books

WD has just upgraded its storage solutions for Macs on both USB and Thunderbolt fronts.

The storage vendor today announced its first USB 3.0-based portable drives for Macs, the My Passport for Mac, and a new Thunderbolt drive, the My Book VelociRaptor Duo.

Apart from USB 3.0, the My Passport for Mac also increases the capacity to 2TB while remaining compact and portable. The reason WD waited until now to release a Mac portable drive that supports USB 3.0 is because USB 3.0 has just been added to the new version of the MacBook Pro and … Read more

An Amazon publishing division has inked a partnership with a book distributor that could help ease some of the tension in the e-book industry.

Amazon's New York-based book publishing imprint signed a deal with book distributor Ingram Content Group that will allow Amazon competitors such as Apple and Barnes & Noble to sell Amazon titles, PaidContent reported today.

"We welcome Amazon Publishing's New York adult group to the growing list of publishers who use our service," Phil Ollila, Ingram Content Group's chief content officer, told PaidContent. The partnership does not include Amazon's West Coast … Read more

If you spend a lot of time in the car, you know what an awesome companion audiobooks can be.

A pricey one, too. A single "book on tape" (OK, CD) might run you $20, $30, even as much as $50.

That's why I'm a big fan of Audiobooks.com, which offers unlimited listening for a flat monthly rate. Just one problem: it's a hassle to use on your smartphone. Although you can access the service via your phone's mobile browser, you need a decent Internet connection to stream the audio -- and the browser … Read more

CruxSkunk sounds like it would add a bad smell to your iPad, but what it really does is turn your tablet into a little laptop.

Sure, we've seen lots of add-on iPad keyboards, but the CruxSkunk from CruxCase goes all out with imitating Apple's MacBook aesthetic. If there were such a thing as a MacBook Mini, it would look like an iPad in a CruxSkunk.… Read more

Production is under way for a Retina display targeted at a more mainstream MacBook Pro, CNET has learned.

Production has begun of a 2,560-by-1,600 pixel density display that will land on a 13.3-inch MacBook Pro, NPD DisplaySearch analyst Richard Shim told CNET.

"The supply chain indications are that it's for a MacBook Pro 13.3 -- not a MacBook Air," said Shim.

Displays are being made by Samsung, LGD, and Sharp, he said.

Shim said that production volume is expected to be substantially higher out of the gate compared to the current 15.4-inch … Read more

Today's laptops, smartphones, and tablets are smaller, thinner, and lighter than ever before. But to build today's ultraslim, ultraportable devices, designers and engineers often make their creations more difficult, if not impossible, to repair.

On this special episode of Cracking Open, I show you five ways manufacturers are making our gadgets harder to fix and give you a few tips on working around these self-repair roadblocks.… Read more

Some owners of Apple's new Retina MacBook Pro are finding that instead of a smooth interaction with the OS X interface, the systems display relatively choppy behavior and may be slow to respond with moving windows, scrolling, and using Expose among other similar tasks. This problem seems to happen primarily when using Safari, Mail, and Mission Control features, but it also occurs in other programs.

Since the debut of the Retina MacBook Pro there has been some discussion over whether the system's hardware is capable of handling the computational throughput required by the Retina Display. In a recent … Read more

The Justice Department's proposed settlement with three book publishers over alleged e-book price fixing is "fundamentally unfair, unlawful, and unprecedented," Apple said in a legal memo today.

In an antitrust lawsuit filed in April, federal prosecutors accused Apple and five book publishers of conspiring to artificially hike prices. The same day, the Justice Department announced it had reached settlements with three publishers but said Apple and the other two publishers had opted to fight the charges.

The proposed settlement -- with Lagardere SCA's Hachette Book Group, News Corp.'s HarperCollins Publishers, and Simon & Schuster (owned … Read more

I'm going to resist the easy Spinal Tap reference and skip right to the part where I tell you Boom is a Mac app that can increase the volume of your Mac's speakers. The app costs $6.99, but its developer, Global Delight, offers a free, seven-day trial. If you are often underwhelmed by the audio output of your MacBook's speakers, Boom is worth taking for a spin.

The free trial is available at Global Delight's Web site. After installing, the app places an icon in the menu bar. Clicking on it reveals a simple volume … Read more