A lot of factors are involved in choosing a new device, and people might be understandably reluctant to drop a lot of money on new hardware now, given the current global economic climate. How you use your device will also ultimately determine whether new features are worth the investment. So consider the following before making up your mind.

Is your contract up?

Carrier subsidies are a huge boon to cell phone buyers. With subsidy, the new iPhone 4S costs between $199 and $399, depending on how much storage you want on your device. Off-contract pricing in the U.S. hasn’t yet been announced, but in the Canadian store, it’s listed as starting at $649 and going up $100 for each additional level of onboard flash storage, topping out at $849 for the new 64 GB tier. U.S. prices should be in the same ballpark, if they don’t match those exactly.

A difference of $450 is going to be a difficult pill to swallow for most. Unless a brand new iPhone is a valid business expense for you, or necessary because your existing phone is actually broken or failing, you probably shouldn’t upgrade if you can’t get the subsidized pricing unless you’re really interested in Siri, but let’s take a look at that particular buying incentive.

Siri looks good, but so did FaceTime

Siri plays well in Apple’s promo videos, and it was impressive during the Apple presentation Tuesday, but those things don’t necessarily make it a must-have. Many are pointing out that using Siri in public will be downright awkward, and there’s also the comparison Stacey drew to FaceTime: How many will actually use Siri with any kind of frequency or consistency?

If Siri is the only reason you’re thinking about upgrading, then taking a step back and waiting might be your best course of action. Siri isn’t going anywhere, after all, and a couple of months of it being on the market might give us a better idea of its usefulness in everyday situations.

Will you be upgrading anyway?

Some might be tempted to consider upgrading an older iPhone (a 3G or 3GS, for example) to an iPhone 4, given that device’s lower starting price point. But if you’re already going to be upgrading, and likely locking in to a new contract anyway, consider that by the next time you become eligible for a phone you’ll be two devices behind instead of just one. That isn’t working out so well for 3G owners right now, since software support ended with iOS 4.3.

A faster processor and dual-core graphics might not seem like big advantages today, but the gap will widen; the iPhone 4 will become slower and less reliable with each subsequent software update, while the iPhone 4S is better able to take advantage of its increased power. Even if you think you can live without Siri, a better camera and faster networking (which will also only get better and make older devices look worse as time passes), you should seriously think about paying up for the iPhone 4S.

How important is your carrier?

If your choice of carrier is a key factor in prompting an upgrade, then now’s a good time to move to the 4S. Sprint availability is going to be great for some, especially considering the availability of unlimited data plans on that network. If you want a new iPhone because you’re looking to improve your network reliability, then the 4S is an especially good choice because of the new, speed-boosting dual-antenna design.

In summary: The iPhone 4S isn’t a disappointing upgrade, no matter what tech pundits and analysts may say. But just because it isn’t disappointing doesn’t mean it’s right for you. Before you decide to stay up late and hit the iPhone pre-order page, consider the above, and should you think of anything else that’s worth considering, share it with us in the comments.

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Try this first

There are some good best practices to perform before running off and resetting your Mac at the first sign of strange behavior. This isn’t a step-by-step list; try each and all of the below separately when you’re having trouble:

• Quit (Command+Q) or even Force Quit (Command+Option+Esc) any and all running applications.
• Log off and then log back on to any and all logged on user accounts.
• Put the Mac to sleep and wake it up again.
• Restart the Mac.
• Shut down and unplug the Mac (and remove any battery if you have access) for at least thirty seconds before powering back on.

You may even have to press and hold the power button several seconds in extreme cases when your Mac is truly not responding or refuses to shut down and power off. But if you have tried all of this to no avail, then perhaps you do need to either reset your PRAM or your SMC.

Parameter random access memory

PRAM is used by OS X to store certain information that the system can access quickly. Macs will store settings like which startup drive to boot from, various display and video settings, startup speaker volume and even the DVD’s region settings. If you feel that you need to reset your Mac’s PRAM because of the issues you’re having, do the following:

1. Turn off your Mac. Don’t worry about disconnecting the power or removing the battery.
2. Turn on your Mac and hold down the Command, Option, P, and R keys all at the same time (all four keys).
3. Keep holding down all four keys until you hear the startup sound for a second time.

If you do not hear the startup sound twice, then you most likely have not reset the PRAM.  If you find that your Mac is not retaining the information that is stored in PRAM when you perform a shutdown, then it might be time to replace your Mac’s main logic board battery.  This is sometimes referred to as the PRAM or Clock Battery. I hardly ever fully shut down and power off any of my Macs, and have yet to replace this battery on any Mac I have owned, so that should only be the culprit in very extreme cases.

