Apple news blog

Growing threads on both MacRumors and Apple’s discussion forums are reporting intermittent vertical striping with current generation 15″ MacBook Pros.

MacRumors reader-submitted photos of the issue
According to affected users, t…

“When Mac OS X was released with VoiceOver, it was a lifesaver,” says Elliot Aronson. Though he’s lost 90% of his vision to macular degeneration, the social psychologist used VoiceOver, which he calls “the single most important …

Would you believe that iTunes already has the soundtrack for the soon-to-be-released “Get Smart available for you to preview and purchase? You’ll also find Filmmaker Talk podcasts (two posted and more on the way) and the exclusive — and …

On my 15″ MacBook Pro (2.4GHz Penryn, February 2008), I’ve found I can boot into the hardware test mode without having the hardware test disc in the machine. If I press F2 before the startup bell, the machine directly enters hardware test mode. I don’t know if this works with MacBooks or iMacs, however.

[robg adds: This doesn’t work on my older MacBook Pro. I know that you can press ‘D’ at startup on the MacBook Air to get into hardware test mode, but this is the first I’ve heard of it on other models. (Any model should boot into hardware test mode by holding ‘D’ at boot with the install disc in the optical drive.) If someone else can confirm the no-disc-required behavior on a newer MacBook Pro (or other Mac), please post in the comments.]

I just noticed a neat trick in Entourage 2008: if you drag a folder out of the folder list, and onto your desktop, it creates a .mbox file just for that folder.

This is a good way to move emails from Entourage to many other formats, especially if you’re only concerned about a single folder.

In the event of a drive failure, Time Machine has the ability to create a bootable backup. It takes some preparation, however, which must be done before disaster strikes.

Using Disk Utility, create a partition on the drive you are using for Time Machine (see Disk Utility Help for instructions on how to do this without erasing your Time Machine backups). The new partition must be large enough to hold the contents of your computer’s drive, plus 10 or 20Gb of elbow room. If your system weighs 85Gb, then the new partition should be 100Gb or so. Leave this partition blank, and go on with your life.

Now, when (not if!) your Mac’s drive fails, do the following. Make sure your Time Machine drive is plugged in and powered on, then insert your Mac OS X Install disc and restart your Mac. In the installer, choose Utilities » Restore System from Backup. Click Continue in the resulting…

My old mobile phone had a ’silent’ mode: no ring and no vibrate. Alarms also wouldn’t play when the ring was muted. To create similar behavior on the iPhone, I created five seconds of silence in GarageBand (iLife ‘08), and installed it as a ringtone. I used GarageBand because it’s convenient.

This let’s me have a ’silent’ alarm using my silent sound as the ring tone with the phone unmuted, or a vibrate-only alarm when the phone is muted with the silent sound as the ring tone.

Photo by Josh Hill
Apple recently took the wraps off their first Apple Retail store in Australia and officially announced the date and time for the grand opening. The Sydney, Australia store will have its grand opening on Thursday, …

The Apple Mac Classic is one of the most famous and easily recognizable personal computers ever manufactured. First introduced in 1990, the Mac Classic was Apple’s low-end under-$1000 computer, which made it very popular with the …

The Khronos Group, a member-funded consortium focused on establishing open standard application programming interfaces (APIs), has announced the formation of the “Compute Working Group” to focus on open standards for parallel computing across graphic…