• apple,  apple silicon,  mac pro

    2023 Mac Pro Completes Apple Silicon Transition

    The 2023 Mac Pro is a massively powerful Mac, however, anyone seriously considering buying this machine for work needs to understand what it can and can’t do for them.

    With the release of the new 2023 Mac Pro earlier this month, Apple completed their CPU transition from Intel CPUs to their own in-house designed Apple Silicon chips.  To call Apple Silicon chips “CPUs” is a bit of a misnomer as these chips really are whole System on a Chip (SoC) designs encasing the CPU, GPU, RAM, Neural Engines, Secure Enclave, video encoders and more.  From my “old man” view, the Apple Silicon is like the whole system board, or motherboard if you’re from the PC camp, all rolled up into a single chip on today’s Macintosh computers. (Side Note: The Apple II series system board was referred to as “the circuit board” in Apple documentation in the late 1970s into the early 1980s.)

    The transition from Intel to Apple Silicon was originally stated to take two years by Tim Cook.  Having lived through the PowerPC and Intel transitions already, I was not surprised with a two year timeframe.  Apple is a company that knows how to do this sort of thing very well.  The transition, clearly derailed by a global pandemic, ended up taking three years.  Overall, not to bad, in my opinion.  However, by the end of Apple’s March 2022 keynote address, the 2019 Mac Pro was already started to feel past it’s sell by date when John Ternus would hint that more news was coming soon about the Mac Pro.  As it turned out, it would be another 14 months before the new Apple Silicon Mac Pro would begin shipping to customers.  Years from now, I would love to read about what happened to this version of the Mac Pro.  Clearly something went wrong and the project needed to be recalibrated.  Perhaps, the design of this machine will become an Apple University lesson.

    The 2023 Mac Pro, now shipping to customers, is Apple’s highest of high-end machines.  It comes equipped with the highest of high-end SoC chip to date: the M2 Ultra.  And a price tag to prove it.  The Mac Pro starts at $6999.  If I was able to use Uncle Tim’s Apple Card, the Mac Pro configuration I would order (base M2 Ultra, 128GB RAM, 4TB SSD) comes in at $8,799 or $733/mo for 12 months.  By comparison, my M1 Pro Mac Studio was a bargain at just $2,999.  Apple also announced the the M2 Max, which is available in updated MacBook designs.  These new chips join the base M2 SoC released in January.

    On the outside, the new Mac Pro looks almost exactly the same as the previous Intel model, which is completely fine in my opinion.  I’m sure Apple chose to re-use the exterior case design as a means to recoup design costs.  I like the idea of having expansion bays so that you can stuff it full of expansion cards.  Just like I used to do with my Apple //e.  But that’s my old man is showing again.  I meant, my PowerMac G4.  Whoops, I did it again.

    Unlike the previous Mac Pro, the 2023 Mac Pro allows you to add cards to it, as long as those cards aren’t the Afterburner card or a third-party graphics card. The former is now supercharged and baked into the M2 Ultra chip.  The latter just isn’t an option because Apple thinks that their M2 Ultra GPU cores are just as capable and are “on package” in the SoC.  You can discuss amongst yourselves about whether or not third-party off SoC package video cards could or should be supported.  If you’re looking for high-speed networking or lots and lots of internal storage, the Mac Pro is for you.

    The Apple Silicon transition was announced in the summer of 2020 during that year’s WWDC.  In November 2020, Apple released the first Macs with the M1 chip.  That year, I traded in my 15-inch 2016 MacBook Pro (the one with the really loud butterfly keyboard) for a 2020 13-inch MacBook Pro (sans butterfly keyboard).  That MacBook should have been renamed “PowerBook” in my opinion because it was way faster than my MacBook Pro and 2015 27-inch iMac.

