Mac

The MacBook Air all by its lonesome has captured the majority of the total thin-and-light laptop market, according to data from NPD.

The MBA grabbed 56 percent of U.S. thin-and-light laptop sales in the first five months of the year, Stephen Baker, an analyst at the NPD Group, told CNET.

The remainder, 44 percent, was captured by ultrabooks from various PC makers.

If reviews of the 2013 MacBook Air -- announced this month -- are any indication of future sales, the situation could become even more lopsided this year.

CNET Reviews had a lot of good things to say … Read more

Perhaps more mysterious than the stealthy look of Apple's upcoming Mac Pro desktop is its price tag, which has yet to be announced.

Apple detailed some of the specs, and even showed off prerelease versions of the hardware to attendees at its annual developers conference earlier this month, but there are still many unknowns as to just what Apple will put inside the machine -- details that have a dramatic impact on what it costs to buy one.

So how much will the machine -- previous models of which have, for a decade, hovered around a $2,500 entry-level … Read more

Your MacBook could one day save space by combining two ports into one.

"Combined Input Port," an Apple patent application published Thursday by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, describes a way to unite a USB port and a memory card slot into a single unit.

Combining two ports with two different connectors poses a challenge. But the invention envisioned by Apple would vary the depth and position of the respective connectors, allowing for both a USB device and a memory card to be inserted.

As the patent application describes it in technical jargon:

Your MacBook of the future could offer a dual-sided trackpad panel that features a touch screen on both sides.

Awarded to Apple on Tuesday by the U.S. Patent and Trademark office, a patent appropriatedly dubbed "Dual-sided track pad," describes a transparent and foldable trackpad panel with both a top and bottom display. The panel itself would take up the entire bottom of the notebook. Each side of the panel would recognize touch input and react accordingly based on whether the notebook is open or closed.

On an open notebook, one side of the trackpad would be accessible. … Read more

Following the release of the new 2013 MacBook Air, AnandTech, in looking at its Wi-Fi performance, found that even though the new systems include advanced high-speed Wi-Fi controllers, speeds are severely limited in software.

The new MacBook Air was announced by Apple at the recent Worldwide Developers Conference, and in addition to extended battery life, the new systems include support for 802.11ac Wi-Fi networking, which supports up to three times faster data rates in comparison with 802.11n.

However, there appears to be some limitation in the software currently shipping on these systems that severely limits real-world data transfer … Read more

After a U.S. government agency received 13 reports of battery fires, including one that caused a "serious burn" to the user's leg, Best Buy has decided to recall thousands of replacement batteries for Apple's MacBook Pro laptops.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission announced Wednesday that "consumers should stop using this product" because "the battery can catch fire while charging." The culprit product is ATG lithium-ion batteries and Best Buy is recalling about 5,100 of them.

Those batteries being recalled are both the black and white ATG replacement batteries … Read more

Surprise, surprise -- after a year's dry spell, new hardware from Apple is causing an unusually high amount of interest in people selling off their old Macs.

That's according to gadget trade-in service Gazelle, which says the number of people wanting to sell their old MacBooks is up 8 percent from the same time last year. Perhaps not too coincidentally, this is all happening following Monday's unveiling of new MacBook Airs, which hadn't been given any hardware updates in a year.

The majority of trade-ins are older models, Gazelle's "Chief Gadget Officer" Anthony … Read more

Apple's new Mac Pro features a striking and quite innovative design -- instead of multiple heat sinks, there's a shared thermal core in the center that helps cool the CPU and twin GPUs at the same time.

As the fan is located right at the top of the thermal core, the Mac Pro features a large hole in its circular frame that's quite unheard of, especially when compared with your normal PC cases.

The unique design has prompted amusing comparisons to trash cans and Darth Vader, and spurred the creative Photoshopping crowd from around the world to innovate further on Apple's new machine. Click on our gallery for some of the funniest mockups we've seen. … Read more

iFixIt took a look at the guts of the new MacBook Air, as well as the new AirPort Extreme base station, which Apple unveiled at WWDC 2013. The new AirPort Extreme offers more advancements in speed, connectivity, and capacity than its predecessors and has a new design, to boot.

Instead of being squat and flat, the new design is an elongated cube that looks like a brick standing upright. Apple claims this was required to implement a major advancement with directional antennas that should extend both the range and speed of connections to wireless devices.

This new design has spurred … Read more