MBA
Latest
Apple's Boot Camp 6 supports dual-booting with Windows 10
Apple began rolling out the latest version of its multi boot utility, Boot Camp 6, on Thursday. It supports newly-released Windows 10 (64-bit edition only) as well as USB 3, USB-C, Thunderbolt, SD and SDXC connections. Users will need to be running OS X Yosemite and have an authentic copy of Windows 10 installed on a separate partition. The update is still propagating, according to MacRumors, but should be available to Intel Mac owners shortly. That includes the 13- and 15-inch MBPs, 11- and 13-inch MBAs, MacBook, MacMini, and various iMacs. Users don't actually have to do anything to get the update, as it will download automatically if you're already running the latest rev of Boot Camp 5. [Image Credit: Getty Images]
Chromebook 101: How to make your new toy more Apple-y
Steve is a deeply bad influence. He started the trend, which prompted me to order my own Chromebook (although I had been waiting to pull the trigger for several weeks). Slowly this US$250 MacBook-wannabe has been infiltrating TUAW households. It's great for kids. It's a unit you don't mind taking on non-work trips. It's undemanding. But it's not quite the MacBook experience, especially for our Apple-trained fingers. The problem is that we want the Control key next to the space bar, not waaaaaay off to the left. Solution? A simple Chromebook option, similar to System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard > Modifier Keys. 1. Visit chrome://settings/languageCustomizeModifierKeysOverlay on your Chromebook 2. Under Device > click Keyboard Settings. A little dialog opens. 3. Swap Alt to Ctrl, and Ctrl to Alt. And, if you like, bring back Caps Lock by selecting that from the Search pop-up. And you're set. You're ready to Chrome like a real Machead!
MacBook Air review (13-inch, mid 2012)
More Info Apple announces refreshed MacBook Air: Ivy Bridge processor, USB 3.0, shipping today The 2012 MacBook Air vs. the 2011 model: what's changed? ASUS Zenbook Prime UX21A preview The last time we reviewed the MacBook Air, we didn't have a whole lot to compare it to. Sure, there was the original Samsung Series 9, but it was more expensive, at $1,649, and ran off a standard-voltage processor, often at the expense of battery life. Companies like Lenovo and Toshiba already had deep experience making ultraportables, but those notebooks generally weren't as light, or as skinny, as the Air. A year ago, too, Ultrabooks, as we now know them were little more than a concept as far as the computer-buying public was concerned. Today, there are 110-plus Windows-based Ultrabooks on the horizon, leaving consumers with an overwhelming smorgasbord of thin, shockingly powerful laptops. Apple, for its part, has stuck with the same Air design we liked so much the first time around, though it's refreshed the lineup with speedier Ivy Bridge processors and traded those USB 2.0 ports for 3.0. Additionally, the Air can now be configured with more RAM and roomier storage. Oh, and the 13-inch version now starts at $1,200, down from $1,300. (The 11-inch version still goes for $999 and up.) That sounds promising, making an already-excellent laptop faster and less expensive. Still, with so many comparable products on the Windows side, we have to wonder, does Apple really continue to define the category or have other companies narrowed the gap? Let's find out.%Gallery-158436%
Apple announces refreshed MacBook Air: Ivy Bridge processor, USB 3.0, shipping today
Apple's skinnier, lighter MacBook option checked in for another (irregular) hardware update at this year's WWDC. Just under a year since the last time the range was renovated, the move to Ivy Bridge processors wasn't the only thing that changed. First up, those processors will reach up to 2GHz Core i7, with Turbo Boost tipping these up to 3.2GHz. The FaceTime camera is now 720p, with the display on the 11-inch model staying put at 1366 x 768 (but with Intel's HD graphics 4000 doing the pushing). The 13-incher will house a 1440 x 900 screen and both will arrive with a pair of USB 3.0 ports and capacity for up to 8GB of RAM. Storage will now extend to 512GB, while prices will start at $999 for the most basic option, up to $1099 for the speediest offering. The best part? They'll start shipping today.%Gallery-157897%%Gallery-157963% For more coverage of WWDC 2012, please visit our event hub.
