MacDirectory magazine is the premiere creative lifestyle magazine for Apple enthusiasts featuring interviews, in-depth tech reviews, Apple news, insights, latest Apple patents, apps, market analysis, entertainment and more.
Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/798
144 MacDirectory COVER STORY sales are up 38 percent, to 1.34 million units, compared with 6.6 million units shipped by market leader HP. These figures prove that Apple's technology strategy is succeeding to an extent that would have been inconceivable 10 years ago, when Steve Jobs came back to the company. Just as successful are Apple's retail strategies: the trend is for consumers to buy laptops at stores based on intangibles like 'feel'. Hence the success of the Apple Stores, since MacBooks usually do feel a lot better than their competitors. Except for the keyboards. I guess Jobs doesn't do much typing anymore. Apple's iPhone It's generally conceded that the iPhone is the best mobile phone yet designed and that's enough to earn it a place here. One major gripe — lack of 3G capability — will, it is rumored, be addressed at mid-year. Apple has been slow to respond to several other problems (no cut and paste?!), and though sales have been spectacular, they have not been as high as Apple hoped. Whatever. This is still the most important phone product of the past decade. Very recent news — Apple opening the iPhone platform up to independent developers, and Kleiner Perkins' announcement of a $100 million budget to fuel iPhone software development — indicates that the iPhone is likely to remain the most important mobile phone platform for some time to come. Maxtor's One Touch III, Turbo Edition Of all the external drives we have tested, Maxtor's One Touch III, Turbo Edition is the one that finally gets it right. Interfaces are Firewire 400 and 800, and USB2. The enclosure contains two hard drives and a hardware RAID controller for either RAID 0 or RAID 1 operation. RAID 1 is the style we prefer: Each disk mirrors the other, so you can always be sure your data — and your workflow — will be absolutely safe, because if one drive fails, the other automatically picks up. The software package is excellent. The drive is performatted for Macs but can be used on all other platforms. We have tested thousands of external hard drives over the years, and this is the best we've seen yet. With other drives, there is always some kind of gotcha — for example, many we have tested can't be successfully used with Apple's suspend command because of some issue with the Firewire controller. After extensive testing, we have yet to be disappointed with the One Touch III. The only improvement we could suggest would be a slightly lower noise level. There is much to be said for some of the inexpensive ethernet-based NAS systems out there — we particularly like Plextor's and Western Digital's — but in the end we find them too slow and subject to unpredictable network gotchas to be recommended over direct USB2/Firewire drives such as the One Touch III. Apple's Time Capsule, just shipping at press time, may prove to be a worthy solution one day, but we don't think wireless is fast enough, secure enough, or reliable enough to replace wired backup — yet. Moreover, the first iteration of Time Capsule has shown transfer rates of just16 megabits/second on fast ethernet wired backups, a figure Apple iPhone Apple MacBook Pro 17" IMAGE COURTESY OF APPLE IMAGE COURTESY OF APPLE