Tag Archives | Apple

Join Me for Live Coverage of Apple’s Mac/OS X Event Next Wednesday

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 13, 2010 at 5:57 pm

Apple is holding a media event next Wednesday at 10am PT at its headquarters in Cupertino. Its invite is–for Apple–relatively non-cryptic: The event is called Back to the Mac, and Apple promises a look at “what’s new for the Mac…including a sneak peek of the next major version of Mac OS X.”

I’ll be in the audience that morning liveblogging my heart out. You can join me at technologizer.com/macfuture, and I hope you will.

Meanwhile, we have  a week to muse about what the future holds for Apple’s operating system. It’s been almost exactly three years since OS X 10.5 Leopard was released–back in a very different era for Apple. (The iPhone had just barely shipped and wasn’t yet a platform for third-party apps; the iPad as we know it may not even have been a glint in Steve Jobs’s eye.)

Last year’s 10.6 Snow Leopard was almost entirely about modernization below the surface, not new features. And if past Apple practice holds true this time around, it’ll be well into 2011 before Lion, or whatever it’s called, shows up. So the time would be right for a major upgrade–one which aims to keep the Mac relevant for a long time to come. That’s what I’m rooting for, anyhow, and I’ll share my wish list before the event happens.

Mac users, what do you want to see in a big new OS X update?

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iPhone: 3G Until 2012?

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 11, 2010 at 1:43 pm

I don’t know whether TechCrunch’s Steve Cheney has it right when he says there will be no 4G iPhone in 2011, but it sounds at least as plausible as a scenario that does involve a 4G iPhone shipping next year. (The original 2G iPhone, after all, appeared well after 3G models had become quite common, which is one reason why I didn’t buy one.)

Cheney’s other prediction–that Apple will release a dual-mode iPhone that works worldwide on both GSM and CDMA networks–is an utter wild card, but one that I like…

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Apple, the Low Cost Leader?

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 8, 2010 at 8:05 am

BGR–which isn’t an unimpeachable source, but one that sometimes gets stuff right early–says that it hears that the Sprint version of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab tablet will go on sale on November 14th for $399 with a two-year contract, or $599 without a subsidy.

The $399 price is $100 less than the cheapest flavor of iPad, but that’s not a very useful comparison, since the $499 iPad doesn’t have 3G and the Galaxy does. You want to compare the Galaxy against the cheapest 3G iPad, which goes for $629. And you want to compare against the $599 Galaxy, since the iPad is always sold unsubsidized, and lets you buy AT&T data at a reasonable price without committing to a contract.

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What If the Mac Were Invented Today?

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 5, 2010 at 12:41 pm

Over at Techland (where I’m guestblogging a couple of times a week–come visit!) I wrote about the tendency of lots of pundits to assume that the smartphone wars will inevitably repeat the PC wars, with Apple’s tightly-managed iPhone getting trounced by the widely-dispersed Android ecosystem. In the Techland post, I explain why I don’t think that’s a given. One big reason why is the existence of the Internet–if all phones end up being portals to an open-standards Net, there’s no particular reason why multiple platforms can’t thrive.

With bigger, traditional computers, we’re already largely there. For operating systems, the Web is a diplomatic place where it doesn’t really matter what OS you’re using as long as you’ve got a modern browser. And nearly all peripherals such as printers, cameras, and networking gizmos work equally well with Windows and Macs. It’s wildly different from the 1980s and 1990s, when the computing universe rotated around Microsoft’s platform and there were lots of things which Macheads simply could not do.

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iPhone vs. Android: The State of the Smartphone Wars (and More to Come)

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 5, 2010 at 8:08 am

It’s Tuesday, so there’s a new Technologizer column up over at TIME.com. This one’s on iPhone vs. Android, and as I wrote it yesterday, I realized that I had bitten off a pretty gigantic topic for one 700-word column. It ended up being a 1,000 word column, but even then, I could have written on for another 2,000 or 3,000 words. Considering how fast both platforms are changing, the shelf life of this column will be short, so it’s a topic I’ll come back to repeatedly.

Actually, I might return to the smartphone wars as soon as next week. I got an e-mail from a reader who assumed that the fact I don’t mention Windows Phone 7 in the column was a sign I was a Microsoft hater. Nope–I just chose to focus on the big battle well underway between two platforms that are already on the market. I’ll be at the Windows Phone 7 launch in New York next Monday–stay tuned for live coverage of it, and for lots more thoughts about Windows Phone and its chances of success.

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A Few Questions About Touch-Screen iMacs

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 1, 2010 at 9:18 am

A couple of years ago, I took advantage of the Q&A session at an Apple press event to ask Steve Jobs if Apple might release touch-screen Macs. (I did so on behalf of a Technologizer community member.) Jobs told me that the company had experimented with the idea and didn’t think it made sense just yet. At the time, I noted that this answer didn’t preclude the possibility of touch-screen Macs–it was pretty much the stock response that he always gives about potential Apple products, right up until the moment that the company releases the item in question.

Now DigiTimes is reporting apparent concrete evidence of a touch Mac that might not be all that far from release: Apple is supposedly testing touch-screen panels for new iMacs.

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No Firefox for iPhone? I Would Have Settled for “Firefox.”

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 28, 2010 at 2:24 pm

Mozilla has published a blog post on its plans for the iPhone platform. Basically, they involve (A) focusing on Firefox Home, an app that provides access to Firefox bookmarks, tabs, and history on the iPhone; (B) not doing a full-blown version of Firefox for iPhone; and (C) not letting Firefox Home evolve into something so fancy that it feels like Firefox for the iPhone.

Why no Firefox for iPhone? The Mozilla post doesn’t explain in much detail:

People have asked about adding more browser-like features to Firefox Home, but there are technical and logistical restrictions that make it difficult, if not impossible, to build the full Firefox browser for the iPhone.

The challenges for a real full Firefox on iOS are obvious: As far as I know, Apple’s recent loosening of its App Store guidelines still don’t permit third-party browser companies to write the comprehensive rendering/JavaScript engine that would be required for Mozilla to write a browser from scratch. But as a Firefox fan and an iPhone user, I would have cheerfully settled for a “Firefox” that involved Firefox Home’s features plus more interface functionality but used Apple’s WebKit engine for page rendering.

Atomic Web Browser, which seems to be the work of one guy, is really Safari with a new skin; it’s terrific. I don’t see why Mozilla couldn’t evolve Firefox Home into something similar, and similarly useful–or how doing so wouldn’t be a boon to Firefox aficionados.

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T-Grid: BlackBerry PlayBook vs. the iPad

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 28, 2010 at 10:26 am

Hey, it’s been a long time since we’ve done a T-Grid–a very simple comparison chart comparing two at least vaguely comparable products spec-by-spec. Let’s do one on RIM’s upcoming BlackBerry PlayBook and the iPad, shall we?

The point of a T-Grid is never to determine which product is better; it’s just to see how the specs stack up. From what we know so far, the PlayBook’s specs stack up rather well–it’s powerful, thin, and light, and has a robust OS in the venerable (if low-profile) QNX. But there are a few speeds and feeds that RIM hasn’t disclosed yet, and one particularly crucial fact remains unknown: How’s the battery life?

After the jump, the details we know so far.

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