You probably know by now that Windows 8 Consumer Preview was released recently. This is what Microsoft is betting their future on, combining their traditional desktop experience with the all new tiled Metro interface, aimed at tablets and portable computers.

Thanks to virtualization, anyone can try Windows 8 easily right on top of their current operating system. This makes it easy to both install and also remove later when you’re done with it. While this article is intended for Mac users, VirtualBox will run in Linux, Solaris, and Windows as well, so you can take this to just about any platform.

Everything is free and there is little risk to trying this out. If you’ve been curious about Windows 8 this is the easiest way to get direct experience with it. Here’s what you’ll need to get started:
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Ever wonder what an iOS developers home office looks like? This great Mac setup should give you an idea. Coming to us from Henry in Florida, this setup is used primarily for iOS development and photography. There’s a lot of great Apple hardware here, including:

• 2011 MacBook Air i7 with 256GB SSD
• 2008 Mac Pro with 2 Xeon Quad-Core CPU’s, 16GB RAM, and 2 3TB hard drives
• 2011 Mac Mini Server
• 27″ Thunderbolt Display attached to the MacBook Air
• 30″ Apple Cinema Display connected to Mac Pro
• iPad 2
• iPad 1 3G
• Original iPhone, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4S, and two iPhone 4’s
• Logitech Mac Keyboard

There’s a Magic Trackpad and Magic Mouse in there too, and the MacBook Air looks to be on an mStand from Rain Design.

If you’re wondering why so many iPhones and iPads are necessary, keep in mind developers need a handful of devices around to test for compatibility and to find obscure bugs that only pop up in certain versions of iOS.

Great Mac setup Henry!

Send us pictures of your Apple & Mac hardware setups! Email them to osxdailycom@gmail.com and include some brief details on the hardware and what you use it for.

The iPad 3 will be priced the same as existing iPad 2 models, even though it is expected to have a significantly improved Retina display, a more powerful processor and graphics capabilities, and 4G LTE connectivity. This unsurprising report comes from 9to5mac, who cites a traditionally reliable source who even provided model numbers of the next-generation iPad. This means pricing for iPad 3 will be as follows:

Wi-Fi Models

• 16GB – $499
• 32GB – $599
• 64GB – $699

Cellular 3G / 4G LTE (?) Models

• 16GB – $629
• 32GB – $729
• 64GB – $829

9to5mac also mentions that some countries with a stronger currency will actually see prices for the iPad 3 go down slightly, though those countries and the final sale prices are not yet known.

While Apple rarely increases the price of products, there was a brief rumor passed around that pricing for the next gen iPad would be slightly higher to accommodate for increased production costs. That sounded unlikely to begin with, and now it appears even less likely.

The model numbers for iPad 3 are alleged to be as follows:

MC705LL/A – J1 GOOD A-USA
MC706LL/A – J1 BETTER A-USA
MC707LL/A – J1 BEST A-USA

MD328LL/A – J1 GOOD B- USA
MD329LL/A – J1 BETTER B-USA
MD330LL/A – J1 BEST-B-USA

MD366LL/A – J2A GOOD A-USA
MD367LL/A – J2A BETTER A-USA
MD368LL/A – J2A BEST A-USA

MD369LL/A – J2A GOOD B-USA
MD370LL/A – J2A BETTER B-USA
MD371LL/A – J2A BEST B-USA

J1 is said to be Wi-Fi and J2 are said to be cellular connected models. Presumably there are two of each to account for the iPad being available in both black and white colors.

iPad 3 will be launched on March 7 and is expected to ship soon after.

iOS 6 running on an iPad is beginning to make appearances in web logs, indicating that Apple is working on a future release of their mobile operating system. Virtually nothing is known about iOS 6 at this time, but it should come as no surprise that Apple is working on versions of iOS beyond the current iOS 5.1 beta.

