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Precisely the why of Apple abandoning Macworld Expo, after all they could have just announced the product when it was actually ready for shipment not a minute before. In a note sent to customers, and distributed all around the web, Apple announced that the new 17-inch MacBook Pro will be delayed at least until Feb 19, 2009.

In the meantime, if you go to store.apple.com, you can see that shipments of the new MacBook Pro will start in about 3 to 4 weeks. Several websites are reporting on the same subject, while none of them are talking about how inconvenient this is for Apple as a business. Delivering products on time is as important as to keeping a good name in the industry you are trying to take over. Read the rest of this entry →

This last Macworld Expo comes with the sad news that Apple will not be participating on any upcoming Macworld Expo events. To add to the bad news, Steve Jobs is not hosting the last Macworld Expo Apple’s Keynote, so the day came and passed and the aftermath reaction I’ve noticed was more like, Steve who?

Nobody forgot about the fact that Steve was not on stage, he was dearly missed. What got me by surprised is the great acceptance that people gave to Phil Schiller. Back when Apple made their announcement about Steve not appearing on the last Macworld Expo Keynote, they also announced that Phil would be the one to host this last Keynote.

While not everyone was bashing Phil’s ability to talk on stage, there were groups of people planning to boycott the keynote by not reacting to any of the announcements. In essence they planned to stay put not matter what were announced, no applause, no whistling, nothing.

I have to say that Phil was great, he was not Steve but in reality nobody wanted anyone to imitate Steve. People had a great time with Phil delivering the keynote as Phil Schiller, the last time Phil took stage to participate on a Steve-note he was great, and this time there was no exception.
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iLife ’09 was announced on Macworld’s keynote presentation on January 6, 2009. The whole presentation lasted an hour and half, and the iLife suite presentation took about one-third of that time. I immediately got excited about this new iLife and the lots of features added to it, so here are my thoughts about it.

Starting with iPhoto which got two new ways to organize your photos, just like iPhoto Events now you have iPhoto Faces, and iPhoto Places. With iPhoto Faces you get to tag the face of the people in your photos, while you start tagging them iPhoto recognize these people on other photos and suggest them for you to tag them as well, all you have to do is to confirm if it’s the same person or not. The result is that you can get a page full of the people you know organized by their face, allowing you to easy find more photos about them no matter when you took them.

Same idea as with iPhoto Faces you also get Places tagging, with iPhoto Places you get to tag where the photo was taken, unless you camera has a GPS capability like the iPhone camera does which will give you the location automatically. After you tag a place the software check for the same photos taken within the time frame and suggest them to you so that you can confirm whether is the same place or not.

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After the holidays, some people try to lose the weight gained during the festivities, hard work for most of us especially if you spend most of your day behind a desk. I was counting on Apple to release the Nike+ Sport Kit for the iPhone but that hasn’t happened either.

In October of last year Gizmodo posted an article about code snippets with information about the Nike+ Sport Kit on the iPhone update 1.1.1 Firmware. Its now January and there’s no word on whether this will be a reality or not. I know some people don’t feel like running with a $400 USD phone, but if I could at lease track distance or time in a fashion way, that might motivate me to do some exercise.

I’m not planning to get an iPod nano, I already have an iPod on my iPhone. What I want is some sort of option to track my exercise on my iPhone, being the geek that I am and don’t want to use a piece of paper or a spreadsheet on my Mac.

I hope that with the launch of the iPhone (software development kit) SDK announce to be release by February I would get what I need to get in shape. Talking about that, there are rumors that Steve Jobs will discuss the iPhone SDK on Macworld, the truth is that I think it will be on a separate event, but who knows.

If you recently started doing exercise, share with us whatever is working for your. Keep in mind that most people have busy schedules, so try to be realistic. Tell your friends about this blog, I’m trying to get as many people as I can subscribe to my blog, thanks for reading.

A week before Macworld, Apple released hardware updates for their Mac Pro and Xserve products, while I wont be covering the Xserve updates I have to say that they look strong. In the other hand the Mac Pro is the best machine I’ve ever seen and the fastest Mac ever -Apple said.

