MacBook Pro - page 74

A terse entry from the sometimes reliable Digitimes might spell bad news for MacBook owners waiting for an imminent hardware refresh: Intel is having a hard time meeting demand for their latest Core i3, i5 and i7 processors, the most likely CPU candidates for the next iteration of Cupertino’s laptop line.

It all comes down to Acer. Apparently, the Windows laptop maker was so optimistic about consumer demand for Intel’s latest processors that they made an abnormally large order, slurping up practically every batch spit out of the assembly line. This has caused Intel to prioritize delivery of the remaining chips to major clients.

The question is: is Apple still considered a major client for Intel? Intel and Apple simply aren’t as close as they were two years ago, mostly due to Apple’s GPU partnership with NVIDIA: now, with Apple getting into chip development of its own, Intel may well see the writing on the wall… Apple’s an up-and-coming competitor.

UPDATE: Seth at 9to5Mac is now backtracking. While he says he’s received multiple tips that Mac Pros will be updated, he thinks the MacBook Pros tip might have been fake. “Shame on us,” he says.

Our friend Seth Weintraub at 9to5Mac thinks MacBooks and Mac Pros will be updated within a week. Seth received a tip that Apple’s pro desktop and portable line are being refreshed in the next few days — maybe as early as tomorrow, but more likely next Tuesday.

A refresh of the Mac Pros is already widely-rumored. The desktops are expected to be refreshed next week with the Intel Core i7-980x, a six-core screamer. But maybe new MacBooks are in line also? The new MacBook Pros will get Intel i5 and i7 processors, just like the current line of higher-end iMacs. The basic 13-inch MacBook Pro will have an Intel i5 processor, while the 15-inch and 17-inch MacBooks will have quad-core i7 processors.

If true, these machines will be screamers.

In February, MacRumors readers claimed to have found a GeekBench benchmark from a Core-i7  M620 MacBook Pro running an unreleased version of Mac OS 10.6.2. Current MacBook Pros score in the 3700-4000 range. However, this result is to be taken with a very large pinch of salt: forum readers say they’ve been planting fakes.

Either way, DO NOT BUY A MacBook Pro or Mac Pro for a while: updates are imminent.

Office for Mac isn’t exactly a software suite most Apple fans pick up unless they absolutely have to, but if you don’t mind compromising your integrity a little bit, you can pimp Office on Twitter a little bit and automatically enter yourself into a drawing to win one of two 2.53GHz, 15-inch MacBook Pros.

All you need to do is either follow officeformac on Twitter, or retweet @officeformac while including the #officeformac hashtag. With a little bit of luck, you’ll win one of the garishly repainted, Office-branded MacBook Pros.

Unfortunately, it’s only open to residents of the US or Canada, which means Microsoft is missing a golden opportunity to bribe at least this Germany-based Apple blogger into saying some good things about their products. If you’re interested, you better get moving: the give-away ends on Thursday.

[via TUAW]

In the competitive rush to win over students and parents by providing the latest technology, one university is letting freshmen decide between an iPad and MacBook Pro.

First-year students at George Fox University in Oregon have been handed personal computers along with their orientation packets for the last 20 years. The devices are included with tuition.

School officials admit they don’t know how much help an iPad will be for trig or anthropology homework.

“The trend in higher education computing is this concept of mobility, and this fits right in,” Greg Smith,  the university’s chief information officer, said in a press release.

“At the same time, we realize there are a number of uncertainties. Will students struggle with a virtual keyboard? Can the iPad do everything students need it to do when it comes to their college education? These are the kinds of questions we really won’t know the answer to until we get started.”

So the school will offer both in fall 2010. Some majors, like film or engineering, may need the extra power from a MacBook pro. But the school also reckons that if the student already has a laptop, an iPad might just be the ticket.

“How the numbers work out will be interesting, but no matter what I think we will see many iPads, iPhones and iTouches throughout the undergraduate population,” Smith said.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the iRush to get students involved with the iPad before it even comes out — tech-happy Abilene Christian University, where the students already go to iPhone dev classes and have been given iPod Touches since 2008, is already working on an edition of the school paper for Apple’s latest device.

