We have to admit that the Macbook Air is a beautiful machine. It makes holding a laptop as little effort as holding an iPhone. Pricewise, it’s pretty good – £1199 for the 1.6GHz version. Battery life at five hours isn’t shabby either. The construction is simply beautifully clever. But it’s all show and no go.

Firstly, you can’t upgrade the memory. The solid-state hard disk adds a lot of cost – £639, and there’s no telling how long it will last. Solid state memory has a finite read-write cycle.

(incidentally, that means the secondhand value of machines with solid-state memory will be poor. How long can you predict it will last?)

But my main issue with them is that they’re not robust. Strength has definitely been compromised in favour of lightness. The body clearly flexes when you press on it even gently. (The Apple demonstrator watching me do this had a look of undisguised horror on her face.)

Sure, you can wrap it in a robust case of plastic or metal. Which will add the weight back and leave you with a poor performance to weight ratio. If you do that, you may as well have bought a Macbook Pro.

If style over substance matters – buy the Macbook Air. It is beautiful. It will sit perfectly on paper-free desks in gorgeously minimalist offices. If you need a machine on which to get your work done, get a Macbook Pro instead.

The Time Capsule is fairly useful in very small businesses. The combination of wireless router and Time Machine backup disk is good. I hope a software update to existing Airport Expresses will allow USB disks to be used as easily – there’s no reason why that shouldn’t happen. It was the one update that wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the Keynote though. We’ll see.

Technorati Tags:
Macbook Air, Macbook Pro, Apple, MacWorld

Posted: January 15th, 2008 under Comment.
Comments: 1

I’m currently over the Atlantic, heading to San Francisco for the MacWorld Conference and Expo next week. While I think the big business announcements have passed with yesterday’s announcements of the new XServes and Mac Pros, it’s still a good opportunity for me to learn new skills (at the MacIT conference) and take a good look about and find out more about what’s coming, in terms of software, hardware and services.

Anything that’s notworthy – you’ll read here first. I’ll be there from Tuesday – Steve Jobs’ Keynote – to Friday, and will be reporting here each day.

Technorati Tags:
MacWorld

Posted: January 10th, 2008 under News.
Comments: none

For most users of RSS readers, the news that NetNewsWire has gone free is either good or, if you’ve already bought the software, not really relevant. And don’t get me wrong – it’s a good newsreader. It’s fast, intuitive, clean and clear. It also, however, synchronises with the Newsgator online feed reading and aggregation service.

Now that is usually seen to be a good thing. It allows you to read your feeds online if you’re away from your computer. It keeps what you’ve read synchronised. It allows Newsgator to pull only one copy of message from a server, and redistribute it to everyone using Newsgator or NetNewsWire. This is a good thing for those running RSS feeds. Less load.

It also has a downside. It means that Newsgator knows about all that you’re reading. It knows about the private feeds internal to your company. It might not be able to access them all, but it means that the fact that they exist is out in the hands of another company, and leakage of this sort of information is not good and should be actively prevented where possible.

Luckily, there are more free newsreaders out there. My pesonal favourite is Vienna – an open source newsreader, built especially for OSX. It’s just as functional (no synchronisation of course) and is close enough in look and feel to be an easy switch. We think if you have concerns about information leakage, you should give it a try.

Technorati Tags:
software, vienna, netnewswire, newsgator

Posted: January 10th, 2008 under Comment.
Comments: 1

I didn’t expect this announcement for a week yet – but Apple announced upgraded Mac Pros and XServes yesterday. They’re good machines too – with quad-core processors and plenty room for expansion.

I’m reasonably impressed with the pricing, too. A run-your-SME-business-on-this XServe (upgraded from the base model with 3x1Tb disks, RAID and a dual PSU) comes in at just over £3000 ex-VAT. This additionally includes a copy of OSX server unlimited user edition – so you get set up and running right away with no additional expense. That’s a great deal that’s worth £629 in its own right.

Models start at a very reasonable £1999, and go all the way up to around £9250 fully tricked out.

The Mac Pros have also moved to quad-core processors and come with better graphics and expandability. They start at £1216 ex-VAT for the base model with no display, with a power-user model (twin quad processors, 8Gb memory, 3x750Gb disk) coming in at around £3000. Still no display there either.

