Sprint’s HTC Hero getting Best Buy presale on September 13?

Alright, look, we seriously have enough evidence here on our desk to put Sprint away for life convince even the most jaded naysayer that Sprint’s got a Hero on the way. It’s happening, end of story — but when, where, and how much? We don’t have the complete picture yet beyond suggestions of an October window, but we’ve just been tipped off here that Best Buy Mobile locations will be taking $50 deposits for the phone starting on September 13 with an SKU of 9510013. Whether the phone will be popular enough to warrant relieving yourself of $50 a month (or more) ahead of time is unclear — especially with the InstinctQ in the pipe — but at least it looks like you’ll have the option.

[Thanks, anonymous tipster]

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Sprint’s HTC Hero getting Best Buy presale on September 13? originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Aug 2009 23:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Popcorn Hour C-200 launch nearly upon us, preorders start tomorrow

As you may have noticed, the new Popcorn Hour C-200 media box didn’t quite make its anticipated July launch, but the company now says that as of 12 a.m. PST August 27, pre-orders will open allowing the willing faithful to put in a request for the first batch, anticipated to ship September 3 or thereabouts. Don’t remember the June announcement? The $299 Sigma powered box takes HDD, Blu-ray discs, USB or network inputs of nearly any video or audio codec available and brings them to your living room. Since then, pics and video of the units guts and interface have leaked out on the forums, check after the break or beyond the read link for a better look.

[Via MediaSmartServer.net]

Continue reading Popcorn Hour C-200 launch nearly upon us, preorders start tomorrow

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Popcorn Hour C-200 launch nearly upon us, preorders start tomorrow originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Aug 2009 22:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Snow Leopard review

Snow Leopard. Even the name seems to underpromise — it’s the first “big cat” OS X codename to reference the previous version of the OS, and the list of big-ticket new features is seemingly pretty short for a version-number jump. Maybe that’s why Apple’s priced the 10.6 upgrade disc at just $29 — appearances and expectations matter, and there’s simply not enough glitz on this kitty to warrant the usual $129.

But underneath the customary OS X fit and finish there’s a lot of new plumbing at work here. The entire OS is now 64-bit, meaning apps can address massive amounts of RAM and other tasks go much faster. The Finder has been entirely re-written in Cocoa, which Mac fans have been clamoring for since 10.0. There’s a new version of QuickTime, which affects media playback on almost every level of the system. And on top of all that, there’s now Exchange support in Mail, iCal, and Address Book, making OS X finally play nice with corporate networks out of the box.

So you won’t notice much new when you first restart into 10.6 — apart from some minor visual tweaks here and there there’s just not that much that stands out. But in a way that means the pressure’s on even more: Apple took the unusual and somewhat daring step of slowing feature creep in a major OS to focus on speed, reliability, and stability, and if Snow Leopard doesn’t deliver on those fronts, it’s not worth $30… it’s not worth anything. So did Apple pull it off? Read on to find out!

Continue reading Snow Leopard review

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Snow Leopard review originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Aug 2009 21:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Entelligence: Will Snow Leopard’s Exchange support earn Apple a new entourage?

Entelligence is a column by technology strategist and author Michael Gartenberg, a man whose desire for a delicious cup of coffee and a quality New York bagel is dwarfed only by his passion for tech. In these articles, he’ll explore where our industry is and where it’s going — on both micro and macro levels — with the unique wit and insight only he can provide.

Apple, Microsoft and the Mac have an interesting history: Microsoft was among the first developers for Macintosh, yet not long after, Apple would sue Microsoft for copying the look and feel of Mac OS in Windows. By the late 90s, Microsoft made a huge splash at Macworld with an announced 150 million dollar investment in Apple and promises of further development of Office and Internet Explorer for Macintosh. Office in particular was a major issue as it was a key requirement for business users. Early on, Office applications for Mac were far more advanced than their Windows counterparts. Excel was actually introduced for Mac users before Windows users could get their hands on it. But by the mid 90s, all that changed, the Mac versions of Office lagged behind Windows in terms of features and performance. It took forever to get things such as a common set of file formats, so that users of Office on the two different platforms could exchange documents with ease (it seems like something we take for granted but having managed and supported PC and Mac users in mixed shops, it was a nightmare to deal with). The latest version of Office for Mac, Office 2008 showed that Microsoft could produce top quality Macintosh software. I personally, think Office 2008 for Mac is the best version of the software that Microsoft has ever done (far better than Office 2007 for Windows, as it preserved the core part of the Mac UI while co-existing nicely with the ribbon UI). Obviously, however, a situation with such broad inconsistency is untenable.

