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TheAppleBlog
News, reviews, walkthroughs, and real-life application of Apple products
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New Mac Mini Small in Size and in Value
Apple’s release of the new Mac mini on Tuesday was partly overshadowed by pre-ordering of iPhone 4. It’s refreshing to see a Mac update in the middle of all the iOS devices and apps that were the center of WWDC.

What’s great about the update is the new case design, the HDMI port, and the speed bump in specs. The new mini lives in a smaller, brushed aluminum case with a twist off bottom that gives easy access to the RAM. No more pulling off the case with a putty knife. Apple has shown once again that it cares intensely about its products, and put its brilliant design into everything it does. Moving the power brick inside the case is another example of small moves that translate to a better user experience. The new mini is sharp and sleek.

Small Size, Small Value

But what’s not so great about the new mini is its value proposition when compared to an iMac or MacBook. The mini is now technically equal to a MacBook, with a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo, 1066MHz front side bus, and 2GB of RAM. They both also use the same graphics card: an NVIDIA GeForce 320M.

The Mac mini used to be the affordable Mac, not cheap, but affordable, when it debuted at $499. Now at $699, it is a mere $300 away from a MacBook, and $500 less than an iMac. Once you throw in an Apple wireless keyboard ($70), a new Magic Mouse ($70), and a new 21-inch monitor ($190 from Dell), the difference between an iMac and a Mac mini is down to around $210.

Still, $210 is a decent amount of money, especially if you are on a budget… and really, who is not on a budget these days.

Specific Audience

The Mac mini appeals to a very specific audience. It was originally designed as a drop-in replacement for a desktop PC. Simply pull out your old PC, and plug your keyboard, monitor, and mouse into the new mini, and you are off and running. Home theater enthusiasts recognized the mini’s value as the digital hub, and began plugging it into their TVs. Technologists then started using it as a home server, a headless Mac to share their iTunes library and act as a file server. Apple’s done a great job paying attention to its customers, and has updated the mini to appeal to each of these groups. The mini is not for me, but I can appreciate how versatile it is. If you are in the market for an upgrade, the new mini looks solid.

Are you going to be buying the new Mac mini? More excited about the mini than iPhone 4? Sound off in the comments!

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5 Ways to Maximize Your Evernote Usage
While I’m a big fan of Instapaper’s “Read It Later” tool, Evernote is my system of record for all my notes and collected information. Simply put, any large project I’m working on, general reference notes, or stuff I just might normally bookmark ends up in Evernote. One thing I love about it is, no matter what platform I’m on, PC, Mac, or iDevice, I can get access to my all my notes.

Over time, I’ve formed a few habits to help me get the most out of Evernote and I thought I’d share them with you.

1. Go Premium

At the risk of sounding like a corporate shill, simply upgrading to Premium helped me get more out of Evernote. At the base level, your storage and bandwidth increases and you gain the ability to dump darn near anything into Evernote with the clipper or by drag-and-dropping. Once I got my iPad, however, going Premium was a no-brainer — with Premium you can store all your notes offline on mobile devices; Standard users can only favorite notes. Unfortunately, you’re limited to how much you can edit a document on an iDevice, so make sure a clipped note is cleaned up as much as possible in a web or desktop client.

2. Tag everything

Absolutely no note should be in your notebook without being tagged. Feel free to overdo it, too. Tagging is the easiest way to find data in your notebooks. Common tags I use are: writing, Apple, iPad, Mac, journalism, etc. Periodically review notebooks to make sure you’ve got everything tagged. This may sound like a no-brainer, but once I got in the habit of tagging everything, it became very easy to find data.

3. Use multiple notebooks

I use notebooks as a type of root-level tagging. For technical subjects, I have two notebooks (“technical – Apple” and “technical”) to separate out Apple-related notes since that’s obviously a big topic for me. Each of my classes at school get their own notebook, and I’ll also tag all notes with the subject of the class. So, my Critical Thinking for Research class will get its own notebook, and all my notes in there will be tagged with the class number and “biology.” This way, future searches on Biology will also pull those notes. I’m working on a fiction book based in Boston in the 70s, and that book has its own notebook.

4. Use saved searches

Because of my often-anal approach to tagging, I’ve got a ton of them. However, there are some search terms I end up using frequently and scrolling through the list of tags isn’t effective. So, for common terms like “iPad” I’ll create a saved search for ALL NOTEBOOKS, with TAGGED: iPad. By command-clicking on multiple tags, I can create a search based on all of them, so if I want to find something I’ve clipped that Merlin Mann wrote about writing, I’ll end up with a search based on TAGGED: MANN TAGGED: WRITING.

Now, it’s possible to think that saved searches might be a replacement for multiple notebooks, but don’t fall for that. Multiple notebooks are an ideal way to segregate information.

