A MacBook Pro 15″ with an Apple Cinema 20″ Display is a classic setup where you can’t go wrong. The fisheye lens distorts things a bit, but it still looks great.
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When was the last time an operating system update gave you more battery life? I can’t remember that ever happening, but here I am running the dev preview of Mac OS X Lion and I have longer battery life than I do running another OS.
I can’t vouch for all Macs, but on my MacBook Air 11.6″ base model with the screen brightness set to half and running Mac OS X 10.7 Lion it’s squeezing out 8 hours of battery life with 91% charge remaining. That is about an hour longer than Apples suggested max battery life on the 11.6″ Air, and nearly 3 hours longer than I get in 10.6 Snow Leopard under similar usage conditions.
It was just last week that I took a screenshot of battery life in this menubar tip. This is the same MacBook Air, same brightness settings, same apps open, the only difference is Mac OS X 10.6.6, where it shows 5 hours of battery remaining at a 95% charge:
Is this just a fluke? Maybe Lion calculates remaining battery life differently, or maybe there is a fundamental change in how Mac OS X Lion manages power? I don’t have an answer, but my anecdotal evidence shows that I get significantly more battery life out of Lion Developer Preview than I do in Snow Leopard. I’ve continued to test this and even after increasing machine activity, CPU load, and screen brightness, the MacBook Air continues to show the same results.
The more I use the developer preview, the more I like it. If you’re a developer and you haven’t used it yet, install Lion on another partition and dual boot your Mac, there isn’t much to lose. For the rest of you, you can either register for the developer program and pay $99 for access, or you can just wait until Summer for the release and watch this 16 minute Mac OS X 10.7 video walkthrough in the meantime to get a good feel for the new OS.
Mac OS X market share is growing nicely around the world with some pretty impressive numbers in North America, Oceania, and parts of Europe.
As a continent, North America takes the cake at 14.09%, which isn’t too surprising considering it is the home of Apple. Next up is Oceania (Australia & New Zealand) at 13.71%. Europe as a whole is at a somewhat low 6%, but looking at specific countries gives a very different picture; Switzerland tops off everywhere in the world with a 17.61% Mac market share, followed by Luxembourg with 15.79%, Iceland at 15.18%, Norway with 12.14%, and Denmark’s 11.71%.
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Here’s one of the stranger tips I’ve seen to boost your iPhone reception; put it in a glass. Yea, like a water glass. I can imagine a surge of funny pictures featuring people talking to water cups, but apparently for some people this actually works.
The tip was discovered by an author at TheNextWeb, who found that they had no reception in a dungeon-ish restaurant:
a few years ago one of the waitresses… discovered (how?) that if you put a phone in an empty glass it dramatically improves the reception. The Pasta e Basta restaurant is basically stuck in a concrete basement so reception has always been awful. But since they found out about this trick they at least have had enough reception to make and receive calls.
The waiter gave me glass, I put my iPhone in, reluctantly, and lo and behold: I got 3 bars and no 3G but some GPRS. Not perfect but a huge improvement from the ‘No signal’ message I got earlier.
Who would have guessed?
I decided to try it out myself. I have AT&T and live in one of those famous reception dark spots, so it’s pretty easy for me to find a place where the iPhone has no reception. I put the iPhone in a glass and… still no service. Just for fun I went to a place where I usually have a few bars and it did increase one bar of reception, but I get the same effect from setting the iPhone on a table and just not holding the iPhone at all. Not too impressive. The next step was to beat the dead horse, so naturally I took this a step further and tried to make a phone call with the iPhone in a glass. Big surprise, it’s a terrible experience. You can’t talk normally (hint: there’s a reason phones aren’t made to resemble a water glass) so I put the iPhone on speaker mode instead, this caused the calls recipient to hear themselves talk in a super annoying echo chamber.
No dice for me, but maybe it’ll work in a bind for you.
AT&T is beginning to crack down on unofficial iPhone tethering methods, including users of MyWi, the unofficial iPhone WiFi hotspot app that is popular among jailbreakers.
Customers are being notified that their service plans need updating to subscribe to a tethering plan, and that they will be automatically subscribed to a DataPro 4GB package that costs an additional $45 per month if they continue to tether. In the email, AT&T also notes that if customers discontinue the use of tethering, no changes will be made to their plan.
Here is the full letter that AT&T is sending to select iPhone customers who are suspected of using unofficial tethering methods:
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If you plan on getting the iPad 2 (if you can find one in stock) and you’re a gamer, don’t forget to grab the video mirroring cable. But don’t take my word for it, check out this video that shows the huge potential of the iPad 2 to be a game console. Combining the Digital AV Adapter with iPad 2′s video mirroring capabilities outputted to an HDTV gives you a very playable gaming rig.
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While investigating a story about the upcoming iPhone 5, I stumbled across several Chinese resellers who are selling what they refer to as “iPhone Nano” parts and accessories. Most compelling is an LCD screen labeled “for iphone NANO 5″ but there are also several cases that are built for an iPhone that currently doesn’t exist.
I had a brief conversation with one of the resellers through online chat, they asked if we needed an LCD screen or digitizer, and confirmed to us that the “iPhone Nano 5″ is an unreleased product:
I blocked out their full name from the screenshot for obvious reasons. When I asked about other parts, they said there is also a ribbon cable for the “iPhone Nano 5″ available for purchase.
To make matters more interesting, the picture of the alleged iPhone Nano digitizer (screen) doesn’t have a home button, which corresponds with past rumors of an iPhone Mini with an ‘edge-to-edge’ screen. Here’s a larger picture of the ‘nano’ screen available:
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If you’ve been provided with an App Store promo code, here’s how to redeem it from the Mac App Store client and iOS App Store from iTunes:
Redeem a Promo Code on the Mac App Store:
Redeem a Promo Code on the iOS App Store:
Remember, once you have redeemed a code or bought an app, any subsequent downloads of that same app are free.
I sense a new trend… iPad 2 Fridge Art! Apparently the magnets in the iPad 2 Smart Cover are strong enough to hold the iPad to a refrigerator, not that we’d recommend it.
I like the idea, but I’m not sure how comfortable I am hanging a $500 item on the refrigerator without additional reinforcement. If you’re brave enough to try this, just grab a good drawing app for the iPad and hand it to the artistic youth in your family for the fanciest fridge art you’ll ever see.
Haven’t had a chance to play around with Mac OS X Lion yet? Check out this 16 minute video walkthrough, it provides a nice look at the current 10.7 developer preview. It goes through the major changes and features, and gives a good overview of the next Mac OS X.
Want to run it yourself? Check out our guide to install Mac OS X 10.7 on a separate partition and dual boot with 10.6, it’s the best way to try out Lion without messing with your stable Snow Leopard installation.
