Feast your eyes on this gorgeous combination of old and new, as photographed and (at least in part) brought bang up-to-date by Pedro Moura Pinheiro.

It’s an original Power Mac G4 Cube, circa 2000, but with a few modifications to its insides. The original 450MHz G4 processor and 256MB of RAM have been replaced with dual G4 chips and 1.5GB of RAM. Those changes were made by its original owner, but Pedro wanted to take things a step further when he bought the machine. It’s now zippy enough to run Photoshop CS4 without any trouble.

Pedro says: “The only thing I did was get an Intel 40GB SSD, place it in an external Firewire 400 enclosure, and install Leopard on it – basically, Firewire 400 is much faster than the internal IDE interface, so the speed benefit is greater than trying to install an IDE SSD inside the Cube.”

He knows what he’s talking about. Check out this stop-motion video of him dismantling, then re-assembling, a G4 iMac. Great stuff.

Laptop users usually have a strong preference for either glossy or matte displays, but unfortunately, if you buy an Apple notebook, you’d better get used to seeing reflections: all of Cupertino’s current notebooks save the 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pros come with displays of the glossy variety.

So what if you’re twitching for the new MacBook Air, but can’t stand seeing the translucent enantiomorph of your ugly mug overlaid on your desktop all the time? No problem: just call up TechRestore, send in your MacBook Air along with $250 bucks and they’ll rub some fine-grained sandpaper all over your glossy display until it nice and matted.

Sorry, we kid: in actuality, TechRestore will simply retrofit a matte display into your MacBook Air that is identical, spec-for-spec, with the stock one. Not worth a quarter grand to me personally, but then again, I’m a narcissist.

[via TUAW]

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmLU4GS7zAI

As a smartphone, the iPhone is hard to beat, but as a tool capable of inflicting extraordinary acts of physical violence, the handset is less impressive… even when compared to Apple’s other products.

A MacBook Air, of course, can be stealthily drawn across a carotid artery, but the iPhone’s rounded, lozenge-like design makes it a poor weapon for either stabbing or slashing. Neither can it be dropped like an anvil upon an unsuspecting brain pan, like the iMac, or used as a blunt, aluminum club, like the MacBook Pro. In battle, an iPhone — at best — can be hurled at an opponent as a distraction while you sprint, comically hooting, in the other direction. It’s a bizarre misstep in Jonathan Ives’ oeuvre of gladiatorial product designs.

Still, where Apple may have failed to deliver, enter the makers to transform the iPhone into the weapon of mass destruction it should be. Christopher Rojas took the TouchOSC application and used his iPhone to remote control a fantastic, solar-powered Arduino Tank, built out of parts from Sparkfun.