The Mac Pro is a strange outlier among Apple's products. It's insanely powerful, but it's priced out of the reach of most mortals. It's by far Apple's most "traditional" computer; the Mac Pro is a tower you can crack open and customize quite easily, far different from its sealed-up cousins the iMac, Mac mini, and the MacBook line. The Mac Pro's design is positively ancient by Apple's standards, with only minor cosmetic alterations since its predecessor, the Power Mac G5, debuted in 2003. It's also a neglected product, last updated in July of 2010, and currently the only Mac Apple sells which has no Thunderbolt connectivity.

All of this led us to ask awhile back whether the Mac Pro has much of a future left. According to AppleInsider, people at Apple itself are asking that very same question. Citing "people familiar with the matter," AppleInsider says that back in May of 2011 management was "in limbo" on whether or not to discontinue the Mac Pro in the face of faltering sales.

Predicting what Apple will do with regards to its products is a dangerous game. We learned that the hard way when a source we trusted told us the iPod classic and iPod shuffle were getting the axe this year. Apple apparently decided both products were still profitable enough to keep around, and that's really the bottom line for the future of any product in Apple's pipeline: if it still makes money, Apple will keep making a product until it has something better to replace it. When a product doesn't make Apple money, it's unsentimental about dropping the guillotine.

There are arguments both for and against discontinuing the Mac Pro, and I've outlined a few of them below. Ultimately Apple's going to do what's in its own best interests, so bear that in mind as we wade through a puddle of speculation sauce.

Why Apple might keep the Mac Pro around

Power: Although the iMac is an extremely powerful machine in its own right, the Mac Pro's performance still kicks the iMac's butt all the way up and down the block. Benchmark performance in Geekbench shows the 12-core 2.93 GHz Mac Pro coming in with an astounding score of 21,789. That's nearly twice the 11,581 score earned by the most powerful iMac, a quad-core 3.4 GHz model.

Benchmarks only tell part of the story, however. A Mac Pro that's been maxed-out on Apple's online store with as much RAM and hard disk capacity as you can shove into it is a Godzilla of a machine:

• Two 2.93 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon processors (for a total of 12 cores)
• 8 TB of internal storage
• 64 GB of RAM
• Two ATI Radeon HD 5770 with 1 GB of video RAM -- each.

The best you can do with an iMac via Apple's configuration options?

• 3.4GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7
• 2 TB HDD + 256 GB SSD
• 16 GB RAM
• AMD Radeon HD 6970M with 2 GB of video RAM

The top-end iMac is an incredibly powerful machine by consumer and even professional standards, but a fully-upgraded Mac Pro is practically ostentatious in the amount of raw processing power it can wield. Professional consumers in areas like 3D rendering, video editing, and other extremely processor-intensive applications surely appreciate the much greater power the Mac Pro can afford them.

Customization:

The Mac Pro stomps the iMac in the customization department. Folding down the Mac Pro's side door gives you easy and almost instant access to its innards, and virtually every component is simple to swap out. Hard drives in particular are extraordinarily easy to swap in the Mac Pro.

Contrast that with the iMac, where the RAM is essentially the only user-serviceable component. Swapping out the hard drive on an iMac is a harrowing procedure that requires removing the entire front display -- not something you're going to want to do more than once, if ever. You could argue that the iMac's Thunderbolt capability vastly expands its customization options (and I will, later on), but it still doesn't quite measure up to the amount of customization available to a Mac Pro.

Server applications:

Since the discontinuation of the Xserve, the Mac Pro is Apple's only high-end server option. The Mac mini server simply doesn't measure up to the performance you can get out of a Mac Pro server -- it's not even close. The Mac mini server is a decent choice for low- to medium-demand applications, but if you need powerful servers (and want to stick with OS X Server), the Mac Pro is the only game in town.

