“Hi, can I speak to Steve please?” Steve speaking. “Steve, hi. Listen, we’ve just found out that someone else already has a product called iPad.” Uh-huh. “Yeah. Fujitsu. Looks like they’ve had it for quite some time. Since about 2002.” Really. “Um, yeah. What do want us to do? Call Legal?” Do nothing.

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The Other iPad

Maybe it’s because you’ve been watching too many of these ads , but for whatever reason, the iPhone isn’t for you. You opted for an Android-based phone instead. It may blend, but will it sync with your Mac? Read on. There are comprehensive third party desktop syncing programs available such as Missing Sync , but realize that with a “Google-based” phone, over-the-air syncing is automatic and built in. When you purchase your Android-based phone, you’ll link it with your Google account (a free Google account is required to use the phone’s over-the-air syncing). Your phone will generally auto-sync with your Google account allowing you to possibly ditch your MobileMe subscription. The task then is to get your Mac to sync with the Google account. 1) Foreplay While using a Droid isn’t as easy as using an iPhone, it’s not that much harder. Here’s a tip, do NOT allow your mobile phone company to import your contacts from your old phone. This has caused problems with synchronization for some. It’s best to start with a clean list of contacts in your Google account. If you haven’t synced your previous phone with your Mac, go ahead and do it before switching phones.

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How-To: Droid Syncing on the Mac

Maybe it’s because you’ve been watching too many of these ads , but for whatever reason, the iPhone isn’t for you. You opted for an Android-based phone instead. It may blend, but will it sync with your Mac? Read on. There are comprehensive third party desktop syncing programs available such as Missing Sync , but realize that with a “Google-based” phone, over-the-air syncing is automatic and built in. When you purchase your Android-based phone, you’ll link it with your Google account (a free Google account is required to use the phone’s over-the-air syncing). Your phone will generally auto-sync with your Google account allowing you to possibly ditch your MobileMe subscription. The task then is to get your Mac to sync with the Google account. 1) Foreplay While using a Droid isn’t as easy as using an iPhone, it’s not that much harder. Here’s a tip, do NOT allow your mobile phone company to import your contacts from your old phone. This has caused problems with synchronization for some. It’s best to start with a clean list of contacts in your Google account. If you haven’t synced your previous phone with your Mac, go ahead and do it before switching phones. If you can’t, you might consider typing the phone numbers into your Mac Address Book beforehand. 2) Safe Syncing Syncing is only one step above the SCSI voodoo of previous generations

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How-To: Droid Syncing on the Mac

Hit the road, Mac. Whether your road-warrior gifteee travels for work, for fun, or just roams around the city using coffeeshops as their office, we recommend bags and travel-ready accessories that are sure to brighten their holiday season. Able Planet True Fidelity Active Noise Canceling Headphones (NC300) For less than half the price of Bose QuietComfort, the True Fidelity delivers active noise cancellation (perfect for blocking the noisy drone of an airplane, train, or bus) and a light, comfy fit. The inline control lets you adjust the volume easily, and Able Planet also includes a carrying case, 1/4-inch adapter, AAA battery, and airplane adapter. Oh, and the cable is detachable so if you ever break it, you can replace it for $9.95 . The True Fidelity (model NC300, in black or white) retails for $129.99.   Microsoft Bluetooth Mobile Keyboard 6000 If you’re hitting the road but plan to spread out at your destination and really get some work done, Microsoft’s latest Bluetooth keyboard is svelte enough to fit in your laptop bag, but comfortable enough to type on all day. There’s no Command key, so just use the Keyboard System Preference to set the Modifier Keys up the way you like them. The keyboard also includes a separate numeric keypad, which is a hundred times more convenient than trying to use the numpad keys on a MacBook. The 6000 retails for $89.95

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10 Gifts for MacBook-Packin’ Road Warriors

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the original release of the Macintosh Portable — the first truly untethered Mac, thanks to its internal battery. There’s a quote attributed to Steve Jobs: “Do not trust a computer that you cannot lift.” The original compact desktop Macs were offered with an optional carrying case, and some pioneer Mac-users did lug them around, but analogous to the tiny Mac mini today, they couldn’t be considered truly portable due to the necessity of a wall-current umbilical. The Mac Portable development project was launched in 1986, not long before Steve Jobs’ departure from Apple, and the product was first released for sale on September 20, 1989. It was featured on the cover of the November 1989 edition of MacUser magazine, which called it “by far the most complex piece of machinery devised by sale by Apple computer.” While it incorporated a laptop-style foldable form factor with a front-mounted carry handle/lockdown lever, the Mac Portable weighed only about a pound less than contemporaneous Mac Compact desktops — a hefty 16 pounds, due partly to it having a robust lead-acid battery. It wasn’t cheap either, selling for a likewise heavyweight $6,500 — or $7,300 with an optional hard drive. Internally, the Mac Portable had a 16MHz Motorola 68HC000 processor chip, an internal 1.4MB 3.5-inch floppy drive, a 40MB 3.5″ hard drive, and a whopping 1MB of RAM, expandable to 9MB but unfortunately in an oddball 30ns SRAM card (one slot) module format. The monitor screen was a crisp 9.8″ 1-bit active matrix, 640×400, LCD — initially without backlighting — and there was also a video output port for driving an external monitor. The upside of that heavy lead-acid battery was a very respectable five-to-10 hour charge life. Also included were an ADB port for a keyboard and mouse, DIN-8 serial ports for printer and modem connections, and a DB-25 SCSI connector

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Milestone: 20th Anniversary of Portable Mac Era

A new cat is upon us , but that doesn’t mean I’ll pounce on the latest upgrade, pardon the pun. Dare I admit in public I’m not an early adopter? Hey, if you like living on the edge, go for it. Go ahead and cook your poultry below 165 degrees or eat raw eggs. Me, I play it safe. Mac users like everything to work out to the box and a new OS simply doesn’t. Do you really want to spend your weekend messing with a “better” operating system? Ask these guys about that. I may be a lonely voice among the chorus of praise for Snow Leopard, but here are five reasons why I’m going to wait a bit before hearing this new cat purr. 1. It’s a Point 0 Release Maybe it’s because I’m married to a Quality Assurance engineer, but I worry about unfixed bugs.

