Mac sales are showing continued growth in the most recent business quarter of 2011, according to a new report from esteemed analyst Gene Munster.

As noted by market research firm NPD, Apple’s Mac sales are up 22% year-over-year in the third quarter of 2011. Strong sales are mainly attributed to the introduction of the new MacBook Air and Mac Mini models released in July.

We’ve seen a MacBook Air being used to cut a cake, but now the razor-thin notebook can used to process and prepare food acting like a knife to slice and dice a variety of vegetables, fruit and your favorite crustacean.

Unsure of how Intel’s “Ultrabook” laptops will compete with the iPad and MacBook Air, manufacturers are “testing the water” by ordering less than 50,000 units for later this month. Acer, Lenovo, Toshiba and Asustek are reportedly uncertain how the revamped laptops will be greeted by consumers shifting to tablets and cloud computing. That sounds to us like they’re giving up and conceding victory to the MacBook Air before they even got started competing with it.

This is one Mac setup you don’t see every day. Deep in the heart of the Amazon Rainforest, Chief Almir can be seen surfing the internet on his 11.6 inch MacBook Air. He leads the Suri people of Brazil, and he helps his tribe utilize technology to protect the Amazon from extinction.

The beat goes on for Apple as the tech giant continues to increase Mac sales amid declining PC demand. The release of a new MacBook Air and the long-awaited Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion” software pushed U.S. Mac sales 26 percent higher during the first portion of the three-month September quarter, Wall Street experts say.

One Intel director revealed in a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal that Apple threatened to drop the chip maker over its hungry processors if it couldn’t “drastically slash” the amount of power they demanded.

I love it. Not only is Acer totally ripping off the design of the MacBook Air for their new “ultrabook”, the Aspire 3951, but even though it looks cheaper than the real thing, it’ll almost definitely be more expensive than the $999 Air as well.

Edit: Wasn’t it just a few days ago that Acer’s founder was saying that the MacBook Air was just a silly fad? Why, yes, it was.

Samsung has just announced the successor to its PM810 solid-state drive which is a super-speedy 6Gbps SATA 3 that boasts read speeds of up to 500MB/s and write speeds of up to 350MB/s. A custom version of the PM810 is currently used in Apple’s MacBook Air line lineup, so there’s a good possibility its impressive successor — the PM830 — will also hit the ultraportables.

Apple’s decision to not include a USB Stick containing a copy of Mac OS X Lion for system recoveries with the new Mid-2011 MacBook Air might be causing the company a bit of a public relations issue this week. A fair number of MacBook Air users are venting their frustrations over the matter on Apple’s Support Community forums.

Acer founder Stan Shih has opened his mouth and said something extraordinarily stupid: the ultrabook and tablet form factors are nothing but a stupid fad with no future. Someone should tell Apple that, so they can stop selling iPads and MacBook Airs to a throng of millions of excited customers.