I’m very impressed with the technology behind this machine and definitely understand why Apple went with Intel for processing power. Not even AMD is getting close to the specs these new Intel Xeon chips have, up to 3.2 GHz Quad Core processors capable of managing 32GB of Memory, these specs are hard to match.

After reading the specs in detail and reading what the industry and bloggers are saying around the web, it looks like the Mac Pro still lacks some features people were expecting to see. The first one, a Blu-ray player option, Apple is a supporter of the Blu-ray format yet no one has seen anything Apple related with support for any HD format.

Apple 23 inch and 30 inch displays are advertise as HD capable and that’s it, no word on whether drives will be an addition on future dates and this drives people crazy (me on the one hand.) I personally think that they are long due to these offering and I can’t simply understand what the delay is.

Did anyone notice that Bluetooth is not an option anymore? WiFi is! This is very weird, the previous model had an optional WiFi-Bluetooth ad on for $99 USD, the new models have integrated Bluetooth and an optional WiFi Extreme card for $49 USD.

One thing I don’t understand, if you can stick up to 4TB why would anyone need a raid card that cost $800 USD to manage a raid on your Mac Pro. Is this true for all flavors of raid (0, 1, 5, and 10) I guess I’m missing something here, my experience with raid arrays is not enough to understand this.

With this new release, Apple included Memory running at 800MHz, which is nice to know that Apple is finally implementing this speed on their memory line. Almost all current processors have a system bus of 800MHz, maybe by Macworld 2008 we have iMacs, MacBook and MacBook Pro running same type of memory.

The addition of the NVIDIA 8800 GT makes this Mac the best choice for many people, let’s not forget that there is another optional graphics card, the NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 with 1.5GB of GDDR3 memory, which is killer. If you are thinking on gaming, me too.

Finally, reading Apple’s website I notice something interesting, Apple advertise the Mac Pro as a 1600MHz dual independent frontside bus couple with the 64bit architecture capable of a processing power bandwidth of 25.6GB a second. At this rate, you can manage lots of application and files at the same time on one of these systems, making you the most productive guy/gal on earth.

Many Apple products are being praise as “wonders of technology”, but the AppleTV is not. Technology sites like Popular Mechanics have it on the top ten worst gadgets of the year, Apple itself prefer to talk about it as a “Hobby.” While most people don’t think is a product worth buying, rumor sites think AppleTV will take off after Macworld 2008.

MacRumors.com believes that AppleTV will see changes in January, they say and I quote “the Apple TV is expected to see changes in 2008 that “could include an LCD display”. AppleTV will need a little more than an LCD display to convince me on buying one, and I think this is the way many consumers think.

What will it take to make the AppleTV a successful product? It’s all about the content, the way AppleTV works now is that you need to have a computer with some media on it, like TV shows, movies, etc. You sync both the AppleTV and your PC/Mac to enjoy then on a TV rather than your computer screen.

Content is king, we all know that movie sales have not taken off either on iTunes, and TV shows are kind of sluggish too. Then you add problems like the NBC fiasco where you don’t really know who to believe, Apple blames NBC and vice-versa. We need more shows available on iTunes and the rumored addition of movie rentals.

The way I see it, movie rentals is the only option that can help AppleTV stop being a hobby. A NetFlix style box that allows you to watch your content or rent some to enjoy on your TV, also we need content to be at a better quality. Cali Lewis from GeekBrief.TV wants a DVD on the device, how about Blu-ray instead?

When the AppleTV came out, many people criticize it because the connections available on the device where for newer TV’s. The native aspect ration on the device is widescreen, is supposedly meant to high definition (HD) content yet movies and TV shows on iTunes are not of HD quality.

To conclude just give me a subscription service ala NetFlix, give me HD content to watch on my HDTV and try not to lose more TV networks. If any of these comes to reality you bet I will be buying one, what about you, will you be getting one if any of this rumored additions come true? Give us your take on this subject and thanks for reading.

For those of you who like free here one utility that you can’t miss. For sometime now many people has taken advantage of the 1Password utility offered by Agile Web Solutions, now with the help of a promotion from Macworld you can too. 1Password is a utility that allows you to create and save multiple logins and password for almost every single website that requires authentication on the web.

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