You have to give Psystar some credit here – they certainly have some balls! Despite their on-going legal trouble with Apple, Psystar continues to up the ante – this time releasing a software package called “Rebel EFI” which essentially makes it possible to run OS X on compatible non-Apple branded PCs. The software is free to download and try although there is limited hardware functionality. The trial version is time limited to two hours – afterwards you’ll need to purchase Rebel EFI from Psystar for $49.99. Looks like you’ll need Snow Leopard to make this work (is this true folks?). Check out the FAQ for instructions on how to install the image.

[Check it out via Ubergizmo]

Technorati Tags: Psystar Rebel EFI

Apple announced today that the next version of OS X, version 10.6 (a.k.a. Snow Leapard), will go on sale starting on Friday, August 28th at Apple retail stores, Apple authorized resellers, and at Apple online. Snow Leopard includes:

• Hundreds of refinements – approximately 90 percent of the 1000+ projects within OS X. Improvements include

• More responsive Finder
• Faster Mail
• Faster initial backups with Time Machine
• Dock with Expose integration
• QuickTime X
• 64 bit version of Safari 4 which is 50 percent faster
• Half the size of previous OS X version and frees up approximately 7 GB of disk space

Pricing for OS X Snow Leopard will be as follows:

For 10.5 Leopard users, a single user upgrade license will cost $29 dollars while the Snow Leopard Family Pack will be available for $49.

For Tiger users with an Intel Mac, the Mac Box Set which includes OS X Snow Leopard, iLife 09 and iWork 09 will be available for $169 while the Family Pack will be available for $229.

[Check it out]

Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

Screw the legal problems – let’s keep selling OS X-based PCs!

At least that’s what Psystar appears to be saying by announcing their third OS X based desktop system – the “Open(3) with Mac OS X”. For $599 you get a system with the following specs:

• OS X Leopard 10.5
• 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E7400 processor
• 2GB RAM
• 500GB 7200RPM SATA HDD
• 20x DVD+-RW DL drive
• NVIDIA GeForce 8400GS 256MB single DVI card

Keep in mind you’re buying just the computer itself. You’ll still need a keyboard, mouse, and monitor to complete the entire package – a la Mac mini.

At $599, it’s certainly a better deal than the mini although it lacks the polish, compactness, and sexiness of the mini. Oh yes, there’s also the issue of the “hacked” OS X version that’s running on the box as well as the ever so slight legal conflict that Psystar is currently embroiled in with Apple.

Perhaps the motto here for Psystar should be – buy an Open(3) to help out defense team…

[Check it out via News.com]

Read this in Chinese Simplified and French

Technorati Tags: Psystar Open(3), OS X, Apple

Could OS X 10.5.7 be right around the corner? BGR reports the latest test build (build 9J27) was released yesterday – only a week after build 9J22 made it out to testers. Check out BGR for a laundry list of fixes.

[Check it out]

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac OS X 10.5.7 test build

In any event, let me try and summarize today’s announcements. Apple announced a new version of iLife ‘09 which features major updates to iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand. IMHO, the best additions have to be for iPhoto where you can now perform automatic face detection within the software, automatically publish pictures to both Facebook and Flickr as well as sync name tags back to iPhoto from Facebook. iPhoto will also now support location information stored in pictures from GPS enabled cameras or mobile phones. You’ll be able to search by places and faces – nifty. iLife ‘09 also contains an updated version of iWeb ‘09 as well as iDVD ‘09 for creating DVDs. You can purchase iLife ‘09 later this month for $79 dollars.

Apple also announced a major update to their iWork productivity suite in the form of iWork ‘09. The new version adds many new features to Keynote, Pages, and Numbers – all of which you can read about in the press release if you’re interested. Not to be outdone by Google or Microsoft, Apple is also getting into the online document sharing business with the introduction of the iWork.com beta website. With iWork.com, users will be able to share their iWork ‘09 documents online using their Apple ID. iWork ‘09 is available now for $79 dollars or $49 dollars with the purchase of any Mac.

