General
My mother-in-law’s ancient iMac 21″ finally kicked the bucket. The hard drive crashed and the video card went kaput. I decided to take it apart to see what the computer’s guts looked like.
Read more “Retiring an old iMac”
General
The Magic Hub is a fully powered USB hub for the Apple iMac or Cinema Display, but it’s missing one significant thing found on most powered hubs; a power cable. That’s because it mounts to the back of your iMac/Cinema Display and uses the built-in power port. It adds four USB 3.0 ports and can charge your devices even when the iMac or display is turned off.
You can pre-order the Magic Hub for $49.90 now, with shipping set to begin on October 1st.
Adobe Illustrator
In part one of The iMac 27″ for graphic designers, I covered the reasons for choosing the late 2012 iMac 27” to replace my 2006 Mac Pro. As a graphic designer who works in Adobe Creative Suite apps all day long, with file sizes pushing the 1GB range, power is important. But as I found out with my MacBook Air, the Mac Pro just isn’t necessary anymore. Not only does the iMac have all the power you need, but it’s a much more elegant hardware solution, and significantly easier on the pocketbook. I also listed some of the pros and cons of the iMac.
Now I’m going to talk a bit about my experience actually using the iMac for the last two months.
Read more “The iMac 27″ for graphic designers: part 2”
Apple | Mac
After six years of using the original Mac Pro as my main workhorse, I finally took the plunge this past Christmas and upgraded to Apple’s latest 27” iMac. It’s the first Mac I’ve owned since the Quadra 650 back in the mid 90s that wasn’t a tower model. It was a scary decision for me, but one I’ve been delighted with so far.
The first thing I had to come to grips with is the revelation that I don’t NEED all the expansion that the Mac Pro has to offer. In the distant past, the days when a 16GB stick of RAM took you a year or so to save-up for, the Mac tower models were the only way to go for pro designers. The desktop models simply weren’t made for people like us.
But times have changed. With NO exception, every Mac model available today can easily be used by the most demanding print and web designers—this includes the MacBook Air and the MacMini. If you think you NEED more, you’re most likely overestimating your needs. Today’s Macs are powerful enough for working with Gigabyte sized files with as little as 8GB of RAM.
Now I didn’t say that every Mac model is a perfect fit, far from it. And that’s where my decision got difficult. Read more “The iMac 27″ for graphic designers: part 1”
General
Came across this video over at CultofMac and laughed my butt off. I must say though, it would have been more believable with only one box. There’s no way someone could carry two iMacs the way he did, they’re just too heavy.
Apple | Mac
General
There were lots of great things happening in tech this year, too many to talk about here. But I have put together a list of things that managed to annoy me to no end. Read more “Rant: The annoying year that was 2011”
General
A collection of interesting or otherwise helpful links I’ve come across recently that you may not have seen:
You can’t replace pants with shorts when your definition of shorts is: everyone buy pants and cut the legs off . That’s the premise behind this article which points out the shortcomings of current web services.
Macworld published benchmarks of the new iMacs shortly after they were released, using Speedmark test results. Though they were impressive, Primate Labs released their own test results based on Geekbench testing and found the new iMacs to be even more impressive than we thought. You can also download a copy of Geekbench for free to test your current Mac and compare the results.
GigaOm mourns the death of the scrollbar in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. Flipping your scrollwheel down to move up may take some getting used to when Lion ships later this summer. Thankfully Apple has offered an option to switch it back to the way Macs currently work. But is this change to the OS a sign of things to come?
MacOSXDaily has posted a few samples of the new voices that will appear in Lion when it ships. For those who live in the UK, you’ll appreciate Serena’s British accent. The quality of the voices is a huge improvement over the current Snow Leopard voices offered.
Who would have thought that there were at least 100 different things to consider when building a brand? Apparently there are. I’m not sure anyone considers all of these when designing a logo, but it does give you a lot to think about, and perhaps helps guide your decision-making process.
General
Has Apple already released it’s latest Mac for pros? The upper-end iMac can now be configured with an Intel Core i5 or i7 quad-core processor, a 2TB hard drive, and up to 16GB of RAM; and the mammoth 27″ LED screen is nothing short of stunning. With all this power in Apple’s supposed consumer-level desktop, one has to wonder if there’s any need for a MacPro by anyone shy of George Lucas working on the next horrible sequel to StarWars. As a designer, I’ve spent the last 20 years accepting the fact that I had to buy the most expensive model of Mac available in order to get the power I needed to edit large multi-layered Photoshop files and videos. Buying a G3, G4, G5, and even the early MacPros was the only way to get a Mac which would support enough RAM to accomplish my job without adding two days to the work week. Read more “Apple’s new pro Mac”