Hasta La Gadget!

Ever misplaced your hard earned MacBook Air or had an entire project vanish at the hands of a dirty thief, only to be gone forever? Well friends, the time is coming soon for the Find My Mac feature to provide a highly sought after sigh of relief, Find My iPhone-style. Apple has released the software into the wild for registered iOS devs, with the only other requirements being OS X Lion and an iCloud subscription. Using WiFi networks to locate your missing appendage via a web browser or iOS device, the location tool offers you a number of anti-theft options — send a threatening message, lock down the machine remotely, or even wipe the machine’s drive clean. Perhaps we will see this security detail launch with iCloud in fall, which was also released in beta form earlier this week.

Apple offers Find My Mac for beta testing, wants to play Cops and Robbers originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Aug 2011 23:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There comes a time when that giant, corporate-issued laptop stops fitting into your lifestyle. When dragging around a Kensington roller case just won’t do. When you start to hear the siren lilt of something thinner, lighter, and maybe a bit more alluring. For years the MacBook Air has been that svelte temptress hollering your name, but it’s always been a bit too slow — all show and no go. It didn’t have the power and the longevity to make it a serious contender for your serious affections.

No more. With its latest refresh, Apple has taken what was once a manilla-clad curiosity and turned it into a legitimate machine, not just a sultry looker. Good thing, too, because the death of the plastic-clad MacBook means the Air is now Apple’s entry-level portable. Weary traveler looking for a laptop that will lighten your load and, it must be said, your wallet too? This might just be it.

Continue reading MacBook Air review (mid 2011)

MacBook Air review (mid 2011) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Jul 2011 12:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

Kerberos, the hound from Hades that lent its name to an MIT-developed network authentication protocol, is often visualized as having three heads. But if dogs can have multiple heads, why can’t other technology species? Many of the features in Lion have impact for different kinds of users, and the value users see in them may well depend on which face they tend to view.

The new user. Lion represents the biggest user interface change to the company’s desktop experience since the debut of Mac OS X. With the Mac hard drive hidden by default, full-screen apps that hide the menu bar, and omnipresent scroll arrows put out to pasture, it even dispenses with some user interface conventions that have been around since the original Mac. The focus on multitouch gestures — while enabling more fluidity in the user interface — are not as self-evident. Overall, though, the gradual shift away from contrivances such as windows, menus, and cluttered icons should make things less intimidating for new users.

The iPad user. One can only wonder what features the successor to Snow Leopard might have sported had Apple not launched the iPad. The most prominent design theme in Lion has been bringing user experience elements of Apple’s tablet to the Mac. This is highlighted best by Launchpad, the iPad-like collection of sliding home screens, and full-screen apps, but also includes support for full-screen apps and bundling of the Mac app store introduced with Snow Leopard.

Continue reading Switched On: A Three-Headed Lion

Switched On: A Three-Headed Lion originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 24 Jul 2011 18:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You told us a lot of you had already downloaded Lion, but now Apple’s gone ahead and put any doubts about this $29.99 update’s popularity to rest. A cool one million downloads of Lion have been registered in the first day of availability. That’s faster than any other OS release in the company’s history, which lends perhaps a bit more weight to Apple’s “best OS we’ve ever made” claim. Still on the fence yourself? Maybe our Lion review will push you one way or t’other.

Continue reading Apple: One million Lion downloads in first day

Apple: One million Lion downloads in first day originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 21 Jul 2011 16:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Never one to shy away from dramatic hyperbole, Steve Jobs declared ours a “post-PC world” about this time last year, acknowledging a move away from personal computers as smartphones and tablets become even more ubiquitous. And while Jobs might happily look on as iPhones and iPads become our primarily tie to the outside world, the question remains: what happens to the PC during this grand transition? To a large extent, the answer lies in the OS, which brings us to OS X Lion. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to post-PC computing.

In typically grandiose fashion, the company has declared OS X 10.7 “the world’s most advanced desktop operating system,” touting the addition of over 250 new features. The list is pretty uneven on the game-changing scale, with updates running the gamut from Airdrop (file-sharing over WiFi) to a full-screen version of the bundled chess game. If there’s one thing tying it all together, though, it’s something that Jobs touched on when he first unveiled the OS back in October: the unmistakable influence of iOS. Now it’s true, we already got a taste of that with gesture-based trackpads and the Mac App Store, but those were merely glimpses of things to come. Apple borrows so heavily from iOS that at times, cycling through features makes the whole thing feel like you’re merely operating an iPad with a keyboard attached.

There are plenty of welcome additions here, including aesthetic tweaks and attention to mounting privacy concerns. Like Snow Leopard before it, however, Lion is hardly an explosive upgrade. And like Snow Leopard, it comes in at a reasonable $29 (or a decidedly more pricey $69 as an upcoming flash drive install), making it a worthy upgrade for current Mac owners. But does a boatload of evolutionary features add up to a revolutionary upgrade? Let’s find out.

Continue reading Apple OS X Lion (10.7) review

Apple OS X Lion (10.7) review originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Jul 2011 17:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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