Last fall I bought a 13-inch unibody MacBook, and I fell in love. For the last seven months I’ve been head-over-heels with the machine. But now there’s a new love in my life: a brand new 13-inch MacBook Pro, which is shaping up to be the perfect laptop.

Released last week, Apple’s MacBook Pro 13″ is an amazing machine. It’s priced as a starter, but it’s now truly a “Pro” laptop. It’s worthy of real work. It adds many of the “Pro” features previously reserved for its higher-end siblings, but costs hundreds of dollars less.

It now has an awesome, all-day battery; a bright, energy-sipping screen; and a backlit keyboard. Firewire is back, and there’s an indispensible SD Card slot. And yet it starts at just $1,200. For a computer of this quality and power, that’s a steal.

Full review after the jump, including real-world benchmarks and tons of pics.

This mini Time Capsule Candle is the handiwork of a Japanese Apple fan, and, as far as we can figure out with google translate, was cast from two aluminum shells.

Not quite a DIY for dummies project, but love the end result. Burning your candle at one end never looked so good.

Via Blog! Nobon

Language app iLingua is keeping down prices for summer, one dictionary/phrase book will set you back $1.99 on iTunes.

The Spanish language demo looks promising: words or phrases have images to make connecting the dots easy. The woman speaks very slowly, which is good for learning, thought it may sound a little silly if you cow out and just play a phrase like, “Hey this room is way too small” to a native speaker.

Background music on a loop is distracting and makes the sounds harder to hear, not clear whether you can turn that off or it’s just a demo thing.

Available in Russian, German, Chinese (Mandarin) and Japanese — would’ve loved to have this for last year’s trip to Shanghai, where trying to get a restaurant reservation from the concierge (in what seemed slow, careful English) elicited nervous laughter and frustration all around…
We’ve written about using language/dictionary iPhone apps on the job —  have you used one traveling?

A new Mac Trojan has been spotted “in the wild” on a porno website, prompting a wave of misleading and inaccurate Mac malware stories.

A Trojan named OSX/Jahlav-C has been spotted on a porno website (xhottube.net), the British security group Sophos said on Friday.

In a blog post about the virus, Sophos also mentioned an update to an email worm called OSX/Tored-A, which has prompted news organizations to warn of renewed malware attacks against Macs.

But only the OSX/Jahlav-C is in the wild, and even Sophos described the OSX/Tored-A as “lame.”

The new OSX/Jahlav-C Trojan infects Macs when visitors to the “hardcore” porno website try to watch the site’s main video. They are prompted to download a “missing Video ActiveX Object” but are infected with the OSX/Jahlav-C Trojan instead, says Sophos.

The social engineering here isn’t very sophisticated — ActiveX is associated with Windows. In addition, it’s unclear what the OSX/Jahlav-C Trojan actually does. Sophos says “it will eventually run a Perl script that uses http to communicate with a remote website and download code supplied by the attacker.”

What that code does, Sophos doesn’t say. Apparently, it hasn’t executed the Perl script yet. Sophos rates the Trojan as low to medium risk.

“Although there is only a tiny amount of Mac malware compared to Windows viruses, that’s going to be little consolation if your gorgeous new MacBook gets infected,” said a sarcastic post on the company blog. “And sadly we know that many Mac users still believe they are somehow magically immune from attacks.”

The company made a condescending video demonstrating the attack (posted after the jump) — “Is it safe to surf for porn on an Apple Mac?”

UPDATE: ParetoLogic, a Canadian anti-virus company, is also warning about OSX/Jahlav-C. The Trojan is associated with PornTube, says MacNN.

UPDATE 2: Reader Scam Finder says the Trojan doesn’t exist on the xhottube site. Scam Finder tried to purposely infect his Mac but failed. See the comment below.

Safari 4 has been downloaded 11 million times is the first three days of release, Apple said in a press release on Friday — and 6 million of those were on Windows. There’s more Windows users running Apple’s  browser than Mac users.

Eleven million downloads in three days is quite impressive, but not a record. In June last year, Mozilla set a Guinness World Record with 8 million downloads of Firefox 3 in one day — the most downloaded software in 24 hours.

Apple claims Safari 4 is the fastest, most innovative browser available (It executes JavaScript nearly 8x faster than IE 8 and loads HTML web pages more than 3x faster than IE 8, Apple claims).