The newly released Breathe Sleeve has been cleverly designed to let the heat produced by your laptop radiate through the ventilated walls of the sleeve. And heat, as we know, can be very detrimental to the life of our laptop battery.

The Tom Bihn Checkpoint Flyer bag is designed specifically to get your MacBook through an airport security screening.

No more pulling out your MacBook and putting it in a plastic bin. With the Checkpoint Flyer, you can leave your MacBook inside the bag and breeze through the X-ray machine.

How? The Tom Bihn Checkpoint Flyer is a fold-out, “Checkpoint-Friendly” design, approved by the Transportation Security Administration.

The bag has three compartments designed to be folded flat on an X-ray scanner bed. Laid flat, the bag gives the X-ray operator a clear view of the MacBook and anything else inside the bag. There are no pockets or metal components to block the screener’s view. Pretty cool!

Note: It’s Bag Week on CultofMac.com. We’re checking out some of the latest and greatest bags on the market. Read all the bag reviews here.

Esquire magazine has a marvelous profile of film critic Roger Ebert, who has lost his lower jaw and voice box after several years of cancer treatments.

Having lost the ability to speak, Ebert is pouring himself into writing instead.

His astonishing online journal runs to more than 500,000 words on topics as disparate as his life, the afterlife (none-he’s atheist), alcoholism, travel, books, and friends, living and dead.

To communicate in everyday life, Ebert uses text-to-speech on his MacBook Pro, Stephen Hawking-style.

A few months ago we reviewed Osprey’s Flap Jack Courier laptop bag, and it scored a pristine five-turtleneck rating.

Well, turns out they actually come in two flavors, and we decided to put the Courier’s big brother — the Flap Jack Pack — through the Cult’s rigorous, uncompromising bag-testing procedures. The result was a demonstration of how applying the exact same design elements to a slightly different application can change things.

The Brenthaven MacBook Messenger bag allows you, the customer, to design your own messenger bag. You can choose from more than ten designs to personalize the front flap.

Wait, it gets better.

You get two different designs, one for each side of the flap. Allowing you to change sides depending on your outfit! It’s almost like getting two bags for the price of one ($129.95). The bags fit the 13-inch MacBook Pro and 15-inch MacBook Pro.

Note: It’s Bag Week on CultofMac.com. We’re checking out some of the latest and greatest bags on the market. Read all the bag reviews here.

Gelaskins has teamed up with National Geographic to produce a new line of stunning, nature-themed MacBook and iPhone covers.

Priced between $14.95 and $29.95 depending on device, the covers showcase photos of cute baby seals, weirdly-colored snails and trippy space nebula.

More info at the Gelaskins website.

More pictures after the jump.

I’ve been a long-time user of messenger bags, ever since I was a bike courier here in San Francisco in the mid-1990s. I’ve been though a few of them, including an original Zo bag, but one of the best I’ve used is the Large Messenger Bag from Incase.

Note: It’s Bag Week on CultofMac.com. We’re checking out some of the latest and greatest bags on the market. Read all the bag reviews here.

I love the latest Horseman laptop bag from Crumpler.

The best thing about Crumpler’s Horseman Bag is its size, which I think is optimum for a messenger/laptop bag. I have owned messenger bags that are too big, really just a huge cavernous void for your stuff to rattle and roll around in.

The other end of the spectrum are bags that are too small, which I personally think look a little on the feminine side on a fully-grown man. Not The Horseman though.

Note: It’s Bag Week on CultofMac.com. We’re checking out some of the latest and greatest bags on the market. Read all the bag reviews here.

For the ultimate wow factor, bring the Knomo Bristol laptop bag to your next meeting or job interview. This well-made leather laptop bag is the ultimate accessory for white-collar workers.

The Bristol looks professional and so will you. Sold at Apple’s retail stores, this $150.00 bag is from Knomo, a posh new company from the West End of London.

Founded in 2004,  Knomo’s mission is to make accesories that are as stylish as they are functional. With the Bristol bag they’ve outdone themselves.

