Macworld Expo 2010 is right around the corner. Although Apple isn’t going to be there, your pals from OWC and Newer Technology certainly are. We’ve been preparing for months, and we’re excited to be showing off all the nifty new OWC and NewerTech products we’ve released over the last few months.

• The OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro mini is a compact, portable version of OWC’s award winning desktop-sized solution line that is bus-powered, fanless and sports a “Quad” Interface.
• The NewerTech NuPower High Capacity batteries for MacBook and MacBook Pro offer up to 10% higher capacity than the factory original.
• The NewerTech Video Display Adapter allows you add up to four displays to your Mac via USB.
• The NewerTech mini-DisplayPort Adapter series allows you to attach a DVI, HDMI or even VGA display to your mini-DisplayPort equipped Mac while offering better cabling and shielding than the standard adapter does.
• With NewerTech’s Window Mount for the iPhone 3G/3GS, featuring an exact fit cradle and super vacuum adhesion, your iPhone 3G/3GS will remain securely in place in your car, boat or even on an airplane tray table!
• The pocket-sized NuPower Charge & Sync+ lets you recharge your digital devices (including cell phones and digital cameras!) via a standard AC outlet or the built-in battery.
• The NewerTech MAXPower SATA 6G PCIe Controller Card for you Mac Pro (and PC’s, too) – High Performance. No drivers.
• The OWC Mercury Extreme SSD – we’re darn proud of our new internal 2.5” Solid State Drive. Sustained data transfer rates for both read and write speeds of over 260MB/s make our new SSDs among the fastest, if not the very fastest SATA I/II SSD on the market today. That’s why we’ve submitted it for Best of Show consideration.

But that’s not all…

We’ve also got a wonderful display where we show you how to integrate a Mac into your home theater system, info about our LEED Platinum Level “Green” facilities, the OWC Podcast booth, and—since His Steveness won’t be there to give one himself— “one more thing” in the form of a new OWC product. And, of course, we have show specials for the entire run of the show.

See you there!

I miss my Solid State Drive (SSD).

This past Monday was a sad day… I had to pull my OWC Mercury Extreme Enterprise SSD out of my MacBook Pro and go back to a conventional hard disk drive (HDD).

About six months ago, I arrived at the office to find a production sample of the OWC Mercury Extreme Enterprise SSD on my desk waiting for me to run long-term testing on it. To say this was the happiest day of my entire life may be an extreme (pardon the pun) overstatement, but I can definitely say this was the happiest day of my computing life. For the first week or so of use, I was bragging to everyone in the Product Development Department on how fast things were running on my MacBook Pro. As they got sick of my bragging, I also gradually got used to having my new-found speedy performance…which is what made this past Monday such a sad day for me.

On a typical workday, I have multiple apps running simultaneously on my computer including but not limited to: VMware Fusion, Numbers, multiple windows of Safari, iPhoto, Mail, and Remote Desktop. I compile a lot of test result tables along with photos and screenshots in Numbers and the file sizes tend to get large.  Any other Numbers junkie may feel my pain when saving and loading these large Numbers files, because it feels like I’m back in the 1990’s saving and loading apps/files from floppy disks. Same scenario with VMware Fusion and it taking a long enough time to load and suspend virtual machines that I found myself going to the break room for a frosty beverage. Needless to say…after installing the OWC Mercury Extreme Enterprise SSD, any hint of slowness on my MacBook Pro seemed to just disappear.

I know many of you are concerned about the limited capacity of SSD’s drives. To be honest with you, so did I. But, as I used the SSD and experienced the speed benefits it gave me, I came to a realization that having all my media files on an external drive was not a problem at all. I simply redirected my iTunes and iPhoto libraries to my OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro mini drive and only plugged the drive in when I needed to have access to them.  The Elite-AL mini is small and bus powered, so I can keep it in my backpack and use it anywhere I go.