5. Use Safari’s Reader view to email articles to Evernote

I’m falling in love with the new Safari Reader view — so much so that I’m thinking of using Safari on the PC more. The new Reader view has two great features: it’ll grab multi-page articles into one view, and it strips out the extraneous crap I end up needing to delete when I clip a page via the web view.

However, the money shot in Reader view is that you email right from it. So, you’ll get a nicely formated note in your notebook. You can also specify the notebook and tags right in the subject line. For instance, “Test Notebook @technical-apple #ipad” to send to my Apple notebook with an iPad tag. Note: this only works for existing tags and notebooks; you can’t create notebooks and tags via email.

Evernote is a very powerful tool that’s replaced almost every note app I’ve used on my iPad (with the exception of Notes, which I use like a scrap of paper). I’d love to hear how you use Evernote!

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Apple Sells Out iPhone 4 Pre-order Units, Despite Hiccups
Likely you watched with a mix of horror and admiration as Apple’s iPhone 4 pre-order kicked off yesterday, nearly bringing down the Internet thanks to the ravenous hunger of the Cupertino faithful. Well, despite the fact that many couldn’t even force Apple or AT&T to take their money far in advance of the device’s actual release date until much, much later in the day, the iPhone 4 initial pre-order allotment has already sold out.

That means that if you order now, your expected delivery date won’t be the June 24 launch date, but July 2 instead. And that’s a ships by, not a delivers by date. Radio Shack tweeted that they ran out of its initial supply only 90 minutes after it started taking pre-orders. AT&T has temporarily suspended pre-orders for the iPhone 4 at its site, which may have to do with demand, or with claims that AT&T customers were seeing other people’s credit card information upon pre-ordering.

Compare that to last year, when it took nearly five days for AT&T to burn through its pre-order stock, and Apple was still guaranteeing launch day delivery a full week after pre-ordering opened. Plus, the iPhone 3GS launched in more countries initially than the iPhone 4 did.

International launch is the next big question mark hanging above this record-setting sell out. We already saw Apple push back international dates for the iPad following that device’s early pre-order success, and that was nothing compared to the speed with which the iPhone 4 sold out. I have a sinking feeling that the loose “July” date for launch here in Canada might get pushed back to “late Summer.” At least when it does get here, it’ll be sold factory unlocked.

The iPhone 4′s launch success will obviously stand as a stark refutation of those who’ve been claiming that iPhone will die in the face of the Android onslaught. AT&T reported to TechCrunch that it received 10 times the pre-order volume for the iPhone 4 than it did for the iPhone 3GS. Presumably that isn’t only return customers, though it would make sense that a lot of the 3G owner crowd that skipped the 3GS would be coming back again now that their contracts are nearly up.

Apple said it was planning on moving three million units per month of the iPhone 4. Does that mean it’s already sold that many worldwide since launch? No, it most definitely does not. Apple has just announced that it took 600,000 pre-orders yesterday, though, which is a very impressive number on its own and promises a very successful launch indeed, since that doesn’t include units being sold in physical retail locations.

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iWork for iPhone and iLife for iPad?
With the rumored but still unexpected announcement of iMovie for the iPhone 4 and the adoption of Apple's A4 processor in the new mobile device, it begs the question of what else could be in store for Apple's iDevices.

Could we see iMovie or other iLife apps arrive for the iPad or even see iWork show up for the iPhone 4?

The Case for iWork on the iPhone

There's quite a bit of evidence to support an eventual release of Pages, Keynote and Numbers on the iPhone. First, looking at Apple's screenshots showcasing iOS 4, there is mention of a feature that allows attachments to be opened in a native application, if the application is installed. The example shown by Apple (the real image from Apple’s website is shown to the left) depicted opening a presentation in Keynote, but Keynote doesn't exist on the iPhone just yet.

Another consideration is the iPhone 4 supports the Dock Connector to VGA cable and Apple actively promotes this as an accessory. While there's potential for developers to make use of this, it seems more likely that this accessory serves the same purpose it does for the iPad — to output presentations to an attached projector. Does Apple really make its accessories for third parties or don’t they really have to serve a function for Apple first?

Yet another reason to believe that iWork is coming to the iPhone is support in iOS 4 for bluetooth keyboards. Sure, if you email all day on your iPhone, there may be a reason why you'd want an external keyboard. But don't you think they have something a little bigger in mind? Like composing a document in Pages?

To learn more about using iWork, check out our iWork screencasts on TechUniversity (subscription required).

The Case for iLife on the iPad

First, while iMovie for the iPhone looks to be phenomenal, there's clearly not a need for it on the iPad yet because the iPad doesn't have a built-in camera. But that super-fast A4 chip and large display just seems to be screaming to edit some video.

