This Week's Apple and Desktop Mac News
PowerBook, iBook, MacBook, and other portable computing is covered
in The 'Book Review. iPod, iPhone,
and Apple TV news is covered in The iNews
Review.
All prices are in US dollars unless otherwise noted.
News & Opinion
Reviews
Software
iPod Deals
News & Opinion
Mac mini Pricing Not Competitive with Windows
PCs
Applepeels says:
"I would actually like to replace one of my older Macs with a new
Mac. I am on a budget and would buy a Mac
mini if the pricing were at all competitive.
"It is hard for me to look at PC prices and give a product like the
Mac mini a second thought except that I know the software, especially
the operating system is far better on the Mac.
"Still the Mac mini hardware configuration is anemic for the
money...."
Link:
Is There Logic in Apple's Mac mini Pricing?
Add an External SATA Drive to a Mac mini
Hardmac's Lionel reports:
"A report from Alexis:
"Thanks to the news published in April 2006 explaining
how to connect an external SATA drive to the internal port of a Mac
mini, I could complete the following 'bidouille': design a small but
highly performing server....
"The Mac mini is definitely the best Apple model for
being modified, since the Apple II."
Link: Mac mini: How to Add an
External SATA HD - Part II
iMac Outpacing PC Sales
The Manilla Bulletin Online's Melvin G. Calimag reports:
"For the longest time, the number of iMacs sold worldwide has always
been dwarfed by PC sales. That trend is no longer true, according to
Apple, as the sleeker iMac machines are now growing thrice as much as
the PCs.
"Even if the growth difference is based on percentage and that PCs
are far larger in numbers, the results still represents a milestone for
Apple, who's flying high these days because of the iPod and the
iPhone.
"And for that, the Cupertino, California-based computer maker is all
pumped up to rollout the all new iMac, with the Philippines being the
first stop in the Southeast Asian swing, in order to sustain its
hypergrowth momentum."
Link: iMac
Outpacing PCs, Says Apple
Switching to Mac Is a Waste of Time
businesspundit.com's rob says:
The fact that there is no right click button on
the touch pad has to be the single worst design decision anyone has
ever made.
"A few weeks ago I bought a Mac. I know several people that speak
highly of them, and they seemed to have some cool features. Three weeks
into it, I would say that if you are considering it, don't waste your
time. It's all bells and whistles, and functionally, they don't offer
any advantages over a PC. For starters, they aren't intuitive at all.
Everything is graphics driven and Apple seems to want to avoid using
text whenever possible. The fact that there is no right click button on
the touch pad has to be the single worst design decision anyone has
ever made. My guess is that they did it just to be different, as I
can't imagine a scenario that makes it somehow more useful. The delete
button is a misnomer, as it's really just a backspace, and the machine
runs 3x as hot as my Windows laptop."
Please don't flame poor rob. Instead, take the time to remind him
that deliberately Apple chose to use a one-button mouse before the Macintosh and before Windows to
eliminate the "which button do I press?" quandary. As for Apple's
confusingly labelled Delete key, see 30
Top Mac User Mistakes: How Many Are Apple's Fault? dk
Link:
Switching to Mac Is a Waste of Time
How Much Does It Cost to Replace the New iMac's
Front Glass Plate?
Hardmac's Lionel reports:
"Following yesterday's news, many readers asked us the price for
replacing the glass plate of the new iMac as we reported it was rather
fragile ONCE removed from its location in front of the LCD panel. After
contacting our internal sources, owners of the new iMac should not
stress so much, as they will be charged USD 35 for the 20" model and
USD 30 for the 24" model. One will have to add USD 10 for shipping
cost. We were surprised by such low prices, and they were checked twice
by our sources on our request."
Link: New iMac: How Much Does
It Cost to Replace the Front Glass Plate?
Hard Drives with 1 GB Cache Coming Soon
Ars Technica's Jeremy Reimer reports:
"Hard drives have long utilized small bits of cache memory to boost
performance, and some recent hybrid hard drives already combine up to
256 MB of NAND flash memory with traditional platter-based storage. Now
a Japanese company called DTS has taken the idea of hybrid drives in a
slightly different direction, having just unleashed a new type of hard
drive called Mcell that offers 1 GB of on-drive cache using standard
DDR RAM. DTS markets the disc as being a significantly cheaper way to
get some of the benefits of solid state drives without the price."
