Mac

A couple of tidbits surfaced Friday related to Apple's current and future Mac lineup.

First of all, the 17-inch MacBook Pro introduced at Macworld 2009 is now shipping, MacNN discovered. Apple is quoting a 7- to 10-day lead time for shipments from its online store, which means it won't arrive until February, but Apple had only promised to start shipping the notebook by the end of January. It doesn't seem to be available in Apple's retail stores yet; at least, it wasn't available at the downtown San Francisco store as of Friday.

Secondly, AppleInsider reports … Read more

Emboldened by my success in getting Windows 7 to run on a Mac Mini using Boot Camp, I decided to press my luck. So Wednesday night, I took my Windows 7 beta disk home and set out to load it onto a virtual machine on my iMac.

Having used Parallels successfully in the past to run Vista, I decided to give VMware's Fusion a try--my first experience with the product. Getting up and running was relatively straightforward, a process aided by the fact that VMware lets you enter information such as your password and product key at the outset--handling … Read more

Correction, 11:48 a.m. PST: This story misstated when the Apple notebooks were redesigned. It was October 2008.

Apple has withdrawn a software update that was supposed to help MacBook owners deal with graphics issues, but that apparently failed to solve many of the problems.

AppleInsider spotted the disappearance of the update on Wednesday, after Apple had released it on Monday. The Web page that hosted the update has been removed from Apple's site, but a copy was available in Google's cache; missing the pertinent file, of course.

As AppleInsider notes, it's not clear why Apple … Read more

At least one analyst thinks Apple has new iMacs on tap but is mulling whether to include two cores or four.

Shaw Wu of Kaufman Brothers put out a research note Monday saying his latest run through Apple's supply-chain vendors indicates that new iMacs will be out sometime before March, or at most before June. It's been awhile since Apple tweaked the iMac in any substantial way, dating back to September 2007.

The changes this time around would mostly be under the hood: Wu believes Apple is debating whether to use Intel's dual-core processors or newer quad-core … Read more

Much was made of the fact that Apple didn't introduce lower-cost Macs ahead of expectations of a brutal economy, but Mac prices did in fact decrease last quarter.

The average selling price of a Mac declined 8 percent during Apple's first fiscal quarter, from $1,532 a year ago to $1,408, according to Apple's 10-Q filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It also declined 4 percent from the average price of $1,469 recorded during Apple's 2008 fiscal year.

iPod average prices declined even further. Apple's ASP for the iPod during the holiday … Read more

Tune in (browse in?) to CNET TV at 11:30 a.m. PST Friday for a special edition of Editors' Office Hours with Brian Tong and me, where we'll talk all about the 25th anniversary of the Mac.

We usually do these things on Tuesdays, but figured we'd put together a special one commemorating the Mac, which is finally old enough to rent a car. Brian and I will be on camera taking your questions, so make sure to stop by here.… Read more

What is a Macintosh?

After 25 years on the market, it's a good question, since someone with no knowledge of computers looking at, say, today's MacBook Pro, would not necessarily know that it evolved from 1984's original 128K Mac.

But evolve it did, and on the 25th anniversary of the release of that original machine (which is this Saturday), one might indeed wonder what hereditary DNA, if any, today's Macs retain from their much more humble ancestors.

The answer is some, but not that much, at least not when it comes to specific identifiable hardware features, … Read more

In January 1984, Steve Jobs--whom I described in my Macintosh review as "Apple's young chairman"--gave me a preview of the original 128K Macintosh. I was very impressed. Thousands of reviews later, I'm still impressed not only by what Apple accomplished back then but by what the company has been able to do since--especially after Jobs returned to Apple.

So, without any editing, here is what I said at the time. And, yes, along the way, I changed my byline from Lawrence J. Magid to Larry Magid.

Macintosh Shapes Up a Winner by Lawrence J. Magid … Read more

As the Mac celebrates its 25th birthday, we asked CNET readers to send us stories of their most vivid memories of the groundbreaking computer. Here are some of the stories we received.

Mac as typesetter I was working at an ad agency and had just left a client who was complaining bitterly about the high cost of typesetting changes on his catalog. The agency's typesetter was a $100,000 state-of-the-art unit that was an art director's dream but could not manage a simple change from page 23 to page 34.

On the way back to the agency, I … Read more