pro

It's that time again: Apple has invited reporters down to its Cupertino, Calif., headquarters for a special notebooks event, which means CNET News will be there to live-blog the whole thing.

The fun starts at 10 a.m. PDT Tuesday at this link.

Apple says the focus of the event will be on notebooks. A redesigned MacBook and MacBook Pro are all but assured, but there are likely to be some other surprises too. Will Apple opt for Nvidia chipsets? Will there finally be a Mac sold for less than $1,000?

Come back here Tuesday morning to find … Read more

I bought my 2.33GHz MacBook Pro about two years ago, shortly after it was introduced. It came with a 160GB hard disk, but that wasn't really enough for all my stuff, particularly when I wanted to add a Boot Camp partition for Microsoft's Windows Vista.

So last July, I upgraded to a 250GB drive, a process I described here ("A new hard disk for my MacBook Pro").

That drive started feeling a little tight within just a few months, chiefly due to videos downloaded from the iTunes Store. Although I rarely buy videos from iTunes, … Read more

As with any Apple event, there's plenty of rumor and speculation to go around. The lead-up to Tuesday's event in which "the spotlight turns to notebooks," according to the event invitation, has been no different.

The Mac maker has invited journalists down to its Cupertino, Calif., headquarters to get a look at its new round of notebooks Tuesday morning. But what exactly Apple CEO Steve Jobs will unveil is anyone's guess.

We have a few clues in the form of purported "spy shots," or leaked photos, of the redesigned notebooks that have made … Read more

This time via a Chinese Web site (which is now timing out, perhaps due to heavy traffic), and reposted on MacRumors.com, Engadget, and others. Just what this photo purports to show seems a little unclear to us, but it may very well be the left side and keyboard tray (minus the actual keys) of a new MacBook Pro.

This does seem to fit in with recent rumors that the new MacBooks will be made from, if not one, then a very small number of aluminum sheets, bent into shape using a process referred to as the "brick." (… Read more

ProPay, a company that specializes in credit card processing and electronic payment services for businesses, has announced prices for eBay users.

The information was released Tuesday, ahead of ProPay's launch as an alternative payment option on the auction site later this month.

As eBay announced in August, it will soon take only electronic payments. Part of that plan includes bringing on an additional electronic payment service to compete with eBay subsidiary PayPal and thus ease concerns over eBay's total control over payment processing. Aside from accepting credit cards, eBay's solution involves giving sellers the option of using … Read more

We focus primarily on consumer laptops at CNET Reviews, but this week I looked at two well-designed models that target small businesses: the 13-inch Toshiba Satellite Pro U400 and the 14-inch Lenovo ThinkPad SL400.

Each configuration clocks in at just north of $1,000, stripping out some enterprise features that a small-business owner buying one laptop or even a handful probably doesn't need and definitely doesn't want to pay for. The Toshiba offers an interesting configuration, one that I feel cries out for more memory, which is an easy add. And the Lenovo includes a couple features not … Read more

On Monday, we reported on some rumors that Best Buy would offer the RIM BlackBerry Bold (in addition to AT&T) after the Boy Genius Report site posted some screenshots of the retailer's computer system showing an October 26 in-stock date for the smartphone.

Well, it seems BGR has uncovered more information that suggests Best Buy will also carry the RIM BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220, the Palm Treo Pro, and the T-Mobile G1.

According to the story, the red BlackBerry Pearl Flip and the Palm Treo Pro will be available on October 26, though you can actually buy … Read more

Stuck with a stinky new Mac Pro? Good news: it might be toxic! (No proof of toxicity has been determined.) Also, Tom Merritt reveals himself to be a ruthless murderer of Firefox downloads. And the state of Pennsylvania takes it upon itself to make the streets safer by making old people smarter. Love it! Listen now: Download today's podcast

Nintendo officially unveils Nintendo DSi and online store, coming Nov 1 in Japan for $180 http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081002-nintendo-shows-off-new-dsi-with-camera-app-store.html http://kotaku.com/5057870/nintendo-announce-new-ds-the-nintendo-dsi

Toxic fumes from Mac Pros? http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/02/1223203 … Read more

A few weeks ago I wrote an article about the new Palm Treo Pro, and I was fairly critical of the new smartphone. Why? Basically because I felt that it was good, but good isn't good enough in today's dynamic smartphone market. To delve a bit more deeply into this I thought it might be interesting to use the Kano model to examine this further.

The model, named after its inventor, Professor Noriaki Kano, provides a simple way to think about how products meet or exceed customer needs, and differentiate themselves against the competition.

The model consists of … Read more