General Tips For Switch to Mac From Windows

Sales of Apple's Macintosh computers have been growing much faster than PC sales overall, with many new Mac buyers switching from years of using Windows computers. For that reason, every month I get emails from readers asking about the differences in using the Windows and Macintosh operating systems.

While the Windows and Mac user interfaces are broadly similar, they do have subtle variations in day-to-day use that require some re-education for switchers. And because there are so many fewer Mac users than Windows users, help from friends and co-workers can be harder to obtain than it is for people switching the other way, to Windows from Mac.

So, here's a quick tip sheet explaining a few of the most common differences in the daily use of Windows XP, from which most people would be switching, and Apple's Mac OS X Leopard, which switchers would be adopting.

This column isn't an argument for making the switch to a Mac, merely an attempt to help those who have done so, or who are considering doing so. Of course, all Macs currently sold can run Windows and Windows programs concurrently with the Mac operating system. But this guide is for folks who intend to use their Macs primarily with Leopard, not Windows.

Menu Bars: In Windows, each program typically has its own menu bar. On the Mac, there's a single menu bar at the top of the screen that changes, depending on which program you are actively using. More>>

Apple considering slider-style iPhone?

That's what The Register thinks, reporting Monday that Apple has shown off prototypes of an iPhone with a hardware keyboard to certain executives at wireless operators. The current iPhone famously comes with only one hardware button that returns the user to the home screen, with the rest of the buttons enabled in software.

The lack of a hardware keyboard is said to be a detriment for business users who are hooked on their BlackBerrys, and the iPhone's touch-screen keyboard certainly does take some getting used to in the first couple of weeks. The report suggests that a hardware-keyboard iPhone will be out around this time next year assuming Apple can work out the kinks.

I can't decide what I think about this notion. It's not completely out of the question that Apple would at least be thinking about a slider-style phone; some designs are quite popular with young and old alike. And we've long expected Apple to eventually release a family of iPhones similar to its strategy for the iPod product line, with different form factors and capabilities targeted at different groups.More>>

Will Enterprise welcome Mac's presence?

As we know Mac is the best and simple easy to use opertating system in the earth. But, it is not stolen as many desktops in the Enterprise arena, may be this is because of their focus only on individual users. But this time it takes very serious into the Enterprise, Enterprise Desktop Alliance showcase the power of using Macs in the corporate environment. It says

By leveraging the suite of capabilities that EDA solutions offer, an enterprise can easily integrate Macs and achieve the same level of control, security, policy compliance, and services that they currently have with their Windows platforms.

We have to wait and see the reaction from the Big companies whether they welcome mac into their environment. Obviously I will rise my hand If my manager asks my opinion :)

Vodafone Offers PreRegisteration form for iPhone 3G in India

Vodafone, one of India's largest telecommunication provider will offer first iPhone to the Indian market. The date is not confirmed but the site Officially announce the preregistration for the upcoming iPhone 3G device.

Register Here

Bharti Airtel-Apple to bring iPhone3G to India

After announcing a tie-up for bringing iPhone, Bharti Airtel and Apple extended their partnership to launch the 3G version of iPhone in India later this year.

Soon customers will be able to purchase iPhone3G at Airtel Relationship Centers. Details of pricing and availability will be announced at a later date.

iPhone3G, the latest phone from Apple, combines all the features of iPhone with 3G networking, which is said to be two times faster than the first generation iPhone. It has built-in GPS for expanded location based mobile services, a joint press release said.

It also has iPhone 2.0 software, which includes support for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync and runs hundreds of third party applications already built with the recently released iPhone SDK.

“We are delighted with the opportunity to bring the innovative iPhone3G to India,” said Bharti Airtel President and CEO Manoj Kohli.

“We are thrilled to be working with Bharti Airtel, India’s leading integrated telecom company, to bring iPhone 3G to millions of mobile customers in India,” said Apple’s COO Tim Cook.

“We can’t wait to get this revolutionary product in the hands of even more people around the world.”

Can Dell be as cool as Apple?

The news that Apple now commands a massive 66% of the market share of PCs costing more than $1,000 and 14% of the overall market mush have sent shivers through some of the big OEMs. Part of Apple’s runaway success has to be down to the fact that the company and its products are seen as being cool and stylish. Could an OEM like Dell ever be as cool and as stylish as Apple?

