Hasta La Gadget!

Apple will be kicking off the new year in style, with the launch of its much anticipated Mac App Store, a desktop-based counterpart to its ultra-successful iPhone and iPad stores. The new storefront will be available in 90 countries and will feature applications from a wide variety of categories, including Games, Productivity, Utilities, Education, Design, and Lifestyle.

Said CEO Steve Jobs in an announcement that went out this morning, “The App Store revolutionized mobile apps. We hope to do the same for PC apps with the Mac App Store by making finding and buying PC apps easy and fun. We can’t wait to get started on January 6.”

Note the use of the word “PC.” Aw, how the times have changed.

The Mac store will offer most of the familiar features, including download charts, ratings and reviews, and one-click purchasing. Once downloaded, apps can be run on multiple Macs when signed into your account. The store is available as a free update to Mac owners with Snow Leopard installed.

Apple is offering up 70 percent of download revenue to developers.

A glass door and a store full of high-priced electronics. Sounds like a virtual welcome mat for potential criminals, doesn’t it?

A Greenwich, Connecticut Apple store’s glass door was the latest to get smashed earlier this week. A group of five thieves broke it at around 3 AM yesterday morning, taking tens of thousands of dollars worth of merchandise with them, as they left.

Burglaries have also taken place at Apple stores in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey–the last took place in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey. On December 6th, four thieves nabbed iPhones, iPod, and MacBooks in 30 seconds and then left–just in time for the holidays.

PhantomSkinz has just announced that its Chromatics Carbon Fiber line of skins is now available for the MacBook Air. It not only delivers protection, the company says, but offers a realistic 3D look and feel. Buyers can choose how much of their notebook they want covered: just the top, the top and wrist area, or the whole notebook. Skins go on without any stick residue, so there’s no chance of leaving lasting marks on your notebook.

The skins are available in either black or white. You apply them by removing the skin from its backing paper, applying it to your notebook, then slowly pressing out the bubbles. The company recommends using a hair drying to firmly attach the skin to corners. Prices range from $39.95 to $79.95, depending on how much coverage you want.

Think touch screens are one of the biggest innovations of the past decade? As it turns out, that concept has been available to consumers longer than a lot of you reading this have been alive.

The MS DOS-powered HP-150 allowed users to maneuver around a very basic monotone interface. The screen was surrounded by a series of infrared emitters and detectors which would be able to roughly place any non-transparent object near the screen. The divots were often known to get clogged with dust, making the “touchscreen” unworkable. The touchscreen was later dropped as a standard feature in later incarnations before being dropped as a feature all together.

After the jump, check out some footage from the gripping television program: Computer Chronicles. The clip wasn’t of note just because of the forward-looking (if ultimately flopping) attempt on the part of HP, but check out how wound-up these guys are. They’re techies, but they’re all at least in their mid-30s and wearing suits. That sort of behavior just wouldn’t be acceptable in today’s tech world.

It sounds like a geeky gift – compared to jewelry, it certainly  is –  but almost everyone needs a backup server. Online backup is nice but only if you have a couple gigabytes of data to protect; I’ve got 2 terabytes (2,000 gigabytes) each of photos and videos, a lot of music, and several hundred gigabytes of data including scans of every document of significance since college. (Hey, I’m a Type A.) That calls for a home backup server, personal file server, or NAS (network attached storage) device. Three names, same thing: One device automatically backs up (and shares files among) every PC, Mac, notebook and netbook in the house. A long-running pcmag.com favorite has been the HP MediaSmart EX series (see pcmag.com review) and you can’t go wrong, especially for sharing photos online. (About $515 direct with one 1.5TB drive and three bays empty.) I’ve thrown my lot with the Synology DiskStation four bay series that isn’t quite as idiotproof on setup and remote access as the HP, but the prices are sensational, as low as $375 for a diskless box, then shop for the best deal on hard drives. Add four 2-TB drives at $100 apiece and with the magic of Synology’s RAID 5 controller, your 8GB of drive space effectively gives you 6 TB of redundant storage that survives the loss of a hard disk (which happens sooner or later). With HP’s technology, you get redundancy by using a second drive.