Hasta La Gadget!

Apple is on a mission to cram the iPad’s and iPhone’s successes into the Mac, beginning with a brand-new software store serving Mac apps. That may be both good and bad.

The Mac App Store will create a new channel for Mac users to find software easily, and it will make it easier for programmers to reach a large audience. But some developers worry about Apple’s future road map, and the potential the App Store has to turn the Mac platform into a more closed, controlled environment subject entirely to Apple’s whims.

“I wonder when Apple will stop shipping Safari,” said Mike Beltzner, director of the Firefox browser at the Mozilla foundation. “It’s obvious already from [Wednesday’s] keynote that they’re looking to bypass the web.”

Apple in a press conference Wednesday announced that the next-generation Mac operating system, Mac OS X Lion, will launch with a Mac App Store similar to the iOS App Store serving its mobile devices. Steve Jobs said the company was planning to take lessons from mobile and weave their benefits into the Mac platform.

When the Mac app store opens, users will be able to automatically install apps and seamlessly run updates whenever they’re available, just like on the iPhone. Apps downloaded through the Mac app store will load in a quick-launch tool, similar to the springboard interface of the iPhone and iPad.

Most Apple developers seem thrilled about the opportunity to sell their wares through an online Mac store, but some have dissenting views. Here are the pros and cons of a Mac app store, gathered from brief conversations with programmers.

More money, more innovation

The Mac app store presents an opportunity for programmers to reach an audience of 50 million Mac customers (for comparison, that’s about half the size of the audience of iOS users). That could amount to hot sales for Mac apps and a few lucky success stories, like the few we reported on when the iOS App Store was young.

Just as the App Store did with the iPhone, we can expect a wave of new programmers opting to make apps for the Mac. As a result, customers will get thousands of Mac apps enabling Mac computers to do things we never even thought about.

“I think it can breathe some new life into Mac software,” said John Casasanta, partner of the MacHeist software bundle.

App discoverability

Even though the idea of a Mac app store is to create a one-stop-shop for all your third-party software, it won’t necessarily make it easy to find apps.

In the case of the iOS App Store, discoverability is still a problem. The list of best-selling apps is the easiest way to find apps, but otherwise the App Store doesn’t provide an adequate method to sift through the other 300,000 apps. You have to do as much research to find the right software as you would searching the web for third-party apps.

If the Mac app store accumulates a large number of apps (and it sounds like it will), customers will likely face the same paradox of choice.

A race to the bottom or top?

The iOS App Store currently serves about 300,000 apps, but many agree that the majority of offerings in the store are sub-par, and are priced at 99 cents or less. Many are even free, and offer minimal value that corresponds to their cheap price.

Casasanta wonders if we’ll see a similar “race to the bottom” with the Mac app store. However, he said he was more optimistic about the Mac app store, because the Mac developer community long ago established standards for quality. As a result, he thinks Mac users will see a plethora of quality software.

We’ll have to assume NEC managed to free Willy and that its first 3D venture was a success, as the company’s just revealed a brand new set of stereoscopic screens, one of which is actually not part and parcel of an all-in-one PC. NVIDIA’s 3D Vision kit (with active shutter glasses) and a 23-inch, 1920 x 1080 120Hz monitor accompany this Valuestar L, with a 2.93GHz Core i7-870 processor, GeForce GT 330 GPU, 8GB of memory, 1TB of storage and Blu-ray 3D drive in an attractive white case. There’s also a similarly-sized Valuestar W 3D all-in-one with a 2.53GHz Core i5-460M and GeForce GT 330M graphics, a digital TV tuner, half the memory, a 1.5TB drive and a passive, polarized display. If you’re not interested in wearing glasses while chained to a desk, of course, you could always consider the new LaVie Light netbook, newly refreshed with a dual-core Intel Atom N550. And yes, we know we made a horrible pun. Sometimes we just can’t help ourselves.

NEC expands Valuestar 3D lineup with two new desktop PCs; laptops say LaVie originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 15 Sep 2010 19:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Nobody uses the iMac for real work, right? After all, the huge 27-inch screen, the fast Core i3-i7 processors and the discrete graphics cards across the entire lineup render the machine hopelessly underpowered for video and photo editing. No wonder Apple hasn’t included an eSATA port. Who would need fast external storage?

Wait. Everyone would, especially as the standard disk is a single Terabyte in size. OWC feels your pain, computer buyer, and will take drastic, deep-cutting measures to help you. The accessory company will literally chop a hole in your iMac and add a speedy eSATA port to the machine. USB2 and FireWire are fine for shifting a few files around, but eSATA-connected drives run at the same speed as the hard-drive inside the computer.

The mod will cost you just $170. If you run a video facility, you’re probably already arranging shipping right now (tip: arrange it with OWC and they’ll pick your iMac up for just $30). If that still looks expensive to you, think about the alternative: buying a Mac Pro instead, which start at $2,500 without a monitor. While your machine is in OWC’s shop for surgery, you can also add more memory and upgrade the existing hard drive.

The service is available now. Rumors that OWC will add a USB-port to the iPad are unfounded.

OWC iMac eSATA upgrade program [OWC. Thanks, Grant!]

See Also:

• New iMacs Add IPS Displays, Core 'i' Processors Across the Range …

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The iMac just got a little bit faster, thanks to an update across the line. Processors, graphics and even the displays have been improved, although the prices have stayed the same.

All iMacs now have i-processors, as in Intel Core i3, i5, and i7 (the last an upgrade option), so the Core 2 Duo now exists only in the Mac Mini. Graphics are now discrete across the line, which means that every iMac has a separate graphics card inside, using its own dedicated memory.

The screens have been replaced, too, using the IPS (in-plane switching) technology found in the iPad. The advantage of IPS is its crazy-wide viewing angle, making the new iMac perfect for watching movies.

There is also a new high-end, small-screen option, letting you put a 3.2-GHz Intel Core i3 in the 21.5-inch iMac (the base chip runs at 3.06 GHz). It’ll cost $1,500 against $1,200, but you also double video memory to 512 MB and get a bigger, 1-TB hard drive.

The sweet spot is now the 3.2-GHz 27-incher, which has the i3 processor and still costs just $1,700. Sure, that’s not a cheap computer, but for what you actually get, it is a real bargain. Add to this redesigned, bassier speakers and an SD card slot that works with the new SDXC spec, and you’ve got almost everything you might want in a home-entertainment computer.

Finally, the iMac doesn’t come with the new Magic Trackpad. You’ll have to buy it for an extra $70. Thanks, Apple.

New iMac [Apple]

Ah, the inexorable rise of a once-small Taiwanese company. Acer chairman JT Wang has told investors in a conference call this week that his company is on track to overtake HP in worldwide laptop shipments before the year is through. That assertion is backed up by Gartner’s data, cited in the Wall Street Journal, which indicates that Acer shipped 9.49 million mobile computers in the first quarter of 2010, just ahead of HP’s 9.47 million. Positive vibes are also being felt on the desktop front, where Acer aims to shift 10 million units this year, while a decent $15 million is being invested into “developing a a smartphone platform based on Google Inc.’s Android.” We’ll be curious to see whether this thrifty strategy pays off against HP’s ebullient $1.2 billion acquisition of Palm, but one thing’s for sure: PC vendors are hungry for some of that sweet smartphone pie.

Acer expects to overtake HP as world’s biggest laptop vendor by year’s end originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 19 Jun 2010 08:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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