Hasta La Gadget!

Oh, sure — we’ve seen a litany of knockoff MacBook Pro units, but how’s about one that actually ships with OS X? As the level of nerve skyrockets towards infinity, an unnamed manufacturer in an unnamed section of China seems to be hawking a lookalike MBP with Snow Leopard onboard — a feat that even Psystar couldn’t achieve for long. As the story goes, around $466 buys you a 14-inch machine with a paltry 1.66GHz Atom D510 processor, 2GB of RAM, a 320GB hard drive and NVIDIA’s Ion 2 graphics platform. Oh, and a glowing Apple logo on the lid. Unfortunately, the dodgy specifications list seems somewhat reluctant to “admit” that “OS X” is actually loaded on, but it’s there. Trust us. We think.

Keepin’ it real fake: ‘MacBook Pro’ runs ‘OS X,’ dodges questions on ‘legitimacy’ originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 27 Nov 2010 19:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Not feeling like enough of an individual owning the same ultrathin Apple laptop as everyone else? We feel your pain, you need something more in your status symbol hardware. This is where Colorware enters, asking for (at least) $1,850 in exchange for a MacBook Air — made in 2010, exactly to your chromatic specifications. Come on, we can mock and we can decry the price, but if this were ever within the disposable income portion of your budget, wouldn’t you jump at the opportunity? Alas, there’s no option for repainting an Air if you’ve already bought one, so whether you want the 11.6-inch or 13-inch version, you’ll have to buy it directly from Colorware.

Update: It originally seemed as if the 11-inch Air wasn’t available, but it is, hence the body of the post has been updated accordingly.

Continue reading MacBook Air 2010 meets Colorware, births skinny rainbow children

MacBook Air 2010 meets Colorware, births skinny rainbow children originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Nov 2010 15:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple’s new MacBook Airs aren’t exactly performance kings — if anything, they’re performance laggards given the finely aged internals they have — but there is some room for upgrading them should you wish for a little extra oomph. AnandTech cornered the maxed-out 11.6-inch variant, with a 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, and 128GB of flash storage on board, and put it through the usual benchmark routine. In spite of costing a much meatier $1,399 than the $999 default config, the upgraded Air was deemed to be a worthwhile improvement as it delivered an average of 15 percent better performance at the cost of no more than seven percent of battery endurance. To our eyes, the biggest driver for these improved results was the jump from 2GB to 4GB of RAM, something all of us can bear in mind when contemplating our next laptop purchase.

MacBook Air has its fully upgraded 11-inch version reviewed originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 07 Nov 2010 14:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Let’s be honest, Apple’s claim that it neglected to preload Flash on the new MacBook Airs so that users themselves could download and install the latest (and safest) version was a bit of a red herring. Behind that thin veil of corporate courtesy, we’re now seeing a pretty potent cause for Apple’s dumping of Adobe’s wares. Ars Technica‘s review of the 11-inch Air discovered that the machine could crank its way through six hours of web browsing when Flash was nowhere near it, but only four hours with Flash installed and giving it “the full web experience.” The primary culprit was Adobe’s penchant for using CPU cycles to display animated ads, which were typically replaced by static imagery in the absence of the requisite software. So yeah, it’s not a surprise that a “richer” web would require more resources, but it doesn’t speak well for Flash’s efficiency to find a laptop loses a third of its longevity when running it.

MacBook Air battery shown to last two hours longer when browsing the web sans Flash originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Nov 2010 19:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Continue reading 2010 MacBook Air owners reporting logic board and display issues

2010 MacBook Air owners reporting logic board and display issues originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Nov 2010 11:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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