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Why I’ll Wait on Snow Leopard, and Why Maybe You Should Too

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion , Peripherals , Wireless , Cult of Mac , iTunes , Apple This morning when my alarm clock went off (playing some Harold Budd ) I was reminded how things have changed over the years for Mac users. My alarm clock is a Logitech Squeezebox Boom , a well reviewed product that will wirelessly stream your iTunes playlists, give you access to thousands of internet radio stations, wakes you up, puts you to sleep, and does it with good quality audio. It’s basically a Squeezebox with speakers in a clock radio form factor. It has an extensive feature set, and like other Squeezebox products, can be controlled or re-programmed from Safari or Firefox from anywhere in my house. Not too many years ago, a cool new product would come out, and the chances of it working with a Mac was pretty slim. In the mid nineties, when Michael Spindler, Gil Amelio and friends just about destroyed Apple, we Mac owners were pretty much on our own. Now, companies are falling all over themselves to make nice with Macs, iPods and iPhones. Walk into any electronics store, or even a department store, and marvel at the gaggle of products that boast about how compatible they are with Apple. Long time owners of Macs will remember those dark days when nothing mated to an Apple product other than a SCSI drive. While new owners of Apple products take this interoperability for granted, it wasn’t always that way.

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The bright side of owning a Mac

Bruce Fox has been a Mac user since 1988. He got in touch with the Cult to tell the story behind his beloved Mac Classic. Take it away, Bruce: “The Mac Classic had done some time in the Los Angeles School District and was surplus obtained by a teacher friend of mine. At the time I had a number of surplus, distressed, or broken Macintosh machines. “I used to use the very nice internal power supplies in my kinetic sculptures. The classic and its bag stayed in service longer than most. I was using it in my Naval Reserve duties for record keeping and documents. As the Navy got more automated I finally started leaving it at home. After the Navy retired me in ‘98 it was only used for Thin C and Tetris. “By that time a larger Mac Performa was the principle machine at home. When I did a wholesale cleaning of old machinery some years back, I stripped out a number of power supplies and recycled the rest of most of the machines. But I kept the best of the machines operating and would boot it up from time to time. “I bundled it up and put it in the loft last year to make room for an old powerbook G3 that hosts a SCSI slide scanner. But I just took it out and booted it for the enclosed photos

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25 Years Of Mac: Bruce Fox’s Mac Classic

Tarus Balog got in touch to tell us this fantastic story of an original Mac that got dumped. Tarus rescued it from certain doom, gave it a little TLC – and found a little software surprise waiting for him. Get the full story, and some more great pics, after the clicky jumpy thing. Here’s Tarus with the whole story… “I didn’t purchase my first Mac until 2003. It was a 12-inch Powerbook and I ordered it the day it was announced. However, I had been using Macs for over a decade before then. “I friend of mine bought a Mac Plus through a school deal in 1986. It had an 800K internal floppy (as well as an external drive) and what was cool was that I could fit System 6, MacWrite, MacPaint and MacDraw onto a single disk and still have room for a few data files

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25 Years Of Mac: Tarus Balog’s Rescued Original Mac

Section: Apple , Originals It’d be hard to think of a more popular technology than the VCR, which transformed the way people could watch TV, created the home video market, and brought the piracy issue out of back alleyways and into the home of everyone. And while home video is going stronger than ever, the ubiquitous VHS tape is now officially “dead” as the last major distributor cancels shipments. Pop culture is finally hitting the eject button on the VHS tape, the once-ubiquitous home-video format that will finish this month as a creaky ghost of Christmas past. After three decades of steady if unspectacular service, the spinning wheels of the home-entertainment stalwart are slowing to a halt at retail outlets. On a crisp Friday morning in October, the final truckload of VHS tapes rolled out of a Palm Harbor, Fla., warehouse run by Ryan J. Kugler, the last major supplier of the tapes. And as I read this (looking over at the long-disused but still fuctional VCR sitting under my TV), I began thinking about how Macintosh, introduced in 1984, had gone through years of unpopularity and still hung on while VHS had reigned for years only to quickly pass away, unmourned. The big difference, of course, is that Macintosh as a platform continued to evolve. There’s the familiar point-and-click user interface, folders and arrows, but that’s just a veneer placed over an operating system that works in a completely different manner, addressing an Intel chip and accessing peripherals over the Universal Serial Bus rather than Apple’s proprietary Apple Data Bus. Wireless networking, ripping CDs, editing movies—these are all ideas that were added to the computer; “Macintosh” is more of a concept of how a computer should work rather than the OS itself. And it’s that idea that’s allowed the Mac to survive—to find an audience that would support it—when a more popular technology which couldn’t adapt, has died out. Sometimes that adaptation has been forced. When Apple introduced the iMac with neither a floppy drive nor an ADB port, it was a sea change. You’d need to buy all new peripherals! What about all the data I had on floppies? But Apple bet the farm that the Internet was going to be the Next Big Thing, and that by embracing USB, it would be easier to get peripheral makers to write a bit of code for Mac, rather than gamble on making an ADB version (which were always difficult to find outside of mail-order catalogs)

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What the death of VHS means to Mac