Macking 141

8-Core Processor
Just in time for the Intel-optimized Adobe Creative Suite 3, Apple rolled out its newest MacPro, sporting Intel's Woodcrest Xeon processor. You want speed and power? This beats all. Price is $1500 over the normal base price of $2500 (I hate the dollar-less prices everyone uses) plus all the optional extra RAM, hard drives, etc.
They also cut the price of their displays to $600 and $900 for the 20 and 23 inch, and $200 off the 30" to $1800. Dell still has equally good displays for hundreds less, and the Dells have embedded speakers. Just don't buy an actual Dell computer unless you want to strip off Windows and make a Linux MythTV out of it. Or, you could always get an...

Apple TV
The Unofficial Apple Weblog is all over the AppleTV, including reports and links to people who have converted them to the cheapest Mac ever ($299) by installing OSX. It's the most underpowered Mac possible: half to a quarter of the needed RAM (256 Mb), a tiny 40-gig hard drive (33 usable when formatted for AppleTV and less with OSX installed. It has no optical drive at all, so you will have to get your software onto it via the USB port and Ethernet, but hey, if you like hardware hacking, it's a new Mac for $300!
Want a bigger hard drive on it? Several companies will take it in and put a 120-gig drive in there, but the best deal comes from our own PowerMax in Lake Grove. As authorized Apple dealers, they will sell you a 120-gig AppleTV for $449, and include their own 1-year warranty. Anyone else replaces the drive, your Apple warranty is invalidated.
Other hacks available at AppleTV Hacker and others.
Do I have one? Not yet. But then, I never buy from the iTMS.

10.5 Delayed Until October
Just read this on column-submission day. It seems Apple moved a bunch of engineers from the Leopard team to the iPhone team. Originally scheduled for release at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June, now there will be beta versions for the developers to take home, but nothing for us until the Fall. Still, I would rather wait and have a finished version then install a buggy one and have to wait for a "service pack" update from Software Update. From Apple's press release:
iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. We can't wait until customers get their hands (and fingers) on it and experience what a revolutionary and magical product it is. However, iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price -- we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard's features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October. We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we're sure we've made the right ones.
If you have been stalling off getting Tiger because you thought Leopard would be out soon, you might as well go ahead and get it. You can always get some of your money back on Ebay later.

For Mac Beginners
The Unofficial Apple Weblog has started a blog for new users to post questions and get answers called Mac 101. Good to see a new resource for people who are new switchers or beginners.

Beware The Double Underline
A new plague on the Web: You may be noticing more web sites with words that have double underlines. Unlike the single underline, which usually but not always means it's a clickable link, the double underline activates a new kind of popup ad. All you have to do is hover your cursor over the word and up pops something like a cartoon speech balloon. It's always an ad, and seldom has any connection to the site you are browsing. You have to click its close box to make it go away, although some will disappear if you just move the mouse away.
Until Pith Helmet and the Firefox ad blocker can stop these things, you gotta watch where your cursor is.

IntelMac Speed Test Results
Geekbench has published a chart comparing the performance of the entire line of Intel Macs, from the original iMac and MacBook through the Mini to the Quad MacPro. Except for the last, there is barely a dime's worth of difference between them.
Not mentioned is the difference in graphics performance between the models that have integrated graphics/shared memory and those with higher-end cards like the MacPro and the MacBook Pro. Performance suffers on the lower end models.

The Perp Drive - Not Just Hitachi
Visit Wikipedia and look up the phrase "Perpendicular Technology" or just Google it for all kinds of info about how these drives store higher density data than ever before. Most of the articles don't go into the unreliability of the units, just the hows and whos. Several companies are making them now, but the warning is the same: This is bleeding edge technology so if you use them, you should always have a Firewire backup drive and use a program like SuperDuper or SilverKeeper to keep a clone of the internal drive, and run it every day.
Your non-perp drive will also die on you; it's just a matter of when. My MacBook drive died in March while I was in the middle of reading an email. The shop told me that the motor had burned out and taken the drive's electronics with it. I had my life on there, and had been running the backup just the day before. I lost nothing but a few emails and I had already answered the important ones. My Mac was just 9 months old. Learn from this.

Windows Wastes Power
A correspondent wrote on Macintouch, "While trying to find a way to power my BlacBook in the air and in my car, I started measuring actual power consumption of the AC adapter using my "Kill A Watt" meter.
"I was pleasantly surprised to see that most MacBook functions draw only about 15-25 watts, with an occasional spike to 35. The Apple adapter is rated at 60 watts max.
"Imagine my horror when I saw what Windows XP under BootCamp draws -- 54 watts at startup and 35-40 most of the time. And this is with the battery fully charged.
"Save energy; don't use Windows [grin]. Especially if you are using an AC/DC inverter in a car or plane."

