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Posts tagged with "os x"

Report Claims No New Macs Until Lion Launches

As Apple is getting ready to launch the next major version of OS X, Lion, in July, AppleInsider reports the company has decided to postpone the release of refreshed Mac models until the OS is available, so customers buying new computers will find Lion already installed. The move would make sense considering the new features being introduced in Lion: a customer that doesn’t need to manually upgrade (in spite of the simple upgrade process of the Mac App Store with one-click install) may result in a customer already tied to the new iCloud ecosystem once the suite launches this Fall, as well as immediate access to new functionalities like AirDrop, full-screen apps, or Mission Control. To put it simply: by releasing new Macs with Lion built-in, Apple would eliminate the risk of users putting off the upgrade for any reason.

Apple management is so pumped up over the advantages presented by its forthcoming Mac OS X Lion operating system that the company has been holding back the release of at least one new Mac refresh until the software is finalized, AppleInsider has learned.

For instance, new Thunderbolt-enabled Sandy Bridge MacBook Air models expected to go into production this month have been ready and waiting for some time, according to people familiar with the matter. But management is currently unwilling to usher the new models into the market with the current Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard operating system.

With Apple’s Lion Up-To-Date program, customers will also be able to request the OS for free for Macs purchased between June 6, 2011, and the day OS X Lion comes out. This means that, even if the rumor’s untrue and Apple is not considering waiting for Lion’s release to unleash new Macs, customers would still have the chance to spend $0 to get the latest operating system.

As for the Macs rumored to be getting an update soon, the most notable ones are the MacBook Airs, allegedly set for a Thunderbolt and Sandy Bridge spec bump following the MacBook Pro and iMac refreshes from earlier this year. According to the rumor mill though, the Mac mini and Mac Pro lines are also due an update, with the server counterparts specifically mentioned in a report last week.

OS X Lion Developer Preview 4 Update Released

As Lion’s development moves forward and nears the public release set for July, Apple has pushed another update to developers running OS X Lion Developer Preview 4. The new version, available through the Software Update control panel on the desktop, weighs at 656 MB and should be one of the latest updates before Lion gets its pre-announced Mac App Store rollout this summer. Lion will be available at $29.99 as digital-only upgrade for all your Macs configured with your Apple ID.

We’ll update this story with more details on what’s new as we get them, so make sure to refresh this page later.

Update: Build number is 11A494a. First reports seem to indicate the login window has got a new linen background – the login window was briefly shown during the WWDC keynote. [image via]

Lion Boots From SD Card, Has New OS X Utilities Screen

Following a report from earlier this week that suggested it could be possible to burn OS X Lion to a DVD and install it from a Mac’s disc drive, a new video surfaced on YouTube shows that, by grabbing the .DMG  file inside the OS X Lion Installer app from the Mac App Store, users could be able to boot OS X Lion off an SD Card and choose from a new set of options after the system restarts. The new Mac OS X Utilities window, which appears at the end of the video, contains options to fire up Disk Utility to repair and erase partitions, possibility to restore from a Time Machine backup (Time Machine has been improved in Lion) and a standard “Reinstall” action to perform a Lion installation. The window also shows a link to “get online support” by browsing Apple’s online documentation.

Nature’s Eye Studios writes in an email to us:

Enabling Lion on an SD card was actually verry easy, easier than I expect it to be…

After downloading Lion from the Apple Developer site, you get a 4 GB DMG file, so the next step was to open up Disk Utility and erase an 8GB SDCX card (XC for the speed) After which I just had click the repair option in Disk Utility. Now select the Lion DMG as source and drag the SD card as destination. After about 10 minutes, the SD card was the Lion ESD installer. Then it was even easier: you just have to start the installation, and follow the on screen instructions.

To erase the hard drive or restore from a Time Machine backup, you have to boot from the installer; to do so, you have to turn off your Mac and turn it back on while holding Option (alt). When it powers up, you can choose from what drive to boot, you have your Macintosh HD and a Lion specific partition of your hard drive and then you have a USB device, which is actually your SD card. Follow the on screen instructions, and you’re able to erase your hard drive, and put everything back from a Time Machine backup.

