Archive: Mac
Apple Apologizes For MobileMe
Earlier today, Apple sent an e-mail to users of MobileMe, the $99/year e-mail/calendar/contacts/photo-album service that replaced its earlier .Mac offering. It was not the usual bland "thank you for your support" communication you might expect after a new site's launch: We have recently completed the transition from .Mac to MobileMe....
By Rob Pegoraro | July 16, 2008; 05:09 PM ET | Comments (18)
Apple's News: iPhone 2.0, iPhone 3G, Mobile Me
If you've been waiting to buy the new iPhone, you can now mark your calendar for July 11. Steve Jobs unveils the new iPhone model in San Francisco on Monday. (Bloomberg) Earlier today, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs opened the company's annual developers conference in San Francisco by unveiling the...
By Rob Pegoraro | June 9, 2008; 02:37 PM ET | Comments (56)
What's Up Apple's Sleeve?
It's time, once again, to indulge in one of the Internet's favorite games: Guessing what Apple will announce at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference. "WWDC" primarily serves as a forum for Mac programmers who come to San Francisco to learn about new and upcoming features in Apple's software. But WWDC...
By Rob Pegoraro | June 6, 2008; 10:10 AM ET | Comments (45)
The Review That Never Happened: Microsoft Office 2008
If only I'd had an extra week in January. Back then, I had been looking forward to reviewing Microsoft's then-new Office 2008 for Mac, the long-awaited successor to its Office 2004. (Long-awaited largely because it was the last must-have Mac program to be rewritten to run properly on the Intel...
By Rob Pegoraro | June 2, 2008; 12:11 PM ET | Comments (14)
Apple's Leopard Gets Third Big Update
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, the operating system that Apple shipped last fall, got its third major update on Wednesday. Mac OS X 10.5.3, like the earlier 10.5.1 and 10.5.2 patches, combines numerous bug fixes with small feature improvements in one very large download -- as much as 420 megabytes,...
By Rob Pegoraro | May 30, 2008; 11:33 AM ET | Comments (30)
Bonus Review: Apple's Time Capsule
It only took some three decades of personal computing, but when Apple's Time Machine software arrived as part of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard last fall, we finally had a backup program easy enough for anybody to use. But as I noted at the time, Time Machine requires a second,...
By Rob Pegoraro | April 29, 2008; 11:50 AM ET | Comments (50)
A New View on Mac Security
Two weeks ago, the CanSecWest computer-security conference staged a simple contest for would-be hackers: Be the first to break into any one of three up-to-date laptops--one running Ubuntu Linux 7.10, one running Windows Vista Ultimate, one running Mac OS X 10.5.2--by exploiting a new software vulnerability, and you can take...
By Rob Pegoraro | April 8, 2008; 10:41 AM ET | Comments (17)
Apple TV's Tune-Up
Today's column takes a look at Apple and Microsoft's new movie-rental download services. I found a great deal to like in both services; even with their issues, I could see myself renting movies this way with my own money. That's much more than I can say for all of the...
By Rob Pegoraro | February 21, 2008; 12:49 PM ET | Comments (5)
Apple Updates Leopard--Again
On Tuesday, Apple released its second major update to Mac OS X Leopard, the operating system it shipped in October. Mac OS X 10.5.2 Update, as Apple calls it, is one of the largest operating-system patches I've ever seen. The "combined update" download, which applies every fix issued so far...
By Rob Pegoraro | February 15, 2008; 12:05 PM ET | Comments (74)
Little Laptop, Big Deal
Apple's MacBook Air looked its absolute best on the stage at Macworld Expo earlier this month, when Steve Jobs plucked it out of a plain manila envelope that had been sitting on the podium since the start of his keynote. In the warm glow of a Jobsian reality distortion field,...
By Rob Pegoraro | January 31, 2008; 08:56 AM ET | Comments (21)
Your Macworld Questions, Answered
I was about to type in yet another dateline to start this post, but then I remembered that I'm home. How nice! Now that I am back in the land of distinct seasons--look, it's snowing outside!--I can finally start to catch up on all the mail and blog comments that...