Bottom line:

While it hasn't been updated in over a year, the Mac Pro is still by far Apple's most powerful and most customizable Mac. Though the iMac's performance and much lower price are driving the Mac Pro out of the consumer market and increasingly pigeonholing it into the "pro" niche, the fact remains that for some applications and some customers the Mac Pro is still the best choice.

Why Apple might discontinue the Mac Pro

The niche:

Outside of a very few specific applications, a vast number of customers who might have bought a Mac Pro now opt for an iMac instead. Many high-end media shops have decided the iMac affords them enough power for their needs and at a much more comfortable price than the Mac Pro. We've been told that even Apple's own developers have largely moved to the iMac.

When it was first introduced, and for much of the last decade, the iMac was unquestionably a consumer-grade product. But recent advances have put it within throwing distance of the Mac Pro's performance, and the most powerful iMacs afford users enough processing power that for many applications a Mac Pro is simply no longer necessary. In years past the iMac may not have been "enough machine" for professional photographers or other media types, but that's no longer the case in all but an increasingly smaller set of circumstances.

With the rising power of the iMac and Apple's portables, the list of applications where the Mac Pro is the optimal Mac for the job is getting shorter and shorter every year. It's become a niche product compared to Apple's other Macs, and Apple isn't known for keeping niche products around forever. The ones Apple does keep around wind up being neglected, sometimes for years. Witness the Xserve, a product even more niche than the Mac Pro, now discontinued. The iPod classic is a niche product too, without even a minor update in more than two years and blogosphere calls of "dead iPod walking" every September.

Over the past decade Apple has increasingly focused on products with wider appeal while slowly paring away the "pro" market. Apple offers far fewer "pro" software applications now than it did in the past, and even the ones it's kept around have been tweaked to give them broader appeal to the "prosumer" market -- Final Cut Pro X is a good example of this, and it's also a potential harbinger of Apple's true disposition toward the "pro" market.

When I hear that even internally at Apple developers are moving to iMacs, I can't help but hear an ominously tolling bell for the Mac Pro.

Thunderbolt:

Every Mac now offers Thunderbolt connectivity, even the MacBook Air -- every Mac except the Mac Pro, that is. Thunderbolt offers extraordinary I/O capabilities and vastly expands the customization options for every Mac that supports it. An iMac may not offer much internal storage compared to what a Mac Pro can support, but once you plug in a RAID array via Thunderbolt that gap closes very quickly.

The power of Thunderbolt doesn't stop at external storage; it can drive multiple external displays, provide fast connections to peripherals, and even connect to rigs that accept PCI cards, basically replicating many of the capabilities of the Mac Pro.

Thunderbolt doesn't completely close the gap between an iMac and a Mac Pro, but it makes that gap less relevant for many consumers and drives the Mac Pro even farther into its niche status.

The money:

More than anything else, this is what's going to determine the Mac Pro's future. All the arguments for keeping the Mac Pro on the market simply melt away if Apple isn't making any money on it.

The numbers are not especially encouraging. In Q4 2010, Apple sold 1.24 million desktop Macs for a total of US$1.68 billion in revenue. A year later, sales amounted to 1.28 million desktop Macs for $1.69 billion in revenue. The year-over-year change amounted to a scant 3 percent rise in unit sales and a 1 percent increase in revenue. Apple doesn't break these sales down by model, but with the Mac Pro competing for sales with both the iMac and Mac mini, it's unlikely that it amounts to a large proportion of Apple's overall desktop sales.

In fact, with the Mac Pro an increasingly niche product and effectively stagnating (and unlikely to receive any upgrades until early 2012), it's very likely that Mac Pro sales have steeply declined year-over-year, with increased sales of 2011-model iMacs and Mac minis just barely pushing the desktop lineup back into profitability.

If the Mac Pro is indeed losing money for Apple, you could make a strong argument that some of the blame falls on Apple itself. Since March of 2009, the Mac Pro has received only two major updates. During the same period, the iMac and Mac mini have both been updated four times. Some of the Mac Pro's stagnation may be due to limited availability of pro-class processors -- delays in Intel's production of next-gen Sandy Bridge processors are reportedly one root cause behind the Mac Pro's lack of updates.

