-What's up?
I'm Brian Tong and welcome to the Apple Byte for all of the good and bad inside the world of Apple.
I know it seems like the show has been dominated by Apple's mobile devices and not the Mac platform, but believe it or not, we have some MacBook news.
According to Electronista, Apple has been testing Intel's latest Sandy Bridge processors for months and they will potentially use Intel's integrated graphics for their low-end MacBooks and MacBoor Airs
signaling a shift away from NVIDIA graphics and some of their products.
Intel will officially unveil them at CE 2010 where you can bet Apple wants a quick turnaround to add the new processors in their next product refresh.
Now, speeds are at 2.5 to 2.7 gigahertz for core i5 and i7 processors, and early benchmarks have shown performance it will be just as fast or faster than current dedicated graphics [unk] NVIDIA, so we'll keep our eyes on that.
Now, research firm, DisplaySearch recently reported that Apple is now third in the world for mobile PC sales,
and first in North America which includes notebooks, netbooks, and tablets thanks to the iPad effect.
Apple grabbed a 12.4% share globally, but without the iPad, it would have only placed 8.
Now, we also told you in our buyer's guide that the next gen iPad will be coming around the end of March to April.
DIGITIMES reports that Foxconn Electronics will begin shipping the next gen iPads within the next 100 days and as soon as the end of February.
It will still take time for product to reach stores and partners, but that timetable looks like it's dead on or you could have just guess it for yourself it was about a year from the iPad launch and I will no longer have any use to you.
iLounge has also revealed an image of a protective case design for the next iPad from Shenzhen MacTop Electronics.
Now, you'll see an opening for a rear-facing camera and the volume controls plus a slot for the dock connector, but there's an opening on the bottom left corner that could potentially be for an SD card slot as well.
These 2 different images both show spaces for a rear-facing camera and an SD card slot that are unconfirmed features at the moment.
Now, on other news the Wall Street Journal's MarketWatch has named Steve Jobs the "CEO of the Decade" and you can't dispute his role in revolutionizing digital media with iTunes and the iPod plus a couple of game changers you might have heard about called the iPhone and the iPad.
But even better, MarketWatch gave him credit for trading what they call "A virtual orgy of technological wonderment."
Awkward!
Alright, let's take a break from news for this week's how-to by Donald Bell for finding and fixing your missing album art.
-Hey!
I'm Donald Bell, and today, I'm going to show you the easiest, fastest way to fill in missing album art in your iTunes library.
We all have songs in our collection that, when they appear on your iPod or your iPhone, give you that lame, generic album cover.
The problem is you can never remember what songs those were when you sit back at your computer and you wanna go fix them.
So here's the trick.
Go to the file menu in iTunes and select New Smart Playlist.
For the first condition, make sure that the media kind is set to music.
Next, create a rule where the "Has Artwork" condition is set to false.
Hit OK and now you've got a listing of all the songs in your library that are missing album art.
Now, to fix up these songs and give them album art, first see if iTunes can do it automatically.
Select all the tracks in the list, head up to the advanced menu and select "Get Artwork." iTunes will scan your library and fill in all the artwork that it can and automatically remove those songs from this list.
For the songs that are left over, you can right click on any track, select "Get Info," and drag a Google Image search result for the artwork into the artwork tab.
But doing this for each individual song is kinda tedious.
Instead, sort by album and select all the albums tracks at once and then right click to get info.
Drag the artwork out of your browser, hit OK and you can update all the songs at once.
Now, one last trick.
If all the songs that are left over on your list are just a random assortment of freebie downloads, DJ mixes, and other odds and ends, you can just kill them all with one fun image and be done with it.
Do a select all on all the remaining songs on your playlist,
right click to get info, and drag any image you like into the artwork square.
It might not be the perfect match for that song, but at least you'll be rid of the generic iTunes artwork.
For CNET.com, I'm Donald Bell.
-Alright, on to the quick bytes guys, Apple is losing its "Gaming Guru," Graeme Devine.
He joined Apple's iPhone game technologies division.
It was incremental in making gaming a topnotch experience and bringing the top games to Apple's mobile devices.
Historically, if you don't know, Apple has lagged in gaming but is now a serious player [unk] away at the DS Lite and PSP for portable gaming market search.
Also, Consumer Reports released its latest reports on cellular service providers in the United States.
AT&T rank dead last with the magazine's lowest "worse" rating in the 8 of the 9 areas and only one step above the lowest for the company's texting service.
All those [unk] out you see, yeah, they're a bad thing and Verizon iPhone can't come soon enough.
Now, Apple's finally ruling out 90-second previews in iTunes.
It applies to songs over 2 minutes and 30 seconds, but there are some in the same album that will have different preview times or you wanna check that out.
And MobileMe users are probably wondering if it's really worth $99 a year now that Find My iPhone is free since really you're paying for e-mail, 10 gigs of storage, and the ability to sync data across Apple devices.
Now, using the power of Steve [unk], SG responded to a Mac rumors reader's e-mail with "Yes.
It will get a lot better in 2011.
See?
Even Steve knows it gets better.
Now, the MacBook Air also received a firmware update to address an issue where in some cases the Air boots up or wakes up to a black screen or becomes unresponsive, so you guys wanna download that.
And now, let's just take a break and look at this week's iPhone app of the week.
It's Infinity Blade, the best looking game on an iOS device to date using Apex on real engine.
This action RPG is $5.99.
It looks gorgeous, runs on the iPhone 3GS, the iPhone 4, some 3rd gen iPod Touches and 4th gen iPod Touches and the iPod.
Now, I know what I'll be doing all week, playing with my Infinity Blade.
Alright, that's gonna do it for this week's show.
Send us your e-mails to the applebyte@cnet.com.
I'm Brian Tong.
Thanks for watching.
We'll see you next week for another bite of the Apple.
