AppleInsider joined Apple investors, some of whom traveled from as far away as Europe, at the company's annual shareholders meeting in Cupertino on Tuesday, where Steve Jobs and his executive team were both grilled and lauded for their future outlook and strategy in terms of games, retail operations, corporate accountability, future product plans, and Jobs' future successor as chief executive.
Time Capsule, Apple's brand name for an Airport Extreme Base Station with an integrated hard drive and power adapter, is now shipping. Here's a look at what's in the box, and how the new Apple TV-sized wireless backup unit stacks up against the existing AirPort Extreme.
Back in 2004, shortly before the release of Mac OS X Tiger, Delicious Library 1.0 arrived as a slick looking inventory cataloging application designed to manage listings of books, videos, albums and other media. This year, Delicious Library 2.0, currently in beta and scheduled for a March release, will deliver a major update by taking full advantage of features in the new Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Here's an exclusive preview.
The most obvious new feature of Apple TV is its ability to rent iTunes movies, including a new selection of HD flicks that turned up on the iTunes Store in the last 48 hours. Here's a look at how Apple's rental solution prices out against rival services in terms of prolonged cost, as well as a comparison of picture quality of Apple's HD downloads when viewed side-by-side against other high-def content sources such as HD Cable and Blu-ray.
Apple is keeping itself busy. Along with the 10.5.2 update to Mac OS X Leopard and a new reference release of Aperture 2.0, the company quietly made available the free new "Take Two" software upgrade for Apple TV on Tuesday. Here's a look at how Apple TV compares as a living room media player and source of HDTV content, what's new in the software upgrade, and how well the device achieves its goal of bringing iTunes media to home theaters in its second try at inventing itself.
In this fourth installment of our MacBook Air review series, we pit Apple's standard hard disk drive (HDD) model against the standard solid state drive (SSD) configuration in a set of battery and benchmark tests to gauge the performance and power saving capabilities of each. Videos are used to demonstrate a side-by-side simultaneous boot, as well some application launch tests.
The MacBook Air ships with software tools that allow users to do without the external drive option for most purposes. Remote Disc, Remote Install, and related technologies that enable the Air to share a network host's optical drive both for reading files, installing software, backing up data, and even booting over the network. Here's a look at the Air's SuperDrive and how well early adopters can expect Apple's software to actually work as an alternative to carrying around a physical SuperDrive.
Any time a car or computer is released with a significantly new design, there are certain to be issues found with its engineering. The more changes, the more likely there'll be early adopter problems to manage. With the MacBook Air, Apple traded FireWire, an optical drive, and Gigabit Ethernet to save a few pounds and shed a few millimeters. Here's a look at problems users face while trying to cope without those once-standard features, and how well the workarounds Apple provided actually work.
Prior to completing our look at the MacBook Air, we asked readers to contribute questions and concerns about the new model in "What's wrong with the MacBook Air?" The response was overwhelming, and helps underscore the fact that the Air has captured the attention of customers both with its new form factor and with its controversial design tradeoffs engineered to deliver its thin profile and light weight.
The MacBook Air just began shipping in limited quantities that quickly sold out of the retail stores that had any units available for purchase. All stores received a small number units for window dressing and hands-on display purposes, but only select stores received enough to have any extra available for sale. We snatched the final remaining unit at the store we visited, as Apple public relations representatives congratulated the first few buyers and took promotional photos.
Apple shipped a few MacBook Air units to its retail stores Friday, leaving the scant supply to mainly serve as in-store demo units. While our SSD model remains on order pending shipment, we managed to snag the one of the few available HDD-based units from one of the company's San Francisco outlets and have set to work on an in-depth review of its ins and outs.
Tech enthusiasts like to argue about whether Apple is a really a software company or a hardware company. Its earnings reports make it clear the company generates its revenues through selling hardware, but its unique software adds much of the differentiated value to its products. The MacBook Air is no exception, leveraging new software assets such as Remote Disc, Remote Install, and a specialized Migration Assistant.