System management controller

The SMC is an Intel-only feature.  There are so many symptoms that can potentially be solved by resetting the SMC that you’d think you would need to do this sort of reset all of the time. These include fans running out of control, lights not displaying correctly, the Mac does not sleep or wake properly, and just generally poor performance and high CPU cycles for no good reason. There are three ways to reset your SMC, based on what sort of Intel-based Mac you have:
Portable Macs with removable batteries

1. Shut down the Mac, unplug and remove the battery.
2. Press and hold the power button for five seconds before releasing.
3. Replace the battery (just put it back in), plug in the Mac and turn it back on.

Portable Macs without removable batteries

• Shut down the Mac.
• Ensure that the Mac is plugged into a power source.
• While the Mac is turned off, press and hold the Shift, Control and Option keys, as well as the Power button.
• Release all four keys at the same time (note: the Mac should not power on when performing this task).
• Press the power button to turn the Mac back on.

Desktop Mac Pros, iMacs and Mac minis

• Shut down and unplug the Mac.
• Keep the Mac unplugged for at least fifteen seconds.
• Plug the Mac back in and do not turn it back on for at least five seconds.
• Press the power button to turn the Mac back on.

This shouldn’t be considered a routine operation, like fixing file permissions in Disk Utility. It’s just something to keep in mind as a possible last resort solution to weird behaviors that your Mac starts to develop, which can often happen when you perform upgrades like installing OS X Lion, especially on older hardware.

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RAM

This is the easiest place you can make an improvement with almost any Mac. iMacs have a user-accessible memory slot located on the bottom edge of the display, between the built-in speakers. It’s as simple as removing three screws, and then replacing the computer’s existing memory with large capacity, compatible RAM units. MacBooks and MacBook Pros are also easily upgradeable when it comes to memory, and require only the removal of the bottom case or a memory area cover, depending on your model.

Remember to make absolutely sure that the RAM you’re buying is compatible with your computer. You can do this by finding out which Mac you have, by doing the following:

1. Go to the Apple menu in the top left corner of the menu bar.
2. Click on “About This Mac.”
3. Click on the “More Info…” button.
4. Take note of the Model Identifier in the Hardware Overview that opens. It should say something like “iMac12,2″ or “MacBook3,1.”
5. Go to EveryMac.com and enter that identifier to get the complete specs for your machine, including what type of RAM it uses and the maximum amount it can support.

If you’d rather make it easier on yourself, you can go to OWC and browse for your model in the Memory section of their online store. Note that this does require that you at least know when you bought the computer, but you can find that out using the method described above.

Note that some Mac mini models and MacBook Airs make upgrading the RAM yourself very difficult or impossible, in which case you might want to consult with an authorized Mac service provider.

Hard Drive

RAM is easier to upgrade, but for Lion, a hard drive change could make the biggest difference. They can be a bit trickier to upgrade, and nearly impossible if you have an iMac, but for most Mac notebooks, the process isn’t very challenging. If you’re unsure how to change your hard drive, check the official Apple manual for your computer, which you can identify using the method described above.

There are a few options available to you here. Like Dave Greenbaum, you could choose to go with a solid-state drive. This is the best possible option, but it’s also the priciest, and you get relatively little storage space for your money.

Another option is to supplement your existing HDD by installing a separate, smaller capacity SSD as your startup volume. If you have a MacBook Pro, this isn’t too difficult to do. Weldon Dodd provided an excellent walkthrough of how he achieved this with his own computer. Lion requires a minimum of 8 GB of free space on your drive, but a 40 GB drive that you can get for around $100 is probably as small as you should go, even if you don’t plan on keeping anything else on there.

Finally, you can also get the best of both worlds in a single drive, using a hybrid drive. Seagate makes a hybrid drive that provides 500 GB of storage, along with a 4 GB flash storage module. It manages to achieve a 32 MB cache with a 7200 RPM drive speed, and provides much better performance than a traditional drive, in my experience, plus it’s way cheaper than a standalone SSD. Boot times, app launch times, and wake from sleep times all drastically improved after I installed this in my MacBook Pro.

The most expensive of the above-mentioned options probably won’t cost you more than $500, and that’s only if you opt for a relatively capacious SSD. Noticeable improvements shouldn’t cost you more than $100, which is a great deal shy of the $1000+ you’d spend on a brand new Mac. Any other suggestions for DIY improvements that could make transitioning to Lion that much more satisfying?

