Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

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Filed under: Laptops

Usually it’s “only a matter of time” before some new-fangled laptop destined for a Windows kind of life up and gets OSx86 installed on it, but for the Dell Studio, that matter of time was extremely short. Witness a Studio 17 running Leopard out of the box, save for a few minor problems like lack of full video support, sound, WiFi, Bluetooth, and Ethernet. Still, it’s pretty encouraging to see the system working at all with such little time and effort put into it. Kind of makes you wish we lived in a super-magical fantasy world where you could run whatever OS you wanted on your laptop, doesn’t it?

Update: We had to pull the read link here due to the “Engadget Effect” — sorry Ken!

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Filed under: Desktops

It’s been almost exactly a year since we heard any chatter over Apple’s adoption of the supposedly rock solid 128-bit ZFS file system, but it appears to be heading into the next version of the company’s OS… at least for servers. According to the promo page for Snow Leopard for OS X servers, the redundant, error correcting, dynamic volume expanding format will be available when the new system drops, though there’s no mention of whether it will make its way onto the standard version of the software. With data handling that’s this tight, our only question is why wouldn’t it make the cut?

[Thanks, Mark]

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Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/apple/Snow_Leopard_to_drop_PowerPC_support’; PowerPC users, your days could be numbered. According to an alleged screenshot of Snow Leopard’s system requirements, only Intel CPUs will get to take a ride on the 10.6 train as of now. The grab comes from an early version of the OS seeded to developers at WWDC this week, though given that Jobsy said we’re a year out from an actual release, these things could change. Still, it’s not looking promising for those of you who’ve stood by your older models — but Apple shutting out legacy users doesn’t come as a real shock, does it?

[Via Mac Rumors; Thanks, Kiwi616]

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Filed under: Desktops

We weren’t terribly impressed with Psystar’s Open Computer the first time around, but hopefully this new revision will perk things up a bit — along with dealing with that insufferable fan noise. Psystar is making no such promises, but it has quietly rolled out a new case design, along with tossing in a NVIDIA GeForce 7200GS 256MB graphics card — a decent bump over the original’s integrated graphics. The price is still $399, and it still costs $155 extra to get Leopard pre-installed on the system.

[Thanks, iPod Macman]

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Filed under: Handhelds

While greeted with heaps of initial skepticism, forum jockeys over at OQO Talk now seem convinced that a junior member by the name of TRF has successfully hacked the OQO to run OS X Leopard. Adding a video filmed by Mr. Blurry Cam didn’t hurt the cause. TRF’s OQO is setup in a dual-boot Vista / OS X mode which boots Leopard in about 2 minutes and 30 seconds. WiFi, sound, power management and Bluetooth… it’s all there with applications popping with serious snap. The only thing missing at the moment is WWAN access which TRF is now testing. While not yet a “plug and play” hack, it’s “definitely doable” according to TRF. Perhaps, but we’ll need more details to say the least.

[Thanks Albert L. and lambda jones]

Read — Forum post
Read — Full Video

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Filed under: Handhelds

While greeted with heaps of initial skepticism, forum jockeys over at OQO Talk now seem convinced that a junior member by the name of TRF has successfully hacked the OQO to run OS X Leopard. Adding a video filmed by Mr. Blurry Cam didn’t hurt the cause. TRF’s OQO is setup in a dual-boot Vista / OS X mode which boots Leopard in about 2 minutes and 30 seconds. WiFi, sound, power management and Bluetooth… it’s all there with applications popping with serious snap. The only thing missing at the moment is WWAN access which TRF is now testing. While not yet a “plug and play” hack, it’s “definitely doable,” he says. Perhaps, but we’ll need more details to say the least. Video excerpt posted after the break.

[Thanks Albert L. and lambda jones]

Read — Forum post
Read — Full Video

Continue reading Video: OQO hacked to run Leopard, now world’s smallest Mac

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Filed under: Handhelds

With all the Psystar-related drama going on in the OSx86 scene this week, it’s easy to overlook the fact that people are doing some pretty wild things with the community-led project — we’ve already seen OS X boot on a Sony Vaio UX, and now the crew at jkOnTheRun have managed to shoehorn it on to a Samsung Q1 Ultra Premium UMPC. The Q1’s 1.33GHz Core Solo and upgraded 2GB of RAM are enough to run Leopard smoothly, it seems — Apple sold Mac Minis with similar specs a while back, after all — and while not everything works exactly right, it appears the digitizer is recognized, allowing Ink to work. It’s not perfect, as there are some calibration issues, but it’s a fun little peek into what an OS X tablet might look like — minus the command button, of course.

