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Quick Tip: Prolong Your MacBook Battery Life

Written on May 11, 2009 by Jenny Kortina and 12 people have commented

Having a laptop battery that drains quickly is one of the most annoying things I can think of. I bought a laptop over a desktop so I could use my computer anywhere and expect the battery to last enough time to get a decent amount of work done. Whenever I find something that can increase [...]

Consumer Reports Gives Apple Notebooks Top Marks

Written on May 05, 2009 by Darrell Etherington and 1 person has commented

If the FTC wants to investigate suspiciously chummy partnerships, they should look at the June installment of Consumer Reports. It reads like a love letter to Apple, and the primary reason for the schoolgirl crush appears to be the oh-so-sexy notebooks coming out of Cupertino. Which notebooks? Just about all of them, actually. Every portable [...]

Apple’s Budget Macs: Real Possibility or Wishful Thinking?

Written on May 04, 2009 by Darrell Etherington and 12 people have commented

Apple computers are expensive. Whether or not you think that price is justified, you can’t deny that even machines on the lower end of the scale will cost you a decent amount of coin.
The Mac Mini is the cheapest machine in the bunch, and you don’t get any crucial peripheral gear like a monitor, keyboard [...]

LG Staffer Says Apple OLED Notebooks Forthcoming

Written on April 23, 2009 by Darrell Etherington and 7 people have commented

If this is true, then LG takes the cake when it comes to leaking. No subtle hints, vague rumors, or supply chain speculation here. Instead, an actual LG employee has come out and baldly stated that the South Korea-based company will be responsible for producing a brand new upcoming notebook from Apple. And no, this [...]

A Beautiful Machine: Two Months On the Unibody MacBook

Written on April 21, 2009 by Charles Moore and 24 people have commented

After two months of getting configured and acquainted, I’m pretty much comfortably settled in with my first Intel Mac — a little jewel of a 13″ unibody MacBook — and thus far it’s pretty much all good.
It’s been an adjustment going down from the 17″ display on my previous workhorse system, a 1.33 GHz PowerBook, [...]

MacBook mini: Sorry Apple Fans, This Is Not Real

Written on March 30, 2009 by Darrell Etherington and 13 people have commented

In case you’ve seen the most recent rumors about an Apple netbook currently circulating, which got their start at 9to5mac.com (whose server load problems seem to indicate that a lot of you have probably already seen this or are trying to as we speak), let me crush your hopes before they get too high: These [...]

OnLive Will Make a Hardcore Gaming Machine Out of Your MacBook

Written on March 24, 2009 by Darrell Etherington and 5 people have commented

The Game Developers Conference for 2009 is just underway, and already there’s some big news which has particular relevance for that rare and frustrated breed, the Mac gamer.
I’m a Mac gamer myself, and have pretty much given up the OS X side of things and just decided to do all my gaming in a Windows [...]

Give Your MacBook a Thick Skin: Seven Laptop Skin Companies Worth Your Money

Written on March 16, 2009 by Nick Santilli and 23 people have commented

The latest unibody aluminum MacBooks are fantastic, and I truly love mine, but I found out quickly that the aluminum surface doesn’t take kindly to scratching. Within the first week of owning it, I had an inch long nick in the top cover…it mocks me daily. So finding some adhesive skin options to protect my [...]

A Continuing Discussion of the Unibody MacBook 13″ vs. PowerBook 12″

Written on February 12, 2009 by Tom Reestman and 14 people have commented

Charles Moore wrote a great article about the unibody 13″ MacBook compared to the much-loved 12″ PowerBook. A friend of Charles argued that until the dimensions were nearly identical it could never be considered a replacement. Charles feels there’s a little more to it than that.
I think they’re both right (yes, life is good sitting [...]

13″ Aluminum MacBook vs. 12″ PowerBook — Is the Unibody A True Successor?

Written on February 11, 2009 by Charles Moore and 35 people have commented

A Mac writer colleague and I have been engaged in a friendly debate for the past several months over whether the 13″ unibody MacBook is a worthy successor to the 12″ PowerBook as a serious road warrior machine. My friend is not anti-unibody by any means — he has a uni MacBook Pro — but [...]

