New Products Introed at Apple Notebook Event

Confirming rumors that had floated around the web leading up to their October 14th notebook event, Apple has released new MacBooks and MacBook Pros that sport a "Unibody" design. Incidentally, the new design was released a couple of weeks after the consumer electronics giant made significant moves to improve their iphone deals.

At the heart of the new design is a seamless enclosure that is machined from a single piece of aluminum. This new construction method is said to increase strength and rigidity while reducing the total number of discrete parts within the notebooks. The new case design also allows the battery and hard drive to be accessed through a panel on the rear bottom of the machine.

With the exception of the base model, the formerly plastic clad MacBooks now sport the same aluminum case as their Pro counterpart.

Apple also introduced a new Cinema Display that is meant as a companion to the updated notebooks. The new displays include a built in iSight camera, microphone, speakers and a breakout cable that contains MagSafe, USB 2.0 and Mini DisplayPort connectors.

3G iPhone Starts at $199

During his WWDC Keynote, Steve Jobs announced the next version of the iPhone.  The new iPhone 3G will feature GPS, a black plastic back and all metal buttons. It will be available on July 11th, and will come in two capacities.  The 8GB version will cost $199 and the 16GB version will cost just $299.

Both versions of the iPhone 3G will benefit from increased battery performance.  Talk time will be increased to 5 hours, browsing time will be 5-6 hours, and standby time will increase to 300 hours.

Time Capsule Eliminates Headaches

Here at Mac Specialist HQ we have four Macs of various flavors. We've got a MacBook, MacBook Pro, Intel Mac Mini and even a G4 Powerbook. They are all running Leopard and all get used very heavily.

For quite awhile we were using Time Machine to backup all of these Macs to a large external drive attached to the Mac Mini via a network share. This solution was less than Ideal. Backups would frequently fail and we were constantly plagued by server disconnection errors.

Enter the Time Capsule. We had held off on purchasing a Time Capsule for a while because we wanted badly to utilize hardware we already had on hand, but we finally caved and are now living in a headache-free backup nirvana. All of our varied macs backup to the same Time Capsule seamlessly and we have the added bonus of an 802.11n wireless access point.

Isn't it amazing the bilss that can be achieved by simply handing over more of your money to our favorite fruit company.

MacBook/Pro owners beware!

Some time ago Mac Specialist purchased a white MacBook configured with a superdrive. We made the decision to skip the black version as we had plans to upgrade past the stock configuration on both the memory and the hard drive. We had no idea that a winding road laid ahead of us.

We promptly ordered 2 sticks of memory and the biggest drive we could find at the time (with any sort of reasonable price tag). We picked up the 5400rpm 120gb Western Digital Scorpio from Other World computing. Upon arrival we quickly imaged the stock drive to an external and popped the Scorpio in. In under an hour it was up and running with the drive and the up to date image.

This is where things stopped being easy. We noticed in the first day or two that we were getting a few kernel panics - wrote it off as a weird coincidence and went about our work. Then it happened again, and again and again. After taking out the new memory and replacing it with the stock memory - we were still getting kernal panics. Then we took out the Scorpio and the put the stock drive and shebam the kernal panics stopped. A quick call was placed to Other World and explained the problem and they insisted that these drives work well with the new Intel Macs. We had them send us another Scorpio.

A week went by and we had another new drive in hand. After repeating the install and clone, we waited… It didn’t take long, as soon as the computer was set down on the table it had a kernal panic. A light bulb then went off… we started to associate the panics with movement. Then it hit us like 3 tons of bowling balls, the Scorpio has built-in shock protection. The ShockGuard technology that WD employs is interfering with the Macs own head parking technology. We placed another call into Other World and returned the second Scorpio in exchange for the slightly more expensive Seagate Momentus (which does not have built-in shock protection). After installing the Momentus and cloning over the now tired image, we haven’t had a single kernal panic.

All that said, if you have a MacBook or MacBook Pro, DO NOT upgrade to the WD Scorpio line of hard drives. They are definitely fine drives, just not fine for MacBook/Pro owners.

Unlike fine wine…

Software lists do not get better with age.  So, we have revitalized our Essential Mac OS X Apps page by getting rid of some dead weight and adding in some new hotness.  Comments are back, so what are you waiting for, go make a good thing better.  We’ll fold popular recommendations into the list periodically.