Wednesday - May 16, 2012
With the expected unveiling of new MacBook Pros just weeks away, rumor mongers have begun to solidify their predictions about the new notebooks. Most Apple prognosticators seem to agree that the MacBook Pros will be thinner, run Intel's new Ivy Bridge chip, and sport an eye-popping Retina Display. Of course, the public won't know for sure what the new MacBook Pros will look like until Apple wants it to know -- which could be as soon as the company's Worldwide Developers Conference June 11 in San Francisco.
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Tuesday - May 15, 2012
Lenovo on Tuesday announced new Ultrabook ThinkPad laptops based on Intel's latest Ivy Bridge processor. Heading the procession is the upcoming X1 Carbon, which will use premium carbon fiber materials and is aimed head-on at the Apple MacBook Air. The lineup also includes new models in the ThinkPad T, X, L and W series aimed at small businesses, government agencies, educational institutions and large corporations.
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Saturday - May 12, 2012
It pays to advertise, right? Not necessarily, as Oracle found out when it tangled with IBM recently over advertisements in which Oracle claimed its servers were faster and much less expensive than IBM hardware. Unlike Oracle's headline-grabbing Java copyright and patent infringement suit against Google, Big Blue didn't spend big bucks to take on Oracle in court.
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Wednesday - May 9, 2012
The laptop world is reeling under the threat of tablets, and vendors are attempting to shore it up with their various takes on the Ultrabook concept. On Tuesday, HP added a new item to the mix with the announcement of a new line of notebooks it refers to as "Sleekbooks."
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Monday - May 7, 2012
This occurred to me last Thursday when first-quarter PC sales came out. Apparently, sales are up 21 percent year-over-year and HP retook the lead from Apple in this segment. In this report, Apple's numbers include iPads, and sales for iPads collapsed in the first quarter. This got me thinking of the scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail when the cart is picking up dead bodies during the Black Plague and one "corpse" not only isn't dead but feels like dancing.
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Friday - May 4, 2012
A new video card from Nvidia or competitor AMD isn't usually all that newsworthy, but when the latest card arrives with eight Graphics Processing Clusters, and a total of 4 GB of GDDR5 video memory that runs at 6.008 GHz over two 256-bit memory, that is enough for hard-core enthusiasts to take pause. For everyone else, the release of a video card that carries a price point just under $1,000 will certainly draw attention.
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Monday - April 30, 2012
Last week, I was at the Dell annual Industry Analyst Conference, and it suddenly struck me that we are looking at a very different technology market this decade. Apple is expected to slide, largely due to the firm's inability to replace Steve Jobs; the dynamic that created Microsoft is changing, and analysts are questioning the firm's relevance as Dell and HP ramp up their own software efforts. Dell, in particular, is doing some really interesting things.
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Thursday - April 26, 2012
In a move that would be akin to unveiling an automobile's new engine in advance of an auto show, Samsung on Thursday introduced its new 1.4 GHz Exynos 4 Quad processor for smartphone and tablet devices. While the company did not say which devices would first use the processor -- which is based on the ARM Cortex A9 chip -- it announced that it would power the "next Galaxy" device.
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Thursday - April 26, 2012
One of the simplest ways to improve performance on a laptop is to add more RAM, or random access memory. RAM prices have been steadily dropping over the years, and it's now possible to see a significant performance boost with an investment of twenty or thirty dollars. If your machine is sluggish, you might need additional memory. Even if your machine is new, a memory upgrade is worth investigating.
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Thursday - April 26, 2012
Despite all the fantastic numbers delivered by Apple when it revealed its latest fiscal quarterly profits this week -- such as an eye-popping 94 percent net profit year-to-year increase -- one question and one rambling answer from Apple CEO Tim Cook made me sit up in my chair. The question: Will Apple create a converged iPad/MacBook with a built-in keyboard?
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Wednesday - April 25, 2012
The tech industry loves the concept of new innovation to the point where product launches all too often call to mind infatuated elders showing off photos of their latest grandkids. But practicality tends to drive the manufacturing side of the IT business, with consistency trumping innovation. As a result, products arrive at market on time, retailers and their customers don't get grumpy, vendors hit their sales targets, and shareholders are happy campers.
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