Apple Archive

"There are many tribes in the tech world: TiVo lovers, Blackberry addicts, Palm Treo fanatics, and people who exhibit unhealthy affection for their Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners. But there is no bigger tribe, and none more zealous, than fans of Apple, who are infamous for their sensitivity to slams, real or imagined, against the beloved company. "It's funny - even if I write a generally positive piece about Apple, I still get more complaints from Apple partisans" than from opponents, Mossberg says. He has even coined a term for the effect. "I call it the Doctrine of Insufficient Adulation."

Apple has released the first version of its browser, Safari, for Windows. Safari 3.1, which was launched on Tuesday, will run on Windows XP or Vista and, of course, Mac OSX. Apple released a beta for the Windows-supporting version in June last year. Apple has claimed that the browser is the fastest available for Windows. In a Tuesday statement, Cupertino said it "loads web pages 1.9 times faster than 7 and 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2 runs JavaScript up to six times faster than other browsers". Don't think you have Safari for Windows installed? You might want to check again.

El Reg reports: "Less than a day after Apple unveiled its much-discussed iPhone SDK, Sun Microsystems has told the world it will build a Java Virtual Machine for Steve Job's handheld status symbol. 'We're very excited,' Eric Klein, Sun's vice president of Java marketing, told the The Reg. 'We've spent the last 24 hours furiously looking through what information was made publicly available, and we feel comfortable enough at this point on the information we have to commit the engineering resources to bring the JVM over to the iPhone and the iTouch as fast as our schedules and Apple's release schedule will allow.'" Sun plans to distribute the JVM free of cost via the App store.

After months of strict control, Apple welcomes software developers to build applications for the iconic gadget--and also gives it entree into Corporate America. The iTunes-controlled service will be free for iPhone users, but there will be a nominal fee for iPod Touch users.

AndandTech has thoroughly reviewed the new Penryn-based MacBooks and MacBook Pros and concludes: "The biggest improvement by far comes in the battery life department. Just as we had seen earlier, you can expect these new models to outlast their predecessors by a good 7 - 15%. The performance side of things is more of a mixed bag. There are some situations where Penryn is clearly faster than Merom while others show the two with equal performance. It's for this reason that we say the biggest improvement lies in battery life, not performance." This puts to rest any uncertainty over the new laptops' battery life.

As predicted by many, Apple today announced upgrades to their Macbook and Macbook Pro line of computers. Both feature the new 45nm Intel Penryn processors, larger hard drives, 802.11n wifi, and for the Macbook Pro, a multi-touch trackpad. Both are "available immediately, shipping immediately." No word on the iPhone SDK.

InfoWorld reviews the MacBook Air, and concludes: "The MacBook Air is not perfect, but it sure is attractive and functional. If you're looking for a desktop replacement system, get a MacBook Pro. If you're looking for a basic laptop, get a MacBook. If you're looking for supreme portability and more than reasonable performance, definitely get a MacBook Air."

After reviewing the HDD model, Ars now looks at the SSD variant of the MacBook Air. They conclude: "The USD 1300 question is whether the SSD is worth the extra cash. The answer seems to be no. I experienced only moderate gains in battery life and not very noticeable speed differences. The one major benefit of the SSD model is that it doesn't cause the same types of slowdowns as the HDD model during times of high disk activity, and that's certainly a huge plus. Speedy read times are great, too, but they are balanced out by pokey write times. Still, even if it's more usable, it's hard to justify the huge price difference for the SSD model."

Ars posted their review of the MacBook Air. "Sure, there are other subnotebooks on the Windows side of the aisle that offer a variety of different configurations. There are ones with smaller screens that people love because they are even more portable. There are ones with built-in optical drives. There are ones with more ports. There are ones with more power. And there's nothing wrong with that, if that's what you want. But the MacBook Air is the only super-thin notebook that (legally) runs Mac OS X, and we feel that Apple did a decent job at figuring out how its users would use such a computer. It's not perfect by any means, and we hope to see Apple make improvements upon the Air with future iterations." AppleInsider has another review.

"Apple has seeded journalists at three of the nation's most widespread publications - The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Newsweek - with early MacBook Air review units. The first reviews from these publications began cropping up earlier this morning. A detailed summary of each review, and some observations, follow." OSNews will review the MacBook Air too, as soon as Apple NL has review items to send out.

AnandTech dove into the mystery behind the small processor in the MacBook Air. "Earlier this week Apple announced its MacBook Air, and within hours we had the mystery of its '60% smaller' CPU uncovered. Or at least we thought. It turns out there's even more depth to the CPU in the MacBook Air, it's even less conventional than we originally thought. Here's what happened over the past couple of days."

"The Axiotron ModBook has been called a lot of things since we first saw it at Macworld 2007, from an amazing product that Apple should have made to vaporware. Why the latter? Because an entire year later, customers who preordered the third-party Mac tablet are still waiting for their orders to arrive. The device's ship date has been pushed back multiple times without much explanation, but on December 31, the company announced that it would finally ship the darn thing, and with new specs. Now that the MacBook Air is out, some wonder whether the ModBook is once again behind on its technology. We took the opportunity to catch up with Axiotron CEO Andreas Haas at Macworld 2008 to see what the holdup was really about, and whether the company plans to turn the MacBook Air into a ModBook Air."

During the MacWorld keynote Steve Jobs introduced various new products. Jobs started off with Time Capsule, an AirPort Extreme base station with an integrated hard drive, so you can use Time Machine wirelessly. The 500GB version is USD 299, the 1TB version USD 499. Apple also released an update to its Apple TV (free software update for current owners), which now does not require a computer to access new content. You can rent movies (new in iTunes) straight from the Apple TV, in DVD or HD quality. Lastly, as anticipated, Apple introduced the MacBook Air, which is quite thin at 0.16" to 0.76". It has a 13.3" display, multi-touch trackpad, optional SSD 64GB drive, Core 2 Duo processor (1.6-1.8Ghz), and 2GB of memory. The device lacks an optical drive, but you can either 'borrow' one from another Mac, or buy an external one for USD 99. The machine costs USD 1799.

Apple today announced upgrades to the Mac Pro and the Xserve, which now feature Intel Penryn processors. Quad-core processors that go up to 3.2 Ghz, powerful video cards, and superfast front-side bus and memory make these especially delicious, however, there are still no Blu-ray drives available. Macrumors has more.