Tag Archive for 'mac os x'

iPhone on-track, Leopard delayed

Published
by
Eric Wallace
on April 12, 2007
in Uncategorized
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Apple iPhoneApple announced today that the iPhone is on-track for its June launch. Good news for all us waiting to get our hands on one. Yes count me as part of this crowd, but it will probably be some time before the iPhone finds its way into my pocket.

Unfortunately, Apple has had to borrow from the Mac OS X team to get the iPhone completed. In doing so, Apple will not be able to deliver a market-ready version of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard until October. I know most Mac users can’t wait for Leopard, but I’m still using an iMac G5. I am already in the mode of waiting/saving/longing for my next Mac. Having to wait a while longer for Leopard won’t hurt that much.

iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. We can’t wait until customers get their hands (and fingers) on it and experience what a revolutionary and magical product it is. However, iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price — we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard’s features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October. We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we’re sure we’ve made the right ones.

Judging by early posts and comments, the Mac community is not too happy with the news. Many feel Apple has abandoned the computer side of the company having already dropped “Computer” from the company’s name. I don’t think Apple has left the computer-types behind. The company is making a business decision. A decision that should make stockholders happy. The iPhone should have a much larger effect on the company’s earnings and growth than Leopard.

MacWorld 2007

Published
by
Eric Wallace
on January 9, 2007
in Uncategorized
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Apple - Welcome to 2007

We are about 20 minutes from the start of MacWorld and Steve Job’s keynote address and hopefully, many new innovative products from Apple. I will do my best to update this blog as the news streams out of the Moscone center.

[Update 10:51AM] TUAW has posted a story about that Cingular may have spilled the beans on the “iPhone” last night during a TV commercial. If this is indeed the “iPhone”, look for it to be serviced by AT&T and not under the Cingular name.

[Update 11:13AM] AAPL Stock up about 2% on much anticipation.

[Update 11:17AM] Apple Stores are making a hug difference. Nearly half of Macs are sold to switchers!

[Update 11:24AM] Over 2 Billion songs sold through iTunes Store. Will DRM die with these kind of numbers? Apple is the 4th largest music retailer bypassing Amazon.com

[Update 11:24AM] 1.3 Million Disney movies sold in 4 months, Paramount joins today with 250 titles.

[Update 11:41AM] Apple TV is the previously announced iTV. Order today, $299. Ships in February.

[Update 11:44AM] Here they come, 3 Revolutionary products: Widescreen iPod + Mobile Phone +internet communicator = iPhone

[Update 1:04PM] Back from lunch meeting. Holy, smokes! I missed a huge event.

[Update 1:20PM] iPhone pricing $499 4GB. $599 8GB. Available in June. 2 year Cingular contract. This phone looks unbelievable. I look forward to getting one of these to replace my SE W600.

[Update 1:22PM] AAPL Stock up nearly 7%.

[Update 2:02PM] Get notified from Cingular when the iPhone becomes available.

[Update 2:49PM] View the Apple MacWorld 2007 Keynote Video when it becomes available later today.

[Update 3:38PM] AAPL Stock finished up 8.31% closing at 92.57. Meanwhile, Blackberry maker RIMM closed down over 7%.

10.4.6 Secrets: Re-Partition your Mac Hard Drive

Published
by
Eric Wallace
on April 6, 2006
in Uncategorized
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There has been of discussion about the great dynamic disk partitioning tool that Apple “included” in Boot Camp. Guess what folks, Apple added this tool to the Mac OS X 10.4.6 update. That’s right. Just fire up terminal.app! PPC too!


Welcome to Darwin!
imac:~ eric$ diskutil resizeVolume
Disk Utility Tool
Usage:  diskutil resizeVolume [Mount Point|Disk Identifier|Device Node] size
          ...
Non-destructively resize a disk. You may increase or decrease its size.
When decreasing size, you may optionally supply a list of new partitions to create.
Ownership of the affected disk is required.
Valid partition sizes are in the format of .
Valid sizes are B(ytes), K(ilobytes), M(egabytes), G(igabytes), T(erabytes)
Example: 10G (10 gigabytes), 4.23T (4.23 terabytes), 5M (5 megabytes)
resizeVolume is only supported on GPT media with a Journaled HFS+ filesystem.
A size of "limits" will print the range of valid values for the current filesystem.
Example: diskutil resizeVolume disk1s3  10G
         JHFS+ HDX1 5G MS-DOS HDX2 5G
Valid filesystems: "Case-sensitive HFS+" "Journaled HFS+" "Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+"
"HFS+" "HFS" "MS-DOS FAT32" "MS-DOS FAT16" "MS-DOS" "MS-DOS FAT12" "UFS" "Linux" "Swap"

I came across this tonight reading Boot Camp First Look: Half Life 2 Video + More burried in the comments. Thanks David Weiss.

MacWorld 2006

Published
by
Eric Wallace
on January 10, 2006
in Uncategorized
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Here is a run down of the new goodies Steve has brought us today:

  • No new iPods, however we do get an FM receiver as an accessory
  • Mac OS X 10.4.4 has Widgets!
  • iLife 2006 has lots of great new features. No FrontRow, No iPhoto/Flickr integration, everything is .Mac, No iTunes updates.
  • iWork 2006 has no features, no spreadsheet. I guess we are still stuck with AppleWorks
  • iMac first Mac to be offered with Intel chip (Intel Core Duo). Available today. Man my iMac G5 is looking old in the tooth and it is not even a year old!
  • Ok, so 10.4.4 is completely native with Universal binaries as are iLife ‘06 and iWork ‘06. Pro apps will be universal in March.
  • I hope 10.4.4 brings an updated iSync to sync to my new SE W600i
  • MacBook Pro, rip Powerbook. Intel Core Duo inside. 15.4″, iSight, $1999 (1.67 Ghz) and $2499 (1.83 GHz) buy today, ship in February.

What no new iPod Shuffle? Powerbooks? iBooks? Mac Mini? DVR? Plasma screens?

Update: A QuickTime stream of the Jobs keynote is now available.

Longhorn

Published
by
Eric Wallace
on October 29, 2003
in Uncategorized
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From News.com’s interview with Bill Gates:

Longhorn, in terms of unifying the way you do things, is about letting people get at more of the power and having more simplicity.

Sounds a lot like Mac OS X. Apple is way ahead and now MS must play catch up.

We demonstrated VisiCalc running on Longhorn today, to show that 20 years of compatibility is a serious thing–people who want to run Electric Pencil and dBase and early versions of 1-2-3 if they want. We have built a compatible operating system. That’s one of the things that Microsoft does.

Again, Apple is already there in terms of backwards compatibility both in terms of OS (Classic) and processor (680×0).

If Bill was really concerned about compatibility he would embrace open standards and get his browser up to par. What Bill really wants is to continually increase the lock-in for his Microsoft Empire.