Mircea Baldean » Mac Thinking

Mac Users More Active on the Web

Mircea — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 02:52:30 +0000

A new Forrester report divides the U.S. online population into six groups according to their social participation on the Web:

Creators – those who blog, publish web sites, upload videos, or participate in other content creation activities – 21 percent own Macs, while only 12 percent own Dell computers;
Spectators – they read blogs, watch videos, and listen to podcasts – 55 percent own Macs;
The majority of Inactives – they don’t participate online – 55 percent own Dells.

Social Participation on the Web:

Social Group	Description	Apple	Dell
Creators	Blog, publish Web pages, upload videos	21%	12%
Critics	Comment on blogs, post ratings and reviews	25%	19%
Collectors	Use RSS, tag Web pages	24%	14%
Joiners	Use social networking sites	26%	19%
Spectators	Read blogs, watch video, listen to podcasts	55%	30%
Inactives	Don’t participate online	34%	54%

Source: Forrester. Via: Macworld.

Apple’s Multi-touch Technology Across the Board?

Mircea — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 02:24:36 +0000

I totally believe that UBS Investment Research is right! Touch screen technology has been around for a while, tablet PCs are becoming more and more popular, self check-out terminals are spawning, Axiotron’s ModBook is using a stylus. Remember, Steve Jobs doesn’t like the stylus, so multi-touch technology can be just one step away from the iPhone to iPods or Macs. Is it more user friendly? We might need to redefine notions like “right-click”, “control-click”…

Steve Jobs doesn’t like DRM either

Mircea — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 21:29:03 +0000

Interesting “Thoughts on Music” by Steve Jobs:

Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats. It’s hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future. And since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes store to acquire their music.

Would be interesting to find out a music/podcast/video/photo split ratio on an average iPod. I bet Apple has the figures :)

Search Engine Fun!

Mircea — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 03:38:28 +0000

I was just looking through the log files today: just try this search “mac no vista“. You can even try “I’m Feeling Lucky” option. Or this: ipod prices around the world.

I take a look at my blog’s stats, especially platforms: 31.25% Mac users! Yey!

How I Switched to Mac?

Mircea — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 23:02:28 +0000

No Vista for me! Not a for a while at least… That’s because I recently switched to Mac and I love it so far! Thanks to Jenn, who was bugging me for the last year, I started to do my homework and got into the Mac spirit. Got a copy of David Pogue’s Mac OS X Tiger: The Missing Manual just to get an overview and features of OS X. If you have a Linux background, you’ll love how Apple integrated it’s super-cool GUI with the robustness of Linux. Everything is so easy to learn and discover.

The second generation of MacBookPros, running on Intel Duo Core 2 is awesome, pretty fast even when rendering big images in PhotoShop. You can even run Windows with Parallels on Intel based Macs, but I don’t see a reason to install it on a such a sleek machine.

More about my experience on Macs to come shortly, on a dedicated new blog. Yes, I think it’s worth it.

Way to go, Apple!
Yours new Mac junkie.