• 65 Burj Khalifas
• A 12-core Mac Pro with 4 512GB SSD drives, a 1GB graphics card, a quad-channel fibre card, and 437,183,098 GB of RAM.
• Mississippi
• Anheuser-Busch, with enough left over to buy everyone in america 3 six-packs of Bud Light
• Disney AND Sony.
• 84 million copies of Microsoft Small Business server with the premium add-on 2011. (download only, discs would cost extra).
• All the planes owned by Delta and United. That’s before depreciation.
• Home Depot and Lowes
• 1,829 TONS of gold.
• They could send the entire population of Sacramento into space, courtesy of Richard Branson.
• Every Major league baseball, basketball, football and hockey team, twice.
• Boardroom seats and dinner for 12 to every red Sox game for the next 140886 years. Not counting post-season games, but lets face it, that won’t be a concern for a while.
• Worried about iPhone competition? Apple could pay cash for Sony, Motorola, Nokia, LG, and RIM, and still have $35B left over.

Those are all fun, but if Apple’s smart, they will buy back some of their own shares. it’s still a bargain at only 9 times earnings. They could buy back almost a quarter of their shares.

Or issue a #$%&@ dividend already! C’mon, Tim!

50% “Should I buy an iPad3?
50% everything else

Which is especially silly because there IS no iPad 3. You may have heard from a guy who knows a guy, but as of now, its all rumor. Yes, there will be an iPad 3. But let me be clear: we don’t know when, we dont know what it will have, and we don’t know how much. I can still conjecture, though.

The next iPad will probably be out in April. Maybe March, maybe May, but I’m guessing April. I was against the idea of a higher resolution screen- what’s the point? It uses more battery life, and people dont use their iPads primarily for reading books. Until, of course, yesterday’s textbook announcement. So given Apples clear dive into the education market, now I DO think the iPad will have a higher res screen, and I know exactly what it will be, too: 2048×1536. That is exactly 4x the pixels, or 2x the resolution of the iPad and iPad 2.

It has to be double, because of the way Apps are coded. If you have coded your own iOS apps before, you know that resolutions aren’t done in pixels, but in units. That way, you can design for the iPhone and the iPhone with retina display and everything is automatically doubled. If the resolution was anything else, converting for more than one device would be a mess. Now, iPad apps will just double for the iPad 3, and iPhone apps will quadruple, the math is easy for the processor to handle.

Higher resolution means faster chips, so the iPad3 will probably have a new quad-core chip, better for gaming and large, complex textbooks full of rich media. It will inevitably have to have a bigger battery, though I suspect it will get the same charge, with all the bigger features. Maybe less charge, but they will try to sweep that under the rug and be vague about it.

I also want to think they will offer more storage, since these textbooks can be up to 2GB, but 64GB is already pretty darn big. We may see them drop the 16 and just offer 32 and 64 for the price of the current 16 and 32?

The 3G antenna: they are going to want to include one universal antenna so they dont have to offer a different model for AT&T and Verizon, thats how the iPhone is now. And I think they will be dropping 3G from the iPad2. So any desire to lower the cost of 3G ($100 extra is a nicer number than $130) will be cancelled out by the new antenna. They COULD add 4G support, but they havent been big on that with the phones yet, and the iPad tech has traditionally lagged behind the phones. Maybe in the iPad4.

They could improve the camera, but I dont see a big push for that. Maybe a little bump, so it is on par with the iPhone4, but the 4s will still feature their marquis camera tech.

I also think they will pull an iPhone and still offer the base model iPad2, 16GB no 3G, for a much lower price, maybe $100 or $200 off. they COULD hit the $299 price point but that seems like wishful thinking. They are NEVER going to try to compete with the Amazon fire, its a whole different market strategy and its not tenable for Apple to sell iPads at a loss like it is for Amazon.

With the minor changes and same body, they may just pull an iPhone and call this the iPad 2s instead of the iPad 3, but somehow I don’t think so. It depends: I could see them calling this iPad2s, and next year the iPad3 will have 4G, but then again that could be confusing, too. maybe they’ll call this the iPad3, so next year they will be perfectly lined up to release the iPad4 with 4G!

We will NOT be seeing a new dock connector, or an SD slot, or any new-fangled gimmicks. Or a new body design. It may be 1mm thicker for a better battery, but it’ll still fit in existing cases.

