ZDNet
Latest
Australian securities market set to begin trading Bitcoin
The Australian securities exchange (ASX) is preparing to publicly trade shares of the Bitcoin Group on February 9th, under the BCG handle. Bitcoin Group currently operates 6,000 "mining" rigs spread across seven international locations (though mostly in China where the cost of electricity is most affordable). The company hopes to raise more than $20 million on the sale of 100 million, $0.20 shares during its initial public offering.
Apple still shipping Macs with Mountain Lion installed
Here's one for the "What were they thinking of?" file. David Gerwitz at ZDNet/CBS Interactive ordered a totally tricked-out iMac from Apple after the October 22 event, totally expecting the device to show up with the latest and greatest version of OS X. The order was made on October 28, a full week after OS X Mavericks shipped, and he received the iMac today. Upon taking the shiny big-screen device out of the box and booting it up, he was surprised to find that it wasn't running OS X Mavericks, nor was it even running the most recent version of OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.5). Instead, it was loaded with 10.8.4. Looking at the order page for iMacs on the Apple website, each device is supposed to come fully equipped with OS X Mavericks. Apparently someone in Shenzhen, China didn't get the memo about updating the devices that were ready to ship, since Gerwitz ended up with an OS version more than a month old. Gerwitz, at the time he was writing his post, was still waiting for Mavericks to finish downloading from the Mac App Store. So, keep your eyes open. That new Mac you just picked up or that showed up at your door today might not be running Mavericks. Fortunately -- at least for those of us with fast internet connections -- it's an easy thing to fix. In Apple's defense, they DO have a disclaimer on this page that states "If you buy a new Mac that does not come preloaded with OS X Mavericks, Pages, Numbers and Keynote, please visit the following links to learn how to get them for free." Hopefully other buyers who run into this issue will be able to rectify it quickly with a few downloads, but it has to be frustrating to wait...
Sports fans with iPads score with in-stadium WiFi
A lot of sports fans are going to be, in the words of Duck Dynasty's Phil Robertson, "Happy, happy, happy" this fall. That's because a number of stadiums are installing WiFi networks that make toting the iPad to a football game a great way to access the second screen that fans enjoy at home. ZDNet's Jason O'Grady attended the Philadelphia Eagles home opener at Lincoln Financial Field last weekend and was delighted to find a free WiFi network that can fulfill the bandwidth requirements of 45,000 simultaneous users (the stadium holds 69,000 fans). A dozen NFL stadiums are currently outfitted with WiFi, although NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell wants all stadiums to be equipped so that fans can use their smartphones and tablets for fantasy football and social networking. According to a press release sent out by the Eagles last week, here's what fans can do with their iPads and the free Eagles iPad app: Fans will have the ability to stream the popular NFL Red Zone Channel live through the app, allowing them to watch action from around the league. Live camera view of the player tunnel prior to the game, which will give fans a unique glimpse of the players pumping each other up right before they run onto the field. Live stream of the video board, allowing the user to get a better view of the replays that are displayed on the big screen. A dynamic stats channel that provides fans with updates from the Eagles game, as well as information and statistics from around the NFL. Social media hub, which will make it easy to log on to various popular social platforms including Facebook, Twitter and others without having to leave the Eagles app. Many of the original features remain, including news, game previews, video clips, photo galleries, fantasy stats, rosters, depth charts, bios, stadium information and much more. Some Major League Baseball parks have also made free WiFi available for fans, including four of the five teams in the NL West -- San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego and Arizona. My favorite ballpark, Denver's Coors Field, doesn't provide WiFi -- between that and the Rockies' season record, it's been a lousy year for baseball.
Alleged Office roadmap says Office for iOS possibly not until 2014
The rumor mill had previously stated that Office for iOS might be coming as soon as last month, but obviously that never happened. Now, an alleged roadmap for the Office family of products from Microsoft says we may not see Office for iOS this year at all. ZDNet reports that it has obtained a roadmap from the company which does not list iOS or Android support for Office until fall of 2014. The roadmap doesn't specify if we'll see Office for iPad or Office for iPhone then, either. Instead, it just says that iOS will finally be supported. But if this roadmap is indeed legit, fall of 2014 represents a much longer wait than anyone expected for these tools. The roadmap also says that April of 2014 is when Microsoft will have the next version of Office for Mac ready, and the plans also include a number of updates to the Windows desktop and Windows Phone and RT versions. Just like all of the rumors we've heard about these releases before (and there have been quite a few), these roadmap plans are completely unconfirmed. But if ZDNet's information is legit, there's still quite a while to wait for that iOS version of Office to see release.