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Filed under: Desktops

If you’re not brave enough to OSx86 your own PC, psystar will sell you its OpenMac clone for $400. For that price you get 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo E4500 processor, 2GB of memory, integrated GMA 950 graphics, 250GB disk and 20x DVD burner. Add another $155 and they’ll even install Leopard on the non-Apple kit with the help of an EFI V8 emulator. Even at $555 it’s still a spec-for-spec bargain compared to the Mac mini (albeit without the mini dimensions). If interested you’d better snap one up quick. Jobs, you’ll recall, put a swift end to official Mac-clone licensing when he resumed power at Apple. No reason to think that he (or his lawyers) feel any differently now.

[Thanks, Roberto]

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Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

As much love as Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard has received in the press and from users, there are still plenty of bugs that need ironing out. Lucky for those users and those not-easily-embarrassed members of the press, Apple seems to be addressing most of those remaining bugs with its 10.5.2 update, which it just seeded to developers. There are apparently 76 fixes listed in the release notes, ranging from fan-faves like MacBook AirPort funkiness to obscure gems like Rosetta PowerPC compatibility memory leaks. This is just the first distribution of the update, and a release to users is rumored to hit mid-January, coinciding with new hardware at Macworld.

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Filed under: Laptops, Peripherals

We’re sure Apple had a fix in the works long before we got around to posting a poll about it, but if the response to Saturday’s informal questionnaire was any indication, this update is long overdue. Apple just posted a new software update for MacBooks and MacBook Pros running Leopard, which solves the problem with the keyboard freezing up sporadically for a minute or so, which had at least two Engadget editors’ keyboards in fits. Apple still hasn’t addressed the issue with dropping the first character when typing into a text box on certain MacBook Pros, but this is certainly a good move — though would it have really killed Apple to be a bit more talkative about the whole process?

[Thanks, Turgemanster]

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Filed under: Laptops, Peripherals

We’ve heard scattered reports of MacBook and MacBook Pro keyboard problems dating back for centuries, and while it sounds on the surface to be a fairly inconsequential problem in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t seem to be going away. So to figure out if this is just a few squeaky wheels, or indeed worthy of a torches and pitchfork party over in Curpentino, we’d like to imploy our super-scientific polling process and put it to a vote. For the uninitiated, the problem manifests itself in many ways, and was present before Leopard but showed up in more machines after the Leopard upgrade. Symptoms can include randomly skipped letters (specifically the first letter), fully frozen keyboards, funky capslock or numlock, and mild indegestion.

View Poll

[Thanks to all the squeaky wheels who sent this in]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Laptops

Inevitable? Yes. Super great? Absolutely. Do we potentially derive too much pleasure from answering our own questions? Quite possibly. Asus has really built itself a PC ripe for the tinkering — as Dan at UNEASYsilence points out, there’s a bootable DVD included to restore the thing to factory settings, so the worst that can happen is you blow a few hours on a bum install. Of course, Leopard wasn’t really designed to speed along on this level of horsepower, but the Eee PC still managed to run the OS, and the pre-hacked disk images available on the internets make it fairly straightforward process. Instructions are at the read link.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

Leopard bugs got you down? Apple just pushed out its first update for the new OS, 10.5.1. It looks like it cures a whole laundry list of niggles with Leopard, including that nasty “potential data loss” issue with partitions in Finder. We heard about most of these fixes last week when the first build was seeded to developers, but there’s a rundown of what actually made it after the break. Highlights include a fix to Time Machine drive limitations, a bunch of improvements to Finder’s Shared Sidebar, and good old fashioned spanking of Mail.app’s issues. Let us know if Apple didn’t fix what ails you and we’ll be sure to have our people talk to Steve’s people.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Continue reading Leopard 10.5.1 is now available

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops, Storage

Although we’ve been mostly happy with Leopard, one of the features we were most looking forward to was the ability to set Time Machine to use a NAS volume like Airport Disk, thus making laptop backups wireless and sexy (well, sort of sexy) instead of wired and cumbersome. Sadly, Apple cut the feature at the last minute, but as with all things OS X, nirvana is usually just a defaults write command away, and Volker Weber has got it sorted for us. Just pop open a terminal window and enter:



and you should be able to select NAS volumes in the Time Machine prefs. Of course, you should only re-enable this for giggles — we don’t know why Apple turned it off to begin with, and it could very well be full of bugs and hose your data. Considering some of the other glitches that have cropped up in Time Machine, we’d actually recommend staying well away from this one, but if you’re desperate, by all means — go for it and let us know how it works in comments!