The iOS 6 server log entries were first noticed by ArsTechnica, who narrowed down the origin of the iOS 6 user agents to Cupertino, California, the home of Apple Inc. Similar finds have become a somewhat reliable method of discovering future Apple OS releases prior to announcement, as demonstrated by with OS X 10.8 last October and OS X 10.7 a full year before its debut. This doesn’t indicate that iOS 6 will be released anytime soon however, though speculation suggests we could see an iOS 6 beta as soon as WWDC 2012.

Of course, it’s always possible that Apple will surprise everyone and skip iOS 5.1 completely in favor of iOS 6, but that seems unlikely given the current version of iOS is 5.0.1. The public version of iOS 5.1 is widely believed to debut as a free update alongside the launch of iPad 3 next week on March 7.

It is worth pointing out that spoofing user agents is ridiculously easy. For example, the string below will spoof a similar iOS 6 and iPad user agent to the target server of osxdaily.com, change the URL at the end to something else if you wish to fool others.

curl -A "Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 6_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/535.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.3.5 Mobile/8J2 Safari/535.8" https://osxdaily.com

That wouldn’t change your geographical location though, so you may need to book a flight to Cupertino if you really want to trick someone.

Can’t wait for OS X Mountain Lion to be released this summer? You can get many of the features of the next generation Mac OS X version right now. Whether you are running OS X Lion or to an extent, OS X Snow Leopard, read on to find out how to get everything from notifications, note syncing, synced reminders, iMessages, the simplified Safari UI, Twitter integration, AirPlay mirroring, and much more.

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Do you need to force quit an unresponsive Mac app? Is your Mac seeing the infamously dreaded spinning beachball of death? Is an app failing to respond to any input? Maybe you have an errant process or two? When any of the above happens, you’ll probably want to forcibly quit the application in question, and that’s what we’ll cover with this walkthrough, showing you how to force quit apps on a Mac with seven different methods.

Whatever your skill level with Mac, you’ll find a way to forcibly exit out of an app. Read on to learn more!

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A MAC address is a unique identification number assigned to network interfaces, these can be attached to physical hardware like NIC and Wi-Fi cards or assigned to virtual machines. On some occasions, you’ll need to change a MAC address to another ID.

We’ve received a few questions about this recently because the process of changing (sometimes called spoofing) these addresses has changed slightly from version to version in Mac OS X. With that in mind, we will show you how to change a MAC address in the latest versions of OS X 10.7, 10.8 Mountain Lion, and 10.9 OS X Mavericks, and OS X 10.10 Yosemite.

Launch the Terminal found within /Applications/Utilities/ to get started.
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CAPS LOCK is a either loved or hated, but regardless of the variety of opinions on capitalizing every single letter typed out, it can sometimes be just outright necessary. If you find yourself needing to use caps lock on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, it’s really easy to turn on and turn off, and you can do it from just about anywhere.

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Reflection is a great new app for OS X that mirrors an iPhone or iPad display directly to a Mac by way of AirPlay.
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By far the easiest way to sync an iPhone to a new Mac or Windows PC is to transfer all iPhone files and backups from the old computer to the new one. The necessary data is stored in several different locations, and we’ll cover what files and where they go for both Mac OS X and Windows.
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Deleting a group of emails in iOS Mail is fairly straight forward, it entails manually selecting each specific email you want to delete, and then relocating them to the Trash.

This process of deleting multiple emails is the same on Mail app for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. We’ll cover the exact steps to take.

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Microsoft released Windows 8 Consumer Preview today, a pre-release version of their next generation operating system. Windows 8 incorporates the touch-centric Metro interface while still maintaining access to the standard Windows file system and desktop, effectively merging their tablet UI and desktop UI into a single operating system. This is obviously a different approach than Apple took while keeping separate iOS and OS X, but nonetheless Microsoft is bent on this strategy to compete with Apple’s offerings and the wildly successful iPad.

