OperatingSystem Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Top 10 subtle Mountain Lion features (and a few more)

by Mike Schramm (Jul 30th, 2012)

Lifehacker has put together a list of what they call the "top 10 secret features of Mountain Lion." That's not quite right -- these features aren't secret, because it would be pretty silly to release an OS update and not tell anyone about it. But they are subtle, and this is a nice list of ...

Users take to iOS 5.1 surprisingly quickly

by Mike Schramm (Mar 24th, 2012)

Developer David Smith has posted upgrade stats for his users in terms of their adoption to iOS 5.1, and as you can see above, the curve is pretty steep. iOS upgrading has always been sort of an issue for Apple -- in the past, users (I mean outside of the elite readers and staff of TUAW, of ...

Mountain Lion developer preview changes file renaming options

by TUAW Blogger (Feb 28th, 2012)

One of my pet peeves with Mac OS X always appears when I'm in the process of opening a file from an app and want to either make a duplicate of an original or just want to rename the file. With Lion and previous versions of OS X, that meant that I'd have to close the "Open" dialog, open a Finder ...

Chitika: Mac OS X market share jumps in September

by Steven Sande (Sep 27th, 2011)

Chitika Insights grabs online advertising data to monitor and report on Internet trends, one of which is the market share of various computer operating systems. There was a surprise reported for Mac OS X in the latest report -- the market share for Apple's desktop/laptop OS climbed 1.039 to ...

Lion's iOS-like Automatic Termination not ideal for some users

by Mike Schramm (Aug 9th, 2011)

Matt Neuberg over at Tidbits has noticed an interesting behavior in Lion: Occasionally, apps running without an active window on will disappear from the Command-Tab application switcher, and sometimes disappear from Activity Monitor completely. The culprit is a new "feature" in Lion called ...

Study finds Macs account for 11% of corporate computers, Windows XP dominates

by Steven Sande (Jun 23rd, 2011)

After 27 years of existence, the Mac may finally be getting some respect in corporations. According to a study by research firm Forrester, Macs have jumped from 9.1% of all computers in enterprises in April, 2010 to 11% in March of 2011. The study looked at 400,000 computers from 2,500 ...

TUAW redux: The future of iPhone OS and Mac OS

by Erica Sadun (Feb 26th, 2010)

One of the big topics of discussion yesterday in our TUAW back channel was this post from the New York Times Bits blog. In "Why can't PCs work more like iPhones," Bilton pointed out that the iPhone has given Apple a chance to build a new OS from the ground up. This is a familiar viewpoint to us ...

Parallels gets down to bare metal with new server software

by Brett Terpstra (Feb 25th, 2010)

Parallels has announced a new version of Parallels Server for Mac called the Mac Bare Metal Edition. It's optimized to provide better performance for virtual machines running on an Xserve, and allows multiple, isolated virtual machines to run simultaneously on the same server. Using "hypervisor" ...

Could Apple be moving to a spectrum of operating systems?

by Steven Sande (Dec 27th, 2009)

I was eating a late post-Christmas breakfast this morning and perusing my email when I came upon a note from my friend and fellow Apple Consultants Network member Michael Kimble. Mike's been involved with Apple products since before the Mac arrived, so he has seen product trends come and go for ...

Snow Leopard: Another upgrader's experience

by David Winograd (Aug 29th, 2009)

I got to the Walt Whitman Mall on Long Island yesterday and they were doing land-office business, according to the blue (not orange) shirt I was speaking with. He told me that he lost count, but they must have moved over 150 copies of Snow Leopard per hour. Two minutes later (they really do have ...

Snow Leopard: The price is right!

by Kevin Harter (Aug 27th, 2009)

After years of being thrown table scraps in the way of a few bucks off the price of Windows for the "upgrade" versions, I happily paid the $49 for my Family Pack of Snow Leopard earlier this week. Sure, there are a few people that say things like "Why should I have to pay Apple to fix the ...

Apple issues patch to speed up Airport after troublesome 10.5.8 update

by Kevin Harter (Aug 12th, 2009)

Apple has just released a patch to the AirPort client to remedy the wireless performance problems stemming from the recent Mac OS X update to 10.5.8. Some users had been forced to downgrade or replace the wireless-specific kernel extensions to clear up the issues. The update, weighing in at a ...

Lessons from Marcia Brady: why Eric Schmidt should resign from Apple's board

by Sang Tang (Jul 11th, 2009)

One of my favorite episodes of The Brady Bunch is "Quarterback Sneak." In it, Marcia starts dating Jerry Rogers, quarterback of the Fairview High School football team. Problem is, Fairview happens to be the rival of Marcia & Greg's Westdale High School, and the two teams are scheduled to play in ...

Google Chrome OS under development

by Kevin Harter (Jul 8th, 2009)

Google just announced they are indeed developing the long-rumored Chrome OS. Expected to be web-focused with a minimal user interface, the lightweight open source operating system will appear initially on netbooks running either x86 or ARM processors. Expansion to the desktop and full-powered ...

Snow Leopard: Party like it's 1998

by David Winograd (Jun 15th, 2009)

On October 17, 1998 Apple released Mac OS 8.5, the first operating system that ran solely on Macintoshes with PowerPC processors. As far as system software upgrades go, this was the end of the line for any Mac built before the Power Macintosh 6100, introduced in March 1994. Earlier Macs ran on some ...