The home of Mac info for New Zealanders, mac-nz serves daily Mac, iPhone and related news from the world of Apple Inc.
CreativeTech & new iMacs
Saturday, 24 July 2010
Go in the draw to win prizes by buying CreativeTech tickets: Thanks to generous sponsors, every Monday CreativeTech Ltd will draw a winner from the week's ticket buyers.The draw is from two-day ticket buyers, Friday (one-day) tickets buyers and Saturday ticket buyers – all ticket buyers, in other words. A winner will be drawn at random and notified by email.
The first prize available is Microsoft Office: Mac Business Edition worth NZ$692.
In the coming weeks CT has Adobe Photoshop elements (Mac) and Renaissance half-day training packs to give away as well!
Electronic QR Code tickets will be issued soon. Check out the program for the first NZ Apple-dedicated conference in years.
New session added to CreativeTech: The new session, on saturday at 10am, features Philip Fierlinger Xero, the NZ-designed online accounting system that's being used by thousands of businesses all over the world.
The session is called 'Designing a game changer' and is presented by the man who Xero, the software that has managed to make accounting "sexy, fun and addictive".
Philip's work has received numerous major awards, set new standards in design and helps generate millions of dollars in revenue every year.
In the past, Philip did groundbreaking work for a wide range of major clients, including Apple, Beastie Boys and the United.
New Mac Pros – and new iMacs? In the US it has been noticed that supplies of iMacs and Mac Pros have become constrained, which usually indicates that a refreshed model is in the pipeline.
While the Mac Pro is well due an update (it's still seems readily available in NZ stores and online), the iMac has just quietly received new ATI video options for the first time in years.
But AppleInsider says it's because the iMacs may get new i3 and i5 Intel chip variants. Apple has lately been advising its direct and indirect sales channels of near-term shortages of its popular all-in-one desktops as it prepares draw-down inventories.
Apple seems to be informing some of its distributors not to expect any further stock of the entry level 21.5-inch, 3.06GHz iMac, implying that production of that model has ceased.
Meanwhile stateside reseller channels are being advised to sell through their stock of all existing iMac models and to keep their inventories as lean as possible for the next few weeks.
These anomalies are similar to those reported by AppleInsider last month when it predicted the imminent the arrival of HDMI-equipped Mac minis, which turned up a few weeks later.
Apple was already brainstorming last year about an iMac lineup that would include more than one quad-core configuration, reckons AppleInsider.
Potential configurations included a dual-core Core i5 model, as quad-core Core i5 and Core i7 configurations or even Intel's Core i3 processor at the low-end.
But it's not clear whether Apple has recently decided to alter any of these earlier plans, especially in light of shortages of Intel's less brawny Core offerings. New iMacs may also include new, faster USB3 connections; USB 3.0 is backwards compatible with USB 2.0 devices.
How to fix common Mac startup problems: This might be worth printing out and keeping in a draw (it's quite long, though). Cult of Mac has posted a page on how to get through some Mac startup problems.
Microsoft stays ahead of Apple in profitability – just: Apple recorded record revenues earlier this week, but it is still trailing Microsoft after all. Microsoft just reported its own record revenues.
There had been speculation earlier this week that Apple might surpass Microsoft in revenues for the first time.
However, Microsoft is still one jump ahead: It just had its best Q4 ever with $16.04 billion in revenue. Apple recorded $15.7 billion in revenue.
