Last year, Christopher Mims wrote about how Apple should kill off the Mac. Just this week, Apple alumnus Michael Gartenberg wrote that the iPad Pro is the new Mac. It’s human nature to try and match things up… to simplify, organize, and categorize data points. To say a thing is like another thing, or a thing can replace another thing. But I think doing so today only confuses normal users. A few months ago, I wrote a post about how you…
As soon as I saw today’s news, I thought that there would be confusion about what “Office for tablets and smartphones going free” would mean. There certainly has been. Office for iOS and Android smartphones and tablets is indeed free, within certain bounds. I’m going to attempt to succinctly delinate the cases under which it is, and is not, free. Office is free for you to use on your smartphone or tablet if, and only if: You are not using…
I hope these rumors are wrong, but for some odd reason, the Web is full of rumors that this year’s CES will bring a glut of bimodal tablets; devices that are designed to run Windows 8.1, but also feature an integrated instance of Android. But why? For years, Microsoft and Intel were seemingly the best of partners. While Microsoft had fleeting dalliances with other processor architectures, they always came back to Intel. There were clear lines in the sand; Intel…
A friend was telling me the other day about his new Mac. He bought it, took it home, and said it was like Christmas; opening it up, the ease of getting started, and the look and feel of the hardware, as well as the software. Normally a buyer of PCs, he decided to buy a Mac. A few months before, another friend said the same about buying his first iPhone. What’s unusual is that these two, like me, are ex-Microsoft…
Earlier in July, Microsoft announced OWA for iPad and OWA for iPhone. Available only for Office 365 subscribers for now (available for Exchange 2013 at an undisclosed point in the future), OWA for iOS originally left me a bit confused. You see, at a glance, there’s really nothing that OWA for iOS does that you can’t do with the built in mail app on iOS. The one benefit I arrived at upfront was that with Exchange’s autodiscover, configuration for novice…
In my wife’s family, there is a term used to describe how many people can comfortably work in a kitchen at the same time. The measurement is described in “butts”, as in “this is a one-butt kitchen”, or the common, but not very helpful “1.5 butt kitchen”. Most American kitchens aren’t more than 2 butts. But I digress. I bring this up for the following reason. There is a certain level of utility that you can exploit in a kitchen as it…
A few weeks ago I wrote about gestures on the Mac vs. Windows 8. By and large, I’ve shifted to using my Mac with most apps in full-screen, and really making the most of the gestures included in OS X 10.8. It isn’t always easy, as certain apps (looking at you, Word 2011), don’t optimally use full-screen. Word has Focus mode (its own full-screen model) and now supports OS X’s full-screen mode – but not together. Meaning if you shift…
Alright – shake out the giggles from the title, and let me show you why I said that. Until recently I had been using Windows 8 every day – and recently switched to a Mac (running 10.8 Mountain Lion) as my primary computing device. The more I have used Mountain Lion – especially with apps in full-screen mode – the more certain things felt subtly similar to Windows 8. I believe that Mountain Lion is yet another step in Apple’s gradual…
I’ve been pondering the existence of devices like the Asus PadFone and PadFone 2 recently. Not really convertible devices, not really hybrid devices, they’re an electronic centaur. Like an Amphicar or a Taylor Aerocar, the PadFone devices compromise their ability to be one good device by instead being two less than great devices. I haven’t found a good description of devices like the PadFone – I refer to them as “form integrated”. One device is a dumb terminal and relies…
I recall hearing a story of a co-worker at Microsoft, who was a technical assistant to an executive, who had a Mac. It wouldn’t normally be a big deal, except he worked directly for an executive. As a result, this Mac was seen in many meetings across campus – it’s distinct aluminum body and fruity ghost shining through the lid a constant reminder that this was one less PC sold (even if it ran Windows through Boot Camp or virtualization software….