The Tech Night Owl — Cutting-Edge Tech Commentary

So is the Mac at Death’s Door?

When I suggested recently that we had returned to the silly season, perhaps a little earlier than I might have expected, I didn’t know how right I was. A recent article, from a site that I won’t name, is now suggesting that the iPad is the first nail in the Mac’s coffin, that it won’t [...]

The Snow Leopard Report: Is it Ready Yet for Prime Time?

Now we all know that Snow Leopard appeared last August, but for some of you it still has serious problems, so you’re sticking with Leopard. Some of you are even Tiger holdouts, because Leopard didn’t light your fire. The other day, I saw a perfectly serious article claiming adoption of 10.6 was not so good and [...]

Reviewing Products They’ve Never Used

It’s nothing new. When the iPod first came out, bloggers and so-called tech pundits were busy complaining about the features it didn’t have, such as a built-in radio, or perhaps a working kitchen sink. None of that hurt actual sales of the product, of course, since it became a runaway best-seller and sales only began [...]

Chasing Fact and Fiction About Apple’s Future

Some people want you to believe that Apple is a dictatorship, with Steve Jobs micromanaging everything and relying on his temperamental personality to make critical corporate decisions. Good or bad, it means that, were Jobs to bow out, the company would be on the skids in an extremely short time. There may be something in this [...]

Newsletter Issue #536: The Silly Season Starts Early

Apple can’t stay out of the news, not that they’d want to. So in the past couple of weeks, you learned that all the known problems with the 27-inch iMac have been fixed, the iPad ships on April 3rd in the USA, and later that month in other countries and, by the way, Apple is [...]

The App Store Report: What About an Exit Button?

On the whole, I think Apple’s tight integration among its mobile devices and the way software is sold is a good thing. There is a rich selection, somewhere in the range 140,000 and 150,000 as I write this, with billions of downloads. Some tiny developers have made boatloads of money as a result of their [...]

Now It’s Inevitable: Flash is Dying!

In 1998, Apple killed the floppy drive. It took a few years for the rest of the industry to catch up, but the handwriting was clearly on the wall. Of course, anyone who actually lost data on a worn or defective floppy would only cheer the end of that flawed storage scheme. Segue to 2007. Apple [...]

Innovation by Lawsuit

This week, there’s a report that Apple is suing a mobile phone handset maker, HTC, over supposed various and sundry patent infringement issues. Now in passing I should point out that HTC is also the company that builds Google’s Nexus One smartphone and a number of other devices that support the Android OS. And, yes, I’m [...]

An iPhone 4.0 Wish List

There are some reasonable certainties in the Apple universe, and one is that there will be an iPhone OS 4.0 release some time later this year, probably in July. That is, if the expected timeframe for Apple’s WWDC remains in late June. For now, I’ll stay away from other possible product revelations, such as the prospects [...]

Newsletter Issue #535: When is a Story Not a Story?

Those of you who have been following the ongoing 27-inch iMac soap opera are aware of the reports about display defects. These include screen flickering and a yellowish tinge. Early on, some newly-minted owners, including Macworld magazine, got units with cracked screens. Worse, this hot-selling model was particularly difficult to get, unless you were ready [...]

It’s the Critics Versus the Users

Some of you may have read a report the other day that Apple was behind the curve because there were no recent updates to the MacBook Pro lineup. This despite the fact that Intel had recently upgraded its mobile processors. So what’s wrong with Apple? Don’t they want their customers to have the latest and [...]

The Great Browser Race to Absurdity

Since Opera released the first alphas and betas for Opera 10.5 beginning last year, they’ve been able to boast of having the speediest browser on the planet. Test after test shows tiny increments of advantage over Google Chrome, Firefox and, of course, Safari. You hardly count Internet Explorer in such benchmarks, since it trails the [...]

Apple’s Iron Fist

All right you know that Apple Inc. is brilliant when it comes to spin control. They have managed to control their corporate message far better than any other company and, in fact, probably better than many governments. Whether it’s all due to the iron fist of Steve Jobs, or it’s a cooperative approach formulated by [...]

An Apple Reliability Reality Check

In the wake of a press release from RESCUECOM, a third-party computer repair service, that Apple remains the top-rated company, I have to wonder why so many people perceive Macs and recent Mac OS versions as seriously flawed. Clearly there’s a disconnect, since other surveys, from Consumer Reports and elsewhere, also show superior ratings for [...]

Newsletter Issue #534: About Control From Apple and Google

Just the other day, author and columnist Kirk McElhearn said he was going to close his Gmail account. Yes, it’s free, so what’s the beef? Well, Kirk is extremely concerned about the way Google tracks everything you’re doing and delivers targeted ads, hoping you’ll click on them and thus boost their revenue. I suppose that’s not [...]