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When Apple announced the iPhone 4S, the company certainly talked up the improvements made to the smartphone's integrated camera hardware. With 8 megapixels of resolution, a redesigned lens, and enhancements to its software, it certainly meets or exceeds the needs of most casual shooters.

Still, we here at Ars have received plenty of questions to the effect of, "can the iPhone 4S replace a 'real' camera?" That's actually a hard question to answer, because individual needs vary widely. Would a professional photographer replace her trusty DSLR with an iPhone 4S? No. But, might a casual snap shooter replace a pocket camera with an iPhone 4S? It's pretty likely.

Mac OS X provides rich scripting and automation tools that can simplify everyday tasks—if you know how to use them. The roster includes the venerable command line, the graphical Automator utility, and the traditional AppleScript natural-language scripting environment. Although these tools all have value in certain situations, they each have some real limitations.

For instance, AppleScript benefits from extremely tight platform integration and powerful support for manipulating user interface elements, but its eccentric syntax and limited functionality constrain the scope of its applicability. AppleScript simply isn't designed to serve as a general-purpose scripting language.

For me, acquiring new gadgets is painfully easy; offloading old ones is more difficult. The predictable result: a closet, garage, or basement full of aging but not quite obsolete tech. As an Ars reader, you can probably relate.

I recently ran into my first-generation Apple TV during a spelunking expedition into the depths of my home office closet. After upgrading to a second-gen Apple TV last year, I had actually forgotten the old one was in there. The rediscovery piqued my curiosity. Though I have long avoided performing jailbreaks on my Apple products, the old Apple TV gave me a chance to find out what else I could watch on this thing besides iTunes content.

You can actually watch all manner of other content on an old Apple TV if you're willing to tinker. The two most popular software interfaces are a version of Boxee and a version of XBMC, both designed for the original Apple TV. Here, I offer you a chronicle of my own experiences setting up these both solutions, and show you how to do the same.

When we recently detailed how to boost the storage space in a MacBook Air with a replacement solid state drive module, some readers asked what it would be like to swap the hard drive in an older MacBook with a similarly speedy SSD. We decided to investigate, and as it turns out, thanks to a common 2.5" drive size and widely available external enclosures, the swap is quicker, easier, and cheaper than the one for a MacBook Air.

Depending on the age of your machine and in some cases BTO drive options, the amount of the speedup will vary. Still, even our old original Intel MacBook—which, as we'll explain later, actually represents a worst case scenario—went from just barely usable to actually productive in just a few hours. Here, we'll tell you how to perform the same upgrade.

So, Michael Jackson is dead and Final Cut Pro X is out, and most people prefer the older versions of each. Most can also agree on Michael Jackson's fate—making a lot more albums from beyond the grave—but people aren't so sure about Final Cut Pro's future.

The FCP X launch, and the discontent surrounding the new product, fed into a larger anxiety about Apple's intentions for the pro Mac market. Was FCP X just a single, poorly handled event or was it an indication of Apple's direction from now on, media pros be damned? With all this talk of bringing iOS features "back to the Mac," is OS X about to lose its luster for content creation? Is the Mac Pro going the way of the XServe?

Apple doesn't answer such questions about future plans, but it's not hard to read Apple's palms if you look hard enough. The company won't ditch creative pros—but that doesn't mean there won't be serious rough spots ahead.

I got my first Mac, an iBook, in 2002. It ran Mac OS 10.2 Jaguar. Since then, I've migrated my electronic life to new hardware three times and to a new OS version four times. I'm sure the Migration Assistant can assist me in moving from my MacBook running 10.6 to a new MacBook Air running 10.7 without trouble. But after almost a decade, I'm ready to make a clean break and start from scratch, only migrating my data—no applications, libraries, or the cruft that has built up in nooks and crannies of the system.

Although all of this is inspired by the imminent arrival of Mac OS 10.7 Lion, the information here is not Lion-specific; I have tested the various migration tactics on Snow Leopard. However, most of them are more application- than OS-specific.