* Ed. Please remember that DIY modifications to Apple equipment is done at your own risk, and voids your AppleCare warranty.

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16 GB FTW!

NextWorth, one of the many companies that offers cash for used electronics, has recently seen a five-fold increase in the number of iPads being traded in. Not surprisingly, the 16 GB iPad is most popular, making up just under 40 percent of trade-ins during the first four days of March, with the Wi-Fi version accounting for most of those. The 32 GB and 64 GB models roughly split the remaining trade-ins, though somewhat surprisingly, the 64 GB 3G was second in popularity. For those considering selling through NextWorth, the resale price of the 16 GB model was around $255 as of last week.

Looking at eBay today, the distribution of iPads being auctioned is similar, with the 16 GB Wi-Fi iPad again being most popular. Resale prices are higher on eBay than on NextWorth, with 16 GB Wi-Fi iPads selling for an official average of $420.78, and the 32 GB and 64 GB models adding approximately $50 and $75 respectively. 3G adds another $25 or so to the asking price. Keep in mind that selling on eBay entails more cost and risk, and that there are other options.

While these numbers only show what people are trading in, they also provide a good representation of what they’re interested in buying in the first place. The numbers may change with the iPad 2 as people realize they need more storage or better connectivity, but the bottom line is that it shouldn’t be hard to find a buyer for a 16 GB Wi-Fi iPad, even if these numbers shift slightly over the course of the next year.

3G or Not 3G?

If you plan on owning an iPad 2 for years or more, the extra connectivity of 3G is worth considering, and as an added benefit, the 3G iPad also features true GPS. Unfortunately, for U.S. iPad 2 buyers, that also means choosing between iPads designed specifically for either the AT&T or Verizon network.

Setting aside coverage issues, comparing plans comes down to price and data. AT&T offers the cheapest plan at $14.99 per month for a measly 250MB of data. Nonetheless, if you get by on that with an iPhone, it’s worth considering for an iPad, but note that for just five dollars more Verizon offers four times the data. Also worth considering is speed, where Verizon still lags until the iPad gets LTE capability. Unfortunately, neither company offers rollover data like rollover minutes.

Which is Right for You?

The takeaway is that if you plan on upgrading your iPad yearly, the 16 GB Wi-Fi model will likely offer the best return on investment. Those planning on keeping an iPad 2 for as long as possible should consider the model with the highest storage capacity they can afford. While rumors of an iTunes cloud service would make storage less of a necessity, the likely reality is that Apple will offer unlimited downloads rather than storage-saving streaming, at least for the foreseeable future. Also, increasingly rich and sophisticated games like Infinity Blade need between 500 MB and 1 GB of storage today, and requirements will only go up from there. More storage is a good long-term investment, and so is 3G capability.

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So here we are, just past the six month mark since Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard was sprung last August 28, and I’m still using OS 10.5 Leopard.

I have lots of company. The NetApplications HitsLink Market Share data for February 2010 shows that Leopard is still the most widely-used OS X version, with a 2.21 percent global market share compared to 1.8 percent for Snow Leopard, and good old OS 10.4 Tiger still hanging in at 0.72 percent.

Why the Procrastination?

So, why the procrastination about upgrading? It’s certainly not the cost holding me back. Snow Leopard is the cheapest Mac OS version upgrade in history, other than complete freebies.

Well, for one thing, Leopard works so darned well, and making a major OS upgrade always involves time investment and the hassle of upgrading at least some of your software and utilities (more about that in a moment), and I’ve been short of spare time the last several months. I also tend to be of the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” persuasion, and haven’t been convinced there’s anything Snow Leopard has to offer that’s a genuine must-have for me.

Some of the improvements — things like a more responsive Finder rewritten from scratch in Cocoa, faster Time Machine backups, a more powerful version of the Preview application — sound like welcome tweaks, but nothing I find compelling. Stuff like enhanced Microsoft Exchange Server support for Mail, iCal, and Address Book have zero appeal for me since I don’t use that service or any of those features, preferring third-party alternatives. Nor do Snow Leopard’s Safari upgrades fizz me much since I favor other browsers with Safari being my fourth or fifth choice, if that.

Bitten Once…

There is also the bitten once; twice shy factor. I ordered OS 10.5 Leopard from Amazon.com a day or two after it was released on October 26, 2007, and immediately installed it on my then main production machine, a 1.33 GHz PowerBook G4. I’m not by nature or temperament an enthusiastic early adopter, but Leopard, hyped by Apple as being “the largest update of Mac OS X” yet, incorporating more than 300 new features, had so much cool stuff I really wanted to check out. Especially the Spaces and QuickLook features, which were every bit as good or even better than I had anticipated, and what I miss most on the two old G4 upgraded Pismo PowerBooks I still have in daily service running OS 10.4.