By Rob Pegoraro | January 17, 2008; 09:56 AM ET | Comments (18)
Other Macworld Tidbits
SAN FRANCISCO--It can be easy to forget this during the keynote, but companies besides Apple exhibit at Macworld. So I spent most of yesterday afternoon wandering around the Moscone Center floor to see what they had to offer. * The Macintosh clone market died about a decade ago, but Axiotron's...
By Rob Pegoraro | January 16, 2008; 01:15 PM ET | Comments (9)
Apple's Macworld News: Movie Rentals and a Super-Skinny Laptop (Updated)
(I've revised yesterday's post with some extra details gathered since I wrote it.) SAN FRANCISCO--Apple chief executive Steve Jobs unveiled a way to back up computers without wires, new software that lets an iPhone and an iPod touch find themselves, iTunes movie rentals you can download without using a computer,...
By Rob Pegoraro | January 15, 2008; 03:03 PM ET | Comments (44)
Up Next, Macworld
SAN FRANCISCO--There's only a day to go before Steve Jobs opens Macworld Expo with his usual keynote, and hotels are starting to fill with exhibitors and attendees. The iPod ads on the street now feature a Macworld banner at the bottom. And the Mac rumor sites are engaged in...
By Rob Pegoraro | January 14, 2008; 10:46 AM ET | Comments (21)
Apple Polishes A Few Recent Releases
Over two days last week, Apple pushed out a pair of operating-system updates that included bigger changes than the usual maintenance release. Users of Apple's older Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger software got the first upgrade. The 10.4.11 update issued last Wednesday, in addition to fixing various bugs in OS...
By Rob Pegoraro | November 19, 2007; 09:36 AM ET | Comments (20)
Trouble Spots in Leopard
As people have continued to install Leopard--the new Mac OS X operating system from Apple that I reviewed last week--a couple of issues have emerged. One is a nasty bug that can cause you to lose files that you're moving to a different hard drive or computer if their destination...
By Rob Pegoraro | November 7, 2007; 04:10 PM ET | Comments (19)
Looking Into Leopard
Today's column takes a look at Apple's new Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard operating system. In the space available, I had to focus on the features I thought most users would encounter--which meant I wound up glossing over many other interesting new things in Leopard (300 in all, going by...
By Rob Pegoraro | November 1, 2007; 10:10 AM ET | Comments (17)
What Real Mac Malware Looks Like
People new to a Mac often ask me if I can recommend any good anti-virus or anti-spyware programs for their new machine. I usually respond that since there aren't any Mac viruses or spyware to test these programs against, I can't offer a clear recommendation. (That said, the free, open-source...
By Rob Pegoraro | October 31, 2007; 04:40 PM ET | Comments (2)
News From Apple: iPhone to Open, iTunes Plus Expands, Leopard Next Week
Apple has had a busy couple of days. I'll start with the most significant item: The company's Hot News page today leads with a statement from Steve Jobs that it will allow outside programmers to write software for the iPhone and iPod touch: Let me just say it: We want...
By Rob Pegoraro | October 17, 2007; 01:50 PM ET | Comments (31)
Apple Reincarnates iLife
Today's column and podcast (listen/subscribe/iTunes) cover a familiar subject: Apple's iLife multimedia suite. Like other multiple-program bundles (for instance, Microsoft Office), iLife is always a pain to review, because my notes hold far more details than I cram into the paper. So here are some details that didn't make the...
By Rob Pegoraro | August 23, 2007; 12:32 PM ET | Comments (9)
A Bushel of New Apple Products
Yesterday, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs unveiled new versions of three of Apple's major products: the iMac all-in-one desktop, the iLife multimedia suite and the iWork productivity bundle. All three products had gone a long time without any real update--almost a year for the iMac, over a year and a...
By Rob Pegoraro | August 8, 2007; 04:01 PM ET | Comments (17)
Help Me Try Out a Help File Recipe
I've got an unusual request here today--I'm inviting you to tell me if this Help File idea is worth taking into print or too esoteric for bother with. The topic in question covers those Mac programs that require you to run an installer. That's not the usual state of affairs...
