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I discovered something interesting this weekend.

I had a need for a new external USB hard drive and rather than buy my usual Western Digital MyPassport drive I decided to spend a little more and get a Toshiba drive. Why? Instead of being made of plastic it was made of brushed aluminium which I preferred.

When I got home I discovered it needed 2 USB ports to work (Toshiba supply a special USB Y cable for just this purpose) which is less than ideal and poor engineering by Toshiba in my opinion as many other drives work just fine with one USB port.

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Some people use a PC or Mac for work or email and to them their computer is just a tool, nothing more. For those of us who spend a large portion of our time using our computers for recreation purposes (perhaps dealing with our digital photos, maintaining a blog or so on) it becomes an indespensible part of our lives. We can’t be without it! At that point we can become quite attached to our machines, in much the same way a car enthusiast may be attached to their Mustang, and wouldn’t consider using anything else. While many PC users love their machines it’s generally common knowledge that Mac users in particular are especially attached to their computers, possibly moreso than others. Hence being a Mac user has often been compared to a cult, with Steve Jobs as the leader. I’m not sure I’d go quite that far but there are certainly signs that I’m more than a Mac “user”, I’m a Mac “person”.

What’s the difference between a Mac User and a Mac Person?

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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.

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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).

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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:

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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…

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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?

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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…

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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…

http://www.apple.com/macbook/specs.html

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As part of our general clearout to make some space in the office and a need to get rid of older technology to make room for the new, we’ve thrown a load of stuff up on eBay.

Although some stuff has already gone we’ve got plenty more hard drives, ram, software & peripherals and almost all of it is Mac compatible (or even Mac specific as we’re a Mac house don’t you know?). And speaking of which, we’ll have a rather nice Macintosh system up for sale in the next couple of days.

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