Tag Archives | PCs

Confessions of an Operating-System Agnostic

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 17, 2010 at 9:40 am

[NOTE: Here’s a story from our most recent Technologizer’s T-Week newsletter–go here to sign up to receive it each Friday. You’ll get original stuff that won’t show up on the site until later, if at all.]

Whenever I write about the pros and cons of Windows PCs and Macs–as I did recently for TIME.com–I make at least brief mention of the fact that I’m a happy user of both. But I’m not sure if I’ve ever outlined just why I buy and use both flavors of computer rather than settling on one or the other. Here are some quick thoughts on that subject.

First, a review of my life as a user of operating systems might be in order. For most of it, I was a single-OS user–sometimes ardently so…

1978-1982: I was a Radio Shack TRS-80 snob (thinking back, that sounds like an oxymoron, but trust me–I was one).

1982-1984 or thereabouts: I had and liked an Atari 400, but I don’t recall being passionate about it. I also backslid and did a fair percentage of my college work on…typewriters.

1984-1986: I went through an odd period during which I temporarily lost interest in computers, except for word processing.

1987-1991: I dabbled on a borrowed Mac, but I also bought a Commodore Amiga and became a–I try to avoid this word, but it’s the only one that fits–fanboy.

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Assisted Computing for Senior Citizens

Posted by Robin Raskin on December 16, 2010 at 9:31 am

Last Gadget Standing Nominee: VitalLink

Price: $4.99 a month

For many older adults, increasing frailty, limited mobility and the trend for younger families to relocate towards employment opportunities (and away from their aging parents) contribute to social isolation. And isolation has been found to have an effect on overall health.

VitalLink provides an innovative and intuitive Internet-based solution to help overcome these challenges. By creating a friendly shell that runs on a touch-screen Windows PC, company has made it simple for an elderly person to use a PC, including making video calls, cycling through family photos, watching video, reading news (in any size type), playing games, and even watching Netflix movies. In fact, for many users, VitalLink could be an all-in-one communication and entertainment center.

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Once Again, “PC or Mac?”

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 7, 2010 at 9:40 am

My new TIME.com Technologizer column is up–it’s a quick look at the pros and cons of Macs and PCs as of late 2010. As always, I’m agnostic rather than partisan.

I talk a little bit in the piece about pricing issues, but they deserve a story of their own–the pricing comparisons I’ve done in the past are all woefully out of date.  (I’ve often found that Mac pricing is reasonable compared to truly comparable PCs, but it seems high at the moment–it’s been a while since Apple has done its periodic CPU/RAM/disk bumps on most models. Time to do the math again.)

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Hey, I See What They Mean About Apple Computers Being Pricey

Posted by Harry McCracken on November 12, 2010 at 1:03 pm

Christie's Apple-1

British auction house Christie’s has a precious heirloom up for bid: an original 1976 Apple-1, the first Apple computer. It says its estimated value is $161,600 -$242,400. That’s nearly ten times higher than the Apple-1 market value of $15,000-$25,000 I came up with when I wrote a story on collectible computers back in 2007. But this sounds like one of the best examples of the machine you’re likely to find, with the original box, cassette interface, documentation, BASIC on cassette, and a letter from Steve Jobs.

Christie’s listing says that the Apple-1 was a landmark personal computer because it was the first sold in assembled form rather than as a kit that required the buyer to solder components onto a motherboard. This seems inaccurate to me. For one thing, as this photo shows, Apple shipped the Apple-1 as a board without a case, keyboard, or video interface; it was still more of a nerdy hobbyist project more than anything else. (1977’s Apple II, Radio Shack’s TRS-80, and Commodore’s PET 2001, were the first major ready-to-use consumer PCs.) And the Apple-1 wasn’t the first non-kit computer, either: 1975’s MITS Altair was best known as a kit, but was also available in pre-assembled form.

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A Wire-Free Way to Dock Your Notebook

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 26, 2010 at 10:06 pm

Last Gadget Standing Nominee: Altona Technologies AT-PCLink

Price: $169

Want to dock your laptop so you can use a big monitor, comfy keyboard and mouse, and external speakers? How about doing the job wirelessly–even if your notebook is up to thirty feet from the peripherals? Altona’s KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) switch lets you make the connection via Ultra Wide Band (UWB) and provides a USB adapter for your PC. Resolutions up to 1440 by 1050 are supported. And yes, it works with Macs as well as Windows PCs.

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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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Dell Rolls Out More Usable Inspiron Laptops

Posted by Jacqueline Emigh on June 19, 2010 at 9:03 pm

Dell today announced U.S. availability of the sleek new Inspiron R laptops first launched a few months ago in parts of the world such as Australia and India.

Like Dell’s existing 14-, 15- and 17-inch Inspirons, the new R models are geared to carrying out multiple roles, ranging from replacing desktop PCs, to serving up multimedia home entertainment, to acting as take-along workstations on visits to Starbuck’s. Yet the Inspirson Rs bring a cooler look and a smoother feel.

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