Purported ASUS holiday roadmap pegs Windows 8 tablets at $599 and above
Windows 8 tablets have had their specs bandied about for months, but their prices have continued to remain off the radar. Now, however, a purported ASUS holiday roadmap sent to ZDNet may give us a glimpse as to how badly bank accounts could be affected this fall. According to the slide, the ASUS Vivo Tab will carry a $799 price tag and its Windows RT counterpart will come in at $599, which matches the previously reported price difference between slates running Redmond's latest OS with Intel and AMD processors. The ASUS Taichi dual-screen notebook / tablet hybrid is said to ring up at a heftier $1,299. As for the firm's Transformer Book, it will supposedly set purchasers back $1,399. If these prices are any indication of what we can expect from other OEMs, Microsoft's Surface might be pricier than hoped.
Adobe issues fix for InDesign crashes under Lion 10.7.4
Adobe confirmed in a recent technical note that InDesign customers with OS X Lion 10.7.4 may experience problems with the app crashing "when performing certain functions." The technical note provides two solutions to the problem, one of which includes the warning not to install the OS X 10.7.4 update. The other solution requires InDesign owners to download and replace several files in the UI.InDesign.Plugin package. As ZDNet points out, it's an "ugly procedure" that could have been made easier had Adobe bundled the files with an AppleScript to automate the process. [Via ZDNet]
Examining an iTunes Store account hack
ZDNet has a long report on a recently hacked iTunes account that involved a linked PayPal account. We've seen an increase in the number of hacked iTunes accounts in which people's gift card balance or linked accounts have been mysteriously drained. This report, like many others, leaves us wondering how the hack occurred. Is it a flaw in iTunes that's giving hackers access to accounts, does the user have an insecure password or did the user fall for a phishing scheme that somehow exposed their password? The good news in the ZDNet report is that PayPal already reversed the charges for five of the seven fraudulent transactions. This incident should be a warning for iTunes users -- you still need to guard your iTunes account password closely and you should choose a payment method that lets you easily reverse an unauthorized charge.
No Comment: Apple pulls Bluetooth OnOff switch app from the App Store, blogger overreacts
Apple has pulled an app that allows iPhone users to turn Bluetooth on and off with a single tap, and that's not sitting right with ZDNet blogger Jason O'Grady. According to O'Grady, that one app removal "demonstrates how (Apple) has become lethargic and how iOS innovation has slowed to a crawl." If a lethargic company can turn in a US$39.2 billion quarter, I'd love to see what an "innovative" company could do. So Jason, innovation in the iOS field has definitely slowed to a crawl?. Yeah, there are only 600,000 apps available in the App Store, so the removal of one app -- the $0.99 Bluetooth OnOff -- that used private APIs specifically forbidden by Apple is obvious proof that Apple has become lethargic and that there's no innovation. Was this post supposed to run on April 1st and got delayed to today by mistake? Sure, it takes five or more steps to turn off Bluetooth in iOS, and it's not a top level on-off button in Settings. While that is a pain, how often do you really need to turn off Bluetooth? According to O'Grady, "Bluetooth uses battery capacity so it's better to turn it off while not in use." What? I have Bluetooth turned on all the time on my iPhone 4S and I don't see it sucking my battery dry. Of course, I don't use a Bluetooth headset or speakers most of the time, but I get amazing battery life with Bluetooth constantly turned on for instant connections when I need them. I'd be willing to bet that most iPhone users couldn't even tell you if Bluetooth is on or off at any particular time. We all get frustrated with Apple at some point or another for some niggling point, but I'd have to conjecture that the overall level of frustration is pretty incredibly low for the company to continue to turn in quarter after quarter of outstanding financial results. This is one ZDNet post that needs to go back to the whine cellar to mature.
