mac

Apple applies for touch-screen Mac patent

Rumors of Apple working on a touch-screen Mac have been circulating for years, and will only grow with the revelation that the company is hoping to patent similar technology.

A number of Mac sites on Thursday are pointing to a U.S. patent application granted for what would appear to be the mythical Mac tablet. AppleInsider has a description of the device discussed in the application, which appears to bring a lot of the iPhone's multitouch functionality to a slate-like tablet computer.

Given Apple' focus on multitouch user interfaces over the past year, there has been a fair amount … Read more

Why Apple should stop chasing rainbows

My MacBook and I are at a difficult stage in our relationship.

We've traveled the world together. We've written heinous insults together. And we have refused to countenance entreaties from sites of ill-repute together.

But something is now coming between us.

It's that little Swirly Rainbow Circle Thingy. You know, the one that tells you, well, what is it supposed to tell you exactly?

The first time I saw it, I had no idea what was going on. It whirled away on my desktop just like a dog that is trying to communicate with you and, in … Read more

Google gooses Apple's Safari with Gears beta

As promised in May, Google has brought the open-source Gears technology to Apple's Safari, augmenting some browser abilities such as using Gears-tailored Web sites while offline.

The company announced a beta version of Gears for Safari (DMG file download link) on the Gears users mailing list Monday.

"We would love for you to install it and test it and file bug reports so we can polish it and find all the corner cases," said Google's Jeremy Moskovich.

Gears extends a browser so, for example, some Google Docs can be edited or viewed while the user isn'… Read more

Solid-state drives slip into the mainstream

Solid-state drives, if not yet ubiquitous, have arrived. You can find them in laptops big and small and as a high-octane storage option for gaming PCs.

SSDs made their mark by appearing in the trendiest ultraportables like the Apple MacBook Air and Asus Eee PC--typically as stratospherically priced options, fashion statements rarely seen in the real world.

These drives are now coming off their rarefied shelf space and appearing across a wider range of laptops and ultraportable computers.

Any new, lightweight enterprise laptop worth its salt comes with a large-capacity solid-state drive option now. Hewlett-Packard recently introduced the 3-pound EliteBook … Read more

Psystar responds to Apple suit, will countersue

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Mac clone maker Psystar plans to file its answer to Apple's copyright infringement lawsuit Tuesday as well as a countersuit of its own, alleging that Apple engages in anticompetitive business practices.

Miami-based Psystar, owned by Rudy Pedraza, will sue Apple under two federal laws designed to discourage monopolies and cartels, the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act, saying Apple's tying of the Mac OS to Apple-labeled hardware is "an anticompetitive restrain of trade," according to attorney Colby Springer of antitrust specialists Carr & Ferrell. Psystar is requesting that the court find … Read more

Why Apple should release a touch-screen Mac

Apple is one of the major leaders in the multitouch space and yet, the company's desire to bring a full-fledged touch-screen device to store shelves has stopped with the iPhone. In fact, the most it has done in bringing multitouch to its computers is offering the functionality in the track pad on its MacBook Air.

But simply offering multitouch on a trackpad isn't enough to make consumers want to flock to Apple products instead of HP or Dell machines. Instead, Apple needs to embrace the fact that many people prefer touch-screen technology and create a Mac that offers the same basic functionality found in the iPhone.

Innovation has been a key to Apple's success over the past decade and without it, the company would be nothing more than another computer vendor. But by releasing a Mac that eclipses the functionality of the tablet PC and fully harnesses the power of multitouch in a way that no one has seen before, Apple can create the computing world's first iPhone-like success.

And in the process, Apple could single-handedly propel the computing market forward into a new era where vanilla products are the exception and establish itself as the de facto leader in innovation.… Read more

Oz falls hard for the Mac

In the US, Mac sales are growing three times as fast as PC sales. The Australians, however, are putting us to shame. In the land "Down Under" made famous by Men at Work, Olivia Newton John, and Crocodile Dundee, Mac sales are growing at six times the industry average.

With Mac sales growing 52 percent in Australia in Q2 2008, Australia is officially the world's fastest-growing Mac population.

Oy, mate! Throw a little of that Mac on the barby!

Intel lists new processors for ultra-portables

Intel has listed new low-power processors for upcoming ultra-portables from Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Lenovo, among others.

The chipmaker also listed its first mobile quad-core processor, the QX9300, which runs at 2.53GHz and comes with 12MB of level-2 cache. The processor is priced at $1,038.

The 45-nanometer low-power processors will go into ultra-portable notebooks like the new ThinkPad X301 announced this week, and HP 2530p also rolled out on Monday. The next version of the MacBook Air is also rumored to be using one of these chips.

The SL9400 and SL9300 processors have a thermal envelope of 17 watts, … Read more

Why is Spotlight using 98% of my MacBook Air CPU?

UPDATED: August 19, 2008 7:42pm

Problem solved. It was a hanging process that got triggered when I installed a new VPN client. The weird thing was it could only be killed via the command line and didn't show up in the Activity Monitor

This MacBook Air goes from decent, to bad, to terrible, back to decent and now into the ridiculous.

Even when running zero applications there are pieces of Apple software that are doing very strange things. The latest issue is that Spotlight is somehow using 98% of my CPU horsepower and the total percentage used is … Read more