The browser will get better with the release of Snow Leopard in September. Says Apple:

“In Mac OS X Snow Leopard, available later this year, Safari runs as a 64-bit application, boosting the performance of the Nitro JavaScript engine by up to 50 percent. Snow Leopard makes Safari more resistant to crashes by running plug-ins in a separate process, so even if a plug-in crashes, Safari continues to run and the user simply has to reload the affected page. Safari running on Snow Leopard also delivers HTTP streaming, making it easy to deliver high-quality audio and video in industry standard formats from any web server without the need for browser plug-ins.”

Safari 4 was officially launched on Monday at WWDC, but had been widely available for months as a beta.

Despite the great hue and cry that arose Monday in the wake of the news that AT&T will not be among the 22 worldwide carriers to support tethering when iPhone 3.0 debuts, a wonderfully snarky how-to from 9to5 Mac spells out step-by-step instructions for getting your tether on today, for free, regardless of whether AT&T wants you to, without jailbreaking your iPhone.

In fact, the process only works with un-jailbroken iPhones legitimately registered for service with AT&T in the US.

Two important things you need to be aware of before you consider sticking it to the AT&T man:

1. You have to be running iPhone OS 3.0, which, obviously, has not been released officially but which is widely available if you know where to look. A very good place to start would be right here.

2. You have to be running the very first pre-release version of iTunes 8.2, which is more difficult to get ahold of but, depending on just how deep your enmity for AT&T runs, is also out there hiding in plain view.

Beyond that, it’s just a matter of refusing to accept the proposition that you can’t do anything you want to do with something you’ve bought and paid for just because a couple major corporations don’t want you to feel so empowered.

As with anything satisfying in Life, there are risks, but to those who are willing to bear them go the richest rewards.

See 9to5 Mac for further details.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7uhO3bM6jw

Apple hired Academy Award-nominated director David Fincher (Seven, Fight Club and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) to show off the latest iPhone in its TV ad debut.

Titled “break in,” (a nod to how most folks got iPhone video capability before the 3S?) the 30-second spot highlights the video angle and hints at other “amazing new features.”

Via Slashfilm

It looks like somebody may have purposely arranged these two magazines in a retail rack to make a point, but credit Flickr user Nep Smith for ferreting out an interesting symbiosis between issues of PC World and Macworld back in October of 2006.

Given the growth Apple has seen since then, it would appear plenty of others may have noticed the writing on the wall as well.

The “sealed” battery in Apple’s new 13-inch MacBook Pro is easily replaced with standard screwdrivers, a teardown by iFixit shows.

The MacBook battery is not supposed to be changed by the user. Sealed inside the case, Apple encourages customers to pay Apple $130 to change the battery and dispose of the old one.

However, the battery is easily accessed with a standard Phillips screwdriver, and the battery removed with a tri-wing screwdriver, iFixit found when dissassmbling the device on Tuesday.

In addition, iFixit notes that the single audio jack (see post below) is innapropriate for a “Pro” machine. The jack supports analog and digital audio-out, and analog audio-in, but not digital audio-in.

“If you need digital audio-in, this is not the machine for you.” said iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens in an email.

Wiens also said the MBP’s new SD card slot is “rather unimaginative.”

“Half the card hangs outside the computer,” said Wiens. “Apparently, Apple couldn’t free up enough space for a slot that would make the card completely captive.”

Wiens notes the battery is beefier (360 grams, about 60 grams heavier than the old one), but is rated 60 Watt-hours, compared to the older battery’s 45 W-h. Apple claims the battery will last for 7 hours. The previous MacBook’s battery was rated 5 hours (yeah, right!)

More details and pictures from iFixit after the jump.

If you haven’t seen the latest Star Trek movie yet, or if you’re interested in rocking a genuine Trek look on your iPhone or iPod Touch anyhow, you will seriously want to consider picking up Talkndog’s super-cool 99¢ Star Radio Communicator (App Store link) app.

Its trillium mesh cover flips out and animates open with a flick of the wrist, exposing the communicator interface. The opening action is accompanied by the familiar “chirping” sound known to old-school Trekkies the world over. Under the mesh antenna “cover” you get a hypnotic spinning black-and-white spiral, with three blinking colored lights and two metal buttons below. One button actually loads a working retro-modern iPhone dialer, complete with sounds that will make you think you’re punching in a star date.

[iPhoneSavior]

What goes around comes around: a ring of disk jockeys have been charged with running a six-figure iTunes scam.
Nine British djs allegedly used 1,500 stolen or cloned credit cards to buy their own tracks to the tune of £500,000 (USD $815,000). They were paid £185,000 (USD $300,000) in royalties before getting caught.