Over the weekend my daughter showed me the new Dell Inspiron notebook. Overall it’s a nice machine that does everything she wants it to do (email, Facebook, IM, bit of gaming, photo storage …), but there’s no way that I’d say that the system had a tenth of the cool or style of an Apple system. Sure, she had bought one with a purple shell, and Dell had thoughtfully set the desktop background to match, but beyond that it was just a notebook. The build quality was average and the feel of the notebook was average. But then that’s the problem - most OEMs feel that average is enough. Compared to a MacBook or a MacBook Pro, the Dell looks and feels awfully generic.More>>

What's next for Apple? We think it's the remote

What's one of the most hated electronics on the planet? The universal remote.

While companies like Logitech have made great advances in making these electronics devices easier to set up and use, for the average individual, anything with an LCD screen and more than 10 buttons can be daunting.

Apple, which has a history of making complicated devices a simpler affair, could be the next company to take a stab at dominating the third-party remote control market. The company has a good track record of venturing into fields where others have gone for more, and succeeded in offering less. For example, the iPod's click wheel, which was introduced with the advent of the iPod mini married two sets of controls in one. Also, the mighty mouse--Apple's current pack-in for iMacs and Mac Pro towers took the idea of a multi-button mouse and disguised it as a single button device.More>>

iMac turns 10

It was ten years ago today that Steve Jobs mounted the Flint Center auditorium near Apple's campus and revealed the product that would save Apple, and become the best selling computer of all time: the iMac. It is hard to believe that this cute little guy is ten years old, but it is true.

The original iMac came stocked with a 233MHz G3, 32MB of SDRAM (though you could bump it up to a whopping 128MB), a 4 gig harddrive, 2 USB ports, a CD-ROM drive (not a CD burner, Apple was late to that party), and an IrDA port. These specs might not make your heart skip a beat nowadays, but the iMac is the product that started Apple's amazing turn around. It was the first mainstream computer to break with the past and offer only USB ports, no legacy connectors here. And it is worth noting that the iMac can also be attributed as the killer of the floppy disk.

I recall the howls from the tech community about the iMac's lack of a floppy drive. 'People love their floppies!' 'This is nothing more than an expensive toy!' All charges leveled against the iMac, but the decision actually helped create a market for USB accessories as most people bought their iMac and a USB floppy drive (I know I did. I used that floppy drive twice: once to make sure it worked, and another time to copy a file).More>>

Apple and Eve

In Pixar Films' upcoming animation epic, "Wall-E," the title character is a cute but clunky robot whose centuries of solitude on an abandoned Earth is broken by the arrival of a svelte, futuristic robot named Eve - who is so white, gleaming, and well, pod-like, that she looks like she was born in Apple's design room. It turns out that she was - sort of: Eve marks the first design collaboration within Steve Jobs' culture-shaping Apple-Pixar-Disney axis. (Jobs sold Pixar to Disney and is Disney's largest shareholder as well as the CEO of Apple.)

"I wanted Eve to be high-end technology - no expense spared - and I wanted it to be seamless and for the technology to be sort of hidden and subcutaneous," Andrew Stanton, Wall-E's director, told Fortune. "The more I started describing it, the more I realized I was pretty much describing the Apple playbook for design." It is, of course, not the first time a product has inspired a film character - think of the murderous HAL 9000 robot in "2001: A Space Odyssey," based loosely on big IBM mainframes of the day.

But it may be the first time a character was based on a true corporate sibling. A call from Stanton to Jobs in 2005 resulted in Johnny Ive, Apple's behind-the-scenes design guru, driving across the San Francisco Bay to Pixar's converted warehouse headquarters to spend a day consulting on the Eve prototype. Stanton said that it was a "lovefest" with Ive, but that the notoriously tight-lipped design wizard offered few specific modifications. "Apple is so proprietary and so secretive that he couldn't even really allude to where the future of technology was going," says Stanton. "The most he could do is nod his head to the things we said we wanted to do." (Through a spokesman, Ive declined to comment.)

Among her other attributes, Eve has expressive blue eyes that look inspired by an old Lite Brite game, a head and arms that seem unattached to her body, hovering and flying abilities and an onboard weapons defense system. Asked whether the robot is meant to be a preview of Apple's product line circa 2,700 - when the film is set - Stanton says: "I kind of leave it to interpretation." Still, don't be surprised to see Eve bots working the counters this summer at an Apple Store near you.

