Apple User Podcast

From Reuters“In a conference call with analysts, Chief Executive Mark Parker said a recently introduced line of shoes and accessories that work with Apple Computer Inc’s (AAPL.O: Quote, Profile , Research) iPod digital music player was “turning out to be huge.”"

We all notice the advantages of our Macs over time, sometimes, we don’t discover great features until they are pointed out, last week in a stellar blog post, Thomas Hawk wrote about some of the spectacular features of his new MacBook Pro MacBook a few hours later and sure enough, using two fingers on the MacBooks touch pad scroll in whichever direction you’d like to go, horizontally, diagonally or vertically. I was amazed and the genius in design and usability of this Touch Pad scrolling feature, I’ve seen scroll areas to the side of the touch pad on Compaqs, but having been a PC user for ten years, was used to a nervous breakdown of windows if two fingers touched the keypad at the same time, some laptops wouldn’t respond at all (resulting in tech support for colleagues whose palm was resting on the Touch Pad declaring “this touch pad is non responsive”) and ’smarter’ laptops who would simply only acknowledge the latest or most forceful finger on the touchpad.

Never before had I seen such an elegant way to provide scrolling functionality to a laptop, This is an example of finding a great feature after being a MacBook user for six months and there seems to be no end to the features to be discovered in your Apple products.

As anyone who has used a PC can testify, from the first minute using it, you notice drawbacks, just the other night I tried Vista, and immediately had difficulty connecting to the open Wifi access point in the same room, then to adjust the volume, I had to press four keys together!

This brings me to the second subject of this post, I came across this post by PalmerDeville in the comments section regarding the Microsoft Zune Player on Amazon.com, It highlights drawbacks that though unoticeable to a first time buyer are shocking to an existing iPod user, for example:

• The Lyrics function on the iPod and in iTunes was one of those great ‘Discoveries’
• The Gapless playback function is a recently added feature that makes live albums a joy to listen to
• Lossless Audio is a necessity on a music player, It’s perhaps comparable to Manual Transmission on a sports car.
• Volume Normalization is another de facto function
• TV-Out being limited to 320×240 is essentially making the function useless, my friends mainly like my video iPod because we can plug it in to an 42″ LCD TV and watch the Full Quality DVD Rips I’ve made.

The Zune lacks the above functions and even more, the full list is below:

Zune:
1. No variable scrolling rate (ie clickwheel)
2. No in-device podcast support, (ie chapters and bookmarking).
3. No lossless audio quality option.
4. No gapless playback.
5. No volume normalization (one song loud next one quite)
6. TV out only 320×240 vs 640×480
7. On-the-go playlists don’t sync back to PC
8. No external Hard-disk support.
9. No free hands-on support at 160 locations (Apple Store).
10. No games.
11. No lyrics option.
12. No clock, alarm or sleep timer.
13. No passcode protected screen lock.
14. No Audiobook support.

With these drawbacks in the Zune and new features being added and discovered constantly to the iPod its hard to see anything Microsoft makes as worthwhile.

Engadget reviewed a laptop that is a clone of a Macbook today, its priced at $1047 if you include xp home.

The lenient writeup prompted me to do a breakdown of the incredible value inherent in the Macbook.
A few years ago you needed $2,000 to look at a mac, in fact you heard $4,000 as a starting price when you spoke to a mac sales person, for that high price you got features and build quality not seen in other computers.
As with all high priced items, copies and emulations were there for half the price to grab the buyer who just wanted the expensive look of the product and it seems that this DosPara laptop is aiming for these customers, the problem is that Apples computers are now extremely affordable. I’ll continue.

