Steve Jobs and company introduced us to a bevy of new products today, and though it’s not hard to find pictures of them all over the web and at the Apple website, for your convenience we’ve gathered some images here.
Click through the thumbnails for larger images.
The gathering of the tribe has begun at Apple HQ in Cupertino this morning, where, in 30 minutes or so, the company will turn the spotlight on its line of notebook computers. I’ll be updating this post with relevant details of the pronouncements from the Town Hall stage during the event, so refresh the post to keep in the news and check back later today for Cult of Mac reaction to and analysis of all the new gear.
The Apple Store has gone off-line in preparation for the stocking of new inventory; no doubt the company’s server array will get a workout in the next 24 hours.
Follow the news after the jump.
Pictures: Fantasic mockups by Miguel Surez
This is guesswork, but here’s the likely feature list of the new MacBooks due October 14:
* Penryn Core 2 Duo chips: 2.4GHz, 2.66GHz, 2.8GHz, and 3.06GHz.
* 2GB of RAM (MacBook); 4GB of RAM (MacBook Pro).
* Hard drives: 160GB — 320GB.
* Glossy widescreen TFT screens. On the MacBook: 13.3-inch (1,280×800 resolution); MacBook Pro: 13.8-inch (1,366×768).
* Integrated NVIDIA graphics system.
* New, all-aluminum enclosures, white, black and silver. (Would love to see multiple colors, but think its unlikely — it’s an inventory nightmare, especially for high-priced products).
* Enclosure is tapered: very thin at the sides, thicker inthe middle, like the iPhone 3G and MacBook Air.
* Magnetic lid latch on all models (replacing mechanical clasps on the MacBook Pro).
* All ports on left side — including FireWire 800.
* Slot-loading optical drive on right (no Blu-ray).
* Extra-large battery pack running full width of computer at the front, under the touchpad.
* Recessed keypad like MacBook Air. Keys are Chicklet style on MacBooks, black and backlight on Pros.
* Price: Starting at $800. This is the mysterious “product transition” that Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer said in July would impact Apple’s gross margins.
“We will be delivering state-of-the-art new products that I cannot discuss today that our competitors will not be able to match,” Oppenheimer said during the Q308 conference call.
The Apple Blogotubes are a-buzz with boffo Interblag bloviating at a rumor from 9to5mac.com that Apple’s rumored “Brick” product was actually a nickname for a new manufacturing process that will use “lasers and jets of water to carve the MacBooks out of a brick of aluminum.” More, it’s a “game-changer;” “totally revolutionary;” “Apple’s biggest innovation in a decade.”
…Yeah, maybe not.
As Adam Richardson, an industrial designer at consultancy frog design and CNet blogger, points out, lasers and waterjets have been used in manufacturing for ages — by Apple.
The glowing LED that appears behind a “solid” front face of the MacBooks is apparently achieved with laser-cutting to thin out and partially perforate the wall in that one area.
Richardson also speculates that the existing iPod Shuffle is manufactured using a similar process, and even the MacBook Air has some telltale signs that it draws on really interesting and unusual manufacturing techniques. But would Apple actually carve an entire laptop out of one block of aluminum? And would it save any money?
On such a small product this is do-able. On a large product like a laptop this would typically result in a massive amount of waste (so kiss your green credentials goodbye). And the notion that this is somehow cheaper than stamping thin sheets or molding plastic is completely wrong – it’s much more expensive.
Yeah… no.
I’ve been talking with other industrial designers about this issue, and they all agree that the reasoning behind the current Brick rumor doesn’t add up. One friend of mine guessed it would add up to $50 in manufacturing costs and might not be any stronger or lighter than more traditional manufacturing approaches.
Does Apple have a game-changing laptop in the wings that will reinvent the MacBook and MacBook Pro design language? For their sake, they’d better. Will it be milled from a single block of aluminum? Not in this lifetime.
Everybody say: “Ohhhhh.”
It’s tiny. It runs Leopard 10.5.2. 80GB. 1GB. 1.6GHz Atom. Niiiiice.
This little MacBook Mini is just what many, many people have been hoping for (myself included).
Shame it’s not real.
Nitrozac is an artist and co-founder of GeekCulture, a high-tech humor web site, thriving online community and, according to the artist, purveyor of fine propeller beanies. She says she’s always wanted to take contemporary technology subjects and render them in old style media, and has been offering her acrylic and oil paintings on canvas by auction since December 2007. “I love working with digital images on my Mac, but there is something extremely satisfying about creating with paint and a canvas,” she adds, and describes her paintings as “based on my work at the The Joy of Tech. The subject matter will usually be geeky and techy; the people, places, and things that make up geek culture.”
