Beware the App Store.

As people willingly walk into the future, they are being lured by streaming this, virtual that, and the ever vague “cloud.” What they do not see or realize is the vanishing control of things they had taken for granted for so long.

The first crack in this “utopia” was when Amazon had to pull books from its bookstore because the entity selling them through Amazon did not have the rights to do so. Well, that’s all proper you’d say, but they also reached into the pockets of the end users who had bought those books, and took those books out of the buyers pockets.

Follow UP to my previous Jawbone post.

I’ve continued to use my Jawbone UP wristband but its usefulness is going down as I use it. It’s designed to be an activity tracker, and there’s mounting evidence that it’s not doing that very well. The app is a nutrition tracker, and I’m finding that it’s not doing what I’d like. So let me discuss my findings to demonstrate what the problem is.

1000 MBps read & 900 MBps write in a non-retina MacBook Pro.

Considering that all the other components (memory capacity, processor speed, bus speed) can be configured nearly identically, just dropping a single OWC 6G SSD into your a 2012 MacBook Pro 15 can boost its performance on par with, or even a little past) the MacBook Pro with Retina Display.

But wait… the MacBook Pro 15” has two drive bays, each capable of running an OWC 6G SSD at full 6Gb/s speeds.

Two drives…

Same speed…

You know where this is going…

Yes, we decided to go all out and put the two drives in a Striped RAID to see how fast we could get.

With this setup, we averaged over 1000MB/s read speeds and write speeds that nearly hit 900MB/s. That completely blows the MacBook Pro with Retina Display out of the water!

OWC SSDs Make 2012 MBP 15″ a Speed Champ | Other World Computing Blog.

What does it take to compute?

As tablets begin to overtake desktop and laptop computers as the “go to” piece of hardware for getting a job done, the need for a big OS and big apps falls into question. Case in point, you can shoot HD, edit and upload to your favorite web repository from an iPod Touch, Android phone, Windows Phone, etc. Apple’s latest OS- Lion, pulls liberally from the iOS devices, and Windows 8 is rumored to be a lot like their Windows Phone OS. It is with this background that I checked out how big the apps were in my Mac OS Applications folder, and I was pretty surprised by the results.

Apple’s new iMovie Pro. (aka Final Cut Pro X)

Say goodbye to the Pro Apps as you know them. The writing has been on the wall for several years, yet many Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Studio users continue to cling to the hope that Apple will make a major leap with Final Cut Pro and bring it into 64-bit computing, and finally address the numerous issues that have been on wish lists, sometimes for an entire decade.

Well, Apple demoed iMovie Pro at the FCP SuperMeet this past Tuesday April 12th and made absolutely no qualms about visually signifying the end of the Pro apps as we know them. There was no talk of Color. Soundtrack, Motion, Compressor, DVD Studio Pro, Blu-ray authoring, 3D authoring, feature film features, etc. No the focus was solely on Apple iMovie Pro.

How did we get to this sorry state? Well, I think there was a conversation in January that sort of went like this:

OWC eSATA Upgrade Program for Apple iMac 27″ 2010 Models

Well, it’s finally happened. And the expert gurus at Other World Computing are the ones that made it happen, again. Giving Mac users the capabilities and features that our PC brethren have been enjoying for years now- eSATA ports.

Apple’s latest computers have Intel Core i3, i5 and i7 processors. Decent graphics power, and beautiful IPS displays, but seriously lack for fast external disk I/O.

Apple has standardized on the obsoleted FireWire 800, but  the rest of the industry has already forgotten about FireWire. They have moved on to eSATA for speeds in the hundreds of MB per second as opposed to FW800’s mere 60 MBps or so. So a Mac user who wanted to use eSATA drives had to have a computer they to which they could add an eSATA card (Mac Pro or 17″ MacBook Pro). But OWC changes that game today.

Apple v. Adobe. – FCS v. CS5. – The choice is pretty clear.

Adobe has really been pushing the limits when it comes to what the software package can do. From CS3, which was nice, but had a few carryover PC apps from a recent purchase, to CS4 which broke new ground in terms of authoring DVD’s for Flash, video in a PDF, and more.

Now CS5 jumps a whole new direction with 64-bit ONLY computing. This cuts some old computers off, but with a decent system, you can access tons more RAM. Add to this the new Mercury Engine using GPU to handle video processing and you can handle multiple streams of heavily compressed video where one stream used to choke a computer. Specifically I mean H.264 and AVCHD, which seem to becoming defacto standards in tapeless acquisition these days.

In an article in EventDV Magazine, Jan Ozer does a pretty nice head-to head comparison and

Apple lays off 40 from FCP team, before NAB?

Apple laying off 40 people from the Final Cut Pro software team has been noted on Twitter, but not corroborated anywhere else as I can find.

But if the layoffs are actually true, it begs us to wonder what Apple’s long term dedication is to high-end computers, and professional apps— especially considering that the vast majority of profits come from: iPods, iPhones, iApps, iMacs, iBookstore, iTunes music & TV shows, laptops and soon- iPad.

PC Makers bring the Shizzle. Apple yawns.

While the netbook category continues to broaden and now develop new spin-offs, Apple continues to twiddle its thumbs. In an age where Apple is all about consumer electronics more so than professional production solutions (i.e. just one) this type of decision just doesn’t make sense.

However they confirmed their stance during their July 21st 3rd quarter fiscal conference call pretty much laid rumors to rest with some pretty strong language.

Apple’s new Final Cut Studio – DVD Studio Pro gone?

One copious absence from Apple’s latest Final Cut Studio upgrade (touting over 100 new features) is any mention of DVD Studio Pro… or ANY disk authoring program at all.