Hasta La Gadget!

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 at the Web 2.0 Summit 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 presently in testing.

Adobe CEO: Flash battery life depends on hardware acceleration, MacBook Air update in testing right now originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Nov 2010 12:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

The title of Apple’s recent Back to the Mac event turned out to have multiple meanings. The first was heralding a shift of Apple’s event focus to the product that was once synonymous with the company. But it also had a more literal connotation, that traits associated both with iPad software and hardware would now be finding their way back to the Apple’s computers. But the impact of this round trip could have different implications for hardware and software.

Apple’s new MacBook Air was cited as taking on traits associated with the iPad such as thinness, flash storage, longer battery life, and instant on. The new MacBook Air also dispenses with an optical drive, but so did the previous MacBook Air, and indeed so do nearly all netbooks and quite a few other “thin and light” notebook PCs. Most would agree that the new hardware choices produce desirable traits in an ultramobile notebook.

Continue reading Switched On: The iPadification of Mac OS

Switched On: The iPadification of Mac OS originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 07 Nov 2010 12:50:00 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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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.

11.6-inch MacBook Air cleared to remain packed through security, but we’d remove it anyway originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Oct 2010 10:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The MacBook Air has never exactly been a simple product to review. Since the laptop’s launch back in the heady days of 2008, we’ve always considered it a niche, high-end product and much less a mainstream system. Originally, the wafer-thin (and somewhat underpowered) laptop sold for a painful starting price of $1,799, and had its fair share of problems. Well, we’ve come a long way from Apple’s original play, with two all-new models of the Air. The first is an update to the standard 13.3-inch model priced at a significantly cheaper $1,299, while the newest entrant to the MacBook family is a tiny 11.6-inch model that’s nearly the size of an iPad — and not wildly more expensive, starting at $999. Of course, over time the market for laptops of this type has gotten quite crowded, with a slew of ULV-based thin-and-lights that offer lots of options for lots of budgets. Do the new MacBook Airs have enough to take on a crowded market, or have they been bumped out of the game altogether? Read on for the full Engadget review to find out!

Continue reading MacBook Air review (late 2010)

MacBook Air review (late 2010) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 26 Oct 2010 19:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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