Switching from Mac to PC. How?

As regular readers know, I use a Mac. But the lack of a midrange model really has me fuming and I need a machine that does the job, at a price that doesn’t kick the buyer in the face.

I received a brochure for Dell the other day which showed off a nice little quad-core machine for pittance compared to a quad core Mac Pro. I could upgrade the dual internal drives to 1 TB drives, drop in a Blu-ray burner and, with Adobe CS4, I could be editing and burning HD video with aplomb, compared to standing around with my thumb up my Mac ass waiting for Steve Jobs to get past his “bag of hurt” feelings and make Blu-ray authoring on the Mac a reality.

But what sort of machine should I get?

Apple MobileMess

This week, Tech pundit David Pogue make some excellent points about Apple’s new endeavor to provide Microsoft “Exchange for the rest of us” with Apple’s new MobileMe service. Not only did they give former .Mac subscribers the option to NOT take part in this new service and keep other service that are no longer offered, but Apple has had interminable problems with the new service.

The worst part is, however, the cold shoulder that Apple gives to those who get screwed.

One step forward – two steps back.

As reported by AppleInsider, Apple’s iPhone 2.0 software enables secure erasure of your personal data, however, it also moves Apple away from iSync compatibility and into their own little cloud of interoperability.

Remember iSync?

Back when Palm dominated the PDA world, and Apple had zero inkling of their own phone hardware, they got the bright idea to make hooks in the software to sync phone numbers, addresses, calendars, notes and more between Apple computers (remember those?) and phones and PDAs from other companies.

Open letter to Steve Jobs. Re: Mac Mini Pro.

Dear Steve,

The MacBook Air is cute. The iMacs are cute.
The Mini is cute. iPods, cute again.
But the Mac Pro is an expensive behemoth.

You see, I’m one of those “Pros” that you target your $1300 software to…
I’m not looking for “cute.” Nor am I looking to get screwed.
So, I’d like you to make a Mac Mini Pro.

Flip4Mac Does Grass Valley Infinity – REV or Compact Flash

Panasonic and Sony aren’t the only ones with flash media in their camcorders. Thompson / Grass Valley partnered with Iomega a couple years back to bring us non-tape recording that was far cheaper than comparative products. The Infinity line of camcorders was born.

Now, Flip4Mac brings us the tools (the glue) that lets you “stick” your Infinity footage into Final Cut Pro.

Raiders of the Lost Card – recover “lost” still images.

I think we’ve all “lost” an image at one point in time. If you haven’t had it happen to you, then you’re not lucky, it’s just hasn’t happened to you yet.

Your still camera has issues, or there’s a bad import session between your computer and your still camera and suddenly, your images are gone. Or one of your kids, or someone playing a joke on you deletes an image you wanted to keep on your camera.

Well, there’s an easy solution…
(how seldom do we really get to hear that!)

MacBook Air. Lacking in a few key “areas.”

I was really hoping for big iPod Touch… a Mac Touch?
But Air is better for Axiotron’s ModBook, as expensive as it is. It’s a true pressure sensitive touch screen, but it lacks multi-touch.

As for the Air? It’s a bit rarefied.
My distance from San Francisco may have kept me out of Jobs’ “reality distortion field” so that I could hear his “amazing” and “unbelievable” but I wasn’t taken in.

There are several few key points where the MacBook Air misses…

Macworld Expo 08: let the rumors begin.

As much as I lament the demise of Macworld Expo East in NYC (Boston was just too far for people from the NYC, Phila, DC, Baltimore hub to easily travel to, compared to NYC) the annual January Expo remains and has actually become stronger in recent years with Apple’s expansion into new electronic markets, and growing strength as a computer company (even though they dropped “Computer” from their name.)

Once the holidays pass, the next event geeks like us focus on (aside from CES) is the Macworld Expo. The rumor mills are already abuzz with ultralight laptop, movie rentals, 3g iPhone, and a whole lot more…

Apple’s 10.5 Leopard file creation dates get wrong

Excuse the bad Engrish, but when Apple still can’t fix OS-X to properly maintain and track file creation and modification dates (one of the points that I griped about before) then there is no reliable way to track your media assets in Apple’s Mac OS.

I always use Creation and Modification dates to sort my various projects and files on today’s massive hard drives. I hate that Windows (at least XP) won’t intermingle files and folders when sorting by last modified, but at least it gets the dates right and properly maintains a file’s creation date when copying to and from external hard drives and servers.

But not Leopard. That’s a dealbreaker right there…

SSD RAID = 800 MBps & 0.1 ms latency. Really.

Next Level Hardware.com has a report on their Battleship Mtron. This is a test of solid state disks (SSD) and how they can take your computing system to the next level. In reality, they take a computing system to the next order of magnitude. Previous tests have taken the Mac Pro to 284 MBps with four internal hard drives striped n a RAID-0.

Would you like 800 megaBYTES a second with near instantaneous access?

Read on…