No matter where the blame falls, it's getting harder to recommend a Mac Pro to anyone at this point, even to professional customers who need the extra power the machine affords.

Bottom line:

Apple's focus has clearly shifted away from the professional market that was once its bread and butter. Power Macs once made up the majority of Apple's unit sales and profits, but that hasn't been true for years. Take a look at the current numbers:

• Unit sales of portable Macs outnumber desktop Mac sales by nearly three to one.
• iTunes Store and iPod accessory revenues almost equal revenues from desktop sales.
• iPhone unit sales exceed desktop Mac sales by over 13 to one.
• iPad unit sales exceed desktop Mac sales by nearly nine to one.
• Revenues from desktop Mac sales account for only six percent of Apple's overall revenues.

Keep in mind that those comparisons are for all Mac desktops, which includes the Mac mini, iMac, and the Mac Pro. If we want to be extremely generous and say the Mac Pro accounts for a full third of desktop sales, it still means Mac portables outsell it nine to one, iPhones by 39 to one, and iPads by 27 to one, with revenues from sales of the most expensive Mac making up perhaps three percent of Apple's overall revenues (I gave the Mac Pro an extra percentage point since it's that much more expensive than the iMac).

If Mac Pros account for much less than a third of desktop sales (and I don't think anyone could convincingly argue otherwise), the Mac Pro's future gets even grimmer. All of the arguments for the iMac's unsuitability for high-end applications blow away like leaves in the wind if Apple isn't making money selling the Mac Pro.

Prognosis:

There are certainly arguments for keeping the Mac Pro around -- despite over a year of neglect, it remains Apple's most powerful Mac, and for certain applications Apple simply offers no substitute for the power it affords. At the same time, the arguments for keeping the Mac Pro around sound ominously similar to the arguments that sprang up around this time last year when news of the Xserve's impending demise became public.

Obviously some consumers actually do need what the Mac Pro offers, but are there enough of them to justify keeping it on the market? Only Apple knows for sure, but the numbers aren't looking good. Apple has already shown that it won't hesitate to exit from market segments that don't drive profitability, and if it turns out the Mac Pro isn't contributing to Apple's balance sheet, expect the axe to fall swiftly.

On the Mac Pro's future originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 31 Oct 2011 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Dear Aunt TUAW,

Can Aunty help find a solution ?

Your loving nephew,

Jack, Cheltenham, UK

Dear Jack,

Use your up and down arrows to navigate through the Spotlight results list. (Do not click on items, that will open them). When the highlight is over the item you want, press Command-Enter.

Hugs,

Auntie T.

p.s. Thanks Uncle Brett

Dear Aunt TUAW: Help me find Spotlight items in the Finder originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 30 Oct 2011 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

iPhone experts Steven Troughton Smith and chpwn seem to have just gotten the iPhone 4S-only Siri working on jailbroken iPhone 4 and current-gen iPod touch units this evening. This bypasses earlier authentication issues. They tweeted their success and posted a screen shot showing Siri working via Wi-Fi (the Airplane Mode icon just means that 3G is turned off, but it is possible to turn Wi-Fi back on even in AM; that's what they did.)

Their success comes just weeks after the iPhone 4S debuted. Since Apple's back-end systems are checking for iPhone 4S devices before processing Siri queries, they managed to work around this limitation. The hack is based on moving compiled code components from a 4S to the older units.

More information as this develops.

Siri hacked to work on jailbroken iPhone 4 and iPod touch originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 29 Oct 2011 22:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Attention East-coasters and anyone who develops iOS apps! You're probably already aware of the wonderful Voices That Matter: iOS Developers Conference that is held in Boston, Massachusetts. The upcoming conference is scheduled for November 12-13, 2011, and you can get an exclusive discount from TUAW.

