Top Rumors for Macworld 2008

Update - I wanted to come back to this post after finding this nice article over at Daring Fireball about the opportunity to make profit or lose on trading Apple's stock around the hype of the MacWorld keynote - see that post here

Ok since we're now past Christmas and the New Year is fast approaching its time to round-up all of the speculation relating to the expected product announcements for Steve Jobs MacWorld 2008 keynote on January 14th. I'd expect that given all the recent iPod launches ahead of the holiday season that MacWorld will have a focus on updating and refreshing the Mac product line.

Here is our list:

• Ultra portable Macbook - At this point it looks like its a pretty good bet that you'll see the introduction of a slim version of the Macbook presumably running Intel's latest mobile processor. See this Mac Rumors post for a good summary of various opinions. The proposed laptop is expected to feature a solid state hard drive. My call on this one is that we'll see the ultra portable with an on board NAND flash drive (likely in the 60GB) range given the cost I'd expect we'll see a price point around $1,500.
• An update for the Mac Mini Ok this one is more in the hope category on my part since I think the Mac Mini fills a great all purpose role in the Mac product line. My thought would be given the number of people that have moded the Mac Mini to act as a media centre it would be great to see an update for the Mini and eliminate the AppleTV. Basically very similar form factors and far more flexibility with the Mini.
• 3G iPhone Update? Given that a number of Apple's carrier partners most notably AT&T have let the cat out of the bag on this one I think you can expect an announcement either at MacWorld or the 3GSM (telecommunications conference) regarding a 3G capable iPhone. My money is actually on a launch coincident with 3GSM - likely just before at an Apple event since Apple has traditionally not played well with the rest of the industry at events run by others preferring not to share the spotlight with competitors.
• Tweaks for the Macbook Pro & Macbook & iMac. I'd expect that you'll see a series of spec changes as Apple refreshes the product line with new Intel processors.
  
  

Send me an email with your thoughts.

iPhoto08 & the growing storage challenge

So you're facing a dilemma the amount of content on your hard drive is growing at a pace that will soon have you needing to upgrade your internal hard drive. It's been a long-time since my first days of using a Mac where I've had this issue. In this case what's driving it is the rapid growth in my iPhoto library based on a couple of choices: 1) my decision to shoot any photos or movies from out digital camera at the maximum resolution possible (given that NAND flash memory is cheap and plentiful there is really no excuse here) and 2) my decision to keep a lot of the duplicate shots that would normally be trashed since the pictures have greater value than the disk space. My thinking behind these decision is driven by the fact that disk space is relatively cheap versus the content. However, as we start taking movies at an increasing pace and I begin to spend more time editing and publishing using iMovie08 the speed with which I've been consuming disk space has accelerated significantly. Rather than wait till I approached the capacity of the 120GB drive in my Macbook Pro I opted to take action now. Two factors drove me to seeking out interim solutions till SATA drive prices drop further: the first is the increased number of steps that you need to undertake to upgrade the hard drive in a MBP vs. my old Macbook, and secondly a desire to save some money and to try and fully utilize the external drives I have at home.

As I dug around the web for potential solutions the one surprising thing that I found with iPhoto is while its an easy to use tool for a beginning photographer it still lacks the ability to easily create and manage multiple iPhoto libraries. The latest release of iPhoto'08 enables you increase the size of your iPhoto library over prior versions but still remains very light in terms of functions to managing the actual library of photos. I realize that iPhoto is created for the beginner and that Apple isn't looking to clutter the application by pushing it towards Photoshop and other higher end applications but there is definitely the need to enable it to work with multiple libraries natively. You can get iPhoto to choose the library you would like to work with by holding down the Option key as iPhoto loads bringing up a dialog box that enables you to pick the library of your choice.

As I searched around the web a number of potential options came-up:

1) Was to undertake a manual replication of my iPhoto library as described in this blog post at Kassblog.
OR
2) The other option that I came across was a great shareware application iPhoto Library Manager from Fatcat Software. It turns out that iPhoto Library so far addresses my need to replicate my library to an external drive so that I could archive the movies we've created which have consumed the majority of disk space. While we wait for Apple to get its act together and update iPhoto to handle the surge in data contained within our libraries and the need to split libraries over multiple volumes/drives. While this still isn't the ultimate solution that I'd like which is to be able to have both libraries show-up in the sidebar of iPhoto on launch it will do for the time being.

Leopard - a little too early...

Update - a great thread at ehMac.ca regarding external device support unlike Vista there do not seem to be any major drive issues with Leopard.

When I returned to the Mac 2 years ago I thought that the days of Sad Macs and Bombs were well and truly behind us. However, with the most recent release of Leopard I must admit that like others I've been suffering from Apple serving up an operating system that isn't fully cooked. We could list out a full range of excuses that resulted in Apple opting to ship an OS that had a number of bugs in its witness the recent spate of security patches and updates to address wireless issues for Macbook and Macbook Pro users.

Overall, I think that the improvements introduced in Leopard apart from Tiger while the 350 features listed on Apple's sight in some cases seemed fairly small I've found a number of pleasant surprises that have been useful including:

• Preview - a beefed up version of the built-in viewer means that you can now easily annotate PDF documents and do basic image manipulation without having to dig into Photoshop or another app.
  
• iChat - the addition of an improved iChat theatre for sharing pictures, movies and slideshows during a video chat is a definite bonus along with the ability to enable a remote user to take control of your Mac without installing Chicken of the VNC.
• Automator improvements are fairly notable as the number of built-in commands supported has grown and you have the ability to record a series of tasks as you perform then. Also the ability to create automator actions that more heavily leverage the web is a real bonus.

What I've found frustrating is the on-going battle between my Macbook Pro and our D-Link router where the Mac intermittently seems to lose the Internet connection despite being only twenty feed away from the router. I've also experienced a series of snags when running Firefox and while it works most of the time I'm seeing the spinning beach ball of death more frequently than I did under Tiger (which was an extremely stable OS). I have no doubt that Apple will remedy the bugs that were introduced by the changes in Leopard. Here's hoping that we'll get the release of 10.5.2 at Macworld in a couple of weeks or shortly thereafter!

Back to the Mac

I just finished listening to a fantastic podcast Macintosh Folklore Radio which brings back great memories of the original Macintosh. The stories were written by Andy Hertzfeld and read by Derek Warren and offer an entertaining glimpse into the development of the original Mac and some of the antics in getting the product to market in 1984. I guess to properly introduce this blog that's where we should begin with my own first computer a Macintosh 128K which shipped with one on-board 3.5" floppy disk drive and an Apple Imagewriter dot-matrix printer. Along the way I inherited another external floppy disk drive and eventually took this Mac in for surgery to have an upgrade to 512K.
I grew with the Mac and it got me hooked on computers. Over the next decade I owned both an original Macintosh and a Macintosh SE working with a wide variety of popular applications (e.g., MacWrite, MacPaint, WriteNow!). I migrated from the original operating system (yes System 1.0) up until version 7.5 in the early 1990s. At that point I was forced to switch over to using a PC and that is where we found ourselves until approximately two years ago. Finally, fed-up with the horrific experience that is Windows and an operating system that proved to be a constant pain I happily returned to the Mac. In this blog my plan is to take many of the Apple, Mac and iPod specific posts from the thoughtful-wheaten.blogspot.com and place them in a Mac-centric environment. Here goes...