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Best Buy begins huge sale on Mac laptops and iMacs
If you're in the market for a new Mac, you'll be happy to hear Best Buy has just slashed prices on all iMacs, MacBook Pros, MacBook Airs, and MacBook Pros with Retina display. Prices are anywhere from US$50 off to $155 depending on what unit you buy. Additionally, if you're a student who registers with your school ".edu" email address on Best Buy's Student Deals site you'll get another $100 off the sale price of the above iMacs and Mac laptops, which brings the discount to anything from $150 to $255. Act fast though, as the sale only runs from today until July 27th. [Via AllThingsD]
Apple fixes MacBook Air Photoshop screen flickering and Wi-Fi issues with software update
Apple has released the MacBook Air (Mid 2013) Software Update 1.0 to address a number of issues the new Haswell MacBook Airs have had since their launch last month. According to the release notes: This update is recommended for MacBook Air (mid 2013) models. This update fixes an issue that in rare instances may cause an intermittent loss in wireless connectivity, an issue with Adobe Photoshop which may cause occasional screen flickering, and an issue which may cause audio volume to fluctuate during video playback. Almost immediately after the new MacBook Air's release, screen flickering while in Photoshop was reported in user forums, followed shortly after by Wi-Fi connection issues, and then just last week, volume fluctuation issues. If this update does indeed fix all issues it will be a nice hat trick for Apple and their newest laptop, which has garnered rave reviews for its 12-hour battery life. Users can download the update by running Software Update on their MacBook Air.
New MacBook Air woe: unstable volume settings
The recently updated Haswell-based 2013 MacBook Air is an incredibly popular line of laptops, but has unfortunately had its share of birthing pains. First, users complained of not being able to connect consistently with WiFi networks. Now Apple support boards are filling with complaints about volume settings that vary all over the map while watching videos. According to a post on Macworld UK, other apps affected with the issue include Chrome and QuickTime. The post quotes one user who complained that volume fluctuated while watching videos, with another saying that the fluctuations only happen when volume is at a middle setting and are nonexistent at either high or low volume levels. As with the WiFi issue, it's quite probable that the sound problems will be fixed soon through a patch in a future version of Mac OS X 10.8 or perhaps through a MacBook Air-specific firmware update.
OS X 10.8.5 update will reportedly fix MacBook Air/Photoshop flickering issue
There's a new annoyance bothering current-model MacBook Air owners who use Photoshop. It seems that the MBAs with Haswell processors have issues with Adobe's flagship software. In particular, many MacBook Air owners noticed severe screen flickering while using brush tools in Photoshop. When news of the flickering first surfaced, an Adobe representative said he believed a GPU issue or a driver bug was causing it. Now MacRumors is suggesting that the flickering is a result of a software glitch. Apple has released a new build of OS X 10.8.5 to developers and the Photoshop flickering issue appears to be resolved. As MacRumors reports: Today, MacRumors tipster Todd Davis tells us the flickering issue has been fixed in the OS X 10.8.5 beta released to developers today. The bug made Photoshop nearly unusable for a number of MacBook Air users. Some users have previously suggested that upgrading to the developer release of OS X Mavericks solved the problem, so the fix may be a matter of Apple pushing upgraded code sooner than it planned. There's no word on when users can expect to see OS X 10.8.5 released to the general public. If the latest build does indeed fix the MacBook Air/Photoshop flickering issue, chances are good that Apple will push it out sooner rather than later, since it doesn't want their newest Haswell laptop to present problems with such popular software.
Boston University sues Apple over chip technology patent
We usually associate Boston University with brain studies and bat-chasing UAVs; we'll have to add technology patent lawsuits to the list. Following similar claims versus the likes of Amazon and Samsung, the university has sued Apple for allegedly infringing on a 1997 patent for making gallium nitride thin films used in semiconductors. The university wants both financial compensation (likely the real objective) and a ban on US sales of the purportedly offending iPad, iPhone 5 and MacBook Air. Neither side is commenting on the case, although we suspect that it will end with a whimper, not a bang. Like many big tech firms, Apple tends to fight patent lawsuits when it expects to win, and settle out of court when it doesn't. We'd add that the patent expires in 2015 -- a Boston University victory would have relatively little effect on Apple's future.