To sum up, this is Apple’s lineup now:

iPad2    16GB    $499    3G   $629    dual-core, standard screen
iPad2    32GB    $599    3G   $629    dual-core, standard screen
iPad2    64GB    $699    3G   $829    dual-core, standard screen

Here is my probable prediction for April:

iPad2    16GB    $399                  dual-core, standard screen
iPad3    16GB    $499    3G    $629    quad-core, retina screen, upgraded camera
iPad3    32GB    $599    3G    $729    quad-cire, retina screen, upgraded camera
iPad3    64GB    $699    3G    $829    quad-core, retina screen, upgraded camera

Here is my best-case scenario prediction for April:

iPad2    16GB    $299    3G    $429
iPad3    16GB    $399    4G    $499
iPad3    32GB    $499    4G    $599
iPad3    64GB    $599    4G    $699

There’s also the possibility, if apple is really behind this education initiative, that we see a new education-only model, with a lot of storage but no 3G, at a discount in bulk, like the eMac used to be sold.

Here’s some more info on iBooks Author:  http://www.tuaw.com/2012/01/19/ibooks-author-under-the-hood/

What do you think? Am I way off? Will the new iPad3 cost $50 and make toast?

Open your Network System Preference. Are you getting your IP info from a DHCP Server? Click Advanced, and click the DNS tab. Even if the DNS server address and subnet are correct, click the + and type them in again, just to make sure they stick. It helped me. Server app and ServerAdmin are a lot faster now.

What is it?
iTunes Match is a subscription service that stores your music “in the cloud”. Translation: on Apple’s servers. So no matter where you are, you can log in and download your music on any device– Apple, PC, iPad, iPod, iPhone.

How?
When you sign in and set up, itunes will automatically scan your music library. Any songs that are already on the store, so probably most of them, will be marked as owned by you, and the rest will be uploaded.

Cool reason to use iTunes Match #1:
Did you notice the part where I said ALL your music is stored in the cloud? Ever been in a bar or at a party with people and a funny story came up, or someone reminded you of a song they just HAVE to hear? But you don’t have it because your iPhone is only 16GB? Now you can hear any of your songs, any time, anywhere, and you don’t always have to carry them around with you. That’s pretty cool.

Cool reason to use iTunes Match #2:
The music Apple already has online is DRM-free and high quality. So if, like me, you ripped a lot of your music years ago at a low bitrate because your hard drive was small, or bought a lot through iTunes when they DRMed their music, you can replace all this stuff with new, high-quality tracks! It takes a little trick, but its easy to do, here’s how:

1. Sign up for iTunes Match, natch.
2. Set up and wait for iTunes to upload all your music. This could take awhile. I had 10,000 tracks, with about the same ratio of on-the-store/not-on-the-store that most people would have, and it took about 4 hours.
3. Now, find all the tracks that are protected, or less than 256kbps. You can make a smart playlist to do the work for you. Just search for music with a bitrate lower than 256, AND kind is music. You dont want to be deleting any videos or podcasts.
4. You also want to find any of that music that is in iTunes match- you dont want to delete anything you cant get back. But the tricky part is, you need to find music which is lower than 256 AND music… and Purchased OR matched. To add the conditional, option-click (hey, there’s the option key again) the little plus sign in the smart playlist window. When its done, it will look like this:
   
5. Okay, now you will have a smart playlist with low-quality music that can be re-downloaded from iTunes Match. Time to… um… do that.
6. Select all the music in the new smart playlist and delete it. Choose to put the files in the trash.
7. Now that you’re signed into iTunes match, your songs wont actually disappear from your Library! There will now be an iCloud icon next to them. Click the icon, and you will be able to re-download.
   
8. Now, it’s going to suck clicking that icon again and again if you are replacing a lot of tracks. So heed my warning: When you select all the songs in the smart playlist and delete them, there will be a short pause of a couple seconds when they are deleted but they haven’t disappeared from the playlist yet. And they are still highlighted. Quickly click the re-download button right away and ALL of them will start to re-download. (in a really random order, if mine is any example).
   

You really want to know why, huh? Okay, fine, here’s why? Apple and Amazon have completely opposite business plans. Amazon sells the Kindle Fire at break-even or a small loss, because their primary goal is to sell eBooks, music, movies and Amazon Prime subscriptions. Apple sells the iPad at a huge markup, and they make relatively little on the iTunes and App stores.

2012 could bring us a cheaper iPad (probably not smaller) but by cheaper I’m thinking $449, $399 at best. And then only if Apple can bring down the component costs considerably. Which could happen- the RAM market is cratering right now.

If you use a Mac, the Command key is your go-to key. Your star. It does it all: Command-spacebar will open the Spotlight search box, Command-Q will quit Warcraft when the boss comes around the corner, and Command-P will print copies of your resumé if you need to find a new job because you didn’t hit Command-Q quick enough.