Continue reading Entelligence: Will Snow Leopard’s Exchange support earn Apple a new entourage?

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Entelligence: Will Snow Leopard’s Exchange support earn Apple a new entourage? originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Aug 2009 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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TiVo projects larger than expected losses, still taking the patent fight to AT&T and Verizon

We’ll let the analysts make sense of TiVo’s new projection that it will lose $8 to $10 million in the third quarter, larger than Wall Street expectations while projected revenues are lower — we’re too busy adding Verizon and AT&T to the patent battlemap. Today it filed complaints against both for violating three of its DVR-related patents — Nos. 6,233,389 B1 (“Multimedia Time Warping System”), 7,529,465 B2 (“System for Time Shifting Multimedia Content Streams”), and 7,493,015 B1 (“Automatic Playback Overshoot Correction System”) if you must know — seeking damages for past infringement and a permanent injunction. We’d assumed it would wait until settling things with DISH to push forward against other companies, but it looks like we’re not the only ones getting impatient. Beyond the legal slapfight there’s a few nuggets for the bleep bloop faithful, with the Comcast TiVo on-line scheduler beginning to roll out in Boston plus further expansions on the way and the due-in-2010 DirecTV HD TiVo still on track — we’ll need a few seasons of Law & Order queued up before this mess ever gets resolved.

Read – TiVo Swings to Loss, Files Infringement Suits
Read – TiVo Reports Results for the Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2010 Ended July 31, 2009
Read – TiVo Files Complaints for Patent Infringement Against AT&T and Verizon Communications in United States District Court, Eastern District of Texas; Seeking Damages and Injunction

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TiVo projects larger than expected losses, still taking the patent fight to AT&T and Verizon originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Aug 2009 20:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Review: Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

Mac OS X Snow Leopard(Credit: Screenshot by Jason Parker/CNET)

Finally, the wait for the next iteration of Apple’s flagship operating system is over. Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard will officially become available for wide release August 28. Apple has refined just about everything in the latest OS, from new and …

Originally posted at The Download Blog

Snow Leopard Review: Lightened and Enlightened

OS X Snow Leopard seems to do nothing really new. And yet, it could be their most important OS since 10.0.0. Updated the Bad Stuff section.

Snow Leopard, as a follow up to Leopard, is almost absurdly insubstantial at first glance. The new operating system takes the same old boring, every day tasks like opening files, for example, and makes them happen subtly faster. But that performance is not being utilized by any third-party programs right now. And there are practically no new first-party programs by Apple. Nope, mostly just rewritten old ones and dozens of little interface tweaks. Some fanboys will ask, incredulously, “This is a new operating system?!” Those people are missing the point.

On deeper inspection, Snow Leopard’s inconspicuous aspects—performance squeezed from underused CPU multicores/GPUs and basic UI tweaks—are found to be the kind of refinement generally reserved for virtuosity. These speed optimizations are deep, reminding me of when a master martial artist puts the entirety of his weight behind a strike (while a neophyte would flails his limbs like a henchman in a Bruce Lee movie). The little UI tweaks are no different than when a great sculptor’s chisel works to remove everything non-essential during the final steps on a statue. Challenging 30 years of ever more bloated software tradition, the changes here are about becoming a more effective middleware between the media and the hardware, reducing friction while becoming more useful by, well, being lighter, less visible.

And if you think that’s bullshit, well, I can’t say you’re completely out of your mind, but there’s always the consolation that this OS upgrade costs about the same as a used Xbox game.