It's all about the battery life, baby
At WWDC this year, Apple introduced revamped MacBook Airs with incredibly impressive battery life. On the the 11-inch model, battery life went up from five hours to nine hours while battery life on the 13-inch model went up from seven hours to 12 hours. Battery life isn't exactly the sexiest of specs, but it's undoubtedly one of the most important things to consider when purchasing any new device. With the new MacBook Airs, Apple has demonstrated, yet again, a deep commitment to the user experience that will inevitably leave competitors scrambling to play catch-up. If a device runs out of juice, it's useless. Pure and simple. To that end, Apple has not only shown a ongoing commitment to improve battery life on its products, but also a rare reluctance to implement new features that have an adverse effect on battery life. The most obvious example, of course, has been Apple's refusal to follow in the footsteps of Samsung and release an iPhone with a ginormous 4.7-inch screen. Tim Cook and other Apple executives have said on a number of occassions that one of the reasons Apple hasn't released a larger screened iPhone is because doing so would have a discernable effect on battery life. What's more, when Apple does add a new feature to a device, such as when it introduced the Retina display iPad, it ensures that battery life does not take noticeable hit as a result. Put simply, battery life matters. A lot. Processing power and screen size may be the type of specs that attract the most attention these days, but as computing continues to become increasingly mobile, it's about time we start paying more attention to battery life. To that end, Ben Bajarin over at Techpinions has an interesting and insightful take on battery life and the new role it may take on in the tech marketplace. The raging question throughout the PC industry has been "what is going to get consumers to upgrade their PCs?" The answer is iPad-like battery life. ... At one point in time when a company released a new PC, they proudly announced how much processing power it had, and the crowd would applaud. At WWDC last week when Apple discussed the MacBook Air, the crowd did not cheer or applaud when they announced the speed of the processor. Instead, the crowd went wild when they announced the new metrics for battery life. ... Apple has set the bar high with these new battery benchmarks. All PC makers are making progress in this area and the new processors from Intel and AMD will help push this needle forward. One thing I will be watching very closely with the fall lineup is the battery life claims from all the new notebooks. I am convinced this is the feature-of-all-features for the PC industry this year. As a quick little comparison, I checked out the top four non-Apple laptops on Amazon and took a look at their battery life. Here's how the competition stacks up today. The 11.6-inch Samsung Chromebook touts 6.5 hours of battery life. The 15.6-inch Asus K55N-DS81 laptop has 5.5 hours of battery life. A 15.6-inch Dell Inspiron laptop touts about 4 hours of battery life. A 15.6-inch HP Pavillion shockingly doesn't seem to have any official spec regarding battery life, at least not on Amazon. Checking the same machine on Staples, however, reveals that the machine has a battery life of up to 3 hours and 15 minutes. Again, the 13-inch MacBook Air sports upwards of 12 hours of battery life. All of a sudden, battery life is looking a lot sexier than ever before. And if you think the 12-hour figure cited by Apple can only be achieved by running the machine on the lowest brightness setting and casually checking email once every four hours, think again. Initial reviews of Apple's new MacBook Airs have had nothing but overwhelming praise for their battery life. Here's a quick sampling. Engadget: Our standard rundown test, as it happens, also entails playing video and last year's machine managed just over six and a half hours before expiring. We were, then, skeptical that this new edition could manage nearly twice that longevity -- but it actually did better. This year's Air survived 12 hours and 51 minutes on a charge. That's a stunning number from a laptop this thin, achieved with WiFi enabled and without any external batteries. Wired: But with the 2013 edition of the 13-inch MacBook Air, concern over battery life is now just laughable. I've been testing Apple's newest ultraportable laptop for a couple of weeks, and I can routinely get through a full 8 to 12-hour workday without a boost, and with battery to spare. Heck, I went an entire Netflix-filled weekend without needing to plug it in once. Where the mid-2012 model got a very respectable 7 hours of battery life, the 2013 model is spec'd at a full 12 hours. It delivers on that promise, and then some. I can forget the charger at home or at work and totally not stress about it. The Verge: 13 hours and 29 minutes. That's all you really need to know - that's how long the new MacBook Air running Safari lasted running The Verge Battery Test, which cycles through a series of websites and images at 65 percent brightness. 9to5Mac: We don't have a specific process to test battery life, because more often than not, you'll get artificial results that aren't relatable to real-world usage. So, to test the battery life on the 2013 Air, we just used it. It's as simple as that. We worked on it and we played on it. We started using it about 12PM and wrote, watched a few YouTube videos, checked Twitter with Tweetbot for Mac, and much more. By about 1AM it was down to about 5% battery remaining and it died shortly there after. That equals out to a little over 13 hours, a tad above what Apple claimed. We had the screen set on 75% brightness and the keyboard backlight on towards the end of the day. Keep in mind this is real-word usage, so there were bits and pieces of time throughout the day when it wasn't being used, as we had to do things like eat lunch, but for the better part of the day, there was at least Spotify streaming music. With the new MacBook Airs, it's all about the battery life.