Unfortunately, that was all before Monday and the need for another user to experience the benefits of this drive. Now I’m back to my lowly 5400RPM 320GB hard disk drive that came with my MacBook Pro. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing “bad” about it…but the speeds just aren’t what I’ve become accustomed to. I’m sure in a week’s time I’ll get used to it.  Until then, I’m sure my coworkers will continue to remind me with such obvious joy that I’m back to the same performance level they are.

In case you’ve been a bit distracted by the iPad, there was another important upcoming launch that was aborted on the pad so to speak. NASA’s Constellation program aimed at transporting humans (the regular kind like you and me…not just astronauts) to the moon was aborted by President Obama in his 2011 budget released this past Monday. The program’s ultimate goal was to develop a new generation of spacecraft that would facilitate human spaceflight to the moon for, according to NASA, establishing a permanent surface based outpost where everyday humans could live and work.

The defenders and objectors to this move are many as one can imagine. And it isn’t a done deal as Congress has to approve this request to reduce funding to NASA. But the one voice that seems to me to be the most logical is that of U.S. Senator Richard Shelby. He stated that Obama’s decision was akin to a “death march for the future of US human space flight”. Shelby goes on to say that the Obama Administrations’ plan is to instead fund ‘commercial’ providers who have failed to fulfill current contracts with NASA to deliver even cargo to the International Space Station.”

I’ve read quite a number of other sources inferring that those ‘commercial’ providers can include other governments. If history has taught us anything, there always seems to be a bit of landrush or landgrab by the largest majority of new visitors to the “strange new land”. Budgets, current economics, and social challenges aside, I’m wondering if this is the smartest thing to be doing…in essence saying to foreign governments that oversee very large populations, “go ahead, plant your flag, you can have the moon.”

And privatizing this type of space travel doesn’t fill me with a lot of confidence. Let’s face it, if a “corporation” could send humans to the moon safely and on a regular basis, they would have done so by now. And even if they were able to accomplish this, having a profit oriented firm in this kind of operation gives me an uneasy feeling. What if they had ulterior motives that could result in a very bad outcome for those first few intrepid explorers? After the recent Wall Street debacles, do you trust greed to send you to the moon?

For me, I think I’ll put my faith in auto body specialist Steve Eves who built a replica of a NASA Saturn V rocket that broke the world record for the tallest and heaviest model rocket that’s ever been launched and recovered.

And if you’re into conspiracies and “black ops”, maybe this budget showdown is all part of a huge deception…we let others move up to the moon and then instead of just looking for water, we go Ripley on them. Then, “game over man”…we own the moon and save money to boot!

I started here at OWC a little over a year ago. I’m a Senior Software architect that has worked primarily in Windows and Linux and have a brother who is a designer that works primarily in Macs.

Although I’ve done extensive studio work (I’m also a musician) where the engineers all have Mac computers running Logic Pro or Pro Tools, I’ve always viewed Macs as a ridiculous hipster toy rather than an actual computer. I held strongly to the view that unless it’s a huge oversized box, it’s not strong enough for my needs. I have a dell XPS laptop at home that’s an inch & a half thick and thought that was the best you could get.

On my first day here, I was handed a 17″ MacBook Pro with a 2.6Ghz processor and 4GB of memory, and took on the task of learning to work with this hipster toy. I installed all of the software I needed (Surprisingly, everything I needed was readily available, with the exception of Internet Explorer, which I use solely for browser testing, so I also installed VMWare Fusion to allow me to run windows to test web applications for IE compatibility) and got to work.

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While I celebrate my 13th anniversary of working at OWC this month, I thought a virtual stroll down memory lane might be informative and entertaining. When I first came here, there were only about six employees, so we all did whatever was needed to make sure orders got out the door and customers were happy. I would take an order in the morning, help run it through the credit card terminal later in the afternoon or evening, and sometimes help enter it into the Fed Ex terminal at night.

I had a number of paper pages stapled together that gave me the latest prices on 30-pin and 72-pin SIMMs, 168-pin DIMMs and everyone’s favorite SCSI drives (is my SCSI fast, wide, ultra, ultra fast, ultra wide, fast wide?).  Notes were all over it since we didn’t yet have the website we have today with all its helpful information. With the Apple II I used once or twice in the library at my grade school being my only Apple/Mac experience, I relied heavily on www.everymac.com and a program called QuickConference to instant message Larry (a.k.a. OWC Larry) or our other techie guy to figure out what was compatible with what.

