There is a fairly standard routine for product refresh cycles in the auto industry. After a major model upgrade, in which the sheet metal and inner workings are extensively redesigned, the manufacturers take a breather (or start work on the next major revision). Annual updates for the next few years will tend to be incremental. […]

Some years back, a few of us made the pitch for a “Mythical Midrange Mac Minitower,” to use the term coined by Macworld Senior Editor Dan Frakes. I preferred to call it a “headless iMac,” since I envisioned something with the guts of the iMac, but without the display. I was thinking of a 21st […]

Not so long ago, some people ragged on The Night Owl because they misunderstood my statements that the Mac Pro might be an endangered species in the near future. My point was not that it would happen this year, or the next, but that the future might be bleak for its continuation several years from […]

The benchmarks are pouring in, and it does appear the recent MacBook Pro speed bump delivers far more performance than what you’d expect from an incremental hardware upgrade. Much of that is due to the use of Intel’s Sandy Bridge processor family across the board, available in dual-core or quad-core configuration, depending on which model […]