A very Mac-y Holiday

Hello out there!

Just a quick question for all of you:

If any, what Mac products(s) did you receive/buy over the holidays?

Thanks for your input!

Snow Days

As the weather warms and the sun comes out here in SF, it finally Snows for Mac users everywhere. That is to say that Apple has released their latest big cat named operating system, Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6). With it Apple has picked up Leopard (OS X 10.5), cleaned it out, dusted it off, and sped it up greatly for all Intel Mac users. Plus, they have dramatically reduced the price for us too! ($29 for a single user and $49 for a family pack (5 users).) Sorry to say that anyone with a non-intel Mac (iBooks, PowerBooks, PowerMacs and G4 Mac Minis) will not be able to upgrade to Snow Leopard. However, now is a great time to upgrade your old hardware and go Intel.

One problem that may affect users though is software compatibility. Some of your third party (non-Apple) software may not work with the latest release of OS X. Generally speaking, a good majority of your higher end software (ie, Adobe, Microsoft…etc) will work without a hitch. It’s more along the lines of the little pieces of software that will fail to work. I, for example, loved a little piece of software called Letterbox (As it stands the developer of Letterbox has a 4th beta version posted, which seems to be working rather well for me.) which allows you to have your emails preview pain show to the right of your email list. Unfortunately it was rejected by Snow Leopard. To be fair to developers, Apple did really jump the gun on the release date of Snow Leopard. That move undoubtedly left developers dangling in the wind by cutting off roughly a month of further testing on their software.

Overall though, Snow Leopard is a gorgeous piece of work. It truly is what Leopard should have been from the get go. The developers at Apple redesigned 90% of Leopard’s internals. Which means Snow Leopard is heavily streamlined and even more visually gorgeous then its predecessor. Snow Leopard is not at all an entirely behind the scenes redesign, there are quite a few little tweaks to what you and I see and use everyday. I have been using Snow Leopard on my MacBook since the early Beta release back in June and I am still finding nice enhancements constantly. Some of my favorites are:

-Dock Expose allowing users to click and hold on an applications icon in the dock to get a view of all windows open for that app, and thereby get to the window you are after with ease.

-I am also a huge fan of the ability to resize items in the finder with a handy slider at the bottom right of the finder window.

-Another nice enhancement comes to Stacks (Stacks is a Leopard-introduced feature of the dock which allows quick access to folders placed next to the trash can icon). You finally have the ability to scroll through a folder’s contents and click into folders within a folder to get to its contents. Also a nice touch is a back button so you can go back to the previous folder you were in.

– Quicktime X has a fantastic, albeit simple, feature that allows you to record a video of actions you make on the Mac real time. Which is a great way to help out family and friends with their most vexing Mac problems.

There are many more little tweaks and improvements that make Snow Leopard wonderful experience, but I won’t be going through them all.

By far I believe that the number one thing you will notice from the get go is speed. I have, of course, installed it on all the machines that are active in my house: a Mac Mini 1.66 core duo, a MacBook 2 gHz core 2 duo and my girlfriend’s MacBook Pro 2.4 gHz core 2 duo. The MacBook Pro was the last machine to receive the upgrade. That being said, my MacBook, after the upgrade was equal in speed if not faster than the MacBook Pro, prior to upgrading the MacBook Pro. Needless to say I was rather pleased with this factor. Next to get the upgrade was the Mini, that bumped it up to equal or slightly greater than my MacBook, prior to upgrading the MacBook. The last computer to get the upgrade was the MacBook Pro, that computer is now SCREAMING fast, incomparably so. The speed bump is worth the price of admission alone.

How did Apple developers achieve such performance, you might ask? Well I will tell you. WARNING: this part is gonna get techie. The main speed boost comes from switching from 32 bit processing to 64 bit processing. To be fair not all Intel Macs can benefit from this as they cannot all handle 64 bit processing. What does 64 bit processing mean? That means that the processors can do the math of processing at almost double the speed of 32 bit processing. Also 64 bit processing means that your computer can handle a nearly infinite amount of RAM. RAM is responsible for allowing you to run more applications at once, aka multitasking, plus it does give a bit of a speed boost as well.

The next reason I am about to give for the speed boost in Snow Leopard is a debatable, yet I believe it to be true. What I am referring to is the slimming down of the system software installed to roughly 7 GB, as opposed to an 11 GB Leopard install. They pulled this feat off by removing any code for Apple’s pre-Intel computers (Power PC Macs, aka PPC), hence the reason older Macs are not supported by Snow Leopard. It is in my belief that without all of the code for the PPC computers, Snow Leopard has to shuffle through less code and thereby improving speed as well. As I said though, this is debatable. One thing I do know for a fact is that when you install Snow Leopard over a Leopard install you gain up to 15 GB of storage on your internal hard drive, which is always a lovely thing in itself!