You can check out early iterations of our website here by typing in “www.macsales.com” into the field at the top. If you aren’t familiar with the Wayback Machine (not to be confused with the WABAC machine), it is a very cool tool and project. Article Continues…

I was out last night and someone asked me what I thought about the Apple iPad, saying that they thought of it as a great new mobile computer.

I stated back that I didn’t really think of it as being a “mobile computer” as much as I thought of it creating a new category of “untethered” home computers. No wires, not to the wall, and not to a mouse.

While it can definitely be thrown in the car or in a bag and taken out on the road and have access to 3G wireless connectivity (if you are willing to pay for it), I think that it will play a big part in the living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms of the future.

The Nintendo Wii is kind of responsible for what has been coined “casual gaming”. I think the iPad will be the device that spawns the term “casual computing”.

I am sure iPhone and iPod Touch owners would agree that they rarely sit down at their computers to check their e-mail anymore, they just pull out their iPhone/iPod wherever they are at the moment. When out and about that will not change as those devices will be what is in their pockets, but in the home the iPad will become the go-to device as it expands the experience of touch-based computing with a larger screen and more power.

While I, and others, have some complaints about iPad’s glaringly obvious missing features, I am still very optimistic about it and it’s product line’s future.

The benefit of eSATA is high performance data transfer typically 2-3 times faster than FireWire 800 for connecting external devices. A drawback has been the need to install and maintain drivers for modern eSATA controller cards… Until now.

The NewerTech MAXPower eSATA 6G PCIe 2.0 Controller Card is among the very first in eSATA Controller cards for the Mac Pro and PCs that is fully Plug and Play. No drivers required for Apple OS 10.5 and later (also Plug and Play driverless with Windows Vista and later), this ACHI compliant PCI Express card is as easy as it gets for adding external SATA device support. Just “install it and forget it” by plugging it into an available PCIe slot and you can then enjoy the performance offered via the eSATA port standard on many OWC, NewerTech, and other third party single drive and hardware RAID solutions. This card isn’t for multi-drive Port Multiplier enclosures/solutions that require software or special RAID controller to enable RAID operation – but it’s an excellent choice for those solutions like the NewerTech GMAX, OWC Elite-AL Pro RAID, and OWC Qx2 solutions that provide a hardware controlled RAID solution and support higher data throughput via standard eSATA ports.

And for all you speed freaks out there, we’ve created the ultimate performance bundle. And we’ll have some benchmarks up soon showing just how fast you can go!

But I digress…back to this awesome card…it offers exceptional ease of use without the worry of a driver that may not work with a future OS release – it’s also an exceptional bargain priced at just $59.99. Because it doesn’t have those pesky drivers to maintain and possibly cause incompatibility down the road, one of its greatest benefits – that Plug and Play ease – also allows it to be exceptionally affordable too.

Bottom line…if you’ve ever wanted to enjoy the higher level of performance available from eSATA – but with the Plug and Play operation that you’ve grown accustomed to with FireWire – the NewerTech MaxPower eSATA 6G PCIe 2.0 Controller Card is your ticket to the fast lane.

Being in the Product Development Department at OWC means I get my hands on a large amount of product you see listed on our site (as well as some you don’t). Any loyal OWC blog follower will be quick to realize that this is my first blog post. The reason for that is here in Product Development, we’re BUSY  testing, documenting, benchmarking, researching, and most importantly…brainstorming products! All done in an effort to be sure you get the highest quality products priced competitively.

Now, I’m no stranger to Solid State Drives (SSD). I’ve spent many long hours putting various manufacturers’ drives through their paces and let me assure you, not all SSD’s are created equal. We knew going into this project that only the fastest, longest lasting, and most power efficient SSD could bear the OWC name. After spending months and months testing our new OWC Mercury Extreme Enterprise SSD, I am excited to finally say: we have that drive!