As long rumored, Apple finally released an updated 17 inch MacBook Pro – bringing the aluminum unibody construction from the MacBook family to the 17 inch domain. The new 17 incher also features a new built-in rechargeable battery with a battery life of up to eight hours and lifespan of 1000 recharges – more than three times the lifespan of conventional notebook batteries. Other features of the new MacBook Pro include:

• High resolution LED backlit 1920 x 1200 resolution display
• Glass based multi-touch trackpad
• Latest Intel Core 2 Duo processors up to 2.93 GHz
• Up to 8GB RAM
• Switchable NVIDIA GeForce 9400M integrated graphics and NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT discrete graphics
• Standard 320GB 5400RPM HDD
• Optional 320GB 7200RPM HDD or 128GB/256GB SSD
• Mini DisplayPort

The new 17 inch MacBook Pro will be shipping at the end of this month. For a suggested retail price of $2799, you’ll get a system with the following specs:

• 17-inch widescreen LED-backlit 1920 x 1200, glossy display;
• 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 6MB shared L2 cache;
• 1066 MHz front-side bus;
• 4GB 1066 MHz DDR3 SDRAM;
• NVIDIA GeForce 9400M integrated graphics;
• NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT discrete graphics with 512MB GDDR3 video memory;
• 320GB Serial ATA hard drive running at 5400 rpm, with Sudden Motion Sensor;
• a slot-load 8X SuperDrive with double-layer support (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW) optical drive;
• Mini DisplayPort for video output (adapters sold separately);
• built-in AirPort Extreme® 802.11n wireless networking and Bluetooth 2.1+EDR;
• Gigabit Ethernet port;
• built-in iSight video camera;
• three USB 2.0 ports;
• one FireWire® 800 port (FireWire 400 compatible); 
• ExpressCard/34 expansion card slot;
• one audio line in and one audio line out port, each supporting both optical digital and analog;
• glass Multi-Touch trackpad and illuminated keyboard; 
• built-in, 95WHr lithium polymer battery; and
• 85 Watt MagSafe® Power Adapter.

Yes.. $2799 is a lot of money..

And FINALLY, changes are coming to iTunes. Apple finally gave up on their single price point of $99 cents – offering songs in three price points now – $69 cents, $99 cents, and $1.29. However, the company also announced that all four major music labels (Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, Warner Music Group and EMI) will now be offering their music in iTunes Plus – Apple’s DRM free format with 256kbps AAC encoding.

Let’s focus on the price changes first. Apple will be rolling out the price changes in April and it will be based on what the music labels charge Apple. The company claims that many more songs will be priced at 69 cents vs $1.29 but you can be sure the newest most popular songs will be on the higher end of the spectrum.

Ah but what about your existing collection of purchased songs? You can upgrade them to the newer DRM free format at a price of 30 cents per song or 30 percent of the album price.  The iTunes Store will begin offering eight million of its 10 million songs in the DRM free format with the remaining 2 million available by the end of March.

Finally, iPhone 3G owners will finally be able to download their purchased songs over the 3G network – just like they would over a Wi-Fi network.

AND.. that’s a wrap

Technorati Tags: Apple, Macworld keynote, iLife '09, iWork '09, Macbook Pro, iTunes Plus

What do you when you want a low-cost OS X notebook? Install OS X on a netbook of course! That’s what the folks at Wired.com’s Gadget Lab did with an MSI Wind netbook. They took a distribution of OS X (containing the necessary drivers for the MSI Wind) and installed the OS right on the netbook itself. Sure some components failed to work but overall, you’ve got yourself an inexpensive OS X based system as a result. Pretty nifty! So who else will try this out?