Performance

After some benching on a first-generation MacBook Air, an older MacBook Pro 15 and a pair of current-gen 13-inch MacBook Pros, it’s clear that Snow Leopard is faster—sometimes drastically—but almost never in third-party applications. Some people like charts. If you feel like skipping them, here’s a summary:

• In preview, where opening six 35MB 20,000-pixel-wide images of Tokyo’s cityscape each took half the time in Snow.
• Safari’s javascript processing, using Snow’s specific tech, is about 40% faster—useful for all those Ajax-heavy websites we all use now.
• Time Machine backed up a 1GB dataset nearly 40% faster than on Leopard.
• There was no discernible improvement in non-optimized 32-bit programs: Photoshop testing and Handbrake DVD ripping times were identical. High-def playback on QuickTime 7 (not the new QuickTime 10 version) was identical in CPU usage, too.
• Synthetic benchmark results were interesting: The aging Xbench app, which tests everything from graphics to disks to memory, took a slight performance dip, implying older software may, too. Geekbench, a multicore optimized, newer benchmark available in both 32- and 64-bit saw a lift on Snow. But the test is only focused on theoretical CPU and memory performance, which may not translate into every day use.

Here’s a video of those JPEGs cranking open in parallel, rather than serial, fashion:

Impressed yet?! You shouldn’t be. Well, not by the act of opening images. But you definitely should once you realize what it really shows: Apple just pulled 2X performance out of my hardware, by software alone. Tada!

How is Snow Leopard Getting Faster?

There are three fundamental reasons for these performance increases: Better multicore processor support through what Apple calls GCD (Grand Central Dispatch—which we explain here); OpenCL APIs for utilizing the processing power in any graphics cards above the GeForce 8600 Series for video acceleration and general purpose computing; and they’ve rewritten almost all the applications that ship with Snow Leopard to run in 64-bit mode while taking advantage of GCD and CoreCL. So it’s making processing for today’s chips more efficient and easier for developers. And giving programs a way to utilize the power of the video card when it’s not playing games. It also allows programs to run in 64-bit mode, the main theoretical advantage of which is to allow these programs to access more than 4GB of RAM on systems that have it. (More on all that at the bottom of the page.*)

Snow Leopard is efficient in other ways too. Install size is down to 10GB from 16GB, most of that weight shed by losing printer drivers and the PowerPC part of universal binaries. (Snow Leopard runs only on Intel hardware and downloads printer drivers it needs from the net, as you need them.) Installation is also quicker by about 30% on any given piece of hardware (consistent with the smaller install footprint). And in a move that can only be categorized as showing off, Snow Leopard can finish its installation if you accidentally power it down midway through.

But I’m digressing. The bottom line on performance is that the programs included with this operating system will do just about everything faster on modern machines that support those technologies—that is, most of the multicore Macs or those running Nvidia 8600 series video cards or higher. And not just a bit faster, but faster on the scale of 25 to 50% which means there’s typically a good amount of latent processing juju in your video card and CPU. Great, but to be honest, it’s a bit less impressive than it sounds in real life today, because all the basic system tasks happen fast anyhow. (When was the last time you sat around while a JPEG opened up?) Again, no other apps that use GCD or OpenCL are available from software makers outside of Apple. But if the theoretical gains are here to be had via easier programming methods, I’d bet those apps will come soon.

Interface Streamlining

There are 5 major changes in the UI:

Finder
Icons now scale, courtesy of a little slider on the bottom right of the pane, up to 512 pixels wide. It sounds wasteful, except that video files can be played directly from the finder window. Honestly, I don’t prefer it more than the QuickLook (hitting spacebar to popup a quick preview window) in Leopard and carried over in Snow Leopard. I don’t mind the option, but I have no use for this feature.

Dock
OS X’s dock has been interactive for some time. You could drag a file to an icon there to somehow get the two to interact, but you could never use the dock to select which window instance of an app to use. Now clicking and holding (empty handed or with a file) triggers Expose, Apple’s window management doohickey, for that particular application. Being able to quickly pop out an app’s windows and then select the right one in a single step is terrific, but you still can’t use Expose to quickly find the browser tab you want within a window. That’s an increasingly big problem as the time spent in browsers goes up.

Expose
Expose itself has been improved, too. When viewing all the windows for one application in Expose’s zoomed-out view, the items are now arranged in a grid instead of a single, impossible to read line, and each window has a text label. (That’s helpful when you’re trying to recognize a particular window amongst lots of similar looking—and rendered tiny by Expose—text documents or emails.) Minimized windows are also now shown at the bottom of the screen under a faint line dividing it from other maximized windows from the same application.