The Pros will be great for users who really need the shove of the quad processors – those involved in machine-intensive tasks. I still feel that most ordinary users will do just fine with iMacs – and considering a 24″ iMac easily suitable for business use comes in at a grand, the extra money needing spent on the Mac Pros for workstations will have to be justified well.

The XServes on the other hand are simply great – and giving away the OS with them makes them a bargain. I can’t see any reason to fault them for business use. Entirely competent machines with an entirely competent OS in Leopard Server. Highly recommended.

Technorati Tags:
Mac Pro, OSX, XServe, server, leopard

Posted: January 10th, 2008 under News.
Comments: none

We’re inveterate downloaders here – it comes with what we do. Documents are read, software is tried, invoices are received (often for the just-mentioned software). All of this creates a pretty extensive clutter in our download folder. And there’s more than that. We’re creating documents almost as quickly. All of this leads to several heaps of stuff that really need some organisation.

Don’t get us wrong – we often do just fine with Quick Look for identification, or Spotlight to find things, but it’s always good to be able to find something manually. Which still means a well-organised file system.

This is where Hazel, from Noodlesoft, comes in. It automatically performs actions of your choice to items in folders you specify. For example, things appearing in my downloads folder are automatically sorted into disk images and zips, pdfs, and other. Videos and music are automatically moved into the correct directories.

This program saves me endless rummaging around on my disk to find where I’ve put stuff, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. Well worth the $24.95 registration fee.

Technorati Tags:
OSX, organization, Hazel, software

Posted: January 7th, 2008 under Stuff We Use.
Comments: none

This article from Marketshare is being widely quoted on the blogs at the moment – saying that Apple’s presence on the internet has gone to above 7.3%. That’s great. It also says that Apple made even greater gains in the last week in December.

Of course they did. Many corporate (therefore Windows users) were on holiday. thus skewing the stats. Ignore that bit of the report.

The very interesting thing though is to note the numbers for Vista in comparison to OSX. You’ll find them here – 10.48% for Vista, 7.5% for OSX.

This reinforces something we’ve been saying for a while. The upgrade path to Vista from XP is not automatic. People are evaluating their options. Of course, I don’t expect companies with significant structural investment in Microsoft operating systems to jump ship overnight. But I believe they should keep their minds open, and consider carefully their best and most cost-effective approach for their future IT requirements.

Technorati Tags:
OSX, Vista, browser, market share

Posted: January 3rd, 2008 under Comment, News.
Comments: none

We’re sold on the iPhone here as a business device. Sure, it’s not as flexible as we hoped, but it’s a rev. 1 product, and it’s still the easiest way to keep in contact via email, SMS and for actual calling.

However, there are aspects of its functions that are distinctly limited. There’s no way of backing up information like call logs or SMSes. And the Notepad application is completely brain-dead.

While I’m hoping that Apple will answer these problems in due course (synching the Notepad to a Notes folder in Leopard would make me very happy,) Mark/Space have gone and got there first. They’ve released Missing Sync for iPhone which answers all the problems described above.

We’ve not played around with it much, so will hold off on the full review for a little later.

And best of all? If you’re an iPhone convert and have used Missing Sync for another device in the past? You’ll get this version for $24.95 instead of $39.95. That’s a bargain.

Technorati Tags:
missing sync, iphone

Posted: January 2nd, 2008 under Stuff We Use.
Comments: none

There has been a lot written on various blogs about the Transport Services Authority in the USA limiting how you can carry batteries with Lithium in them. This is important here because it pretty much inevitably means that Europe will adopt the same regulations in due course. And of course, if you’re flying stateside right now you’d better get it right!

You can find the TSA’s summary of the regulations here. What this means for Mac laptop users is as follows:

A 15″ Macbook Pro battery is Li-ion, and 60Wh. This is pretty much the biggest of the Apple batteries at the moment. According to the chart on the above web page, you cannot carry such batteries in your hold luggage any longer. By extension, it’s safe to say that all Macbook and Macbook Pro batteries now have to be carried in your carry-on luggage.

That’s it. That’s all you need to know.

Comment: The reason I think this isn’t exactly a big thing is that surely the reason for having a spare battery in the first place it to have it with you when your laptop runs out of power during a long flight? A spare battery in the hold will do you no good! I’m guessing that because of this, most people will have carried them in carry-on up until now, so this will not affect laptop users to any great degree.

Technorati Tags:
battery, li-ion, lithium ion, TSA

Posted: January 1st, 2008 under News.
Comments: none