Link:
Coming Soon: Hard Drives with 1 GB+ DDR RAM Cache
Reviews
Core 2 Mac mini: 'An Impressive Performance
Boost'
Macworld's James Galbraith reports:
"With its low price and small size, the Mac mini has always offered a versatile and
economical Mac experience. But, while Apple has regularly updated its
line of consumer laptops and desktops, this year the Mac mini seemed to
have been all but forgotten by the company. In fact, many industry
pundits predicted that the mini would be eliminated from Apple's
product line. So it was a welcome surprise when Apple quietly updated
the Mac mini to include Intel Core 2 Duo processors, the same processors
the MacBook, MacBook Pro, and iMac have been using since the end of
2006. The good news for those remaining loyal to the Mac mini, or for
people just looking for the least expensive Mac available, is that this
under-hyped upgrade gives the Mac mini an impressive performance boost
in several applications."
Link: Review:
Mac mini Core 2 Duo
Hands-on Review: 24" 2.8 GHz iMac Core 2 Duo
Macs Only's Dana Baggett says:
"We ordered the 24" aluminum iMac
from The Apple
Store online on April 7, the day it was presented by Steve Jobs at
a Special Event meeting at One Infinite Loop, Apple's headquarters. We
opted for the 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme processor and the 500 GB
Serial ATA hard disk drive which The Apple Store online offers as a
package including the ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO with 256 MB of GDDR3
memory standard. (Later we realized that we could have started with the
2.3 GHz Core 2 Duo model and added options while leaving the hard drive
at the 320 GB base and saved $80.) We also opted for 2 MB of
Apple-installed memory."
Link: Hands-on Review - 2.8 GHz
24" Aluminum iMac Core 2 Duo
New Apple Keyboard: Fine Hardware, but the Software
Side Still Needs Work
Betalogue's Pierre
Igot reports:
"The other day, for some reason I felt that typing with my older
white Apple keyboard (the one that does not cause spurious double
keystrokes for me) was particularly slow and hard. It might just have
been the mood or the physical state that I was in, but since I had seen
positive reports about the new (wired) keyboard recently launched by
Apple, I figured I would order one and give it a try....
"Well, I have been using the new keyboard for 24 hours now and, on
the whole, I am really pleased with it.
"There are absolutely no problems with double keystrokes. In fact, I
occasionally would get double keystrokes even with the older white
keyboard that I was using, especially with the Return key. So far, I
haven't had a single occurrence with the new keyboard."
Link:
New Apple Keyboard: Fine Hardware, but the Software Side Still Needs
Work
Software
One Finger Snap: A Right Mouse Button for 1-Button
Mice
PR: Don't throw away that 1-button mouse:
Many new Mac buyers find that the first purchase they make is for a
2-button mouse so they can have quick access to the contextual menu.
Sure, you can hold down the control key when you click, but let's face
it, a two button mouse makes the contextual menu so much easier to get
to. Now with One Finger Snap, you can just click and hold down that one
button to get to the contextual menu. And that way you can hold onto
that beautiful Apple mouse, too.
Great for PowerBook users:
At the office, you have a nice two-button mouse, and you use it
every day. Now you take your PowerBook on the road, and your right
mouse button finger is just twitching. You get things done so much
faster with the contextual menu. Don't you wish there was an easy way
to get to it from the track pad? One Finger Snap works as well with a
one-button track pad as it does with a one-button mouse. So you can
click and hold the trackpad button rather than carry along another
piece of equipment.
For ex-Windows users:
So you took the plunge and switched to the Mac. Good for you. While
you like Mac OS X on your new Mac mini, you can't help but miss that
old 2-button mouse. Don't go back to Windows, just try One Finger Snap.
It's much cheaper, and it has fewer viruses.
But I already have a 7-button, wireless mouse with a scroll
wheel:
Oh, you ubergeek you. One Finger Snap can still help you. Wouldn't
it be nice to have just one more button? Turn on One Finger Snap, and
you no longer need that right mouse button for the contextual menu. Now
you can reassign it to something more useful.
System Requirements: One Finger Snap will work on Mac OS X 10.3
Panther or 10.4 Tiger.
New with One Finger Snap 1.4: One Finger Snap is now an open source
project. Appropriate changes were made to make it more accessible to
other developers.
While it was once a shareware product, One Finger Snap is now open
source as of version 1.4. It is offered under the MIT license:
Link: One
Finger Snap
Desktop Mac
Deals
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