    The 2023 Mac Pro is a power house, for sure.  The Mac Pro has become, in my opinion, a show piece.  It demonstrates what is capable with Apple Silicon and shows off the raw power of the architecture.  As an average Mac user, think of the Mac Pro more like a concept car or an extremely expensive luxury car.  Unless your or your organization needs all of the compute power in Mac Pro.  Then, it becomes a day-to-day business tool.  Apple likes to talk about it’s Pro hardware in terms of audio and video creative work, however, the Mac Pro platform can be used for other high-end needs including engineering and design, big data analytics and academic research, machine learning, and, of course, application development.  Being a casual observer, the new Mac Pro looks like it it has all the number crunching capabilities of Unix/Linux and Windows system and more.  Examining the Mac Pro more carefully, one can see that it’s greatest strength, the unified architecture of the M2 Ultra, is in some ways, it’s greatest drawback.  Because of the unified CPU/GPU/RAM architecture of Apple Silicon, it is impossible to add more RAM or upgrade the GPU.  Moving RAM or GPU functions external to the M2 Ultra SoC will decrease overall performance of the system.  Ed Hardy, writing for Cult of Mac, explains:

    “The weakness of the architecture is that individual components can’t be upgraded. It’s not possible to add more RAM to the SoC, or swap out the GPU.

    While it’s theoretically possible to add more RAM off the chip, this would not take advantage of the significant speed boost that comes from memory built into the chip. In short, this add-on RAM would slow down performance, the opposite of the reason why it’s being added. That’s likely why Apple doesn’t offer the option.

    The same problem affects external graphics processing units, called eGPUs. Apple used to sell these for Intel-based Macs but has since stopped because they aren’t compatible with the M series.”

    And there in lies the conundrum of the 2023 Mac Pro.  It’s raw performance comes from the specialized M2 Ultra SoC.  At the same time, that same SoC performance is the thing that prevents the addition of more RAM and GPU video cards.  While I am sure that these limits do limit the already small pool of customers for the Mac Pro, clearly Apple has optimized the machine for a specific type of customer.  When deciding on purchasing a Mac Pro for work, a prospective customer will need to weigh out the options for faster compute vs the need for large data sets in RAM vs the raw horsepower of GPU processing cores.

    I am glad that the Mac Pro exists as the very top of the Apple line up.  Almost no one should buy this machine as consumer needs will be readily met by other less expensive Macs.

  • apple,  mac pro,  macintosh

    2013 Mac Pro Homecoming and Retrospective

    The 2013 Mac Pro (left) joins the Museum “Pro” Family

    In the summer of 2013, at that year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple executive, Phil Schiller, previewed the then all-new Mac Pro that would go on sale in December of that year. The boxy “Cheese Grater” design was swept away and a new sexy Space Grey polished aluminum housing for its cylindrical body was ushered in.

    While looking at old computers on eBay, I came across several 9-year-old Mac Pro towers at a fraction of their retail cost. Most were B stock equipment. Banged up, scratched, and for some of the used computers, broken USB ports. I started watching several of them, getting outbid on many of them. On eBay, $200 looks like a great price, until the final few minutes where the real bidding happens. Eventually, I was able to find a Mac Pro with all of it’s ports working and in good condition. I received my new to me Mac Pro earlier this month.

    2013 Mac Pro’s ports (left) compared with 2006 Mac Pro’s ports (right)

    The 2013 Mac Pro was a radical departure from previous models in the Mac Pro line. Stripped of all of the internal expansion bays, the 2013 was reduced to the essence of the computer: CPU, memory, disk, video, and networking. For everything else, users would have to connect external wired peripherals. Unlike the front-to-back air flow of the physically larger Mac Pro towers, nicknamed “Cheese Graters”, the cylindrical “Trash Can” Mac Pro relied on a triangular system board arrangement that radiated heat into the core of the machine to be drawn up and out the top by a single large fan. The 2013 Mac Pro runs dead silent unless pushed very hard. The only way I know that it is turned on is because the monitor wakes up when I tap the space bar on my keyboard.