If you couldn’t tell from reading this post, I am a HUGE fan of Apple’s latest operating system (OS), Snow Leopard. It is, in my opinion, the best OS Apple has released to date. At $29, it is by far their cheapest offering as well. So, what are you waiting for? Go on out and grab yourself a copy today! If you need help with the install, don’t hesitate to call DandyMac if you are in the SF Bay Area!

Maconomics

As it stands in our current economic climate here in the good `ol US of A, we are almost all strapped for cash. I would guess that there are a bunch of us out there that would really like to get a new Mac with a bigger hard drive that might even be faster, I mean really who wouldn’t? Trouble with that is that a new Mac is pretty expensive, which is not easy to swing these days. What is one to do?

Well, I will tell you exactly what you can do, and I do this all day every day for people just like you. The most affordable way of achieving the bigger hard drive and more speed is to upgrade what you already have. This can be done for a fraction of the cost of a new computer. In many cases it will run about $300-400. Most people I talk to are surprised that it can even be done, let alone how much cheaper it is than buying a new Mac.

So what can be done to an older Mac? The first thing you most likely want is the bigger hard drive. Having more room for all of your files, music, movies, photos, applications and everything you download is always a good thing. Depending on what type of Mac you have, you can go as high as 1 terabyte, which is a LARGE amount of storage space. To give you an idea of how much it would cost to upgrade the hard drive in your older (or even newer) Mac, it would cost about $50 for an 80-gigabyte drive and up to $100 for a 500-gigabyte drive for a Mac laptop, depending on the model. If you have a desktop Mac it can be an even cheaper upgrade and you can add much more space: up to 1 terabyte for as little as $119. Installation should run about $100 or less depending on what kind of Mac you own. So for less than around $200 you can have a much larger hard drive for storage. (prices gathered from http://www.otherworldcomputing.com )

The next thing you can do to give that old Mac some new life is upgrade your RAM. RAM stands for random access memory and it serves two basic functions. The first is it allows you to open more applications at the same time without bogging down your workflow. The second thing it does is add more speed to the Mac. The two in conjunction really makes a huge difference in your Mac’s performance. Again, this is a rather cheap investment that really pays off. For example if you have an iBook G4 (purchased in late 2004) you can max out your RAM to 1.25 gigabytes for $50 (OWC), if you have a 2.4ghz MacBook Pro (late 2007-early 2008) you can max our your RAM to 4 gigabytes for $60 (OWC). Installation on most Macs is very simple and you can find instructions at otherworldcomputing.com as well. I cannot recommend this upgrade strongly enough, you will love your old Mac all over again!

The final thing I can recommend to spruce up the old Mac is to upgrade the system software. The system software is how your computer runs, it’s also what gives your computer more functionality and features.  This upgrade can be a bit more of a challenge because not all Macs can be upgraded to the latest operating system from Apple (OSX 10.5 Leopard). To make things more challenging it is rather difficult to find the operating systems prior to the latest. If your Mac is under ten years old, odds are you can run up to OSX 10.4 Tiger. (Because this is an older operating system it is more costly than the latest operating system. I ran a Google search for it and found this to be the cheapest: (OS X 10.4), although I do not know about the reliability of the source.) If you have a Mac that has an 867 mhz processor or greater and at least 512mb of RAM ( you can find out what processor speed and how mach RAM you have by clicking the little Apple menu in the upper left corner of your desktop, then click ‘About This Mac’) you can upgrade to the latest from Apple OS X 10.5 Leopard for about $129. I do not recommend doing this yourself unless you really know what you are doing,  have done it before, and have backed up your data.

Before you go running out and buying these products it is essential that you know what kind of Mac you have and how far it can be upgraded. There are many variables involved in picking the right parts to upgrade to. That said, I recommend talking to someone like DandyMac (shameless self-plug!) who is a certified Apple Technician and Consultant before making purchases. Buying the wrong parts and trying to install them can be disappointing and even dangerous.

So for now save yourself some cash in these hard times and upgrade that older Mac. You will make you and it much happier by doing so. In these trying Maconomic times you can extend the life of your older Mac with very little expense and start saving for your next new mac at the same time. As a small hint to those of you who can actually afford to get a new Mac, I would strongly suggest that you hold off until the next round of hardware updates are released before you buy a laptop. The desktops are the way to go right now if you are considering buying new.

UPDATE: During my nromal morning scouring of my favorite mac news sites I stumbled upon this article from Macworld .com:    Opinon: Which is better for your business, a Mac or a PC? This guy has his own take on the economic times we are in and how his choice of computer helped his company. Perhaps a bit off the topic but it’s still great!