When you’re galavanting about with your MacBook Air or Pro, it’s important to manage you battery power. It just wouldn’t do to show up for an important meeting or interview with a dead battery, let alone not being able to watch a movie on the airplane, now would it?

Knowing which apps are sucking up the most juice is key to this effort, of course, and OS Mavericks beta makes it severely easy to know which ones are the most power-hungry. That way, you can quit the apps that are using up too much battery in order to leave enough power for the important stuff.

Here’s how it works.

People love to moan about the slimline MagSafe 2 adapter that was launched to match the skinny (current) MacBook Air. It falls out, they say. It’s too easy to knock from its magnet-hole. I’ve never had any trouble with it. In fact, I like it more than the original because not only does it stay firmly in place, but it also snaps in properly in to begin with. I often found the old fat MagSafe would fail to engage, leaving me with a dead battery when I left the house (not that I ever actually leave the house).

Anyhow, you whiners now have something else to waste your money on: the Snuglet.

French antitrust watchdog Autorite de la Concurrence raided Apple offices, wholesalers, and retail stores in France last week as part of an investigation into claims that the Cupertino company carries out anti-competitive practices against third-party retailers by offering consumers better deals through its own stores.

I’ve been exploring for months what the ultimate mobile setup would be — my laptop, tablet, phone and other mobile devices — and now I’m starting to put it together.

There’s no way around it: The Apple, Android and Windows fanboys are all going to hate my conclusions and barbeque my decisions.

Why? Because you’re expected to take sides, for some reason. You’re supposed to be an Apple fanboy and get all your stuff from Apple. Or you’re supposed to be an Apple hater, and denounce everything that the company does.

Objectivity and reason get buried under the vitriol.

I’m not out to help Apple or Google. I’m out to help myself, and get the best mobile experience I possibly can.

My conclusion is that as of right now, no one company can provide the best overall mobile experience by itself anymore — not even Apple. And neither can Google, Samsung or any other company.

So let’s start with the opinions, conclusions and decisions that are going to make the haters hate. 

We were surprised that a new MacBook Pro wasn’t part of Apple’s Mac refreshes at WWDC earlier this month, but if new benchmark tests are anything to go by, it shouldn’t be too long before they’re made available. A new 13-inch model with the latest Intel “Haswell” processor has appeared in Geekbench tests showing slight performance gains over the current generation.

The new Mac Pro has been benchmarked ahead of its release, too.

If you haven’t already watched Apple’s WWDC keynote, it’s probably because you just haven’t found the time. At just under two hours long, it’s not something you can just slip into your day. But you can now watch it at your leisure on any of your electronics devices because Apple just uploaded the entire thing to YouTube.

The  MiniDrive is tiny caddy that lets you hide a microSD card entirely inside the SD card slot on your MacBook Air (or any other Mac with an SD slot). The idea is that you can cheaply add storage to your SSD-equipped Mac.

When I first wrote up the MiniDrive as a news piece, a whole bunch of readers got in contact to tell me how much it sucked, mostly because it didn’t fit properly into the SD slot on their Macs.

My experience has been fine, so I’m putting down those bad experiences to being the first wave of Kickstarter order fulfillments. That’s no excuse, clearly – if you sell something it should work – but I can only review what I have to review. And so I will.

UPDATE: This MiniDrive has nothing to do with the Nifty Minidrive I saw at CES. Sorry for any confusion.

Auto background app updating isn’t just for iOS 7 — a brand new pane in System Preferences has been added to take care of App Store update settings. The big news? Auto updates in the background.

This time ’round on CultCast: iOS 7 debuts to a standing ovation, but some aren’t in love; OS X 10.9 Mavericks will have you rewatching Top Gun, we’ll highlight the new features; new MacBook Airs get insanely long battery life and more power; and Apple resurrects the rumored Mac Pro to uproarious applause—it’s our complete WWDC coverage on this very special episode of the CultCast.

Join us as we review all the great stuff Apple announced in the glorious 90-minute event know as WWDC. Stream or download new and past episodes on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing now on iTunes, or hit play below and let the good times roll.

Show notes up next.

OS X Mavericks has some crazy new power-saving technologies, as demoed yesterday at the WWDC Keynote. Most of these are system-based: the OS stops wasting CPU cycles running animations that are hidden behind another window, for example. But some, like this neat addition to the battery menu, are about advising the user what’s sucking the juice.