macFAQ.info – News about Apple

PC Pro: News: Microsoft emails reveal Tiger envy

‘Tonight I got on corpnet, hooked up Mail.app to my Exchange server and then downloaded all of my mail into the local file store,’ wrote Microsoft’s Lenn Pryor, former Director of Platform Evangelism. ‘I did system wide queries against docs, contacts, apps, photos, music, and … my Microsoft email on a Mac. It was f***ing amazing. It is like I just got a free pass to Longhorn land today.’

Of course, publicly, Vista is a 100% OS X *not* inspired product. It is only too bad that MS couldn’t/wouldn’t do the things they needed to do to make “Cairo” a reality. Their size, and their inability to shake off legacy requirements/obligations, may doom them.

Jim Allchin co-president of the company’s Platform Products and Services Group was just as impressed.

‘I don’t believe we will have search this fast,’ he wrote.

….and you won’t. If you are stuck updating your five year old OS (XP) to look and act, and hopefully function like a 2+ year old OS, you are always going to be behind the curve.

Macworld: News: Hackers can’t wait for iPhone

“If it’s really going to run OS X, [the iPhone] will bring certain security implications, such as potential misuses of wireless connectivity facilities, [and] deployment of malware in a larger scale,” the hacker known as LMH wrote in an e-mail. He declined to provide his real name.

In typical Apple fashion, the tech pundits are pronouncing the iPod dead for its lack of features that no one wants, or cares about. Here is one take, by the in>famous John C. Dvorak:

the iPhone which doesn’t look, I mean to me, I’m looking at this thing and I think it’s kind of trending against, you know, what’s really going, what people are really liking on, in these phones nowadays, which are those little keypads. I mean, the Blackjack from Samsung, the Blackberry, obviously, you know kind of pushes this thing, the Palm, all these… And I guess some of these stocks went down on the Apple announcement, thinking that Apple could do no wrong, but I think Apple can do wrong and I think this is it.

They were wrong before, especially him, about the iPod, about the iMac, and pretty much about Apple in general. So that is boring. The interesting part of this is the hacking aspect.

• What is the CPU (edit:John Gruber thinks it is an ARM processor
• What is the OS (how much can be taken out before you can’t really call it OS X)
• …and all teh little things that go along with it…will it do 802.1x security
• java (seems reasonable)
• flash (that may be impossible for now unless we get a flash lite (no pun)
• battery life with wi-fi, without wi-fi?
• What API’s?
• are widgets applications?
• Bootloader? Firmware?
• SIM access?
• Is it unlockable?
• battery access/life?

There are many, many more questions that will go unanswered for months to come, unless more information is gleaned from the FCC website. In the meantime, I guess we will have to wait it out, and of course speculate some more.

Review: Mac OS X Shines In Comparison With Windows Vista – News by InformationWeek

Here is a pretty good take on the new Apple v. Microsoft debate. Evolution versus Revolution. Vista, revolution without a single shot fired, versus the evolution of OS X. Six releases of OS X versus XP in ‘01 and SP2. Why? They run the show. Will Vista sell? No doubt, if only for the fact of the MCSE economy, and the multitude of companies with proprietary software that is Windows only. Is Vista better than XP? Yes. Does Vista live up to the hype that it was first billed as? I don’t think so, and there are some people who agree with me.

Maybe the tide is shifting. Maybe vendors will start to do crazy things like resurrect long dead mac projects due to the popularity and room for growth that Apple can provide.

2007 Technology of the Year Awards: Hardware Slide: 5

Congratulations! to Apple for winning “Best Desktop/Workstation” AND “Best Notebook” at Infoworld.

This is what they have to say about the MacBook Pro:

MacBook Pro is both elegant and powerful, thanks to a 2.66GHz 64-bit Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, 3GB of RAM, an AMD/ATI X1600 GPU, dual-layer DVD burner, long-life battery, and plethora of ports. And with OS X Tiger, every iota of that power is focused on your work.