However, there was pain associated with my early move to Leopard, notwithstanding all the good stuff. I’m a windowshading junkie, and I simply can’t abide not having that feature, for which no function built into any version of OS X comes remotely close to being a satisfactory substitute. Windowshading’s been integrated into my work habits for more than a decade. Typically I may have two dozen or so windows open, scattered amongst nine Spaces views, mostly windowshaded, conveniently identifiable by their full title bars being visible.

Unfortunately, OS 10.5 upgrade broke third-party WindowShade X, and I was obliged to struggle along for several months without windowshading until its developer, Unsanity Software, got a Leopard-compatible version of its proprietary and required system add-on Application Enhancer (APE) out the door in February 2008, mercifully restoring WindowShade X support to Leopard.

Withdrawal too Painful to Repeat

Snow Leopard broke Windowshade X and Application Enhancer redux, and I’m not willing to go through that form of addiction withdrawal again.

Unsanity say they’re busily rewriting their more popular “haxie” add-ons to support Snow Leopard, the latest word being that WindowShade X is largely redone, its MIP system rewritten from scratch, and currently at internal beta status, a new build seeded to testers on February 13. A public beta should be released any day now. Until it is, I’m sticking with Leopard.

How about you? If you’re among the plurality of Mac users still running Leopard, and not because you’re on a PowerPC Mac, is something else in particular holding you back?

A prize draw for passing the training for sales associates for the month advertises two prizes of MacBook Pro laptops, featuring the Intel Core i5 processor. Intel, for its part, maintains that although the flyers are indeed company material, the suggestion that MacBooks will soon feature Core i5 tech is merely a typo.

The Intel Core 2 Duo has been running the show in MacBook Pros since the very same year Intel took over chip-making duties for the Apple line of computers in 2006, although originally the upscale notebooks ran Core Duos, and were upgraded late in the year. That means it’s been nearly four years since we’ve seen a major platform upgrade, although we have seen minor spec bumps and the introduction of the Santa Rosa platform in 2007, which incorporated the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M integrated graphics card.

Intel formally introduced the new Core i3, i5 and i7 chips last week during CES, and the mobile i5 is definitely the most likely suspect for inclusion in subsequent generations of Apple’s powerful notebook line. If Apple does decide to go with the Core i5 chips, contrary to earlier rumblings, future MacBook Pro owners can expect a nice little increase in performance over the Core 2 Duo chips, while at the same time not sacrificing anything due to increased power demands. Advantages also include increased battery performance, more speed and better graphics, and they could allow Apple to assign less internal space to the motherboard, which could clear up room additional battery volume or other things. 3G antenna, anyone?

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As previously reported, Apple TV 3.0 supports iTunes LP and iTunes Extras, and does so with a new look. According to Eddy Cue, Apple VP of Internet Services, the new interface “gives you instant access to your favorite content.” The new interface continues an evolution away from Apple’s other media software, Front Row.

In addition to the “widescreen” interface, Apple TV 3.0 also includes Genius Mixes, Internet radio, and photo enhancements. For the latter, users can now flip through photos grouped by event, while face recognition software similar to iPhoto puts “snapshots” of each person named on a corkboard background. It’s sort of like wanted ads at the Post Office.

As for iTunes, besides supporting Apple TV 3.0, the 90 MB update adds “an option for a dark background for Grid View, and improves support for accessibility.” What’s not mentioned in the support note is that iTunes has once again been fixed to keep Palm from leeching off Apple via the Pre syncing with iTunes. Get a life, Palm.

That would probably be good advice for the Apple TV, too. While additional features are always good, features people really want are even better. Is the Apple TV really going to be the last one in the living room to support Netflix without hacks like XBMC?

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It seems inevitable that the new bonus material featured in LP and Extra releases, which includes things like photos, videos, mini-documentaries and commentary, would become accessible on Apple’s home theater device, but this is the first official confirmation that it is in fact on the way. It would seem to suggest that we’ll see the update sooner rather than later, too.

Both iTunes LP and iTunes Extras are based on the TuneKit JavaScript format, which uses HTML, CSS and other open web standards. It’s designed for a 1280×720 pixel resolution, which fits perfectly with HD TV sets and the HD output resolution of the Apple TV.