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While others here in the halls of OWC and others in the blogosphere grouse about the name iPad for Apple’s new device, it only makes sense to me.

Apple products are as much about the message and the marketing as they are the device. They don’t exclude anyone…from the average user to the ubergeek, there’s something for everyone…features and operations that are easy to use and yet can be expanded upon if one so desires. And I feel a bit qualified to make that statement having been in marketing and at times going head to head with Apple since the very earliest days.

So, how does it make sense? The 3P’s of marketing…and in this instance for Apple…iPod, iPhone, and now iPad.

With that name, they’ve created their own 3P’s to product category killers…and add a family extension of similarity to the entire line. Just like how many of the same features have evolved in the Mac OS.

Come on…iTablet? Did you ever use a tablet of paper? You grabbed a pad of paper.

Perfectly Positioned Product…there’s my 3P’s on the subject.

And I have to say I pretty much told you so in my predictions…for the most part, an iPod Touch…larger screen and a full size QWERTY keyboard. For many Boomers, this is exactly what we’ve been…pardon the pun…looking for since a screen showed up on an iPod.

Review post to come….  Stay tuned to the OWC Blog.

Since at least September (and, really, quite a bit of time before then), rumors and speculation have abounded about Apple’s amazing new tablet device. How big was it going to be? What OS would it run? What price points are we looking at? How would it integrate with our current systems? How many unicorns would it be brought in upon the backs of?

Well, the waiting is over. Today, Apple introduced it’s new product, the unfortunately-named iPad.

We’ll save the pondering of the intangibles for later, once it’s all had some time to sink in. For now, let’s take a look at what is being offered.

• It’s fairly compact—half an inch thick, 9.56″ tall and 7.47″ wide—and it weighs in at about 1.5 pounds.
• It sports a 9.7″ backlit LED Multi-touch display that runs at a 1024×768 pixel resolution.
• The iPad is powered by a 1GHz Apple A4 processor.
• All iPhone apps will run natively, both in standard size and in full screen via pixel doubling.
• A version of iWork for the iPad will be available, with many of the features found in the full version.
• All the “Standard” applications from the iPhone (Safari, Mail, Maps, YouTube, etc.) are updated to work additional features like the new pop-up menus.
• iBooks is the new feature, with a built-in store, much like the iTMS or the App Store. Books are sent/saved in the EPUB format.
• Adapters will be available to export 1024×768 resolutions via VGA, or up to 576 and 480p.
• The battery supports up to 10 hours of Web surfing via Wi-Fi, watching video or listening to music. In standby mode, it’ll be good for up to a month on a full charge.
• An optional keyboard dock is available, and it will also work with an Apple Wireless keyboard.
• Apple will also offer a “camera connection kit” which will allow you to plug your camera in via USB or use an SD card to import pictures.
• WiFi connectivity is available on all models
• A version with 3G data connectivity will be available, with 2 Data plans via AT&T –  250MB/month for $14.99 or unlimited for $29.99
• The WiFi-only versions will be available within 60 days. The “WiFi+3G” version will be available in about 90 days.
• Pricing for the unit itself breaks down as follows:
  

  	16GB	32GB	64GB
  WiFi	$499	$599	$699
  WiFi+3G	$629	$729	$829

That’s the “hard data” rundown. However, there is a lot more to this device that can’t be broken down into technical specifications. Stay tuned to the OWC Blog for a closer look into the pros and cons of the new iPad.

One gadget we know is being debuted in just a few short hours is the new Apple Tablet. Apple’s Hype Machine has had interest in this not so new concept brewing to its current peak for months. It’s really incredible the art of Apple’s team in seeding the rumors, stirring the pot, and – for lack of a better term – manipulating the masses to have all eyes turned on Apple for what this Magic Tablet will be.

I’m not trying to be a downer here… I have incredible expectations for what Apple will unveil. It won’t be the techie specs that make it though, it’s going to be all that Apple has coordinated behind it. To be sure, there were a host of slick Windows OS Tablet/Slates shown off at CES. And then products like Amazon’s Kindle have put books on digital for quite some time. What I expect Apple to show off is an elegant piece of hardware with the functional, real-world use software tools that makes their Tablet consumer ready right out of the box. Great tech specs are nice, but more important is what you can do with it. Where others show off specs, tomorrow Apple is going to sell their new Tablet – not unlike the iPhone – on all the great things you can easily and intuitively do with it.