But today I want to send some love to the humble Option key, the little brother, forever sitting in Command’s shadow. Maybe you are cheap thrifty and use a PC keyboard on your Mac, and you call it the ALT key. If you use a Das Keyboard, then you just call it the ”   ” key. But if you use one of those bad boys, you’re way too bad-ass to be reading my blog, anyway.

Here are ten cool and little-known tricks you can perform with the Option key.

1. Hide an app.

If you hold down the option key while switching to an app, it will hide the current app you are in. This works whether you are using the Application Switcher (command-option-tab instead of just command-tab) or option-clicking an app in the dock. Or simply option-clicking an open window in an already-running application Also, if you hold down option when double-clicking an app in the Applications window, the window will close when the app launches.

2. Change audio inputs.

Clicking the speaker icon in the menu bar will allow you to change the volume of your speakers, but option-clicking will reveal a hidden menu where you can switch inputs and outputs without having to stop what you’re doing and go to the Sound System Preference.

3. View detailed info about your wifi network.

Option-click the wifi icon in the menu bar to view detailed information about your wifi network, like channel, band, and security method.

4. Select multiple items.

This one isn’t universal, but you can often option-click an item in a list to select or deselect every item. Works in places like the Sharing System Preference, the Layers panel in Photoshop and tracks in Final Cut.

5. Copy or move.

If you drag a file or a folder from one place to another on the same disk, it will move the item, but drag a file or folder to another disk and it will make a copy. Hold down the option key when you drag to do the opposite. In fact, option-drag will make a copy of an item in a whole variety of places, from tracks in iTunes to layers in Photoshop to slides in Powerpoint.

6. The Inspector.

Command-I, or the Get Info command will open up a window listing the metadata and permissions for a selected file or folder. But if you want to get info on multiple items, you must open a separate window for each. Until now! Think of the Inspector like an interactive Get Info window: hold down option while choosing Get Info, or hit Command-Option-I, and the inspector will open. It looks just like an ordinary Get Info window, but if you look very closely, the title bar is slightly different. The inspector is interactive: instead of opening a new one every time, just select a different item and the Inspector will automatically refresh. Once you see it, you’ll get it.

7. Instant download.

Option-click a link in most any web browser, and that link will be downloaded to your hard disk. No more clicking through and accepting a dozen confirmations, selecting “are you sure” and choosing a destination folder.

8. Close a dashboard widget or a space.

Hold down the option key in Dashboard, Mission Control or Launchpad, and a small “X” will appear on the top-left of any widget, space (after the first) or application (Only apps which were installed by the App Store). Clicking the X will hide the widget, close the space or uninstall the app.

9. Delete a stubborn file.

If you get a warning that you have locked or in-use items when trying to empty the trash, holding the option key will often override the lock and force the trash to empty anyway.

10. Unmount all.

Have multiple volumes on a disk? Tired of the “Do you want to eject all items” dialog when you try to eject? Hold down option when you eject to automatically eject all mounted volumes for that drive.

Special bonus Lion-only content! (you lucky people!)

11. Show the Library.

As you may or may not have noticed by now, Apple decided to make the user Library folder invisible, so people wouldn’t accidentally wander in and cause havoc. Nice thinking, but I know what I’m doing, and I need to go in there all the time! Instead of fussing with the Go To Folder command, just hold down option when clicking the Finder’s Go menu, and there it is!

12. Quit and close all windows.

Lion has a nifty new feature called Resume, which will automatically re-open any windows you were working on when you re-launch an application or even reboot your whole machine. Which is a great time saver, until that one time you launch an app to get some work done, and you have to wait for 55 windows to re-spawn. or worse, when you are giving a presentation in front of colleagues and some embarrassing files pop up on screen. You can disable this feature permanently in the General System Preference, but if you like the feature, except for certain times, you can quickly close all windows when quitting an app, and they won’t respawn. Just hold option when clicking the application menu, or hit Command-Option-Q

If you’re not familiar with Forrester, this is the equivalent of the Republican Party coming out and admitting that global warming is real, banks should be taxed more, and Project Runway is the most fabulous show on TV. Forrester has always been the calm, reliable (stuffy) voice of corporate IT, so you know they carefully considered and reasoned their argument before putting it out there. Maybe this will finally get people to sit up and listen.