Apple sold 645,000 devices per day in the 2nd quarter
Blogger Adrian Kingsley-Hughes over at ZDNet did the math and came up with some staggering statistics about Apple's hardware sales during the last quarter. As we heard during the Q2 2012 earnings call yesterday, Apple sold 35.1 million iPhones, 11.8 million iPads, 7.7 million iPods and 4 million Macs. That total of 58.6 million pieces of hardware, divided by the 91 days in the financial quarter ending March 31, 2012, means that Apple sold an average of 645,000 devices per day. Of those 645,000 units, over 385,000 of them were iPhones and about 130,000 of them were iPads. Kingsley-Hughes also played off the announcement during yesterday's call when Apple CEO Tim Cook noted that the company has sold 67 million iPads so far, and that it took Apple 24 years to sell that many Macs. In 42 quarters, notes Kingsley-Hughes, Apple has sold 344.3 million iPods, but in half that time the company has sold 218.1 million iPhones. It's also obvious from Kingsley-Hughes's almost-obsessive charting of cumulative and quarterly sales of Apple's devices that Apple has "undoubtedly made the transition to being a true post-PC company." As he notes when discussing the chart below, "If we add Macs into the equation, they are barely a blip on the post-PC landscape." It's a fascinating visual look at the changing product mix at Apple and how it is has completely moved away from dependence on the Mac as a primary revenue source.
NVIDIA disputes Apple's claim that A5X processor outperforms Tegra 3
During yesterday's Apple event, senior VP of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller took the stage to tout the power of the new A5X processor that inhabits the innards of the latest iPad. Schiller stood in front of a chart showing the relative graphics performance of the NVIDIA Tegra 3, the Apple A5 (2x the performance of the Tegra 3), and the new A5X (4x the performance). Not surprisingly, NVIDIA is now taking exception to Apple's claims about the performance of the A5X. NVIDIA spokesman Ken Brown was quoted on ZDNet as saying that "We don't have the benchmark information. We have to understand what the application was that was used. Was it one or a variety of applications? What drivers were used? There are so many issues to get into with benchmark." As a result, NVIDIA is planning to get a new iPad once they hit the streets on March 16 to do some comparisons. Says Brown, "At some point it will become more clear what the performance really is. For now, Apple has a really generic statement." To quote our very own Chris Rawson, "Prediction: Once NVIDIA runs A5X benchmarks and finds out it trounces the Tegra 3, we hear nothing more from them about it." What do you think, TUAW reader? Do head-to-head benchmarks of GPUs really make that much of a difference to your purchase decision? [via BGR]
Mountain Lion: It's called a developer preview for a reason
Every time a developer preview of a new version of Mac OS X or iOS arrives, we at TUAW wait for the onslaught of emails telling us about the favorite apps that did or did not work, peripherals that suddenly won't work, or machines that end up being totally borked. Jason O'Grady at ZDNet has written a wonderful cautionary tale about what might happen if you pull the tail of Apple's OS X Mountain Lion. O'Grady installed OS X Mountain Lion DP1 on a backup 11" MacBook Air and basically loved the new OS and how well it worked with most of his existing apps. He was impressed with the integration of iOS capabilities and the improved security. And then all hell broke loose. While working with eBay client iSale on the MBA, things started going bad -- the app crashed repeatedly. So O'Grady decided to try a reboot ... which didn't work. To make a long story short, he "elected to take the "nuke and pave" option. I ended up booting from my Lion flash drive, reformatting the SSD and re-installing the relatively stable Mac OS 10.7 (non-Mountain) Lion. Patching it up and calling it a day." O'Grady ends the post with a reminder that all of us who are anxious to try out developer previews need to have pounded into our brains every time Apple tempts us with a new and shiny OS release -- don't install developer previews on production machines, and always assume that the worst will happen. As O'Grady found out, sometimes that worst possible case does happen and in this situation, you'll be mauled by an angry Mountain Lion.