As an iPhone on steroids, out of the box the Apple Tablet should already have the same function and support as an iPhone. But more than that – it’s said to be the right product with the right display technology to take the ‘old media’ experience to digital. Translation: getting magazines, newspapers, and, of course, books in an agreeable and appealing display format. While it’s all been done before, Apple tends to be ground-breaking by providing a solution with a software accessibility that has everyone wanting to use it.

Reportedly, a huge segment Apple is after with the Tablet is education. McGraw-Hill has already spilled the beans that they’re excited about their deal to make their textbooks available via the Apple device. If the usability is up to all the hype that Apple’s brought upon their tablet – just this one segment alone is a game changer. At all levels, from grade school to university, printed books consume considerable financial and physical resources. Worse, when books are updated – prior editions become obsoleted forcing schools and students to buy the latest editions new. The proof is in the pudding, but this could be Apple’s ticket if they deliver a model for education that shows a long term cost benefit whereby the tablet with eBooks replaces those traditional printed texts. And of course, the Tablet is far more than just a glorified Kindle in doing this too.

The possibilities are whatever one can imagine. I expect a lot of what has been imagined will be delivered in the new Apple tablet. It’s not going to be about the raw specs, it’s going to be about all the things people have imagined doing with a tablet and Apple having the software and deals in place that make it real.

I first heard about a girl named Hermione marrying her Mac this morning on my drive into work. It was incorrectly reported by a Chicago area FM radio station that it was the actress that portraits Hermione Granger of Harry Potter fame was engaged to her Mac. And I was pretty much going to leave it at some funny business by some local radio jocks.

But I started looking into this a bit here and was pretty surprised to see just how much love some users have for their Macs!

If you’re a regular reader, you know we’re not immune to this lovefest either…as OWC Robert’s entry about his beloved Lola certainly wove a curvy tale.

The latest chapter in this romance novel features 24-year-old Hermione Way…who reportedly has been unofficially engaged to her Mac laptop, fondly referred to as Alex, for 11 months now.

She apparently has spent every minute of every day with Alex for the past two years, and while she holds a rally against current laws not allowing humans to marry computers, she plans on exchanging vows on January 31.

Naturally we want you to experience all the emotion and relate to her connection to Alex, so the clip that will soon have everyone forgetting about Avatar is ready for your viewing enjoyment here.

Now, I don’t know if this is just a publicity stunt or not. She certainly holds a poker face while telling her tale to the camera. And the only reason why I think there could be some truth to her professed affinity for her Mac…OWC Robert not withstanding…is this Mac user’s obvious comfort with his machine.

Which leads me to the conclusion so appropriately defined by the somewhat infamous OWC Jamie who often is my counterpart in humor, movie quotes, etc….once you go Mac, you never go back.

Several months ago, I had a catastrophic drive failure with my main music computer which wiped out my audio drive & motherboard!  I decided then and there that I would never let myself be vulnerable for data loss again.

I recently purchased the new Mercury Elite-Al Pro mini, and I love it! The purchase was made specifically for storing my precious music, financial records, and picture data off-site. That way, if anything were to physically happen to my computer, I would not lose any of my data.

Initially, I was going to ask my brother-in-law to hold onto the backup drive at his house for my off-site storage, but he’s approximately 40 miles from where I live.  But then I remembered my safe deposit box at the bank. Why not put the drive in there along with my paper based documents?

The beauty of this drive, as well as the Mercury On-The-Go-Pro, is that it fits easily in my safe deposit box.  So with very little expense, I now have off-site storage within 2 miles from where my studio is for protecting all my precious data.

I will be purchasing a second Mercury Elite-Al Pro mini so I can reduce the trips to my bank to every two weeks with new data saved. I’ve found that this is an excellent product, and now I finally have an inexpensive off-site storage solution!