While it may not come as a surprise, a new major update for the Apple TV firmware would be the first big one since the “Take Two” 2.0 update that came at Macworld Expo in January 2008. Other things expected to arrive with it include Quicktime X and the HTTP Live Streaming protocol, both of which were recently introduced as features of OS X Snow Leopard.

It sounds like it’s shaping up to be a decent little upgrade for Apple’s main foray into the living room, but it doesn’t really sound like anything that’s going to turn heads among people who are on the fence about buying the device. Apple has recently taken some steps to increase Apple TV sales, including getting rid of the 40 GB model altogether and dropping the price of the 160 GB version. Which is great, but there’s still a lot more Apple should be doing to make the device viable.

Like the Mac mini, the Apple TV seems to be lagging behind other Apple offerings in terms of the tech behind it and its software capabilities. Many new TVs coming to market now offer built-in functionality comparable to a lot of what Apple TV brings to the table, beyond access to the iTunes Store and all of its associated content. And HD-capable nettops from companies like Asus offer a fully functional home theater PC at a comparable price, with better storage options and more.

A software update is great, but Apple needs to do more than just what’s expected to breathe some life back into its least exciting device.

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The new Mac Pro will feature a brand new Xeon CPU from Intel, if the rumors are accurate, which it will offer exclusively for a short time until the second quarter of 2009. The CPU, code-named Gulftown, boasts a huge six processing cores, which beats the current single core total by two. With two processors, like the more expensively configured Mac Pro has, that would result in a total of 12 cores of processing power.

The Gulftown processor also sports 12MB of shared cache, instead of the 8MB on current models, uses 32-nm engraving instead of 45, and will feature slightly lower power consumption than the current generation Xeon. Also, even though it’s a true successor to the Xeon line currently found in Mac Pros, rumor has it that it will be ditching that moniker in favor of the “Core i9″ namesake.

Hardmac.com speculates that the new six-core Core i9 processor might not immediately be put to work across the Mac Pro line, instead suggesting that Apple may want to extend its line in that category by continuing to offer the quad core version in an entry-level Pro. It’s a nice thought, but without any real basis, so I’d file this one under wishful thinking for the time being. Hardmac believes a lower-priced, entry-level Pro might attract some mini customers, but I doubt that’s something Apple really wants to do.

They do have other info directly from the source, who remains anonymous, as per usual. The motherboard will sport some major changes that should allow it to increase performance exponentially. There will be an Ethernet 10Gbits/s port, and a bump up in the RAM module capacity for 8 and 16GB units, which would mean that the future Mac Pro could theoretically support up to 128GB of RAM at once.

Being way more hardware-savvy than myself, Hardmac sums up with the tantalizing prediction that the combination of Snow Leopard, the Core i9 processor, and top-of-the-line graphics cards from either NVIDIA or ATI could provide more than enough power for real-time rendering in Final Cut Studio 3.0. Speaking for my friends who work in television editing, who’ve spent many a late night waiting for a render to finish, this is very good news indeed.

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So the operative question is whether to dig deep and go with a full hardware upgrade, or spend much less to upgrade a few select parts that will help bring your aging ‘Book back closer to contemporary standards of performance — is it worth upgrading an existing Apple notebook with more RAM and a new hard drive — or more sensible to simply buy a new one?

I would say it depends on the individual machine. I’m typing this post on a nine-year-old Pismo PowerBook that’s been considerably breathed-on, with processor, hard drive, optical drive, RAM, and wireless upgrades, and I even have a FireWire 400 PC Card adapter for it. But on the other hand, I have a six month old unibody PowerBook, with an up-front upgrade to 4GB of RAM, and it’s many magnitudes superior to the Pismo in objective terms.

Maxer says he tends to buy a new PowerBook, iBook, or MacBook every two years or so, usually around the 16-month point. I provisionally shoot for three year system upgrade intervals, but this Pismo is well outside that envelope, and still my second-most-used computer. Despite being more than a bit power challenged, and limited to OS X 10.4 Tiger, it’s such a likable tool that I’m unmotivated to move on to using, say, my 17″ PowerBook G4 as my number two laptop.

I am somewhat puzzled by Maxcer’s suggestion that, while the new MacBook Pro models are fantastic, they don’t seem quite worth the cost just yet. My contention would be the diametric contrary — the current low end 13″ and 15″ unibody MacBook Pros are the most rip-roaring value-for-the-money bargains Apple has ever produced.

However, Maxcer says he still likes his black 2.4GHz MacBook, notwithstanding its poky Intel GMA X3100 integrated graphic chipset that pales by comparison with the powerful Nvidia 9400M integrated graphics chipsets in the new MacBook Pros, but is finding the 250 GB hard drive way to cramped for his needs, and 2GB of RAM isn’t quite enough either.

