iMac

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Prices are pretty on par with our leaked Apple Black Friday Ad leak from yesterday.

1. iPad 2 – Save A$ 45.00
2. iPod touch – Save A$ 21.00
3. iPod Nano – Save A$ 11.00
4. MacBook Air – Save A$ 121.00
5. MacBook Pro – Save A$ 121.00
6. iMac – Save A$ 121.00

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From 9to5Toys.com:

Best Buy gets the Black Friday started early with some pretty incredible deals this morning:

Buy an 8GB iPod Touch for $195, get a $50 Best Buy Gift Card sent to you.

iPad 2s are $45 off across the board.

iTunes Gift Cards are 20% off 

And the current Macbook Airs start at an impressive $849

More below:
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A trusted tipster has provided us with the details on Apple’s Black Friday (November 25th) 2011 sale. The sale is very similar to Apple’s offerings in past years, but does give better discounts to higher capacities of the iPads and iPods. The deals on the Mac end cover the iMac, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro, while the iPod nano and iPod touch are the discounted iPod offerings. The Macs will be $101 less, the iPads will go from $41-$61 discounts depending on capacity (16GB, 32GB, 64GB), the iPod nano will shave off $11 for both 8GB and 16GB storage sizes, the iPod touch will follow the iPad’s lead of bigger discounts for bigger capacities, ranging from $21-$41 discounts.

The biggest break is the base level MacBook Air which will now start at $898, but both Best Buy and Amazon have it now for $849.

Apple will also (images after the break) discount accessories. On the Apple in-house accessory list is $11 off the iPad 2 Smart Cover (comes out to $28 for the polyurethane and $58 for the leather), $11 off ($58 in total for each) for the Apple Wireless Keyboard and Apple Wireless Magic Trackpad, $5 off ($45 total) for a $50 iTunes/App Store/iBookstore gift card, in addition to discounts on the AirPort Extreme, Time Capsule, and AirPort Express. Third-party accessories such as Western Digital hard drives, the mophie JuicePack Air, Speck CandyShell iPhone 4/4S case, Jawbone Up, a Griffin Universal Remote Control system for the iPod touch, the Jawbone Jambox, a Phillips clock radio, and more are also on sale. Check out the entire sale with the rest of the leaked pamphlet after the break:

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Popular Science Magazine is once again declaring their Best of What’s New Awards for 2011, and not so surprisingly this year’s top three spots in the computing category are all technologies that you will find in Apple’s latest lineup of Macs.

At number one we have OS X Lion which earned a spot for its ability to close the gap between desktop and mobile operating systems with the publication calling it “the first step toward a computing landscape in which one interface can serve all purposes”.

The number two spot goes to Intel Sandy Bridge chips and their ability to reduce “data’s travel time from component to component by replacing lengths of wire with nearly a billion close-knit microscopic transistors”. We know Apple just recently refreshed their MacBook Air and Mac Mini lineup with new Sandy Bridge processors, and future Macs will likely get the same treatment. The new Thunderbolt I/O has also been an emerging technology Apple has adopted for future Macs, and that brings us to number three…

Last but not least, we have Intel Thunderbolt at the number three spot, which we all know Apple teamed up with Intel to help develop and is now being implemented on future iterations of iMacs and MacBooks. Minor limitations aside, its contribution to the tech industry is pretty obvious, as Popular Science puts it, “Thunderbolt’s wires are the first to combine the languages that handle data and display in one channel, making it faster and more versatile than any other connection”.

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I was in New York City for a Samsung event focused on SSDs and gaming on PCs last month.  There wasn’t much in the way of new information, but Samsung gave me one of their SATA III 256GB 830 SSDs to try out.  These are within a few bytes per second of the fastest SATA3 SSDs money can buy, so I was pretty excited to get home and throw it in a Mac.

The problem is that I don’t have a worthy Mac to test it out on.  I’ve been using an Air as my exclusive machine for a year and my wife is tired of me testing stuff on her MacBook Pro.  We have a bunch of old Macs laying around the house but nothing with a SATA III connection.