802.11ac WiFi fix coming for latest MacBook Airs
Apple's latest MacBook Airs, unveiled at WWDC in June, have received rave reviews for their performance and -- most notably -- their battery life. However, the latest generation of Apple's sleek portable is reported to be suffering from some pretty annoying WiFi issues relating to its new 802.11ac WiFi chip. However, it appears that Apple is working quickly to squash the bug. As AppleInsider notes, some owners of the latest MacBook Air models who are in Apple's AppleSeed program have received emails from the company inviting them to beta test a prerelease version of the "MacBook Air WiFi Update 1.0." Apple doesn't state what issues the update addresses; instead the company only asks for feedback on the machines WiFi capabilities after the update is installed. There are no clues pointing to when the general public may get access to the software update, but Apple's 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display also suffered from WiFi issues after it first shipped in October. By December, Apple had issued a software fix to address the problem.
Daily Update for June 25, 2013
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here. No Flash? Click here to listen. Subscribe via RSS
Apple investigating MacBook Air WiFi issues
Apple is investigating potential MacBook Air WiFi issues, according to 9to5Mac. The website reports that Apple Store Geniuses were recently given the following directive: In the United States, Apple Geniuses and Advisors should capture MacBook Air (13-inch, Mid 2013) and MacBook Air (11-inch, Mid 2013) computers with any WiFi issues. The machines in question use a new 802.11ac WiFi chipset. Users have reported that affected MacBook Airs will connect to WiFi hotspots, but then drop the connection after a minute or two, requiring a restart to connect to the hotspot again. As Apple seems intent on getting a hold of affected machines, users who have noticed the issue should go to their Apple Store and request a replacement.
Apple allegedly looking into MacBook Air WiFi issue, replacing machines
Over the last few days we've been hearing from several of our readers about WiFi instability on new Haswell-equipped MacBook Airs, which also happen to be Apple's first computers with 802.11ac. Despite those rare reports, the company's new laptops impressed us in our recent review with solid performance and incredible battery life. Today 9to5Mac learned that Apple is supposedly aware of the issue and working on a fix, while some customers have also reported getting their systems replaced. In the meantime, the company's apparently directed its Genius Bar employees to "capture" machines experiencing the problem -- i.e. return them to Cupertino for testing. We've contacted Apple for comment and will keep you posted if there's any official response.
Samsung makes first PCIe-based SSD for Ultrabooks, we see one likely customer
Solid-state drives are so speedy these days that even a SATA interface might not have the bandwidth to cope. It's a good thing that Samsung has started mass-producing the first PCI Express-based SSDs for Ultrabooks, then. The new XP941 series uses PCIe's wider data path to read at nearly 1.4GB/s -- that's 2.5 times faster than the quickest SATA SSDs, and nimble enough to move 500GB in six minutes. It also ships in a tinier M.2 format that makes past card-based SSDs look gargantuan, even when there's up to 512GB of storage. Samsung hasn't named laptop makers receiving the XP941, although it doesn't take strong deductive skills to spot one of the (probable) first customers. When Apple is shipping a new 13-inch MacBook Air that just happens to use a very similar PCIe SSD from Samsung, there's likely more than coincidence at work.
This week on gdgt: PlayStation 4, MacBook Air, Google Now
Each week, our friends at gdgt go through the latest gadgets and score them to help you decide which ones to buy. Here are some of their most recent picks. Want more? Visit gdgt anytime to catch up on the latest, and subscribe to gdgt's newsletter to get a weekly roundup in your inbox.
The Daily Roundup for 06.13.2013
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
CNN Money happy with MacBook Air battery life
CNN Money reporter JP Mangalindan recently got his hands on a review unit of the new 11-inch MacBook Air and he has good news to report. As a longtime Air user Mangalindan's major criticism of his old 2011 model was its skimpy battery life. While Apple said the 2011 Air was capable of five hours of life, Mangalindan experienced closer to three hours before he was out of power. Based on his experiences with the 2013 review unit however, it appears the Air's battery problems have been solved. The review unit is an 11-inch MacBook Air with a 1.3GHz dual-core i5 processor, 4 GB of RAM and 256 GB of flash storage. Over the course of his basic testing, Mangalindan was able to get eight hours of battery life with WiFi on, multiple apps running, the brightness turned up and the keyboard illuminated. Now granted this is a brand-new unit, so as time wears on that battery life will drop. But that's still an incredible amount of juice for such power-intensive use settings. Mangalindan will have a full review later this week, but head over to CNN Money now to check out the rest of his first impression.
