MacBook Air - page 30

The biggest shopping day of the year is fast approaching. This Friday, countless retailers all over the U.S. will be slashing prices for Black Friday, causing a frenzy amongst shoppers who cannot wait to spend some of their hard-earned cash on discounted goods.

Apple famously recognizes the event by discounting some of its hottest products in the Apple online store for one day only, with savings to be made on new Macs, iOS devices, iPods, and even the latest accessories for your beloved Apple gadgets. This year will be no different, so based on the past few years’ reductions, here’s what to expect at the Apple online store on Black Friday.

Did Apple almost switch to AMD processors this generation in the MacBook Air? That’s the latest report, and while we’re really skeptical, if it’s true, it would have been quite the blow against Intel.

Apple’s MacBook Air has been an incredibly popular machine since the company introduced solid-state drives as standard and reduced its price tag back in October 2010. But for some, it just doesn’t come big enough.

However, dreams of a 15-inch model are about to come true, according to sources in Apple’s supply chain. And it’ll be here by March 2012.

A new Apple patent that details battery and solid state drive configurations for the company’s MacBook Air suggests that future models will boast battery life that significantly exceeds the 7 hours offered by today’s ultraportable.

Over at the Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal puts the enormous gains in the electric efficiency of computation (or how much power a computer draws) in perspective using the example of Apple’s new MacBook Air.

Imagine you’ve got a shiny computer that is identical to a Macbook Air, except that it has the energy efficiency of a machine from 20 years ago. That computer would use so much power that you’d get a mere 2.5 seconds of battery life out of the Air’s 50 watt-hour battery instead of the seven hours that the Air actually gets. That is to say, you’d need 10,000 Air batteries to run our hypothetical machine for seven hours. There’s no way you’d fit a beast like that into a slim mailing envelope.

When Steve Jobs called the MacBook Air magical, this isn’t what he meant, but after reading this article, it’ll be hard to look at the wafer-thin ultrabook on my desk the same way ever again.

Even just looking at the picture, it’s easy to see this 11-inch MacBook Air “luxury mod” is a grotesque mockery. Crystallize-Your-Design would probably have you believe that recreating “Angel of the Chapel Sistine” on a MacBook Air in Swarovski Crystals took some sort of artistry, but this is the high-end equivalent of smearing your laptop in glue and then rolling it in crushed glass and glitter.

Here’s where you’ll want to lose your lunch, though. This frickin’ thing is being positioned as a product that pays tribute to the life of Steve Jobs! A man whose obsession with clean zen aesthetics would have caused him to suffer some sort of rectal prolapse just looking at this glittering pile of faux-diamond puke. The audacity!

Apple is supposedly is preparing to overhaul its key product trifecta: the iPhone, the iPad and iMac, as well as the MacBook Air in 2012. The report, based on the tech giant’s “upstream supply chain,” echos existing chatter the company will unveil new versions of its products in the coming year.

What’s this? Looks like a unibody MacBook Air, right? Don’t bet a kidney on it: Shenzhen’s Evil Confederacy of Mad Scientist Cloners have managed to almost perfectly rip off the feel of Apple’s bestselling MacBook Air, including unibody enclosure, for under half the price of Apple’s ultraportable.

And you know what? For a piece-of-$%@! netbook dumped into a MacBook Air-like shell, it’s not a bad machine for the sub-$500 price.

It’s been three years since the last major design refresh of the MacBook Pro, and we’ve been hearing whispers for almost a year that the next major update would see Apple’s professional line of laptops take on some of the characteristics of the MacBook Air line: slimmer profiles, ubiquitous SSDs, no optical drives.

If those updates sound swell to you, good news. Inside sources say Apple’s already working on the skinnier MacBook Pro, and the new LCD displays have already been developed.

Hot on the heels of the early 2011 iMac firmware update comes an EFI firmware update for the mid-2011 MacBook Air and Mac Mini. The new updates are labeled version 2.2 and 1.4 respectively. The updates are available via Software Update or direct download.

The updates address the following issues:

During the initial iPhone 4S buzz we told you that Apple’s newest smartphone is among a class of new devices with Bluetooth 4.0. Apple’s most recent MacBook Airs and Mac minis also sport the technology.

Bluetooth 4.0 has been rebranded as “Bluetooth Smart” and “Bluetooth Smart Ready.” The technology focuses on low-energy consumption and will be present in all kinds of consumer products moving forward.

Thanks to a leak through Apple’s own website, we’re all expecting a refresh to its MacBook Pro family to introduce faster Sandy Bridge processors. According to the latest rumor, they’ll be ready to purchase from next week.

Some PC makers may have taken comfort in a few analyst comments following Apple’s fourth-quarter financial report that left some on Wall Street wondering if the laptop was truly dead. However, look a bit closer and it becomes a case of Apple sales being lost to, um, Apple.

Intel’s upcoming Ivy Bridge processor could finally bring Retina displays to our Macs, after the company announced support for ‘4K displays’ last week. That’s a display with a staggering resolution of 4096×4096 pixels.

PC makers hoping to compete with Apple’s lightweight MacBook Air laptop want chipmaking giant Intel to cut prices in order to produce “Ultrabook” alternatives costing under $1,000. So far, the company has balked at any discounts, yet still seeks to capture 40 percent of the notebook market.

In a world of heavy data consumption, TruConnect Mobile is partnering with Sprint to offer pay as you go internet for as little as $4.99/month.

Instead of adopting a set in stone pricing structure like the carriers do for smartphone and tablet usage, TruConnect Mobile is offering a true ‘pay as you go’ internet service to subscribers. Customers will only pay for the data they use.

Apple’s recent firmware updates were famous for preparing the company’s latest Thunderbolt-equipped Macs for the upcoming Thunderbolt Display. However, they also enabled one feature than Apple didn’t tell you: SATA 6Gbps support.

Following the release of an EFI firmware update for its latest MacBook Air earlier this week, Apple has also prepared its Thunderbolt-equipped MacBook Pro and Mac mini with an EFI firmware update of their own. Now available through Software Update, the updates resolves issues with the upcoming Thunderbolt Display, and signals its release isn’t far away.

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.

Dying to get your hands on an iPad 2 before the weekend? Don’t order one from the Apple online store, then, because a whole host of Apple’s gadgets have had their shipping times mysteriously extended.

These BlackBox cases are some of the most stylish cases I’ve seen for our Apple gadgets. Available for the iPad 2, the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro, they’re all made from beautiful bamboo and provide you with ultimate protection and a super sleek design.

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.

A “one of a kind” MacBook Pro prototype, which has been listed for sale on eBay, reveals Apple’s work on a notebook with built-in 3G connectivity. It’s the first MacBook Pro we’ve seen with an antenna built into the side of the display, and a SIM card slot beneath the memory cover.

If you’re still banking on Apple releasing the iPad 3 this October, this might disappoint you: there’s just no chance that an A6 SoC will be ready this year. In fact, if there’s going to be a quad-core chip at the heart of the iPad 3 at all, we might be looking at an iPhone 5 sized delay between tablet generations by the time the next iPad comes around.