD is defined as “A disk drive that uses memory chips instead of rotating platters for data storage.”
By now you should be able to recite the benefits of SSD by rote: lighter, longer MTBF, more shock resistant, lower operating temperature, faster boot times, yadda, yadda.
In a previous post I posited that SSD may be overhyped because it’s not really that fast but is super expensive. While random “disk” access is pretty fast, initial benchmarks show that SSD boot times and sequential disk access are nothing special.
The other big knock on SSD technology is its finite lifespan. People in the know claim that SSDs can start to fail after 100,000 writes to every single cell in the chip, which is almost virtually impossible.
Steve Gibson addressed the SSD lifespan issue on Security Now podcast #122 (transcript). Gibson also responded to a commenter on The Apple Core that wrote to his company to ask why he couldn’t use his Spinrite hard disk repair software on a thumb drive.
…the other thing that happens is, if you write to (non-volatile, solid state memory) over and over and over, they die. So they don’t die fast. It’s like on the order of 10 to the 5 write cycles, so like 100,000 write cycles. But not infinite. Hard drives are infinite. That is, it doesn’t hurt them in any way to change the data on them. It actually hurts non-volatile memory to change its data. So in order to mitigate the damage, non-volatile RAM has a technology that spreads the actual writing around the surface of the RAM. So that even if you are reading and writing the same area, that is, the same address of the RAM over and over and over, it’s actually occurring in a distributed fashion across different physical areas of the RAM. They do that in order to spread out the damage caused by writing to it.
But naturally the manufacturer says that it’s not the case…
February 26th, 2008
Is Apple’s Mighty Mouse too smart for its own good?
While most attention on Mac input is focused on multitouch gestures on new notebooks and iPhone screens, even longtime Mac users may not know exactly how many buttons are on the Mighty Mouse that ships with desktop Macs. But all will enjoy the new trick Leopard Finder has when scrolling with a mouse or trackpad.
Before Monday evening’s BMUGWest Mac User Group meeting in San Francisco, longtime member David Schwartz and I ran down some of the Leopard 10.5.2 changes and our discussion strayed to input.
I mentioned a scene that I overheard in a retail electronics store. A Mac critic said loudly that a big reason he hated the Mac was its lack of support for multibutton mice — of course, he was a solid Windows user. The original Mac had a single button and looking over at the iMac nearby, things didn’t look any different.
Now, I couldn’t let this pass. I walked over to his posse and pointed out that Apple’s Mighty Mouse on display, the standard mouse that ships with all desktop Macs, has 4 programmable mouse buttons. This is only one button less than the usual complement found on a Microsoft mouse and this number must count as “multiple” by even a hardened PC user.
But it was tough to convince him since the industrial design of the Mighty Mouse hides almost all the buttons from view. Except for the separations surrounding the side buttons, there’s not much evidence of buttons on the Mighty Mouse.
February 26th, 2008
Updated MacBook inherits Penryn processor
In addition to a new MacBook Pro Apple also today announced an updated MacBook notebook with similar upgrades.The new MacBook ships with Intel’s latest mobile processor, Penryn, which is based on 45nm-process technology, just like its big brother the MacBook Pro.
The new MacBook configurations are:
- MacBook 13″ White–2.1GHz, 1GB, 120GB 5400RPM, Combo drive US$1,099
- MacBook 13″ White–2.4GHz, 2GB, 160GB 5400RPM, SuperDrive US$1,299
- MacBook 13″ Black–2.4GHz, 2GB, 250GB 5400RPM, SuperDrive US$1,499
Features that are only available in the MacBook Pro include:
- Faster 2.5GHz processors
- Larger 15 and 17″ displays
- Better GPU (NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 256MB or 512MB)
- Support for driving a 30-inch monitor
- ExpressCard/34 expansion card slot
- Multi-Touch trackpad (MacBook has a scrolling trackpad)
- FireWire 800 port
- DVI out port (MacBook has a Mini-DVI out)
Loading …February 26th, 2008
Apple updates MacBook Pro with Penryn; Multitouch (updated)
Don’t say I didn’t tell you so.
Apple today announced an upgraded MacBook Pro notebook based on Intel’s Penryn processor and featuring a NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics processor with 512MB of VRAM and a Multi-Touch trackpad.
MacBook Pro configurations include:
- MacBook Pro 15″ 2.4GHz, 2GB, 200GB 5400RPM, 256MB VRAM US$1,999
- MacBook Pro 15″ 2.5GHz, 2GB, 250GB 5400RPM, 512MB VRAM US$2,499
- MacBook Pro 17″ 2.5GHz, 2GB, 250GB 5400RPM, 512MB VRAM US$2,799
Probably the single biggest feature in the new MacBook Pro is the move to Intel’s latest mobile processor – Penryn. Intel announced the new chip in September 2007 and began shipping it in January. You can read more about Penryn in my piece Inside Intel’s Penryn Processor. From Apple:
The Intel Core 2 Duo runs on 45-nm process technology at speeds up to 2.6GHz with up to 6MB of L2 cache. Its SSE4 vector engine handles 128-bit computations in a single clock cycle, accelerating data manipulation by simultaneously applying a single instruction to multiple data.
Apple’s MacBook Pro performance page lists some impressive benchmarks for the new NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT GPU:
The combination of a 16-lane PCI Express architecture and the powerful graphics processor brings a new level of realism to MacBook Pro users.
The 16x full-screen anti-aliasing, 128-bit High Dynamic Range rendering, and texture fill rate of up to 8.2 billion textured pixels per second provide unrivaled picture quality and lifelike contrast and tone for next-generation 3D animation and games. The new MacBook Pro graphics performance is up to 2.3 times faster than that of the original Core Duo-based MacBook Pro.
Unfortunately, we didn’t get any cool goodies like a Blu-Ray drive, new enclosure or built-in 3G wireless, but then again, Apple has to keep something for the next model, right?
The new models are listed a shipping “within 24 hours” from the Apple Store.
Loading …February 25th, 2008
Jon Stewart’s iPhone: Product placement or pop culture?
Last night I was watching the Oscars (go Ratatouille!) frantically adding movies to my Netflix queue when host Jon Stewart did a bit about his iPhone.
It occurred during a long reel of previous Oscar winners (I think), when the camera cut back to Stewart he joked about how great technology was while he watched Lawrence of Arabia on his iPhone. He even made a joke about how it was better in wide screen.
Was it product placement or just pop culture? Click on the jump for two more photos and a poll.
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