Apple User Podcast

Wow, we are in 2007, Macs can be bought for $599 dollars, and even more impressive, Mac Mini g4’s that were bought for $499 over a year ago are fetching $450 dollars (according to this and Adam from the Maccast). What other computer bought a year ago could fetch 90% of its RRP after 12 months?

But despite these facts, the Myth that “Feature for feature, you still get more for your money with a windows pc” is still being perpetuated. The messenger today? David Einstein, Computing Q&A guy for the San Francisco Chronicle.

I’m pasting a comment I left on engadget a few months ago here to remind us of the value feature for feature of the modern Mac.

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!

Onion Reports
“Microsoft released its new operating system, Vista, on Jan. 30. Here are some of its features:

Microsoft Word’s helpful paper-clip icon now blinks at rate of normal humans

Enhanced graphics on “System Is Not Responding” pop-up window

Five new card-back designs for Solitaire

Something that Apple would never, ever dream up in a billion years

4,391 security flaws to be patched over next 15 years

Promise of broad, open-minded future or some bullshit

Lists blocked wireless connections with greater speed and accuracy

New operating system, same old Microsoft Paint”

Spotlight has given us all the abilty to file in any method we choose, using smart searches (which can be saved), spotlight does a greater job of minding our files than we could ever do ourselves.

Spotlight pulls words, patterns from file names, metadata and even inside the file. This means that if you entitle your word documents with “written by brendan” at the top of each file, spotlight will locate these with a search for “written by brendan”, ever dragged a file into the wrong folder by accident? with spotlight it doesn’t matter if your pieces of your novel are spread between 1000 folders and the trash, the “written by brendan” search will reveal them all.

Too much? then adjust the almost infinite parameters in spotlight, ‘created in the last week’, ‘created in 2005′, you can assign colors to your files. There’s infinite choices, and this article hightlighted by digg goes into detail about how you can effectively use Metadata (small descriptive information attached to a file (think track information on an mp3) but for all kinds of files) to organize your files and put an end to looking through your folders for that elusive chapter of your memoirs.

Fake Steve is back blogging at fakestevejobs.blogspot.com, and at his absolute funniest, take this quote:

“So Gates just called all in a rage. He’d heard about us telling iTunes users not to upgrade to Vista just yet because if they do they may lose all their songs and blow up their house or whatever. He’s like, Steve, you know that’s utter bullshit. There’s no danger at all and you’re just making this all up. Jesus!”

Welcome Back Steve!

Skype just released Skype 2.5 for Mac a few days ago, it features nifty new features(discussed in a prior post) and some slick effects.

I just found this article  which gives fairly straightforward instructions for enabling 640×480 resolution on our Skype video chats, this is an increase of 4x so make sure your Mac is highish end and you’ve got nice bandwidth.

Remember to use textedit to edit your config.xml, and be careful, only you hold responsibility for what happens. But after doing it your friends will see super sharp images of you.

Namaste.

It was only a matter of time, at CES last year (2006) I remember reports of Sonys Walkman display boasting how incredible their new mp3 players were, meanwhile their Xplode car stereo division was boasting about seamless iPod integration.

Here we are, 2007 and Sony has introduced iPod docks, its not a surprise, Sony aren’t cohesive internally, we’ve often seen companies grow and grow and suddenly they reach critical mass and have to split up their divisions.

Sony and Ibm are examples of this, IBM physically sold off pieces of itself to be leaner and more focused, Sony internally seems to have complete radio silence between its departments. Doesn’t a guy from Walkman division ever have tea with a guy from Xplode division or Bravia Division or Playstation Division and say “Hey John, We can’t move these walkmen, can we integrate something to your Car stereo, TV to make these sexier?”

Apple and Yahoo are exemplary examples of smooth communication in a large company, one hand is always washing the other at Apple, Yahoo aren’t close to as good, but I think they do it better than Google, who had their backsides slapped a few months ago when the incredible Eric Schmidt shook up the geniuses at the ‘plex and said ‘you’re all making great things, docs, spreadsheets, mail, etc, but where’s the integration?’ Up until then, Googles Word App and its Spreadsheet App were at DIFFERENT url’s!

I loved Sony products, grew up with great Amps, Vcr’s and Tv’s,  it would be great to see them (and all companies) synergise their product lines more.

Can anyone give examples of other companies that streamline and synergise their products?

Humourous Video look at Windows Vista features compared to OS X by the New York Times.

Skype 2.5 for Mac is just out of beta and available for download here.

Biggest new features:

• SMS sending
• Ten Way Conference Calling
• Improved video