[Check it out via NetbookTech.com, Ubergizmo]

Technorati Tags: OS X, MSI Wind

Here are other stats of interest:

• 11 million iPods were sold during the quarter – 12 percent unit growth and seven percent revenue growth over the year-ago quarter
• 717,000 iPhones were sold during the quarter compared to 270K in year ago quarter (of course the iPhone had just started sales during the third quarter of last year)

Now here’s where things get interesting. Apple’s CFO, Peter Oppenheimer, decided to warn analysts that 4th quarter gross margins will be negatively affected by a “product transition.” So as News.com points out – let the guessing games begin. What exactly does this product transition mean exactly? Does this lend credence that new notebooks are coming out from Apple? Does this mean product prices are coming down? Does it mean things getting more expensive to manufacture? It’s really anyone’s guess right now (but you can be sure that people will be coming out with their own theories now). For the record though, News.com thinks that Apple will do two things during the fourth quarter: Introduce new Centrino 2 based MacBooks and reduce price for the iPod touch.

[Check it out]

Technorati Tags: Apple, Third Quarter, 2008, Fourth Quarter, Apple iPhone, Mac, iPod Touch

Think Linux and Windows XP are the only viable OS’s for the MSI Wind notebook (which isn’t available yet of course… at least not easily)? Well if you know what you’re doing and you know where to look, you can have a third alternative thanks to OS X. A adventurous fellow over at the InsanelyMac Forum managed to get Kalyway 10.5.2 installed on the MSI Wind. As you can see in the picture above, the OS thinks it’s running on a Mac Pro system powered by an Intel Core Solo processor (of course the actual processor is a 1.6GHz Intel Atom). Pretty nifty stuff! I’ve played with Kalyway before and I must say – when it works, it’s awesome.

[Check it out]

Technorati Tags: MSI Wind, OS X, Kalyway 10.5.2

General

• Fixes a font issue that could result in Helvetica Narrow being used in applications instead of Helvetica.
• Addresses an issue with stuttering video and audio playback in certain USB devices.
• Resolves stability issues with Word of the Day, iTunes Artwork, and Slideshow screen savers.
• Fixes an issue in which certain attached hard drives may not show up in the Finder.
• Addresses an issue with .Mac syncing of Dashboard widgets over multiple Macs that use different screen resolutions.
• Includes additional RAW image support for several cameras.
• Improves the accuracy of the Software Update progress bar indicator.
• Addresses an issue in which Finder may not be available if the computer name is blank in Sharing preferences.
• Improves Active Directory binding and login.
• Eliminates a delay when logging in as an Active Directory user in a .local domain.
• Improves Spotlight searches on a AFP file server volumes.
• Clients can now change their password at the login window when bound to a Mac OS X 10.4 Open Directory server.
• Improves Safari reliability when connecting to the Internet through a Microsoft ISA proxy.

Address Book

• Addresses reliability issues when searching for contacts using built-in search.
• Resolves issues with mapping addresses that contain an ampersand character (&).

AirPort

• Improves 802.1X behavior and reliability. 
• Improves reliability when using Time Capsule.

Automator

• Addresses an issue in which some actions may not work with the “Show When Run” option enabled.
• Resolves an issue in which the “New iCal Event” action may not work.
• Resolves an issue that prevents workflows from being saved in the Finder’s contextual menu.
• Fixes reliability issues for Automator scripts that search for files by date.
• Resolves an issue that prevents workflows from being saved in the Finder’s contextual menu.
• Addresses an issue in which Automator workflows as Finder plugins do not work when the workflow begins with the “Get Selected Finder Items” action.
• Fixes an issue in which the “Copy Files” action does not reliably work when added from Automator’s warning dialog.

iCal

• Addresses potential privacy issues by allowing events to be marked as private.
• Resolves an issue in which the inspector does not show capacity and availability info for conference rooms within a building.
• Addresses an issue in which the current day could appear in the left-most column of the weekly view.
• Addresses reliability issues with meeting alarms, invitations and attachments.
• Resolves issues with reliability when restoring from iCal backups.
• Fixes accuracy issues with auto-completion, availability data and location names.
• Resolves an issue in which iCal may send cancellation notices for events in the past after a calendar is deleted.
• Fixes reliability issues with iCal syncing.