Assuming the author of the video has followed the same method detailed by TUAW, the process should be fairly easy and useful to keep a portable copy of Lion that doesn’t live in your file system. Apple has announced at the WWDC keynote that Lion will be distributed only on the Mac App Store at $29.99, as opposite to previous speculation that claimed the company would also offer DVDs and portable USB drives for Lion. It’s unlikely Apple will publish documents to explain to users how to keep a physical copy of Lion (which involves opening the Installer package and finding a DMG file in the Contents folder), still it’s interesting to know there will be the possibility to do everything from Disk Utility as Lion’s Installer is nothing but a wrapper. Check out the video below. Read more

Find My Mac Gets Real on Lion, Lets You Remote Wipe & Lock

Initially discovered a few months back after the first developer previews of OS X Lion, “Find My Mac” was rumored to be a new service that, following the path of “Find My iPhone”, would allow users to geo-locate their computer, remotely lock and wipe it just like it’s already possible with an iOS device, and perhaps even control it using Lion’s multi-user access features. Following last night’s release of Lion Developer Preview 4 with iCloud integration as announced at WWDC, 9to5mac details some of the aspects of Find My Mac, which apparently will behave exactly like its iOS counterpart in the way it’ll let users lock and wipe lost & connected Macs.

Setting it up is pretty straightforward. Interestingly, Apple lets guest users use Safari if you have this set up. That is a trick to help the Mac figure out where it is (IP address) and let you connect to it.

Once you connect to your lost Mac, you can then “Play a Sound or message”, “Remote Lock” or “Remote Wipe” the Mac.

Safari integration sounds like a clever solution to force a Mac to connect to the Internet, though we’re curious to see how this feature will look like in practice. On the iOS side of things it appears everything will work from the standard Find My iPhone app with the usual “remote” and “play sound” functionalities, and assuming there will also be Mac and web-based counterparts to control Find My Mac, the new option is shaping up to be quite powerful and user-friendly at the same time. Taking in consideration Backblaze’s recently announced feature to locate stolen Macs and stories of success with tools like Hidden, it’ll be interesting to see how Apple will market the (free?) Find my Mac against the competition.

From the screenshot above it looks like Find my Mac will be an iCloud service, although Apple hasn’t officially announced anything in addition to old MobileMe sync & push functions, OTA purchases and iTunes in the Cloud. Find my Mac could come this July when Lion is released, or this Fall, when iCloud is expected to go live for everyone.

Mac OS X Lion Developer Preview 4 Now Available

Following iOS 5 beta and iTunes 10.5 beta for Mac, Apple also flipped the switch on Mac OS X Lion Developer Preview 4 – available now for download in the Mac Dev Center. Build number is 11A480b, and it should contain all the new features demoed at the WWDC keynote today, including iCloud integration.

We’ll update this story with more details as they become available.

iCloud To Be Deeply Integrated With Apple’s Time Capsule?

In an article today by Cult of Mac, the website claims to have a scoop on what iCloud is and how it will work. Their source, which is supposedly ‘close to the company’, told Cult of Mac that iCloud will be deeply integrated with Time Capsule. Apparently iCloud will become less of a local backup and “more of a personal cloud server”. The source corroborates the recent rumors that suggested a refreshed Time Capsule would come with embedded A4 or A5 CPUs.

There will apparently be a “Home Folder” in which files saved on a Mac connected to the Time Capsule will be instantly backed up and then made available to any remote Mac or iOS device. The Time Capsule will archive and serve up any files to any connected device, even if the computer that made the file is off. If you do work on a device outside of your local network, the changes will be automatically made when you get back home.

Then in terms of iOS devices, it will allow you to upload photos and videos from, say, an iPhone to the Time Capsule – making them available to the other devices on the network. iCloud becomes the “conduit” for all your files and media.

“Your computer gets backed up to Time Capsule anyways,” said the source. “Now it’ll serve up your content when you want it, where you want it, right there on your iOS device.”

However the source wasn’t entirely sure if it was going to be announced at WWDC, just saying it was “what’s next in line” despite also noting “I heard that they have [it] ready to go”. The final thing the source noted was that they hadn’t heard of anything “about a Time Capsule holding iOS updates”, calling the rumor “incredibly stupid”.

[Via Cult of Mac]

Rumor: Lion To Launch On June 14th

In last year’s ‘Back to the Mac’ event, Apple publicly revealed that the next version of OS X, Lion, was scheduled for a summer 2011 release, but didn’t specify an exact launch date. 9to5 Mac today claims to have information that suggests Lion will launch on Tuesday, June 14th, less than two weeks away. It comes after Lion was said to have gone “live for internal testing” less than two weeks ago, suggesting a public release in the near future.

They claim to have heard chatter from several sources, suggesting the June 14th date is a “strong possibility”. Furthermore they report that Apple retail stores will revamp their storefront window to publicise the launch of Lion.

Apple is said to be planning one of their product launch-indicative “visual updates” for the morning of Tuesday, June 14th

The report also suggests that the launch of Lion will mark the beginning of reduced software presence within Apple stores, starting with the possible removal of Snow Leopard. In line with this, another source claims that the retail supplies of Snow Leopard are dwindling, solidifying the possibility of a mid-June launch of Lion. Earlier this year the appearance of several Lion manuals on Amazon had suggested a late-July launch based on their launch dates.