The fake buys also boosted them up higher in the iTunes sales rankings, generating further buzz and more royalties. It all started in September, when the DJs used American music distributor TuneCore to get their music on iTunes.

The scam played out with the police in London in New York about three months later after Apple got hit with ‘stop payment’ orders from credit card companies, saying accounts were fraudulent.

The DJs, ages 19 to 41, were arrested in London and the Midlands on suspicion of conspiracy to commit fraud and money laundering.

Via Metro UK

It’s official — Steve Jobs will be back to work as planned at the end of June.

Speaking at WWDC, Apple’s top marketing executive, Phil Schiller, reiterated the company’s line that Jobs will be returning to Apple at the end of this month after six month’s medical leave.

“That’s still our statement,” said Schiller, who is Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing.

As one of Apple’s top executives, Schiller’s word is as good as gospel.

It’s not the first time the company has said Jobs will returning to work in June. At Apple’s annual shareholders’ meeting in late February, the company said he planned to return to work this month.

Meanwhile, Jobs has been deeply involved in the company even while on leave.

“These products have been in development for a while, so of course Steve has been very involved in them all along,” said Schiller. “You could say that Steve has stayed on top of some of the key strategic things at Apple throughout [his leave].”

Jobs unexpectedly took medical leave in January, saying his declining health was “more complex” that previously believed. He said at the time he would be returning in June, but his rapid weight loss in 2008 and various conflicting statements about his health has led many to be pessimistic about his prospects of returning to work.

Link: Daily Telegraph.

T-Mobile.nl has posted specs for the iPhone 3GS that indicate Apple’s new 16GB and 32GB mobile devices will sport 600 MHz processors and carry 256MB of RAM when they hit the market later this month.

Current iPhones operate with a 412 MHz chip and have but 128 MB of RAM, so it would appear the new models will be equipped to fulfill the promises of a much faster, snappier UI that Apple made in introducing the phones Monday at WWDC in San Francisco.

The company has given developers at WWDC few details about the guts of the new models, but they are believed to run a new PowerVR SGX graphics processing unit which provides support for OpenGL ES 2.0., which is good news for users, though it could cause headaches for developers who want their apps to be backward compatible with original iPhones and 3G models introduced in 2008.

Stay tuned for the inevitable iFixit teardown shortly after the phones are released to find out what’s really underneath that oil-resistant glass.

UPDATE: The security lock on this device does not block the SuperDrive. See our review

Eagle-eyed reader Ronald Kang thinks the new 13-inch MacBook Pro may have some design problems.

Poring over pictures of the machine on Apple’s website, Kang is worried about two things: the Kensington Security Slot blocking the Superdrive; and the single audio I/O jack, which makes the machine unsuitable for “Pro” audio recording.

You have to love the guys at iFixit. No sooner does Apple release new hardware into the wild than those guys are all over it with their Phillips #0, Spudger and Tri-wing screwdrivers like so many buzzards on a fresh carcass in the desert.

As we post, they are liveblogging their tear-down of a new 13″ MacBook Pro. If you’re enthralled by computer innards and don’t get queasy at the sight of silicon, you’ll want to head on over for a look-see.

Apple has cut the price on previous-generation notebook computers buy hundreds of dollars, looking to get rid of end-of-life stock before the arrival of new machines for retail distribution later this month.

13-inch MacBook prices have been slashed by $100 to $300, previous-generation MacBook Airs by $400 to $800, and previous-generation MacBook Pros by $400 to $500, though not all Apple Stores may have all models in stock at the discounted prices.

In all, nine previous Mac notebook configurations are being offered with end-of-life pricing.

If you don’t happen to live near an Apple retail store, see this handy online price guide (scroll down to see end-of-life pricing on discontinued models).

Reports indicate that even the new notebooks may be had at significant discounts to Apple’s announced pricing at resellers such as ClubMac, which is offering online retailer’s rebates with special coupons that knock an additional 3% off the cost of the just-announced machines.

[AppleInsider]

My real life, I’m a Mac moment.

So I’m siting on an airplane trying to leave DC yesterday, after three hours on the tarmac, and the flight attendants bringing us “Apple Juice” (really just Jack Daniels), even the most stone-faced folks with their noses in books will get chatty. He tells me where he works, they’re a client, I tell him where I work, and so on.

After take off, he sees me trying to watch Lonesome Dove on my ipod and mentions he has a splitter and did I want to watch a movie on his computer. Sure I say.