In a conference call reporting earnings for Apple's fiscal Q1, the quarter ending in December, Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer announced he was "very pleased to report the best quarter ever" for the company, with revenue of $9.6 billion and net quarterly profit of $1.58 billion, resulting in $1.76 per diluted share.
At last year's Macworld Expo, Apple's dramatic unveiling of the iPhone divided the world into two camps: those who were excited about the state of the art being pushed, and those who were irritated that Apple was the one doing it. This year, the role of the iPhone is being played by Apple's new MacBook Air.
Steve Jobs released a flurry of new product offerings in the Macworld Expo Keynote, along with upgrades and updates that touched the entire Apple product lineup from Macs to iPhones and the iPod Touch to Apple TV and iTunes.
Major motion picture studio Warner Bros, which was reported earlier this month to be mulling a deal with Apple to offer up its catalog for a new iTunes rental service, is now said to have inked a deal with the iTunes operator that will see its films available through the service at launch.
Apple Inc. in a new patent filing proposes to solve the ages-old problem of having to manufacture distinct keyboards to support the various alphabets and key arrangements of foreign countries by developing an OLED-based model where key arrangements are altered on the fly by software.
Sources familiar with Apple's plans for 2008 report that the company is eyeing a new mobile processor from Intel code-named Silverthorne for use in a new generation of handheld devices. That has broad implications for Apple's expanding role in consumer electronics, and holds out the prospect for the company to play the savior for a chip originally designed to power the second-generation of Microsoft's beleaguered UMPCs.
One of the most anticipated applications in Office 2008 is the new Entourage. While some users can use alternatives to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, most of the users of Entourage are required to use it to access an Exchange Server for their mail and calendar. The reason for that has a lot to do with Exchange itself. Here's a look at the new Entourage in comparison to using Apple's built-in Mail, Address Book, and iCal.
The planned mid-January release of Office 2008 offers a significant overhaul of the productivity suite's look and features. Previous segments described new features in Word and Excel, with comparisons to Apple's Pages and Numbers. This article examines what's new in PowerPoint 2008 in contrast to Keynote 4.0, the first new standalone productivity application Apple released for Mac OS X. It also looks at why Mac Office 2008 is still missing applications from the Windows version of Office, including Project, Access, and Visio.
The planned mid-January release of Office 2008 offers a significant overhaul of the productivity suite's look and features. The previous segment described new features in Word 2008, with some comparisons to Apple's Pages 08. This article examines what's new in Excel 2008 and contrasts Microsoft's oldest application to Apple's newest: the Numbers 08 spreadsheet included with iWork.
The planned mid-January release of Office 2008 offers a significant overhaul of the productivity suite's look and features. The previous segment described the challenges in front of the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft: deliver a new suite of applications with the features of the Windows side, but with an appearance and behaviors attractive to Mac users. Here's a more in-depth look at the specific new features in Word 2008, with some comparisons to Apple's Pages 08 included with iWork.
Apple software subsidiary FileMaker, Inc. unveiled a preview today of a new database product named Bento. If you've been waiting for Apple to offer an easy to use database as part of iWork, this is it. The product is aimed at consumers and requires Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Here's an in-depth first look at the app.
It's been four years since Microsoft last updated Office for the Mac. Is the new Office just a mild reheating of the last version, or a complete overhaul and fresh revitalization you desperately need? How Mac-like is it, and conversely, how Offlce-like is it, particularly when compared to its Windows cousin? We've spoke to a source testing the beta release of Office 2008 for Mac to find out. Here's an overview of what you can expect related to installation and its new user interface.
Microsoft's Office for Mac 2008 adds new features and a revised user interface to the standard suite of productivity applications including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage. Scheduled for release in January 2008, the upgrade will be the first new release for the Mac since 2004, back in the days of Mac OS 10.3 Panther.
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