Apple just announced its new Magic Trackpad. Looks like a very nice little buddy for your Apple keyboard. But, as it is with these things, the proof is in the pudding. I will have to try it out.

Looks like the next logical move in Apple’s “everything touch” strategy. Curiously absent: Touchscreen Macs. New iMacs maybe? Stay tuned.

Update: New iMacs and Mac Pro also released. The iMacs are all upgraded to the Core i range, starting from the Core i3 upto Core i7. No touchscreens though. Mac Pro is now upgraded to the Intel hexacore processors, giving you up to 12 cores if you feel you need that kind of power. With hyperthreading, that results in 24 threads at once. Nifty.

Apple 27 inch Cinema Display

Apple also announced its new 27 inch Cinema Display. With a 2560 x 1440 IPS panel, this is clearly for the professional or very well heeled crowd, at $999. Keep in mind the display also comes with USB hub, built in iSight camera and a Magsafe charger for your Macbook. Think of it as a very expensive docking station with a beautiful display attached.

Just about any techie would tell you that the slowest part in a modern computer is still the harddrive. In fact, 90% of the time you wait for your computer is because that little needle is busy reading sectors from a very fast spinning disk (not counting waiting for Seacom delays…). True, hard drives have become very quick over the years, but the other components in a computer has just progressed at exponentially faster pace.

Its for this very reason why you might have the latest Core i7 machine with large amounts of RAM, but still can go make a cup of coffee in the time it takes to boot up. Luckily solid state storage has come along – this does away with the moving platter inside a hard drive and instead replaces it with chips that do away with access times (the average time the needle takes to find that little bit of data) and also makes the drive silent and uses less electricity. Sounds like a terrific solution, except for price. Whereas a 500GB 7200rpm hard disk drive costs R800 today, a similiar size SSD costs around R15000. No, that is not a typo. So people who wanted the speed of SSD were forced to buy smaller capacities – 64GB currently goes for about R1800 for a decent Corsair SSD.

And this exactly what makes the Seagate Momentus XT so special. Seagate refers to it as a “hybrid hard drive”. The XT has a 500GB traditional HDD merged with a fast 4GB SSD chip. Now 4GB might not sound like much, but you do not have to manually choose which files to drop on this SSD portion. As you use the drive, it keeps track of what files are used often, and stores these files in the SSD. These typically include files that are used by the OS often, your most used apps, etc. The Momentus XT is not only a laptop drive – in fact, it will beat most standard desktop hard drives as well. In many benchmarks it beats the WD 10,000 rpm Velociraptor drives… Its also operating system independent, so you can go ahead and use it with Windows, Mac or even Linux. The adaptive memory just keeps on doing its thing.

Now you might think 4GB SSD is not enough – but here is some of the changes I noticed using this drive. Just for some background – I installed this drive into a late 2009 Apple Macbook Pro 13inch, with a Core 2 Duo 2.53GHz processor and 4GB of RAM. It used to have a Seagate Momentus 7200.3 320GB 7200rpm drive installed, which was pretty quick already. Here is the boot times of a full Mac OS X install. Take note this not a clean fresh install, but instead a install that is made from time machine restore for both the old and new drives. In fact, I havent reinstalled or reformatted my machine in more than 2 years. Time Machine just does such a good job of that, another thing where I really do believe Mac is still better than Windows. This install is full of apps I run often, but also small utility apps that I like to use every now and then. All in all a pretty representitive Mac install. You can expect the same performance improvements on Windows as well.

Both the old and new image is defragmented and then left for about 10 minutes so that the adaptive memory does its thing.

These speeds are carried over to shutdown speeds as well. Again, once the adaptive memory gets used to the shutdown procedure, speed increases as well. Very impressive.

So how does it affect everyday apps? Just everyday apps like Firefox load in half the time (and this does not include timing from cached apps in memory, this is after reboots). Larger apps like Photoshop get even better performance. iTunes gets zippier as well. Here is some timings I did with the drive. iTunes load time for a 60GB library. (Take note this is timed after a reboot every time).

Here is the startup times for Photoshop. This is a standard install without any plugins. Again, this is a startup after a boot every time.

I did not time everything, but here are some things that improve as well:

• You know that little wait while you type into the Spotlight search box? Thats gone.
• Virtual Machines are faster as well. I know an average VM is much larger than 4GB, but over times these do become faster. I guess that adaptive memory looks for files within the VMs as well.
• Everything is snappier. The stuff you do most often on the computer just happens so much faster. Makes me only wish for the day when SSDs will be cheaper.

I did notice that the drive is a little more noisy than the previous drive, but I can only hear it it if I put my ear right against my laptop. Other than that I did not find any other negatives when using the drive on a day to day basis.

Just a tip to Mac users who would like to install one – do not use  a tool like SuperDuper, rather do a Time Machine backup, and then restore the image during the install process of Mac OSX. For some reason the drive doesnt cooperate with those image cloning tools. This goes the same to Windows users, do not use DriveImage XML. Do a reinstall, I know its quite a process, but the performance boost is well worth it.

