Adi's Tech Site

The fourth out of the five new products announced at yesterday’s event was a new iMac. The first thing that you will notice is that the display is 5mm thin on the side. They have done away with the optical disk drive on the side that was there in a previous generation of the iMacs. On the front you have a HD FaceTime camera. On the back, you have your usual headphone port, an SD card slot, four USB 3.0 ports, two thunderbolt ports and a gigabit Ethernet port. The new iMac will come in either a 21.5″ or 27″ model.

On the inside, you have 8GB of RAM and a 1TB hard drive as standard.  You can also put in a fusion drive which combines the storage capacity(1TB or 3TB) of a traditional hard drive with the speed of a solid state drive(up to 768GB). With the CPU, you can get a 2.7GHz or 2.9GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 CPU. You can also get a 3.1GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 CPU in the 21.5″ Model. In the 27″ model you can get a 2.9GHz or 3.2GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 CPU, or a 3.4Ghz quad-core Intel Core i7 CPU.

What about the graphics card?  Well, on the 21.5″ model you can get either an Nvidia GeForce GT 640M or GT 650M both with 512MB of memory. On the 27″ model you will be able to get a GeForce GTX 660M with 512MB of memory or a GeForce GTX 675MX with 1GB of Memory.

Onto the pricing then.  The base 21.5″ model, will start from £1,099 with the 2.5″ Intel Core i5 CPU and the same size model with the 2.9GHz Intel Core i5 will start from £1,249.  On the 27″ side, the model with a 2.9GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 will start from £1,499 and the model with the 3.2GHz quad-core i5 CPU will start from £1,699

The new 21.5″ iMac will release in November and the 27″ model will release in December.

Apple also had a couple of new macs to show at their press event. One of the macs that they showed off today was a new 13″ MacBook Pro with a Retina Display. Of course, you have a 13″ display with a resolution of 2560×1600 which is a lot more than you would get out of a HD TV.

You have a 720p HD FaceTime camera at the top of the glass display.

Let’s get to the I/O(input output).  On one side you have an SDXC card slot for SD cards, HDMI, and a USB 3.0 port.  On the other side you have two thunderbolt ports, another USB 3.0 port, dual mics and the new MagSafe 2 connector for power.

On the inside, you have a 128GB of flash storage as standard(upgradeable to 768GB) and 8GB of RAM.

As standard, you have a dual-core, 2.5GHz Intel Core i5 CPU with Intel HD 4000 graphics. With turbo-boost you can have a 3.1GHz intel Core i5 CPU.  That being said you can upgrade this to a 2.9GHz i7 quad-core CPU which can be set to 3.6GHz with turbo-boost.

So what about battery life? Well, you will be able to get 7 hours of battery life for web browsing and 30 days of standby time.

Onto the pricing then. It will start from £1,449 for a model with 128GB SSD and a model with 256GB SSD  starting from £1,699. Best of all, you can order your 13″ MacBook Pro with retina display right now.

Hot on the heels of the release of iPhone 5 and iOS 6, Apple have also released a software update for Mountain Lion(the latest version of the operating system on the mac).  Dubbed OSX Version 10.8.2, the update adds the promised facebook integration feature amongst a whole slew of other features.  To download this update right now, go to the Apple logo, click “software update” and you will be able to download the update from the App store.  Alternatively, grab the manual installer from the link below.

On a side note, you should back up using Time Machine(or other backup solutions) before doing the update. After which you will need to restart your computer.

OSX Mountain Lion Facebook integration update

In response to the recent flaw discovered in the recently released Java 1.7 Apple has pushed out a software update for their version of Java for Mac.  The update is now available for Macs running OSX Snow Leopard(AKA 10.6), Lion(AKA 10.7) and Mountain Lion (AKA 10.8) via the “Software Update” tool. Alternatively you can grab the manual installer below. If you use Java I would highly recommend downloading this right now.

Java for OS X 2012-005  – For OSX 10.7(Lion) or later

Java for Mac OSX 10.6 update 10 – For OSX 10.6(Snow Leopard) only

By default, Java is turned off on all macs running Java. I would recommend only turning on Java if you want to play Minecraft or Runescape.

Apple has released a software update for OSX Mountain Lion on their Macs.  The update, released today includes a lot of software fixes including:

• Resolve an issue that may cause Migration Assistant to unexpectedly quit
• Improve compatibility when connecting to a Microsoft Exchange server in Mail
• Address an issue playing audio through a Thunderbolt display
• Resolve an issue that could prevent iMessages from being sent
• Address an issue that could cause the system to become unresponsive when using Pinyin input
• Resolve an issue when connecting to SMB servers with long names
• Address a issue that may prevent Safari from launching when using a Proxy Automatic Configuration (PAC) file
• Improve 802.1X authentication with Active Directory credentials

Although some of these fixes may not seem of relevance to you, it’s important that you run Software Update as soon as you can. You can do this by clicking on the Apple logo at the top right-hand corner and clicking on “Software Update”. If you want to see the full support notes, then click here. If you have multiple computers that you need to apply the update on, then there is also an installer that you can download.

Sound the klaxons, get your Apple IDs ready, and get your backups done!  After lots of hard work, the folks at Apple have just released OSX Mountain Lion(the newest version of the Mac operating system). You can download it right now for £13.99($19.99) from the Mac App Store.  If you are intending on buying it, then I would recommend waiting at least a five days or so.

As tempted as I am to upgrade(due to the very low upgrade price), I think that I am going to hold off from upgrading for now. There are a lot of apps that I have which are not supported by Mountain Lion at the moment. With time, I am sure that might change. In addition to that, I also want to be assured that I will have the same amount of access to the file system that everyone’s had since OSX Lion.