    2013 Mac Pro with case removed, showing CPU board

    The 2013 Mac Pro went on sale for online orders starting on December 19, 2013. The base model Mac Pro shipped with a single quad-core 3.7GHz Intel Xeon E5 CPU, 12GB of ECC DDR3, dual AMD FirePro 300 GPUs, and 256GB of SSD storage. Six Thunderbolt 2 and four USB-A 3.0 ports round out peripheral connections. The external expansion ports being intended to take on the load of the internal card slots of earlier Mac Pro systems. The Mac Pro also includes dual 10Gbps Ethernet RJ-45 NIC ports for high-speed networking to things like network attacked NAS storage arrays. The base model retailed for $2,999 with a six-core configuration selling for $3,999. Unlike most other products, the 2013 Mac Pro was both designed and built in the United States. A trend, in my opinion, that I would like to see more of in the future now that the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 has been signed into law.

    The 2013 Mac Pro originally shipped with Mac OS 10.9 Mavericks. While it would have been nice for Mac Pro owners if Apple chose to release 2022’s Mac OS 13 Venture for the Mac Pro, Mac OS 12 Monterey will be the last official upgrade for the 2013 Mac Pro.

    Mac Pro’s OEM 1TB M.2 nVME SSD

    My 2013 Mac Pro has a slightly different configuration that I cannot fully account for. It arrived with the stock quad-core E5 Xeon CPU, and it still has its OEM 1TB SSD. However, the machine only had 8GB (2 x 4GB) of non-OEM non-ECC RAM. The DIMMS in my Mac were matte black and locked like stock RAM, but they weren’t. For high-end use cases, like those the Mac Pro is intended for, Error Correcting Code (ECC) memory should be used due to its ability to detect and correct minor data errors that can lead to data integrity problems and file corruption. I decided to purchase and install an OWC 32GB (2 x 16GB) RAM upgrade kit using DDR3 ECC-R 1866GHz RAM. The OWC upgrade kit was about $60 USD. Apple has a KB article on the 2013 Mac Pro memory specifications if you want to choose a different memory vendor.

    Two RAM bays, one on each side, pop open so you to install 64GB (4 x 16GB) of RAM

    Since I plan on using my Mac Pro, with its 3.7GHz Xeon CPU for running my Intel-based VMware Fusion (aka Workstation in PC parlance) virtual machines. 32GB of RAM should be fine for this use case. If I need more RAM, I can add another 32GB upgrade kit and install the modules into the remaining two memory slots. If you want to tinker with a 2013 Mac Pro of your own, you are in good luck. It is possible to upgrade the Intel Xeon CPU, SSD via an adapter bridge board, and the aforementioned RAM. For an extensive list of hardware and software upgrades that can be performed on the 2013 Mac Pro, also known as MacPro6,1 (Late 2013), check out Greg Gant’s excellent upgrade guide.

    The Mac Pro launch was greeted with fanfare from hungry professional customers who had been worried that the Apple was about to abandon the high-end workstation market and focus solely on consumer hardware, like the iMac. However, once the new Mac Pro started shipping to customers things started to turn bad for Apple and customers alike. Apple, in a rare misstep, chose to build the 2013 Mac Pro around dual AMD FirePro video cards. While this configuration worked well for Apple software, like video editing Final Cut Pro, third-party software needed to be updated to support dual video cards. The rest of the industry, focused on single powerful GPU cards.

    Mac Pro: designed and assembled in the USA

    Apple needed to face the fact that they were not going to be able to upgrade the GPU support in the 2013 case design. The dual GPU bet not paying off resulted in four years of not being able to deliver any significant system upgrades, resulting in the 2017 Mac Roundtable discussion with a small number of tech journalists. During that meeting, Apple executives talked about their plans to completely revamp the professional’s Macintosh by returning to a modular design with an Apple external monitor, reversing a decision to cancel the Cinema Display line of first-party monitors.

