Tag: Apple

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As a long time Apple computer user, it is sometimes hard for me to understand why Windows users are so afraid of giving a Macintosh a chance. Working in a Windows world, I have had countless conversations with co-workers about which computer they should buy next, and, of course, I always suggest they should buy a Macintosh. This statement is always countered with the normal Mac-bashing comments: “They’re more expensive,” “I don’t know how to use one,” “There’s no software.” When you think about it, Microsoft has done a fantastic job at convincing the world that these comments are actually true. When I hear comments like this, I often go into my usual speech about how Macs are competitively priced with Windows computers of the same quality and because Macs use the same processors as Windows
machines, it is possible to run Windows and all of their favorite Windows applications if they really want to. This information is usually received with a bit of shock as if it’s the first time they have ever heard it. Occasionally, someone will come back and thank me because they went with a Mac and will never go back. What a great feeling it is to save yet another soul from Microsoft.

I do have to say that the iPod has made these conversations much easier over the last five years. Now, people usually come to me and say, “Hey, I really love my iPod. Is a Mac this easy to use?” Gladly, I can answer this question with a resounding “Yes!” I have no doubt that people are buying Macintosh computers for the first time because the iPod has given them a glimpse into why Mac users are so loyal to their computers. iPod users see the ease of use, they see the attention to detail, and they see the high quality of the product. The iPod Halo Effect is clearly working.

With the introduction of the iPhone and now the iPod touch, Apple has made it even easier for millions to see why a Macintosh is so easy and fun to use. On each one of those little devices is Apple’s Trojan Horse, Mac OS X. Without even knowing it, iPhone and iPod touch users are enjoying the benefits of an operating system built to just work. Like the iPod before them, every one of those iPhones and iPod touches is a portable demonstration of the power and ease of Mac OS X. As Apple introduces more products based on OS X, it will become clearer and clearer for more consumers that Apple truly makes the best computing products available today.

The iPod was just the beginning. The iPhone and iPod touch have kicked the halo effect into high gear.

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For all of us that have been telling our friends and co-workers to save their Microsoft Office 2007 files using the Office 2003 formats, we can finally stop worrying about it. Apple’s recently released iWork ’08 supports Microsoft’s Open XML formats that are the default files formats for Office 2007. While iWork can only read these formats at this time, I fully expect Apple to add the ability to write to these formats in an update soon. What’s funny about the whole situation is that Apple actually beat Microsoft to the punch with this release because Microsoft has yet to release a non-beta file converter for Office 2004. Full support for the Open XML formats is not expected in Office for Mac until the 2008 version that will be released in early 2008. If Apple can provide full read/write support for the Open XML formats in iWork by then, they have the chance to really increase their market share. There’s also another great reason for Mac users to switch from Office to iWork. iWork costs only $79 compared to the hundreds of dollars that Microsoft charges for Office. How can you beat that?

Via (Digg)

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On Tuesday, Apple announced and released the latest and greatest version of their iLife suite. On the surface, iLife ’08 looks like an update worthy of purchasing. I have been using iLife ’05 since January 2005, and have generally been very happy with it.

The one application my family and I use most is iPhoto. Like most families with kids and pets, we take a ton of digital photos. Without a great program like iPhoto, it would be incredibly difficult to manage our photo library. iPhoto ’05 has some great features, and we’ve used them to their full potential. iPhoto ’06 added Photocasting which almost got me to upgrade, but .Mac had such little storage that it didn’t make a whole lot of sense for me to share my photos using Photocasting. Instead I turned to services like Flickr to share photos.

Apple’s announcements on Tuesday may have changed things a bit for us. In addition to the iLife update, .Mac got a long needed increase in storage space and monthly bandwidth allowance. This opens the door to using iPhoto and .Mac to share photos and movies with the world. Following are the new features I find most interesting.

