Daniel Pietzsch

Personal blog. Mostly photos.

All posts tagged with #apple

Apple’s next major Mac revealed: the radically new 12-inch MacBook Air | 9to5Mac

9to5mac.com

Interesting new rendering of a rumoured upcoming 12-inch MacBook Air.

If the following turns out to be true, I currently can’t imagine how this is going to be practical:

The upcoming 12-inch Air has the fewest amount of ports ever on an Apple computer, as can be seen in the rendition above. On the right side is a standard headphone jack and dual-microphones for input and noise-canceling. On the left side is solely the new USB Type-C port. Yes, Apple is currently planning to ditch standard USB ports, the SD Card slot, and even its Thunderbolt and MagSafe charging standards on this new notebook. We must note that Apple tests several designs of upcoming products, so Apple may choose to ultimately release a new Air that does include the legacy components, though there is very little space on the edges for them.

10 years with a Mac

As the Mac turns 30, I realised that I’ve been using Macs for 10 years myself now.

“The Switch” started in 2003 — during the end of my apprenticeship — when a colleague regularly brought his personal 12-inch PowerBook G4 to the office. It caught my attention, and I spend quite a bit of time learning about his computer. He was happy to tell me all about it — and Apple in general, too.

I ended up buying this very PowerBook from him at the beginning of 2004. I’ve been using Macs ever since, and I haven’t looked back.

The Mac and Mac OS X felt like the sweet spot to me. It seemed to be like a merger of the good bits of Windows and Linux with an extra dose of taste, logic and fun on top. Over the years, I’ve owned 3 Macs:

  1. A 12-inch PowerBook G4. Bought used at the beginning of 2004 — sold again September 2004, to buy
  2. a 15-inch PowerBook G4. This one was retired in May 2012. Later that year, I gave it to a colleague for free.
  3. For my 30th birthday, my family gave me a 15-inch MacBook Pro, which was very generous. It arrived in May 2011, and I’m using it right now.

I’ve used three more Macs given to me at my workplace: a 2009 21.5-inch iMac, a 2009 (or 2010) MacBook Pro 15-inch, and a 2011 MacBook Air 13-inch.

All the Macs I’ve used have been fantastic machines. And they just keep getting better with every generation.

So, happy birthday, Mac!
If you hadn’t been created, I’d be using a different computer and I wouldn’t even miss you.

Fixing iCloud Photo Stream

For some reason my Mac suddenly stopped downloading photos from iCloud’s Photo Stream. The folder at ~/Library/Application Support/iLifeAssetManagement/assets/sub/ didn’t contain any photos taken after a certain date.

The following steps fixed this for me:

  1. Go to System Preferences -> iCloud.
  2. Disable “Photo Stream”.
  3. Wait a few minutes (this seems to be important, because the first time I tried, I turned it back on after a couple of seconds already and that didn’t fix my problem).
  4. Enable “Photo Stream”.

After this, the Photo Stream folder started filling up again with all the photos my Mac hadn’t downloaded so far.

“[Steve Jobs] is a design dictator of the company. And it’s fortunate for Apple and the world in general that they have him, because without his iron hand, the company would soon devolve back into a political, consensus-driven company. It would still have great products from a certain point of view, but I doubt that they would ever have the game-changing superiority they exhibit now. Committees would grow, politics would ensue, control battles would happen, and superior products would be hampered by all of this. Steve removes all of that; he makes the final decision and pushes details that no one else would have the authority to push. And being at the top, you have to listen to him or else you’re fired. That’s it; end of story.”
–

David Shen, who hopefully won’t mind that I’ve edited this a bit for punctuation and capitalization. (via marco)

Make sure you read the whole article.

“Apple’s goal isn’t to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products…We trust as a consequence of that, people will like them, and as another consequence we’ll make some money. But we’re really clear about what our goals are.”
– Jonathan Ive (via Andy Budd) (via nikf)

Great interview with Jonathan Ive of Apple.

A lot of what we seem to be doing […] is actually getting design out of the way. And I think when forms develop with that sort of reason and they are not just arbitrary shapes, it feels almost undesigned. It feels almost like “Well, of course it’s that way. Why wouldn’t it be any other way?”