Apple refreshes its education bundles, replaces white MacBook with MacBook Air
It was back in July that Apple quit selling the white MacBook to the general public, and recently the remaining stock -- only available through its education webstore -- met a similar fate. Although the folks at Cupertino quietly removed the polycarbonate machine from the store, it's now offering up 5-pack bundles of both the 11- and 13-inch MacBook Air in its place. Notably, an education-only variant of the 13-inch model is available, priced at $4,995 for the bundle ($999 a piece), which rocks the baseline configuration of the 11-incher (Core i5, 2GB of RAM and a 64GB SSD). As MacRumors points out, the cheapest 13-inch Air available to the public starts at $1,200, although it does have beefier specs, so it's nothing to be terribly upset over. You'll find more details at the links below.
OWC Mercury Aura Pro Express SATA 3.0 SSDs doubles your (MacBook) Airspeed velocity
It's MacWorld, which means those providers of Apple gear are busting out wares for aftermarket insertion into your objects of desire. Other World Computing's latest offering is a slender solid-state drive ready to be crow-barred into last year's MacBook Airs. The bombastically named OWC Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G SSD is a SATA Rev. 3.0 drive with a promised 6Gb/s data speed at sizes of up to a staggering 480GB. Since the stock drives are limited to the 3Gb/s SATA Rev. 2.0 (but the controllers run 3.0), you should find a significant performance bump when swapping in the new unit. The toggle-synchronous NAND drives come in a variety of sizes, starting at 120GB ($260), but it's the brand new and quite beastly 480GB model that has us excited. Sure, $1,150 is a lot to ask for less than half a terrabyte of storage, but you'll get a three-year warranty for all that cash. We may never give you our money, nor our funny pages, but you can have the press release that's after the break.
Apple boots Sandy Bridge-based MacBook Air into mass production? (update)
Concord Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo is starting to build a bit of a reputation for accurate Apple rumors, so you may be able to take this with a slightly smaller dose of NaCl: Kuo told AppleInsider that Cupertino's allegedly ordered 380,000 of those new MacBook Air models with Intel's Sandy Bridge processors on board, to be completed within the month. Of course, if Apple's got its heart set on distributing silica scaffolding, it has to phase the existing Core 2 Duo variants out, and so the company's reportedly finishing a final production run of 80,000 units now. If you happen to notice that your entire state is out of aluminum-clad ultralights, you know who to call! Update: iPhone hacker Chronic claims the MacBook Air refresh could appear as soon as Wednesday morning. Update 2: Never mind -- Chronic says his sources were mistaken about the MacBook Air on Wednesday.
Some MacBook Airs sporting faster blade SSDs, probably from Samsung
When Apple released its redesigned MacBook Air in October 2010, much was made of the switch to flash storage using a custom-built Mini PCI Express form factor SSD drive. It took a few weeks but these SSDs would ultimately be released as the commercially available Toshiba Blade X-gale SSD module, model TS128C. Now we're seeing user reports showing MacBook Airs equipped with a second, even faster SSD with a SM128C part number -- the "SM" hinting at its presumed Samsung manufacturing origins. Samsung's SSD manages up to 260MBps read and 210MBps write speeds compared to Toshiba's 210MBps read and 185MBps write performance. Of course, it's hardly unusual for Apple to multi-source components. And a recent decision to source parts from Korea's Samsung would have been a smart move to keep just-in-time supply lines fully stocked following the spate of disasters in Toshiba's home country of Japan. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be any way of confirming which SSD you're about to purchase without cracking open the retail box and running the OS X System Profiler. Good luck with that.
Ask Engadget: best PC alternative to 13-inch MacBook Air?
We know you've got questions, and if you're brave enough to ask the world for answers, here's the outlet to do so. This week's Ask Engadget question is coming to us from Sheikh Adnan Abdullah, who seems to need a MacBook Air not made by Apple (or a KIRF counterpart). If you're looking to send in an inquiry of your own, drop us a line at ask [at] engadget [dawt] com. "I currently own a Macbook Air, but I'm not a big fan of Mac OS. I'm planning to transition back to Windows. Can you recommend me a 13- to 14-inch Windows PC that is as light as a MacBook Air and provides the same amount of battery life? Thanks!" We just have to believe that this fellow isn't in this boat alone, and while the obvious answer is to just install a fresh copy of Windows 7 onto the MBA through Parallels or Boot Camp, it's quite possible that he's trying to shake the entire Apple design. So, outside of MSI's X-Slim series, is there anything on the Wintel side quite like Apple's thinnest laptop ever?
How would you change Apple's 11-inch MacBook Air?