“Mac users are drinking furniture polish in back hallways, getting their fix from fellow bootleggers who have blazed the trails around IT’s prohibition,” writes David K. Johnson for Forrester Research in an introduction to their study. “End user computing professionals steeped in two decades of Microsoft management traditions are either prohibiting Macs on the company network or limiting their support to executives only. It’s time to repeal prohibition and take decisive action. This document is the first in a collection in which we’ll introduce you to a new class of Mac users, explain why they matter to the business, and share how other firms successfully managing Macs are doing it. Later, we will explain the management tools available and drill into the specific technology approaches for managing Macs in a PC environment.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself! Unfortunately, the article is $499. Yikes. Save your money, and hire me instead! I consult.

Okay okay, here’s the article if you really want it: People Are Bringing Macs To Work — It’s Time To Repeal Prohibition

And here is Fortune Magazine’s rather amusing take: Hell Freezes Over: Forrester urges IT to support Mac

iMessage is Apple’s answer to Blackberry Messenger. It lets anyone with an iPad, iPhone or iPad Touch running iOS5 send messages to each other without paying carrier fees. Since the few people I text to most all have iPhones, I plan on canceling my text message bundle and saving $10 a month. (but don’t tell AT&T!)

First of all, you have to upgrade to iOS5. Its free, so if you have an iPad, iPhone 3gs, iPhone 4 or iPhone 4s, (hereafter referred to as ‘iDevices”), its a no brainer. I’d be a little worried about putting it on an iPhone 3g, read some reviews online and see if people are running it okay.

So, upgrade your Mac to the latest version of Snow Leopard (10.6.8) or Lion (10.7.2), then download the latest version if iTunes (10.5). Now you can plug in your iphone, and it will tell you there’s an upgrade available. Download and install it. Enjoy your new features, too many to list here, but Google it. Theres lots worth upgrading for. I love it.

Next: You need an iCloud account. It is also free, so even if you dont use any other of the other features (like Find My iPhone, Photo synching, and backup) its worth it just for iMessage. Go to iCloud.com to set up your account form a Mac running 10.7 or an iDevice.

Okay, finally! here’s how you activate iMessage: Click the Settings button in your iDevice. Click on Messages. Next to iMessage, click ON. Enter your account and password, and youre good to go. Now open your Messages app. Click the New Message button and search for someone’s name. if they are on iMessage, they will have a little blue speech bubble next to their name. And the text box where you enter your message will say “iMessage”, and your speech bubbles will be blue. If they’re NOT on iMessage, the input box will say “Text Message” and the speech bubbles will be green. Send them a text and tell them to get with the program!

I guess what I’m saying is, after all I’ve seen and done, I’d much rather work with the built-in tools than learn something new just for the sake of it being new. I really started to ruminate over this yesterday, when i read a review of a new app for creating customer invoices, called… well, I don’t even remember what its called right now, and I can’t search for it because the Mac I’m sitting at only has 10.6.5, and no App Store (see what I mean?). It got a good review, and i was all set to click the button and pay $20 to try it out, but then I thought about it… do i really need a specialized app for creating invoices? Yes, I travel, and yes, I do freelance work, but I only have to make 3-4 invoices a month, and my system works fine: All my invoices are iWork documents. I make a copy of an old one, fill in the new data, save a PDF in a folder, and print a copy. Done. They’re not saved in a fancy searchable atabas,e but they’re in folders by client name, and they’re dated, and thats enough for me. iWork doesn’t look like its going anywhere, and even if it does, it wouldn’t be much trouble at all to start doing the same thing in Excel instead, plus they’re all saved as PDFs so I’ll always be able to go back and look through them later.

I started thinking that maybe I should share how *I* do certain things, with or without special apps, and maybe you’ll find a new trick or workflow of your own in here somewhere. So here we go.

Bookmarks

I tried del.icio.us, but I didn’t like always having to log into a web page or use a plugin, they almost went out of business this year and could again, and to be honest, I hate their friggin name, I can never remember how to type it. But i really want to sync my bookmarks to multiple Macs and always have them. Google Chrome to the rescue! In addition to being a great, fast browser (that only occasionally sucks up all my RAM and needs to be force-quit), Google Chrome can sync bookmarks, passwords and autofill data in a flash, just with your Gmail account. Install Chrome, click Preferences> Personal Stuff, and all your sync settings are right there. As long as I’m on the web, I can pull down my info in seconds.

Email & Contacts

This section became so long, I turned it into its own post. It will be up there, just above this one. If not now, then soon.

Short answer: Gmail does everything I want, its free, its (usually) stable, it works well on my macs and my iPhone, it syncs my contacts, the filters are flexible, and once in awhile I can launch my Mail app on my home Mac to download a copy of everything, juuuust in case.