[Via 9to5 Mac]

CCleaner Coming To The Mac, First Beta Available Now

CCleaner, widely praised amongst Windows users, is making its way over to the Mac, with a first beta release available now. For those who are unfamiliar, CCleaner has been a Windows application that lets users easily delete and clean up their computer of temporary files, caches and other files that clog up their computer’s space, with many also using it for privacy, clearing out their browser data.

Being the first beta release, the OS X version has far less features than the current Windows version does. Nonetheless it still includes the core features of removing caches, cookies and history from either Safari or Firefox as well as clearing out the Trash, Recent Files and Servers and the Temporary folder.

Piriform, creators of CCleaner have said that they plan to release a full version within a few months, so expect more beta releases soon with support for more applications and more cleaning features. You can download the first beta release for OS X here.

[Via Lifehacker]

OS X Lion To Be Priced Aggressively, Offer iCloud Features for Free?

Ahead of the official Lion and iCloud announcements set for the WWDC keynote on June 6, AppleInsider reports today sources familiar with Apple’s plans claim the company will offer some iCloud features and services for free to users who decide to upgrade to Mac OS X Lion this summer. In the press release issued yesterday, Apple touted iCloud as “upcoming cloud services offering”, leading to speculation that Apple has built a series of services and not just a cloud-based music application for streaming to desktops and mobile devices. According to recent speculation, iCloud will offer a set of tools to replace MobileMe, which currently comes with calendar, email, storage, contact organization and photo gallery services. It was rumored before that a MobileMe revamp could also see Apple making more services free (besides Find my iPhone), though AppleInsider claims free functionalities will only be enabled for Lion users, with older OS X versions and Windows PCs getting access to iCloud for an unspecified fee.

People familiar with Apple’s plans indicated to AppleInsider that at least one of those secrets is expected to be that at least some of the services included in iCloud will be offered for free to Mac users who make the upgrade to Lion. iCloud is expected to replace the company’s existing MobileMe service, which offers e-mail and remote file storage, along with syncing of bookmarks, contacts and calendar events, at a price tag of $99 per year.

That price tag may remain for users who do not make the upgrade to Lion, or for Windows users. But it is expected that the cloud services will become free to Mac users who run the latest version of Mac OS X.

Music streaming is not expected to be offered for free, as Apple has been working closely with music labels and publishers to get deals done to launch a music service this year and, considering the licensing fees Apple will have to give back to them, users will likely have to pay an annual fee or monthly subscription in order to have their songs mirrored to the cloud and available for streaming on any device. Another report from March indicated the new MobileMe cloud music service would cost around $20 per year.

AppleInsider also reports a source “with an unproven track record” has said Apple will follow a similar pattern to Snow Leopard to price OS X Lion “aggressively” and persuade users to upgrade early without waiting for possible discounts or online deals. Snow Leopard was released with boxed copies priced at $29 as Apple considered it a “minor” upgrade to Leopard still worth purchasing and, if Lion will also be released digitally through the Mac App Store as recent speculation pointed out, Apple might try to cut the price of Mac App Store digital download and increase the price tag of boxed copies / (rumored) portable USB key distribution. Or, Apple could simply offer all versions of Lion at a lower price to convince all kinds of Mac users to upgrade early, get some iCloud features for free, and stay on the latest version of OS X. Apple has usually priced major OS X releases at $129 with Snow Leopard being the exception at $29. It’s unclear from today’s report whether “aggressive” pricing could refer to Lion being available at $29 as Snow Leopard, or simply below $129.

It’s possible that the lower price could also be tied to purchasing Lion through the Mac App Store. The company already does this by selling its professional photography software, Aperture, for $79.99 in the App Store – a price more $120 lower than the $199.99 Apple charges for a boxed copy of Aperture 3, and even $20 less than the $99 Aperture 3 Upgrade.

Whether Apple will choose to go with the same sub-$30 pricing of Snow Leopard when Lion goes on sale is unknown.

Mac OS X Lion was initially rumored to be scheduled for a summer release in late July or August, although a report from last week claimed the OS is nearing public release after widespread internal testing.

Update: 9to5mac reports iCloud could be offered for free to students and teachers with educational discounts tied to a Mac purchase. Apple could announce such an initiative as part of the Back to School promo rumored to be unveiled at WWDC next week.

A source with some success in the past has passed along that iCloud will have educational-tiered pricing, perhaps being free for students and teachers to a certain level or with the purchase of Apple products.

Example: Buy a Mac, get an iPod and two years of iCloud for free.