Just enter TUAW444 as the priority code when you sign up for the conference, and you'll get $150 off of the normal $745 cost of the registration. The conference is going to be chock-full of some amazing speakers. Here's what conference manager Barbara Gavin has to say about this year's event:

Learn all about the new functionality and tools in iOS 5 at the Voices That Matter: iOS Developers Conference. Don't miss sessions like Designing a Creative Process for iOS Development from Jason Festa of Disney Mobile or Mike Ash's Defensive Programming in Cocoa. You can hang out with the folks you read and follow, like Erica Sadun, Aaron Hillegass, Erik Buck, Chris Adamson, and Daniel Jalkut. Join us in Boston, November 12-13, 2011 and learn how you can leverage Apple's commitment to the iOS platform.

Conference registration includes admission to all education and networking sessions, continental breakfast, lunch and breaks, a conference guide, and access to speakers' slides. The price of the conference is normally $745, but Pearson Education (Erica's publisher) has been good enough to offer a $150 discount to TUAW readers. To take advantage of the discount, go to the conference registration page and use the code TUAW444.

You'll also be able to meet up with TUAW's Victor Agreda and Dave Caolo at the event in addition to my writing buddy (and conference Technical Chair) Erica "Aunt TUAW" Sadun. It's a great conference and this is a nice discount to take advantage of.

Voices That Matter: iOS Dev Conference offers exclusive TUAW discount code originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 28 Oct 2011 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

When Cerulean Studio made an alpha version of its Trillian software available for the Mac in early 2010, I wasn't very impressed. There were no buddy icons, the product didn't resemble the images released for it, there was no group chat support, a good many of the options didn't work, therer were no chat logs and more. At the time, I recommended sticking with Adium or Pidgin.

I'm very pleased to say that nearly two years later, Trillian has developed into a solid text-based instant messaging client for the Mac.

Trillian is available as a free download in the Mac App Store now, and it has gone through a vast number of improvements. While there's still not as many features as Adium, it's a solid client. Like Adium, it has integrated Facebook and Twitter, and I actually like these features better on Trillian than Adium.

It also syncs with the free Trillian for iPhone, which means you can start a conversation on your Mac and pick up where you left off on the iPhone if you need to run somewhere. The sync is the standout feature for Trillian, and for those of us who need to maintain IM sync on the go, that might be the feature that gets you to use this.

You still have to register for a Trillian account if you don't have one, but since you gain syncing ability for chats and settings, it's not as nitpicky of an issue as it was for me last year.

Some of the cons I found last year still exist. There is still no group chat ability, which prevents Trillian from adding IRC. It's light on customization, for that you'll need Adium. There's no audio/video/Skype integration, but that's something I've lived with regardless because I use Adium. Not all the buddy icons come through OK, the most success seems to be the ones associated with AIM and Yahoo accounts. You can log chats now, which that alone makes it worth considering for me as a Mac client. I like the way the chat logs are handled. Right click on each user, and you can access the history, including a calendar for easy access to certain dates.

Trillian Pro is available for $12 a year, which allows chat logs to be stored in the cloud and no ads, though there are currently no ads in the Mac version anyhow.

If you need a solid text-based IM client with updates handled through the Mac App Store and syncing, Trillian is a good way to go. If you want more features and customization, stick with Adium. If you want audio, video or Skype, you'll be stuck juggling multiple clients regardless.

Daily Mac App: Trillian originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 27 Oct 2011 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Tech.pinions' Tim Bajarin has opined on why they feel Google and Microsoft hate Siri, citing some excellent sources. As the article states, Google's Andy Rubin told the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg, "You shouldn't be communicating with the phone; you should be communicating with somebody on the other side of the phone." Likewise, Bajarin quotes Microsoft's Andy Lees saying it "isn't super useful."

