Hasta La Gadget!

Desks can get messy, and if you are hooking up a laptop to a host of desktop peripherals, it can get messier still. One answer is a clutter-reducing basket slung beneath the desk. Another much more dangerous solution was created by Matt Lumpkin, a man so cavalier that he drove screws into the back of his monitor.

This rather elegant hack takes a standard, wire-mesh office file holder and fixes it to the back of the monitor. You then drop in the notebook, hook up the cables and – if you don’t look too closely around the back – you have converted your MacBook into an iMac. Matt actually avoided any real danger of piercing his screen with a screw by picking a monitor which already had mounting holes for a VESA stand.

As you can see, the rats nest of cables is still there, but at least it is out of sight. Better still, Matt reports that the MacBook actually runs cooler than it did when on the desktop — the wire mesh means that air can run freely over every surface, comfortably convecting away the heat.

MacBook/iMac Rack Hack [Instructables via Life Hacker]

While Apple grandly updated their notebook line to the new unibody design, the 17-inch MacBook Pro, Apple’s granddaddy of mobile computing, was left behind. Now, the 17-inch model joins its siblings—with promising bonus features.

Design

With nothing to scale this image, it’s nearly impossible to tell the new 17-inch MBP from the 13- or 15-inch unibody macs. From the outside, it’s the same thing, only bigger. At first it’s a little intimidating to see such a large, unadorned block of metal. But at 6.6 lbs, it’s actually not as heavy in your hands as you’d expect. And at .98-inches in stature, it’s only ever so slightly thicker (.03 inches) than the other two MacBooks.

Apple will tell you that the MBP17 is the thinnest, lightest 17-inch notebook in the world. We’ll tell you that for a monster of a laptop, it manages to not be too monstrous. The 17-inch (1920×1200) screen is a sharp, contrasty and colorful panorama, but it’s the little touches that make the MBP17 manageable: The system’s near-silent operation (using a 256GB SSD instead of a hard drive) is almost unnerving. Its underside gets warm, but never hot. And the unibody design makes particularly good sense in this larger size, as the wide chassis does not flex to your grip as you might expect.

The battery is one of the only components that’s significantly different than that of the smaller machines. Striving for 8-hours of battery life the newly designed power pack screws right into the chassis. (Lots more on that topic below.)

What’s missing, however, is the underside hatch that made for easy hard drive and battery replacement. This smart design feature, recently introduced in Apple’s 13- and 15-inch unibody laptops, has been replaced by a series of screws to remove the bottom panel, and another series of screws to remove the battery. Removing a few screws is by no means a horrendous exercise, but we can’t help but feel that it’s a step in the wrong direction. The most spend-happy pro users will be the most likely to crack the lid of their laptops—so this design choice will likely annoy a key part of the MBP17’s target audience.

What’s Different About It?

Compared to the MBP15

• Supports 8GB of RAM; the MBP15 only supports 4GB

• Includes a 256GB SSD option; the MBP15 only a 128GB

• The MBP17 includes five speakers with a wider frequency response

• There’s one extra USB port (3 total)

• Slightly faster processor options

(note: shot comparison of 13-inch model)

Compared to the old 17-inch MBP

• 40% larger battery (95WH vs. 68WH)

• Glossy and matte screen options are now available

• The screen has equal resolution, but a 60% wider color gamut

• Unibody structure, of course

Performance

The MBP17 features a 2.66 or 2.93GHz processor, up to 8GB of RAM and dual Nvidia 9400M (integrated) and 9600 (discrete) graphics cards. A 320GB 5400RPM hard drive comes standard, but that can be upgraded to a 320GB 7200RPM drive or a 128GB/256GB solid-state drive. (Note: There’s no option for a 500GB hard drive, though they are readily available if you want to swap one in.)

The model we tested was fully loaded, with a 2.93GHz processor, 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD.

Still, because the MBP17 is so similar to the 15 internally, we’re going to point you in the direction of our last review for benchmarks on the dual Nvidia 9400M and 9600 graphics cards. We also ran Xbench and uploaded the predictably impressive results to their database. However, one feature we wanted to be sure to check out was the new 256GB SSD option, a drive made by Toshiba. It’s a $750 upgrade that we were able to test in our review model.

SSD Speed Benchmarks:

Against the stock drive that comes with MBPs, the speed gains are obvious. However, the SSD market is still very young. There are only a handful of drives out there, so how do you know if Apple’s $750 offering is price competitive?

Searching through the XBench results forums, we found a user who tested out a G. Skill Titan 256GB SSD on a unibody mac. It’s not rated to be as fast as Samsung’s $1000 SSD gold standard, but according to these benchmarks, it’s still considerably faster than the drive Apple will sell you. The catch? The Titan runs $500, or $250 less than Apple’s bundled Toshiba. In other words, as with most upgrades, you’re still better off going through a third party for your SSD.

The other bonus to SSDs is how quickly they boot. From the picture, you can see that our MBP17 booted in 31 seconds, despite me having a few hundred icons on the desktop. The MBP15 (normal hard drive, 4GB RAM) took about 90 seconds to load a similar configuration, or “three times longer” in marketing speak.