Calendars

Man, this has been a pain. I’m a very calendar-oriented person, I constantly have to glance at my schedule to remember what I have to do. A calendar that is always available and editable to me is essential. I had a lot of trouble finding a working system, and I will admit that there may be a better solution out there now, Google calendars may have improved since I settled on this system, but what works for me is a combination of Google Calendar and MobileMe.

I have two calendar accounts on my MobileMe account, one for me and one for my wife. MobileMe is nice because it syncs almost instantly between our computers, iPhones, and iPad, and in a pinch I can log into me.com and see and edit them there. And don’t worry, you don’t have to pay $100 for MobileMe, next week they are rebranding it as iCloud, and it will be free, so sign up if you haven’t already.

I also subscribe to a a couple calendars, a google calendar my boss maintains, my travel calendar through Tripit.com, and my Facebook events through facebook. The only downside is that these are read-only, but Theres nothing there I’d have to edit anyway, that’s what my personal calendar is for. Here’s how I subscribed to my Facebook events feed so that it shows up in iCal and on my phone:

1. Log into Facebook and click Events
2. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Export
3. It will give you a link to all your events. Copy this link and subscribe to it in iCal

Files

I used to use MobileMe’s iDisk, and I tried to tell everyone how great it was, but man, DropBox blows it away, I wish I had known before. For $100 a year you get 50GB of space that will automatically sync between multiple Macs and PCs, plus you get online access to your files too. It will even display your Photos folder as a gallery when you log in online. You can set up multiple shared folders for different clients, and give them open access or password access. And here’s a neat feature: If you are on a local network with another of your computers, it will automatically sync over the local network instead of sending the files up to dropbox.com and back down.

On the LAN or on the web, its sooo much faster than iDisk. And 50GB is more than 20GB last time I checked.

The only thing I liked more about iDisk was, if you didn’t want your files to sync to your local hard drive and fill it up, you could still access your files online through the iDisk icon on the desktop. With DropBox, if you dont want the files to sync, you have to access them via the web page. As far as I know. If I’m wrong, please enlighten me!

oh, and if you feel like signing up for DropBox, I wouldn’t mind at all if you used my referral link!  –>  http://db.tt/0GsL6a1A

Note taking

One thing I do want to do it quickly jot down a note and have it on my computer or phone later. I am excited to try out Tasks in iOS 5, but for now I do use a third party app for this, called EverNote. It’s a free service that lets you take notes on their web site, or with the EverNote app for iPhone and Mac, and notes will automatically sync to all your devices. It will also store images, web clippings (There are browser plugins to make this even easier) and voice memos, but I hate the sound of my own voice. I stick to text.

The one complaint I had was that the iPhone app didn’t support rich text, but that was added in the latest update. Yay!

Travel

Heres another service I can’t live without: Tripit.com. I take about 20 trips a year, and Tripit is amazing for keeping track of my hotel reservations, plans and flights. All I have to do is forward my confirmation emails to plans.tripit.com and it knows how to parse the info into an itinerary. It can even monitor my mail account 24/7 and automatically add plans, but that creeps me out a little.

Any time I need to check my flight status, my hotel address, check in, etc, I can log in on my mac or the Tripit app on my iPhone (which caches the data locally in case I’m in a dead zone, a subway or on the plane with no wifi). I can also remember past trips, share with friends & family an see how my miles stack up with my coworkers.

There’s a paid pro membership that will track your frequent flyer points for you and notify you of flight changes, but I havent needed that.

Newsfeeds

Google Reader, hands down. Love it. I can subscribe to news sites, professional blogs, friends’ personal blogs (including WordPress, Blogger and Livejournal all in one place), any RSS feed, and I can group them in folders. Since its part of my Google account, I can access them from anywhere and it keeps track of what Ive read and what I havent. i can view headlines, snippets or full stories, ascending or descending in order. Clean, fast, simple, just what I need.

For reading on my iPhone, I like the GoodReader app much more than Google’s own interface. I think it was only $2 or $3.

The way projects and media are organized is a huge, huge improvement over the old way of doing things, but there are still a few shortcomings, like not being able to manually reconnect clips one by one, and if you need to share projects within a group, it’s still a mess. But it gives me hope that we could see an upgrade that meets or exceeds what Final Cut Server used to do, sooner rather than later.

And XSAN support is a go right out of the box, so that further encourages me that Apple is still behind XSAN.

If you’re part of a department, you’re still going to have to wait a while, but if you’re a solo editor, a freelancer, etc, you really should give it a try, there’s a free trial available now. But remember, this isn’t just an upgrade– everything is brand new, so you should pick up a book at the same time. The Apple Certified book by Diana Weynand will be shipping any day now, in print and Kindle edition.