Stacks
When Stacks made its debut in Leopard, the dock mounted quick file viewer was too twitchy to use. You’d try to move a file andit would snap close, offended you’d try to do anything but open a file. And the space was always too limited in fan or grid mode to display more than a few icons. Stacks improves on this by allowing scrolling in the Grid view, but by also adding a smart list view capable of showing numerous files at once. It’s an improvement.

QuickTime 10
Putting QuickTime in this list is questionable, but aside from its acceleration, there are some major changes here. That is, as you mouse away, the video screen loses all borders and buttons, appearing like the video equivalent of an infinity pool or one of those ultra thin LCDs. The program has a new capture system for encording video and audio clips and even voice annotated screen capture sessions. It also borrows the trimming thumbnail line from iMovie ’09. I love it.

Let’s face it, in the big picture, calling these changes “major” is generous. But there are literally dozens of even smaller examples, all welcome, all reducing friction points in the OS’s usage, eliminating clicks needed and making the OS less obtuse. You can read about all of these additions in the gallery below, or here on one page, if you’re curious to read about them all. If not, take my word for it: They all make things better.

While it’s not UI- or performance-related, one additional Snow Leopard benefit is free Exchange support, so your mail, address books and calendars can all sync through it. I don’t work at a corporation, so I don’t care, but you may.

Bad Things

What kind of sick fanboy would I be if I didn’t mention the imperfections?

And Safari 4’s ability to segment unstable browser plugins made itself useful when many more flash powered pages crashed in Snow Leopard than Leopard.

Other reviewers have discovered that Snow Leopard has disabled or quirk-ified some of their apps.

I’ve also noticed that Expose doesn’t work as smoothly with spaces now. You sometimes select a window on another virtual spaces desktop and it won’t bring the window up top.

If you’ve got some third part mission critical app that you need to run every day, you should double check its compatibility and wait for a new version before upgrading your OS. Look before you leap here. The OS isn’t so radically new that you have to have it right this moment.

Meow

The changes here are modest, and the performance gains look promising but beyond the built in apps, just a promise. If you’re looking for more bells and whistles, you can hold off on this upgrade for at least awhile. But my thought is that Snow Leopard’s biggest feature is that it doesn’t have any new features, but that what is already there has been refined, one step closer to perfection. They just better roll out some new features next time, because the invisible refinement upgrade only works once every few decades.

Uses latent multicore and GPU power to speed up
the apps it comes with by relatively huge amounts


Costs $30 to upgrade


Still haven’t seen any third party apps
rewritten to take advantage of Snow Leopard’s speed yet


No major new functionality might turn off
some

[Back to our Complete Guide to Snow Leopard]

*Performance Background: You May Skip This Section.
Today’s chips have hovered in the 2-3.6GHz range for some time, with gains in theoretical processing power made by increasing the number of CPU cores on one chip and optimizing the silicon in those cores. Think about it as roof shingles: It’s easier to protect your roof with lots of little shingles than one huge one. Unfortunately, the power afforded by the additional CPU cores has largely gone to waste, because it’s difficult to write code that takes full advantage of multiple cores. The programmer has to write the application in a way that breaks down large problems into multiple smaller problems (called threads), each of which runs on a single CPU core. The application then becomes a traffic cop keeping threads in sync. If any part gets out of sync, the app crashes or hangs.

This problem is made more complex because many apps are written with a maximum number of threads in mind. While some workloads, such as video encoding or photo processing can take advantage of many cores innately, most need to have some work done to add support for more threads, so future-proofing has been difficult. I don’t know if programming GCD is easier than straight-up multiple-core programming—we cover some of those details here—but the key here is that Apple’s created a middleware that developers can write for, which automatically scales up to work with the number of CPU cores or other hardware in your system. The developer writes for GCD, while the system handles the gruntwork. Apple hopes more people will use this easier, more future-proofed way to tap into multiple-core power. Of course, no one has so far, except Apple programmers themselves. This explains why Finder, Preview and basically everything else that ships with Snow Leopard run faster. But in my tests, Photoshop, still a 32-bit program on the Mac and written without any support of GCD or OpenCL, showed less than 1% variation from Leopard to Snow Leopard. Still, as we can see from the system apps, there’s potential here. And let’s face it, the majority of us are not rendering Photoshop files all day, so this is performance you can put in your pocket today.

