Tag Archives | Apple Macintosh

Flash on Macs: Birthright? Curse? Something Else?

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 22, 2010 at 11:54 am

I’ve been using a new MacBook Air which Apple loaned me for review–thoughts coming soon–and it didn’t take me very long to discover that it didn’t have Adobe’s FlashPlayer preinstalled. To be honest, I wasn’t sure whether there was anything noteworthy about that–I couldn’t remember whether any Mac I’d ever used came with Flash, or whether I’d just installed it myself. In this case I did the latter (although–odd coincidence–going to the Flash download page got me an error message at first, and I had to come back later).

But as Daring Fireball’s John Gruber writes, the lack of Flash is a new twist in the Apple-Adobe squabble. Apple says that it’s still cheerfully supporting Flash, and that downloading it from Adobe is the best way to get the safest, most current version. Others, of course, may draw more conspiratorial conclusions. (The timing is probably a coincidence, but it’s an interesting one: The news is hitting right before Adobe’s big, news-filled conference MAX kicks off.)

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Five Questions About This Week’s Apple News

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 21, 2010 at 5:34 pm

Apple’s big press event yesterday previewed OS X, introduced iLife ’11 and two new MacBook Air models, and provided lots to chew on–including decisions on Apple’s part that are bound to be controversial. I’m working on some stories about the news (including a hands-on look at the 11.6″ MacBook Air) but in the meantime I’m interested in what you think. So here’s a T-Poll extravaganza with five questions for you.

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Join Me for Liveblog Coverage of Apple’s Mac Event

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 19, 2010 at 9:12 pm

Quick reminder: I’ll be in Cupertino Wednesday morning at 10am PT for Apple’s “Back the Mac” press confab. We know that the company will talk about OS X for the first time, and everyone seems to assume there will be a new MacBook Air (or two) as well. I predict a surprise, too–mainly because I’d like to see one.

Join me at technologizer.com/macfuture, won’t you? And tell your friends…

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Optical Drives: Obsolete? Almost Obsolete? Necessities?

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 16, 2010 at 4:15 pm

TechCrunch’s MG Siegler says he’s never once used the DVD burner on his MacBook Pro and is therefore excited about the possibility of a superlight, driveless MacBook Air. I keep going back and forth on whether optical drives are superfluous yet: They’re still occasionally handy for installing software, and I still use them to watch movies (or just rip them into a form I can watch on any device). I figure that three years from now, they’ll be quite unusual–but I could be wrong, since I would have guessed three years ago that they’d be almost extinct by late 2010…

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Join Me for Live Coverage of Apple’s Mac/OS X Event Next Wednesday

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 13, 2010 at 5:57 pm

Apple is holding a media event next Wednesday at 10am PT at its headquarters in Cupertino. Its invite is–for Apple–relatively non-cryptic: The event is called Back to the Mac, and Apple promises a look at “what’s new for the Mac…including a sneak peek of the next major version of Mac OS X.”

I’ll be in the audience that morning liveblogging my heart out. You can join me at technologizer.com/macfuture, and I hope you will.

Meanwhile, we have  a week to muse about what the future holds for Apple’s operating system. It’s been almost exactly three years since OS X 10.5 Leopard was released–back in a very different era for Apple. (The iPhone had just barely shipped and wasn’t yet a platform for third-party apps; the iPad as we know it may not even have been a glint in Steve Jobs’s eye.)

Last year’s 10.6 Snow Leopard was almost entirely about modernization below the surface, not new features. And if past Apple practice holds true this time around, it’ll be well into 2011 before Lion, or whatever it’s called, shows up. So the time would be right for a major upgrade–one which aims to keep the Mac relevant for a long time to come. That’s what I’m rooting for, anyhow, and I’ll share my wish list before the event happens.

Mac users, what do you want to see in a big new OS X update?

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What If the Mac Were Invented Today?

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 5, 2010 at 12:41 pm

Over at Techland (where I’m guestblogging a couple of times a week–come visit!) I wrote about the tendency of lots of pundits to assume that the smartphone wars will inevitably repeat the PC wars, with Apple’s tightly-managed iPhone getting trounced by the widely-dispersed Android ecosystem. In the Techland post, I explain why I don’t think that’s a given. One big reason why is the existence of the Internet–if all phones end up being portals to an open-standards Net, there’s no particular reason why multiple platforms can’t thrive.

With bigger, traditional computers, we’re already largely there. For operating systems, the Web is a diplomatic place where it doesn’t really matter what OS you’re using as long as you’ve got a modern browser. And nearly all peripherals such as printers, cameras, and networking gizmos work equally well with Windows and Macs. It’s wildly different from the 1980s and 1990s, when the computing universe rotated around Microsoft’s platform and there were lots of things which Macheads simply could not do.

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A Few Questions About Touch-Screen iMacs

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 1, 2010 at 9:18 am

A couple of years ago, I took advantage of the Q&A session at an Apple press event to ask Steve Jobs if Apple might release touch-screen Macs. (I did so on behalf of a Technologizer community member.) Jobs told me that the company had experimented with the idea and didn’t think it made sense just yet. At the time, I noted that this answer didn’t preclude the possibility of touch-screen Macs–it was pretty much the stock response that he always gives about potential Apple products, right up until the moment that the company releases the item in question.

Now DigiTimes is reporting apparent concrete evidence of a touch Mac that might not be all that far from release: Apple is supposedly testing touch-screen panels for new iMacs.

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