Tag Archives | Apple

Verizon Event Live Blog Coverage This Morning

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 11, 2011 at 4:46 am

Greetings from a taxicab in chilly New York. I’m on my way to Verizon’s “Latest News event,” where the company will stun the world–if it doesn’t announce that Apple’s iPhone is coming to its network. Live coverage of the event begins at 11am ET/8am PT at technologizer.com/verizon. (Pssst: I’ll try to be there a few minutes early.)

I’m happy to report that we’ll have two special guests providing color commentary from San Francisco: Macworld Editorial Director Jason Snell and PCWorld Assistant Editor Nick Mediati. They’ll share their thoughts on the news as it develops as I report from the scene here in Manhattan.

If you’re reading this before the event kicks off, feel free to share any last-minute predictions or other thoughts. It’s going to be a weird feeling if nobody ever writes or reads another article longing for a Verizon iPhone or reporting (rightly or wrongly) that one is imminent. Pining for a Sprint iPhone or a T-Mobile iPhone just isn’t going to be the same…

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The Mac App Store is Live

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 6, 2011 at 7:56 am

Apple’s Mac App Store has launched. (You’ll need to download OS X 10.6.6 to get it.) I wrote about it for Techland and will be back with more thoughts once I’ve had a chance to use it a bit. (First impression: “Wow, this really is virtually identical to the iOS App Store experience.”)

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Apple's Mac App Store Debuts Thursday

Posted by Ed Oswald on January 5, 2011 at 9:32 pm

With all the hubbub surrounding CES and everything non-Apple, chances are you may have forgot that Thursday will be a big day for Apple itself. As it had previously confirmed, the Mac App Store will launch — although we’re not exactly sure when.

Jim Dalrymple at The Loop claims that sources are telling him the service would become available at noon ET, and it will follow a similar structure to Apple’s successful App Store for its iOS products. The goal is simple: users will have a simple one-stop shop to purchase both free and fee-based applications.

No doubt many folks will scoff at Apple’s attempt to once again exert its control over the experience of its customers, but it will have benefits. For example, smaller developers would be able to benefit from the widespread exposure Apple would be able to give their application, while at the same time not having to worry about the expenses of delivering the product to the consumer.

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This Dumb Year: The 57 Lamest Tech Moments of 2010

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 21, 2010 at 1:33 am

Progress–to swipe an ancient General Electric slogan–is the technology industry’s most important product. Its second-most important product? That’s easy: blunders. In fact, you could argue that the two are inextricably intertwined. An industry that was more uptight about making mistakes might be more cautious and therefore less inventive.

It’s also sometimes difficult to tell where progress ends and blunder begins, or vice versa. If you believe that Google Wave was a bad idea in the first place, you might think it was smart of Google to kill it this year–but if you thought Wave had promise, then it’s Google’s early cancellation that’s the gaffe.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that while the industry’s lame moments are…well, lame, they can also be important. Last year, I summed up a decade’s worth of tech screw-ups and came up with 87 examples. This time around, I’m covering only a single year–but I found 57 items worth commemorating. No, tech companies aren’t getting more error prone; I was just more diligent. And as usual, there was plenty of ground to cover.

Thanks once again to Business 2.0’s 101 Dumbest Moments in Business and, of course, to Esquire’s Dubious Achievement Awards for inspiring this. Here we go…

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Apple's Mac Store is a Go. And the Mac is a PC

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 16, 2010 at 11:48 am

Apple has announced that its Mac App Store will open for business on January 6th. It’s a close counterpart to the iPhone App Store–easy app discovery, downloads, installs, and uninstalls, and a deal that gives developers 70 percent of the profits. But the dynamics of the business may be quite different given that the Mac Store will be an additional way to acquire apps rather than the only official one. I’m reserving judgement on how big a deal it’ll be. (Actually, I’m not even sure how much I’ll use it, let alone the rest of the world.)

Apple’s announcement about the launch included the following Steve Jobs quote:

The App Store revolutionized mobile apps,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We hope to do the same for PC apps with the Mac App Store by making finding and buying PC apps easy and fun. We can’t wait to get started on January 6.

This isn’t the first time that Jobs has referred to Macs as PCs. And it doesn’t pay to read too much into canned quotes in press releases. But it’s been my stubborn habit to call Windows-based computers “Windows PCs” for years, based on the principle that Macs are also personal computers. It’s nice to see Apple–a company that has been known to bash PCs–using the same logic. To me, it’s linguistically and technologically appropriate. And who knows–Windows users might be a tiny bit more likely to consider buying an Apple computer if they look at them as an excellent PC rather than a fundamentally different, foreign device.

(I was tempted to end this post by wondering whether Jobs’ reference to PCs was a hint that the company might release an App Store for Windows PCs. But nah, it’s not going to happen…)

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Once Again, “PC or Mac?”

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 7, 2010 at 9:40 am

My new TIME.com Technologizer column is up–it’s a quick look at the pros and cons of Macs and PCs as of late 2010. As always, I’m agnostic rather than partisan.

I talk a little bit in the piece about pricing issues, but they deserve a story of their own–the pricing comparisons I’ve done in the past are all woefully out of date.  (I’ve often found that Mac pricing is reasonable compared to truly comparable PCs, but it seems high at the moment–it’s been a while since Apple has done its periodic CPU/RAM/disk bumps on most models. Time to do the math again.)

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Turn Your Mac Display Into an HD Display

Posted by Robin Raskin on December 6, 2010 at 11:00 pm

Last Gadget Standing Nominee: Kanex XD

Price: $149.95

The Kanex XD does one thing and while it’s probably something that shouldn’t need doing in the first place, it does it well.  It transforms your 27-inch Apple iMac or Apple LED Cinema Display into a High Definition display. This allows you to connect and play your HD devices:  Blu-Ray DVD player, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, or digital set top box in HD format. Reviewers have noted that Apple’s limit of 720 dpi 720p on the screen (no fault of Kanex) is an issue. But, they’ve also noted that  Kanex provides a true, crisp, and clear picture from any HD source with no video scaling. To sweeten the deal, full control of volumn and brightness is available through the unit’s Bluetooth keyboard, and the XD also supports audio pass-through to enhance sound as well as video.

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Anyone Still Want to Contend That the iPad Isn’t a Creative Tool?

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 5, 2010 at 3:59 pm

“The iPad is for consuming content, not creating it.” iPad skeptics have been repeating that mantra for months now. It’s become clear that the rap is a snippy, simple-minded exaggeration of two more specific facts about Apple’s tablet:

  1. After eight months on the market, it hasn’t yet matched all the creativity apps available for Macs and Windows (two platforms that have been around for more than a quarter of a century).
  2. Most writers aren’t going to be crazy about cranking out massive quantities of prose on its on-screen keyboard. (Even that is subject to debate: Macworld Editorial Director Jason Snell wrote this article entirely on an iPad, and it recently won an Azbee award.)

But while it’s true that the iPad can’t replace a Mac or Windows PC for every creative task, the evidence is piling up mighty fast that it is an exciting creative tool. Yesterday night, I dropped in on a San Francisco art show called Future/Canvas, and I can’t imagine any rational human being attending the event and continuing to maintain that the iPad is only for passive, sheeplike intake of content.

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