Honestly I don’t think this is news except for the information they provide at the bottom while comparing Macs. You can now take a look at the amount of greenhouse gases generated during the life of the Mac and a break down of how much of material is used in production. You can also see how much power each one uses in various modes.
Try it for yourself at the Apple Store
AppleInsider is reporting that ASUS will be shipping fewer netbooks in the third quarter of 2010 because of strong competition from Apple’s iPad. Anyone who has been reading this blog or following me on Twitter knows what I think of netbooks so this is hardly a surprise to me.
It’s being reported in a number of places, including Engadget, that some code has been found in the most recent firmware allowing a development phone to bypass the activation routine in iTunes. Some are thinking this is in reference to the rumored CDMA (Verizon) iPhone. Evidence is also there to support that a new type or updated version of the iPad is also in the works, though that should hardly be surprising.
Apple throws Adobe a bone — on the Mac: “
Filed under: Software
Adobe’s Flash Player has never performed as well in Mac OS X as it does on Windows-running PCs. The traditionally poor performance of Adobe’s plugin on the Mac has led many iPhone and iPad users to support Apple’s decision to keep Flash off of its mobile devices. While the upcoming Flash 10.1 does boast some significant performance improvements over its predecessors, the performance is still pretty terrible compared to h.264, which has access to hardware-accelerated video decoding via the GPUs in Macs.
Adobe’s stance has long been to blame Apple for the poor performance of Flash on the Mac, citing Apple’s unwillingness to allow third-party developers access to APIs necessary for hardware-accelerated video. Adobe no longer has that excuse to fall back upon: Apple posted a technical note back in late March that removes this restriction and allows third-party developers access to hardware-acceleration APIs for h.264 decoding in compatible GPUs. The technical note describes ‘a C programming interface providing low-level access to the H.264 decoding capabilities of compatible GPUs’ — meaning only the latest Mac GPUs, the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M and GeForce GT 330M. ‘It is intended for use by advanced developers who specifically need hardware accelerated decode of video frames,’ the note continues.
So there you have it, Adobe. The one thing that’s supposedly been holding you back from getting decent Flash performance on the Mac is now gone. Now that Apple has removed this ‘stumbling block’ and you’re unfettered by Apple’s restrictions, the onus is on you to prove that you can deliver a well-crafted Flash plugin for the Mac — preferably one that doesn’t crash constantly or send my fans into a cyclone any time I try to watch full-screen Flash videos.
It will be interesting to see how Adobe responds to this. If Adobe takes advantage of the hardware-acceleration APIs, how much improvement Flash’s performance sees as a result will settle the debate once and for all over who’s been at fault for Flash’s subpar performance on the Mac. Even if Flash sees substantial performance on the Mac as a result of this move, though, there’s probably no chance that Apple will relent on its stance regarding Flash on iPhone OS.
[Via MacRumors]
TUAWApple throws Adobe a bone — on the Mac originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 22 Apr 2010 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
“
There is a bit of buzz on the internet right now about Apple’s announcement of OS X Snow Leopard which is to replace Leopard sometime next year. Word on the street is that it won’t be luring people in with hundreds of new features but Apple is instead concentrating on stability of the OS. This is amazing to me for a couple of reasons. One, Apple seems to be admitting that it is out of ideas! Two, when is the last time you’ve heard of a big software company just going back and streamlining their OS? This is fantastic because as I wrote before, I’m liking Leopard more now than I did when it was initially released but compared to Tiger it’s just not as polished. Boot times for instance could be improved as Leopard takes nearly 50% to twice as long to boot compared to Tiger.
Along with the Snow Leopard client comes Snow Leopard Server and here is my prediction. Apple hasn’t told us everything (as usual) and based on the direction Apple is taking the iPhone, I believe Snow Leopard is going to be Apples biggest attack on the business/enterprise market yet. They have already admitted that ZFS will be included in Snow Leopard and they are talking about better Exchange support. Virtualization is a huge topic lately and I won’t be the least bit surprised to hear Apple announce virtualization support in Snow Leopard Server and maybe even in the client version. My guess is for the support of any OS including OS X itself..
What are your thoughts? Leave them in the comments area!