Note: It’s Bag Week on CultofMac.com. We’re checking out some of the latest and greatest bags on the market. Read all the bag reviews here.

I must admit I love the BBP Hybrid Hampton bag, possibly my favorite of the year, in terms of style at least.

BBP’S Hybrid Hampton is the company’s flagship laptop bag featuring the Bak2Pak system that converts from a backback to a messenger bag in no time at all.

I’ve been on the lookout for a bag that is cool enough to be hip ‘with the kids’ while grown-up enough to take to business meetings without feeling like mutton dressed as lamb. And this bag is what I’ve been waiting for.

Note: It’s Bag Week on CultofMac.com. We’re checking out some of the latest and greatest bags on the market. Read all the bag reviews here.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2010 — You’ve probably seen the late pitchman Billy Mays on late-night TV smashing his hand with hammer while it’s wrapped in Impact Gel — a super cushioning material used for insoles.

In fact, Impact Gel was featured in the first episode of PitchMen, the Discovery Channel show featuring Mays and his partner Anthony Sullivan.

Now, Impact Gel is being used to make a laptop sleeve that can be hit with a hammer and dropped without damaging the contents.

Primate Labs’ Geekbench is a tiny little benchmarking application with one really neat funcitonality: run it on your system and it’ll upload the results to their servers, allowing users to easily compare benchmark scores across computers to inform their next purchasing decision.

That’s swell, but hardly news in and of itself… except that over the weekend, someone downloaded the GeekBench app and ran it on a system referring to itself as a MacBookPro6,1, the commonly acknowledged successor to the current MacBook Pro line. Oh, and it’s packing an Intel Core i7 M processor.

Is this the best MacBook vinyl sticker mod yet?

“I made this the other day for an Apple fan, a BIG Apple fan,” says its creator, JiroBot, otherwise known as New Yorker Jiro Baskin.

Compare to the clever Snow White mod and the equally witty Carmen Miranda mod (hit the jump).

Still, Steve gets my vote. Anyone seen its rival?

Thanks Seth J.

A recent Intel contest ad “confirming” a forthcoming transition to Intel’s new Core i5 mobile chips for the MacBook Pro had all the hallmarks of a corporate gaffe…. and so it was. Intel has issued a statement, clarifying that they never meant to use MacBook Pros in the ad in the first place.

According to Spanish site faq-mac.com, which broke the story, Intel has now revised the promotion to give away HP Envy notebooks, which do contain a Core i5 chip, instead of the MacBook Pro. They’ve also apologized for the confusion, blaming the error on a lack of communication from their central marketing agency.

That’s not to say the Core i5 MacBook Pro isn’t likely to be unveiled sometime in the future… as usual, it just goes to show you can’t take a contest entry form as a prophetic glimpse into the future of Apple products.

An archeologically stratal cross-section of the port placement of Apple’s metal-skinned professional line of notebooks over the course of the last decade, courtesy of photographer and Mac enthusiast Robert Donovan. Fireflies dance in the background.

From top to bottom, the notebooks pictured are:

• The 13-inch Unibody MacBook Pro (2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo)

• The 15-inch Titanium PowerBook (400MHz G4)

• The 15-inch Aluminum PowerBook (1.25GHz G4)

• The 15-inch MacBook Pro (2.5GHz Intel Core 2 Duo)

For me, this is morbidly erotic. It’s like four ex-lovers stacked nakedly atop each other, two of whom were dumped for their younger, hotter sisters, one of whom ran off on me because of my drinking problems, and the last so emphysemic from passive smoking that she’s due to cough up a lung any day now… a medical emergency definitely not covered by Apple Care.

For Apple fans abroad, the price discrepancy between between the cost of an Apple computer locally and what it would cost in the States is often enough to justify a flight to the States. In first class. On a chartered Gulfstream jet. Loaded as cargo in the belly of an Anatov An-225.