Her latest work is titled, “The Introduction,” a painting of Steve Jobs unveiling the MacBook Air at Macworld 2008, shown above. Click through in the gallery below to see some of her past work.
MacBook update fever has the Mac community in its grip, and everyone’s talking about or leaking images of possible new MacBook designs.
But what about the growing threat of so-called “netbooks”? Those tiny, cheap machines pioneered by Asus and now on offer from pretty much every PC manufacturer around.
ZDNet wonders if Apple will make something similar, or, more likely, reduce its MacBook prices to compete. (I don’t think that’s very likely, but anyway.)
The Apple Gazette declares a resounding no, saying that the netbooks are not affecting MacBook sales anyway. They are reducing sales of more expensive non-Apple Windows laptops, but not hitting Apple products that hard at all.
I’m inclined to go along with the Gazette’s view that reducing the MacBook prices by a little — getting them down to the $700-$800 range — would be sufficient to make sales soar once more. That said, I suspect it’s more likely that the machine will be much improved and stay at roughly the same price that it is now.
Personally speaking, the biggest hurdle to overcome is battery life. I still yearn for a good sized mobile machine that will last for the best part of a day without a charge, and none of the current netbooks, or the MacBook Air, will do that. And I know which of those I’d rather buy.
Much is made of the Apple ‘halo’ which helps sell products based just on brand. However, brand consultants Interbrand Thursday put a value on the halo: $13.7 billion.
Although Microsoft again beat Apple in most valuable brand ($59 billion), the Cupertino, Calif. company had a 24 percent jump in brand value — second only to Internet giant Google.
Apple’s position rose to 24th place compared to 33rd in 2007, according to the ranking of global brands.
“The latest iPods, iPhone and MacBook Air strike the perfect balance between coolness and mass appeal,” Interbrand said in its report.
The consultancy cites Steve Jobs coming aboard as CEO as another reason for the brand’s rise in value.
Software giant Microsoft may have reasons to look over its shoulder. Although its brand value is steady, its ratings are falling.
The Redmond, Wash. company ranked in third place this year, down from its second-place showing in 2007. Rival Google, on the other hand, turned in the largest gain in brand value, leaping from to 10th position from 20th last year.
The summer holidays are barely over and the children only back at school for a week, but already the Christmas tat has started appearing in the shops and the media is casting its collective eyes over the events of the last few months to put together some “thing of the year” contests.
And first on the radar is the UK’s Stuff Magazine, best known for the scantily clad ladies who adorn its front cover (usually clutching some gadget or other in their manicured paws).
In the Reader’s gadget of the year category, the iPhone 3G is up against Nintendo’s Wii Fit, the Asus Eee, game consoles the PS3 and XBox 360 60GB, and the B&W Zeppelin speaker system.
That’s not all though. The MacBook Air crops up in the Design of the year category, against the Zeppelin (again) and a bunch of other things that, in my opinion, don’t even come close.
But wait, there’s more. Apple is also nominated in Retailer of the year.
So does the iPhone deserve Gadget of the Year status? I’d say it does, yes. I’ve not seen anything else — except perhaps Mario Kart on the Wii — make people smile so much. Everyone who picks up an iPhone, whether they’re playing with a friend’s or toying with one of the demo models in a shop, smiles. You watch, it’s true. They pick the thing up for the first time, they start tapping on it, and they smile.
Apple released the OS X 10.5.5 update in the US on Monday afternoon to immediate acclaim as an all-out assault on bugs. Despite initial skepticism, even TUAW, which was first to the tape, acknowledged the release notes are “quite detailed.”
Gizmodo provided a laundry list of items addresed in the update, with MacWorld shortly touting 30 bugs fixed in the new software. Not six hours later, ComputerWorld upped the ante to 70 bugs fixed.
Security experts are finally satisfied the “Dan Kaminski exploit,” referring to the researcher who disclosed a critical flaw in DNS that made it much easier than originally thought to “poison” the cache of DNS servers, or insert bogus information into the Internet’s routing infrastructure, has been fixed.
Apple also updated Mac OS X’s implementation of BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain), the open-source DNS software maintained by the Internet Software Consortium (ISC), to keep it current with an early-August version that ISC released to solve performance issues that had shipped in the original fix for Kaminsky’s vulnerability.
The update also fixes a number of non-security flaws, according to the release notes. iCal and Mail both received more than half a dozen fixes, Time Machine got slapped around a bit, and MobileMe even came in for some love.
See the complete list of adjustments after the jump.