#macbook

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. [↩]

MacBook Air

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Steve Jobs presents the Macbook Air at Macworld 2008 in San Francisco, CA
Photo from Gizmodo

From Cuper­tino, CA. Weigh­ing at 3.0 lbs, 0.16–0.76 inches… 13.3″ dis­play w/ a full-size and back­lit key­board; being pow­ered by 1.6GHz Core2Duo, 2GB of mem­ory and 80GB HDD; not to men­tion 802.11n Wi-Fi…

Mac­book Air

Sell­ing for $1,799 w/o a CD/DVD-drive though?!?! Don’t know about that part. Size is great if you travel a lot and don’t care about the CD/DVD-drive not being there. That or you have money to burn.

I rather spend an extra 3-bills for another Mac­book Pro per­son­ally if I’m going to pay that much.

So What’s New In May?

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Hey, hey, hey. May 1st has come and gone and those who have promised them­selves to Reboot were either suc­cess­ful, or behind. One of the sites I’m curi­ously await­ing to check out is Bryan Veloso’s new ren­di­tion of Aval­on­Star.

So what the heck am I doing this early in the morn­ing? I can’t damn sleep, and have been try­ing to fig­ure out how to orga­nize my shiznit a bit bet­ter. I have too much stuff going on (as usual), and need to com­plete tasks I have set in my to-do list. But it seems that that list just keeps get­ting big­ger and wider (in terms of those URL-bookmarks).

Any­ways, just wanted to catch-up with this writing-thingy-majig. Maybe some­one out there can help orga­nize things with some cool advise and/or refer­ral gift =)

Speak­ing of which, here’s some cool things that have inter­ested me in the past cou­ple of days:

  • Mac­Book Pro — yeah, I’m a “switch-hitter” now
  • Text­Mate Basic Tuto­ri­als — this will prob­a­bly change my devel­op­ment work­flow for work and on-the-side
  • Com­pil­ing new “points of inspi­ra­tion” from the Reboot-ed sites, new and old
  • … and the list goes on—but it seems that I should be catch­ing some Zs now as I hear some people’s alarm clock going off; at least I think I’m hear­ing it

From my mind to yours, keep learning.

Quick News on iPods, the Web and on the Streets

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Today was the first day of the Apple Expo in Europe, Paris to be exact. I was hop­ing that Steve Jobs would be announc­ing the new “Core 2 Duo”-based Mac­books. But alas, that spec­u­la­tion wasn’t even close.

His announce­ment weighed more heav­ily in the release of prod­ucts from the iPod fam­ily, then the release of iTunes 7. Here’s the break­down of the new fea­tures per iPod fam­ily member:

iPod:

  • 60% brighter display
  • 75% longer video bat­tery life
  • Gap­less playback
  • Excit­ing new games
  • Search and Quick Scrolling
  • New head­phones
  • $249 for 30GB
  • $349 for 80GB

iPod Nano, 2nd Gen­er­a­tion:

  • Made of thin­ner aluminum
  • Col­ors of blue, pink, green, sil­ver and black
  • 40% brighter display
  • 24 hour bat­tery life
  • Gap­less playback
  • Search and Quick Scrolling
  • New head­phones
  • $149 for 2GB (sil­ver), $199 for 4GB (blue, pink, green and sil­ver) and $249 for 8GB (black)

iPod Shuf­fle, 2nd Gen­er­a­tion:

  • World’s small­est MP3 player
  • Alu­minum case with clip
  • 1GB — up to 240 songs
  • 12 hour bat­tery life
  • USB 2.0
  • Dock & ear­buds included
  • $79

I’m eye­ing that Shuf­fle for $79. Seems rea­son­able and func­tional if you play sports; espe­cially when you run a lot.

Any­ways, besides Mr. Jobs announce­ment, a cou­ple of the MA folks and I will be attend­ing Car­son Workshop’s Sum­mit: The Future of Web Apps tomor­row and Thurs­day. Should be some inter­est­ing and excit­ing time. It’s just too bad I don’t have a Mac­book (yet) so I can look as cool as those tech­f­reaks attend­ing. Oh well, I hope this Dell Lat­i­tude loaner can do the job of writ­ing notes and check­ing email.

The Future of Web Apps

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.