Apple and The World of Tomorrow

Apple, is of course at the fore-front of the technology world, releasing product that help people. Products that are innovative, products that are useful, products that are amazing, and products that are undoubtedly, talked about.

For now.

Microsoft, just one of Apple’s rivals, and probably the biggest, is also at the fore-front of the technology world, coming up with their own innovations, and products that are useful, helpful, and are fun to use, like Bing, and with the promise of Windows 7 being great, and with so many Apple-YouTube users using the beta of Windows 7, like Jon4lakers, Microsoft seems to be taking the stage.

For now.

Are either Apple or Microsoft thinking about the future of their company’s? Probably. We know that Apple is, keeping secrets from the public, which as I noted before, isn’t all that bad. As most of you know, some things can’t be the best forever, like the United States, historians have noted that our country has passed it’s golden age, and is in decline. Could this be the same for Apple? Has Apple’s golden age already passed?

Yes.

I think Apple’s golden age was the summer of 2008. Long lines for the iPhone 3G, and hype about Snow Leopard, which took up less than 30 seconds of the WWDC 2008 Keynote, during that time Apple’s Mac User base was growing rapidly, and partly because of the iPhone, as we found out this year’s WWDC keynote.

What is Apple’s future going to look like? Because we all know their past has been looking very, very good.

Bye Nvidia, You Served Us Well, But We Are Booting Your Ass – Sincerely, Apple Inc

SemiAccurate is reporting that Apple will soon be dropping Nvidia GPU chips from their product line. The article says that Apple will start to drop them from Nehalem Processors, meaning the Mac Pro, and then the iMac, and then the rest of the line after that.

I’ll have to assume that SemiAccurate is well, accurate, or maybe not.

If Apple really is dropping Nvidia from it’s line, then an assortment of questions come up. What will replace Nvidia? Why are they dropping Nvidia? Perhaps even this question, which a user posted on the MacRumors forums.

Is there anything better than Nvidia?

Apple is to go back to Intel GMA graphics chips and also continue to use ATI chips as well. Upon hearing that they were using GMA I had to think for just a second, aren’t GMA chips what used to come standard in crap 14 Inch laptops made by Dell, Gateway, HP, and Asus?

Yep, you bet.

Whether or not Intel’s GMA chips have graduated from being crap is the real question, and you’ve got to admit that using Intel GPUs in Apple’s product line is just showing that Apple and Intel really are friends, as they keep trying to point out, both to the Intel transition, and the fact that they have both given each other awards at keynotes and events.

But wait, didn’t Apple just implement new Nvidia GPU chips into their notebook line? Yep, In fact, a little over 6 months ago, why the sudden door opening to Nvidia?

Well, exactly a month ago, on June 1, Apple announced an extension on the warranty for MacBook Pros from early 2008 and on, specifically covering the GPU area of the models.

At that same time, NVIDIA assured Apple that Mac computers with these graphics processors were not affected. However, after an Apple-led investigation, Apple has determined that some MacBook Pro computers with the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics processor may be affected. If the NVIDIA graphics processor in your MacBook Pro has failed, or fails within three years of the original date of purchase, a repair will be done free of charge, even if your MacBook Pro is out of warranty.

It probably really is Nvidia’s fault, as there are tons of Nvidia problems with Windows PCs too.

Not Everything Steve Jobs Does Is News

So when I made my post about Steve Jobs getting a liver transplant, I looked for more about it online and found this great article by a fellow named Kevin on GigaOM. Kevin makes some very interesting points in this article.The title of the post is “Are Steve Jobs’ Innards Really Any Of Our Business?”.

After thinking about it for a while, no, they aren’t. As we all know Steve Jobs has had many health problems over these recent years, hormone imbalance, Cancer, the liver transplant, whatever, but that really shouldn’t matter to us.

Steve definitely out of the Apple spotlight, even if he returned to work today, Apple has been smart by not talking about him as much and trying not to make his personal affairs public.

In fact, I think all this talk about Steve Jobs has gone way too far, like last year, when Steve had to publicly say during a keynote that the reports of his death were stupid, and I do exaggerate, that isn’t what he said, but that’s probably what he should have said.

Still don’t believe it’s gone too far? Let me point you to here, where some folks have been tracking where Steve Jobs has been on his private jet, via the internet.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Not everything Steve Jobs does is news. I will admit that there are things that Steve Jobs does, or something that has happened to him is news, but that still doesn’t mean that his flight numbers need to be put all over the internet so people can look at them and say “Holy crap this was Steve Jobs’ flight number.”

While we were obsessing over Jobs’ absence, we lost something even more important. We ignored the right of a human being to face a life crisis in private. We forgot what it would feel like to have strangers intrude on an experience that is disorienting, self-defining and unimaginable until it happens.

That excerpt is taken from Kevin’s post. He’s absolutely right, people seem to forget that Steve Jobs is also a person, he can be an icon too, and a hero, someone you look up to, whatever, but please try to respect him, you’ve got his flight records for goodness sake.

