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Archive for February, 2010


Sunday, February 28th, 2010

Those of you who have been following the ongoing 27-inch iMac soap opera are aware of the reports about display defects. These include screen flickering and a yellowish tinge. Early on, some newly-minted owners, including Macworld magazine, got units with cracked screens. Worse, this hot-selling model was particularly difficult to get, unless you were ready to wait two or three weeks for yours to arrive.

Now to put my cards on the table, I ordered one of the optional versions equipped with the quad-core Intel Core i7 processor in late November. I didn’t choose Apple, because MacMall was offering a $100 rebate, but I didn’t wait any longer than Apple’s promised delivery date. It took a little over a week to arrive.

I was certainly concerned when I picked up the unit from the local UPS Store, where we receive our business mail. No, I didn’t open the box at the store; I waited till I returned to my home office. As I drove home, I recalled a comment suggesting that Apple, in its quest to be environmentally compliant, used boxes that were just too thin, without sufficient protection, thus making the delicate contents more susceptible to damage.

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Thursday, February 25th, 2010

Some of you may have read a report the other day that Apple was behind the curve because there were no recent updates to the MacBook Pro lineup. This despite the fact that Intel had recently upgraded its mobile processors. So what’s wrong with Apple? Don’t they want their customers to have the latest and greatest and fastest notebooks?

Of course, the real world doesn’t always work that way. Yes the chips may be available, but there are also complications in the way Apple has configured its recent hardware, using the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M chipset. Now this integrated graphics processor is way faster than anything offered by Intel, but both Intel and NVIDIA are embroiled in a dispute over the latter’s right to produce chipsets that support the new Core i5 and Core i7 mobile processors. Until that’s resolved, Apple can’t use those parts, so they’d have to devise a different solution.

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Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

Since Opera released the first alphas and betas for Opera 10.5 beginning last year, they’ve been able to boast of having the speediest browser on the planet. Test after test shows tiny increments of advantage over Google Chrome, Firefox and, of course, Safari. You hardly count Internet Explorer in such benchmarks, since it trails the pack by a such a huge margin.

Now the specifics of those tests aren’t important unless you live your life at a frantic pace where a few milliseconds here or there will somehow impact your earnings potential or your emotional stability.

But that hasn’t stopped the hard-working developers of all those products from working feverishly to unearth even the most miniscule cause of a rendering slowdown, and eradicating it pronto. I mean, just think how all this impacts your Web surfing experience.

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Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

All right you know that Apple Inc. is brilliant when it comes to spin control. They have managed to control their corporate message far better than any other company and, in fact, probably better than many governments. Whether it’s all due to the iron fist of Steve Jobs, or it’s a cooperative approach formulated by a number of executives, you have to expect that they will make sure things are done their way as much as possible.

When it comes to the products themselves, the situation varies. Mac users have a pretty good amount of freedom to run what they want, even if it screws up their computers. As much as Mac OS X is perceived as a proprietary operating system, it’s actually built upon a core consisting of loads of open source apps.

WebKit, the rendering engine for Safari, is open source and thus amenable to contributions from loads of smart programmers. It’s also used in Google Chrome, various mobile platforms in addition to the iPhone and, in fact, by any developer who feels they have a better idea for a browser.

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