There’s a story of efficiency here, too, however. Because GCD is better at managing resources, a program like, Mail, for example, shows less system impact (thread usage, cpu usage) while sitting idle in Snow Leopard, than on Leopard. When testing OpenCL’s hardware acceleration, something Windows machines have had for awhile, by playing a 1080p trailer of James Cameron’s awesome new Avatar movie, CPU usage dropped drastically when machines were using the 64-bit CoreCL and GCD supported version of QuickTime. Any modern machine can play 1080p video well, but here, we were talking about Snow Leopard causing the strain on the system to take total CPU usage from 30% to 16% on the 13-inch MacBook Pros. Other apps will eventually be able to use these GPU superpowers, but what Apple claims is the real potential for GPU processing is that OpenCL will let computers use video cards for not only 3D acceleration, video encoding, and heavy math, but more general computing tasks, too, because its written in a non-specific (C-based) programming language.

Furthermore, there have been a number of good articles questioning the speed benefits of 64-bit computing. Apple only goes so far to claim that math-based tasks benefit from the larger bus, but generally the only concrete advantage of 64-bit computing is the ability apps gain to manipulate over 4GB of RAM, a 32-bit limitation. Apple’s dev docs go on to say that some apps will incur a penalty if going 64-bit. So, rewriting apps in 64-bit versions is not a surefire recipe for speed improvement.

In many cases, with many of the built-in apps, Apple attributes the performance improvements to all three core technologies above. That stuff that means not so much today, but might mean a lot tomorrow as GPUs get faster and CPUs gain more cores and there’s already an infrastructure in place to take advantage of all that.

[Back to our Complete Guide to Snow Leopard]

Zii EGG SDK roadmap revealed, some important features not coming until end of year

Remember back when Sony introduced Rolly to stunned silence followed by a protracted effort to determine exactly what the hell it was, an effort that arguably continues to this very day? Yep, that’s kind of where we’re at right now with the Zii EGG, and nothing in the SDK documentation we’ve received today — the same documentation paying developers are just now getting — is helping us flesh that out. We can tell you that it’s well-equipped — there are proximity sensors and accelerometers on board, it’s got native support for Flash Lite, voice recognition, and 3D acceleration and it’ll eventually have support for Creative’s X-Fi audio tech — but really, that’s like saying “the Rolly is well-equipped.” What does it mean?

Here’s what we do know: out of the gate, it seems the EGG will only be running Creative’s homegrown Plaszma OS, though Android support is forthcoming. The Plaszma SDK is being rolled out in three phases spanning the rest of 2009, and some pretty important stuff — Bluetooth support, for example — won’t even be available to developers until the third phase, which is a pretty strong indication that Zii-powered products intended for consumer consumption probably won’t be around in time for the holidays. For the moment, there isn’t any indication on when devs will have access to Android support libraries, which we think might be where Zii’s true value lies, because let’s be honest — the world realistically doesn’t need another target platform for mobile.

Interestingly, Creative is using Zii to actively target China-based devs that it says “may not have brands but have an insatiable appetite for ready-to-go technologies, and can adapt these technologies very quickly to new market opportunities” (in other words, KIRFers) through its “Shanzai program,” a mix of prototype boards and support packages that it says will help small businesses bring products to market faster. If that means we can get the next great N97 clone running Android in record time, we’re all for it. Check out the full Plaszma SDK roadmap in the gallery below.

[Thanks, Joe]

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Zii EGG SDK roadmap revealed, some important features not coming until end of year originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Aug 2009 19:37:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Review: Apple’s Terabyte Time Capsule Makes Data Simple To Share

pr_apple_timemachine_f1

Yeah we know storage is freaking boring. But at least Apple makes a legitimate attempt to make it sexy. We take a long hard look at the 1TB Time Capsule which also support s 802.11 a/b/g/n connectivity. From the mind of reviewer (and Wired senior editor) Rob Capps:

Time Capsule has just about every feature you could want in a Wi-Fi router. It simultaneously runs both 2.4- and 5-GHz networks, so it seamlessly connects with both fast n-spec network devices and b and g gizmos like iPhones and older laptops. And if you’re a Mac user (surprise, Time Capsule is heavily geared toward Macs) you can use Leopard’s automated Time Machine software for no-brainer backups and access files on the hard drive remotely via Apple’s $100-a-year Mobile Me service.