iChat

• Addresses reliability issues with screen sharing.
• Resolves an issue in which saved chat transcripts may reported as “still in use” after opening and closing them in iChat.
• Resolves an issue with group chats not being indexed in Spotlight.
• Only the last 250 messages of an active chat are saved.  Fixed to save unlimited number of lines.
• Addresses issues with echo cancellation that may occur on portable Macs.

Mail

• Resolves an issue in which Mail may prevent idle sleep when set to automatically check for new messages every minute.
• Addresses stability issues that may be encountered when dragging large attachments into an email message.
• Fixes an issue that could occur if two compose windows are open when dragging a file to the Mail icon in the Dock.
• Addresses reliability issues when changes are made to a mailbox while offline.
• Resolves wrapping issues that may be found with consecutive spaces in plain text.
• Fixes issues with certain web pages appearing garbled when emailed from Safari.
• Fixes an issue in which the Sent, Drafts, and Outbox mailboxes incorrectly list the “cc” recipients in the “To” column.
• Addresses reliability issues with attachments added to plain text notes.
• Fixes reliability issues with authenticated RSS feeds.
• Resolves an issue in which attaching an alias to an email message may not send the actual file.

Parental Controls

• Addresses reliability issues with application logging and time limits.
• Resolves an issue in which Parental Controls may prevent forced sleep. 
• Addresses performance issues with web content filters.
• Fixes an issue with managed accounts in which iChat transcripts may not be created.
• Addresses issues with 4-byte files and whitelist.

Spaces

• Resolves an issue in which switching to a different space and returning back to the original space may reorder the application windows with a different active window.
• Resolves an issue in which activating an application from the Dock switches to a different space, even if there is a window for that application in the current space.
• Fixes an issue in which Command-Tab may incorrectly switch to a new space.
• Addresses reliability issues with Spaces when syncing preferences over .Mac.

Time Machine

• Includes fixes for Time Machine compatibility with Time Capsule.
• Resolves certain issues when backing up a portable Mac that is on battery power. 
• Addresses compatibility issues with Aperture 2.
• Addresses reliability issues when performing a full restore from a Time Machine backup.
• Fixes an issue in which certain function keys may be disabled after using Time Machine. 
• Fixes a possible alert message that incorrectly states a backup volume does not have enough space. 
• Updates Time Machine to reliably restore attachments and messages in Mail.

VoiceOver

• Includes Braille Update 1.0 which enables GW Micro, HandyTech, HIMS, Nippon, and Papenmeier Refreshable Braille displays.
• Addresses an issue with Braille dot 7 and 8 underlining.
• Fixes an issue in which HTML page anchors may be ignored by the VoiceOver cursor.
• Fixes an issue that prevented Hot Spots from being used in text areas.
• Resolves an issue with spell checking in which VoiceOver may only announce the first misspelled word if there are multiple words spelled incorrectly.

Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X, 10.5.3

• Intel Core 2 Duo processor
• Up to 4GB of RAM
• 250GB 7200 RPM HDD
• DVD burner
• Gigabit Ethernet

Psystar essentially installed a version of OS X that’s been modified to run on non-Apple hardware. Yes.. the legality of such a move is dubious at best but at least the company is shipping hardware (and software) to people buying the product. CNET has an unboxing video of the system which I’ve embedded here on Krunker:  

Its hardware isn’t made by Apple’s design team, it will likely never work as a full member of the greater Apple ecosystem, and one ill-intended software update could turn it into a $750 brick. Get past all of that, and you’ll find Psystar’s OS X-based Open Computer a fast and otherwise compelling lower midrange desktop.