Apple more aggressive on Mac sales

Apple is more aggressive on selling macs. I come across lots of ads in major sites. Below is the one example:

Steve Jobs: Wizard of Apple Computer

Steve Jobs: Wizard of Apple Computer
From the emergence of Apple Computer in the late 1970s and early 1980s to its current resurgence, charismatic leader Steve Jobs has captivated the public. Both revered and reviled for his dictatorial manner and stunning successes, Jobs has transcended his legend in Silicon Valley to take on some of the heaviest hitters in Hollywood.

This story begins back in 1985 when Jobs was exiled from Apple, and then it goes on to chronicle the rise and fall of his own company, NeXT; the enormous success of Jobs's film animation studio, Pixar; and finally his triumphant return to Apple in the late 1990s, with Jobs taking the title of CEO in January 2000. Displaying an uncanny skill at the negotiation table and an intuitive sense of brilliant design that could capture the public's fascination with products like the iMac, along with a celebrity's ability to command the spotlight, Jobs has been able to catapult himself to the top of the Silicon Valley and Hollywood establishments.

Based on interviews with scores of people--rivals, colleagues, friends--who have worked with Jobs over the years, The Second Coming of Steve Jobs gets under the hood of this extraordinarily complex man: how and why he almost gave up on his career; the details of his negotiations with Disney's Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner, and of the culture clash between Silicon Valley and Hollywood; his methods of leadership, management, creativity, and innovation; his friendship and rivalry with Bill Gates--and much more. In an unsentimental and powerful voice, Deutschman reveals a man who suffered his midlife crisis at thirty, compressing it into just three months; struggled between self-imposed exile and the allure of public life; and became the baby boomer icon who was constantly blurring the lines between businessman, rock star, and beatnik.

Buy this book from amazon store

San Francisco Geared Up For Macworld

http://www.macrumors.com/mwsf/

Macworld 2008

Stand in line here for Keynote

2008 There’s something in the air

Appleologists, train your furrowed brows on the first banners up at Macworld 2008. As the work crews set up this morning, Moscone South has the first hint of what is to come.

Read More

Apple's Steve Job's Successor

The Times has reignited the debate around the eventual successor to Steve Jobs, suggesting that it might be the company's UK-born design chief, Jonathan Ive.

In an article drawing purely on speculation the newspaper suggests that Ive is the best candidate to succeed Jobs, Apple's co-founder and chief executive. In Ive's favour, a design portfolio that includes four generations of the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone. And he is not a dull American businessman, unlike current Apple number two, Tom Cook. read more

Apple's Steve Jobs in Time Magazine

Feb. 15, 1982

Aug. 18, 1997

Oct. 18, 1999

Jan. 14, 2002

Oct. 24, 2005

May. 14, 2007

How Apple Can Win The PC Battle

According to Apple Insider, just a year ago Apple's share of the computer market was close to 2%. Now MacWorld and CNet are reporting that - according to NDP research - Apple's Desktops have crossed 10% and the MacBooks now closing on 15% of the laptop market. This puts MacBooks in 4th place behind HP, Toshiba and Gateway. The figures are likely to increase in the 3rd quarter, which is traditionally strong for Apple, because of the back-to-school sales.

The above stats are backed up by my own experiences. When I walked into the BestBuy store recently, something was very different. It took me a second to realize that among the usual scenery, I was also looking at a big section featuring Macs. So Apple is back with a vengeance and has re-ignited the PC war. Despite dropping the word computer from its name, Apple still desperately wants to win the PC market.

But why? Surely Steve Job's spite and ego play a role, but more importantly, desktops and laptops still hold the lion's share of profitability in the computing industry. The computer is becoming, if it has not already become, the personal media center. Laptops are literally everywhere and it is likely to remain the same way for at least a decade. So Apple is fighting as hard as it can to fix its mistake of the past - letting Redmond win the personal computing market.More>>

How the iPhone will rock the mobile industry

The initial release of the iPod wasn’t great. A so-so product that only worked with Macs and required users to spend their lives ripping CDs. But its long-term effect were huge: a massive 10% (and rapidly growing) chunk of music is now sold digitally to the iPod and its competitors. So what will the iPhone’s long-term effect on the cell phone industry be?

