Has Apple become the Big Brother they rebelled against in 1984? How large should the role of tech be in education? Has internet privacy gone the way of the dodo? Join us as we shake out the answers to these and other burning questions in this month’s episode.
OWC Radio is a monthly, forum-based podcast focused on the events and happenings in the Mac community. This week’s hosts are: OWC Grant, OWC Chris S., and OWC Mike H.
Options include enough capacity to hold up to 6,145 hours of DVD quality movies with Mercury Pro Qx2 RAID storage solutions up to 12TB – – and the ability to make copies of purchased CD/DVD/Blu-ray media with OWC’s Slim portable bus-powered drive
Other World Computing announced today its new OWC Media Center Solution for the 2010 Mac mini to address the growing need of consumers wanting to search, navigate, consume, store/backup, and sync digital content from multiple content sources and devices with one easy to use solution. The OWC Media Center Solution includes installing the Plex digital media management platform onto a customer’s 2010 Mac mini, upgrading the mini with 4GB of OWC RAM, and bundling all the necessary hardware – including an OWC Mercury Pro™ Qx2 storage solution, OWC Slim portable CD/DVD/Blu-ray disc burner, Elgato EyeTV Hybrid tuner or HD DVR, and Apple Remote – to deliver a complete and hassle-free Plug and Play Mac mini based home theatre/entertainment solution. OWC will be demonstrating the new OWC Media Center Solution and other first-to-market products, like the OWC Mercury Aura Pro SSDs for MacBook Air models, in booth #513 at the Macworld Expo, which begins today in San Francisco, California. Article Continues…
As the year winds down, we take the opportunity to look back over the last 12 months or so to see just how far we’ve come and give ourselves hope for the future. Looking back at 2010, we can sum it up as a year of innovations and advancement, both for OWC and for the Mac platform.
Obviously, the innovation from Apple that had the greatest impact on the computer industry as a whole was the introduction of the iPad. End users flocked to it; other companies tried to emulate it. Reviewers alternately praised it as the “next big thing” or derided it as being “a really big iPod Touch.” Hundreds of cases and accessories sprang into existence in to help you make the most of the new device. Whether you liked it, hated it or really didn’t care, you couldn’t deny that Apple made a big splash with the iPad.
The iPhone 4, with its high-resolution Retina Display and video chat capabilities was a huge seller, but its success was tainted somewhat by antenna problems. After receiving a lot of flak for dropping calls via the “grip of death”, Apple rectified the problem somewhat with a free “bumper” program.
That wasn’t Apple’s only stumble during the year. In November, a “mysterious” announcement sent the rumor mills into overdrive by promising a day that we’d “never forget.” The result was a somewhat anticlimactic announcement of The Beatles catalog being available on iTunes. While this was something many music fans had been looking forward to, most agreed that the amount of hype given to it was far too much.
It was a bit of a downer for a year that had started so well. OWC, on the other hand, started strong and got stronger as the year progressed. Article Continues…
Hi, my name is June Oehlers and I’m co-owner of a small media production company named freshlab inc. based in Curaçao. We mainly produce commercials and infomercials. Recently, we started on the production of a 30 minute TV program which airs every other week on our local TV station. We shoot with DSLR cameras due to their amazing image quality, small footprint and cost.
Editing was previously done on a Dual 2.3 MHz Power Mac G5. As you may know, HD video editing and Motion graphics can be a very processor intensive procedure. We needed to upgrade ASAP to a faster Mac in order to accommodate the growth of our company. My first choice would have been an eight-core Mac Pro with a 27” display, but it didn’t fit our budget. Shortly thereafter, though, the news came out about the faster 2010 iMacs. We decided to go for a 27” Intel Core i7 iMac because it fit our budget perfectly.
A couple of weeks later, I visited macsales.com to search for an external 3.5” hard drive enclosure. That is when the magic happened; on the front page was an ad about OWC’s iMac Turnkey Upgrade Program for the 2010 iMacs. I was immediately sold on the eSATA upgrade option. After some research and getting our budget complete, we placed an order with OWC for the eSATA upgrade, then ordered a 27” iMac at the Apple store and had it delivered directly to OWC.
