Apple User Podcast

Well, I DID ask you to get out and Buy, Buy, Buy, and sure enough, two days after a HUGE drop in Apple’s stock its back to its $88 dollar level. Lehman brothers DID upgrade the stock and reiterate a $105 target price, so there are many reasons why the stock has rebounded so well in comparison the rest of the Dow and Nasdaq which haven’t recoved in the same way. These reasons include:
Lehman Brothers Upgrade
Apple Maccs now have 6.8% Market share
Timothy Cook, Apples second in command, declared tuesday that the reason many cell phones come free with a contract is because they are “wothless”, and reiterated the iPhones $499 price and also commented rightly that when the iPod came out at $399 there were NO mp3 players at that price either.

Its nice to see and hear that Timothy Cook is as proud and confident as the messiah Steve Jobs, and shows that Steve isn’t the only guy with the skills to preach the gospel of Apple.

The Apple Comment by Denny Grabowski

For all Apple addicts is a new toy on the market. The AirPort Extreme is ready for use at home or in every office. The best feature is obviously the 802.11n technique for better performance, but rumours are around that this tool could faces limitation in UK and maybe in other European countries. Consider that beside the fact that so far it’s not available in every European country. That is the reason to keep a look back in time to his little brother and his still good performance.

The AirPort Express is a compact 802.11g base station to fit easily into a laptop bag that does not need a cable to get the power, because it uses a flip-out plug attaches to a standard power outlet. Of course the small size has few limitations and could be not usable for your office but it will support your office wireless range definitely. It comes with 10 simultaneous wireless connections, enough for every household, versus 50 of the Extreme version. And it does not include a built-in modem. For me is that point not important, because I got my broadband modem delivered by my broadband provider.

The configuration is simple and in comparison with his big brother it stores up to 5 profiles in its built-in memory. That means for example one profile for your home, another for your office use and one for your use in hotels.

Further in addition to his portability its streams your music from iTunes to the Express and from there to your entertainment system. But there is one more feature: printing wireless. With the AirPort Express station is your printer a wireless partner in your network for printing from every part of your house or office.

If you are looking for an Apple-branded wireless base station, consider the Express station. It is on the market for 99 Euro or US Dollar and does the work like his big brother, is very small and especially for laptop user very interesting to life without cable around. And it gives you nearly everything that the Extreme offers!

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”

Over the last six months (someone tipped me off about fakesteve.blogspot.com in August) this blog has provided great insight, hilarious wit and a few great Apple stock buying tips.
This blog is one of the funniest and most entertaing sites I’ve seen in recent months, heres a good post from November, depicting IT managers cheering over Vista’s increased footprint and higher complexity:

“Allah bless you, O wondrous Microsoft! How do you perform these miraculous feats? You have reproduced the Mac OS X desktop with none of its reliability and a far greater hardware requirement. All this plus hundreds of as-yet-undiscovered security holes, and for only $400 a seat, plus $500 for extra memory and another $500 for our IT drones to install it and patch it? Thank you, thank you, thank you, for always putting the customer first! Oh we are so grateful that we never adopted those attractive, easy-to-use, super-reliable iMacs”

FakeStevs is Finally shutting down though, a quote from the latest post:

“For now, dear friends, let me leave you with a message of hope and peace and love. Follow your dreams. Do what you love. Dance like nobody’s watching, sing like nobody’s listening.”

We’ll miss you FSJ.

“Windows Vista Premium upgrade: $160.

New graphics card: $60.

New hard drive: $130.

1 gigabyte RAM: $100.

Microsoft XP ain’t broke, so I don’t need this stuff: priceless.”

An excerpt from this article by the Kansas City Star.

Wow, I found this on Digg, We all knew that our Macs would run Vista really well, but seeing these presenters running Vista on an iMac really makes you feel like you’ve got the best of both worlds. As stated by Kevin Rose and illustrated in this cartoon:

OS X is a superior system to Vista, but if we need to try it out we can, can PC’s try out OS X? No.

read more | digg story

Switching from Linux meant I left behind lots of free open source software, here’s the silver lining:
The best Linux open source packages make it to OS X, its easy to port, as Mac OS X is based on FreeBSD, and my top pics from Linux, The GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, LinCity, Mplayer, Netpanzer and Armegatron

Those applications were literally my top ten used applications when I used debian, and they’re all on OS X too. Did I know that before switching to Mac? No! I switched with faith that things would be easier and better on the Mac, they sure are!

For more great Open Source software, visit Open Source Mac

The Macbook is my favorite computer of the last year, nay, five years. Its lightweight, widescreen (I can’t bear non Widescreens since using the iMac anc Macbook), lights up the room, attracts oohs and aahs, and much more.

I recommend the Base Configuration to almost everybody, Its very powerful, a Core 2 Duo 1.83Ghz Chip is quite incredible, 60gb Hard Drive is lots when your iPod carries all your movies and music, and a Dvd burner is not an essential in my eyes (if you need to, you can FULLY author your DVD in iDVD, and drop the image onto a Mac at your home or office that has a DVD Burner)
I’ve discovered that as well as the really fun Board games that come preinstalled with your Mac (Backgammon, Chess, Four in a Row) we can grab a Great absolutely free cross platform game called Sauerbraten here
Here Follows Screenshots:

This game is great and reminds me of Doom and Quake, its multiplayer, single player, nice AI, good weapons and great graphics. Its great to fire this up and see your Macbook tearing through these great levels, colors, textures all look super, and you can go online and play with your friends or at a Lan Party(Ugh)
Try it out to have some fun.

While recuperating, I recently considered perhaps grabbing a game for my Macbook.
Browsing the shelves at the Apple Store San Francisco reveals lots of good looking and interesting games,

Civilization 4 is a game that allows you to develop a civilization from the stone age to the space age, sounds like fun and most importantly, is a universal binary(meaning it runs at full speed(natively) on older macs(pre 2006) and brand new macs).
Another good looking Mac Game is

X-Plane looks to be the most advanced Flight simulator available on any platform, After mastering every kind of flying machine in every environment around the world, you’re able to create your own scenarios and Aeroplanes.
The sequel to the best selling game of all time ‘The Sims’ is
The Sims 2 is a Dollhouse taken to the computer, a player creates, controls every detail of their character down to personality. The player then builds them a house, gets them a job, helps them get promoted (by educating, amusing and finding love) for them. This formula worked incredibly in the first Sims and the Sims 2 essentially adds superior graphics, extra features and most importantly, the ability to procreate and see the parents genes come to life in the kids and grandkids.

All these games were noticable to me for one reason, they all have the “Universal symbol”

on their box, the fact that these are Top games and are some of the first to become Universal is not a coincidence, being top selling games, their parent companies have the funds to develop Universal editions of their games relatively quickly.
If buying games for my Macs, I’ll only buy Universal games, I’m a huge fan of Rosetta(the software in Intel Macs) that allows older games(Non Universal) to run, I’d simply prefer to grab software thats designed for the Intel Mac.

“In other news, one blogger believes that Vista is the first Microsoft OS since Windows 3.1 to have regressed in usability from its predecessor (he kindly forgives and dismisses Windows ME). And there’s a battle raging over the top 10 reasons to get Vista or not to get Vista.”

Last week Ballmer gained infamy when his nervous laughter at Apples iPhone made it to youtube.com, today on slashdot I saw this quote in relation to the fact that Microsoft has announced it needs testers quickly for its Service Pack 1, how often are Service Packs being prepared before OS’s Ship?