Accelerate 3G adoption in the US
The iPhone is a 2G device - ie, it’s slow. This was the right decision: the US has paltry 3G coverage. In most major cities, however, free 802.11b wireless networks are ubiquitous. People with devices like the iPhone and Nokia’s N95 (which also has a desktop-quality web browser) can get a taste of viewing real web on their phones content at reasonable speed over 802.11b wireless networks in cafes and bookstores. The massive speed drop users will get attempting to view a real website over an EDGE network will raise consumer demand for 3G and better networks from carriers.

They’ll also want a 3G iPhone like their friends in Australia have. Late next year Apple intends to release the iPhone in Australia, where 2G networks are being shut down, 3G or 3.5G HSDPA is everywhere, and free 802.11b wireless is rare. By the time that happens, the iPhone will be 3G - not only because Apple wants it to be, but because it has no other choice.More>>

Steve Jobs - #2 in The 50 Who Matter Now from CNNMoney.com

Why he matters: Apple's co-founder has started to channel his inner Wayne Gretzky. "I skate to where the puck is going to be," Jobs said as he introduced the iPhone in January, "not to where it's been."

Given the continuing strength of both the iPod (100 million sold) and the iTunes store (2.5 billion downloads), it's a credible boast. But will millions of Americans really pay $500 to replace their Razrs and Treos with iPhones? And will they come around to the Apple TV, a device so far ahead of its time that nobody's quite sure what it's for?

Jobs's genius as a designer, product manager, and pitchman is that he's never comfortable unless he's pushing the envelope. And like an athlete at the top of his game, it's hard to take your eyes off him.More>>

Apple's iPhone casts big shadow on cell industry

If the device—a melding of phone, Web browser and music and video player—is a hit, analysts say it will cut into market share of major phonemakers, including Schaumburg-based Motorola

As if struggling cell phone-maker Motorola Inc. doesn't have enough to worry about: Here comes the iPhone, heir to the mighty iPod, brainchild of tech golden boy Steve Jobs—and riding a tidal wave of hype to boot.

Due in U.S. stores Friday, the iPhone promises to stir up the mobile phone business. Apple Inc.'s first phone isn't expected to take much business from Schaumburg-based Motorola or anyone else in the short term, but it will change the industry landscape nonetheless, analysts say.

"It will not be a financial disrupter, but it will be a psychological disrupter, a research and development disrupter," said Roger Entner, senior vice president of IAG Research's communications sector. "That's because everybody will say [to competitors like Motorola], 'Why can't you do that?' " More>>

Happy 52nd birthday, Steve Jobs

Happy birthday to you – Steve, this is your day.
On this day for you we’re gonna love you in every way.
This is your day, your day, happy birthday to you, to you, to you.

Happy birthday to you, you’re still young.
Age is just a number, don’t you stop having fun.
This is your day, your day, happy birthday to you.
This day only comes once every year,
Because you’re so wonderful with each and everything you do, hey!

Happy birthday to you, this is your day.
On this day for you were gonna love you in every way.
This is your day, your day, happy birthday to you, to you.
This day is only for you, because you’re so special in every way,
Happy birthday to you and thanks for the Apple iPhone!

Steve Jobs, Business Personality

• Born: 24 February 1955
• Birthplace: San Francisco, California
• Best Known As: The co-founder of Apple Computers

Steve Jobs was a college dropout when he teamed up with Steve Wozniak in 1976 to sell personal computers assembled in Jobs’ garage. That was the beginning of Apple Computers, which revolutionized the computing industry and made Jobs a multimillionaire before he was 30 years old. He was forced out of the company in 1985 and started the NeXT Corporation, but returned to his old company in 1996 when Apple bought NeXT. Jobs soon became Apple’s chief executive officer and sparked a resurgence in the company with products like the colorful iMac computer and the iPod music player. Jobs is also the CEO of Pixar, the animation company responsible for movies like Toy Story and Monsters, Inc. Pixar was purchased by the Walt Disney Company in 2006 for $7.4 billion in stock; the deal made Jobs the largest individual shareholder of Disney stock.

Some sources list Los Altos, California as Jobs’s place of birth. However, in a 1995 oral history interview with The Smithsonian, Jobs said, “I was born in San Francisco, California, USA, planet Earth, February 24, 1955.” Jobs was given up for adoption after birth and raised by his adoptive parents in Silicon Valley… His biological sister is novelist Mona Simpson, author of Anywhere But Here.