Apple may not be much on the idea of a 7-inch tablet, but an 11-inch ultraportable? Now that's an idea even the engineers in Cupertino could dig. When we reviewed the 11-inch MacBook Air, we found an awful lot to love -- that all-Flash design is definitely a boon, and the more-mobile-than-mobile design is sure to be loved by road warriors and light packers everywhere. But it's still (comparatively) sluggish, and it's lacking a backlit keyboard. Enough from us, though -- we're here to hear what kind of changes you would make. Would you have thrown a faster chip in there at the expense of the case? Boosted the screen resolution? Added an SD card slot? Bit the bullet and tossed in USB 3.0? Comments are open below -- dive on it!
Adobe CEO: Flash battery life depends on hardware acceleration, MacBook Air update in testing right now
Getting a little more oomph out of your MacBook Air after giving Flash the boot? Adobe's Shantanu Narayen stopped just short of saying that's Apple's fault for not handing Adobe a device ahead of time. We asked the CEO what the greater battery life sans flash in Apple's new laptop meant for the platform (vis-a-vis HTML5) just a few minutes ago. He said it's really all about optimizing for silicon: "When we have access to hardware acceleration, we've proven that Flash has equal or better performance on every platform." You wouldn't be blamed for thinking that sentence a cop-out, but that's actually not the case -- the chief executive says they've presently got a Macbook Air in the labs and have an optimized beta of Flash for the device in testing even as we speak.
11.6-inch MacBook Air cleared to remain packed through security, but we'd remove it anyway
Really, TSA? Are you honestly so stoked to disappoint? If you'll recall, the American Transportation Security Administration got up close and personal with a first-generation MacBook Air after wrongly assuming it was an Apocalypse-bringer, and even after adjusting rules so that iPads, netbooks and other smaller electronics could fly through carry-on screening equipment without being unpacked, we've still heard of (and personally experienced) occasions where agents have demanded that tablet PCs be ran through naked. If there's a lesson to learn here, it's that the TSA is consistently inconsistent, and you're probably better off putting everything you own in a separate grey bucket for the sake of covering your bases. The same applies to Apple's new 11.6-inch MacBook Air, which is cleared to undergo TSA scanning while packed under the aforesaid amended rules. In theory, you shouldn't have to remove it from your backpack as you struggle to reach your gate, but if we had to guess, we'd say you'll be ask to take it out and re-run it if you try. But hey, you're only being victimized and scrutinized in the name of security, so it's all good. Trust us.
MacBook Air upgrade kit bumps capacity to 256GB, turns old module into USB 3.0 SSD
Sure, the only remotely user-replaceable component on the 11.6-inch MacBook Air are those tiny Toshiba SSDs, but PhotoFast's got what might be one of the most elegant upgrade solutions we've ever seen. The Air USB 3 Adapter gives you not only a brand-spanking-new 256GB module with a Sandforce SF-1200 controller, but a speedy USB 3.0 flash drive too -- which smartly doubles as the mechanism by which you move your old files over, as you can just transfer everything through the USB port. Once you're done swapping modules, the company says you'll see a 30 percent speed boost over the original drive, with reported transfer rates of 250MB/s on both sequential reads and writes. Shame the Japanese company didn't specify any sort of estimated release date or price.
MacBook Air (13-inch) first hands-on! (update: video!)
We just spent some quality time with the new 13-inch MacBook Air, and it certainly seems like a worthy upgrade. It definitely feels significantly bigger than the 11-incher, and we noticed the function keys are standard MacBook size, as opposed to the shrunken ones on the 11. We also noticed that it was seriously instant-on -- we popped the lid open and closed several times while taking photos, and it was ready to go the second we opened it. We'll have more impressions and pics in a few, stay tuned! Update: Video after the break! %Gallery-105554% %Gallery-105559%
MacBook Air (11.6-inch) first hands-on! (update: video!)
Look, all we can tell you is that this is one of the tiniest, thinnest, most lust-worthy laptops we've ever seen. We're taking a deeper look at the device right now, but for the time being, enjoy the gallery below! Update: Video after the break! %Gallery-105548% %Gallery-105559%
MacBook Air: all substance, no Flash
Amusingly enough, you know what's missing from the new MacBook Air models? Adobe Flash Player. While preloaded on Apple's past hardware, out of the box here it just says missing plugin, with no click to install option. To be fair, Flash doesn't come standard on a lot of machines, even for Windows, but we wonder if past models will continue to ship out with Adobe's plugin, especially once OS X 10.7 becomes de facto. It's not like Adobe was feeling the love from Steve anyway, and you can still install Flash yourself -- we did, and are happy to report the Air plays 720p video great. We were too bandwidth-challenged at the time to try 1080p for real, so we'll have to let you know about that later.