Battery Life

Everything so far about the new MBP17 is all well and good, but we think there’s one claim in particular that’s going to interest consumers the most: A 7-8 hour battery life*.

*Assuming screen at half brightness, Wi-Fi on, light browsing, light word processing (so no Bluetooth but otherwise a standard configuration). 8 hours on integrated graphics, 7 hours with more beefy discrete GPU.

Indeed, the MBP17’s battery is huge. It takes up roughly the whole bottom half of the computer’s underside. To make the battery as big as possible, Apple removed even the battery’s removal mechanism. Apple’s lithium polymer pack screws in and promises a shelf life of 1000 complete charges—which also means 2000 half recharges or 4000 quarter recharges—before the battery depletes to 80% capacity.

And while we didn’t have the time to test Apple’s 1000 recharge claim, we were able to run some battery tests.

First we put the system up against a day of blogging. This test was admittedly harder than Apple’s cushy benchmarking, but I wanted to see how it would stand up to true pro use. So with the screen just a hair above half brightness, Wi-Fi on, Bluetooth off, backlit keyboard on, discrete graphics on, heavy web browsing and occasional Photoshop work, we achieved 3 hours 57 minutes of run time.

Should we be pissed? After all, Apple offers 7-8 hours in their ads! That’s your call. In truth, we’ve found that most laptops hit about half their rated battery life under real world conditions (cough, netbooks, cough). If we can only cover our ears and hum through Apple’s latest marketing campaign, we’re actually fairly pleased with about 4 hours of heavy use from a fully loaded 17-inch laptop—especially since that metric includes no real compromises to our workflow.

We also wanted to simulate watching a movie on the plane. So we played back an MPEG4 with the screen at half brightness, discrete graphics off, backlit keyboard off, Wi-Fi off, Bluetooth off and headphones in. We received 4 hours 39 minutes of run time. That’s nearly two hours longer* than we received from the MBP15, and 2 hours 30 minutes longer than we received from the MB13. That’s basically the difference between watching one movie and watching two.

*The previous MBP tests had Wi-Fi on, the backlit keyboard on and speakers on. These alterations should account for a small amount of the increase, but my no means a majority. The 17-inch unit also has an SSD, but these non-spinning drives don’t necessarily mean power savings.

For the Lazy Readers Needing a Summary

A 17-inch notebook has never been designed for the mainstream consumer. But then again, nothing about this MacBook Pro is aiming for the mainstream. It’s a laptop that starts at $2800, and our fully loaded test model runs a hair over $5,000. Its screen is as big as most CRT monitors from just a few years back.

The thing should feel like a beast on the couch, but it actually doesn’t. It’s almost frightening how quickly you adjust, appreciating the extra screen space while disregarding that this system is supposed to be a “laptop” in name only.

If you can get over the purported 8 hours of battery life and settle for longevity around half that number, you’ll be welcomed with a laptop that feels like a desktop but is actually a laptop. It’s a Cadillac that you can just about park, a triple cheeseburger in the bun of a double, a stocky man in a well-tailored suit. And we’re liking it. We just can’t help but ask, why can’t Apple fit a 256GB SSD or 8GB of RAM—or even a 4+ hour battery—into a 15-inch MBP?

It’s a big honking computer in a smallish package

As with the other unibody systems, the MBP17 runs cooler and quieter than past MacBooks

Battery life is reasonable, but will fall short for pro users looking for a true day of use

Apple’s Toshiba SSD upgrade is pricey for its performance

There’s no easy pop-off bottom panel like in other unibody models

External Sources [ifixit, Xbench]

A large number of MacBook owners have reported cracks appearing in their notebook cases.

The cracks are mostly occurring in the palm-rest corners of the earlier generation, plastic MacBooks. The defect has occurred in enough MacBooks that a Flickr gallery is documenting the problem with over 180 photos to date.

Though the issue only appears to be affecting a small percentage of MacBook users, it’s still a questionable defect coming from Apple — a company most famous for its meticulous, premium design.

iFixIt’s Luke Soules, who performs repairs and disassemblies of Apple products, pointed at the design of the MacBook as the root of the problem. For MacBooks, the bottom part of the notebook is the box that holds the guts of the computer; the top part, where the cracks are occurring, is just a flat sheet.

Soules noted that cracks weren’t an issue with the older iBooks, because the design was flip-flopped: The top part had sides, so it was essentially an inverted box; the bottom part was a flat sheet. 

Affected MacBook users might view this as a design flaw on Apple’s part. Some users have reported the defect is fully covered by Apple warranty. Of course, the new unibody MacBooks aren’t experiencing this issue (since metal doesn’t crack).

MacBook cases still cracking up [Macworld]

Photo: Robplusjessie/Flickr

What’s the first thing you do after buying a new computer? Apart from a good few fingers of scotch to dull the pain of your dwindling bank account? For me, the first online purchase with a new Mac is RAM, and after picking up a shiny new unabomber MacBook I made the traditional trip to Crucial.com, memory suppliers to the smart and beautiful.