MacBook Air review (13-inch, mid-2013)
We can't lie: we were hoping for a Retina MacBook Air last year when Apple rolled out the thinner, faster MacBook Pros with their pixel-packed displays and optical drive-free chassis. The Air, sadly, got left out of that particular party, but when we reviewed it we found a perfectly fine machine. This year, then, would surely be the year of major updates to Apple's venerable thin-and-light machine? As it turns out, no, it wouldn't be. From the outside, the mid-2013 MacBook Air refresh is again a very minor one indeed, with no new display and (virtually) no exterior modifications. On the inside, though, bigger changes are afoot. New, faster SSDs and a selection of power-sipping Haswell CPUs from Intel have created a device that's all but identical to its predecessor yet is, in many ways, vastly improved. Is this wedge-like, 13-inch paradox worth your $1,099, and can it really live up to Apple's promised 12-hour battery life? Let's find out.%Gallery-190960%
2013 MacBook Air benchmarks from AnandTech
The new MacBook Air went on sale this week, and customers want to know how this year's Haswell models compare to last year's Ivy Bridge units. Yesterday, Engadget benchmarked the new MacBook Air looking primarily at the SSD drive performance and now AnandTech has published its own report that includes CPU performance. The 2013 MacBook Air has a Core i5 CPU with a lower base clock speed than the comparable 2012 MacBook Air, but it has the same max turbo speed of 2.6GHz. Though the Haswell architecture improves the battery life in the 2013 MacBook Air, the CPU performance is generally the same between the two models. SSD drive performance in the new MacBook Air is boosted significantly by the adoption of PCIe-based SSDs. Hardware specs show that the PCIe 2.0 x2 interface is capable of 1 GB/s in each direction, and AnandTech recorded a respectable peak sequential read/write performance of almost 800 MB/s. There are a lot of other goodies in the AnandTech article for hardware fans to geek out on, so head on over and check it out.
iFixit breaks down the MacBook Air 13-inch Mid-2013
iFixit got its hands on a shiny new 13-inch MacBook Air and tore the diminutive machine apart. On the outside, the new MacBook Air is similar to last year's model, but the innards revealed a few minor differences like a smaller SSD module, and updated AirPort card, a new heat sink clamp and more. They also noticed dual microphones that'll help cut down on background noise during a FaceTime call. In the end, the MacBooks Air was awarded a Repairability Score of 4 out of 10, with 10 being the easiest to repair. The case is easy to remove and some the parts are easily replaceable, but several key components like the RAM, SSD and certain screws are proprietary. iFixit also confirmed that the RAM is still soldered to the Air's logic board, and the SSDs are not compatible between generations. You can read more about the teardown on iFixit's website.
iFixit tears down 2013 MacBook Air, finds bigger battery and smaller SSD
iFixit has a tradition of tearing apart Apple gadgets (and many others) as soon as they're on sale, and it's maintaining that custom with a fresh peek at the 2013 edition of the 13-inch MacBook Air. This isn't a repeat of last year's by-the-book affair, however -- there's a few minor surprises in store. We now know that Apple is bolstering the efficiency of Intel's Haswell chips with a larger 7,150mAh battery pack, and that Broadcom makes the 802.11ac WiFi chip. The solid-state drive inside also represents a major rethink: while we've heard that Apple has switched the drive's interface from pokey SATA to PCI Express, we can see that the SSD itself has shrunk dramatically since 2012. iFixit is still down on the Air's repairability and scores it four out of ten, but those who've wanted to answer a few of Apple's more recent riddles will still want to check out the full examination at the source.
Daily Update for June 11, 2013
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here. No Flash? Click here to listen. Subscribe via RSS
First MacBook Air 2013 benchmarks
Apple refreshed its MacBook Air line yesterday at WWDC, and Engadget got some hands-on time with the sleek and slim notebook. Besides taking some photos of Apple's ultraportable, they also put the hardware through its paces. Early results from the benchmark testing suggest the new MacBook Air has a nice bump in performance over other Mac notebooks, especially in the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test. Engadget recorded read speeds of 725.4 MB/s and write speeds of 433.4 MB/s, which is almost twice the speed of the current 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display. That is surprisingly good for such a tiny machine. Head over to Engadget's website to check out photos and additional comments on Apple's new MacBook Air.