Good on Chris. I’m all for squeezing every bit of useful service life out of a Mac before upgrading to a new system, so long as one isn’t terribly compromised by performance limitations for things one wants to do. So if I were in Chris’s shoes with a nice black MacBook that I was fond of, I’d buy a bigger hard drive and double the RAM — both easy and relatively inexpensive upgrades for that machine — and hang on to it for a while. The only semi-specialized tool you’ll need for these upgrades is a Torx T8 screwdriver, which can be hard to track down on short notice (I have a nice one I got from Wegener Media) and some very small Philips screwdrivers.

I’d love to have a new 13″ MacBook Pro with FireWire and a SD Card slot, but my plan is to still go to early 2012 with my current MacBook, although a new inexpensive polycarbonate MacBook, provided it has those features, could test my holdout resolve.

Chris decided to proceed with a mid-life upgrade for the old MacBook, going with a Western Digital Scorpio Black 320GB 7,200RPM drive, with 16MB of cache, and bumping the RAM spec. with a $54 Kingston 4GB kit, which was considerably cheaper than I paid for a 4GB upgrade kit from Other World Computing (currently $87.99) for my MacBook last spring. The BlackBook would need DDR2 RAM, while my unibody machine uses DDR3, but a 4GB DDR2 kit at OWC is still $78.97.

With the great deal he got on the Kingston RAM, Chris’s memory and storage upgrade of the BlackBook came to a pretty digestible $130, which seems like good value to me, although Chris says performance gains realized are not as dramatic as he’d anticipated, and he thinks if he was doing it over, he’d opt for a 500GB 5,400RPM drive instead, noting that the 7,200RPM Scorpio’s speed causes a minor but annoying vibration. He also says that upgrading the OS to Snow Leopard provided a more substantial performance boost than the new hardware bits did.

I also expect he may notice more subtle and welcome improvements down the road. With its stock 2GB of RAM, my MacBook was a decent performer, but it’s even better with 4GB, and while pre-upgrade I had to restart the laptop every two weeks or so to freshen the memory heap, with 4GB I can go for a month or more between restarts.

Frankly, with new (or even better, refurbished late model) Mac laptop prices plumbing historical lows, and the extreme desirability of the unibody notebooks in particular, it’s harder to make a compelling argument for upgrading an older Mac rather than applying the cost of that to a new purchase, especially if you can sell your present machine for a respectable price.

What do you think? Better to hang on to a spruced-up known quantity, or go new/refurb with a fresh warranty and the latest feature set?

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For a limited time, Microsoft is offering students the opportunity to grab one Windows 7 upgrade to either the Home Premium or Professional versions of the upcoming operating system for only $29.99, the same price that the single-user version of Snow Leopard retails for.

That’s $90 cheaper than the Home Premium upgrade costs at regular retail prices, and $170 off the price of the Professional version. There is a catch, though. You need to have a valid student email address from a U.S. educational institution (college or university) in order to qualify.

AppleInsider claims that there are similar deals in place in the UK, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Korea and Mexico, though I could only find a “Coming Soon” notice when I tried to change the country using a drop down menu at the top of the order page. Entering a valid Canadian university email address also got me nowhere.

Microsoft is very much aware that Apple’s student market share is one of the company’s most consistent strengths, despite recent incursions by low-cost netbook machines into that demographic. This deep discounting, and the accompanying 741.com micro-site on which it can be found show that Redmond is willing to go to great lengths to try to recapture some of the youth market.

If you’re planning on taking advantage of this deal using yours or a relative’s student email address to install Windows 7 on your Boot Camp partition, remember that the deal only applies to upgrades, not full versions, so you’ll already need either Vista or XP installed for it to work.

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For a while the blogosphere has been running its mouth off about how “Snow Leopard is just a service pack Apple has the gall to charge for.”

TechRadar.com reports, “Despite all of the necessary ‘under the hood’ improvements in Snow Leopard, this release has the inescapable air of a service pack about it.”

Gina Trapani says, “Even though David Pogue says this is an ‘uninformed wisecrack,’ I’m still calling Snow Leopard a service pack. ‘Snow Leopard Fixes Leopard’s Bugs’ is not the headline you’re going to see in the NYT or WSJ.”

Merlin Mann snarks in this tweet, “Wow. 10.6. If some of these ‘refinements’ were any more ‘subtle,’ they’d seem kinda like ‘bug fixes.’”