Technorati Tags: Psystar Open Computer, CNET, Review, OS X

In actuality, while this is certainly a threat, the real problem isn’t so much Boot Camp but applications like Parallels which allows Windows applications to run simultaneously under OS X. Boot Camp only allows you to choose one OS over the other while a program like Parallels will allow you to run Windows within a VM under OS X. Plus – thanks to Intel Virtualization technologies, you will get pretty darn good Windows application speeds out of Parallels. So .. why purchase say Office for Mac when you can run Office for Windows on a Mac OS X platform?

At the end of the day, I believe giving consumers the opportunity to run Windows applications actually will help spur the sales of Mac systems – primarily because consumers can opt to have the best of both worlds – something not quite possibly with a Windows only solution.

[Check it out via CrunchGear]

Technorati Tags: Apple, Boot Camp, Windows, Parallels

Now here’s an amusing hack story for ya. A guy named Dan has taken his ASUS Eee PC and installed a version of Mac OS X on it. Now there’s a thought eh? Take a fairly inexpensive, ultra-portable notebook, and install OS X on it. Of course, the Eee PC isn’t exactly the most powerful notebook around but at $399, you do get an interesting piece of hardware. Consider the specs..

• 7 inch display
• Full QWERTY keyboard
• 900 MHz Intel Mobile CPU
• 4GB flash memory drive
• 512MB RAM
• 10/100 Fast Ethernet
• Wi-Fi
• Three USB 2.0 ports
• VGA output
• microphone, headphone, and SD card reader

Replace the pre-installed Linux OS with Mac OS X and you’ve got one tiny portable Mac system!

[Check it out]

Technorati Tags: ASUS, Eee PC, Mac OS X

Apple Mac owners have a new way to capture television broadcasts on their computers thanks to the newly announced ATI TV Wonder 650 Combo USB for Mac. The TV Wonder 650 Combo USB features two TV tuners capable of receiving over-the-air ATSC/HDTV broadcasts as well as analog television programming. Using the included ATI tvPORTAL TV application, users get full DVR functionality right on their Mac – including the ability to watch, pause, or record high definition television. Features of the ATI TV Wonder 650 Combo USB for Mac include:

• Two built in tuners offering combo tuning for ATSC and NTSC
• ATI Theater Video Processing Technology with Hardware MPEG-2 Compression, Motion Adaptive 3D Comb Filter, Automatic Color Control, Automatic Gain Control, Noise Reduction, and Edge Enhancement
• ATI tvPORTAL application with ability to watch TV and DTV on your Mac, full PVR and time shifting functionaloty, fast forward, rewind, or pause live analog TV and DTV, record MPEG-2 videos with ease to your hard drive, and built in electronic programming guide (EPG)
• USB 2.0 support
• Input connectors include F-Type Coax input for analog TV, F-Type coax input for ATSC(HDTV), S-Video input, Stereo audio input, Composite video input
• Requires Mac OS X 10.4.10 or higher

The ATI TV Wonder 650 Combo USB for Mac has an MSRP of $149 and is scheduled to be available later this month. The product will be distributed by VisionTek

[Check it out]

Technorati Tags: ATI TV Wonder 650 Combo USB for Mac, Mac OS X, TV Tuner, ATI

Here are some snapshots of the line and the front of the store taken with my iPhone.

Once inside, I took a walk around and guess what? I actually picked up my first Mac in about 6 years! Yes.. my last Mac system was the very cool iMac from 2001. This time around, I decided to pick up a Mac mini which came with the 10.5 DVD inside.

I’ve yet to set things up but hopefully you’ll hear more about it here at Krunker over the next few days. I still have to get my systems back up and running here in the office.. so that’s why news has been somewhat irratic.

That’s it for now.. I’m off to a Halloween Party! Stay safe everyone!

Technorati Tags: Apple, Apple Store, Third Street Promenade, OS X Leopard