The reasons he gives behind Microsoft and Google's dismissal comes down to two no-brainer answers: Jealously and knowing that Siri will develop into such a powerhouse that it will be a threat to business. And, you know what? He's right.

Bajarin points out that Siri is a front to some major databases including Yelp and Wolfram Alpha. And, just wait until Apple allows developers at Siri's API. The possibilities will be endless. Even now, like Remember the Milk has done, developers are figuring out ways to make Siri work for them. Siri's future paves the way for similar technology to be introduced across all Apple products. Tech.pinions sees Siri as "the gatekeeper to natural language searching" and urges Apple to acquire as many databases as it can to promote this. I think Apple should open the API to developers.

I also think it's more than gatekeeping.

I had the absolute thrilling experience Tuesday to watch someone be introduced to an Apple product for the first time. I was in a Verizon store starting the process of switching carriers, and the other woman in there was picking up her new iPhone 4S.

It was amazing to see her use Siri for the first time, as the salesman asked for hamburger joints, and Siri responded with several locations. He had her instruct Siri to call her spouse, which it did. She talked for a bit, then started playing with the other features. She called one of her children using FaceTime. I finished my business and left before she did, but watching her morph from skeptic to fan was brilliant. Apple's most likely gained another lifetime customer.

And a big chunk of it is that Siri makes an already easy-to-use device even easier. Right out of the package, you can press and hold a button and have Siri do so much for you. My grandmother, who had crippling arthritis by the end of her life, could have used Siri to enrich her life.

To circle back to Rubin's quote, you're not just communicating with your phone. You're using it as a bridge to be able to connect with people on the other side of the phone easier. Whoever possesses the technology and ability to do this will be the one to dominate the industry in the future, and right now, the ball is in Apple's court.

Why Google and Microsoft need to fear Siri originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 26 Oct 2011 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

I've just finished a marathon session of reading all the way through Steve Jobs on my iPad -- and I'm sure Jobs would have appreciated the odd harmony of people reading his life story on a device he helped create.

After reading his biography, I'm no longer convinced that Steve Jobs would have liked me if we'd ever met in person. At least not at first. More likely, he'd have torn me a new one in our first meeting and told me that I sucked and everything I did was worthless. Then, in our second meeting, he'd have parroted my ideas back at me as though they were his own. It was apparently one of his signature moves, and it probably would have made me want to throw a chair at him.

But even if I had been provoked that far, he most likely would have just bellowed that I should have thrown a better chair.

Reading biographies is perhaps a different experience for me than it is for most people, since I spent most of my Master's thesis examining the concept of truth in biographical works. Most of the memoirs, autobiographies, and biographies I've read have fallen into one of two categories. Either the text was something designed to lionize its subject and make him or her seem larger than life, or else the writer had taken pains to focus on only the parts of the subject's life that fit into a clean narrative arc while leaving everything else on the cutting room floor, an approach that leads to easy and almost cinematic storytelling but leaves out much of the facts.

Neither approach to biographical writing strikes me as particularly true; in fact, almost every biography I've read seems to contain about as much actual truth as an episode of Star Trek. The tendency to over-praise or over-dramatize is both pernicious and pervasive throughout the various forms of biographical texts.

Walter Isaacson's 656-page profile of Steve Jobs falls in neither category. It is quite possibly the truest biography I've ever read. In the process of telling the unvarnished truth about Steve Jobs, it dispels much of the myth and magic surrounding the man and his legacy. It does not depict Steve Jobs as the information age's equivalent of Moses descending from Mount Sinai with an iPad in each hand. It would have been easy for some misinformed hack to portray Jobs that way in a quick cash-in "unauthorized" biography soon after Jobs's death, but it also would have been closer to fiction than biography.

What Isaacson gives us instead is a portrait of a man with keen insight, brilliant powers of observation, and a stubborn determination to "put a dent in the universe." However, the biography also depicts a man with deep flaws, some of which arguably contributed to his early death. It humanizes a man who's spent much of the past decade as a living legend in multiple arenas, and it gives valuable insight into the person Steve Jobs was, not just the icon he became.

