macs

Chrome modders take a shine to iMacs

This may be the best news all year in the flawed world of gadget fashion: Gold could be facing a serious challenge as the luxury look of choice. And the pretender to the throne may not be a precious metal at all.

Witness this brewing battle in custom Macs. Only a few months ago, an outfit called Chromac offered some fetching photos of an iMac with a mirrored patina worthy of the company's name. But now there's a rival service from Computer Choppers, which showed off its Midas touch with the MacBook around the same time but has … Read more

MacBook Air sliced and diced

Leave it to the guys at iFixit to get a new MacBook Air and, instead of showing off at the local coffee shop (like us), they take the thing apart. The company specializes in Mac and iPod parts and repairs, but it is perhaps best known for taking every new Apple product and dissecting it. They then post step-by-step photos and a detailed analysis of the parts inside.

From iFixit's photos, we see that the battery is the biggest internal component by far. It is held in place by nine screws, in case you were thinking about replacing it … Read more

Lenovo, Fujitsu planning to use Intel's MacBook Air chip

The PC industry is wasting little time getting in line behind Apple to use Intel's spiffy new notebook chip.

CNET News.com has learned that Lenovo and Fujitsu are in the process of putting together systems based on the special Core 2 Duo chip that Apple is using in the MacBook Air. The new laptops should be out shortly, according to sources familiar with the companies' plans, and will give customers a chance to see what the rest of the PC industry can do with the power-thrifty chips.

Representatives for Lenovo and Intel declined to comment, while a Fujitsu … Read more

Um... nevermind!

Shorter Gartner (tip o' the antlers to Daring Fireball):

Oh, man, we were so high when we wrote that!

Public beta set for DxO's raw converter for Mac

LAS VEGAS--In a departure from how it handled its Windows release, DxO Labs plans to begin a public beta testing for the Mac OS X version of its DxO Optics Pro software used to convert raw files from higher-end cameras.

DxO Labs released DxO Optics Pro version 5 for Windows last year, saying it hoped to release the Mac OS X version in November. However, the Mac version of the software now is scheduled for release on Feb. 22, said Luc Marin, DxO's director of marketing for photography, at the Photo Marketing Association trade show here.

The company hopes … Read more

The verdict for Office for Mac 2008? OK, but not great

I installed the new version of Microsoft Office for Mac on Saturday and spent a bit of time with it on my flight to Boston on Sunday. (Check out the official CNET review here.) While I like the cleaner interface and some of the new fonts, overall I feel like the applications are much slower. I also found out the hard way that the default save state of .docx screws you pretty much immediately if you aren't careful. (To Microsoft's credit, you can easily change this in the preferences.)

I mainly used Word as I was afraid that … Read more

Where do your blog posts go?

Wired has a great interactive info-graphic on the path blog posts take once you hit the "go" button.

You have a blog. You compose a new post. You click Publish and lean back to admire your work. Imperceptibly and all but instantaneously, your post slips into a vast and recursive network of software agents, where it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped, republished, and propagated throughout the Web. Within minutes, if you've written about a timely and noteworthy topic, a small army of bots will get the word out to anyone remotely interested, from fellow bloggers to corporate … Read more

Leopard users: Manage files better in the Dock

By now most Mac users (and certainly Leopard users) know about Stacks, the new file-management feature that resides in the Dock in Mac OS X 10.5. Stacks are great for many things, like organizing a bunch of similar files or keeping all the parts of a project together. To create a stack, you just put a folder in the Dock and start grabbing files and drag them to the same folder. You get your choice of the way it displays your files when you click the folder--either in a grid or fanned out. The less-than-useful issue I noticed, is … Read more

MacBook Air comes in for a landing

The usually quiet CNET offices were abuzz this afternoon thanks to a new visitor--Apple's MacBook Air laptop. Since its announcement at Macworld last week, this superthin 13-inch system has been conversation topic number one for Apple fans, and after getting our hands on one in person, it's easy to see why.

The Air is incredibly thin, about 0.75 inch thick, even though it occupies the exact same desktop footprint as a regular 13-inch MacBook. Picking it up, the MacBook Air feels a little heavier than you'd expect from looking at it, even though it's … Read more