How to enable iCal's debug menu
ZDNet (via Macgasm) has posted a couple of neat iCal tweaks that should make your life a bit easier: Enabling the debug menu and showing two weeks worth of appointments at once. The trick involves a couple of Terminal commands. To enter debug mode, use the following: defaults write com.apple.iCal IncludeDebugMenu 1 And, if you want to remove it, use the following command: defaults write com.apple.iCal IncludeDebugMenu 0 Once you've got the debug menu activated, restart iCal. Here's what you'll see. There's quite a few tricks here, including the ability to have to multiple iCal windows open at the same time. You also can expand the week view to glimpse up to 28 days at once, which is a little too much. But like ZDNet says, being able to see two weeks at a time in week view is pretty handy. To switch the views, select the desired time from the "top sekret" menu and toggle between week and another calendar option. The new mode is enabled once you return to the week view.
iPad 2 launch: not Apple's finest hour
Jason O'Grady, writing for ZDNet's The Apple Core, penned an incisive piece on the five ways that Apple screwed up the iPad 2 launch. I agree with every point. Usually, Apple has been very good on getting information to the huddled masses waiting for the next new iThingy, but this time the company side-stepped the issue and let everyone fend for themselves, to the liking of no one. Here's what Apple got wrong: Not allowing pre-orders: Allowing potential customers to pre-order new products helps assure they can get the new stuff in their hands on day one. This time, not so much. There are plenty of reasons pre-orders might have been infeasible, including lack of inventory or a bad component delaying shipments. Still, in a perfect world, Apple should have taken the high road and allowed pre-orders, even if the number of units allocated was slim. No availability tracker: Apple has been good about providing information on in-store availability of new products. In the past, the company has put up a page (it no longer exists), providing a grid of what stores had particular models. This prevented the stress of going to your store and coming up empty. If you were in a populated area, with a few Apple stores, you were given alternatives. This time, no such information was provided.
Australia election campaign promises iPads in every hospital
In what I can comfortably say is a previously unimagined application, the iPad is now being used as an election promise to entice voters in Australia. ZDNet notes that the promise was made last week by Victorian Premier John Brumby as part of a proposed new state health policy, which would see iPads given to every doctor in Victoria's public hospitals, "noting their potential to impact positively on long-term hospital problems such as scheduling across the health ecosystem". Australia-based iSoft, an e-health vendor, has welcomed the policy due to their interest in targeting the iPad for use with its medical applications. Victoria has invested $360 million in an extensive overhaul of its record-keeping systems and iSoft is a key supplier of their efforts. My own dermatologist uses an iPad during exams and has said it makes record keeping much easier for his nurses and assistants. Meanwhile, I just sit there thinking it's cool to see my doctor carrying around an iPad. It's only a matter of time before tablet computing takes over for paper records in medical settings. [via MacDailyNews]
ZDNet: 'iPhone running Windows XP'? Fail
Citrix is developing a "thin client" iPhone app that allows users to connect to networked workstations via WiFi, and control their desktops. Basically, it's like VNC or Microsoft's Remote Desktop client. This isn't huge news, I understand, but after seeing ZDNet Australia's headline, I was thinking something completely different. On stage, Citrix reps showed the iPhone connecting to (and controlling) a Windows desktop, which ZDNet took to mean that someone actually installed Windows XP on an iPhone. Yeah, no. The demo was part of a presentation titled Directions in Virtualisation & Application Delivery in the Dynamic Datacentre.
ZDNet: Benchmarking the Psystar Open Computer
It's a big day for the Psystar Open Computer -- the quasi-Mac clone based on PC hardware and a cracked version of Mac OS X. ZDNet today published their comparison of the Open Computer with a Mac mini, and all three flavors of MacBook. The results? The Open Computer fares pretty well against all of its Mac cousins. It scored nearly 147 with Xbench 1.3. It beats the Mac mini, its closest price competitor, by nearly 50 percent. The Open Computer outperforms even a MacBook Pro (with a 2.4GHz Penryn processor) by 10 points. Not too shabby at all, if you can stand the sound of a jet airplane on your desk (Just kidding. Apparently the noise isn't too bad). ZDNet promises results using GeekBench soon. UPDATE: the GeekBench results are here, and the Open Computer still leads most of the Macs, but by a narrower margin. The MacBook Pro, though, edged out the Psystar 3327 to 3244.
Is Apple TV's (and Xbox Live and VOD's) HD truly high definition?
