tanousjm

I can barely get my 'Hello World' program to work...

As of 12:30 AM EDT, can't download, update, or restore anything on iOS or Mac.

D'oh!

If they include even a bit of exclusive content, I'll have to buy it, even though I bought all the games individually upon their release. Even with the controversial (and to me, disappointing) ending in 3, this was still the best game series I've ever played (from a storyline and overall perspective point of view). Now as an adult, I think about Mass Effect the same way I thought about LOTR as a kid.

Worked for me with an AT&T micro-SIM.

Much faster than stock SSD, better capacity, minimal hit on battery life. It's a great alternative for those planning to purchase the $500 512 GB Apple SSD upgrade.

JUST bought an 830...

Just finished three days of repeat testing on the final builds of 10.8.2 and 10.7.5. Good news is that battery life remains restored in Mountain Lion compared to the developer builds.

I have to say I was a bit worried it wouldn't last, given Apple's recent software missteps (i.e., the battery life in the developer builds was restored by disabling critical underlying code, etc). Glad I was wrong!

Pre-release benchmarks didn't lie. The iPhone 5 is dramatically faster than the 4S and even the iPad 3 in some tests.

Of course, this only has value for those looking to stay within the iOS ecosystem. Many current and upcoming Android phones score as high or higher than the 5.

Good point, gojomo. Sorry about that! I used Apple's Numbers app to make the graphs and it doesn't do too well at offering color customization. It's often an all or nothing approach.

I'll make future graphs with Excel.

Thanks for the feedback!

We got some feedback on our last virtualization benchmark. Lots of people wanted to know how Parallels 7 compared to 8 and Fusion 4 to 5. They were also curious about how well the free VirtualBox performs and how they all stack up to Boot Camp.

Short answer: Boot camp is the champ (obviously) and Parallels 8 is second. Fusion is third, but not by much, and VirtualBox is a distant fourth ("you get what you pay for").

Okay guys, here it is! It took weeks of non-stop testing but we finally have the comprehensive look at battery life from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion.

This was requested after we performed our earlier tests that focused on Lion to Mountain Lion. The good news is that 10.8.2 seems to bring a HUGE improvement. I just hope whatever changes Apple made survive into the final version.

I hope we were able to answer your requests and comments. Please continue to let me know if you want us to test other scenarios.

Hi guys, thanks for the feedback. We didn't have access to a copy of Parallels 7 for an 8 vs 7 comparison, but we're working on getting one and will update the article when we do.

We're also planning to run tests in native Boot Camp, and we're going to take a look at the free VirtualBox to see if it's worth even paying for these apps at all.

Thanks again, and let me know if you have any other specific benchmarks or apps/games that you'd like us to test. We'll do our best to try everything.

In a variety of benchmarks, Parallels 8 beat Fusion 5 by five to twenty percent. But both were remarkably capable of running Windows 7 and Windows 8.

Heck, even Crysis was "playable" on Medium settings.

Any other tests you want to see? Let me know!

Ha, I know, I wrote the article. I think I didn't correctly articulate my first comment. What I meant to say was something like "I don't think there's any way to overlook this, and that's a problem" because many of media outlets covering the trial have not even mentioned it.

I just imagine a bunch of Apple legal team members watching the foreman's interviews and all of them simultaneously face-palming. It probably won't cost Apple the verdict, but it will cost them more time and money on appeal.

This is certainly more legal than technical, but I've been very intrigued by the comments that the jury foreman has made to the media.

After some research, and speaking with attorneys, I think there may be a problem with the way the verdict was decided. Not that I'm trying to make a judgment on who should have won, but it seems that this foreman was a bit too excited by his role and the information he claims to possess.

Any thoughts?

These are different articles, Casseres. First one was MacBook Pro battery tests, this is a follow-up with MacBook Air tests.

Never liked OnLive's technology. It was certainly cool, but I must have been too far from the servers; always had slight, infuriating lag whenever I tried it.

You're right; I'm sorry I missed discussing that. Our testing methodology is to run each test at least 2 times and if the second test is within 5 percent of the first, to average the two results. If there's a greater than 5 percent difference, we run multiple tests until we can determine which result was abnormal and why.

It's not THE most scientific methodology, but it's a decent balance between time and accuracy. In the case of our most recent round of tests, none of the second results were more than 4 percent off the first test.

Hi toadkick,

Yep, I'm currently sitting here running 10.6.8 battery life tests as we speak. I'm going to make it as comprehensive as I can and run multiple tests on each build of OS X from 10.6.8 to 10.8.2 (prerelease). It will take a while; should be ready by the middle of this coming week.

10.8.1 improved things a little bit, but running time is still short of where it was in Lion.

We only have one Mac in our test suite that can support it, but we're going to try to test the 2011 MBP with Snow Leopard and compare that to the results on the same machine for Lion and Mountain Lion.

I knew there was a reason I liked the new Microsoft look.

"Content worth being submitted will find its way here without employees dumping links like clockwork and if it doesn't end up here then maybe that means something too."

Good point!

Hi toadkick, That's a great idea. Our 2011 MacBook Pro that we used in the test can run 10.6, so this weekend I'll see if I can roll it back and run the tests on Snow Leopard for comparison.

Hey benologist, I can see you're frustrated by the frequent submissions that The Mac Observer and other tech sites make to HN. I've read a lot of your commentary on the topic and I agree with many of your points.

In my own personal opinion, it's not cool to simply dump every article that a site publishes to places like HN, Reddit, etc. I also agree that a lot of sites generate content solely as "link bait," fill their articles with useless internal links, and offer no real substance other than to re-report what some other site said.

However, in this case, and in the relatively few articles I've submitted to HN and other places (check my profile), I think that the content is both original and of general interest to the HN community.

I'm not going to lie: there's definitely a problem with many sites "spamming" HN, but in some cases there's arguably a legitimate reason to submit a story. If you don't agree, could you please elaborate on why?

As for me, I'll continue to submit infrequent stories from The Mac Observer and other sites that I think offer original perspective and are of potential interest. If you think this is unreasonable, please let me know.

This was alarmingly accurate.

I've been disturbed by this situation ever since the iBookstore launched and all my eBook prices went up. I've used the Kindle since day one and I understood and appreciated the eBook discount. Now, I find many books with prices on the iBookstore that are higher than the equivalent printed book at the local bookstore. I understand the need to keep Amazon from getting/maintaining a monopoly, but man, I just can't agree that the solution is to raise prices 30-50%.

Didn't think we'd ever get this. Now I can use my factory SSD that's been sitting in the closet since I upgraded.