Macbook pro looks quite nice but fairly juicy if you want that retina display. It's still only coming with a 1gig 650m though and has a lot more pixels to push so wouldn't it be a little pointless unless you were an arty type? The normal display version looks a better bet for the normal punter out there. 

Mountain Lion for £20 seems like a good deal but no huge changes I can really find. Some light gesture changes and slightly more social integration. Fair enough. 

iOS 6 seems a bit better if you haven't bought a satnav app for your phone yet but I have so not a great deal of changes that seem to be much use to me rely. They better make the new iPhone (when is that getting announced??) look pretty if they want my money as fluffing up Siri (probably just for the US again…) ain't making me crack the wallet. 

Hmm..

Holy moly that new MacBook Pro is pretty. I think I'll be sticking with mine, though, given the price and the lack of an optical drive. I don't use mine often, but I use it with enough frequency that I'd notice if it was gone.

£20 for Mountain Lion, eh? Deal. Assuming it's not as buggy as Lion. I'm still running Snow Leopard* as the number of reviews I've read of people upgrading to Lion and it buggering their systems is too high for my liking.


*I got up at the ass-crack of dawn and took the train to Manchester to buy this on disc. Ah, memories.

Mountain Lion looks awesome; I love the fact that iMessage is integrated.  Ages ago when my house had poor reception I was looking for a way to send SMSs from my computer, and now it's beautifully integrated.

Cellular FaceTime if it happens in this country is a big one; also beefing up Siri which despite still being a bit gimmicky is actually great for setting reminders, much easier than doing it manually.

Mountain Lion does seem to be worth the punt at just 20 notes. New Safari, Dictation to play with and closer integration of iClouded notes and messages is nice. Quite a bit of social inputs as well, notifications and game centre. 
Lion coincided with a lot of problems with my Macbook Pro that an eventual Applecare installed logic board or somesuch has managed to fix. I've never managed to work out if Lion's new system demands were what pushed it over the edge but that was what was inferred to me by the phone dudes. If you've a mid 2010 Macbook Pro then it could be trouble.

JMW wrote:

Cellular FaceTime if it happens in this country is a big one; also beefing up Siri which despite still being a bit gimmicky is actually great for setting reminders, much easier than doing it manually.

just waiting for lte no?

I use Lion on my 2008 Macbook unibody. It works great, once you get used to it, and I find going back to Snow Leopard machines to be difficult. Mountain Lion may be incremental but it's got enough going on for me to get it.

iOS6 has some nice features for me; the do not disturb is cool, they've finally introduced "I'm busy fuck off" SMSs, quite like VIP inbox. On the other hand, ripping out Gmaps is a nightmare. Apple maps doesn't have public transport, directions for walking or cycling, street view which I find really useful and fun, it really can fuck right off until it's ready (will it ever have a street view equivalent?).

Separate note: I thought iOS6 specifically does introduce an app-restriction feature, allowing for things like single-use set-up, certain buttons / commands not being possible without a code, only allowing access to certain apps on springboard without a code, etc? (that was in answer to a statement on the previous page)

Anyone got an Airport Express?  I'd quite like to stream music to a little iPod dock thing in our kitchen, but it only has a line-in port, no optical or RCA.

I can't think of a reason why it wouldn't work, but I thought I best check.  The diagrams in the manual only show RCA cables and optical.

Anyone know more about the removal of "Save As..." from OS X? Does this only effect Apple software, or is it across the board?

Ah, gotcha, that's fair enough, then.

Apparently they've added it back to Mountain Lion, but you have to hold Ctrl Alt Shift Command S and do the hokey pokey.

I certainly don't have the cash to splash on a new Macbook or PC but the initial response on the retina is… promising-ish?
I'd wait for a while yet to see how a few things pan out though. 

1gig pokey 650M GPU for 4.887746 quadrillion pixels - wouldn't be using full res much then. 
Soldered RAM - no user upgrade
Proprietary SSD - no upgrade easily available yet, would have to probably get a full on NAS setup (Thunderbolt?) that works with Win7/8 & ML. Hmmm.
Mahoosive battery - more heat dissipation issues, scorched balls?
Having to wait for devs to pump out new content for apps to take advantage of the retina. 
Win7/8 bootcamp compatibility issues with display presentation. (tiny text perhaps?)

Where was the iPhone 5 or is there another event due for that on it's own at some point? 
I agree that throwing out Google maps entirely could be a bit irritating if you have to hop over to the browser to get street view. If the nav works though I could live with it but I'd imagine most of the amazing features (3D buildings etc..) will work great for Elm in the Yankland but for us in the real world London village will be a barren flat/poorly updated runty cousin. What mapping company did they buy again back in the day? Might go hunt down what mapping service they are going to be using for all this iOS6 shite.

There isn't one "mapping" provider, it's a mashup of different techs

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/10/apple-now-has-third-piece-of-mapping-puzzle-but-whats-the-full-picture/

Throw TomTom for guidance on to that pile as well.

Guys are those new Sony smartphones (Xperia) any cop, they look nice.

People I've known with Sony Android phones have all been unhappy with them.  People I've known with Samsung ones haven't.

Funkstain wrote:

Apple maps doesn't have public transport, directions for walking or cycling, street view which I find really useful and fun, it really can fuck right off until it's ready (will it ever have a street view equivalent?).

No walking directions?  That can fuck right off, then.  Pity you won't be able to disable it in the restrictions settings.

Elmlea wrote:

Mountain Lion looks awesome; I love the fact that iMessage is integrated.  Ages ago when my house had poor reception I was looking for a way to send SMSs from my computer, and now it's beautifully integrated.

Just curious: does Apple provide an SMS gateway or do they require you to? Are there fees, if the former?

It's all internet-based instant messaging; they're not sent as SMSs.

Aww, poo; I thought it was actually going to be useful for a second there.

isanbard wrote:

Win7/8 bootcamp compatibility issues with display presentation. (tiny text perhaps?)

Should be fine; due to the nature of Windows, it has all sorts of options for changing text etc. to suit your screen size.

g.man wrote:

Haven't seen any of this as im on holiday with limited internets, but am I to understand Apple are going to bin Google Maps from iOS6? Unless they either replace it with something that's as good as, or Google makes it available on the iStore I'm going to be very unhappy about that. harrumph g.man

The Google Maps mobile web interface is really, really nice.  Just add a shortcut for that to your home screen and hide the Apple Maps away, that's what I'll be doing.


Completely unrelated: what happened to notifications in this place?

So...

Those Apple TV thingies, eh?...
What's the bloody point?