Year: 2010

Review: good looking, good sounding speakers cost a cool grand

I love Harman Kardon products. I’ve reviewed (and bought) plenty of ’em over the years. However, the GLA-55 high end” system (“http://www.harmankardon.com/EN-US/Products/Pages/ProductDetails.aspx?PID=GLA-55) is too expensive by any stretch of the imagination. How expensive? A thousand smackers.

For a cool grand, you’ll get some of the most unusual looking speaker systems ever to see the light of day. As my son Matt noted, they look like two alien noggins from “Indiana Jones & the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls” sitting on my desk.

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The iPad, Curated Computing and a closed Mac

A lot has been made of last week’s forecast by RBC Capital Markets analyst Mike Abramsky that predicts Apple is now selling more iPads than Macs. And it’s garnered some speculation that we may see Macs that are more iPad-like.

Abramsky says that, by his estimates, Apple sells more than 200,000 iPads per week in the U.S., a total greater than the estimated 110,000 Macs sold stateside every seven days. Obviously, people love the Apple tablet, as well as the iPhone and iPod touch, so I do think we’ll see future Macs that adopt features from the iPhone OS.

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Greg’s bite: the secret to Apple’s lower R&D budget is focus

By Greg Mills

As an inventor and R&D guy myself, it comes as no surprise to me that Apple is spending far less for its research than it’s competitors. We ran an article yesterday with numbers that
put Apple’s R&D expenditures at one-seventh that of Microsoft with similar market caps between the companies.  

Look at what is coming out of the two companies and you wonder how Microsoft is blowing so much money. The truth is that Apple is just innovating better at a low cost, not that Microsoft is wasting so much more than typical companies their size.

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Macsimum Poll: should Apple release an iPad-like (closed) Mac?


In this week’s poll, we’re asking whether you think Apple should released an iPad-like Mac — in other words, one with a closed system. The poll is located on the right hand side of the home page beneath the Macsimum Opinion column.

In our last poll, we asked if Apple should support Flash on its mobile devices. Seventy-nine percent of you said “no,” and 21% said “yes.”

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