After reading his biography, I get the sense that no matter how brilliant Steve Jobs was or how many fundamental shifts in our landscape he spearheaded, in the end, he was as human as the rest of us. It's a testament to Isaacson's skill as a biographer that readers can at last obtain the picture of Steve Jobs as a human being rather than a legend.

Jobs's reputation as a control freak was legendary, yet he relinquished all control over the contents of his biography. It's a surprising move from a man who insisted on so much control over all of his life's projects -- the Mac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad were all born and thrived partially because Jobs refused to cede control over them. Jobs explained his motivations to Isaacson for his atypically hands-off approach to the biography. Partially it was because he wanted his children to know him better, flaws and all. It was also because he wanted to make sure that only someone possessed of all the facts about his life would write his story. "When I got sick, I realized other people would write about me if I died, and they wouldn't know anything. They'd get it all wrong. So I wanted to make sure someone heard what I had to say."

Jobs's biography manages to allow him to get the last word in many debates. Many of the people who have toasted both him and his achievements will find themselves bearing the brunt of his last barbs against them. Some, like Jobs threatening to go "thermonuclear" on Android, have already been outed. Others are a bit more deeply buried within the text, but once found they're both candid and a bit stunning.

"IBM was essentially Microsoft at its worst," Jobs said, reminiscing about the early days of the personal computer revolution. "They were not a force for innovation; they were a force for evil. They were like AT&T or Microsoft or Google is." My jaw dropped at this quote, but another later on in the book was more alarming. Immediately after heaping praise on his successor, Tim Cook, Steve said, "Tim's not a product person, per se." Considering that at many other points in the book Jobs heaped scorn on people like Bill Gates or John Sculley whom he also considered more concerned with profits than product quality, his unfiltered opinion of Cook's product sensibilities definitely raised an eyebrow.

Much of the biography will be familiar to hardcore Apple enthusiasts. Chapters on the birth of the Macintosh will be familiar to anyone who's read Andy Hertzfeld's recollections at folklore.org, and if you're a regular TUAW reader there won't be too much in the chapters about the iPod, iPhone, or iPad that you haven't already read. Older Apple fans will likely find the earliest chapters about the founding days of Apple not much more than a refresher course. But I suspect that few people will be able to read the entire book and not discover some surprising fact about Steve Jobs that they didn't already know.

If you come into Steve Jobs already hating him, the biography gives you plenty of reasons to hold onto that opinion. If instead you view Jobs as a personal hero, there are plenty of episodes within his life story that might make you reconsider that opinion. Isaacson doesn't shy away from describing Steve Jobs's darker moments or personality deficiencies, some of which border on the downright despicable. To put it lightly, Steve Jobs was not a "people person."

One of his ex-girlfriends read about Narcissistic Personality Disorder in the DSM and said, "It fits so well and explained so much of what we had struggled with, that I realized expecting him to be nicer or less self-centered was like expecting a blind man to see." Even his closest friends, like Apple design guru Jonathan Ive, noted that Jobs often exhibited a vicious and unnecessary lack of empathy for those around him. The fact that so many people all over the world have been lauding him since his death, both friends and dogged competitors, speaks to the complex and paradoxical nature of Steve Jobs, a man whose greatest goal was to establish empathy between people and technology but who often displayed precious little empathy of his own.

Isaacson's biography of Jobs isn't a character assassination by any means (though I do wonder why the first third of the book dwells so often on Jobs's body odor during the 1970s). That said, I still feel terrifically sorry for any employees who find themselves at the mercy of a supervisor who uses Steve Jobs as a managerial handbook, just like the legions of young would-be entrepreneurs trying to emulate the callous Mark Zuckerberg they saw in The Social Network.

