The Mac Professional's Resource
The end of the year may mean a slow down for many industries as people leave work and spend the holidays with their families, but this is the time of the year where Mac rumors really start to heat up, as people begin to anticipate what Apple may have in store for MacWorld Expo. MacWorld events were traditionally the place where Steve Jobs would drop hardware and software bombshells, but that has waned in recent years as Apple has incorporated more and more special events throughout the year to showcase new products.
Steve Jobs’ keynote is still over a month away, and the rumors are starting to pick up. Bloomberg anticipates a new ultra-thin portable along with a higher capacity iPhone, while Fortune wonders if flash storage will be coming to the MacBook line. We will be looking forward to the new announcements, but also guess that the most significant product releases will come later in the year. Best bets are that this year’s keynote is heavy on Leopard and iPhone, but 2006 brought us Intel Macs, 2007 brought us the iPhone, and so the possibility for something really big still exists.
— Joe Fahs
Mac OS X 10.5, known as Leopard to some, and “unholy piece of crap interface experiment” to others was released less than three months ago, but is already getting its second update. AppleInsider reports that recent seeds asked developers to test “iCal, iChat, Mail, Parental Controls, Quick Look, Rosetta, Safari, Time Machine, and Airport”. For those of you that have beta-tested Apple OS releases before (i.e. installed it before the first two bug fixes were available), you know this is par for the course.
A more interesting note comes from a source at Macenstein which reports that Stacks feature will be getting a number of interface improvements, most noticeably adding list view, but also providing an option to display your stack as icon, making it much easier to tell what your stack is all about in the first place. Now if they would only do something more about that damned dock.
— Joe Fahs
Those of you that have followed Mac rumors since before blogs ruled the Internet universe are probably familiar with ThinkSecret. Started by Nick Ciarelli, ThinkSecret quickly became one of the most trusted sites on the Internet for timely and accurate news about Apple and their upcoming plans. ThinkSecret became so good at what they do that they became tangled in an Apple lawsuit over the release of some of that insider information and the site’s intent on keeping its sources a secret when Apple and the MIMH lawyers came to investigate.
A settlement has been reached in the dispute, and as a result, ThinkSecret will no longer be published, but their sources remain safe. We wish Nick and the rest of the ThinkSecret crew the best of luck as they pursue other endeavors.
— Joe Fahs
Recently, many users of Intuit’s Quickbooks software for Mac were bitten by a software bug that resulted in the complete loss of data in some users’ desktop folders. There have been varying reports on the severity of the bug, but it is another in a long line of security and functional concerns in various Intuit products for the Mac. This wouldn’t really bother us that much, but Bill Campbell, Chairman and former CEO of Intuit, still sits on Apple’s Board of Directors.
Yesterday, Intuit announced they would be releasing an iPhone friendly version of Quicken to the masses as part of its Quicken Online product. Quicken Online will be web-only, so there should be an almost zero chance that they can do damage to your iPhone, but the good folks at Intuit tend to surprise us with their feats of ignorance, so won’t be taking any bets, even with those odds.
— Joe Fahs
2008 looks like it will be an interesting year for everybody who likes to follow the latest in peripheral cabling trends. The USB 3.0 Promoter Group has announced the specs for USB 3 which will boost the throughput to a theoretical 4.8 gigabits per second. Meanwhile, the people at IEEE 1394 Trade Association announced FireWire3200 which will boost speeds of the competing protocol to 3.2 gigabits per second.
Although this is going to be a big step forward for both protocols, we don’t see either announcement really changing the landscape for normal desktop peripherals. Both camps still maintain the same advantages and disadvantages. Most desktop peripherals will stay USB because it is still cheaper to implement and is available everywhere. Meanwhile, FireWire will still be the choice for people who need longer cable runs, would benefit from the lower processor loads associated with it.
In round 3 of this battle, there is still no real winner.
— Joe Fahs