To end, I’d like to add this quote from Kevin’s post:

And while I hate to say it, I honestly think most of the coverage I’ve read about Jobs’ illness has less to do with him or Apple and more to do with others drawing attention to themselves.

Click that link, it perfectly backs up when I say “This is why I hate the WSJ and the NYT reporting on Apple and Steve Jobs.”

Big thank you to Kevin for the idea, see more of his work here.

100 Reference Tools for Your iPhone

MacBook Transformer

^.^

New Build of Snow Leopard, 10A394, Includes features shown at WWDC 2009 Demo

A new built of Mac OS X Snow Leopard was seeded to the very unhappy developers who received the WWDC 2009 build, which did not include the features shown in the keynote, however, the new version has been rumored to include all of the features shown at the keynote (However this is unconfirmed), including the beloved Dock Expose feature. 191119-snow_leopard_dock_expose_500The Dock Expose feature is being dubbed as a rip from Windows 7, ironic, because Apple has always poked fun at the Windows camp for stealing features from Mac OS X, but it seems to be the opposite this time. In Windows 7, if you have multiple windows of a program running, you put the mouse over the application group in the taskbar and the windows of that program will fan out to show you their content, much like Mac OS X Snow Leopard’s feature.The Apple camp has dismissed the idea of Apple copying this Windows 7 feature 191247-snow_leopard_10a394because it would take “far too long” for Apple to recreate that feature in the amount of time between the Windows 7 release and the Snow Leopard demo at the WWDC 2009 keynote.

Images from: MacRumors

Why Apple’s Community Will Stay The Same Even With More People

Apple has wonderful community don’t they? People like DRBUK, thecreativeone, Mrbit10, Jon4lakers, and many more who contribute to the Apple community by writing or vlogging about it, providing us with news and updates.

There are many who believe that this community will plunder as Apple’s market-share grows, and more users come into the picture to join the community and eventually take it down with uneducated groups etc…

I used to believe this for a while, but after thinking about, the community will stay the same, even with more Mac users coming. Why? Because many of the people who buy Macs today don’t really want to have anything to do with that community, all they want to do is use their Mac productively for whatever they want to do, who cares about the community, they have better things to do.

Taking this into effect, all of us bloggers and vloggers will be able to reside in our community and continue to contribute to it.

Apple: Too Secret?

The New York Times wrote a feature article about Apple and how they keep their ideas and future products a secret, and how it is almost an obsession.

23apple01-600

My only guess to the NY Times writing an article like this is because Apple’s secrecy is such a hot topic that is covered by hundreds and hundreds of blogs, like mine, MacRumors, TheAppleBlog, and just about everyone else who talks about Apple.

As if blogging wasn’t already enough, the New York Times goes on to say that the secrecy of Apple is covered by other sites, and that they attract thousands of visitors every day. No kidding. If you ask me, this article was just a cheap shot to get extra traffic to the NY Times website, because, this article has already been on MacRumors and other Apple “secrecy” sites, such as mine, and is likely to get tons of people to go over and read it.

Likewise, I thought I would give the folks at the NY Times a little bit of trouble.

Apple is one of the world’s coolest companies. But there is one cool-company trend it has rejected: chatting with the world through blogs and dropping tidbits of information about its inner workings.

Is there a list of “cool-company” trends I could look at? As far as I’m concerned there aren’t too many “cool-companies” that go out and share their future plans with blogs, and even if there are, information gets out of Apple all the time, how else would the rumor sites continue to run? Employees at Apple talk every once and a while.

Employees have been fired for leaking news tidbits to outsiders, and the company (Apple) has been known to spread disinformation about product plans to its own workers.

Who says people from other companies haven’t been fired for leaking information? It happens at every company. As for disinformation to it’s own workers, that’s actually a pretty smart idea, if they want to prevent their information from getting out, then they lie about it, it’s common sense if you want to be secret.

-Charles Elson, director of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware. “For a technology company that views itself as innovative, it’s a little odd that they are getting a reputation for lack of transparency.”

How is it odd? If anything, being secretive about you’re company is very healthy for it. By being secretive, you gather more interest towards you’re company, and are likely to have a more successful launch of you’re product, as Apple has proved with it’s past iPhones and the current one.

This is exactly why I don’t like normal news organizations reporting on Apple and technology.

Image: The New York Times

WWDC Build of Snow Leopard

World of Apple has posted some pictures and a video on Vimeo of the new features in Snow Leopard, keep in mind this is the WWDC build and some features that were shown at the keynote are not included.

Here is a link to the video: http://vimeo.com/5225871?pg=embed&sec=

Firefox 3.. and a half?

The RC is out, and meh, it’s definitely a lot faster, and has a nice glossy icon :) See for you’re self:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.5/releasenotes/

What bothers me is why didn’t they just name it Firefox 4?

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