Apple released the last quarter’s sales reports today. Since we at OWC specialize in upgrades for your Macintosh, iPod/iPhone, and all things Apple, we were very interested to see the results, and figured you might be, too.

Since financial news makes most people’s eyes cross after the first few lines, here’s the abridged version that pulls out the interesting tidbits.

• Posted revenue: $15.68 billion
• Net quarterly profit: $3.38 billion – roughly $3.67 per share.
• Macs sold during this quarter: 3.36 million
• Percent change in Macs sold during same quarter last year: 33% increase
• iPhones sold during this quarter: 8.7 million
• Percent change in iPhones sold during same quarter last year: 100% increase
• iPods sold during this quarter: 21 million
• Percent change in iPods sold during same quarter last year: 8% decrease

We should probably take some of these numbers with a grain of salt, as they reflect changes to how Apple accounts for sales of things like the iPhone and the AppleTV.

Overall, though, these reports show that the company behind the computers we use and enjoy seems to be doing quite well…

…and they haven’t even released the mythical Apple Tablet yet.

One of the most important things to remember in being the Sales Manager for OWC is to look at the product from the customer’s perspective. What products do you need? Why do you need them? How will they benefit your work flow or lifestyle? It’s these questions that when answered, provide the basis for OWC’s principle of serving the customer.

The reason I bring this up is that besides being the Sales Manager for OWC, I’m also a customer. This is unique to many other professionals in my position as several Sales Managers will never purchase product from the company they work for. I, on the other hand, was a customer before I even worked here (the sales rep that sold me my first piece of RAM is now reporting to me) and still am today. Besides being the Sales Manager for OWC, I’m also a recording musician and resident audio expert. This means that my Mac Pro Quad Core 2.66Ghz machine gets its fair share of abuse on a regular basis.

Two weeks ago, I opened up a session in ProTools to begin recording a new song idea. My machine was straining to keep up. Audio was dropping, popping, clicking…it was terrible. I opened up the Activity Monitor only to find that I had 16MB of free memory out of 2GB! My hard drive space situation wasn’t much better. I was basically at a standstill because I needed more memory and more HD space. So, the next day I came into the office and literally went to www.macsales.com, clicked on “My OWC”, and let the website guide me to the RAM and HDs that were compatible with my machine. Within minutes, I placed an order for a 4GB kit for my Late 2006 Mac Pro as well as a new 1.0TB Hitachi 3.5″ SATA drive.

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January seems to be a bad month for people who have influenced the staff of the OWC blog. After last week’s passing of Jan C. “Sunday Sunday Sunday” Gabriel, we’ve had another loss, this time hitting a little closer to the Macintosh community as a whole.

Guy Day—one of the co-founders of the Chiat/Day, the advertising firm behind the “Think Different,” and “Switch,” campaigns and the now-legendary “1984″ Super-Bowl commercial—passed away in his sleep last Saturday of natural causes.

The “1984″, and the agency behind it, are considered the main force behind the advertising spectacle that modern Super Bowl ads have become. And we all know that the product it promoted has become somewhat popular over the last few years. :-)

As for Day himself, his employees and coworkers throughout the years have chimed in, relating stories regarding his creativity, amiable nature, and pragmatism that helped propel Chiat/Day to the upper echelon of advertising agencies.

We really don’t think about our optical drives a whole lot. That is, of course, until we need them.

Unfortunately, with the near-ubiquity of broadband access we really don’t use our optical drives all that much any more. Software updates are downloaded from the appropriate server, we get our movies and music from the iTunes Music Store or other sources, and we wind up transferring files using USB flash drives or a “cloud” service like Dropbox.

Even backups, that perennial favorite use for recordable media, is shifting towards hard drive-based solutions, with their lower cost per gigabyte, reusability and overall faster transfer rates.

With this shift away from the optical drive, about the only time you need to use it is when you’re installing software. This is probably why there were so many reports of broken optical drives just after Snow Leopard’s release; they were probably broken for a while before that point, but nobody noticed until they actually needed to use the drive.
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