Coming Soon: OS X, Ocelot? Apple Running Out Of Cats

macgui.com

Apple is running out of big cats.

Ten years ago, Apple introduced the first major release of its OS X operating system, Cheetah. Since then, all seven new versions of the operating system have been named after big cats.

The cats give the Cupertino,Calif-based company’s software an aura of power, elegance, and beauty. “I tell my students one of the values of wildlife is symbolism,” says Reginald Barrett, a professor of wildlife biology at UC Berkeley. “They use them to sell cars, computers, and God knows what.”

The problem: there are only so many kinds of cats. In March 2001, Apple released Cheetah. In September of 2001, Puma arrived. Jaguar stalked into the market in August 2002. Panther slunk along in October 2003.

Tiger bounded onto the Mac in April 2005. It was the first version of OS X to run on Intel’s processors. Leopard arrived in October 2007. Snow Leopard padded onto the scene in August 2009. That version dropped support for Apple’s older PowerPC processors.

Finally Lion — which incorporates a few tricks learned from Apple’s iPad — was released in July. Apple hasn’t said anything, publicly, about the next version of its OS X operating system.


First they’ll have to come up with a name. That could be hard. All of the animals Applehas used come from Felidae family in the Carnivora order of mammals. Tiger, Lion, Jaguar, and Leopard all come from the subfamily known as Pantherinae. Cheetah comes from the other still-living subfamiily, felinae.

There are a lot of other cats left. None of them are particularly intimidating though. The Eurasian Lynx, can weigh as much as 66 pounds. Even less fearsome: the Eurasian Lynx’s North American cousin, the bobcat; the ocelot — the biggest of the dinky Leopardus genus; and felix catus, the domestic cat.

Apple hasn’t tapped a third group of Felidae, now extinct, known as the Machairodontinae. That subfamily includes smilodon, also known as the ‘saber-toothed cat.’ “That name is so long,” Barrett says. “It seems like they’d want to go with something like Cougar before they went with Smilodon or saber-toothed cat.”              More

Walmart Selling iPhone 4S for $188

PCMag.Com - Want the cheapest Apple iPhone 4S in town? Head to your nearest Walmart.

The “always low prices” retailer has begun selling the 16GB version of the iPhone 4S on Verizon for $188, or $11 less than units offered through Verizon’s own retail stores or the Apple Store. The iPhone 4S is only available in select brick and mortar Walmart stores.

Last Friday, the iPhone 4S hit Apple Stores and three U.S. carriers: AT&T, Verizon, and for the first time, Sprint. The devices start at $199.99 for a 16GB model with a two-year contract, to $299.99 for a 32GB model, and $399.99 for a 64GB model. The iPhone 4S is also available from Best Buy, and in-store at select Radio Shacks.              More

Gizmodo Explains: What’s So Smart About the iPhone 4S’s Antenna?

With the iPhone 4S, Apple says it will deliver an iPhone that works anywhere in the world, and with fantastic reception.

How did they do it? One word: antennas.

Apple’s marketing guru Phil Schiller said the iPhone 4S “intelligently switches between two antennas to receive and send.” Brilliant! But vague. How exactly does a smart antenna act?

When you have a small, thin device that needs to receive and send multiple types of signals without interfering with one another, you need to get creative. As we learned from the iPhone 4 “antennagate,” even the best engineers and designers can’t always come up with perfect antenna scheme.

But antenna gurus have plenty of tricks up their sleeves, it’s just a matter of finding the best recipe—and sometimes inventing a spanking new technology.

“What [Apple] seemed to allude to was a switching or selective processing technique: taking the better signal between two antennas and using it,” said Aaron Vronko, co-founder of Rapid Repair, in Portage, Michigan.

That’s one step in the right direction, but there are many other antenna hurdles to clear. On a cell phone, antennas have to be placed close together simply because cell phones are little. And antennas close together tend to interfere with each other. One way phone makers can address that is by placing antennas at opposite ends of the phone, a technique called spatial diversity.
In the AT&T version of the iPhone 4, however, both cell antennas were at the bottom. So if you happened to grab the phone too close to both of them simultaneously, you would experience signal attenuation. Antennagate!

But Verizon requires that the antennas on their phones be separated at the top and bottom of the device. That way, if you’re holding the phone at the bottom, you likely have a free antenna at the top.

Still, since a cell phone is so small, simply separating the antennas won’t prevent all interference. You need a space between them of at least one full wavelength. At the lowest wavelength, about 900 MHz, that would be 13 inches. Not even Gordon Gekko’s phone was quite that big (his DynaTAC was 9.8 inches). So engineers use other “antenna diversity” approaches, like polarity—placing the antennas at varying angles, or pattern diversity—using antennas with different radiation patterns.          More