To be fair, Windows 8 is actually a pretty decent OS with some innovative ideas, and with the freely available Consumer Preview anyone can download an ISO and install it themselves to give it a whirl. If you’re curious what’s been cooking in Redmond Washington, running Windows 8 yourself is the best way to find out. Dust off that PC and run it natively, or you can try installing it on a Mac with Boot Camp or run it within VirtualBox or VMWare. Here are the general system requirements before getting started:

Windows 8 System Requirements

• 1 GHz CPU or faster
• 1GB of RAM or higher
• 16GB hard disk space
• DirectX 9 GPU or better
• Internet access
• Touch-screen to support multitouch features

If you have hardware that meets the requirements (you probably do), download an ISO and start installing, the links below point directly to Microsoft servers.

Download Windows 8 Consumer Preview ISO

The product key for both versions is: DNJXJ-7XBW8-2378T-X22TX-BKG7J

• Windows 8 CP 64-bit – 3.3GB – Download Now
• Windows 8 CP 32-bit – 2.5GB – Download Now

Don’t want to bother with downloading and installing a beta OS that you may not spend much time on? Check out the two videos below to see Windows 8 in action instead.

Read Receipts show the sender of a message that a message has been delivered these are enabled by default in iMessages for iOS, but they are disabled by default in Message for Mac. If you’re interested in having the read receipts sent along with each message received on your Mac, you can toggle a setting to do so.
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A long hidden airport command line utility buried deep in Mac OS X can be used to scan for and find available wireless networks. This powerful tool is very helpful for network admins and systems administrators, but it’s handy for the average user to help discover nearby wi-fi routers as well.

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It’s official: Apple will be unveiling the next iPad on March 7 in San Francisco at 10:00 AM PST. The confirmation of the previously rumored date came in the form of press invites sent out this morning, with an image showing what looks to be a high definition iPad screen and the words “We have something you really have to see. And touch.”

Since the invitation was sent out, Bloomberg has chimed in to confirm that iPad 3 will feature the much expected high-resolution display which is “capable of greater resolution than the current iPad, with more pixels on its screen than some high- definition televisions… the pixels are small enough to make the images look like printed material,” a quad core CPU and greater graphics processing capabilities, and be compatible with significantly faster 4G LTE wireless networks, noting that iPad will receive LTE support prior to the iPhone because of it’s larger battery capacity. The latter hinting that iPhone 5 will feature 4G LTE too.

Additionally, MacRumors posted some photos of a digital caliper measuring the thickness of what claims to be the rear shell of an iPad 3. The shell itself looks identical to the iPad 2 rear aluminium enclosure, but it measures in at 9.5mm, or about 0.8mm thicker than the current iPad 2. For some comparison to a tangible object, the iPhone 4 is also 9.5mm thick.

There is no information on iPad 3 availability after the initial launch, but typically Apple releases new iOS products within a week or two after announcement. Considering the immense interest in a retina screened quad core iPad, we can only hope that pre-orders will offered through Apple’s Online Store, otherwise expect long lines, daily sell outs, and weeks to months before the supply catches up to demand.

If you’re suffering from email overload, sometimes the easiest thing to do is just mark everything as read and start over again. While there is no select all or mark all as read option in iOS, you can mark multiple emails as read on the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch as long as you select them manually with a tap. Here’s what you’ll need to do:

• Open Mail app and tap on “Edit” in the upper right corner
• Tap each email you want to mark as read so that a red checkbox appears on the left alongside the message
• Tap on the “Mark” button in the lower right corner
• Tap “Mark as Read”

The “Mark” buttons label will change to include the number of emails selected so you can be sure of how many messages will be marked as read.

As shown in the screenshots, you can also use bulk message selection within Mail search, making it easy to find and mark messages from a single sender or of a theme as read.

A MAC address is a unique identifier that is assigned to each physical network interface on a computer. Different than a computers IP address, MAC addresses are frequently used for network access control and to monitor network connectivity, and they can be spoofed for virtualization needs or to circumvent some network limitations. If you need to access yours, here’s how to find one from the friendly GUI and the command line.

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We recently covered 12 keyboard shortcuts to help navigate around and manipulate text in Mac OS X, and now we’ll show you a handful of similar tricks for use at the command line. These shortcuts can be used just about anywhere in the Terminal, including the bash prompt.
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