Snow Leopard and Apple’s dirty little secret

As one of the last of our WWDC posts, I want to talk a little bit about Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.  It may end up being the most important software upgrade Apple has ever done. To understand its significance and why you will want it, you’ll need a little bit of history to set the stage.

For the most part, there’s not a whole lot of new stuff to get excited about.  Yes, there are a few new features – some really good ones, like OpenCL, Grand Central, and QuickTime X.  I’m going to save my thoughts on Exchange support for another time (beyond this article: it begs the question on whether Apple’s own server is now second class to Microsoft’s groupware solution or if Snow Leopard Server will be up to task).

The name and the price tell the tale of Snow Leopard.  And it makes more sense to people, like many of you reading this, who have been using the Mac for a long time… and also to people like me, who have been supporting the Mac for a long time.  Now maybe this is just me being a conspiracy theorist and no, I haven’t done a lot of homework on this – it’s just a combination of remembering things I’ve read and my own gut feeling on some recent experiences.

Read on for why Snow Leopard is most important to the future of the Mac

WWDC Review: New iPhones mean no more laptops?

Yesterday was a busy day. At BestMacs we had a couple of downed servers to deal with (stupid hard drives on both) so we didn’t get to sit huddled around a live broadcast of the keynote. The impact of all the new Apple gear is still settling in with us. All four of your BestMacs team will be commenting on the changes this week.

In case you missed Molly’s cliff notes yesterday, here’s the short list:

• iPhone Software version 3.0
• new iPhone hardware (3GS) and price reduction on existing model to $99
• Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) announcement and preview
• Safari 4.0 release
• All-new Mac laptop line up

Just one of these would make for a pretty good discussion, but all 5 on one day?!  Daaaang.

I’m going to start with the one that for me sets off wild possibilities for the future of computing and asks us to open our wallets again: new iPhone hardware. 

This new model paves the way for a whole new mobile platform – it may make laptops obsolete in a few years. And once again, we have to confront the big hardware upgrade questions.

Read on for my analysis

Utilities You Can Use

Built-In Utilities Every Beginner Should Know About

Leopard has a bunch of useful utilities. Airport Utility for when you purchase a new base station, Migration Assistant for moving data over to a new computer, System Profiler to check the specifications of your computer. These are awesome, but you don’t need to use them on a day to day basis and if you have technical assistance, you may never need to use them at all. In the above article, Nancy Gravley lists a few utilities that might come in handy on a regular basis.

Keep Reading!

My Thoughts on AppleCare

Why should you buy AppleCare? Sure, it can be pricey, between $169 and $349, but it is worth it. It extends your warranty from one year to three years and your phone support from 90 days to three years.

Read about my personal experience.

DroboPro: Part 2

I wrote a couple weeks ago about a cool new offering from Data Robotics here, called the DroboPro. Well, here we are a couple of weeks later and i thought i would share my findings with this cool new tech, now that we have it in the field.

I had previously mentioned that Drobo worked on a technology called iSCSI where as the more expensive solutions currently available will typically use Fiber Channel. I have to admit that installing the DroboPro at a large client had me worried with regard to data throughput. I was unsure whether a device like this could match up to an XServe RAID when dealing with large amounts of data. Apple used to reccomend this product exclusively for server deployments and has since adopter the newer Promise Tech RAID solution. These ranged in price from $7,000 dollars and up depending on your storage configuration. This piece of hardware used Fiber Channel as its only means of data transfer which adds significantly to the cost of ownership. Read the rest of this entry »

Getting Rid of Unused Languages

Your operating system takes up several gigabytes of space on your computer– valuable space you could be using for applications, documents, music, photos, etc. But, you can’t delete your operating system. Your operating system does, however, come with a few things you probably don’t use which you can delete. One of these is extra languages. Do you really nee d to use your computer in Afrikaans, Hebrew and Brazilian Portugese? Probably not.

Read more…

New White MacBook

One nice thing Apple has been doing lately is releasing updates to their line of products quietly but often. We see another example of this today with a shiny new white MacBook. The new notebook will still feature the old firewire 400 port but has received some nice updates. Read the rest of this entry »

Typing on PDFs

This article does a great job of summing up how to fill out PDF forms on a Mac. For free, you can use Preview of Adobe’s Acrobat Reader to fill out PDF forms. By PDF forms, I mean a PDF which the author intended you to type in, a PDF with editable fields. What if someone sends you a PDF which doesn’t have editable fields, but you want to give it that professional typed look?

Read how.. .

Protecting Your Laptop

This news story got me thinking about how important it is to protect your computer, especially a laptop.

Read on about protecting your laptop…

Safely Delete Apps

Are you a computer packrat like me? I download free applications all the time, only to never use them.

Check out App Delete. It safely deletes the applications and the associated files. It will check with you before putting them in your trash can, in case there is something that you’d like to hang on to. You will still need to empty the Trash Can after using App Delete, by clicking on the Trash Can and selecting “empty”. How simple is that?

App Delete costs $5, but you can use it three times before it will ask you for payment.