Luckily, I’ve been in the market for a new Mac desktop since I replaced my MacBook Pro with an Air  last year, but to my surprise, I haven’t really found myself in need of one.  The Air drives my 30-inch display pretty well and most of my media has been offloaded to a Gigabit NAS.  Since I already have a 30-inch display, an iMac doesn’t really appeal to me.  Apple’s headless desktops don’t make sense in my situation either. A Mac Mini isn’t going to be much faster than my Air and the Mac Pro hasn’t been updated in over a year and doesn’t even have SATA 3 on board.

I also have some USB3 and eSATA peripherals that I get for testing and can’t use these products on standard Mac hardware.

I decided to give into temptation and build a Hackintosh…
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There has been no shortage of Apple patent applications published by the US Patent & Trademark Office today (via PatentlyApple). Three of the most interesting with potential to be implemented in upcoming products include a dual OLED backlighting system for future iPads, integrated speaker clip for iPod nano, and new hold and swipe gestures for iOS devices.

First up we have a patent application that backs up a report from DigiTimes claiming Apple is considering alternative backlighting systems with a dual-LED light bar design for iPad 3. PatentlyApple outlines the application which details use of multiple OLED backlights not only in a future iPad, but also potentially in a next-gen iPhone, Cinema Display, MacBook, and iMac.

The report also claims Apple mentions “television in passing” within the application, while quoting an announcement from DuPont regarding new AMOLED processing technology, PatentlyApple says that tech is already being supplied to Asian AMOLED manufacturers. Apple’s alternative backlight solutions could also lead to an overall thinner design:

“The bonding of the OLED backlight in the LCD may also increase the mechanical rigidity of the LCD, which may enable the use of thinner glass substrates and possibly reduce the thickness of the overall device. Further, an OLED backlight may generally be thinner than a typical LED backlight, and may also provide improved light uniformity without the use of light guides or additional brightness enhancing films.”

Details on iPod nano speaker patent and swipe and hold iOS gestures below the fold.

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghdTqnYnFyg]

Among other interesting tidbits on Steve Jobs, technology investment pioneer Ben Rosen reveals that the new Apple CEO invited the then Compaq Chairman and CEO to Silicon Valley in 1999 to inquire about licensing Mac OS X:

After we finished with the amenities and reminiscences, we got to the purpose of the meeting. Steve wanted Compaq to offer the Apple operating system on its PC line, adding to the Microsoft OS that had always been our sole OS. At the time, Compaq was the world’s largest manufacturer of PCs. Our adopting the Apple OS would be seen as a feather in Apple’s cap (and a pretty visible slap at Microsoft). The catching up with Steve was fun, the food was great, but the OS idea never gained traction. Upon further analysis, it didn’t make sense for either Compaq or Apple. Compaq wasn’t about to declare war on Microsoft, our partner from our birth in 1982, and Steve had second thoughts about licensing their crown jewels.

What’s interesting here is this is a year after the introduction of the iMac and more than a year after Jobs had terminated Mac Clone licensing deals with Power Computing, Motorola and others. This was something else entirely.

This is also around the time OS X was being tested (the server version which was a NeXT port was released that same year). From the Intel transition announcement (4:40 above) we know Apple always had an Intel version of the Mac OS X being built alongside the PowerPC version (codenamed Marklar) but it now appears that Apple was seriously considering licensing the Intel version alongside the PowerPC version when the Mac OS X client was released way back at the turn of the decade.

Imagine an alternative universe where Compaq Macs competed with Apple’s Macs through the last decade. Weird.

Also, Rosen has a warm email contact with Steve Jobs where he reveals that though he was a Compaq CEO and Chariman for 20 years, he’s back to using a Mac as of 2007, below:

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Anand, as per usual, does one of the more in-depth reviews we’ve seen of the Thunderbolt Displays. Some interesting notes:

• The Thunderbolt Display uses less power than the previous Cinema Display at its dimmest setting (likely just panel efficiency variance) and draws a bit more at max brightness.
• Pegasus hardware seems to cause serious audio issues which corrupts sound while large file transfers are happening. Expect a fix.
• There are some nuances with display daisy chaining. For instance, in one configuration Anand had to put a Promise RAID array between the two displays in a daisy chain to get them to work.
• Next year’s Ivy Bridge will bring more Display options to Macs (and likely USB 3 since the controller is built into the Intel chipset). The future may also hold displays with GPUs built in.
• For a $1000 display, the speakers “were OK, but not great”. The Camera and Mic were both good.

