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Oct
21
Whistling Past The Graveyard
Filed Under Apple News | Leave a Comment
Yes my friends. On the heels of the new hardware announcements and in anticipation of All Hallows Eve comes the dreaded updated Apple graveyard list. What is the graveyard list you ask? It is a list of machines that Apple will no longer support in any way. They are machines that Apple considers vintage or obsolete and the company will stop providing any product support or spare parts for these models from next month. The list:
- iBook G4 (early 2004)
- iBook G4 (14″ early 2004)
- eMac (USB 2.0)
- Apple Cinema Display ADC
- Apple Studio Display 15″ ADC
- Apple Studio Display 17″ LCD
- Apple Studio Display 17″ ADC
- Power Mac G4 (QuickSilver 2002)
- Macintosh Server G4 (QuickSilver 2002)
- PowerBook G4 (DVI)
- iBook (14.1 LCD 16 VRAM
- iBook (16 VRAM)
- Base Station Airport (Dual Ethernet)
Basically, the PowerPC is dead (except for the G5 Towers and iMacs). According to 9to5 Mac, “Apple includes products discontinued over five but less than seven years ago as ‘Vintage’”. Hello eBay!
Oct
20
Forward and Further
Filed Under Apple News, Apple Updates, Very Very Cool | 2 Comments
Like the Merry Pranksters Apple keeps moving forward and further. The rumours were correct. With little fanfare the entire consumer line has been updated and upgraded.
iMac
New iMacs – 21″ and 27″ models (that’s a serious amount of screen real estate!) – replace the older 20″ and 24″ models. The larger model now houses a quad core processor – that means it’s really really fast. The ports are the standard 4 USB, 1 Firewire 800, network connections and a new SD card slot for memory cards. They now come standard with a wireless keyboard and Apple’s new Magic Mouse. Standard ram is now 4GB and the minimum hard drive capacity is 500GB in the entry level iMac 21″ ($1299 – lower prices too!) and 1TB hard drives in all other flavours.
This is a brand new product from Apple. Basically, it’s a wireless mouse with support for all the new gestures/wipes found on their new laptop trackpads.
Very cool.
The entry level MacBook at $1099 also received a face lift today. The MacBook Pro line remains untouched, but this baby now sports a uni-body design, the new longer life battery technology, the newer trackpad etc…It’s unclear whether it still has the firewire 400 port. The picture on the site shows it, but the tech specs make no mention of it.
The venerable little Mac just more powerful – larger hard drives, more ram capacity, faster processors and a special edition Server edition. The Server version is very interesting – a great product for offices not needing a powerhouse server. Instead of a DVD drive it comes with two 500GB hard drives. It’s ideal as a business file server, calendar and address book server as well as a website and FTP host. In addition it can be a great secondary server to a larger more powerful Xserve to ease it’s load burden and can also act as an inexpensive host for Apple’s new Mobile features in Snow Leopard Server for iPhone syncing which requires two servers to act in conjunction with one another.
Airport Extreme and Time Capsule
Tweaks to Apple’s wireless/wired routers allows for a claimed 50% better performance and 25% better WiFi coverage
Even the venerable Apple Remote got a make-over – an Aluminum one!
All in all a HUGE day. More commentary from the designers themselves:
Oct
20
Rumours Galore
Filed Under Rumours | Leave a Comment
So, many rumours are flying around the Mac-o-sphere with predictions of major product announcements this morning (the 20th):
New iMacs, MacMini Servers, new Plastic MacBooks and a tablet! VERY wishful thinking – we’ll see!
Oct
13
Cautionary (Snow Leopard) Tail
Filed Under Advice, Alerts!, Apple News | Leave a Comment
It’s been about a month-and-a-half since Snow Leopard (10.6/10.6.1) has been in the wild. As I’ve written and suggested about every major upgrade (or even update) – BACKUP is CRITICAL. Apple tests it’s software in controlled conditions and it’s impossible to anticipate every scenario. That being said a particularly nasty bug (not a virus or anything like that, but a software glitch) has made it’s appearance. It seems that for users who upgrade from an existing 10.5 system i.e. you had 10.5 on your system and you upgraded to 10.6 as opposed to wiping your drive out and starting from scratch or buying a new machine with 10.6 pre-installed AND have utilized the GUEST account system it is possible to LOSE ALL OF YOUR DATA if you log into the Guest account and then log out:
Reports have been cropping up on the Apple Support forums that users have been losing all their data due to a nasty bug in Snow Leopard, Apple’s latest Operating System. Many users are reporting that all settings are being reset and most data is gone, according to iTWire.
The problem, can easily be reproduced when a user logs into the ‘guest’ account, either on purpose or by accident, and when they log back out of the account and back into their normal one, they find that their account has been fully reset with all data wiped and lost – the account is like a brand new one. The home directory still exists under “/Users/username” but is completely empty.
Users are reporting that the data is unrecoverable and cannot be found anywhere on the hard drive, and the only way to restore it is if the user has been performing backups on a separate hard-drive. Apparently the problem has been present since a few days after launch, as the forum post dates back to 12th September
Apple has acknowledged the issue:
“We are aware of the issue, which occurs only in extremely rare cases, and we are working on a fix,” an Apple representative said in a prepared statement Monday.
The notion of the issue as ‘rare’ is being challenged since it seems to be easily reproducible. More from the Neowin site that’s reporting it:
It seems the only work around at this stage is to disable the Guest account, or at least disable it and then re-enabling it so that it’s a native Snow Leopard account. Another suggestion is to create a new account and enforce parental controls, if you really need a temporary account.
It’s not clear how many users are affected, but it seems like any user who had Leopard before the upgrade, and had the guest account enabled are affected and are at risk.
Update: CNet has published a method to restore the files from a Time Machine backup to a new, identical user profile. If you have lost files due to this problem, and have an intact backup please follow the steps found here – the restore process may take over two hours to complete.
Update #2: For those who are concerned that they could be affected, our recommendation is to disable the guest account fully. If you require it though, make sure you make a complete backup of your hard disk before you try the account again if you upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard, just to be safe.
Again – the importance of Backup can never be overstated. It is a critical aspect of computing today. Data loss can strike at any moment from a random hardware failure to lurking software bugs. If you buy a new machine you have to buy a companion hard drive to go with it for back up or use an online service to back up your critical files. Email services like Google or Google Premier or any IMAP-based system ensure your mail is backed up as well. Apple’s Operating System since 10.5 basically begs users to back up their information using Time Machine when an external device is attached. Please heed the warning.
Again, to reiterate about this current issue:
To avoid the bug, while Apple continues to work on fixing it, it is suggested to disable any accounts without passwords (e.g. “guest” account) and do not log in and out of any such accounts.
Oct
2
Blackberry Goes Apple
Filed Under Tech News | Leave a Comment
Finally! I mean finally! RIM is releasing a native Blackberry Desktop application for the Mac! This is great news for all you Blackberry users out there. No more Pocket Mac or Missing Sync hell (we hope). Those products will have to offer different features to stand out. RIM’s offering is to be released today (October 2nd) from their site:
It will allow easy syncing of your device with Apple’s Address Book and iCal as well as Entourage. The software will also let
…BlackBerry users add and remove applications from their device, schedule back-ups, encrypt back-up files and install software update.
Various other improvements in this release include support for syncing with multiple computers, and the capacity to choose where to store any required music or media files (on an SD card, on the phone’s internal memory, etc).
System requirements for the new Desktop Manager will be:
Mac OS X 10.5.5 or higher, and BlackBerry OS 4.2 or higher. It will be available as a free download, starting at 10 a.m. PDT on Friday..
Hooray!