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As of first thing this morning, Apple has rather quietly announced an update to it’s entry-level White MacBook. Keeping its price of $999, the laptop now offers a faster 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo processor as well as the NVIDIA 320M graphics chip used in the latest revision of the 13″ MacBook Pro. It also now boasts the same higher capacity 63.5Whr battery first introduced in the 13″ MacBook Pro. According to the Apple Store online, it is available immediately and ships within 24 hours.
See that shiny new toolbar at the bottom of your screen? That’s our new social media toolbar here at The Apple Vine, courtesy of Wibiya. What does this mean for you, our loyal reader? Easy access to your preferred social media outlets, that’s what! You can now easily keep track of us on Facebook and Twitter, share a post you like on various different social bookmarking sites, and “Like” any page or post. If English isn’t your native language, you can even automatically translate TAV in to one of many common languages. I hope it helps improve your reading experience and if it doesn’t, you can even click to hide it away.
You know you’ve thought about it. Ditching cable and hooking a small computer up to your TV to stream videos, TV shows, movies, music and more is something that every geek would love to do. Well, there isn’t really a better computer on the market for doing this than the Mac Mini from Apple. In this article, we will tell you everything you need to get and install to be able to hook your Mac Mini up to your TV and maximize your viewing experience.
Hardware Requirements
There are a few things you’ll need to buy (or already own) for this to work.
- Mac Mini
– You won’t get too far without actually owning a Mac Mini. Coughing up a little extra cash for more RAM and a larger hard drive is likely something you will not regret.
- Wide-Screen HDTV
– This really isn’t worth doing without a good TV.
- Mini DisplayPort to HDMI Adapter
– Gives your Mac Mini an HDMI port.
- HDMI Cable
– Along with the Mini DisplayPort to HDMI adapter, this will allow you to hook up your Mac Mini to virtually any modern television.
- Apple Remote
– This will allow you to control and navigate through most of the programs you’ll be using in your media center.
- Apple Wireless Keyboard
+ Magic Mouse
– There will be times when you’ll need and/or want to do something that just can’t be done easily or quickly with the remote. This duo will make life at your couch a lot easier.
Optional:
Hardware Setup
Setting everything up is relatively straightforward and really much more complicated than setting up any other Mac. Find a good place to put your Mac Mini near your TV where it is visible and has room to breathe (overheating is bad, mmkay?). Once you’ve got it where you want it, simply plug everything in (power, hdmi adapter, and hdmi cable) and power up the Mac. It should automatically adjust to display correctly on your TV, but you can always adjust the resolution to suit your needs. If this is a brand new Mac Mini, just run through the set up and configure it like you would any other Mac. The initial setup is where you will find that having a keyboard and mouse is needed the most. Once you’ve got everything in place and working, it’s time to decide what software you want to use to view various different shows and programs on your Mac Mini.
Software Options
There is a decent selection of different programs you can install (or come preinstalled) on your Mac Mini to improve your viewing experience. Here’s a quick selection of the best options and what they offer you. Are there more than just these three? You bet there are, but many of the features overlap with these or aren’t as extensively developed.
Front Row is Apple’s very own media center application. It will seamlessly integrate with anything you’ve added to iTunes or iPhoto and give you a nice clean full-screen interface with with to view your movies, tv shows, pictures, or listen to music. It also has access to a huge assortment of movie trailers, if you’re looking to catch up on what will be hitting the theaters soon.
Boxee is a beta product and comes with its fair share of bugs, but it is still one of the absolute best media center solutions that you can get. It can play back just about any type of audio and/or video file format that you throw at it, scrapes the web for coverart and information on whatever you’re playing, will function as your DVD player, offers social networking integration, and much more.
Hulu’s Desktop Client gives you access to all of the content of the net’s most successful destination of streaming TV & movies without having to open up your web browser. As a joint venture of Fox, ABC, and NBC, this offers you access some of the biggest hit shows on network and cable television, not to mention feature length films, trailers, and more.
Drawbacks
If you’re doing this as a replacement for your Cable or Satellite TV as opposed to a supplement, then there are some caveats you should be aware of. Unless you are one to illegally pirate all of your viewing materials, there is a plethora of content that you might have access to now that simply isn’t available on the Internet, free or otherwise. One huge glaring example of this is the hugely popular programming on pay channels such as Showtime or HBO. Neither of these networks currently offer any kind of online access to their content, even as a paid subscription (Which I would gladly pay if any executives happen to be reading this!). Another factor to keep in mind is new programming. Not everything that is available through services such as Hulu is available as soon as it has aired through traditional means. Sometimes you have to wait a day, week, or more and sometimes it won’t be available until it has been released on DVD.
Summary
If none of the above drawbacks are a huge concern to you, then setting up a Mac Mini as your new media center solution is a fantastic and fun idea that can provide you, your friends, and your family with endless entertainment. It requires a decent initial investment to get any hardware that you might not already have, but can save you hundreds of dollars a year in cable or satellite costs, if not more.
According to the NPD Group, a market research firm, Android has usurped Apple for the #2 spot in the US smartphone market. RIM still leads the pack with it’s Blackberrys (-ies?) commanding a 36% market share, with Google’s Android OS now at 28% and Apple’s iPhone at 21%. AT&T, amazingly still the only company to offer the iPhone in the US, is still the leader of the pack with a total 32% of the smartphone market with Verizon trailing closely behind at 30%.