If anyone comes away from reading Steve Jobs thinking that being a leader makes it okay to be an asshole, they'll have missed about 99 percent of the point. Anyone can cut an employee to shreds or throw epic temper tantrums at the slightest provocation, but replicating Jobs's intuition, perfectionism, dedication, and vision is arguably something that only one person in seven billion can manage to pull off.

Steve Jobs is at its core the study of the man himself, but along the way it's also a fascinating history of the genesis, near-death, and resurgence of Apple. It also describes the birth, near-death, and ascendancy of Pixar, with fascinating details I've never read before. As the book follows Jobs through the personal computer revolution, the birth of the Macintosh, his "wilderness years" at NeXT and Pixar, and his return to Apple and subsequent paving over of the landscape for the music industry, cell phones, and tablet computing, Steve Jobs's biography also offers incredibly detailed insights into how our world shifted from the hobbyist computing era of the mid-'70s to the ubiquitous techscape we live in today. Steve Jobs didn't enact any of these revolutionary changes singlehandedly -- his biography takes pains to make that clear -- but he was most assuredly at or near the center of all of them.

Though the book makes his flaws obvious to readers, it also makes clear that we would be living in a very different world if Steve Jobs hadn't set out to put a dent in the universe. Anyone with even a passing interest in Apple's history, and anyone who's ever wondered how so very much about the technology landscape has changed so fundamentally in just 35 years, owes it to themselves to read this book.

Review: Walter Isaacson's 'Steve Jobs' originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 25 Oct 2011 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

We've seen quite a few holidays this year get bookended by app sales, and it appears that Halloween will be no different. Sega has kicked off the spooky season by putting all of its iOS apps on sale, dropping prices down to as low as 99 cents.

Apps on sale (starting tomorrow, and going through the weekend) include the recently released Brick People, the iPad version of Chu Chu Rocket, the classic Virtua Fighter 2, and perhaps most exciting, the iOS port of the great Gunstar Heroes 2D shooter.

There may be even more titles on sale -- the company asks you to go just search "Sega" in the App Store for more. Or just stay tuned; I doubt these will be the last titles we'll see drop in price over the upcoming holiday weekend.

Sega kicks off the Halloween app sales originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 24 Oct 2011 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

When it comes to forecasting the next big thing, we turn to our secret weapon: the TUAW braintrust. We put the question to you and let you have your go at it. Today's topic is the Mac Pro.

The powerhouse of the Mac universe, the Mac Pro is a hard-working mainstay for video editors, graphics shops, and other professional use. With Apple turning almost overwhelmingly towards producing consumer products, and with the higher end iMacs providing screaming power and great peripheral support, does the Mac Pro have a future?

You tell us. Place your vote in this poll and then join in the comments with all your predictions.

View Poll

You're the Pundit: What's up with the Mac Pro? originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 23 Oct 2011 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Forbes is reporting a fun story about former Compaq CEO Ben Rosen. Seems Steve Jobs and Rosen met in 1999, and Jobs tried to convince Rosen, then at Compaq, to license the Mac OS. It never happened, and Steve reportedly had second thoughts about it all anyway.

Fast forward to 2007. Rosen writes Jobs a letter that says in part:

"Well, after a 20-plus year interlude with that other OS (necessitated by my Compaq involvement), I thought you'd be pleased to know that for the last few years I've returned to my roots. I'm once again an avid Apple user and evangelist.

Imagine, Ben Rosen, former Compaq Chairman, now a Mac enthusiast!"

Then Jobs replied:

"Sorry for my delayed reply - I was on a much needed family vacation for the past three weeks.

Wow - this news makes my day! I'm glad to hear it. I hope you like what we've done with the Mac. I'm biased, of course, but I think its light years ahead of Windows."

You can read more Ben Rosen memories of Steve Jobs at his blog. Written, no doubt, on his trusty Mac.

Former Compaq CEO now loves his Mac originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 22 Oct 2011 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.