Nowadays, Apples prices are the lowest of ANY computer maker, feature for feature, lower than Dell, lower than Compaq and lower than DosPara (wtf!).
The first commenter on Engadget correctly pointed out the poorer firewire port on the Dospara copycat, lack of dvi out and the power hungry (but slower) amd chip.
But lets look at what else we get in our macbook:
Bluetooth
Wireless 802.11N !!!
Magsafe connector
Six Hour Battery Life
Stunning Screen (Everyone knows what Pc users feel when they see the bright screen of a mac)
Popular New keypad
Two Finger to scroll touchpad !!!
The Best Operating System in the World !!!
OPTICAL Audio In and Out !!!
Gigabit Ethernet !!!
Small Bezel
Allure
Attractiveness
Ability to run Windows & OSX !!!
Incredible power efficiency (17watts idle and 53watts at 100% on both cores with bluetooth and wireless-n blazing)

Give each of those a $50 value (which is a bargain for completely integrated optical audio, 802.11n, gigabit ethernet, core duo chip, etc) and its plain to see that any of the Macbooks is a far greater V.A.L.U.E. than this laptop, In fact I’m going out to stock up on Macbooks before they raise the prices!

I saw this an amazon today, you’re saving about $150 bucks off the list price, these offers come mostly at christmas and it seems you have to act fast, I missed out on DVD’s of Sealab last week at $8.99 (they’re now back to $14.99). so if you’re interested in printing really high quality prints at a pretty fair price per shot (39cents), give this Samsung Samsung Digital Photo Printer ( Windows & Macintosh )a try.

Everybody is aware of how important and expensive energy is in the modern world, Oil prices have skyrocketed in the last five years, Utility bills have increased astronomically (the Irish Gas Board recently lowered its enormous 34% increase to a still astounding 25%), and according to Steve Jobs, Google and Bill Gates are building their ownership of Power Systems (including Wind Farms, Electricity factories) worldwide.

So in these days of power use awareness, its a great relief to discover that when considering if I should dispose of my remaining desktop PC towers, I learned that the Mac Mini consumes only 25Watts while Idling! Thats a 64 bit Dual Core Processor with each core running at 1.83Ghz, 512Mb Ram, Sata 80Gb Hard drive plus incredible graphics, sound, wireless networking and bluetooth operating at a quarter of what the average reading lamp consumes!

Even better, according to this article iMac keeps its power promise, PC challenge issued” by Tom Yager, the 20 inch Dual core iMac uses an astounding average of 80-85 watts with six applications open, and at full throttle (each processor running at 100%, as would occur during video encoding or rendering) the iMac still consumes only 95 watts of power. Tom notes that his wifes 19inch lcd for her PC uses 32 watts of power and challenges anyone to find a PC that operates at 63 watts (as the iMac Core Duo 20inch does), Tom posted this article in February of 2006 and has had no challengers so far, giving the iMac the most power efficient computer of the year title!

The best part of this news about the Apple’s power efficiency are highlighted by this comment from Bernhard Michaelis who says:

Great – exactly what I was loooking for. I run my house completely on solar, and remember looking for the watts usage at the apple site. couldn’t find it – so this is a great help, and take this advice from a very power consumption aware person: these specs are amazing! A coffe machine uses at least 1200 watts, a hair dryer uses 1300 watts, so 95 watts is not even two light bulbs (each 60 watts, average user consumption). I tested the power book today (older one) when loading the battery and turned on, up to 50 watts. so there’s not too much difference..
Bernhard

These results and numbers mean that its not only better for your lifestyle to switch off that noisy tower pc that takes up 2 square feet of your living space and replace it with a Apple Mac mini or iMac, but its much better for the e=nvironment and for your wallet!

but this is a really good looking mockup of an Apple cell Phone:

If you must read more, click here

“Burlington, Massachusetts-based security firm Sophos, whose labs have been testing Vista, on Thursday released a top 10 list of virus concerns. The researcher said that Vista is already vulnerable via web email to the Stratio-Zip worm, which is the most widely circulated piece of malware.”

From RedHerring comes this article quoting security experts concerns about Windows Vista.
I tried Windows Vista on a Microsoft insiders laptop last night and was shockingly underwhelmed, unfortunately, despite some fancy effects, it is as unhelpful as ever. Thirty seconds into testing it, I was pining for my macbook.
I look forward to welcoming a huge amount of new switchers to Apple over the next few years. All PC users are impressed when they see OSX Tiger even in comparison to Vista, so just wait until Leopard, it’ll blow away Vista, and by the way, will capably run on a g4 mac, compared to vista (which won’t run on a friend of mines 11 month old, 17 inch widescreen laptop!)
Happy Computing.