To a certain degree I can see their point. We’re used to Steve Jobs getting on stage and touting an OS upgrade with 300+ new features as well as moving any purchaser to the front of a liver transplant line. Frankly, the parts of Snow Leopard the average user would notice are incredibly pedestrian. Boring, even. Apple priced it a boring, $29 price point to make it a no-brainer.

I’m going to go through some of the marquee features and break them down into areas I think would be in a service pack, could be in a service pack, and are too invasive for a service pack.

Service Pack Candidates

Just to show some partisanship, I’m going to reach across the aisle and tell you the features I think Apple could have released in a 10.5.x update: the new Exposé and Stacks, signal-strength meters in Airport, quicker Time Machine, QuickTime X, hi-res iChat and improved disk eject. All of these could have been added into the eight sub-releases of Leopard. Maybe there’s something to the theory that Apple held them back just to have something to sell users on. Maybe there were two gunmen in Dallas, too.

Borderline Candidates

Built-in support for Exchange: I know Microsoft dot-released the new Exchange features into Entourage, but I’m labeling this one borderline because I’m not sure the underlying code in Mail, Address Book and iCal would have been feasible for a .x release.

Rewrite of Finder: For the same reasons above, I’m not sure the Finder rewrite could have been done in a service pack. I’m erring on the side of caution and theorizing as a central part of the OS, it needed to be done in an upgrade.

Not Service Pack-able

The 64 bit transition, Grand Central Dispatch, and Open CL: I believe these could not have been done as a service pack. They are too central, too invasive, and are also key parts that require the Intel chipset to work. Since Snow Leopard will not run on Power PC machines, and I doubt Apple would have ever released a dot upgrade to Leopard that didn’t work on both platforms, to me these are the features that required an upgrade.

The perception problem is while these are likely to be the most important parts of Snow Leopard long term (once developers upgrade their apps), to the average user they are seriously unsexy because we don’t see them.

I think Bertrand Serlet’s comment at WWDC ’90 “[Snow Leopard] is a better Leopard” has been misinterpreted as Apple’s way of saying Leopard had some issues and needed some serious love. I don’t read it that way. I think Apple is fairly happy with how Leopard turned out — at least once it got a lot of the Spaces issues worked out. I do agree that Leopard was released too early, but by 10.5.5 or so it was in fine form.

With Snow Leopard, Apple wanted to refine some of the user interface elements while building an underlying architecture that will continue to take advantage of Core Duo 2 (and better) chipsets and decent video chipsets. When you look at the enhancements Open CL can give, it’s no mystery why Apple got away from the crappy integrated chips in even the low-end products — it wanted all Apple products to be able to take advantage of it.

People claiming that Snow Leopard is just a service pack need to look past the handful of interface improvements and focus on the underlying architecture. It may not be a sexy upgrade, but I think it will be a very important upgrade as apps are upgraded to take advantage of its features.

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Poor NVIDIA — it looks like your honeymoon with Apple is over. There hasn’t been an official announcement from Cupertino yet, but a glance at the customization options for high-end iMacs (the ones that use discrete graphics) and Mac Pros reveals that ATI Radeon HD 4000-series cards are already available as new configurable alternatives to NVIDIA products.

ATI was shown the door at Apple when the computer maker introduced notebooks and desktops that feature integrated NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics cards. Many suspect that things turned rocky between Apple and NVIDIA, thanks to the faulty GeForce 8600M GT cards that resulted in the Mac maker offering customers an unprecedented warranty extension for problems related to that component.

We didn’t see the effects right away, because Apple’s supply chain is likely structured in such a way that its product line was probably in place long before any of the hardware problems began to surface. Adding the Radeon HD 4850 to the iMac line and HD 4870 to the Mac Pro as configurable options may not seem like much in the way of retaliation, but it was probably the first option available to Apple short of overhauling its product line.

Both new ATI options are easy single component swap-outs. If Apple intends to get rid of the integrated GeForce 9400M cards, it will have to wait until the computers themselves receive a major update.

ATI is touting the ability of the new cards to fully utilize and benefit from Apple’s implementation of Open CL Version 1.0 in Snow Leopard, which developers can incorporate into their software to allow a sharing of processor load between CPU and GPU. The HD 4850 is a $50 upgrade, available on the 2.93GHz and 3.06GHz 24-inch iMac models, and the HD 4870 is a $200 upgrade for the Mac Pro.

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Naturally, as a contributor to this blog, I purchased a Snow Leopard family pack the first possible day. Some people may have pre-ordered on Amazon, but they missed out on the in-store experience. My mother lives close to an Apple store, so I decided to stop by and upgrade my Macbook Pro while catching up with her.

