Apple Magic Mouse

Last night I stopped by the Walnut Creek Apple Store to check out the new hardware that Apple announced this last Tuesday. They had both 21.5 and 27-inch iMacs on display with the included wireless keyboard and the new wireless Magic Mouse.

I picked up the Magic Mouse and the first thing I noticed is that it does have one whole clickable button (I incorrectly called the Magic Mouse a buttonless mouse in my previous blog entry) which I thought worked fine. The Magic Mouse is very sleek, curvy, and slim. It feels good in the palm of my hand, but I do prefer a mouse with

more of a higher rounded area toward the rear of the mouse, for example the Kensington ThinkingMouse (pictured left) felt great in the hand, it fits in the palm of your hand better than any low profile mouse.

I tried out the multi-touch surface and it's very accurate. The different finger gestures worked as advertised. Moving your index finger vertically up and down scrolls a page up and down in Safari and moving your index finger horizontally scrolls the page horizontally side to side. The right-click also worked fine. I was however unable to try the two-fingered gesture that allows you to for example, page through a multiple page document or browsing through pictures in your iPhoto library, but after playing with the mouse I'm sure it works fine based on how accurate the multi-touch surface is. I was only able to test the Magic Mouse on the Apple Store's display table because they had a cable tethered to it, so I couldn't test how good it tracked on different kinds of surfaces.

In comparison to the previous Mighty Mouse, the Magic Mouse is an improvement, hardware-wise, meaning it's electronics are solid state with no moving parts with the exception of the clickable top surface. The problem with the Mighty Mouse was that in a short period of time, the scroll ball would either start malfunctioning or stop working altogether. So, because of that, Apple's solution to the scroll ball is the solid state multi-touch surface technology borrowed from the iPhone and iPod Touch.

I hope that Apple will come out with a wired version of the Magic Mouse because unless you are using rechargeable batteries, batteries could become quite costly over time.

The Apple wireless Magic Mouse retails at the online Apple Store for $69.00 US.

New Apple iMacs Today!

Apple has released the next generation iMac line this morning. New LED backlighting and screen sizes, 21.5 and 27-inch and more pixel depth, 1920 x 1080 and 2560 x 1440 respectively make watching and editing High Definition content amazing. The new iMacs come with a new buttonless wireless bluetooth mouse called the Magic Mouse along with the Apple Wireless keyboard standard. Ports on the back now include the MiniDisplay port which replaces the mini-DVI. These new iMacs do include FireWire 800 for connecting an external hard drive for video capturing when doing video editing for example or for a Time Machine backup drive. All the other ports, USB, Gigabit Ethernet, etc. are included also. Apple mentions the new iMacs have better sounding speakers too!

The 21.5-inch model has a 500 GigaByte hard drive, 4 GigaBytes of RAM, 3.06 GigaHertz Intel Core Duo 2 processor, and a NIVIDIA GeForce 9400M integrated video processor standard for a base price of $1,199.00 US. Available now at the online Apple Store. Build to Order options are also available.

The 27-inch model has a 1 TeraByte hard drive, 4 GigaBytes of RAM, 3.06 GigaHertz Intel Core Duo 2 processor, and an ATI Radeon HD 4670 dedicated graphics video card with 256 MegaBytes of Video RAM standard for a base price of $1,699.00 US. Build to Order options are also available. This model will not be available until November.

An iPhone Case that Reflects Current Events

This morning I came across an unusual iPhone case that I thought was hilarious. It's called The Recession Case. It's made of recycled cardboard from Case-Mate for $.99 for one case. At the bottom of their website, there are a couple of videos; The first one, showing a cool review of The Recession Case and the second video, shows you how you can use The Recession Case to Microwave food with it. I think it's a basic iPhone accessory made out of a basic material (Cardboard), but I also think the creators of The Recession Case are very creative. From what I saw this morning, it seems to work and it works for the original, the 3G, and the 3GS iPhones.

Warning: Guest Accounts and Snow Leopard

I've heard that when running Mac OS X Snow Leopard, when the Guest account is activated, there have been some cases of data loss in the main or administrating user account. Until Apple comes up with a fix, I strongly recommend not turning on the Guest account option.