Blogintosh

 Students already get a 10% discount at the Apple store, but now Apple is throwing in a little extra.  With the purchase of a new computer for college Students also receive a $299 rebate for an 8GB iPod touch or 8GB iPod nano.  After purchasing your Mac and iPod submit your rebate online before October 15, 2008.  Apple isn’t taking any chances this year  in their fight to be number one on college campuses.  The college students of today, are the Enterprise Employees and Business Owners of the future. 

Like it or not, the wedding season is upon us. When I was planning my wedding one of the most difficult things was avoiding the cheesy “wedding” products. A feather longer than my arm with a pen attached to it and a binder covered in a large lace pillow seemed to be my only options for the guest book. I waited until the very last possible moment and finally cut up a bunch of paper and just had people sign their names on a random piece of paper… it turned out OK at the time but now I have 500 pieces of paper with signatures and limited closet space.

Now 3 years later (which equals about a million in the technology world), one novel idea to avoid the lace pillow binder is a book from iPhoto. Put pictures of the couple in using the smaller picture settings with two or three pictures per page, or place one large picture with the opposite page blank. Provide fine tip permanent markers and have guests sign their names and comments in the blank portions of the book. Creating a beautiful personal book will give the couple something to treasure rather than shove in the attic.

iPhoto books run $29.99 for a 10 page book which should be more than enough space for the average wedding and is much cheaper than every company specializing in personalized guest books.

Apple released a promotional video on Apple.com illustrating the convenient new MobileMe. They have marketed it as “Exchange for the rest of us.”

MobileMe is a secure online server that holds your email, calendar, address book, photos, and files pushing your most current information to all of our devices. MobileMe will work with your Mac, iPhone, PC while also giving you the option to access your information from online from any computer in any location. Web applications can be accessed through Me.com where icons for your mail, address book, calendar, photos, files and account settings are readily available upon login. This means even on your trip to Mexico you can access all your information from any hotel internet center and photos on MobileMe are accessible through Apple TV creating beautiful slide shows of your pictures. The instructional video illustrating every possible feature is on Apple’s website at: http://www.apple.com/mobileme/guidedtour/index.html?size=medium

While Apple only talks about the consumer benefits of such a product the business benefits are obvious. Try MobileMe for free for 60 days or purchase 20GB of space on the secured server for $99 a year. A family plan is also available for $149 a year for 4 people with 40GB of space.

Yesterday, Apple announced the release of Mac OS X Snow Leopard to take place in 2009. The developers in the press release give a large amount of information as to why they want to lay a foundation for the greatest operating system to date. The truth of the matter is that Leopard, while a great system with a lot of wonderful new features, is just plain buggy. Our technicians have spent hours working with Leopard and have found odd spots here and there (no pun intended). Apple describes Snow Leopard as the following,

“Snow Leopard is optimized for multi-core processors, taps into the vast computing power of graphic processing units (GPUs), enables breakthrough amounts of RAM and features a new, modern media platform with QuickTime® X. Snow Leopard includes out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 and is scheduled to ship in about a year.”

Snow Leopard is an attempt to make Leopard the operating system that was expected and the system Apple intended. When Leopard is working more efficiently Apple can roll out all of the great new features they are sitting on. Our predictions are that Snow Leopard will be set at a lower price point around the $30-$50 range to encourage consumers to buy. It makes sense to us, what is the point in releasing more features and more gadgets if the fundamental operating system is weak? If that were the case we would call it Microsoft.

Get a little Pro-Patria in July by spending your Economic Stimulus Check on the new iPhone. Apple announced the release date of the iPhone G3 today. The beautiful new iPhone will be faster, with enterprise features such as Microsoft Exchange.

The iPhone comes in the standard black or new white option with a GPS unit inside giving the Google Map feature an even greater boost. But here is the kicker, this new iPhone which has all the features of the original plus is selling for half the price. It is not available for pre-order on the website as of yet. For purchasing Internet searchers are being directed to the Apple Store.

Microsoft released a critical update for users of Office 2008 today. The update is said to improve security features of the program with some frighten specifics of problems that have been occurring with Office 2008.

The update description reads:

“This update contains several improvements to enhance security, stability, and performance, including fixes for vulnerabilities that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer’s memory with malicious code.”

Keep checking your updates to apply this patch since it is an important one.

This idea was first posted on the TUAW website but it was just genius enough to repost on Blogintosh. Membership cards from Hallmark, Staples, Blockbuster, Safeway, Petsmart and every other retail chain plague my wallet leaving little room for the large amounts of cash I make. One little Appletard had the great idea to scan the cards and save them in the iPhone or iPod Touch under iPhoto. The cards are still fully scannable and cut down on wallet size an average of .3 inches. Presumably the same could be done for gift cards, you would just have to remember to delete the photo when the card was used up.

Unfortunately this solution will not work with punch cards or stamp cards but give it a couple months and someone will come up with a solution for that too. Just remember you heard the prediction on Blogintosh first.

This morning at 6:00am the new Apple store in Boston, MA opened. The Boston store is the largest Apple store to date outshining the 5th Street Apple store in New York.

The store opening featured a free T-Shirt give away as well as “special prizes” given out throughout the day…. one can only hope the “special prizes” started with an I and rhymed with PiePhone. While the store rumored to be opening on NW 23rd in Portland has still not showed any signs of remodeling it does encourage us to stand outside with bated breath when it does.

Apple announced they would be offering iTunes Movies for sale on the same day as the DVD release.  They also followed by saying you can now purchase movies directly through your Apple TV.

Previously you could only rent movies through your Apple TV but now you will be able to keep them forever with the added “Buy” button.  The Apple TV will then sync to your iTunes library and be yours forever.

These are big announcements for Apple as they attempt to take over the movie market as they have the music market… however personally I feel like both of these are no-brainers in simply becoming more competitive.

With June quickly approaching and the scheduled release of the SDK “store” rumors are fluttering about the new 3G iPhone.

The 3G iPhone has been rumored for months now but recently a price point has also been circulating. The 3G iPhone is said to be going for $199 with a 2 year AT&T contract. The purpose of making a lower end version with an accessible price point is to simply get it in the hands of users. While it would not have the same amount of space as it’s beefy predecessors it would serve the same functionality and become the staple of every 13 year old in America.

The rumors seem very founded when you consider Apple’s huge push for the iPhone to be number one in the corporate market. Companies nationwide would switch and add users to include even entry level employees for such a low cost.