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

With the number of bugs that’ve already been reported for Leopard — most of which are fairly inherent in any .0 release, but are no less annoying — it doesn’t take much of a rumor-enthusiast to figure out that Apple is hard at work on a 10.5.1 update. The first fruit of that effort just hit ADC developers today, in the form of build 9B13. The update is pretty broad, and since this is just the first seed of 10.5.1, there’s no telling how long it’ll take for Apple to get this all tightened up for public consumption. Issues that are being addressed include:

• Mail Sync
• Spotlight Index
• Disk Management
• DesktopServices and moving files across partitions
• Text Drawing
• iCal and CalDAV syncing
• Keychain login
• Read-Only Issue with SMB
• AirPort 802.1X
• Application Firewall
• To-Do Notes
• and Smart Mailboxes.

Granted, that’s just a high level overview so it’s hard to tell if this will tackle your specific 10.5.0 pet peeve, but there’s a mite bit more after the break in other areas of change.

Continue reading Mac OS X 10.5.1 seeded to developers

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Desktops, Features, Laptops

Alright, so you’ve had seven whole days (and a few minutes now on the East coast, but who’s counting?) to wrap your loving / skeptical arms around Apple’s latest operating system, toss it on your machine and test out “300+ new features” that Cupertino managed to include. During the past week, we — along with quite a few others — looked this OS up and down in order to determine if it really was worth the $129 asking price, and while we wouldn’t deem Leopard unflawed, we’ve yet to find ourselves itching to downgrade. ‘Course, we’re sure there’s a plethora of you out there still perusing the feature list and wondering if it’ll work on your near-decade-old machine, but this space is for the resolute souls who wiped their calendar clean last weekend to sit diligently behind a keyboard / mouse and put OS X 10.5 to the test.

For those of you who fit the aforementioned description to a T, we’re beyond curious to know how your experiences have been. Have you found that Leopard makes your life a little less hectic? Roiled senseless by countless bugs? Are there any features you wish Steve’s drones would have programmed in at the eleventh hour? Considering that over two million of you have already made the leap to Apple’s latest feline, we know there’s a flood of squawks just waiting to be unleashed — so go on, we’re all ears.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

Two and a half years of waiting, and two million plus copies later, Leopard has made its way into many a Mac — but are all its users completely satisfied? Probably not, but there’s still a lot to love. Apple really did a spot-cleaning on OS X this time, and virtually every nook and cranny of the system has been tweaked, tuned, modified — and in almost all cases improved. You don’t need a lengthy review from the likes of us: if you’re an Engadget reader and a Mac user, Leopard is a must-have. If you haven’t already snagged it (or just wanted to read over some of the news you may have missed) check out our coverage roundup below.

Leopard: impressions, features, hardware, questions, and the BSOD icon
All about Leopard: gallery, apps, impressions
Leopard vs. Vista: feature chart showdown
Mini How-To: Remove the Windows BSOD icon in Leopard, make OS X a little less smug
We’ve got Leopard, what do you want to know?
Leopard on an 8 year old G4 Power Mac — can it be done?

Sad Mac
RIP, Classic Mac OS: 1984 - 2007
Getting Leopard’s BSOD? Try uninstalling APE.
Apple halts Boot Camp downloads ahead of Leopard’s release

Everything else
Apple: 2 million copies of Leopard sold
Leopard reviews coming in, usual suspects agree: it’s all gravy
Leopard hacked for Intel PC consumption
Leopard: final features and further upgrade details
Poll: How do you want us to cover Leopard?

Rumble on
Poll: OS war, 2007

Nostalgia
Post-Tiger wishlist from way back in 2005 — we actually got some of the things we wanted!
Tiger Direct sues Apple over Tiger (and then calls it off)

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Desktops, Features, Laptops, Networking

It’s pretty clear that Apple left no stone unturned in Leopard, making changes and fixes throughout the new operating system. Unfortunately, that also included an upgrade to its crucial smugness subsystem: the image you see above of an old school CRT monitor with a blue screen of death is actually the icon Leopard uses to represent Windows machines on your local network. (Is it any wonder why PC and Mac fanboys tend to get in so many fights?) Granted, many Leopard beta users have seen this icon since the early releases, but we didn’t actually think the shipping version would include something so pompous and galling to the other 90%.

We’ll save the missive on the subject (although if that’s what you’re looking for, Anil Dash wrote a pretty good one), and skip straight to the problem solving: hidden away deep within the recesses of Leopard, far, far away from the reaches of Spotlight, is an unassuming icon file that’s doing a great job at perpetuating the myth of Mac users’ disdainful sense of self-superiority. Luckily it’s an easy fix, and we’ll show you the three easy steps necessary to get rid of the BSOD and make your Mac a little less condescending.

Continue reading Mini How-To: Remove the Windows BSOD icon in Leopard, make OS X a little less smug

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

Leopard is on track to be Apple’s most successful OS ever. According to Apple, Leopard sold two million copies in its first weekend, “far outpacing” Tiger — Apple’s previous best selling OS. Anyone have Vista’s first 2.5 days sales numbers available? Come on, it’s always fun to compare.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!