Earlier this evening we saw a new ad come out of the Microsoft hive mind showing Lauren, a charming everywoman, purchasing an HP laptop for $699 after finding that the lowest-priced Mac matching her meagre requirements would cost her nearly double. The resulting commercial is effective in these lean times but isn’t it a bit disingenuous?
I’ve often spoken of the PC industry’s race to the bottom. A $699 laptop – along with a $200 LCD monitor – would have been unthinkable a few years ago but it is now commonplace. At that price, however, you get a machine that wouldn’t get a second look, spec for spec, a few years ago. These would have been called barebones machines – a little memory, a hard drive, and a processor are all you’d get. But with the advent of high design, it’s easy to put lipstick on that particular pig and make Lauren happy.
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They’ve got a point on the cost to feature ratio of Macs v. Windows machines in this new Microsoft ad. I have to say, these things are getting a lot better over time. And the price difference is the key weak point in the Apple product lineup. Mac fanatics couldn’t care less. But to a recession-beaten regular computer user, this message is right on the money. “I’m just not cool enough to be a Mac person,” the actress says after visiting an Apple store and not finding any laptops in her price range.
See our coverage of other recent Microsoft ads here, here, here.
So these might not be for everyone, but Iogear announced a 2-port USB 2.0 printer switch and a 4-port USB “Net ShareStation.” The printer switch allows you to plug in one Mac and one PC into a single printer and it automatically detects which one is sending print jobs. The Net ShareStation allows you to hook up four different doodads via USB and share that amongst your fellow co-workers or home inhabitants. If you plug it into your wireless router than it puts everything over the network wirelessly. Did you get that last part? Wirelessly.
The latest Mac mini is barely a day old and already we are getting the first look inside the updated computer. Apple kept to the original design though which still requires the use of a putty knife and a bit of patience to open her up. It would be nice if Apple adapted a similar easy swap-out design that the new notebooks sport, but whatya going to do. Inside, there isn’t that much different besides the obvious new parts. Click through for a bit of circuit board pr0n.
Two new Mac Pros today with some pretty serious power configurations and very-serious price tags. There’s a quad-core version that starts at $2499 and an eight-core version that starts at $3299.
Is it still called “PC gaming” when it’s done on a Mac? I’d ask Ubisoft, which just announced that Prince of Persia and that Shaun White snowboarding game will be available on the Mac in March, but it seems my Internet connection is being censored by The Man right now. Censorship makes the Internet Jesus cry.
Last month at Macworld, FastMac showed me their upcoming external Blu-ray drives, which I was excited about, and it appears they’ve made their way onto the site.
Have an old Power Mac G4 lying around the house?
So you wanted to steal CS4 and got nothing but a trojan for your mac. Now you are sad. Let me cheer you up by letting you know that SecureMac released a free removal tool to clean your mess up. Happy?
Heads up, freaks. There’s a trojan inside a certain Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Mac crack generator that’s spreading around. (Type “photoshop cs4 mac crack” in The PirateBay for the offending file.) It’s a variant of a trojan that was first discovered last week, so that means this trojan is getting around.
Oh boy! I can’t believe the day has come! iLife ‘09 just got a ship date and it’s coming your way tomorrow. But wait, didn’t you already snag it off the Pirate Bay or something? Anyway, iLife ‘09 ships with all new Macs and those of you who purchased a Mac on or after January 6th ‘09 will have to shell out $10 to get the iLife Up-To-Date upgrade package. Talk about nickel and diming. The family pack goes for $99 and the Mac Box Set goes for $169. Hit the jump to see if you’re Mac can handle the awesomeness that is iLife ‘09.
Our buddy Larry Magid posted wrote this article for the LA Times way back in 1984. What’s he writing about? The $2,495 128K Mac from Apple. The computer is completely portable, provided you buy the $99 case, and weighs a total of 22 pounds. Sassy!
If you read Larry’s review you really come to understand why Apple got the reputation for being expensive and weird. The printer cost $495 when similar gear cost maybe $250 on a good day. But remember: this thing had a “mouse” and a “GUI” back when most of us were about ten years old. Now we basically define our entire computing experience by saying how far from that original 22 pound box we have come.
Sony’s new subnotebook Vaio P does look like a neat little machine but several official promo shots of the device triggered a wave of mockery in the blogosphere of its home country Japan.
Apple’s latest update to Mac OS X, 10.5.6, has been causing several problems since its release last week. The Bluetooth glitch comes to mind immediately. An even more serious glitch, which causes the download to stop halfway, has been addressed by Apple on its Support site.
Attention, Mac World of Warcraft players. You may want to consider holding off on buying that SteelSeries MMO mouse till January, since that’s when the company plans to the release Mac drivers, as I just learned. Without those drivers, those 15 buttons are useless. Well, like three of them work when using SteerMouse, a fancy third-party Mac mouse driver, but that’s not exactly ideal.
I have the mouse sitting on my desk right now, but without Mac drivers I have to use my underpowered MacBook just to try it out under Windows.
Just a heads up to my fellow World of Warcraft players, especially those of you who use a Mac. You know that SteelSeries MMO Gaming Mouse that came out a few days ago? It doesn’t ship with Mac drivers, meaning that you’re not able to use all 15 buttons as intended. (That’s even when using fancy, multi-button mouse drivers like SteerMouse.)
In other words, the mouse isn’t nearly as useful to Mac users right now as it is to Windows users. (Windows users can download the drivers from Steelseries’ Web site.) Mac drivers are said to be on the way, but we’re looking at around one month from the mouse’s release till the drivers are released.
Meanwhile, I have to install Wow on my Bootbamped MacBook just to be able to use it properly for the review I’m working on. Shouldn’t be more than a few days till that “drops,” though.
Some climate experts are predicting this winter will be the coldest of the decade and this Apple quilt might be a great way for MacHeads to keep warm. 20 shirts make up the quilt and they appear to range from the late nineties to around OS X Tiger’s launch. While blankets are economical way to stay warm, this ebay listing, at time of writing, is $237.50 so it essentially will not save you any money. Mac Fanboys are used to throwing away money, anyway.
Guest review: John Ha
I recently bought a Macbook to replace my aging Windows XP laptop. I figured that, like any new computer migration, I would load the applications I needed and then copy the data from my old laptop to the new one. I have a large USB thumb drive and a couple external hard drives, so no sweat – just use them to migrate everything.
So when my brother told me he would lend me his Targus File Transfer Cable for Mac, I scoffed. Who needs this unnecessary cable when I can just as easily use my external drive to copy data from one laptop to another. Plus, I was skeptical of the software. It would probably be crappy and limiting, when I just want file-level access to my data.
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Apple sent out new firmware yesterday that was suppose to fix a few items in the latest MacBook Pro. Early reports indicate that it doesn’t seem to fix the RAM issues though. James Kendrick, from jkOnTheRun, is indicating that his system still freezes and locks up with 4GB of RAM installed. Anyone else experiencing the same?
If you have multiple batteries for your (post-1997) Apple laptop and prefer not to tote around multiple power adapters then Fastmac may have a solution for you. The U-Charge is a lightweight, cost effective, and compact charger for iBooks, PowerBooks, MacBooks and MacBook Pros, with a nice little bonus feature: it can charge a battery without the help of a laptop. No more swapping batteries just to keep them all juiced up!
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