Well that’s when the fun starts, his computer takes like 10 minutes to boot, Windows had a hard-crash he says. then when the movie starts, it’s all stuttery and such,we try to watch for like 10 minutes, and finally I mention, hey, you wanna try mine? He says, sure, may as well…

I pull out the 17inch Macbook Pro, like it was the gold artifact in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction, his eyes go wide, I open the lid, it’s on instantly, I’ve got like half a dozen spreadsheets and documents open, it doesn’t matter, I pop the movie in, it starts right up, as a final floursih I produce my remote control, and set it next to him, “You Drive,” I said.

The punchline: My new friend, is a senior executive at Dell.

The Movie, Lakeview Terrace, not so awesome.

My I’m a Mac Moment, Priceless.

Sound off and share your “I’m a Mac Moments” in the comments, I’ll pull them together into a best of post later in the week!

Trust Apple to deliver scintillating graphic evidence of just how revolutionary and amazing its impact is at events such as the Worldwide Developers Conference taking place this week at San Francisco’s Moscone Center West.

The company is drawing raves for the massive ‘hyperwall’ it has erected in the conference hall, made from twenty 30″ Cinema Displays showcasing the icons of 20,000 of the most popular applications on the iTunes App Store. The icons pulse and send a light wave rippling outward every time an app is downloaded from the store, creating a stunning visual depiction of just how in-demand are the services of developers attending the show.

Apple has said 3.000 apps are downloaded every minute and is giving conference attendees quite an eyeful of what that can look like this week.

As a child of 1980s gaming, I’m used to injury from videogames. In my younger days, I got arm pain from too many hours parked in front of the Atari and C64, and even recent years have seen pain caused by ‘too much Space Invaders Extreme DS’ syndrome.

Therefore, although it came as something of a surprise that I’ve now been injured by iPhone gaming, it probably should have been expected. Two days ago, I had rather serious pain at the end of my index finger. Closer inspection showed that the finger surface wasn’t returning to normal when prodded. And the middle finger was also showing symptoms.

Puzzled and in quite a bit of pain, it dawned on me that Flight Control was to blame. Too many hours landing tiny planes on tiny airports caused finger damage reminiscent of my guitaring days. Unfortunately, since I’m British and therefore only have the ability to complain about things in a vaguely sarcastic and satirical fashion, rather than unleash laywers on Apple, Firemint and any current manufactureres of aircraft and videogames (no matter how related), I’ll have to content myself with the fact that Flight Control’s recent update is rather spiffy, rather than rolling around in my underpants on a $100,000,000 out-of-court settlement.

Sebastiaan de With, a Dutch artist from Groningen, The Netherlands goes by the username Icon Designer on Flickr. He’s in San Francisco this week for WWDC and has promised to do a give away on his blog while he’s in town for Apple’s hit developer’s conference.

Definitely a distinctive entry in the ever-popular ‘exploded’ graphic design style.

The latest developer build of Snow Leopard and the iPhone 3.0 OS software (which aqllows tethering) are available on the Bittorrent file-sharing network.

Programmers at WWDC got the latest version of Snow Leopard on a DVD, but now the same build (10a380) is available on Bittorrent. The build is 5.84GB and will require a dual layer DVD burner to install. Apple said on Monday the developer build of Snow Leopard is “near complete,” but will likely see extensive changes between now and September, when it will be officially released.

Likewise, the final version of the iPhone 3.0 OS — which will be available officially next week on June 17 — can be downloaded from the file-sharing networks. And for some inexplicable reason, the software supports tethering.

The 3.0 software can be easily installed via iTunes onto an iPhone or iPod touch. However, users have to download the correct version of the software for their device. That is, the firmware for the original iPhone will not work on the iPhone 3G. The 9to5 website says the software may make it harder to unlock the phone’s SIM. In the comments, the site’s readers report no major problems installing or running the software.

“It works fine,” said one commenter. “You can upgrade your current 2.0 firmware in iTunes and not lose any data – all my apps still work perfectly and the phone has been running fine all day (installed last night), snappier than before even. seem to be losing the cool ‘fade’ action you get when quitting an app a lot of the time though.”

Previous developer builds of the 3.0 software have been available on Bittorrent for some time, but installing it required registering the device’s ID through a developer’s account. The latest OS build however does not require device registration, and is said to the same software that will be officially available next week.

NOTE: Only a desperate freak installs dodgy software off the internet onto their cell phone just a week before getting it officially, and for free. Proceed at your own risk.