.Mac Web Gallery

With .Mac Web Galleries, Apple actually replaces the Photocasting feature they added to iPhoto ’06. .Mac Web Galleries provides the ability to share photos with your friends and family (or the entire world) with a few clicks of the mouse. As the name indicates, a .Mac account is required to really make these web galleries work. Unfortunately, Apple did not make it possible to use an outside web host. The web pages created by iPhoto and .Mac are incredible. They offer all of the best features that Web 2.0 has to offer. Check out the sample gallery that Apple created. To me, the .Mac Web Galleries alone are worth the price of the upgrade to iLife ’08.

New calendars

My wife and I have a little tradition going of giving calendars of our kids to our parents and grandparents every Christmas. We’ve always used Ofoto (or Kodak Photo Gallery as they call it now although I think they should have stuck with Ofoto) to make our calendars, but we may have to switch to iPhoto this holiday season because of all of the cool features. The templates look great, and I really like the feature that makes it possible to put photos on specific dates. It would be pretty sweet to put pictures of everyone on their birthdays.

Home Printing

Okay, so home printing doesn’t sound all that cool or ground breaking, but it is something new to iPhoto ’08. iPhoto provides themes with borders and mattes that make instant frame-ready prints. Text can also be added to the prints. For all of us that have photo printers sitting around the house, we can have instant gratification by printing photos ready for framing directly from iPhoto.

Events

Events are a new way to organize photos in iPhoto ’08. The program automatically assumes that photos from a particular day were most likely taken at the same event. Basically, Events provides another layer of organization beyond albums. For me, time will tell if the new Events feature justifies all of the time Steve Jobs spent talking about it at the event on Tuesday.

iPhoto ’08 is yet another reason for Windows users to make the switch to Mac to manage their digital lives. Trust me, there is nothing this good for Windows. Period.

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It seems that the market has yet again overreacted to a bit of bad news out of Cupertino. Apple is delaying the release of the Apple TV by a couple weeks, and of course, this is a sign that the end of the world is near, and Apple’s share price should automatically be pummeled.

Since becoming an Apple shareholder many years ago, I have had to endure many trading days like today. Apple lives and dies by hype, and unfortunately, when they don’t deliver, Wall Street decides that the company is worth five percent less than it was the day before. I have no doubt that the stock will rebound in a day or two as it always does when things like this happen. I just wish the market would be a little more rational when it comes to Apple. I like roller coasters, but enough is enough.

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My buddy, Scott, and I went to the same Microsoft launch event for Windows Vista and Office 2007 in San Deigo and Saint Louis respectively. Even though we were separated by 2,000 miles and different speakers, we both came away with similar opinions of Windows Vista. It just isn’t all that impressive when you get right down to it. My wife and I have a new laptop running Vista, and it looks nice, but it has nothing that Mac OS X hasn’t had for years. Plus the laptop had to be souped up big time to even run the system. On the other hand, I have an almost eight year old Power Mac G4 running Mac OS X Tiger like a champ, and I plan to upgrade to Leopard soon after it is released. It seems to me that Microsoft tried too hard to make Vista look similar enough to XP that it wouldn’t freak people out. Vista has some really nice new features, and they could have been much cooler if the general layout of the desktop wasn’t the same as it’s been since Windows 95. There do seem to be some underlying technologies that could produce some cool new applications in the future. Now all we have to do is wait for developers to redesign their applications.

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I stumbled upon a story on Digg about an IT director for a suburban Chicago school district wanting to get rid of Macs because they’re not used in the “real world.” He wants to replace them with more “appropriate technology” from Microsoft. This guy clearly has not been keeping up with what is going on in the world. Surely he must know that those new Macs that his district just purchased this year can most likely run Windows if they need to. The article is not clear about what kind of computers were purchased, however. Being a daily user of both systems, I prefer my Mac. I also have enough sense to know that I need to know Windows to function in the corporate world. Using a Mac in school provides “appropriate” training to use either Mac OS or Windows. The systems are similar in so many ways that it really doesn’t matter what computer a student uses. Besides, corporate users don’t know Windows. They know Office, and Office is available for both Windows and Mac OS. In fact, the Mac version of Office is easier to use and better designed than the Windows version. The Mac Business Unit over at Microsoft is doing a great job making Office more Mac-like.