With the release of the iPhone OS 4.0, the next generation iPhone (Potentially called the iPhone HD), and a rumored Verizon offering all coming this summer, one can likely expect the iPhone’s market share to climb back up by fall and potentially retake second place.
As you may or may not be aware, The Princess Bride is one of my favorite movies. A few years ago they released the 20th Anniversary Edition on DVD. Although I did not see this then, as I already own a copy of the movie, this edition of the DVD has what could possibly be the greatest DVD cover ever. It is easily the most awesome ambigram I have ever seen.
Thoughts on Flash
Apple has a long relationship with Adobe. In fact, we met Adobe’s founders when they were in their proverbial garage. Apple was their first big customer, adopting their Postscript language for our new Laserwriter printer. Apple invested in Adobe and owned around 20% of the company for many years. The two companies worked closely together to pioneer desktop publishing and there were many good times. Since that golden era, the companies have grown apart. Apple went through its near death experience, and Adobe was drawn to the corporate market with their Acrobat products. Today the two companies still work together to serve their joint creative customers – Mac users buy around half of Adobe’s Creative Suite products – but beyond that there are few joint interests.
I wanted to jot down some of our thoughts on Adobe’s Flash products so that customers and critics may better understand why we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. Adobe has characterized our decision as being primarily business driven – they say we want to protect our App Store – but in reality it is based on technology issues. Adobe claims that we are a closed system, and that Flash is open, but in fact the opposite is true. Let me explain.
First, there’s “Open”.
Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.
Apple has many proprietary products too. Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards. Apple’s mobile devices all ship with high performance, low power implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.
Apple even creates open standards for the web. For example, Apple began with a small open source project and created WebKit, a complete open-source HTML5 rendering engine that is the heart of the Safari web browser used in all our products. WebKit has been widely adopted. Google uses it for Android’s browser, Palm uses it, Nokia uses it, and RIM (Blackberry) has announced they will use it too. Almost every smartphone web browser other than Microsoft’s uses WebKit. By making its WebKit technology open, Apple has set the standard for mobile web browsers.
Second, there’s the “full web”.
Adobe has repeatedly said that Apple mobile devices cannot access “the full web” because 75% of video on the web is in Flash. What they don’t say is that almost all this video is also available in a more modern format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads. YouTube, with an estimated 40% of the web’s video, shines in an app bundled on all Apple mobile devices, with the iPad offering perhaps the best YouTube discovery and viewing experience ever. Add to this video from Vimeo, Netflix, Facebook, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, NPR, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, People, National Geographic, and many, many others. iPhone, iPod and iPad users aren’t missing much video.
Another Adobe claim is that Apple devices cannot play Flash games. This is true. Fortunately, there are over 50,000 games and entertainment titles on the App Store, and many of them are free. There are more games and entertainment titles available for iPhone, iPod and iPad than for any other platform in the world.
Third, there’s reliability, security and performance.
Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.
In addition, Flash has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it. Adobe publicly said that Flash would ship on a smartphone in early 2009, then the second half of 2009, then the first half of 2010, and now they say the second half of 2010. We think it will eventually ship, but we’re glad we didn’t hold our breath. Who knows how it will perform?
Fourth, there’s battery life.
To achieve long battery life when playing video, mobile devices must decode the video in hardware; decoding it in software uses too much power. Many of the chips used in modern mobile devices contain a decoder called H.264 – an industry standard that is used in every Blu-ray DVD player and has been adopted by Apple, Google (YouTube), Vimeo, Netflix and many other companies.
Although Flash has recently added support for H.264, the video on almost all Flash websites currently requires an older generation decoder that is not implemented in mobile chips and must be run in software. The difference is striking: on an iPhone, for example, H.264 videos play for up to 10 hours, while videos decoded in software play for less than 5 hours before the battery is fully drained.
When websites re-encode their videos using H.264, they can offer them without using Flash at all. They play perfectly in browsers like Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome without any plugins whatsoever, and look great on iPhones, iPods and iPads.
Fifth, there’s Touch.
Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers. For example, many Flash websites rely on “rollovers”, which pop up menus or other elements when the mouse arrow hovers over a specific spot. Apple’s revolutionary multi-touch interface doesn’t use a mouse, and there is no concept of a rollover. Most Flash websites will need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices. If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?
Even if iPhones, iPods and iPads ran Flash, it would not solve the problem that most Flash websites need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices.
Sixth, the most important reason.
Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices, there is an even more important reason we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. We have discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices.
We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.
This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms.
Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps. And Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms. For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X.
Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications. Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps, developers reach a wider and wider audience and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform.
Conclusions.
Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.
The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content. And the 200,000 apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games.
New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.
Steve Jobs
April, 2010
There is quite a large selection of Facebook pages with over one million members (Fans? Likers? I can’t keep track of the correct terminology). The following page is the absolute worst one out there. It’s so offensive, I almost don’t even want to link directly to it, this wouldn’t be the World Wide Web without links, so here it is:
When the FBI is searching for whack-jobs who are actually trying to assassinate a public figure such as the President, they need to closely examine all 1,165,602 (as of this posting) of the douche-nozzles that “like” that page.
This likely won’t matter to most of you reading this, but to any webmasters reading this out there who are familiar with the ongoing argument about the merits of dofollow vs. nofollow linking, I just wanted to let you know that The Apple Vine’s comments have turned off the rel=”nofollow” attribute for the comment author’s name. Just like always, however, comments that are clearly spam and make it clear that you have not read the post (beyond perhaps the title) will be marked as such. Let the link juice flow.
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