    It would be another two years before Apple introduced the 2019 Intel-based Mac Pro desktop computer and Apple Pro Display XDR. The 2019 Mac Pro was everything that professionals wanted – a large Cheese Grater design that they could stuff full of disk drives, RAM modules, and expansion cards. Everything they wanted, except maybe, the $5,999 starting price. Anyone seriously considering the 2019 Mac Pro would almost certainly want to bump up some of the base model specs, pushing the price of the machine well beyond the starting price. And that was before considering the purchase of the $4,999 Pro Display XDR monitor with Pro Stand, a $999 option.

    Today, the complicated Mac Pro story continues as the Mac Pro is one of two remaining Apple computer that have not yet made the transition to the in-house designed M-series Apple Silicon ARM-based CPU designs. In my option, 2022’s Mac Studio and Studio Display was meant as a partial stopgap release for a heavily rumored 2023 Apple Silicon rumored Mac Pro. That has left customers and fans to wonder if the next Mac Pro will be another Cheese Grater like the 2019 model, a compact Mac Studio design, or something else entirely. While I would like to see another “big iron” Cheese Grater design myself, I feel that we are going to end up with something more like the Mac Pro, with limited to no internal card slots and locked down RAM and primary storage like we have seen with M1 and M2-based Mac configurations.

    For now, I am happy to have gotten a 2013 Mac Pro. It has an innovative design that will be an interesting talking point in a collection of boxy Macs from yesteryear. And, while Apple may no longer be supporting the 2013 Mac Pro hardware or releasing new versions of Mac OS for it, my new Mac Pro has a long second life ahead of it running my Windows virtual machines. Nice.

  • apple //e,  apple //gs,  apple tv,  apple watch,  imac,  iphone,  ipod,  ipod touch,  mac,  mac pro,  power mac,  powerbook

    Happy 40th Birthday, Apple! Stay Foolish!

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtY0K2fiFOA]
    Apple – 40 Years in 40 Seconds video originally show during Apple’s Spring 2016 event

    In honor of Apple’s 40th birthday today, I decided to help celebrate by listing out all of the Apple gear that I have either owned (my own personal hardware) or I have used at work (which was a big Mac shop until the mid-2000’s).

    Items that I owned have a picture and the approximate year in which I started using it. All of the hardware listed below has been listed in chronological order by the year Apple released it.

    Apple //e, Apple

    ImageWriter II (1986)

    Apple IIgs (1988)

    Macintosh SE/30 (1995)

    Macintosh Classic (1990)
    Macintosh IIci (1996)

    Macintosh LC (1992)

    Macintosh IIsi (1995)

    Macintosh PowerBook 100 (1992)

    Macintosh PowerBook Duo 230 and DuoDock (1993)
    Apple QuickTake 100 camera (1995)

    Power Macintosh 7100/66av (1995)

    Macintosh PowerBook Duo 2300c/100 and DuoDock (1996)
    Macintosh PowerBook 5300ce (1996)
    Apple StyleWriter 1200 (1996)

    Apple Newton MessagePad 2000 (1998)
    Power Macintosh 7600 (1997)

    Macintosh PowerBook G3 “Wall Street” (1998)
    Power Macintosh G3 Blue and White (1999)
    Power Mac G4 Cube with Apple 17-inch Cinema Display and Apple Pro Speakers (2001)

    iMac 17-inch Flat Panel (2002)
    PowerBook G4 DVI (2002)
    Power Mac G4 Mirrored Drive Doors (2002)
    Power Mac G4 QuickSilver with Apple 20-inch Cinema Display (2003)
    Apple iPod with Dock Connector (2003)
    Power Mac G5 (2004)

    PowerBook G4 (2004)

    Xserve and Xserve RAID (2004)
    Apple iPod 5th Generation (2005)
    MacBook 13-inch (2006)
    Mac Pro with 23-inch Cinema Display (2006)

    iPhone 2G (2010)

    iPod Touch (2008)
    Apple TV 1st Generation (2009)
    MacBook Pro 17-inch (2010)
    iPad with Wi-Fi (2010)

    iPhone 4s Sprint (2011)
    iPad 3rd Generation with Wi-Fi (2012)
    iPad mini 1st Generation with Wi-Fi (2013)
    Apple TV 3rd Generation (2013)
    iPad Air (2013)
    iPhone 5s Sprint (2013)
    iPhone 6 Sprint (2014)

