Apple smashes expectations: record setting $78.4B in revenue on sales of 78.3M iPhones: "Mac sales were up slightly, reaching 5.4 million in the holiday period. That bested the 5.3 million units Apple shipped a year ago."

We'll take it.

Labels: mac os x

AMD reveals Radeon Pro 400 series GPU specs, as used in new MacBook Pro | Ars TechnicaAMD has released a smattering of specs for the Radeon Pro 400 series on its Creators with Radeon Pro website, which show the Radeon Pro 450 used in the MacBook Pro to have a peak FP32 performance of around one teraflop. That's under half the 2.2 teraflops of the desktop-based RX 460 and miles behind the performance of Nvidia's Pascal-based laptop GPUs.

I liked the two GPU design that switched between the low-power Intel integrated graphics and the NVidia GPU as necessary.

Labels: mac os x

Another Mac-specific malware pops up, but Apple's Gatekeeper still prevents infection: "A second piece of Mac-specific malware has been discovered this week, one that could expose the passwords stored in the macOS Keychain. But once again, Apple's Gatekeeper security — when properly configured — will block the attack from succeeding."

Hmmm.

Labels: mac, mac os x, macOS, malware

OS X source code hints at switch to 'macOS' | Cult of MacWe’ve all noticed Apple’s latest operating system nomenclature, with each new release a device-centric OS, like iOS, tvOS, or watchOS.

Why not macOS, then?

A bit of source code in the current stable release of OS X (10.11.4) seems to point to that very thing.

Or perhaps a lowly developer trying to grapple with complexity by choosing simple and obvious names.

Labels: mac os x

Apple’s new OS X Mavericks crashes far more frequently for some (including me) | VentureBeat - But the new OS release, named for the famous surfing location in northern California, also crashes just like the big waves it was named for.

I have Leopard 10.5 running on a PowerBook and haven't rebooted it in over a year. Might be two years. Low-power, nice and cool, crash-less. In short, what an operating system is supposed to be.

I remember my TiBook running 10.2 was the same way. Simple. Reliable.

Labels: mac os x

Some iPhone 5s owners reporting 'Blue Screen of Death' with iWork apps - Posts regarding the Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) began to appear on Apple's support boards in September, with users claiming that their iPhone 5s units would crash when using Apple's iWork apps.

Sometime in the 90s, Richard Gabriel had a though-provoking article in his column observing that in biological systems, very fast evolution comes before extinction. It's been awhile and I may be inaccurately paraphrasing, so I'll say it here: nobody needs a new operating system every year. Nobody needs an operating system with a ton of new features that causes existing application software to cease to function incorrectly.

In the end, Linux will be running most of the important systems in the world because nobody is forcing anyone to upgrade their systems for some commercially motivated strategy guised as a benefit to the ultimate user of the product or in response to some perceived market need generated by retarded online "journalists" or worse "M&A" investment bankers. I could just as easily have written this post on my G4 PowerBook, which is overloaded with 10.5 and is still working perfectly after just 5 years.

The consumer culture of disposable things is going to be replaced by a culture of valued, recyclable, renewable things.

Richard Gabriel http://www.dreamsongs.com/Essays.html

Labels: ios, mac os x

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger | Ars Technica: "Access control lists, or ACLs, are a finer-grained, more flexible way to control file permissions: who can do what to which files. In Tiger, ACLs are a supplement to the traditional Unix file permissions. Since I've never covered Unix file permissions in a Mac OS X article before, I'd like to do so now. "

Good article on ACL permissions I found googling.

Labels: access control lists, mac os x, security