TheAppleBlog

Last month I commented that Apple’s substitution of Secure Digital Card (SD) slots for ExpressCard slots in the 15″ MacBook Pro made considerably good sense. It would be nice to have both, but the ExpressCard support wasn’t being heavily used, according to Apple, while SD was growing more popular. The 13″ MacBook Pro also gets [...]

What do you do with your old Macs when you upgrade to a new system? Many folks sell their old computer on eBay or locally, but that’s something I’ve rarely done. I mostly either keep them as “B-team” units, or hand them off to other family members.
My Mac laptops are tools of my trade, and [...]

Born in the early-middle of the Baby Boomer generation (1951), I’m one of the folks O’Reilly Radar’s Mark Sigall is talking about in a recent essay contending that an Apple assault on the tablet computer market is “inevitable,” since such a device would be so symbiotic for we Boomers, who, now aged 53-73, constitute a [...]

Back in March, I reviewed the Opera Turbo Labs preview version of the Opera 10 alpha browser incorporating server-side optimization and compression technology that Opera claims can speed throughput over slow connections by reducing the amount of data needed to display Web pages by up to 80 percent — music to my ears, being stuck [...]

Apple first began shipping notebooks with glossy displays in May 2006 with the release of the first-generation MacBooks, which were only available with glossy, and as a no-cost option on MacBook Pros. In mid-2007, glossy “behind glass” displays were also made standard on the aluminum iMac line with no matte option. With the release of [...]

Two abiding challenges of laptop computer engineering are the antagonistically complimentary objectives of packing more and more computing and graphics power, memory, speed, and storage capacity into thinner and smaller form factors, all while keeping power consumption, heat generation and heat dispersal to tolerable levels.
In the context of cooling, desktop computer designers have the luxury [...]

Apple’s new/refreshed MacBook Pro 13″ and 15″ models each come equipped with an SD Media Card reader slot, but in the case of the 15-incher, this has required elimination of the ExpressCard/34 expansion slot that had been in every 15-inch MacBook Pro since the get-go, back in 2006. This has led to a crescendo of [...]

A Mac laptop question I’ve been getting asked over the past few months is which 13-inch MacBook is the better value — the posh aluminum unibody model, or the $300 cheaper carryover white polycarbonate unit, which, after two substantial updates in 2009, had been upgraded to pretty closely match the more expensive machine performance-wise, and [...]

Last week Apple quietly upgraded the entry-level white MacBook’s Core 2 Duo processor clock speed from 2.0 GHz to 2.13 GHz, added an additional 40GB of standard hard disk capacity, and upgraded its RAM specification to 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM. Obviously, additional speed and capacity is a plus, but as The Mac Observer’s Ted Landau questions, [...]

I use a bunch of different Web browsers — Opera, Camino, Firefox (or lately the Shiretoko Intel-optimized build of Firefox), Safari, Netscape 9 on my OS 10.4 machines, and iCab — but my favorite continues to be Opera. I’m specifically using the Alpha Turbo 10 version, which is far and away the fastest browser on [...]

Addressing what evidently is a common defect in the NVIDIA GeForce 8600GT graphics processor units used in the May 2007 and Early 2008 revisions of the original MacBook Pro (remediation of which involves replacing the entire logic board), Apple has announced that it will lengthen coverage of its extended service program for this defect for [...]

Among the things I love about my unibody MacBook is the barely audible whisper of its 160 GB, 5400 RPM Hitachi HDD shrouded in solid carved aluminum, which makes it the most blessedly silent personal computer I’ve ever owned.
It easily beats the previous high-water mark set by my commendably quiet 700 MHz G3 iBook with [...]

Apple must feel besieged by an attack of the clones these days, with Mac OS knockoff makers popping up in the U.S. (Psystar and OpenTech), Germany (PearC), Argentina (OpeniMac) the U.K. (FreedomPC). Now a Russian startup calling itself RussianMac is offering a comprehensive line of desktop and laptop computers.
The list of clones covers pretty much [...]

Quite a few folks are reporting problems in getting the Mac OS X 10.5.7 Update installed and working properly on their officially supported Macs, while “hackintosh” netbook users are finding they’re getting dramatically improved battery runtime with 10.5.7 — one of those ironies.
I’m still waiting to see how the dust settles, and also looking [...]

The brushfire popularity of small, inexpensive laptop computers, aka netbooks, shows no sign of losing steam, with a reported growth rate for the category of 80 percent so far in 2009 (vs. a general laptop growth of around 13 percent), putting netbooks on track for sales of around 21 million units this year. Apple consequently [...]

Last week I posted a Beta Watch mini-review of Firefox 3.5 Beta 4, Mozilla’s sixth development milestone and fourth beta release of what will become Firefox 3.5.
Unfortunately I found that, like earlier beta releases of FireFox 3.1/3.5, beta 4 was a perplexingly sluggish performer on my setup, which is a 2.0 GHz unibody MacBook running [...]

Last week, Mozilla released Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 as a public preview, and I duly downloaded it for a look-see. I had tried earlier beta builds of Firefox 3.1 and 3.5, but hadn’t been favorably impressed, and soon reverted to using either the latest final update of Firefox 3, or lately Camino 1.6, with its [...]

Apple arguably could do a better job of educating their non–tech oriented customers about the advisability and desirability of periodic software — especially OS version — upgrades.
That epiphany dawned on me during a telephone conversation last weekend with a friend I don’t see or talk to very often. This individual bought a G5 iMac several [...]

Many enterprise IT departments are exercising false economy by extending the service life of notebook computers from the traditionally recommended 3-5 years in an effort to keep a lid on replacement cost, according to a new research report (PDF) released by Northborough, Mass.-based market research firm J.Gold Associates.
The report estimates that squeezing out an additional [...]

A relative of mine recently got a fairly sophisticated digital camera and sought my counsel on what sort of photo correction and image editing software to use. He’s been getting along with the version of iPhoto that OS 10.4 installed on his G5 iMac, but he’s not finding it to be quite adequate for the [...]