    Apple Watch Sport (2015)

    iPhone 6s Plus Sprint (2015)
    iPad Pro 12.9-inch with Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard (2015)

    iMac Retina 5k, 27-inch (2016)

  • apple,  mac os x,  mac pro,  macbook air,  macbook pro,  macintosh,  yosemite

    Photos App Rolls Out in Yosemite 10.10.3 Public Beta Seed

    Yesterday, Apple released the Mac OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 public beta.  The 10.10.3 public beta also includes the new Apple Photos app for OS X.

    If you are currently enrolled in the public beta seed, you will see the new update appear in your Updates tab.

    One word of warning: Photos, just like OS X 10.10.3, is pre-release beta software.  That means that there are going to be bugs and you should not install either of these updates on your main, production, Mac that you use daily.  To be a beta tester, you must be prepared to delete everything, applications and data (including family photos).

    My recommendation is that you make multiple backups before you install OS X 10.10.3 and Photos on your Mac.  Time Machine, BackBlaze or event a Finder data copy to an external USB hard disk drive or flash drive is a good idea.

    The complete list of updates to OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 updates are as follows:

    Mac OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 public beta seed can be installed on any Mac that is currently running OS X Yosemite.

  • apple,  imac,  mac os x,  mac pro,  macbook air,  macbook pro,  yosemite

    Apple Releases Mac OS X Yosemite 10.10.2 Update

    Earlier this week, Apple slipped out the latest security and enhancement update for OS X Yosemite.

    OS X 10.10.2 includes the following enhancements and fixes:
    General content
    Resolves an issue that might cause Wi-Fi to disconnect
    Resolves an issue that might cause web pages to load slowly
    Fixes an issue that could cause Spotlight to load remote email content when this preference is disabled in Mail
    Improves audio and video sync when using Bluetooth headphones
    Adds the ability to browse iCloud Drive in Time Machine
    Improves VoiceOver speech performance
    Resolves an issue that could cause VoiceOver to echo characters when entering text on a web page
    Addresses an issue that could cause the input method to switch languages unexpectedly
    Improves stability and security in Safari
    For enterprise customers
    Improves performance for browsing DFS shares in the Finder
    Fixes an issue where certain Calendar invitations could be displayed at the incorrect time
    Fixes an issue for Microsoft Exchange accounts where the organizer of a meeting might not be notified when someone accepts an invitation using Calendar
    Addresses an issue where Safari could continually prompt for credentials when accessing a site protected by NTLM authentication
    Adds the ability to set “Out of Office” reply dates for Microsoft Exchange accounts in Mail
    Security Content
    For detailed information about the security content of this update, see Apple security updates.
    I’ve been testing a prerelease version of this update for about two weeks now and it is looking pretty good.  The Wi-Fi disconnects had been driving me a little more nuts than usual which was masking the slow web page load issue.  (Huh, why aren’t these pages loading faster?  I’ve rebooted all my networking gear…eye roll.)
    This update is available now from the Updates tab in the Mac App Store app.  
    It’s always a good idea to plug in your MacBook and backup your Mac before installing any new software like OS upgrades and patches with Apple’s Time Machine or with a third-party solution like the fantastic BackBlaze service.
  • apple,  imac,  mac,  mac os x,  mac pro,  macbook air,  macbook pro,  yosemite

    Looking Forward To My Trip to Yosemite

    Earlier this month at Apple’s WWDC developer’s conference, Craig Federighi, introduced us to the future of the Mac OS – OS X 10.10 Yosemite.