By Rob Pegoraro | July 9, 2007; 10:06 AM ET | Comments (6)
Mac Market Math
Between those "Hi, I'm a Mac/And I'm a PC" ads, the well-documented problems with upgrading to Microsoft's new Windows Vista and the continued smart design of Apple's own hardware and software, a lot of people have been expecting the Mac's share of the computing market to rise. Some numbers published...
By Rob Pegoraro | June 26, 2007; 09:21 AM ET | Comments (50)
Apple TV: Now Safe To Buy?
When I tried out the Apple TV--the small, networked box that plays a computer's iTunes music, TV shows and video and also displays its digital-photo album--I wanted to like it but couldn't. The hard drive was too small and it didn't offer any access to streaming media from the Web,...
By Rob Pegoraro | May 30, 2007; 07:14 PM ET | Comments (3)
Danes Detail iBook Defects
This is some dogged consumer-protection work: Denmark's Consumer Complaints Board, after receiving numerous reports from buyers of Apple's iBook G4 laptops who found their computers dying after the one-year warranty had elapsed, asked an electronics laboratory to research the problem. That research determined that these problems were due to a...
By Rob Pegoraro | May 4, 2007; 09:19 AM ET | Comments (40)
Leopard Won't Leap Until October
To everybody who's asked if they should wait to buy a new Mac until Apple ships the next version of Mac OS X: You might as well get the new machine now, because Leopard won't ship until October. Apple released a statement late yesterday saying that this new release of...
By Rob Pegoraro | April 13, 2007; 11:02 AM ET | Comments (6)
New Office Suites For Macs
Last week saw a couple of noteworthy developments in the Mac productivity-suite business: * The most Mac-like offshoot of the free, open-source OpenOffice suite, NeoOffice, advanced to version 2.1, which adds support for the new file formats Microsoft introduced in Office 2007 for Windows. (Confusingly enough, the original OpenOffice project...
By Rob Pegoraro | April 2, 2007; 06:16 AM ET | Comments (22)
Reviewers' Notes: Apple TV
(Part of a continuing series of posts related to info that didn't make it into my print column. This week: A review of the Apple TV media receiver). In today's piece, I talked a little about the Apple TV's display requirements, in which Apple (accurately) summarizes the Apple TV's hardware...
By Rob Pegoraro | March 29, 2007; 10:19 AM ET | Comments (12)
A Tweak For Tiger
On Tuesday, Apple released a maintenance upgrade to Mac OS X 10.4, aka Mac OS X Tiger. This 10.4.9 update offers the usual mix of bug fixes, security patches and minor new features, as Apple's release note outlines: The 10.4.9 Update is recommended for PowerPC and Intel-based Mac computers currently...
By Rob Pegoraro | March 19, 2007; 07:00 PM ET | Comments (7)
More Ways To Run Windows On A Mac
Today's column addresses something that's been on the wish lists of Mac users for a long time--a way to run the occasional Windows program when they need to, without having to set aside their usual Mac programs at the time. This was an advertised feature of Macs more than a...
By Rob Pegoraro | March 8, 2007; 08:24 AM ET | Comments (35)
Must-Have Windows Programs - For Mac Users?
I've been working on a review of a couple of programs that let you run Windows programs on a Mac with an Intel processor. I've got my own list of Windows programs that I'll be testing in each of these virtualization applications, but I'd like to get your thoughts on...
By Rob Pegoraro | March 5, 2007; 03:18 PM ET | Comments (115)
Want an Apple TV? Tune In Next Month
Anybody looking to try out the Apple TV media receiver--the wireless gadget from Apple designed to bring your digital music, photos and videos to your television--will have to wait a little longer. Although the company had said this $299 device would ship in February, spokeswoman Teresa Brewer confirmed reports of...
By Rob Pegoraro | February 26, 2007; 05:02 PM ET | Comments (7)
