Apple's traditional desktop computing business has suffered many indignities over the past decade. Once Apple's flagship product line, the Mac first found itself playing second fiddle to the iPod—a me

On a past Apple conference call, Tim Cook said "one thing we'll make sure is that we don't leave a price umbrella for people". What's that? A price umbrella is when a company with dominant market shar

Artist's rendition of Pioneer 10 above Jupiter NASA The Pioneer 10 spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida on March 2, 1972. Its planned mission was to be the first man-made craft to traverse

Today, Tapbots released the first public alpha of Tweetbot for Mac . This is not a final review of the app: being in the development stage – albeit ready to be tested by the public – Tweetbot for Mac

Last year when I wrote about the new MacBook Airs I offered two forward looking paragraphs: What happens from here on out is what's really interesting. Intel has already committed to moving the TDP of

Warner Brothers Adam Rogers Jul 19, 2012 Why the Dark Knight's relationship to his city is unlike that of any other superhero. In 2008, Batman went a little crazy. It wasn’t his fault. He’d been intentionally pushed into a semi-delusional state by a villain called the Black Glove. Standing on top of…

Authors :Jörg P. Dietrich, Norbert Werner, Douglas Clowe, Alexis Finoguenov, Tom Kitching, Lance Miller, Aurora Simionescu First Author’s Institution : Physics Department, University of Michigan The C

Uh… so is it “play” or “Play”? For the most part, Apple’s product naming is extremely logical. Computers are Macs and consumer products are i-devices. Customers know the language and the brand is reinforced at every turn. But you don’t have to dig too deep before things the logic shows a few cracks.…

Enlarge / Apple applied lessons learned from the MacBook Air to make its Retina MacBook Pro thinner and lighter. Chris Foresman A thinner , "Retina" MacBook Pro had been rumored for some time, and App

Next post Previous post Warning! This is one of those blogging-about-blogging posts. If navel-gazing 1 like this annoys you, move on. Blog comments are a contentious issue. Most political blogs have t

“Six hours’ sleep for a man, seven for a woman, and eight for a fool,” Napoleon famously prescribed. (He would have scoffed at Einstein, then, who was known to require ten hours of sleep for optimal p

With the chaos of different screen sizes and a new generation of web browsers, the design paradigms of layout and typography have shifted away from static layouts and system fonts to dynamic layouts a

(Or: Why Windows 8 Scares Me -- and Should Scare You Too) I was very excited when I saw the first demos of Windows 8. After years of settling for mediocre incremental improvements in its core products

It’s been two weeks since the launch of Writer for Mac, and it went off like a rocket. We sold almost 5,000 copies in two weeks. Of course, version 1.0 had some birth defects (1.01 is out now), but th

I keep hearing people talking about Apple finally going “thermonuclear” on Google with the forthcoming iOS 6 mobile operating system. No, it hasn’t. In fact, there are good reasons why it can’t, thoug

Next post Previous post As I made my tea tonight, I thought about how just a little bit of thinking about a little annoyance was able to make my life a little better. Here’s how I make tea at home: I

Last week, Readability CEO Richard Ziade [announced](http://blog.readability.com/2012/06/announcement/) that Readability’s acceptance of reader fees and their publisher payment system is ending. In th

Out There A Career Waiting for E.T. to Phone Jill Tarter once complained to me that she had no poetry in her soul. It was 1990, and NASA was getting ready to undertake a survey of the 1,000 nearest st

When we built websites we usually started by defining the body text. The body text definition dictates how wide your main column is, the rest used to follow almost by itself. Used to. Until recently,

SO THE EX just moved to Manhattan’s most iconic private housing community. It is a large residential complex of oversized, renovated apartments set in an 80-acre private park. The sprawling collection

Need help? Contact us We've detected unusual activity from your computer network To continue, please click the box below to let us know you're not a robot. Why did this happen? Please make sure your b

The hype surrounding Sculley’s CES announcement of the Newton was immense, a precursor of the hoopla that would later accompany Steve Jobs‘ keynotes for iPods, iPhones, iPads and other post-Newton gadgets. But it didn’t change anything right away. Sculley, in fact, was demoing vaporware: The…

If you want to venture into New York City's subterranean nether circles, let Jeff Roth be your Virgil. To a basement two levels below the bustling streets near Times Square, for example. Just past som

The Computer Lab's Beyond Cyberpunk Hypercard stack Beyond Cyberpunk! Update : It's Memorial Day weekend here in the US, and the Ars staff has a long weekend accordingly. Many will spend that time rel

There are at least three dozen sessions marked ‘to be announced’ on Apple’s WWDC schedule. Many of them are positioned in the largest room, one normally dedicated to the keynote address. Whatever is being announced at WWDC, a huge amount of programming has been planned and rehearsed for it. It’s…

Look Now for Venus to Cross the Sun, or Wait Another Century NOTED The transit of Venus in 1769 drew scientists’ attention not only in Britain but also in its American colonies. Credit... APS Collecti

A series of three interesting papers appeared today on astro-ph presenting a very exciting result: researchers at the Space Telescope Science Institute are finally able to predict with great precision the details of the collision of our Milky Way with the Andromeda galaxy, the nearest massive spiral…

Illustration by Robert Neubecker. For a few hours last week, I’d planned to write a column about the “ five-second rule .” Scientists at Manchester Metropolitan University in England had released a st

After a “hands across the Apple world” edition last week the Macalope promised he’d get back to punching jerks this week and he’s a mythical beast of his word. First some silly punditry from Mashable