I’ve been researching solar panels for some time now and really fancy having a go at putting together a system to run my computer setup off of solar power only. But I’ve decided to try walking before running (or maybe I should consider it crawling before even walking?) and just see how easy it is to power my iPhone purely from solar energy.
To power something like an iPhone from solar energy you need at least 2 things: (more…)
Following on from Part 1 of my opportunity to play with Snow Leopard (OS 10.6) I thought I’d give a bit more feedback on the applications I ran under it.
Now, bear in mind that I only had a few hours to play with this machine so my testing was very limited in scope.
1 to change the light bulb and to comment that the light bulb has been changed.
14 to share similar experiences of changing light bulbs and how the light bulb could have been changed differently.
7 to caution about the dangers of changing light bulbs.
7 to point out spelling/grammar errors in posts about changing light bulbs.
There have been a few rumors today that Apple might be killing off the Mac Mini, stores are unable to order any further systems and there is no word on a replacement.
Some people are prepared to say good riddance, complaining that the Mini hasn’t ben updated in a long time and thus represents poor value, especially compared to PC equivalents (ah that old chestnut!).
So I decided to price up a Mini and its closest competitor. The problem with most mini PC’s is that they’re not especially “mini” in size and they certainly have no class. But Dell seems to have woken up to the concept of design and has a really lovely Mac Mini-like computer called the Studio Hybrid. It’s available in several nice colours, including a very nice bamboo finish (an expensive option but the one I’d have).
Today I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to check out a Macbook Pro running the Developer Preview version of the next generation 64bit Macintosh operating system, OS 10.6 “Snow Leopard”.
This is the preview version that Apple handed out to developers back in June so of course it’s incomplete, stuff will change in the 12 months before its released, particularly drivers and general compatibility. But for fun I downloaded a copy of the XBench benchmarking utility and ran it on the same system, booting Snow Leopard off an external drive and booting “regular” Leopard off the internal drive. No apps were running and I waited for all disk activity to stop before I started the benchmarks.
The results for regular 10.5.5 Leopard are below, with the figures for Snow Leopard in brackets:
As a follow on from yesterdays MacBook Pro vs DELL Notebook comparison where we discovered that the MacBook Pro was slightly cheaper AND faster than the closest comparable DELL system I decided to take a look at the more popular consumer MacBook.
Apple announced a new MacBook this week so I decided to take a look at the high end model (where presumably Apple make the highest profit margin) and up the spec here and there, for example increasing the RAM to the full 4GB. Now for the purposes of this comparison I let Apple do the upgrade at the factory but in reality I would do myself as it always works out cheaper to buy the RAM from Crucial, fit it yourself and sell off the old RAM on eBay…
I bought my existing MacBook Pro almost 2 years ago and I love it. It’s a fast machine and I have no need to buy the latest version. But 2 years ago I did a price comparison between the middle/high spec MacBook Pro (that I bought) and a Dell Latitude notebook, on a like for like spec and found the Dell cost about £50 more…
Is that still the case?
The ticket price for entry into Apple laptop ownership in the UK hasn’t dropped as most people forecast, even though in the USA the popular notebook has dropped $100 (about £40).
In the UK the price has actually *risen* by £20 from £699 to £719.
The culprit? The value of the pound which has taken a battering in recent weeks falling from a lofty $2 per £1 to around $1.65 per £1…
While touting the new aluminium clad MacBook, a firewire port was conspicuous by its absence.
As per the Macbook Air, the new Macbook is also lacking a firewire interface.
While most consumers probably use USB hard drives for their external storage needs, those who want to edit their home movies using iMovie will be flat out of luck…