If you are considering getting one of these displays, check out the full review which was very favorable overall. MacConnection also has the lowest price we could find on the new Thunderbolt display at $979.

Update: Macworld put up a review this morning as well. 4/5 Stars.

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Update: Apple has pulled the listing. 

Some eagle-eyed commenters noted that the Support document about Thunderbolt Displays included an interesting addition.  Apple says that iMac (Mid 2011 and Late 2011) can both support two Thunderbolt displays.

There’s only one problem:

Apple hasn’t released a Late 2011 iMac…yet.

Apple released an EDU-only  iMac in August which is sometimes called “Late 2011 iMac” but that device has no Thunderbolt so that wouldn’t make sense.  Apple last updated the iMacs in May to Sandy Bridge processors.

Rumors of a late 2011 MacBook Pro refresh perhaps could also point to an iMac refresh as well.

Here is Apple’s current support doc on how to identify iMacs:

Interesting to say the very least.
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Following the first shipments of Apple’s new 27-inch Thunderbolt Display, a new support document reveals some limitations regarding multiple display support that we weren’t exactly expecting.

Nearly every current Mac model is able to support two Thunderbolt displays. The exceptions are the 13-inch MacBook Air (mid 2011), which only supports one, and the 13-inch MacBook Pro which supports two, but disables the device’s main display to do so. Also of note, the $800 Mac mini can support three Thunderbolt displays thanks to the AMD graphics and its HDMI port.

One other somewhat surprising limitation of the new displays is the inability to daisy chain a Mini DisplayPort screen off the new Thunderbolt display. The support document explains:

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Belkin took a little bit of time today at IDF to show off their new Thunderbolt Express Dock that provides a selection of ports that mirror the new 27-inch Apple Thunderbolt Display, sans the $999 price point.

The accessory sports three USB ports, a Thunderbolt port, Firewire 800 port, and Gigabit Ethernet. Perhaps the dock could use some more of that Apple “mimimalism” – we’re sensing some wasted space being used here.

There is no word on pricing or availability as of yet, and Daily Tech reminds us we might still have to cough up $50 for a Thunderbolt cable. We’ll keep you updated when the device is officially announced. More Thunderbolt accessories here, another image after the break.

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Apple’s Thunderbolt hardware pieces are coming together and to get ready, Apple is updating MacBook Air firmware. The 4 MB update promises to enhance the stability of Lion Recovery from an Internet connection, and resolve issues with Apple Thunderbolt Display compatibility and Thunderbolt Target Disk Mode performance on MacBook Air (mid 2011) models.

Thunderbolt parts have already began shipping and new products include Docks, external PCI Card adapters, as well as storage.

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From 9to5Toys:

MacConnection offers readers an additional 3% off Mac desktops and laptops via coupon code “3%MacDeal”. The coupon applies to MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, Mac Pro, Mac Mini, and iMac computers. It’s the best percent-off coupon we’ve seen from MacConnection in recent months. Even better, free shipping applies to most deals, yielding a trove of lowest-we-could-find prices.

Best Bets: New Core i5 MacBook Airs now start $921 (Amazon is $949).  Mac Minis start at $551.88  (Amazon is$569)

MacConnection also has the lowest price we could find on the new Thunderbolt display at $979 and a 128GB Crucial 6Gb/s SSD for $189.99.  AppleTVs are $94.99 as are Airport Express base stations..  Wireless Magic Mouse – $64.99.
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Usually, when a brand new industry standard debuts on Macs, there’s a period of shortage before compatible devices begin trickling in. Thunderbolt is no different. Intel partnered with Apple on Thunderbolt earlier this year and it took Apple several months to update its notebooks, iMac and Mac mini families with Thunderbolt I/O. The offering of supported peripherals was initially limited to Apple’s $49 Thunderbolt cable, LaCie and Promise RAIDs, Matrox gear, BlackMagic’s solution for field video editing and a couple other devices.