HD is coming in a lot of forms these days, but ZDNet's George Ou thinks some of them -- like Apple TV, Xbox Live Marketplace, ABC.com streaming and cable VOD -- don't count. Sure all of these sources are HD resolution, but George's argument is that due to overcompression and low bitrates, they don't compare with 1080p upconverted SD DVDs, much less Blu-ray or HD DVD. Low bitrates might mean less detail than we're used to and some issues with fast moving action, but we've checked out all of the above, and if you've got the pixels, then you're HD. Whether or not thats enough to satisfy is up to the viewer, but we're sure there's a faction out there arguing if you have to get off your couch to buy it, it's not really a high def experience either.
Financial bigwig says virtual worlds leading digital currency charge
Andy Kyte, vice president of Gartner, Inc., told Gartner Symposium attendees last week that virtual worlds such as Second Life are "contributing to the drive to use electronic currencies." This comes from a ZDNet report on Kyte's talk about the potential of electronic currencies to reduce overhead costs for pretty much every one. He said Singapore has already introduced an electronic currency and that the rest of the world is watching what happens there.He also said, though, that online currencies like Second Life's Linden Dollar carry with them security issues that create "phenomenal opportunities for money laundering and tax evasion." Those issues would have to be resolved before online currencies similar to the L$ or EVE Online's ISK can be used with confidence in the real world.[Via Worlds in Motion]
iBacklash: Are ZDNet blogs naysaying the iPhone?
Over at 2 A Day, they certainly think something's gotten into the water at ZDnet. The quick meta-analysis shows that 11 ZDnet blogs have posted more than 50 negative items about the iPhone in the last 10 days or so. Is this excessive pre-release carping, or simply prudent, slightly contrarian analysis? Don't forget, ZDnet is home to some of the most well-regarded voices in the Mac blogosphere... and certainly mainstream media outlets like the Wall Street Journal (analysis courtesy Daring Fireball) are not being coy on the topic of iPhone's appropriateness for the corporate market.I know I'd be frustrated if someone was peeking over our shoulders at TUAW and second-guessing our individual editorial choices, seeking for a hidden bias and specific agenda. 'Course, the thing is, around here we wear our agenda on our collective sleeve: we're Apple fans, and we wouldn't be here if we weren't. While we may cast the occasional gimlet eye at the choices and products made at One Infinite Loop, the fact is that we're all excited about the iPhone, and I don't see that there's any point in pretending otherwise. If there is an iPhone backlash brewing, I hope we'll be among the first to point out the line of people jumping off the bandwagon -- and, as we've said repeatedly, let's try to reserve formal thumbs-up or -down on the device until it ships.Update: Larry Dignan has posted a post-by-post response to the 2 A Day item over on the Between The Lines blog at ZDnet. Summary: Larry says nobody's hatin' on the iPhone.[via Fake Steve]
Debunking ZDnet on Intel and power consumption
Earlier this week, ZDnet blogger Paul Murphy posted a full-bore critique of Apple's move from PPC to Intel processors from the perspective of power consumption. By his calculations, the shift to the new processor architecture added hundreds of gigawatts to the energy cost of the Mac population, and thousands of tons of carbon to the atmosphere every year. His tongue-clucking extends to Apple's most visible environmental activist, board member Al Gore, who he says "not only voted for the MacTel switch, but actively campaigned on Intel's behalf prior to the vote," thereby adding pollution to the air while "hurt[ing] America's economic diversity" by cutting IBM out of the Mac processor market.If your response to this is "Wha?!? Everyone knows that the Intel switch was about LESS power consumption per cycle," well, apparently, everyone but Mr. Murphy. Over at Roughly Drafted, there's a precise and scathing debunking of these bogus statistics and correspondingly off-the-wall conclusions. The core points: the numbers for Intel power consumption are off track for the actual Mac configurations; the PowerPC low chip power figures are for the embedded-system versions (not the G4 and G5 that Apple used); CPU power consumption doesn't contribute nearly as much as, say, CRT power usage (which Apple replaced with low-power flat displays); and, the PowerPC platform is doing fine without Apple as a customer, thanks very much. To sum up, every new Intel Mac uses less power than the older Mac (or, dare we say it, vintage PC) it replaces, and Murphy's carbon calculations are full of hot air.