The best part of the Momentus XT is that it costs only slightly more than a standard 7200rpm notebook drive. I payed R1200 for the 500GB model. And the performance in real life use is much faster. While it wont quite reach the speed of a fast SSD, it is a fraction of the price. And that makes it a very good deal. So you might want to know if it makes more sense to rather spend your money on a full on SSD or even more RAM. Suppose you have a machine with a normal 250GB 5400rpm drive and 2GB of RAM. Here is a pretty handy chart to put hybrid hard drives into perspective:

So if you want large capacity plus fast performance, it seems like a hybrid hard drive might be the ideal middle ground before SSDs become affordable. I am willing to bet that Seagate will spread this hybrid technology to its other hard drives as well. I think the sweetspot will be a desktop drive with 8GB or 16GB of SSD memory. Hopefully in a few years we will laugh at this as SSD have finally become comparable in price with hard drives… Bring on the speed.

The Seagate Momentus XT reached South African shores last week, its currently only at suppliers, but should reach stores soon.

Highly recommended.

Via: MBA Online

I recently got contacted by the folks at ALK – they wanted to show off their new CoPilot Live product for South Africa. In case you dont know, CoPilot is available on iPhone, Android and Windows Mobile. I have been using the iPhone version for the past week, and yes, I am very impressed.

Key Features

I have used alternative solutions by other vendors on the iPhone, and over time certain things started to irritate me. It has gotten so bad, that in most cases I just fire up Google Maps instead of actual GPS apps. Their database is up to date, and their routing is good as well. But of course, Google Maps does not actually navigate you to the your destination, with a convulatuted next, next, next type of interaction which is downright dangerous to use in a car. (Maybe one day they will grace South Africa (or even the iPhone) with that feature.

So lets get round to CoPilot Live 8. The install is easy enough – it is on iPhone after all. Standard Appstore solution. At 100MB+ you do want to download it through wifi however.

First off, the interface is slick and easy to use. Buttons are large, and easy to interpret, which is necessary when using a GPS in your car. Most things can be understood at just glance, which I appreciate. It’s pretty clear when you open it that it is a ported interface (it is almost exactly the same as on the Android and Windows Mobile), which I normally dont like. But after playing around with it, I realized that it works very well, despite not following the typical iPhone app look. Integration with the iPhone keyboard is perfect, which is more than I can say for NDrive. The level of detail on the maps is also great – in fact much better than with my Garmin with the latest mapset. The maps move along at a good pace – and there is a very cool feature where the top of the screen is changed to indicate where the current lanes you are driving down is heading. Orientation switch between landscape and portrait is quick and without bugs.

Voice instructions are clear and loud enough (on the 3GS at least). Routing was very good, and seems to be very similiar to my Garmin dedicated device. Talking about Garmin – they bring out new mapsets, and still havent included my security village’s road, which is by no means new. With CoPilot, it is there, with all the streetnames. And here I thought dedicated devices like Garmin have always been the best.  Small issues include the strength of the GPS signal, but this is a iPhone issue, not the software. On cloudy days, it did take a while to grab the signal, but just leaving it under the windscreen seemed to do the trick.

The performance on the iPhone 3GS was very good, but it was a lot slower on the 3G, and I did get some warnings on the 3G about memory shortages. But it did not crash once, which is good. Battery life was also better than I expected, and a hell of a lot better than using Google Maps which has to continually download map tiles as you go along. A small thing I also appreciate is the integration with the iPod – and creating quick playlists were a breeze. Also, while playing music, it didnt stutter once while giving directions, and the music were slightly turned down while talking, and than smoothly increased back up to the previous volume. I really appreciate that.

Even if the interface of a GPS app is good, it comes down to routing ability. And this is where CoPilot really shines. It has calulated all my routes perfectly, and never once give me an error, or a situation where I had to second guess it. And just for that I really like CoPilot. I wouldnt hesitate recommending this to people who are still not happy to use GPS’s. In fact, I have stopped using my Garmin in the last few weeks.

One criticism I have is that the South African version of CoPilot is expensive – CoPilot makes versions of CoPilot for many parts of the world, and currently the only version that is more expensive than the SA one is a version for the entire Europe. Meanwhile, the entire US mapset costs $19.99 at the moment. What makes this even more unfair is that the SA one doesnt support many of CoPilot’s “live” features, such as traffic reports. Now I realize there isnt infrastructure in place for this in SA, but still, the price seems to target international travellers visiting SA for the World Cup. Maybe the map providers in SA ask very high prices, but I think the price should drop a lot. At least we do get weather, and you can easily ask for current location or just about anywhere:

Overall I am very impressed by CoPilot Live – it is clear that they have put more attention to detail in their product – it runs smoothly, and works well around the iPhone’s application framework shortcomings. I am actually very interested to see what how they will implement the GPS framework of iPhone OS 4.0 in the future.

