Top 20 posts of the year - Nos. 1-10

As 2009 winds down to a close I wanted to take a look back at the 20 most popular posts here on The Apple Core over the past year. On Friday I posted numbers 11-20, today I'll cover the top 10 posts of the year.

1. Rumor: Tablet Mac coming this fall(originally posted May 23, 2008)

Although this post dates back to 2008, it's pretty easy to see why this one is the number one story of the year here at The Apple Core. Tablet rumors were incredibly hot this year as the world waits for Apple to release its mythical tablet Mac. Dating as far back as 2004, the iTablet is easily the most anticipated Apple product of all time. In light of the wild success of the iPhone and App Store, both customers and competitors alike are waiting for the proverbial "other shoe to drop" in Cupertino. Many believe that the Apple tablet will build upon the successes of the iPhone/iPod touch and expand Apple's reach into books and magazines further cementing the company's dominant position in digital distribution of media. Since it's not yet announced, we'll all have to wait until Steve and company deem us worthy to buy its new, shiny device.

2. Installing Mac OS X on a Dell Mini 9 - the easy way (March 5, 2009)

Everyone wants a mini-Mac (see post #1 above) and some aren't willing to wait for Apple to get around to it. It became extremely temping to create your own Mac OS X-based netbook in 2009 with the arrival of the cheap ($200) and eminently hackable Dell Mini 9. With a couple hours and some patience it became trivial to install Mac OS X onto the diminutive Windows netbook. And many of you did.

3. Mystery solved: Apple's new product is iTablet(July 25, 2008)

Noticing a trend here? Readers were clearly hungry for any morsel of a rumor about the upcoming Apple tablet pushing this post into the number three spot of the year. Now if Apple would just release the darned thing!

4. Microphone support comes to the new iPod touch and classic (September 10, 2008)

Another hot topic in 2009 was the iPod touch. While it sometimes sits in the shadows of it's flashier cousin - the iPhone - it does everything that the iPhone does (except for the phone and camera, that is) and was wildly popular as people scooped them up in droves in 2009. A feature that flew under the radar is the iPod touch 2G's support for a microphone via Apple’s new headphones. This is boon for iPod touch users that previously had to hack together an external microphone that could be used for VOIP applications such as Skype. Apple said that it won’t restrict Wi-Fi VOIP applications as long as they don’t run over the iPhone’s cellular networks opening the potential for the device to use VOIP.

5. Will your Mac boot 64-bit Snow Leopard by default? Not unless it's an Xserve (August 18, 2009)

When Apple released Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) only Xserves were able to boot the 64-bit version by default. All other Mac users will have to hold down the “6? and “4? keys at boot to load the 64-bit kernel and kexts. Every time. This annoyed and concerned many but turned out not to be a big deal. Those that were worried about being stuck in the slow lane with a 32-bit EFI quickly discovered the various workarounds for booting the x86_64 kernel on a 32-bit Mac.

6. 3G iPod touch in two to three months? (July 20, 2009)

The iPod touch was a hot commodity in 2009 (see #4 above) and rumors of its successor were quite popular. The third-generation iPod touch was indeed released on September 9, 2009 - but without the built-in camera that has been rumored.

7. Snow Leopard bug deletes all user data (Updated) (October 13, 2009)

Posts began showing up on the Apple Support forums in September from users have been losing all their data due to a nasty bug in Snow Leopard, a.k.a. Mac OS 10.6. The bug would rears its head when a user logs into their Mac’s Guest account and then tries to log back into their regular account. Data gone. Luckily this was fixed in the Apple's latest dot release 10.6.2.

8. The $200 "Mac" (April 21, 2009)

Netbooks, hackintoshes and Psystar were all hot in 2009 (see #2 above) but this post in particular got people into a lather because it brought the entry price of a hackable netbook down below the $200 mark – even if only for a few days. All it took was $200, a copy of Leopard and a little hacking and you had yourself a netbook running the Mac OS. That’s right, for less than the price of an iPod touch you could buy a machine that runs desktop-class Mac OS applications and a Web-browser - with Flash.

9. Four core iPhones and firmware 3.0 (January 8, 2009)

While the current iPhone has (roughly) the processing power of the Sony PSP, an upgraded four core iPhone would slaughter pretty much every portable gaming platform on the market. Rumors floating around Macworld Expo last January suggested that Apple was indeed working on multicore iPhones, but to date this one has just been a rumor.

10. Hold 6 and 4 keys at boot to enable 64-bit Snow Leopard (August 19, 2009)

64-bit was a hot topic in 2009 with the announcement of Apple's 64-bit capable Snow Leopard on June 8, 2009. Since most Macs don't boot into 64-bit by default (see #4 above), this tip helped Mac users boot into 64-bit by holding down the “6? and “4? keys at boot.

Thank you for a great year!