    Yosemite User Interface

    With Yosemite, the Mac user interface remains familiar to long time Mac users and yet, have a clean new look.  Long time and new Mac users will be able to walk up to the Mac and begin using it very quickly.  OS X Mavericks was a nice upgrade from Mountain Lion, but the user interface across all of Apple’s stock apps and icons looked disjointed.  Some icons didn’t change at all, such as Contacts, and then new apps, like iBooks, used the design language from iOS 7, and used the round orange ball with a white book.  Similarly, apps like the aforementioned Contacts and Reminders apps just looked or functioned terribly.

    With Yosemite, Apple goes back under the direction of Jony Ive, and created a new cleaner, flatter, less cluttered design language for Mac OS X (1) and I think it looks really fantastic!

    Simulated Yosemite screen running on a MacBook Air

    Yosemite screen capture from the Apple WWDC ’14 presentation

    As you can see from the above images, take from the Apple website, Mac OS X still looks like Mac OS.  All of the interface elements look like they belong together as a whole.  The dock icons take on three clean shapes: round, square, and rectangles.  (They are suggestions, however, developers can use their own icon design, so for example, Office 2011 3D stylized icons are OK in Yosemite.)

    And, for the first time in a long time, Apple will be including a sort of theme for OS X.  You can chose from the standard “light” theme which looks much like the stock Mountain Lion and Mavericks theme with it’s translucent or solid white menu bar or the new dark theme which uses a darker menu bar styling.

    Softpedia screen captures of Yosemite’s dark mode

    I’m really excited to get my hands on the first public beta later this year and install it on my Mac. (2)

    Supported Macs

    For Yosemite, Apple has elected to keep the current list of compatible Macintosh hardware as it’s predecessor, Mavericks.  Essentially, any Macintosh that has a release date of “Mid 2007” or later will be able to run Yosemite.  Well.  That’s a pretty generous range of hardware and means that my five year old 17-inch MacBook Pro will still be supported and will be able to run Apple’s latest Mac operating system.

    Now there will be a catch, as with everything in life.  Not all of Yosemite’s features will be available on every Mac released since mid-2007.  For example, my MacBook Pro won’t support the new Handoff feature in Yosemite.  That’s because my Mac lacks the Bluetooth LE 4.0 hardware.  That may chance by the time Yosemite is released this fall, but you get the idea.  The take away here is that if you want all of the bells and whistles, you had better be running on the current or previous generation of hardware.

    At some point, I’ll need to upgrade to a new MacBook Pro or MacBook Air, but for now, there’s no need since my Pro’s hardware is still in great shape.  The question is, will there be a cool feature in Yosemite that requires a hardware upgrade that will push me to buy a new Mac this year?  The answer is probably not, but when the next MacBook Pro or MacBook Air hardware refresh comes around, it will be time to upgrade. (3)

    Upgrade Path

    Most customers will be installing Yosemite directly over the top of Mavericks or Mountain Lion.  The software will be delivered over the Internet to your Mac via the Mac App Store.  Just download the update installer (which, can take a long while) and you’re off to the races.

    For this upgrade though, I’m thinking about doing a clean install of Mac OS X.  Since getting my MacBook Pro, every OS upgrade has been an “over the top” upgrade.  This time around, I want to do some house cleaning, so I’ll be making a backup of my Macintosh HD with Carbon Copy Cloner, and then creating a bootable DVD of the Mac OS X Yosemite installer (a USB flash drive also works), and then erasing my disk and installing Yosemite “cleanly”.

    It will be a little bit of extra work, but I think my Mac will run a little bit faster after clearing out the years of left over garbage that can build up over time.

    Conclusion

    Over all, Yosemite looks like it will be a great upgrade for both customers and OS X software developers alike.  Apple has made a lot of under the hood changes that will benefit everyone.  Customers running on the newest Apple hardware should see all of the new features, while older Macs will enjoy most of the new features, but maybe not all of them.  (Handoff and AirDrop, at the time of this writing, are still not confirmed to work on all the Macs that Yosemite can be installed on.)

    For more information on Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite, check out the Apple OS X Yosemite preview website.


