Except for some reports of the form of future Apple products — the iPhone 12 and the first Macs with Apple Silicon — that hasn’t been a whole lot of important news to cover about our favorite fruit company. Whether you have time on your hands — or are working at home — no doubt you are running the family TV for more hours than usual.

Now there’s so much content available for streaming from the various services, you should be able to find some material that’s worth watching.

As most of you know, Barbara and I are very pop culture oriented, and we found enough good shows on the family TV from traditional broadcast networks to keep us occupied most evenings, at least until seasons ended prematurely because of production shutdowns. So we were left looking for alternatives.

Continue Reading…

Some of you have wondered whether the fact that I’m not writing as many columns means that I’m slowing down, or planning to retire. But it’s not about wanting to work less. It’s more about the fact that Apple is not the company it was when I started the original version of this site in 1999, and I’ve begun to repeat myself a little too often.

Then, Apple was just a couple of years coming out of a near-death experience. It wasn’t out of line to think that there wouldn’t be an Apple Computer for many more years, so those of us who embraced the platform by buying its products had to work harder to prove — maybe to ourselves — that it was the correct idea. And as Apple’s fortunes improved, to refute the fake news and ill-informed commentaries written about them.

Segue to 2020.

Continue Reading…

One of the main reasons given for Apple’s decision to limit most discussion about future products is not to harm sales of existing hardware. This is certainly true for incremental product updates. So if you knew what was coming in the 2020 iPhone, you might postpone buying the current (2019) model. Well, at least when the next version is coming soon.

More or less.

But when it comes to an iPhone, Apple has been quite predictable in releasing annual updates, and for the most part, the new model isn’t so improved compared to the current model that you should rush to upgrade. At this point, most iPhone owners probably know that new models are forthcoming — and when — and they will decide if they need to wait for something special, or just buy what they want now.

Continue Reading…

In announcing a two-year transition from Intel Inside to Apple Silicon, has Apple killed potential sales of new Macs?

Is that even possible? Or are the tech pundits getting just a little bit beside themselves with logic and reason?

Now the news about Apple’s third processor switch wasn’t surprising. It had been predicted for several years, and Intel’s delays in reducing die size and making CPUs faster and more power efficient haven’t helped. It meant that your spiffy new Mac wasn’t very much better than the one for the previous year, or the year before that.

In turn, Apple boasts that A-series CPU performance has increased 100-fold in the past decade. I’m not aware that today’s MacBook Pro’s performance is 100-fold faster than the 2010 model, the one that’s still in regular use over here.

Continue Reading…