Following Intel’s release of the Thunderbolt development kit, more companies are announcing Thunderbolt-ready products. By the way, 9to5Mac, MacRumors and other publications received tips that Apple began shipping its new $999 Apple Thunderbolt Display to stores. Now, among the upcoming Thunderbolt gadgets, Magma’s ExpressBox 3T, seen in the above image, caught our attention. Basically a three-slot expansion chassis allowing any Thunderbolt-equipped Mac to connect to PCIe 2.0 cards, the box also lets you power up your MacBook Air’s integrate Intel HD Graphics 3000 processor with any PCIe graphics cards, useful if you’re going to do some serious video-related work or play latest games on your Air. The accessory is to be demoed at the upcoming Intel Developer Forum which runs September 13 – 15 in San Francisco.

Magma joins Sonnet, which also unveiled a similar Thunderbolt box last month. The $150 Sonnet ExpressCard/34 Thunderbolt adapter accepts ExpressCard peripherals and also expands your Air’s connectivity with eSATA, USB 3, Firewire 800, Gigabit Ethernet and SDXC and CF cards. More product highlights after the break…

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U2 frontman Bono responded to the story “The Mystery of Jobs’s Public Giving,” in the NYTimes Opinion pages today telling readers that Jobs was indeed a generous giver through the product (Red) campaign.  Bono further hinted that Jobs is a private person and his donations may not all be on the books.

I’m proud to know him; he’s a poetic fellow, an artist and a businessman. Just because he’s been extremely busy, that doesn’t mean that he and his wife, Laurene, have not been thinking about these things. You don’t have to be a friend of his to know what a private person he is or that he doesn’t do things by halves.

Apple and U2 of course collaborated on a U2 iPod and later Apple built red iPods with a portion of the proceeds going to Bono’s private fund to fight AIDS in Africa. Steve Jobs reportedly said when Bono first approached him about (RED), “There is nothing better than the chance to save lives.”  Apple’s involvement encouraged other companies to get involved.

Jobs has also been active in organ donation causes since his liver transplant.
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Macworld decided to put a decked out Mac Mini Mid-2011 against a current baseline iMac 2.5GHz to see what kind of performance could be gotten from Apple’s diminutive little machine when an SSD is added.

When we say “decked out”, we’re referring to the $100 2.5->2.7GHz CPU improvement + $600 SSD upgrade which almost doubles the price of the $799 ($769) high end Mini and pushes it above the price of the base model iMac. Minis start out at around $568.

The results are pretty apparent: when running simple tests, especially ones that rely only on CPU and disk access, the Mini beat the iMac handily (above). That’s almost entirely due to the added speed of the SSD compared with the iMac’s 3.5-inch HDD. When doing more graphics intensive tests (below), the iMac and its more powerful GPU took over.

The takeaway on this however is that a HDD to SSD upgrade can make a heck of a lot of difference in performance. For those handy out there, adding an SSD to a Mac Mini doesn’t have to be a $600 proposition either. Reasonable SSDs can start out at $100 and can be added to the new Minis’ hard drive configuration (not swapped) with a simple kit.

Another important tweak not detailled in these tests is adding 8GB of RAM to the Mini which will run you somewhere south of $40. Added RAM really improves performance when lots of windows or applications are open at the same time.

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Apple has released a pair of new updates meant to fix video-locking issues on iMacs that run Lion and improve hardware compatibility when running Windows in dual boot mode on your Mac. The iMac Graphic FW Update 3.0 is now available for download, weighing in at a paltry 482KB. Apple says the firmware update “fixes a graphics issue that may cause an iMac to hang under certain conditions”. You can also download this update by choosing Software Update from the Apple menu, in which case the update mechanism will determine whether your iMac’s graphics card needs updating and offer the refreshed software appropriately. Also, Boot Camp got a small update for Windows 7 (version 3.3).  The 200MB download includes critical bug fixes and hardware support. It is recommended for all Boot Camp 3.2 users and requires Windows 7 plus an existing installation of Boot Camp 3.2 on your system.

