#macbook pro

News from Apple WWDC 2009

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apple-wwdc-20090608-0612

For those that don’t know, Apple’s WWDC (World­wide Devel­op­ers Con­fer­ence) 2009 was this past Mon­day morn­ing at Moscone West, San Fran­cisco. It’s pri­mar­ily for those devel­op­ing for Apple’s prod­ucts (OS X, iPhone apps, etc.) but it’s also for the Apple fans out there as the Keynote usu­ally addresses new prod­uct releases, etc.

I was tuned in, lis­ten­ing to Ustream’s live stream of the Keynote.1 Pretty cool as you can mul­ti­task ver­sus hav­ing to read every new updates on a blog. Though you have to give it up though as the pho­tos on the blog updates are more eye candy.

Con­tinue read­ing →

  1. The recorded stream can be seen here. Apple’s offi­cial recorded video here. [↩]

Use the Cavalry 2TB CADA002SA2-B External Drive in OS X and Windows

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I recently pur­chased an exter­nal drive to upgrade from my West­ern Dig­i­tal My Book 500GB Essen­tial Edi­tion. I needed the upgrade as I am plan­ning to upgrade the hard drive on my Mac­Book Pro some time this year to at least a 500GB (from a 120GB). I decided to go with the Cav­alry 2TB CADA002SA2-B exter­nal drive (aka. CADA-SA2).

It was sell­ing for a good price (~1GB/$1) a cou­ple of weeks ago. That and hav­ing the addi­tional eSATA inter­face helps with trans­fer­ring huge files (3.0Gbps vs 480Mbps, about 6.25x faster). Any­ways, my My Book was cur­rently setup with the fol­low­ing partitions:

  • 120GB for HFS+. I just use SuperDuper1 once or twice in a month, and/or when I want to do a OS X update, to have a bootable backup just in case of Murphy’s Law.
  • And the rest, 380GB for­mat­ted on NTFS. I use that space for back­ing up music, pho­tos, videos, appli­ca­tion install files, etc. both for Win­dows and OS X

I some­what wanted to do the same with the Cav­alry, but I’ve read on their site and their man­ual that it doesn’t work on OS X 10.5+. Luck­ily, some­one posted a review on NewEgg that they have suc­cess­fully got­ten it to work with Leopard.

You can get this drive to work on Mac OS 10.5. The way Cav­alry Tech sup­port told me to do it was to find a OS 10.4 machine, for­mat it on that and then plug it into the 10.5 machine. All I did was put in my old 10.4 disc, boot from the CD and use disk util­ity to for­mat it. How­ever, if you don’t have a way to boot OS 10.4 you are pretty much stuck.

I hope that helps for those who decide to get the same exter­nal stor­age and use it with your Mac products.

  1. SuperDuper is the wildly acclaimed pro­gram that makes recov­ery pain­less, because it makes cre­at­ing a fully bootable backup pain­less. [↩]

Apple Releases New MacBooks

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If you don’t know already, Apple has just announced its new line of Mac­Books1 ear­lier at 10 this morn­ing in Cuper­tino. Today’s line is a com­pletely new build from the ground-up, start­ing with its “uni­body” approach.

Other than the uni­body being totally new to the line as well as the indus­try, I am lik­ing the fol­low­ing on the MacBooks:

  • 13.3-inch LED-backlit dis­play. The 12-inch ones is just to small. Hav­ing that extra 1.1-inch is truly a big step.
  • Upgraded video adapter, NVDIA GeForce 9400M2. Nice upgrade for those want­ing to do more gam­ing on these. But I think this is also nice for those doing photo edit­ing like me.
  • All-new, smooth glass Multi-Touch track­pad. No buttons—it itself is the button!

Though these are nice upgrades, the price went up to $1299 for the Mac­Books. If I was in need of a new laptop/notebook com­puter, this would be the best pick. It’s just too bad it doesn’t have an ExpressCard/34 slot like how the Mac­Book Pros have them. It would be great to have for those peo­ple who take their Mac­Books on vaca­tion or on trips and want­ing to edit/backup/upload their pho­tos from their SD-based media cards (like the one I have for my Canon Pow­er­Shot) along with a card read for the slot.3

You may get more infor­ma­tion and/or watch the video via apple.com/macbook/. If you don’t know which Mac­Book is for you, click here to com­pare them at a quick glance.

Update
If you are lean­ing towards buy­ing a Mac­Book Pro and need the quick run­down of the new bells and whis­tles, click here to read up The Apple Blog’s review about it.

  1. Mac­Book, Mac­Book Pro, and Mac­Book Air [↩]
  2. The Mac­Book Pro has both the 9400M and the 9600M GT. You may switch to either depend­ing on your need for per­for­mance as well as bat­tery life. [↩]
  3. They do have a ExpressCard/34 slot. I don’t know where I read that dif­fer­ent. [↩]

ExpressCard Media Card Reader for MacBook Pro

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I recently pur­chased this from eBay: adapterbest. Works pretty good.

This thing is tiny. I almost for­got what I pur­chased as the pack­age that came from HK was pretty small.

Here are some specs:

  • Sup­port ExpressCard/34 and ExpressCard/54 slot
  • Sup­port SDHC format
  • Sup­port mul­ti­ple flash cards:
    • With­out adapter: SDHC, SD, MMC, MMC­plus, M.S., M.S. PRO and xD
    • With adapter (NOT included): microSD, min­iSD, MMC­mo­bile, RSMMC, M.S. Duo, M.S. PRO Duo
  • Rugged and reli­able stain­less steel cover
  • Size: 34.2 mm x 75 mm x 5 mm
  • Sup­port Win­dows 2000 and XP, and Mac 10.4 and above

PS. Here’s how it looks injected into the slot.

So Which Should Come First, the Laptop or the Desktop?

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It’s been a great year for lap­tops I’d say. After send­ing ginor­mous rip­ples through­out the tech-world with Apple announc­ing that its going to be con­sum­ing some Intel baked goods, com­puter enthu­si­asts looked more closely at the prac­ti­cal idea of buy­ing a Mac.

Well, let me clar­ify that last state­ment… more “PC” enthu­si­asts liked what they heard, that the sim­ple Mac can do their bid­ding. Any­ways, with sec­ond quar­ter almost to a close, I’ve been see­ing a lot of deals espe­cially on note­books. Dell always have them but when you hear IBM/Lenovo have an annual sale to cel­e­brate its first year, you just can’t help but to look at what they’re offer­ing the T42 for 42%-off.

Entic­ing ain’t it. I mean, its a IBM/Lenovo Cen­trino lap­top. The thing just oozes with great qual­ity and build. But it’s still $1100+. Then again, its an “IBM”, or should I say “Lenovo” now. That, and Ronald­inho seems to like them.

Mean­while, the Mac­book is just sexay but expen­sive. Not to men­tion, the need to buy new soft­ware. Oh deci­sions, deci­sions… One ques­tion that keeps bounc­ing off in my head would be, “will I even use a lap­top when I get home?” Granted, I can use it when I’m in the liv­ing room down­stairs but that just takes away from loun­gin’ and relaxin’ with the roomies.

Blah. I shouldn’t even be think­ing about this. I should be con­cen­trat­ing on get­ting a good deal on Hawaii tick­ets in August. Damn. Did I men­tion, sav­ing up money for Japan (Novem­ber) and P.I. (Decem­ber) as well? When will we hit that lotto jack­pot? One can hope I guess.

PS. Here’s what Google Trends have to say in terms of the pop­u­lar­ity in search of the key­words: desk­tops, lap­tops and notebooks.