Chris K

A very informative and helpful article. Thanks, Steve.

We're fortunate that this trojan can't do its dirty work without root. Telling your users "don't give out root" is possible. Telling them "don't visit the web" (for auto-infecting viruses) isn't possible.

I won't be buying any Macs with this limitation. If any of my six Macs (well, not the SSD Air) had a hard drive failure, I'd replace the HD myself with off-the-shelf parts. Heck, my Mac Pro has had a half-dozen hard drives float through it.

I'll pay Apple for custom parts, like the failed motherboard on my C2D Mac Mini, but I'll be damned if I'm going to buy a hard drive from them at a markup simply because they hack on the hard drives.

I hope this doesn't mean I won't be buying any more Macs. My Pro is circa 2006 and I had been eyeing a 12-core replacement, and I was hoping to replace my 2006 iMac with a new one as soon as they come off the glossy kick. But I refuse to buy a closed box. I'll sooner build a Hackintosh.

I hate my Airport Extreme for three reasons:

1) You can't change much of anything without requiring a reboot. Port forwarding? Reboot. Wifi settings? Reboot. IP reservations? Reboot.

2) It tends to lose its mind occasionally and require a reboot, which is compounded by:

3) Reboots take a long time. Other routers take a second or two at most. The Apple router takes quite a long time. I've never measured it, but it's perhaps a minute? With a house full of devices and people using the Internet nearly 24/7, this feels like a day at work, waiting for maintenance windows.

I love my Airport Extreme for one reason:

It's the only router I've used that can maintain signal throughout my entire house. No Linksys, no DLink, no Netgear, no Belkin.

Dammit.

It's a nice app, but I couldn't manage to add a video to an Album earlier today. A bug, I suppose. I'll have to submit a bug report to Vimeo. Still, the app is very full-featured, and it will be very useful!

The problem with the MacBook Air for photos is the semi-gloss TN screen.

Tilt the screen slightly off-angle and you get color shift. Keep the brightness at a normal level and you get reflections. Increase the brightness to overpower the reflections and the image is inaccurate (too bright, whites blown).

I do photo processing with my MacBook Air 13", but it's not the best tool for the job. Now, if Apple offered an IPS screen with a matte finish, THAT would be the perfect photographer's laptop.

That's just what I mean, though. Not having a battery is silly for a laptop, but *I* don't use it. I am ALWAYS plugged in.

My point is, just because someone doesn't use a feature doesn't make it useless.

I don't use:

1) Backlit keyboard
2) Video camera
3) Firewire
4) Glossy screen
5) Battery power

Apple, remove them. They're a waste of space.

(Does this illustrate how silly removing the optical drive is? Just because you don't use it, doesn't mean others don't.)

It sure is easy to be an anonymous snarky little jerk on the Internet, isn't it?

It doesn't cost Apple much to make glossy AND matte monitors (see: MacBook Pro), but there's a good portion of the market who will not use glossy monitors. Unfortunately for Apple, it's the high-end graphics market who tends to avoid glossy monitors, which is exactly the segment of the market who's likely to pay Apple's big price premium.

The solution for the user is easy: buy monitors from other makers. It's too bad, though; despite the lack of adjustment on my Apple 30", it calibrates very nicely and has been rock solid for me for a few years.

I was worried this would happen. Apple's best display is now 3" smaller and glossy. I have a 30" display and there's no way I'd downgrade to that. Sadly, my Apple 30" was the last Apple display I'll ever buy. I just can't do glossy; it kills image quality too much from glare and reflections.

I hope Apple gives up on the glossy screens someday. They make a nice monitor, but glossy screens are totally unsuitable for demanding work in anything but an unlit room.

Agreed. If ads in eBooks ever comes to pass on a platform, I will never use that platform again. If all of them implement it, I will pirate books and read the text outside of an eBook app/device.

Ads have no place in books. I refuse to be an enabler for the introduction of this particular scourge to literature.