Boo-ya! Apple took the top honors in terms of desktop and laptop retail sales in the U.S. in October, according to market research firm NPD Group. As reported on CNET, the iMac line (refreshed in October) and laptops occupied some of the top slots in the list.
During the month of October, the new 21.5-inch iMac was the best-selling desktop computer, with the awe-inspiring 27-inch model in third place. Stephen Baker, who is NPD’s vice president of industry analysys, told CNET that Apple was helped by a rather dismal month for Windows desktops, since retailers were pushing existing inventory prior to the launch of Microsoft’s Windows 7.
Today was supposed to be a joyous day in my apartment. As of yesterday, my new Apple iMac was to be delivered at some point this afternoon. But alas, it was not to be. But the reason why is a truly great WTF moment. Apparently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has to approve its delivery to me.
Well, to be more specific, either the FDA or the Department of AG/PPQ has to approve it, according to UPS. Seeing as the FDA having anything to say about my computer makes no sense, I decided to check what the latter department was. Apparently, it’s the Department of Agriculture. Again, WTF.
After the introduction of the new 27″ Intel Core i7 iMac in October, a lot of us in the Mac world were puzzled by the lack of a new higher-end Mac Pro. After all, the Mac Pro has traditionally been the most powerful Mac with the highest level of expandability.
This morning, Apple quietly announced a speed bump for the Mac Pro, as well as new storage options for both the Mac Pro and the Xserve. For the quad-core Mac Pro (but not the eight-core model), you can now order a 3.33 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon “Nehalem” processor. This is an amazing CPU, with 8 MB of fully shared L3 cache, Hyper-Threading technology, an integrated memory controller, and Turbo Boost for short bursts of speed up to 3.6 GHz.
Way back in August we announced the release of the Twelve South BackPack for iMacs and Cinema Displays. It’s a cool little metal shelf that clamps onto the back of the desk stand on your computer or monitor, giving you a place to hide a backup hard drive or proudly display the best of your Star Wars figurine collection.
Twelve South sent us a couple of BackPacks to try out, and in following TUAW’s policy for review equipment, we’re going to be giving those away to two lucky readers. Before we get to the details of the giveaway, be sure to read the review of this surprisingly handy little accessory.
Hello and welcome back to Ask TUAW, our weekly troubleshooting Q&A column. We hope you had a great Thanksgiving! This week we’ve got more questions from readers, such as using Target Disk Mode, moving your iPhoto library to an external drive, putting a bigger hard drive in an iMac, sharing a Magic Mouse, good gifts for a recent Mac convert, and more.
As always, your suggestions and questions are welcome. Leave your questions for next week in the comments section at the end of this post. When asking a question, please include which machine you’re using and what version of Mac OS X is installed on it (we’ll assume you’re running Snow Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don’t specify).
It didn’t take long, but it seems that sometime in the night, following their agreement with Apple, Psystar has mysteriously run out of stock on all of their Mac clones. Apparently their settlement with Apple on the order of $2,000,000USD has caused them to accept defeat. Given that they only sold 768 clones over the course of the past two years, I don’t imagine the inability to sell their hardware will have much of an impact on their financial statements.
Down but not out, however, Psystar is still selling its Rebel EFI product which is used to circumvent OS X’s EFI requirements for installation. In other words, it aims to make it dead simple to install Snow Leopard on any PC. Psystar’s basis for continuing to sell Rebel EFI is that it was not included as part of the original case in San Francisco.
Virtual currency monetization platforms, like OfferPal, have recently come under fire (a.k.a. “Scamville”) for scamming users of virtual games on social networks. gWallet is entering the space as a potential beacon of ethics, with a a service that hopes to legitimize virtual currency exchanges by connecting game publishers directly to the advertisers. Today, the startup is announcing a $10 million Series A round of funding raised from Adams Street Partners and Trinity Ventures, bringing the total funding for gWallet up to $12.5 million.
Founded by serial entrepreneur Gurbaksh Chahal, gWallet works directly with brands directly as opposed to adopting an affiliate leads model. gWallet claims that its proprietary technology and transparent platform allows game developers and social networks to see when and where exact offers are being presented within their ecosystems.
Taiwan-headquartered Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturer, will launch up to 10,000 consumer electronics retail stores in China, says China Daily. Until now they have not had a significant retail brand or presence.
What will they sell? Probably some of the many products that they build for well known brands, including the iPhone, iPod, iMac, Sony Playstation, Sony Vaio notebooks, Amazon Kindle, Nokia phones and Nintendo Wii.
Hardmac has provided the Mac universe with an interesting rumor — that a future Mac Pro, expected in early 2010, will sport dual Intel Xeon Core i9 “Gulftown” CPUs. The website cites a Polish website, PCLab, as showing test results of the CPU at about 50% faster than the corresponding quad-core Xeon processor. Intel’s new 6-core CPU features 32 nm engraving, which results in less power consumption in idle (50% less) and fully-loaded (10% less) modes. PCLab had posted a detailed review of the new CPU, but pulled it when asked by Intel to remove the data.
Many Mac pundits have been wondering what Apple would do to differentiate the new iMac Core i7 and the Mac Pro models. The six-core CPU would give the engineers in Cupertino a growth path that results in a top-of-the-line 12-core Mac Pro that incidentally uses less power. Of course, applications will need to be properly coded to take advantage of the multiple cores, something that many Mac developers are already doing.
The sust-it website, which provides rankings of energy usage and annual energy cost for thousands of appliances, home entertainment devices, and computers, has announced that Apple’s Mac mini fills the top four spots for the most efficient desktop computer in their latest listing.
The 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Mac mini is at the top of the chart, sipping just .94W when turned off (power still goes to circuits monitoring the power status of the computer), 1.71W when in sleep mode, and just 12.6W when turned on but in an idle mode. sust-it calculated the energy cost per year for the mini (without a monitor, of course) as US$5.51 when calculated with the average US electrical rate. It’s interesting to note that this model is no longer produced by Apple, and that the new 2.26 GHz mini is even more energy efficient. Apple’s own environmental report for the mini shows that the revised model uses only .80W when turned off, 1.39W in sleep mode, but 13.4W while in idle mode.