Soon after arriving she asked, “Do I need that?”

Silence.

I honestly had no idea what to say. Sure it’s a cheap and quick upgrade, but does she really need Snow Leopard on the 20 inch iMac she bought last year? Her entire computer life at home revolves around Safari, Mail, and Microsoft Word. She networks, reads, and writes. I, however, consider myself an über power user: Netbeans, Adobe CS3, and tinkerer extraordinaire. I can’t refuse an OS upgrade.

Let’s take a look at Apple’s Snow Leopard page.

The only item I see here that is actually appealing to my mother is “faster.” One can never say no to speed in the computer world. The rest sounds like under the hood features. Fortunately, the UI changes in Snow Leopard are miniscule enough to not terrify the average Mac user. I guess it’s safe to upgrade her. After all, the Apple coolness factor always entertains.

What about all of you? Planning on upgrading your parents’ computers?

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Of course, while Tiger users are probably pleased as punch, it’s unclear how Apple’s going to feel about this. On the one hand, Mossberg has let the cat out of the bag, so to speak, and advised users of a course of action that could deprive the company of a lot of potential revenue. Not to mention that those who do use this upgrade method will be in clear violation of Apple’s licensing agreement.

On the other hand, Walt’s exact words are:

[H]ere’s a tip: Apple concedes that the $29 Snow Leopard upgrade will work properly on these Tiger-equipped Macs, so you can save the extra $140.

That “Apple concedes” bit makes it sound like Cupertino had a hand in this particular revelation, which could mean the company expects to make more off of Tiger users buying the upgrade at a discounted price than it would from straight-up sales of the box set. Which makes sense, since why would you pay $169 for an update when your machine is humming along fine without it? A $30 price point, by contrast, will convince an awful lot of fence-sitters.

It remains unclear whether the $29 Snow Leopard upgrade disc (or $49 family pack) will work for standalone (ie. clean slate) installations, though it seems likely that it will, at least according to Lifehacker’s review of the software. Snow Leopard goes on sale tomorrow, Aug. 28th; the NYT and USA Today have interesting reviews as well.

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Snow Leopard’s release is just around the corner, so here are some quick and easy steps to make sure that you are ready to upgrade.

Turn On Time Machine

If you haven’t already, now is a great time to turn on the Time Machine built in backup. It’s not perfect, but it’s a great first line of defense against data loss.

Make a Bootable External Drive

Use Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper to clone your Mac’s hard drive to an external USB drive as an emergency backup, in case both the upgrade and the Time Machine backup both go south. The real point of both this step and the Time Machine step are to backup, backup, backup! Get your data off of your computer and onto something else that can be saved in case of the worst.

Get Rid of Haxies

Haxies are unsupported hacks that alter the appearance or functionality of OS X. While they can be cool, and nothing against Unsanity, anything that’s done under the covers or outside of what Apple says is OK to play with is easily broken during a major OS upgrade. Application Enhancer has been a known culprit in the past, and some developers will ask that it be removed before support or ignore crash reports that involve it all together.

Disable Bundles

Bundles like SIMBL are also a sort of hack that can cause problems during an upgrade. As I said before, they are a good hack, but a hack nonetheless, and can cause unforeseen problems during an upgrade.

Sync Up

iPods, iPhones, MobileMe, any third-party devices or syncing that you have set up…make sure they are all synced and up to date before starting the upgrade procedure.

Update Your Apps

This shouldn’t be that big of a deal as long as you are already running Leopard, but it’s still a good idea to check and make sure that you are running the latest released version of your apps. Developers who joined the Apple Developer Connection as a premier member have had access to Snow Leopard for a while now, and have hopefully worked out the bugs in running their app. That being said, upgrade your apps, just to make sure. I’ve found that it’s also a good practice to download updated installers for your favorite apps and burn them to a CD or DVD for quick access.

If you are feeling daring, you may want to give AppFresh a look and see about having it update all of your apps for you.

Clean House

Have a ton of old apps laying around that you don’t need anymore? Now is the best time to AppZap them! I seriously do not understand why AppZapper, or some similar functionality is not built into OS X. Both Cocktail and Onyx have functions to clean out temporary files, check permissions, and ensure that the OS is in good operating order.

Watch the Clock

Snow Leopard is set to be released in September 2009, which as the writing of this happens is just around one month away. Snow Leopard brings with it the opportunity to make your Mac “Better, Faster, Easier,” than ever before.

Have a favorite OS X upgrade tradition? Sound off in the comments!

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