As always you can scope the review in its entirety (with gorgeous pics) right here.


MacGyver Chef: Dishwasher-Steamed Salmon With Cilantro Sauce

This second MacGyver Chef recipe, fish in a dishwasher, is a true classic, yet I had no great luck. I tried on two machines, and though edible, the resulting dish was either sashimi or cat food.

Gallery haters take note, to skip the slides and jump to a single long post, click here.


Equipment: A dishwasher. To make sure I got a good sense of the process, I tested out two machines, one from probably 1975 and one that’s maybe two or three years old. Both relatively cheap.

Ingredients:
For the Fish
• Two smallish fillets of salmon, about 4oz.
• Olive oil, salt, pepper

For the Cilantro Sauce (from Salon)
• 1 tbsp butter, lots of salt and pepper
• 1 leek, finely chopped
• 1 shallot, minced
• 1 jalapeño chile, seeds removed and diced
• 1.5 cups chicken stock
• 2 cups lightly packed cilantro leaves
• 3 tbsp lime juice
• 3 tbsp sour cream

Notes: This recipe cheats a little bit. The fish is cooked in the dishwasher, yes, but the sauce is made in usual boring fashion with a saucepan and a blender. A more MacGyverian side: Vegetables (asparagus, broccoli, etc) can be cooked in the dishwasher, sealed in a foil packet with butter, though you’ll have to take them out before the dry cycle kicks in or they’ll be overdone.


Step 1: Pull out three 12-inch square sheets of aluminum foil, and coat the shiny side of two of them with butter, oil or that aerosol spray stuff. Put both salmon fillets on one of these sheets and season with lime, salt and pepper.


Step 2: Put the other coated sheet of foil, coated side down, on top of the fillets, then press the two sheets of foil together and roll tightly from all four sides. Make sure your foil doesn’t tear or your dishwasher will smell like fish for at least a week. Wrap the last sheet of aluminum foil around the packet, as a last measure to keep your landlady from knowing you put fish in her dishwasher.

Step 3: Stick the double-wrapped foil packet on the top shelf of your dishwasher. (You can also stick dishes in there if you want.) Turn on the dishwasher, both a wash and a dry cycle. The key, says the original recipe, is to disable the Energy Star power saver mode (it won’t get hot enough) but to use the regular cycle instead of “pots and pans” (which makes it too hot).


Step 4: Start making your sauce. I followed the sauce instructions from Salon to a tee—it’s an easy sauce to make and tastes pretty good, though I think it’d be better on a taco than on delicately steamed fish. It’ll be done by the time your fish is out of the dishwasher.


Step 5: Here’s where things started to go wrong for me. The first dishwasher I tried is probably 30 years old and on a normal cycle can barely clean dishes. After a full wash and dry, my first attempt at dishwasher steamed salmon yielded…


Sashimi. Dammit. Lucky for me, I happened to move that very weekend, and my new place has a newish dishwasher that I immediately broke in by following steps 1 through 3. Little did I know that this was no ordinary dishwasher.


There must have been some kind of nuclear reaction happening in this dishwasher because it overcooked the crap out of my fish. We’re talking straight-up cat food here. At least I could just stick the undercooked fish in a frying pan and then have dinner. Not very MacGyver, but still dinner. This time, the dried-out piece of gross orange fish carcass was in no way salvageable.

The Results: After two disasters in a row, I can pronounce dishwasher salmon too finicky to be worth MacGyvering. I’m sure I could have played around with it and gotten it right (ruining several whole salmon in the process), but I just don’t think it’s worth it. Dishwashers are just too varied in heat to reliably steam fish, even one as forgiving as salmon. If you have tried it yourself, and can shed some light, please share in the comments.

After the bland success of coffee-maker poached chicken, dishwasher salmon was a big disappointment.

Taste Test is our weeklong tribute to the leaps that occur when technology meets cuisine, spanning everything from the historic breakthroughs that made food tastier and safer to the Earl-Grey-friendly replicators we impatiently await in the future.