Fine. I’ll cop to the slightest of exaggerations. But as an American living abroad, paid in dollars but doing business in Euros, the 40% premium on the cost of a new MacBook Pro or iMac is enough, sometimes, to make me want to weep. Apple’s not alone in this: across the board, gadget makers releasing their products in the EU set a MSRP assuming a dollar-to-euro exchange rate of 1 to 1…. even when, in reality, the actual exchange rate is 1 to 1.45. There’s optimistic ways to look at it, of course — commit to buying that new MacBook Pro I have my heart set on for its euro price but in the States, and I get a trip home “for free.” But this is meager comfort: in reality, it often feels like the low prices of gadgets in America and Japan are subsidized by the exorbitant markups people pay for their technology in the rest of the world.

Don’t believe me? Check out this helpful infographic over at CMYPlay, which colorfully and informatively breaks down the price discrepancies between the same model of MacBook Pro over a handful of countries. At the end of the day, the average Brazilian spends enough in local currency for one MacBook Pro that he could pick up two of the same model if he bought it in the States. It’s almost enough to make a native Brazilian woe the day he was born in that bright, sunny paradise of plump, bethonged bikini bottoms.

Click through for the full infographic.

Intel’s decision to marry their new mobile Core i5 and i7 CPUs with integrated graphics has reportedly not gone over well with Apple, who are rumored to be demanding custom-designed chips from Intel for an update to their MacBook and MacBook Pro line of notebooks.

But perhaps there’s another solution. Gizmodo noticed that NVIDIA, maker of the MacBook line’s ubiquitous GeForce 9400M GPU, is now teasing a new notebook technology called Optimus that is supposedly capable of achieving the performance of discrete graphics in a notebook while still delivering great battery life.

It’s probably just scalable performance, but if the Optimus tech is as good as NVIDIA is bragging, it would allow Apple to ditch the substandard switchable GPU configuration of current unibody MacBook Pros, which requires a reboot, to a discrete-only solution, like the earliest MacBook Pros and PowerBooks.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihXtbB-4GWw&feature=player_embedded#

Remember Lily Sussman, the 21-year-old American tourist whose MacBook was shot up by Israeli security?

TheDailyNewsEgypt interviewed Sussman, who explains what happened. She also gives some different views of the destroyed machine. Look what a rifle round does to a MacBook.

If you’re set to automatically grab new updates, you’re likely to notice Apple’s Software Update burbling insistently in your dock for your attention, after Apple released a couple of updates of both their Airport software and the MacBook / MacBook Pro’s EFI.

The Airport Client Update 2009-002 is a routine update, fixing a few routine issues. The update solves the inability to turn the AirPort on or off in some cases after upgrading from Leopard, as well as an occasional loss of network connectivity when using Wake on Demand and the inability to create computer-to-computer networks or share Internet connections on some MacBook, MacBook Pro and Mac Mini computers.

The MacBook and MacBook Pro EFI Update is more interesting, in that with the installation of SuperDrive Firmware Update 3.0, the optical drive of these machines should no longer sound like Cookie Monster trying to chew his way through a sheet of plate glass when waking from sleep or start-up.

As usual, you can either load up Software Update to automatically suck them down and install them (restart required), or you can grab the latest updates from Apple’s support page.

[via TUAW]

Apple likes Intel’s desktop line of Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs well enough to put them in their iMacs, so it makes sense that they would want to avail themselves of Intel’s three new Core i5 and i7 mobile CPUs (codenamed Arrandale) for any forthcoming refresh of the MacBook line. But things may not be that simple.

One way the Arrandale line of processors differs from previous Intel mobile CPUs is that the chips include mandatory integrated graphics. According to the Bright Side of News, Apple’s not interested in that: even the most inexpensive Macs now contain NVIDIA GeForce 9400M GPUs, which offer far superior performance to integrated graphics solutions.

It should be no surprise to anyone that the newest iMacs catapulted to the top of the sales charts when Apple released them in October. But just in case you have any bets going on the matter comes sweet analyst confirmation: Apple computers topped the list of the most popular machines sold at retail in October, according to the NPD Group. Gentlemen, collect your outstanding beers and pony rides.