books

Five setup tips for Apple's new MacBook Air

For the past couple of months, prospective MacBook buyers, especially those looking for a slim MacBook Air, have been holding off on purchases, waiting to see what Apple had in store for its annual WWDC keynote.

While the new 11-inch and 13-inch Airs look and feel a lot like the previous couple of generations, the internal components have been upgraded with new, and incredibly energy efficient, CPUs, leading to battery life scores in excess of Apple's estimated 12 hours for the 13-inch version.

Because of that great battery life, you can bet that plenty of new MacBooks were ordered … Read more

Apple's Eddy Cue: Steve Jobs was confused in his e-mails

NEW YORK -- An e-mail from late Apple CEO Steve Jobs about e-book deal terms is no smoking gun, just a confused draft of a message, said a high-level Apple executive Monday during the e-books antitrust trial.

Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of software and services, testified that he never received an email from Jobs that said publishers would have to change their e-book sales terms with Amazon in order to reach an agreement with Apple. Cue said he didn't receive any of the four other drafts of the message, either.

Furthermore, Cue said there's no … Read more

Apple holds a quarter of e-book market, Eddy Cue says

NEW YORK -- Apple sells about a quarter of all e-books in the market, a high-level executive at the electronics giant said Monday.

Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of software and services, estimated that Apple holds a 25 percent share of the market, about on par with Barnes & Noble. He noted the two companies often flip the ranking, with Barnes & Noble sometimes having a higher share than Apple.

"I believe it's close," Cue said in his testimony Monday during Apple's e-book pricing trial. "At different times, we go back and forth.&… Read more

Samsung mass-producing speedier solid-state drives

Apple's new MacBook Air has adopted faster solid-state drives made by Samsung. But Apple won't be the only beneficiary.

Samsung announced Monday that it has started mass-producing new PCIe solid-state drives aimed at the next generation of ultrabooks. SSDs that use a PCIe connection offer faster speeds than those outfitted with SATA (Serial ATA) connections.

As one example, Samsung's XP941 SSD can read data sequentially at 1,400 megabytes (1.4 gigabytes) per second, the highest speed offered by a PCIe 2.0 interface. In the real world, that means the drive can read 500GB of data … Read more

Apple e-book trial: How the case has unfolded so far

Apple's e-book pricing trial has brought its fair share of funny moments and tense exchanges.

The Justice Department, which initially sued Apple and a handful of the nation's largest publishers slightly more than a year ago, contends Apple forced publishers to move to a model that artificially inflated the prices of digital books and hurt consumers. Apple has argued that it wasn't trying to change in the industry and that it was only trying to secure the best deal for itself.

With two weeks down and one week to go, most of the key witnesses have testified. … Read more

One reason Apple is hard to beat

Apple products aren't perfect, but they get a lot closer than most.

One reason for Apple's success can be summed up nicely in the 13-inch MacBook Pro Retina.

At first blush, it seems uncharacteristically pedestrian and unrefined for an Apple product. It doesn't have the usual Apple panache or design boldness. And it's thicker -- despite being smaller -- than the 15.4-inch Pro Retina. … Read more

Steve Jobs initially didn't want an iBookstore, Eddy Cue says

NEW YORK -- Apple is in hot water over its digital bookstore, but late-CEO Steve Jobs initially didn't even want to enter that market, a high-level Apple executive said Thursday.

Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of Internet software and services, on Thursday testified in district court in lower Manhattan that he had to convince Jobs to let him pursue an e-bookstore. Even before the iPad launched, Cue was certain Apple should have a bookstore for its iPhone and Macs, but Jobs believed those products weren't ideal for reading.

"What happened was when I got my … Read more

Review: SpeakText for eBook loads and reads out eBook files on your phone

SpeakText for eBook is another in a long line of SpeakText apps that offer a useful text-to-speech tool in a dated and often confusing interface. While the core functionality of the app works well, it is often frustratingly hard to navigate and there are a number of limitations that will make the app less useful in certain situations.

There are two functions in SpeakText for eBooks. You can load an eBook into the app directly, choosing from anything in your documents folder, or you can type text into the interface and it will be read by the system voice. Both … Read more

Review: Caption Photo Time offers numerous features but operates slowly

Caption Photo Time tries to bridge the gap between photo taking, sharing, and captioning, but due to a poor interface, slow performance and buggy controls, it falls short in many ways. The app is loaded with features, but many of them were buggy during our tests, either not working properly or taking a long time to load onscreen.

When you load Caption Photo Time, initially, it prompts you to load or take a new image and then add a caption. Without onscreen guides or tutorials, however, finding the menus can be difficult. Even when you do find the menus, they … Read more