Rating: 4 out of 5 (drop the price and I will give it a 5)

Pros:


Works well – nice speed, reliable
Routing works well
Very detailed mapset
Interface is excellent – good example of how porting is not always a bad thing

Cons:
Pricey for the SA version
Performance on the 3G is significantly slower than the 3GS

This is a big deal folks. In terms of market capitalization, Apple has just shot past Microsoft. For many, many years Microsoft was untouchable, but unfortunately their growth in terms of share price has been dwindling recently. Apple on the other hand, has had a impressive growth spurt in the last few years, starting with the iPod, and now their big money maker, the iPhone.

What makes this even more impressive is that in the mid nineties, Apple were just about ready to close up shop. With a bunch of corporate shake ups and poor leadership on the board, many expected the company to just give up. Luckily Apple somehow go hold of its ousted leader, Steve Jobs, and put him back in charge as interim CEO, or in Apple speak, the iCEO. Before this, Dell CEO, Michael Dell famously pronounced that the right thing to do for Apple is to close shop, and give back the money to the shareholders. Imagine you were one of the shareholders then – things are definitely looking up today. This because Steve Jobs shaked up Apple’s structure and brought back its culture, something that was always Apple’s biggest asset.

What he did is basically scrap unnecessary product lines and refine existing products to just a few choices. It is still very much evident today with the Apple range of products. Despite thinking that people want infinite choice, Apple proves that people do not want to be bombarded with different products.

Now one should not dismiss Microsoft in this – this is after all percepted value of a company based on shares. Apple only has around 10 percent of the US market, while Microsoft is still very profitable, despite these profits primarily coming from its operating systems and productivity software, but then again they sink a lot of money in to other divisions like Xbox and Windows phone, which is yet to turn signaificant profits, if any at all.

What it comes down to is that investors are not always the best people to value a company – Microsoft is still the dominant player in the corporate market, where scale, not pure profit per sale is what is more important (just go look at the profits in building an iPad). Whatever you might read into this, we still live in a Windows world.

I dont believe Microsoft to take back their place in the next few weeks – Apple has an exciting month lined up. On June 7th they are releasing their next generation iPhone (which has been leaked it seems, and it looks great) and also roll out the next release of it iPhone operating system, which will roll out to eager iPhone 3G and 3GS users. This software update also addresses one of the last major criticisms of the iPhone platform with multitasking, although only for the 3GS model (and of course the upcoming one).

I think the battle is still coming.
PS: If you want some history on Apple, go read iCon: Steve Jobs, The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business, a great book by Jefferey S. Young. Another great book is Inside Steve’s Brain, by Leander Kahney (he is the guy behind the Cult of Mac website).

According to Mike Abramsky, analyst at RBC Capital Markets, Apple is currently selling over 200 000 iPads a week – almost double the number of Macs being sold in the USA each week (approximately 110 000), and only slightly lower than the number of iPhone 3GS handsets being sold each week (around 246 000).

Abramsky believes that the strong sales figures of the iPad are being driven by “rising consumer visibility to iPad’s user experience, sustained PR/word-of-mouth marketing, 3G iPad launch, and broadening iPad apps/content”.

Based on the current outlook, Abramsky has raised his expectations for global iPad sales in 2010 from 5 million to 8 million (via Digital Daily).

Dutch analytics company Distimo have just released their latest report, which focuses on the US App Store for the iPad and iPhone. The report makes for good reading for anyone with an interest in mobile device application development.

According to the report, the number of apps for iPad has grown to 4,870 since the release of the iPad on 3 April. Predictably, the largest application category for the iPad is Games, which has 1,577 titles (32% of the total), followed by Entertainment with 455 titles and Books with 396.

The average price of an iPhone app in the app store is $3.82, as opposed to $4.67 for iPad apps. 80% of the 4,870 applications for iPad are paid, compared to 73% of the 186,414 applications for iPhone.

Medical and Finance applications are the most expensive apps for the iPad, at an average of $42.11 and $18.48 respectively. This is significantly more than the average price for applications in these categories for iPhone ($10.74 and $5.74 respectively).

Visit the Distimo site to download the full report for free.

Apple yesterday made public the dates for their annual WWDC conference. On June 7 you can expect Steve Jobs to grace the stage again to welcome developers for the Apple ecosystem. While it has been primarily concerned with development on the Mac platform in the past, in recent years the focus has been much more on the iPh0ne. While the conference deals primarily with app development, iPhone fans everywhere are also interested seeing as this is where Apple traditionally announces their new iPhone. Perhaps also a sneak peak at the next generation Mac OS X. Cougar? Or Feral Cat?

Unfortunately this year the hype will be a little more subdued, seeing as most tech lovers have already seen the pictures and specs of the next iPhone, but this is not to say that prototype was final…

Update: Turns out this WWDC will focus much less on desktop development than ever before.