Realty World Northern California & Nevada

Everyone knows that one of the biggest shopping days of the year is Black Friday and Apple has posted a teaser of the special shopping day.

After the Tech Talk training from November, many of you walked away asking yourself, “Am I a PC or am I Mac?”

For many of your I had made a recommendation that you go to the Apple store and take a look for yourself as to the fit and finish and overall quality that the Macs had to offer. Additionally, for those of your who wan/needed to run Windows for those pesky situations where you are required to run Microsoft Internet Explorer to render a specific website properly you can always run VMWare. However, please remember that you will need someone technically capable to install Windows and you will need to now maintain both your Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems, which can be quite time consuming.

If any of you are out there contemplating one of the new Apple MacBook, MacBook Pros, or the brand new MacBook Air, keep in mind that some discounts might be coming your way soon!

Apple released the Magic Trackpad which is utilizing a very similar design, shape, styling and technology as the new MacBook Pro trackpad. It uses the same Multi-Touch technology which supports a full set of gestures allowing more flexibility with interaction with of what is on your screen and swiping across the trackpad for picture, page, and browser control. The fluid, consistent, and ease of control for scrolling is one of the best features in my mind with the new trackpad.

The surface of the Magic Trackpad is 80% larger than the built-in trackpad on the MacBook Pro, which is already very large for a trackpad, giving a very smooth user experience. The surface is made with a smooth, wear-resistant glass that feels great to the touch. Because the entire surface of the Magic Trackpad is a button, you can click on objects just as you would using a traditional mouse.

For those of you out there that have the Apple Wireless Keyboard (click here for the review) the Apple Magic Trackpad is designed at the same height and angle so you can go from the keyboard to trackpad in one seamless motion.

Connectivity to the Apple Magic Trackpad is done using Bluetooth technology providing a cable-free and uncluttered environment. The Bluetooth connection provides a secure connection from your computer to the trackpad to upwards of 30 feet which is a huge plus, especially when in use during a presentation.

The Apple Magic Trackpad is designed for use with a Mac. A software update was released for a driver update to enable inertia scrolling and three-finger dragging. This three-finger dragging is a unique gesture which enables users to drag windows around quickly. Two-finger gestures are supported including two-finger scrolling, pinch to zoom, and rotate. Invoking of Expose and switching between applications as in the notebook multi-touch trackpads are also available.

When connecting the Apple Magic Trackpad to a Windows 7 laptop with Bluetooth, Windows 7 recognized the Apple Magic Trackpad as a mouse device instead of a trackpad so movement and button action of the trackpad was recognized. However, two-finger scrolling was not available.

The iPhone 4 pre-order was made available today. Were you able to get one?

If you were like me you went to the Apple website and tried… and tried… and tried, only to receive the “Your request couldn’t be processed.” The Apple’s online pre-order system used an eligibility check for existing AT&T customers, which appears to have been the cause of the issue. Additional problems arose for users who attempted to pre-order using the Apple retail store software from the App Store and found the software hung up at a “processing” screen while checking eligibility for their upgrade.

Even with all of the “processing” issues, the pre-orders for the iPhone 4 stopped from the AT&T website as of around 1:30pm Pacific from the AT&T website. So I guess in between all of the problems there were people that were able to get their hold on the prized iPhone 4.

As if the problems of today is not bad enough rumors have been circulated that a potential AT&T security breach worse than the one encountered days before with the iPad 3G email addresses being leaked. AT&T reports it has been unable to reproduce the issue but users are reporting that they are logging into their AT&T accounts only to find out they are looking at someone else’s account information. Talk about a case of “when it rains, it pours.”