Looks like the next Apple store in the GTA is going to be Fairview Mall.

Too bad, because I know we could really use one in Markham or Vaughan.

Tags: apple, store, fairview mall

There was much made over Psystar's Leopard "hackintosh" bundles yesterday. It was certainly a big enough deal that Psystar's site buckled under the traffic load, leading to speculation that the site was down as a result of an Apple cease and desist order.

The thing that seems to got everyone bent out of shape is that Psystar has offered to sell a legal copy of Leopard and then break the Apple EULA and install the software on the box itself (for an extra fee, of course).

Ars has a pretty good analysis of the situation.

I'm surprised that someone hasn't done this sooner, there is a lot of activity on Insanely Mac's forums on what specs make the ideal hackintosh.

Apple could easily put a company like Psystar out of business without even unleashing their lawyers if they simply provided a consumer level tower. Forcing users to spend the big bucks on a Mac Pro fuels the motivation to create a hackintosh among many of those who can't afford it. Of course, there will always be part of the population who just won't buy a Mac under any circumstance, but there is clearly an untapped market for Apple out there.

Tags: psystar, apple, mac, osx, insanely mac, hackintosh

Not one to be outdone by Adobe's two Photoshop announcements this week, Apple has announced the release of Aperture 2.1, now with plug-in support.

Tags: apple, aperture, photoshop, adobe

Apple was recently profiled as Fortune Magazine's most admired company in America.

While there are a bunch of quotable nuggets in the interview, Jobs' view on surviving a recession is quite admirable:

We've had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren't going to lay off people, that we'd taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place -- the last thing we were going to do is lay them off. And we were going to keep funding. In fact we were going to up our R&D budget so that we would be ahead of our competitors when the downturn was over. And that's exactly what we did. And it worked. And that's exactly what we'll do this time.

Tags: apple, steve jobs

The New York Times has an article on how mobile phone companies are trying to meet consumer needs.

I think they could start by making phones that get the basics right. You know it's a sad state of affairs when a $5 home phone can outperform your spanky $300 smart phone. Phone designers should make sure that they live with a phone for a few months before releasing it to manufacturing. To this day, I still can't figure out many of the design choices that Microsoft made with Windows Mobile. Hello! My phone is NOT a computer!

Apple is definitely going in the right direction with the iPhone, although their strategy isn't perfect either. If it weren't for my form factor preferences (sorry, but I really do need a hard keyboard), I probably would be iPhoned right now.

I'm really hoping that the upcoming Android platform is successful, since Google, like Apple, is a company that Gets It.

Tags: cellular, windowsmobile, iphone, android, google, apple