The order process went smoothly. After our iMac was shipped, we informed OWC of the shipment and they immediately informed us they have received our iMac. Within two days, we received a notification e-mail from OWC that the upgrade was complete and that our now eSATA interface equipped iMac was on its way to us. Just three days later, the iMac had arrived on the island.
We are very pleased with our OWC eSATA upgrade. With an 8.0TB RAID unit connected via eSATA, it makes the 27” Intel Core i7 iMac a real video editing beast.
Though the excitement of new internal workings on a recently-released Mac is always a crowd-pleaser, there’s something to be said about keeping things the same: namely, the security of knowing what worked before will likely continue to work. Such is the case with the 2010 Mac Pros, which—as far as upgrading goes—are pretty much identical to the 2009 models.
This continuance of design means that it remains simple to add an eSATA port to the back of your Mac Pro at a fraction of the expense of a full PCIe card. All you need is the Newer Technology eSATA Extender Cable and a Phillips screwdriver.
Just like the 2009 version, all you need to do is detach the SATA cable going to the empty optical bay and route the extender cable behind the internal fan, to the PCIe ports. We even have an instructional video that shows how easy it is.
eSATA is the fastest external hard drive connection method currently available for the Mac Pro. OWC and Newer Technology make it easy to add it yourself.
While “unboxing” photos are fun for a brand new product line like the iPad or even the iPhone 4, showing the same for a model that doesn’t change a whole lot — like the Mac Pro — is a little like going to an ice cream shop and ordering vanilla. Really, how many times do you need to see the styrofoam corner protectors or the little sleeve with the owner’s manual and restore discs?
So what we thought you would find interesting is what’s inside this new computer; since as we learned with the 2010 iMacs sometimes, you find something unexpected.
This time around though, despite offering up to 12 cores of computing power and beefed up video capabilities, the internal layout looks to be pretty much the same as previous versions. But sometimes you can’t get enough of a good thing and in this case, we’ve verified there is still plenty of room for easy upgrading! But don’t take our word for it, here’s what it looks like inside: Article Continues…
As we’re always in the pursuit of making your Mac (and our Macs, and the Mac of that nice guy down the street) faster, we have confirmed that the new Mac Pro 2010 models do address dual- and triple-channel memory addressing.
Similar to dual-channel interleaving in previous models, installing memory in matched sets of three will allow the Mac to distribute memory functions across the modules in that set, allowing faster access to that information. In triple-channel mode, you can see up to 15% more memory bandwidth over dual-channel addressing.
Technically, this isn’t anything new; the 2009 Mac Pros also had this feature. However, when they came out, there were few applications took advantage of this and most apps didn’t show any real-world advantage over dual-channel setups.
As software progresses to take advantage of the capabilities of new Macs, though, that will change. If you upgrade your 2009 or 2010 Mac Pro to a triple-channel setup now, you can rest assured that—both now and in years to come—your system will be performing to the best of its ability.
Puttin' out the "fire in a crowded theater."
There’s nothing quite like a juicy Apple related headline to get the masses going all atwitter…yes the word definition, not the app! The latest case of perhaps blowing a minor inconvenience out of proportion and getting Mac users unduly concerned was a forum posting claiming the 2010 Mac Pros are “incompatible” with some external hard drives, specifically “quad interface” models with Oxford 934 chipsets.
The fact that puts out the “fire” alarm on the world’s stage “crowded theater” is that the Mid-2010 Mac Pros will work with drives containing this chipset. The only small “concession” that users will need to make, at this time, is that they will need wait to turn on their external drives until a few seconds after booting. Of course, it’s practically a certainty we’ll soon be seeing a firmware update to address this very minor inconvenience, be it from Apple for the Mac Pro or from Oxford for their bridge chipset.
It just goes to show that the old adage could be revised to “where there’s smoke, you should look through it to see there’s no fire.” Or, perhaps, turn to the OWC blog to get the straight facts. They may be boring…but at least we don’t get you running for the exits. ;-)
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UPDATE 7:09 PM Well, we couldn’t leave enough alone…we’ve tested every one of our Oxford 934 based solutions and none of them exhibit any operating issues with the new Mac Pro. If Globeman could talk, he might be saying, “move along, nothing to see…keep moving.”