Anyway, my point here is that Macs are just fine for school or business or any other activity, and anyone who thinks otherwise has not done enough research or testing to know better. Judging by the number of Diggs this story has already, this guy is going to hear what people think of his grand plan.

read more | digg story

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Apple Computer had a great day on Wall Street today due to incredible 4th quarter financial results as well as some very exciting news about Mac market share. Apple posted a healthy $546 million profit for the quarter beating estimates by a substantial margin. Separately, Gartner announced that Apple accounted for 6.1% of the PCs shipped in the 3rd quarter of 2006. That’s a 31% increase year over year. These two announcements sent shares of Apple soaring about 6%. After hearing all of the doom and gloom stories back in the ’90s, it sure feels good to see Apple doing so well. I can’t wait to see what happens after the holiday season.

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Well, the talk is heating up again for Apple’s all but certain entry into the mobile phone market.

ThinkSecret reported today that Apple has once again hooked up with Cingular to help them launch the iPhone. While this is great for me and millions of other Cingular customers, my hope is that Apple doesn’t tie themselves down to one service provider for too long. There are just too many potential Apple customers that use the other major cellular providers to ignore them for long, and I don’t really see people switching providers just to get a new fancy phone. It costs too much in fees and penalties to do that.

Of course, because it’s an Apple product, maybe it will be sweet and cool enough to cause a revolution in cellular phones just as the iPod has changed the digital music market for the better.

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So, I was reading MacRumors.com the other day and found their post about Wal-Mart retaliating against Apple to be very disturbing. The post cited a New York Post article claiming that Wal-Mart threatened movie studios so that they wouldn’t sell their movies on the iTunes Store. From what I’ve read about Wal-Mart’s tactics, this does not surprise me one bit.

Personally, I do not buy media from Wal-Mart because of their demands to censor albums and movies. Besides that, I can’t really stand going in to their stores in larger cities because they’re completely trashed. The employees or associates or whatever they call them couldn’t care less about the way the stores look. I wish I could say this is an isolated situation, but I have been in Wal-Mart stores all over the country, and they’re always the same. The only time I’ve enjoyed a trip to one of their stores was when I was in the middle of nowhere in Wisconsin. The people there had pride in their store, and it was a nice experience. Store managers from large cities should go out to these stores out in the country to see how to do their jobs.

Anyway, back to my main point. If Wal-Mart did indeed threaten their suppliers, they should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Time to take down the Goliath of Retail and let Apple take over the world (big sinister laugh).

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Ever since Microsoft and PC makers started marketing and selling Windows Media Center PCs, I’ve thought that they were just taking the wrong approach. While a geek like me would want a PC in their living room, the average person most likely does not want to have a PC as the centerpiece of their entertainment center. Using a computer is a very active form of entertainment whether a person is surfing the Internet or playing games. Watching television, on the other hand, is a very passive activity. People just want to relax and enjoy the show, and they want it to be very easy. As Aerosmith once said, “Just Push Play.”

In comes Apple with the iTV. They’re going to change the name before the official release, and my bet is that it will be part of the Mac family rather than the iPod family. I’m sure Steve Jobs and co. will come up with a snappy, marketable name. The iTV allows users to stream movies and media from their Mac or PC that’s sitting anywhere in their house through a wireless or wired connection. There will be no need to have a computer sitting next to the TV. Using the handy little remote included with the iTV, users will be able to browse through their media and select the movie or media they want to watch.

Apple once again has taken something insanely complex and made it accessible to the average person. That’s how they won the MP3 player market and the digital download market. It is also how they will continue their dominance in the digital media age by bringing the media into the living room. Congrats Apple! I can’t wait to see the finished product.