And I mean traditional. One of the "features" of the Mac is that the memory comes in matched pairs. This means that it takes up both slots, and therefore bumping up from 2GB to 4GB means buying a pair of 2GB sticks and throwing out the old ones. I have a box somewhere around here full of useless RAM. Can’t use it, can’t sell it. Maybe I’ll make a nerd-necklace for the Lady.

The new MacBooks and MacBook Pros are designed to be easy to open and operate upon. Pop open the battery hatch and you can simply tug the hard drive out — a huge improvement on the old MacBook Pro — changing a drive on that thing was like playing a particularly tricky game of Operation.

But oddly, adding more RAM is actually harder on the new MacBook than on the old white plastic one. Not much harder, but certainly a lot scarier. Read on to find out why. Warning: Lots of pictures

In the old MacBook, the RAM slots were reached through a hatch in the battery compartment. You undid a few captive screws and pulled out the L-shaped cover. Once there, you flipped a couple of levers and out popped the RAM, ready to be replaced. Total time taken, five minutes. Experience level needed — n00b.

With the new aluminum MacBooks, there is a little more work. First, flip the little lever to remove the battery cover:

The battery pulls out by the little plastic tab, just like the hard drive. Go ahead and remove the battery. Then the work begins. You’ll need a small Philips screwdriver to take out a total of eight screws, three long and five short. Check the data sheet and diagram and print it before shutting down the computer. Or just look in the instruction manual that came with the Mac. Or, failing both of these, do what I did and pull it up on another device:

And we’re in! See what I said about being scary? The machine is barely two days old and already it’s opened up on the slab. I don’t have a problem with this (I once took a hot air gun to the inside of an iBook to reflow solder on a dry joint) but for the average user this is probably a little too much. But then, I guess that’s what the Genius Bar is for.

Next up, the RAM. I always use Crucial. The prices are good, the online selector means I always buy the right sticks and the stuff turns up fast. This order was placed on Wednesday afternoon and arrived this morning, and that’s slower than usual.

I bought 2x2GB of DDR3 memory, running at 1067 MHz, to give me a total of 4GB, the maximum allowed in the MacBook. The price was OK, at €56 (about $70) plus taxes and shipping. All in, €73.07 ($92.05). Certainly not the least I have paid, but then Apple always wants us to put the good stuff in our machines. Actually, buying the extra memory from Apple would cost $150, double the price, and much less fun.

Here it is, freed from its anti-static bag. The new stuff is at the top, with twice as many chips. I guess that’s better.

The instructions for memory removal say to flip a lever, but in my Mac you just pull a plastic retainer to the side and the memory springs up.

Then you take out the second one and pop in the new sticks. Pretty simple, and almost no pressure required. Then the back plate goes back on. Make sure you don’t let the tiny screws stick to your arm and then drop onto a cowhide rug like the one in this room. Just saying, is all. Before it goes back on, here’s a quick look at the bottom plate:

It’s every bit as solid as the rest of the machine. After screwing the plate back in place and replacing the battery and hatch cover, its time to see if we broke anything. Hopefully it will go well, as I pulled of some rather important stickers from one of the sticks:

Oops. Let’s switch it on and see:

It lives! Fantastic. Now to see if it’s working properly. Here’s a before and after of the About This Mac panel.

All working fine, although the Startup Disk section seems to have gone missing. The disk is still there – I saw it – so I’m not too worried. Total time, including going to buy a new set of tiny screwdrivers and digging the lost screws out of the rug, was around 20 minutes. You could do it quicker by not taking so many photographs.

Does it feel faster? Yes. Lightroom, where I processed the images you see here, screams along now. Flipping between library and develop modules, for instance, feels faster than my old MacBook Pro. €70 well spent, I’d say.

See Also:

• Hands On: Old MacBook Pro vs New MacBook
• How Not to Fix a MacBook Keyboard
• PowerBook Teardown. What Gadget Labbers Do at Lunchtime

GScreen has announced a ruggedized version of its dual screen notebook, seen above. This is interesting news, and the notebook will be tough enough for the US Navy, which provided the specs.

But the real surprise here is the gScreen G400 itself, a rather odd device which has only just come to our attention. Internally it’s a pretty well equipped notebook — Intel Core 2 Duo 2.8 GHz, 4-8GB RAM, up to 500GB hard drive space and a choice of two speedy NVIDIA graphics cards. But the obvious feature is the dual-screen setup.

Those are both 15.4" LED backlit monitors, both the same size as the already generous MacBook Pro screen, and we totally dig them. You gain a little weight (7.7 lbs) and some thickness, but it sure beats dragging an external monitor around with you. The only problem we detect is a whiff of vapor. The site says that we can pre-order the G400 from February 25th. It lists no price, and the only product shot is the 3D render seen above. We do hope all goes well, though: dual screen notebooks to date have been rather clunky affairs.

Product page [gScreen]

See Also:

• Photo: Lenovo Dual-Screen Notebook Is A Heavyweight
• Lenovo Introduces New Dual-Screen Notebook, Slim Desktop
• Review: Lenovo’s Mega Notebook Crushes Benchmarks, Femurs