Apple appears to have frozen-out fans tired of waiting for an official Cupertino netbook, dropping support for Intel’s Atom processor from the latest build of Snow Leopard 10.6.2, according to reports. The move may signal Apple is clearing the way for its own netbook in tablet form.

For some time, Apple has dismissed the growth of small, low-powered notebook computers, refusing to join the army of computer makers producing so-called ‘netbooks.’ Apple COO Tim Cook described netbooks having “cramped keyboards, junky hardware, very small screens, bad software” and were not worthy of the Mac brand. In response to the lack of an official Apple entry, Mac fans have created hackintoshes able to run Mac OS X on netbooks using Intel’s Atom processor. Although 10.6.2 is currently only in the hands of developers, if the Atom omission is retained, the lack of support could either force OS X-based netbooks to vanish or restrict the hacked hardware to remain frozen at 10.6.1.

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.

In what can only be considered a turn of logic from an alternative “evil twin” universe, Hackintosh maker Psystar answered Apple’s cease and desist lawsuit of July 3th with their own alleging restraint of trade and antitrust violations.

via Computerworld

// Opinion Follows //

It’s been long anticipated that  Psystar would play the “Antitrust Card” in defense of its illegal activities.  The only thing is, it’s not illegal to have a monopoly. The key predicate to an antitrust suit is that the consumer must in some way be harmed by the monopolistic behavior of the defendant.  Rudy Pedraza, Psystar’s president summed up their consumer harm argument by saying: “It’s not that people don’t want to use Mac OS X, but they’re not open spending an exorbitant amount of money for something that’s essentially generic hardware.”

So that’s it, ‘the Apple’s hardware is too expensive’ argument we’ve heard time and time again, and have time and time again refuted. On a direct feature for feature comparison with Sony, HP or IBM, Apple hardware is no more expensive than the competition.

Our industry is FULL of monopolies that no one seems to disagree with, examples follow:

• Tivo has a monopoly on the Tivo OS, in that it too can only be employed on Tivo or licensed 3rd party hardware.
• Sony has a monopoly on the PlayStation, PS2, PS3 and PSP operating systems and regulates very closely the hardware they’re allowed to run on
• IBM has a monopoly on mainframes and the mainframe Z-OS
• even Microsoft has a monopoly on XBox OS and limits the hardware it can run on

While I can understand that free spirited hackers take unbrage at being locked out, there is nothing inherently wrong or illegal with Apple’s strategy of controlling the whole widget. Monopoly “sounds” bad on it’s own, but in Apple’s case they’re not abusing their power.

• CG: Jackass iPhone devs line-cut by exploiting naming conventions. Gizmodo: https://tinyurl.com/6p99yw (via Daring Fireball) #
• CG: Apple on iPhone cut and paste, GPS turn-by-turn and the lack of an iPhone office suite: https://tinyurl.com/67bgph (ExtremeTech) #
• CG: MacRumors reports that Psystar is indeed likely to get a butt-kicking over its Hackintoshes: https://tinyurl.com/5a69qq #

Celebrating the growing Hackintosh community, the small but prominent group of closeted Mac-lovers finding ways to put unauthorized installs of OS X onto garden-variety PCs, Willowhaven, a user at Insanely Mac, has created a set of logos to print out and slap on the side of your beige box to show your true heart.

They all look pretty good, except for that horrifying Apple + Dell logo. Some things simply can’t get redeemed.

Via Begley

There’s several new screenshots lighting up the internet that are purportedly taken from a new Leopard build (9A410).

Posted to Hackintosh, MacRumors, Flickr and elsewhere, the screenshots show a new, simple UI that’s darker and sharper than the current — note the corners of windows are no longer rounded. There’s less brushed metal, more soothing grey.
The screenshots on Flickr look much more like the current UI (Tiger) ,except Mail now has a metallic look.
But there’s something fishy about them. The interface is too plain and stripped back.

Many on the MacRumors’ forums think the screens are fake, and one poster on Flickr is sure about it.:

“Fake! Fake! Fake!

I write themes for OSX. And, I can tell you how this was most probably done:

The file Extras.rsrc still kinda works in the betas for 10.5 although, I hope that it will be removed before release.

Anyway, Installer based themes (though out of favor in 10.4) still work by replacing Extras.rsrc among other files.

Someone swapped out the normal Extras.rsrc and took some screen shots. Since most of the guts of 10.5 do not depend upon Extras.rsrc anymore, I am confident that 10.5 would run with a 10.4 Extras file for now.

Note that you do not see any signs of resolution independence! That is what would break this fake theme (since res independence calls to images not stored in Extras.rsrc).”

More screens after the jump