    Footnotes

    (1) Yes, I keep calling “OS X” by it’s old name, “Mac OS X”.  Some old habits die hard and this is no exception for me.  I really don’t care that Apple is trying to make Mac OS X sound more like iOS by dropping “Mac” or “Macintosh” from their desktop operating system’s name.  I’m a Mac guy, the computer is a Macintosh, and so it’s still Mac OS X for me.

    (2) OS X Yosemite is still in prerelease software development cycle know as “beta”, which means it’s up and running, but still has lots and lots of bugs in it.  You’re not going to install buggy beta software on your Mac’s primary partition as your everyday OS are you?  I’m not.

    (3) I just really, really don’t want to give up the 17-inch display, even if newer Retain MacBook displays have a higher resolution.

  • apple,  ios 7,  itunes,  mac os x,  mac pro,  macbook pro,  windows

    Apple Releases OS X, Windows, and iOS Software Updates

    Earlier today, Apple released maintenance updates for OS X 10.9 Mavericks, iTunes 11.2, Safari 7.0.3, and the iOS Podcast app.

    The OS X Mavericks update, available now from the Mac App Store, is recommended for all customers running OS X 10.9.  For Mac Pro and 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display customers using 4K displays, Apple has added improvements for the new hi-resolution monitors.

    The update also includes Safari 7.0.3, bringing with it security improvements.

    Apple also rolled out iTunes 11.2 for Mac OS X and Windows PCs.  The latest maintenance release of iTunes brings with it enhancements for finding, playing, and managing podcasts.  In addition to iTunes 11.2, Apple also updated their iOS Podcast app to version 2.1.

    iTunes 11.2 and Podcasts 2.1 are available now from the Mac App Store (Macintosh), Apple Software Update control panel (Windows PC) and the App Store (iOS).

  • apple,  ipad,  mac os x,  mac pro

    Rumor: Apple’s Second Media Event Scheduled for Oct 22

    AllThingsD.com says to get ready for new iPads.

    “People familiar with Apple’s plans tell AllThingsD that the company will hold its next invitation-only event on Tuesday, October 22. The focal point of the gathering will be the latest updates to the company’s iPad line, but the new Mac Pro and OS X Mavericks will likely get some stage time as well, I’m told.”

    I am so ready for Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks and iPad 5.  Whether or not we’ll get an iPad mini with a Retain display this year is still the subject of debate, and frankly, would be disappointing, considering that Google is pushing the 2013 Nexus 7 with a hi-res screen.

    Check out the full article on AllThingsD.com

    [Via AllThingsD.com…]

  • apple,  ilife,  iphoto,  mac,  mac os x,  mac pro,  macbook pro

    Briefly Noted: Apple Releases iPhoto 9.4.3 Update

    Yesterday afternoon Apple released a minor update to their iPhoto software for Mac OS X.

    iPhoto 9.4.3 gains the ability to now delete photos directly from the My Photo Stream, export photos directly from My Photo Stream, and allows you to edit RAW photos that have been manually imported from My Photo Stream.

    In addition to the My Photo Stream enhancements, Apple also fixed a number of bugs related to Facebook photo syncing, stability improvements and fixes related to making your own books, calendars and cards.

    The iPhoto update is free to customers who purchased it from the Mac OS X App Store.  If you don’t have a current version of iPhoto, it can be purchased for $14.99.

  • apple,  mac,  mac mini,  mac os x,  mac pro,  macbook pro

    Apple Releases Mac OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.3 Update

    Earlier this week, Apple released Mac OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.3.  This maintenance upgrade is recommended for all Apple customers running Mountain Lion on their Macintosh.

    You can upgrade your Mac by clicking on the Mac App Store icon in the Dock and then clicking the Updates icon on the top right of the App Store toolbar.  If you are running the upgrade on a MacBook, MacBook Pro, or MacBook Air, it is strongly recommended that you plug in your power adapter before starting the upgrade.