Greg In The Desert

MacNN: Apple’s 30% sales growth outpaces HP, Dell. Resitance is futile…

Sales of Macs largely kept pace with significant growth in overall PC shipments during the first quarter of 2007, two market research firms concur, yielding Apple the title of fastest growing manufacturer with regard to U.S. computer sales. Both Gartner and IDC issued statements today indicating that while the shipment of Microsoft’s Windows Vista was help drive increased PC sales in the first quarter of 2007, Apple was able to match the market with stronger portable sales and an increase in units moved through retail channels, despite stagnant Mac growth predictions from Gartner earlier this year.

I could give a rats ass about “professional” wrestling, but if it involves Donald Trumps hair…

Trump and World Wrestling Entertainment owner Vince McMahon will pick a wrestler to represent them in the ring April 1 at Wrestlemania 23 at Detroit’s Ford Field, The Detroit News reported last week. If their pick is beaten in the “Battle of the Billionaires,” the loser will get his head shaved after the match, the Detroit Free Press reported Monday.

News that Intel wants to rip off the Mac mini.

A new Wintel prototype that openly apes Apple Computer’s popular Mac mini is due out this week, sources told Wired News, giving Intel a showcase to prove its chips are a match for anyone when it comes to tiny PC designs.

Working prototypes of the Mac mini look-alike running Microsoft Windows and based on Intel’s Pentium M CPU have already been built by Taiwan PC maker AOpen at Intel’s request, according to two sources in Taiwan’s PC manufacturing industry who have seen them.

I’ve decided to switch from Microsoft Entourage to Apple’s Mail application. In my opinion Claris Emailer was the king of all email programs. I paid $40 for that program many years ago. Since they stopped making it I switched to Microsoft Outlook, which almost completely duplicated it. And Entourage followed suit. Apple’s Mail program is not without missing features, and doesn’t match feature for feature with Entourage.

Entourage suffers from feature bloat. I just want a email program I don’t want all that other stuff in it. I like having addresses in a separate, system wide address database. Plus its easier to sync stuff to the address book with my palm and t68i than it is Entourage’s built in address book. I do miss the mailing list manager (I subscribe to a lot of mailing lists) and threaded view. Of which the later is addressed in Panther. Panther also addresses the lack of auto-deleting messages based on age. I will be able to set that in a rule. Mail also has a bult in spam filtering mechanism, where in Entourage I need to have another program running for that. The lack of a mailing list manager isn’t a big deal. Emailer didn’t have one, I simply need to manually create rules for each mailing list.

I have played with the Panther version of Mail and look forward to it. The new Mail application alone is reason enough to upgrade, now if Apple would just release it!