News tagged ‘Mac’

Three days after releasing Mac OS X 10.6.5 Build 10H571, Apple seeded Build 10H574 to developers. That just means that the company continues to work under Mac OS X 10.6.5 to prepare for a public release. The public release of Mac OS X 10.6.5 is expected to come nearly simultaneously with a release of iOS 4.2, because the 10.6.5 will enable AirPrint wireless printing compatibility between iOS devices and Macs. No details of the changes made in the latest build have yet been revealed.

Last week Ars Technica test found out that the MacBook Airs battery life was reduced by up to two hours when Flash was installed. But the Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch believes that it is impossible.  In his interview to Fast Company he claimed that reports of Adobe Flash causing reduced battery life are a “false argument.”

“When you're displaying content, any technology will use more power to display, versus not displaying content. If you used HTML5, for example, to display advertisements, that would use as much or more processing power than what Flash uses”, -  Lynch explained.

Moreover, he blamed Apple in inciting and condoning a negative campaign against Flash. Earlier this year, Jobs spoke out against Flash in an open letter, labeling it unfit for the modern era of low-power devices. And as a result, the MacBook Airs and Macs are shipped now without Flash pre-installed.

People close to Apple claims that iWork '11 productivity suite is finished and ready for launch but will be released alongside the Mac App Store in early 2011. Initially iWork '11 was planed to be launched alongside iLife '11 last month and its release was held back at the last moment for unknown reasons. Now Apple is planning to launch the new productivity suite alongside the forthcoming Mac App Store. The application will include Pages, Numbers and Keynote bundles, which may be available for purchase exclusively through the Mac App Store for $19.99 each, below Apple's current $79 price for the complete retail box suite.

The Mac App Store should debut on January 18th, 2011. Last week the company began accepting submissions from developers who would like to include their applications in the Mac App Store. Developers will take a 70 percent cut of sales, while Apple will retain 30 percent.

Some days ago Patently Apple published a new patent application from Apple under the name "Scrollable Menus and Toolbars." The document describes the use of a small selection window through which a variety of options could be scrolled and offers use of an entire toolbar with all options remaining visible at all times. The drawings above and below depict implementations on both Mac OS X and iOS. The application notes that toolbars and menus are for typical commands, such as opening a file or saving a document and etc.

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Today Toshiba started selling Blade X-gale Solid state drives for mass market, the same that are used in the new MacBook Airs. That was confirmed by MacRumors, which compared Toshiba's part numbers with the numbers of the components found in the latest Apple's notebooks.

Here are the short specs of the SSDs:

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Last week Cult of Mac reported that Microsoft wasn't the first company that was really interested in the Kinect technology.

The history actually begins with Israeli military engineers, who developed Kinect camera and infrared sensor. According to the report, after inventing the technology they hired PrimeSense CEO Inon Beracha so he could "shop it around Silicon Valley and find partners to commercialize it".

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9to5Mac reports that an ad for the upcoming iPad 2 may have already been filmed by David Sims, a British photographer, in New York last month. The iPads used in the shoot were all current generation models which will be swapped out with the new ones in post production.  A participant at the shooting, said that there were no new products on scene, and that everyone had to sign non-disclosure agreements. At this point, the only thing may be confirmed is that the new iPad 2’s will probably be the same size as the current generation iPads.

MobileTerminal is a terminal emulator application for the iPad and iPhone. The version of MobileTerminal that is available in Cydia doesn't work with iPad iOS 3.2.2, iOS 4.x and iOS 5.x. However there are beta versions that do work, but aren't on Cydia because they are still in beta stages. This tutorial will show you step-by-step how to install MobileTerminal on iPad (tutorial for iPhone is here). If you have old version of MobileTerminal installed - uninstall it in Cydia (Search - MobileTerminal - Remove).

First of all you need to jailbreak your iPad. After you successfully jailbreaked iPad:

1. Run Cydia by tapping on Cydia icon



2. The Cydia will start:

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This week Apple announced that it is going to discontinue Xserve after January 31, 2011. Apple will not be developing a future version of Xserve. Customers may choose between the Mac Pro with Snow Leopard Server, and the Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server. Both systems should replace existing Xserve systems. The documentation notes that the 12-core Mac Pro with Snow Leopard Server meets or exceeds the performance of the baseline Xserve hardware. The Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server, on the other hand, is significantly outperformed by Xserve, but it has been Apple's most popular server system since its introduction in the fall of 2009.

In the screenshot above, you can see a Macbook Air with a picture of the new Mac App store, which divines some potential prices for Apple's official apps.  This is directly from Apple’s website. So, what are the prices? Turns out they're pretty close to current software prices. The iLife apps are priced out at $14.99, while the iWork apps are priced at $19.99, and when you add them all up, they cost about the same as the bundles you can buy in the Apple retail store. There's also a few other titles at various prices. There's a dice game called Roll 'Em which is priced for free, an app called Color Studio at $29.99, and another game called Fast Lane priced at just $4.99.  If this is a real picture of what some of the Mac apps might cost then it will be interesting to see what we get when the store officially opens.

Apple seeds Mac OS X 10.6.6 build 10J521 to developers on Thursday ahead of the public release of Mac OS X 10.6.5. The changelog for Mac OS X 10.6.6 notes that the beta "contains developer support for fetching and renewing App Store receipts." App Store receipts could be a reference to the recently announced Mac App Store that is coming to Snow Leopard in the next three months. Strangely, the download is only 3.7MB. The last update to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard came in the form of 10.6.4 in June. Mac OS X 10.6.4 resolved issues with the trackpad and Adobe's Creative Suite 3.

This week Barron's site published a forecast of Wedge Partners analyst Brian Blair, which reveals details on Apple’s suggested progress based on the study of the company's supply chain. He is assured the Cupertino's company will sell 100 million iPhones, which in turn means almost 100% year over year sales growth for the device in 2011. Besides that, the analyst also suggested the number of iPads sold will reach 45-48 million next year.

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Apple sent registered Mac developers emails inviting them to begin submitting programs to the Mac App Store. Moreover, on the Apple's developer website appeared the above banner. That means that Apple has started accepting Mac Apps for their upcoming Mac App Store. The Mac App Store was announced in October as part of Mac OS X Lion's feature set. Apple claimed that it would be launched in 90 days from the time of the announcement. The Mac App Store mirrors many of the submission guidelines and policies as the iOS App Store. The Mac App developer program is $99/year just like the iOS App developer program.

Katy Huberty, who is a well-known analyst at Morgan Stanley, posted a new report, where she notes that China is a potential growth driver for Apple, but the fact still remains unappreciated by Apple's investors.

"...Despite steady upturn since February 2009, we continue to believe investors underappreciate the AAPL growth story, which is driven by one, iPhone market share gains and expanded distribution; two, the iPad market opportunity; three, rising enterprise adoption, and four, the Chinese consumer."

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This morning Apple dropped the price of the Mac mini in international markets. In Europe the price was cut down on €100. It is now available for just €709 and €999 from most European stores. In the United Kingdom the Mac mini price dropped on £50 (from £649 to £599). This is probably in response to the dollar's continuing decline relative to other currencies. Prices in the U.S. remain unchanged at $699 and $999 for the two Mac mini models.

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