Stan's List

A blogger on Corante sees a potential Apple living room device being extremely bad news for Microsoft. “… I believe that Apple Kaliedoscope — a retooled Mac mini with DVR capabilities — poses a real threat as the killer app in the battle for the living room, a battlefield that Microsoft has failed to consolidate despite numerous advantages.)”

Official stats from Amazon show that iPods ruled the holiday season in Electronics, owning the top three slots- the Apple 4 GB iPod Nano (Black), the Apple 30 GB iPod with Video Playback (Black), and the Apple 512 MB iPod Shuffle were the top sellers.

Net Applications reports that the number of people using Mac OS online topped 4 percent by the end of November. Over the last 12 months the use of the Mac platform has surged from 3.29 to 4.11 percent.

Further, preliminary data for December from Hitslink, yet another web metrics company, shows that Mac OS usage will post another large jump, as well.

Lazy Sunday, Saturday Night Live

SciFi Inside: Battlestar Galactica

The former is a 2 minute, 30 second skit whereas the latter is a 21-plus-minute segment that’s designed to be a primer for the upcoming Winter season. Moreover, this Battlestar Galactica segment won’t air on regular TV until Jan 2.

Single of the Week

She Wants Revenge is a Los Angelos-based band that’s put forth a mixture of dramatic, gloomy and paranoid pop that is likely to please fans of Interpol and their precursors, Joy Division. She Wants Revenge has given iTunes users the chance to hear the band’s self-titled release months before it’s in stores. If you are looking for a sample of the band, try Tear You Apart our “free” Single of the Week, which exemplifies the group’s moody greatness.

Apple KB article: Do you have a lot of stuff in your mailbox? Never clean it out? Well, if you leave too much stuff in there you might find yourself saying, “My stuff! It’s… GONE?!”

First thing is to not to worry.

Know everything (well, almost everything) there is to know about every Mac ever made, all for free. Mactracker also includes info on Apple monitors, printers, cameras, AirPort Base Stations, iPods, etc. Download the update from within the application or the authors web page.

According to the Read Me file,

“Mactracker 4.0.2 adds a “Timeline” option to view models by date introduced, adds updated history information for latest iPods and the main window now uses the “Unified title/toolbar” appearance under Mac OS X 10.4 if “Use brushed metal appearance” is not checked in the preferences.”

PC Mag has reviewed Apple’s sweet new quad-processor PowerMac G5 and it easily tops the best numbers posted by a PC. What’s surprising is the relative margin of victory:

“The Quad G5 got the highest score we’ve ever seen on the CPU-stressing CineBench rendering test: 1,104. The Pentium EE840 overclocked to 3.6 GHz recently got a 667, and an Athlon 64 4800+ overclocked to 2.7 GHz scored 775. CineBench is a multithreaded app, so the more cores or threads your system can handle, the more efficiently your workload gets done.”

Forbes thinks this will happen, and that Apple will also enter more new markets.

“2006 will undoubtedly mark another major year in Apple’s transformation, but its new markets bring together tougher competition,” said a Goldman Sachs research note. “If early indications from suppliers prove correct, Apple is likely to move further from its Mac core in 2006, leveraging its brand and building on the consumer success of iPod.”

The Miami Herald reports that Seagate Technology, the world’s largest disk drive maker, will attempt to purchase its struggling rival, Maxtor of Milpitas, in a stock deal valued at about $1.9 billion “It’s the latest merger in an industry that has seen the number of players dwindle over the years amid fierce competition. This could cause antitrust scrutiny.