White MacBook Gets NVIDIA, Better Specs

Written on January 21, 2009 by Darrell Etherington and 7 people have commented

They didn’t cry it from the mountain, but Apple this week did indeed update some hardware. Specifically, the 13-inch white MacBook, a holdover from previous models, now ships with the same NVIDIA GeForce 9400M of its bigger, aluminum unibody siblings. Not only that, but it also gets a processor bump up to the 2.0GHz Intel [...]

A Unibody MacBook, VMware Fusion, and Windows 7 Beta

Written on January 20, 2009 by Tom Reestman and 15 people have commented

A couple of days ago I installed Windows 7 beta (32-bit, Ultimate version) on my 13″ unibody MacBook, and I thought I’d recount my installation experience in case some of you are curious how the other half (OK, the other 95 percent) live.
Alas, this exercise afforded little opportunity to dazzle anyone with my technical acumen. [...]

Could a Jumbo MacBook Replace the iMac?

Written on January 19, 2009 by Charles Moore and 9 people have commented

In the lull between Christmas and New Years, Intel released its new Q9000 quad-core mobile processor, and PC maker Acer almost simultaneously its Q9000-powered Aspire 8930G-7665 “extreme gaming” and multimedia notebook computer with an 18″ 1920 x 1080 pixel 16:9 aspect ratio display.
Many Mac notebook fans and watchers had been hoping that Apple would roll [...]

Apple Replacing 17-inch MacBook Pro Batteries In-Store

Written on January 16, 2009 by David Appleyard and 8 people have commented

Apple has posted information about their battery replacement service for the new 17″ MacBook Pro. Their latest notebook released offers a new industry standard in performance (up to 8 hours use on a single charge), but comes at the expense of a user-replaceable battery.
Apple notes that the battery in your MacBook Pro is a consumable item, [...]

24-inch LED Cinema Display Gets a Little More Touchy-Feely

Written on January 12, 2009 by Darrell Etherington and 2 people have commented

Leopard may not have quite the level of touchscreen integration as Windows 7 appears to be packing, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t those out there who would appreciate having one for their Mac. We can probably cry out for a tablet till the cows come home, and not be rewarded any time soon, unless [...]

Axiotron Modbook Pro Announced

Written on January 08, 2009 by David Appleyard and 4 people have commented

Many of you will have seen images of the original Modbook – it’s a customized tablet style MacBook, with a host of hardware additions and a touch sensitive screen. The makers of the Modbook, Axiotron, have announced the addition of the Modbook Pro to their lineup. The 15.4 inch device is heralded as “the ultimate tablet [...]

MacBook and Apple’s Black Friday Sale: “Almost,” But Not Quite Enough

Written on December 02, 2008 by Charles Moore and 16 people have commented

The 13″ aluminum MacBook is an “almost” machine. It appeals to me in many aspects, being a roughly three-quarter-sized unibody MacBook Pro at a substantially lower price. But it falls just short of the slam-dunk it might have been.
For me, probably the biggest negative is the lack of a FireWire port. I think I could [...]

Apple Pushing Green Notebooks in Ad Campaign

Written on November 27, 2008 by David Appleyard and 4 people have commented

With their latest lineup of products, Apple is pushing the new environmental features in an aggressive way. Rightly so, they are proud of their achievement — going from a heavily criticized Mac and iPod lineup a few years ago, to a set of very environmentally friendly products today.
Their environment page states, albeit in a typically [...]

Examining the Battery/AC Performance Gap on MacBooks and MacBook Pros

Written on November 25, 2008 by Darrell Etherington and 5 people have commented

Back in the dark ages, when I used to have a Toshiba laptop, I would always remove the battery when running off of AC power, out of what may have been misguided superstition. I was told, and I fervently believed, that doing so would extend the life of my battery considerably by reducing the total [...]

Mini DisplayPort to Dual-DVI Delayed Until December 23

Written on November 20, 2008 by Darrell Etherington and 4 people have commented

As if it wasn’t aggravating enough that new MacBook owners had to go out and replace all of their video adapters since Mini-DVI has been phased out and Mini DisplayPort introduced, today those lucky enough to have a 30-inch external monitor are now out of luck…again.
In an email to customers who’d purchased the Apple Mini [...]