Posts from — April 2008

Daniel Eran Dilger
After a burglar broke into her truck and stole her iPhone and MacBook, a woman in Santa Cruz teamed up with a friend to use Mac OS X Leopard’s “Back to My Mac” screen sharing feature to track and identify the thief for the police.

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Daniel Eran Dilger
Demonstrators waving red flags in favor of the Beijing Olympics mingled rather peacefully among those protesting China’s atrocities in Tibet, its support of genocide in Darfur, and its record of human rights violations against its own citizens. Meanwhile, in efforts to avoid any serious confrontation or stop the Olympic torch run through the City, officials decided to hide the torch in a van and spirit it from the ballpark to Van Ness and Pine, where it was then run up to Fort Mason and then through the Marina to the Golden Gate Bridge, avoiding the planned route down the Embarcadero.

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Daniel Eran Dilger
Is Apple’s announcement of Exchange Server support in the upcoming iPhone 2.0 software an admission of failure for the company’s apparent plans to push its own Exchange alternative in Mac OS X Leopard Server? Reader Pete Wann asked the question; here’s what I think about it.

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Daniel Eran Dilger
As Apple struggles to adapt its retail store inventories to account for sales flowing out of the country, the company has hinted that it may adopt other business models to target markets outside of the US. Apple COO Tim Cook has said the company is not exclusively married to the carrier revenue sharing model it began with AT&T, and which it also maintains in varying degrees with T-Mobile, O2, and Orange in Europe. Here’s how Apple could diversify its revenue options by integrating .Mac services into its mobile WiFi platform.

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Daniel Eran Dilger
Apple Stores across the US are running out of iPhones, resulting in the rumor that Apple is allowing inventory levels to dry up in advance of the release of a new 3G model. While this commonly does happen prior to the release of a new model, the current iPhone shortage appears to be a artifact of unpredictably high demand from foreign markets rather than an artificial supply shortage, here’s why.

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Daniel Eran Dilger
Michael Mace of Rubicon Consulting interviewed 460 iPhone users–0.01% of the installed base, all users in the US–and published the results in a white paper. Here’s the more interesting bits Mace reported, with a look at how the tech media has worked to sensationalize some of his findings, particularly the unsurprising concept that most iPhone buyers are already familiar with Apple’s products.

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Time Capsule is billed as an ideal backup target for Time Machine. At the same time, networked drives (and particularly wireless shares) are often slower than a directly connected USB backup drive. This segment, the fifth of six exploring Time Capsule in depth, compares the pros and cons of using a solution like Time Capsule and the AirPort Extreme to perform Time Machine backups relative to using a directly attached hard drive.

Continues: Exploring Time Capsule: Time Machine over the Network vs USB

Technorati Tags: Apple, Review

Daniel Eran Dilger
The previous article, The Unavoidable Malware Myth: Why Apple Won’t Inherit Microsoft’s Malware Crown, outlined that Microsoft’s malware crisis is a product of that company’s engineering mistakes, not an unavoidable problem facing whatever computing platform becomes the most popular in the future. Even for those holdouts who choose to ignore the realities of the malware economy–so they can insist that the only reason Macs aren’t infected with viruses is because Apple isn’t selling enough of them–there are other reasons why future platforms, including Apple’s Mac and iPhone, aren’t fated to be plagued with Microsoft’s malware crisis of the past and present.

There are five factors related to the future of computing platforms that will prevent Apple from inheriting Microsoft’s malware legacy. Here’s why these factors will have such a significant impact on the future of malware, and why the world’s greatest malware threat will continue to be firmly attached to Microsoft, the company that introduced the epidemic to the world in the first place.

The Unavoidable Malware Myth: Why Apple Won’t Inherit Microsoft’s Malware Crown

“No Windows for Old Men” composition by Michael Jackson.
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Time Capsule, like most of Apple’s earlier AirPort base stations, can handle both wired and wireless networked devices, but is optimized for serving wireless clients. This segment, the fourth of six exploring Time Capsule in depth, highlights the differences between wired and wireless networking on Time Capsule and the AirPort Extreme.

Continues: Exploring Time Capsule: 10/100/1000 Ethernet vs. 802.11g/n Wireless Networking

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, Review

Daniel Eran Dilger
According to the Unavoidable Malware Myth, Microsoft’s Windows security epidemic of viruses, spyware, and adware will be passed on to the next major computing platforms as an inevitable symptom of platform popularity. Were this to be true, it would be bad news for both Apple’s Mac platform, which is growing several times faster than the PC average, and for the iPhone and iPod Touch, which appear to have an early lead as one of the most promising mobile platforms of the future. But malware isn’t unavoidable. The myth is wrong, here’s why.

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