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More patent fun today as a small Florida company that may or may not be an LG spinoff called OSS systems sues Apple according to Patently Apple.  The Patent was originally filed by LG in 1999 and describes…

“A method for fast booting a computer system, comprising the steps of: A. performing a power on self test (POST) of basic input output system (BIOS) when the system is powered on or reset is requested; B. checking whether a boot configuration information including a system booting state which was created while executing a previous normal booting process exists or not; C. storing the boot configuration information from execution of the POST operation before loading a graphic interface (GUI) program, based on the checking result; and D. loading the graphic user interface (GUI) program.”

As far as Android competitors go, LG and Apple have a pretty cordial relationship  having signed a $500 million display deal a few years ago.  Displays in Apple’s popular devices, from 27-inch iMacs to retina iPhones are made by LG. LG could have spun the patent off as its own company, in an attempt to avoid locking horns with Apple in the courts.  Apple has been suing what seems like every other Android manufacturer over patent disputes.
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Update (Aug. 8th): Following our report, Apple has gone ahead and released it!. Interestingly, no Thunderbolt and RAM not upgradable?!

Apple is gearing up to launch a new addition to the iMac lineup later this month that appears to be geared towards education/volume customers. The new iMac has less power than the current line of all-in-one Apple desktop computers and also has less storage space. The computer packs a last generation 3.1 GHz dual-core processor (3.06 GHz rounded up), 2 GB of DDR3 RAM, 250 GB of hard drive storage space, and the AMD Radeon HD 6750M graphics processor with 256 MB of dedicated memory.

This lower-end iMac obviously has much less horsepower than the current iMac line and should be priced as such. For comparison, the entry level 21.5-inch iMac features a 2.5 GHz quad-core processor, 4 GB of RAM, a 500 GB hard drive, and the same AMD Radeon HD 6750M graphics processor but with double the dedicated memory at 512 MB. This entry level 21.5-inch iMac is priced at $1,199, so don’t be surprised to see this less-powerful machine with a sub-$1000 price tag. For reference, Apple’s last education-geared iMac was priced at $899. A similar (more RAM, worse graphics) refurbished model is currently priced at $929 (pictured below).

Apple is expected to silently release this new machine later this month. As always, thanks Mr. X.

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Smarthouse has a particularly bad reputation when it comes to Apple rumors, especially when they involve OLEDs.  But we’ll bite on their latest because it is so tantalizing.

There is also speculation that Apple has held discussions with LG Display the Company that makes display screens for MAC products, about the possibility of getting access to a new 55 LG OLED panel that will be used in a new Apple TV that will be capable of delivering music, Video & TV shows over an IP network.

On Friday LG said that they will launch a limited production OLED TV late in 2012.

There are no shortage of people advocating for an integrated Apple television, but certainly the leader is Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster who expects one next year.

As far as the big display makers are concerned, Apple’s relationship with LG is probably the strongest.  LG makes iPod Touch and iPhone Retina Displays and Apple secured a $500 million dollar investment in LG displays in 2009.  The net of that was a temporary exclusive on the panels for the 27-inch display that Apple’s iMacs and now Thunderbolt Displays now use.  Sony makes OLEDs as well but doesn’t have a strong relationship with Apple, at least as far as displays are concerned.  The other big OLED maker is Samsung, who is now tangled with Apple in patent disputes.

If Apple does do a TV, it will likely have some sort of game-changer tech innovation that Apple could exclusively own for a period of time.  A 55-inch OLED would probably qualify even though yields will be low and prices will be astronomical during the ramp up.

We’re still not convinced, however.
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Apple has issued a recall for a “small number” of 1TB Seagate hard drives in the 21.5-inch and 27-inch iMacs. Apple’s announcement doesn’t go into specifics, but says the systems were sold between May 2011 and July 2011. If you’re are experiencing issues you can take your iMac to an Apple retail store or Apple service provider, or you can contact Apple technical support. Apple will replace the hard drive free of charge. (via MacRumors)

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