Here's some more evidence. The iPad Camera Connection kit supports more than just photos. If your camera also records video, they will copy into your camera roll on the iPad. Guess what? If you record video now on your iPhone 3GS, it goes into the your camera roll. That's where iMovie for the iPhone searches for source footage to edit. There's two logical conclusions that I draw from this. The first is that it should be possible to use the same connection kit on the iPhone 4 as a means to get additional video onto the device (though we won't know for sure until the device ships). The second thought, and most important, is that we already have a method to get video clips onto the iPad, so why not allow us to edit them? The technology is already in place and with Apple pushing towards universal binaries to allow iPhone and iPad apps to share a same codebase, it's not as hard as you'd think for them to port the app over to the iPad.

As an aside, when I refer to this app as iMovie for the iPhone, the “for the iPhone” emphasis is my own. Look around on Apple’s website and you’ll notice that when they refer to the app itself, it’s just iMovie, just like Pages, Keynote and Numbers.

What about the potential for other iLife applications? The Photos app already lets you see your photos by Faces and Places. While the current Connection Kit just imports into an album, the next logical step would be for the iPad to crunch away and tag your photos with existing people and locations that it recognizes. In terms of editing your photos, this seems like a no-brainer as well. Considering the fairly limited editing functionality built into iPhoto '09, it seems that it wouldn't be too difficult to add that functionality into the iPad, especially considering the nature of finger input and how this would be a very natural way to touch up a photo.

In the areas of GarageBand and iWeb, well these are a bit harder of a sell. Certainly there's plenty of argument for the success of music-related apps and the iPad is a great platform for this. When these types of apps are successful, Apple wants to get in on that action. iWeb is probably the least likely of these, but who knows?

With such a large screen and Apple's push towards these devices paving the way towards a future of new ways to interact with technology, I feel we've only seen the beginning of what's to come. When the original iPhone launched, everyone oohed and ahhed but the device was rather simplistic. It had some fancy features, sure, but the real power wasn't tapped until developers started creating apps for it. Of course, Apple contributed its own plethora of apps and feature updates as well. The iPad still exists in this space but that's starting to change with new apps and whenever we may finally see iOS 4 for the iPad.

To learn more about using iLife, check out our iLife screencasts on TechUniversity (subscription required).

Some of this may be speculation, but there's also some evidence that point to some surprises Apple may have up its sleeve. Remember Steve's quote… for a device to exist between the iPhone and the laptop and be successful, it's "going to have to be far better at some key tasks. They're going to have to be far better than the laptop and better than the smartphone." Steve even listed off what those key tasks were, including photos, video and music. So what do you think? Share your thoughts!

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Should There Be iOS Support for the Mac?
My daughter loves her iPhone, and recently observed that the iPhone OS reminds her a lot of Mac OS Classic System 6 — the operating system on which we both cut our computing teeth some 18 years ago. I think she has a valid point.

Even on our respective underpowered and memory-challenged 8MHz Motorola 68000 Mac Plus compacts, with their puny 2.5MB of RAM, System 6 was amazingly lively — especially when booted from their external 20MB SCSI hard drives rather than standard, floppy-drive booting. Startup was much faster than with Snow Leopard on a Core 2 Duo, and once it appeared, the System 6 GUI’s tasteful and spare simplicity was charmingly elegant in razor-sharp one-bit black and white, although if you had a “color Mac” you could assign colors to folders. Until displaced by System 7 in 1991, System 6 provided a basic co-operative multitasking function called MultiFinder.

Notwithstanding its limitations by today’s standards, System 6 was in many respects my favorite Mac operating system version ever. It’s not very useful nowadays for anything but the most rudimentary computing tasks on antique hardware, and it never had more than vestigial Internet support, but I’ve fantasized from time to time about how great it would be if Apple were to offer a System 6 UI skin for OS X — especially back in the day when OS X running on my older, slower, Power PC hardware was more than a bit, well…sluggish. Nothing sluggish about System 6, or, back to the main point of this screed — the iPhone OS. Dual-booting the iOS on a Mac along with OS X for power and versatility when you need it would be a super value-added feature for Mac users.

Given that the iOS is a direct derivative of OS X, developed from the same Darwin core, and when you can run Windows and Linux on Macs, it seems silly for it not to be supported by the Mac, opening the vast selection of iOS apps to Mac users.
More on WWDC
With multitasking, folder, and Bluetooth keyboard support as well as greater optimization for the iPad’s larger display all coming in iOS 4, the iOS’s appeal as a lean computer operating system will be even more attractive.

Major advantages afforded by running the iOS on the Mac would be faster boot times (perhaps even faster than old System 6) and a “greener” carbon footprint thanks to its economy of power consumption — the latter a potential major advantage for laptop users when running on battery power.

Some are suggesting that Mac OS 11 might well even be merged and integrated with the iOS, which seems plausible and logical. In the meantime, there’s much to be said for adding iOS dual-boot capability to OS 10.7.

Would the ability to run the iOS on your Mac appeal to you?

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