Apple.com reveals iLife upgrade, reaffirms MacBook Air refresh
Ah, it's good to see Apple can leak its announcements ahead of time just like the rest of the world. Overzealous forum mods on Apple's own site have been setting up Discussions sections for products to be announced at today's Back to the Mac event a little early, which has inevitably been picked up by some sleuthing souls over in Poland. A little bit of URL manipulation has revealed separate forums for a new iMovie '11, iPhoto '11, and GarageBand '11, all three of which are core components of the iLife suite, leading us to go ahead and presume that Steve Jobs will be discussing an iLife '11 later today. There's also confirmation of the new MacBook Air with an "MBA (Need official name)" forum emerging, alongside a mysterious "Reserved 20 10" destination. [Thanks, MM]
MacBook Air supply dwindling for online retailers, rumor mill raises an eyebrow
In the market for a MacBook Air? Well, now may not be the best time. Apple Insider is reporting indirect sales channels (read: non-Apple stores) are running out of the thin-and-light with no indication of a replenishment. Indeed, we just checked Amazon, Best Buy, and a few other online retailers and were consistently greeted by limited- and out-of-stock notices. So, you know what the means -- new hardware rumors. Or rather, old ones resurfacing, such as the 11.6-inch display from late September. Compounding the community's curiosity would be vague tweets from famed company insider John Gruber, who casually mentioned "the imminent" new MacBook Air as a possible reason for the recent Apple Store downtime. Of course, that didn't turn out to be the case, and for all we know it could just mean some refreshed specs -- if even that, really. AI reminds us that October has been historically the month of refreshed Mac hardware in the lead-up to holiday shopping... but that doesn't mean it's the case now. All we really know now is that third-party outlets aren't currently stocking the Air and it's unknown if they're getting anymore shipments of this particular model -- which, we know, isn't nearly as exciting as the imagination. Sorry about that. [Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
How would you change Apple's Rev. B MacBook Air?
Generally speaking, we wouldn't bother asking you how you'd change the second iteration of something, but Apple's MacBook Air is a different beast. Given how Apple maintained a lot of those severe limitations the second go round (see: single USB port, non-removable battery, etc.), we're extra curious to see how you want the next round of MBA to go. Is it finally time for Apple to downsize into the world of netbooks? Or do you just want a more "pro" oriented MacBook Air? Is 13-inches really the ideal display size here? Would it kill the suits in Cupertino to throw an integrated SDHC card reader on the side? Time to take off the gloves and let it rip!
MacBook Air hinge defect not covered by Apple's warranty?
digg_url = 'http://digg.com/apple/MacBook_Air_hinge_defect_not_covered_by_Apple_s_warranty'; Our rocky history with the MacBook Air Rev. A has been well documented, and while Apple would very much like us to forget all about it and plop down another $1,800 for the much-improved Rev. B, not everybody has that sort of birthday money to throw around. Reports of cracked hinges on the laptop are nothing new, but we always assumed Apple would eventually 'fess up to the problem and comp those repairs. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be the case, and we just got another report of a hapless MacBook Air owner who has a broken hinge that Apple says will cost $800 to repair, despite the fact the laptop is under warranty. Our own MacBook Air Rev. A had the exact same problem -- the hinge becomes loose over time, then suddenly catches and cracks from normal use, it's not from undue stress -- and Apple did the repair for free, but only after we escalated the issue to a manager, who let us know how very nice of them that was. From reading various reports, that seems the exception to Apple's repair policy, which lists this sort of damage as "accidental," and we're wondering how widespread this issue may be. If you or a loved one has been affected, hit up the poll below and pour out your heart in comments. If you're unscathed or MBA-free, feel free to show very little compassion to your fellow man. Wiggle hinge and broken hinge video is after the break. [Thanks, Alex, and sorry for your loss! Photo courtesy of LanDung2008] %Poll-26759% Read - Apple Discussions forum thread Read - MacRumors forum thread Read - Crashzone's link roundup