One day after Apple’s triumphant WWDC, angry iPhone users are burning up Twitter with invective aimed at AT&T.

Twitter users are complaining in their thousands about the ways AT&T has dropped the ball: no iPhone 3G S subsidy for current iPhone customers; and no support for important new features like MMS and tethering when the new iPhone launches on June 19.

The #attfail hashtag is attracting many of the complaints about missing features and upgrades, as is the #iphone3gs hashtag, and AT&T’s official corporate account. Hundreds of complaints are being sent directly to the account, and there appears to be no messages at all defending the company.

Meanwile, a pair of Twitter petitions, or “twititions,” are hoping to pressure AT&T and 02, the UK iPhone carrier, to offer “reasonable upgrade prices” for current iPhone 3G customers.

The O2 twitition has attracted about 2,500 signatures by Tuesday afternoon (PST), and the AT&T twitition about 1,500. The AT&T twitition was started later in the day, but both are spreading fast through retweets.

The latest iPod shuffle is arguably too small to need a case to keep it from harm, but the folks at Scosche devised a case with external controls — so you can plug in other headphones instead of relying on the originals.

Available in black or white in early July,  tapStick slips over the iPod and, though the design doesn’t do much justice to the original, it allows you to control the device sans headphones. Tapstick also comes with a three-foot aux cord, for playlist goodness in the car.

It’ll set you back $30 from Scosche.

Via Coolest Gadgets

An Arizona man with a video business wonders whether  indiscreet Tweets cost him a Mac Book Pro,  plus monitors and printer while on vacation.

“My wife thinks it could be a random thing, but I just have my suspicions,” Israel Hyman told the AP. “They didn’t take any of our normal consumer electronics.”

While he and his wife were on a trip to Kansas City, Hyman sent updates to around 2,000 followers on Twitter.

The timely thieves left behind an Xbox 360, a Wii and, fortunately, the Drobo where his Time Machine backup was housed. His later tweets note that they also left  a “too old” Macbook Pro behind — well, at least he has something to work on while police search for the criminals.

It’s hard to know police will be able to pin the crime to Twitter but keeping schtum about going on vacation — whether digitally or verbally — is kind of common sense.

What’s your social media vacation policy?

Outside of the iPhone brouhaha, much of the buzz at WWDC today has been about whether the system-level support for Microsoft Exchange e-mail and calendaring in OS X Snow Leopard and various encryption options for Mac and iPhone would finally allow Apple to make serious in-roads in corporate America. Well, at least if corporate IT guys will give them a chance, that is.

In spite of Lonnie’s optimism, I think Apple is just as far today from mainstream adoption in big business as it was yesterday and pretty much every day of its entire history. As I’ve written before, the Steves founded Apple in large part because they thought that the IBMs and HPs of the world were holding back the potential of computers to transform our society.

Consequently, the organization’s entire self-image and frame of reference over time has been that big business is all too willing to adopt mediocre technologies based solely on a reputation for reliability. Macs have long provided superior tools for creative endeavors like graphic design and video editing, which is why Macs have a huge niche in corporate marketing departments, but the same can’t be said for other business pursuits.

Apple has a huge opportunity right now to make serious in-roads in the enterprise market while corporations resist upgrading to Windows Vista and don’t yet know whether or not they can trust Windows 7. But Apple won’t make big gains unless they take more drastic measures, three of which I outline below. Bear in mind, I’m not saying this is what Apple should do, just that this is what it would take to succeed in business.

Start making cheap computers with standardized parts.From the early 1990s until the sale to Lenovo, IBM’s ThinkPad line of notebooks defined the look, feel and attitude of computers for business. They were black, rugged, and nearly identical in industrial design. A machine from 1999 looked pretty much the same as one from 2003. Corporate IT managers loved ThinkPads because people generally couldn’t tell if their co-workers had a newer or better machine than theirs — the exterior was always a constant. All that, and frequently replaced parts like batteries and power supplies were common across the decade. If it worked on one, it worked on another.

Recent years have seen the trend that IBM began extrapolated upon in the corporate market. These days, it’s not just that corporations prefer to buy identical machines for employees at all levels — they’ve also chopped their budgets for PCs dramatically while increasing spending on servers and data centers. And that means that low-cost strategy players like Dell and HP are winning with large-screen machines for less than $500 (or significantly less at large volumes). If Apple wants to even think about competing, it would need to get cheap quickly and make compromises that the company has diligently avoided over the years. And do you really think business wants a line-up of laptops without replaceable batteries? Not in this galaxy.