Google Desktop
Google Desktop, previously Microsoft-only, is supposed to help you find things on your hard drive and do a better job of it than Spotlight. I installed it and discovered that everything I did was slowed down dramatically. Every time I switched windows, started typing, or checked email would generate a spinning rainbow. Typing would hesitate and then fill in later if I paused. It was erratic but pretty consistent.
I didn't even give it a chance to prove its searching capability; it degraded performance so much I uninstalled it immediately. And yes, I did give it two restarts and a day to finish indexing. Spotlight also degrades performance when it is indexing, but it takes just half an hour or so and then performance returns to normal. According to MacFixIt, I should expect a day or two of serious slowdown while it is tying up resources, and then a generally "heavy toll on system resources" at all times. Um, I have a laptop and a "heavy toll" means the processor is running needlessly, which shortens battery life. Thanks for trying, Google, but no thanks.
The search for a simple Find utility that can replace Spotlight goes on.

Blu-Ray Burner
Got $800? FastMac is offering both tray-style Blu-Ray DVD burners and now slot-feed models for the MacBook Pro, MacMini and iMac (but strangely, not the MacBook). This is not very useful yet because although there are a handful of Blu-Ray movies available, there is no player for Macs that read them. The drives come bundled with Toast 8, and will burn all media including the 50GB Blu-Ray. Blank disks? Expensive as hell right now.

I'm Worth $1,836
My little old website has been up since 1995 and has over 1500 links to various pages on it. These stats are from dnscoop.com, a Domain Evaluation Site. If you have a web site, it's fun to see all that it knows about it. They think I could make $15 to $120/month by selling text link ads on it. While I am not opposed to capitalism or making money, I really hate cluttering up the site with annoying ads. In fact, I use PithHelmet to block most of those ads from appearing in Safari!
Right now my site looks the same as it did in 1995. That's because I'm both a) lazy and b) not a web designer. The only thing I update on it are these columns, and sometimes fall a couple of months behind doing that..

TXT2U PLZ A DFLA
I missed out on the whole text revolution. I'm old. I know I'm old. Sproglets, tweeneys and 20-boppers are living their lives out on tiny cell phone screens while giving their thumbs repetitive-motion syndrome. Want to learn what all these contractions, TLAs and abbreviations mean? There is a great dictionary of net-lingo but DRIB.
I think I'm gonna skip this one. I share that opinion with the 30-something columnist Mark Morford at SFGate..

Scream Bloody Murder
If Apple hasn't recanted by press time, they are now embedding commercials in paid TV shows from the iTunes Media Store. They do not have a policy prohibiting it, but up to now they have not done it. Commercials in free shows are to be expected, but if they want me to pay $2 per program, it better be commercial-free. Back to BitTorrent, I guess, but be careful. The copyright police are harvesting the IP addresses of people using Torrent sites and then sending nastygrams to the ISPs, who will either send you a friendly warning, like SpiritOne did to me recently, or just cut you off and hand you over to the MPAA, like Concast is reported to have done. All I can say is, they gotta lotta nerve. Meanwhile, I'm enjoying Life on Mars and Doctor Who from BBC, which would otherwise take months to wind up on SciFi, hacked to pieces to cram in the commercials.
But what about the new DRM-free EMI $1.39 tunes from iTunes? Nice idea, but none of the extra money goes to the artist. Sure, you get a higher-bitrate AAC file, but that just means that they have been selling you an inferior product all along. Score a big thumbscrew for the crooks that run the record companies, and a tiny, tiny picostep towards intelligent 21st century music distribution.
Before you buy ANY tracks online, always check out the artist's website first. They might be selling the tracks themselves, free of DRM, and you know they get to keep more of the money.

StickyWindows Brings Back Tabs
Remember the Popup Windows feature from OS9? It placed any open Finder window at the bottom of the screen with the titlebar turned into a tab. Click on it and up it popped. There is a new product for 10.4 or later that returns this feature and expands it to work on any application window, and also enables the sides of the screen as well. Learn more by watching the video and then download the shareware product and try it for a while. I just did. When you watch the video notice that the clock on the menubar shows the correct time. Very cool trick.

Letter
Tom Almy writes, Good to still be able to read your column. I commented about Verizon in an Email to you about Macking 121 back in September 2005. Since then things have changed in the DSL world.
At the time I was paying Aracnet (now SpiritOne) as my ISP and also Verizon to provide the connectivity. At the time, Verizon was charging less to be an ISP than they were charging to provide connectivity alone (which was billed at business rates), although they didn't provide static IPs and I believe didn't allow running a server.
Things have actually turned better. SpiritOne now handles the entire connection and charges less than before -- $25/month for 768k/128k. I was paying over $40/month combined to Verizon and SpiritOne. Because I'm on old circuits (I've had DSL for 7 years now) I can't get a faster service without difficulty.
So there *is* an alternative to Verizon for DSL, and for Quest as well. Also, COVAD is still out there. They are primarily a business provider but do have a $60/month 1.5M/384k business grade service available.
Of course when optical fiber arrives (and where it has arrived), DSL is obsolete, and the Telcos have a monopoly. Business grade service is competitive with business DSL service but with much higher data rates. This will probably eliminate DSL providers for good.

No Microsoft products were used in the production of this column.

email mp at moonmac dot com. (I took out the mailto link because that's how the spammers find me.)