Apple had two interesting announcements this week. The first was the addition of a low-end iMac strictly for the education market. In the past Apple has kept around older iMac models and continued to sell them to students and educators. But this time around they have produced a new version of the 21.5-inch iMac for that purpose. The model comes with an i3 processor, 2GB of memory and a 250GB hard drive for $999. You can buy this low-end iMac from Apple, but only if you qualify for educational pricing. Note that for only $200 more you get the standard low-end iMac which comes with an i5 processor, twice the memory and twice the disk space.
The discontinued white MacBook is also available for educational purposed, but cannot be purchased by individuals from Apple. Reportedly it can only be ordered by educational institutions.
Apple released an add-on to Lion this week in the free Lion Recovery Disk Assistant. It allows a Lion user to use an external hard drive, such as a USB flash drive, as a recovery disk. A hard drive with Lion installed will include such a disk as a separate hidden partition on that same drive. But this method will work even if that internal drive is damaged. It will allow you to boot from the external drive and use tools to repair your disk, restore from Time Machine or even log on to the Mac App Store and re-download and install Lion.
The financial turmoil this week has produced an interesting bit of data. While Apple’s stock price went down with the rest of the market, it didn’t suffer as much as others. Several times on Tuesday, and by the end of the day on Wednesday, by the numbers it was the world’s most valuable company. At the end of Wednesday it was valued at $337.2 billion, ahead of Exxon Mobil which was in the lead previously.
“I gave up chewing on his shoes. He seems to get much more excited when I chew on those new Apple Thunderbolt cables.”
Here’s a simple but fun and beautiful game that can be enjoyed by just about anyone. In Osmos you are a small cell trying to get bigger. You do that by simply eating things small than you, and avoiding things larger than you. But each level has a puzzle aspect to it that keeps it interesting.
Select an editable piece of text in Safari, Mail, TextEdit or almost anything else. Then Control+click or right+click and look for Transformations. You can make the text all upper case, all lower case, or capitalize each word in the selection. Very useful for when you accidentally type some text in all upper case and want to correct it without typing it all again.
