Anith Gopal

Apple’s new/refreshed MacBook Pro 13″ and 15″ models each come equipped with an SD Media Card reader slot, but in the case of the 15-incher, this has required elimination of the ExpressCard/34 expansion slot that had been in every 15-inch MacBook Pro since the get-go, back in 2006. This has led to a crescendo of protest from certain classes of MacBook Pro users who depend on the expansion interface, even though an ExpressCard/34 slot is still offered on the 17″ MacBook Pro. Does this move represent wise decision-making, or is it a blunder on the scale of the misbegotten elimination (now thankfully rectified) of FireWire support from the first revision 13″ unibody MacBooks

Last week Apple quietly upgraded the entry-level white MacBook’s Core 2 Duo processor clock speed from 2.0 GHz to 2.13 GHz, added an additional 40GB of standard hard disk capacity, and upgraded its RAM specification to 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM. Obviously, additional speed and capacity is a plus, but as The Mac Observer’s Ted Landau questions , why upgrade this long-in-the-tooth laptop at all? Significant Value-Added To recap recent developments in the MacBook world, the unibody aluminum machines, released October 2008, mostly replaced the preceding white-and-black polycarbonate models, with the entry-level unibody model featuring a 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor, which remains the current spec at this writing ( although reportedly there has been an unheralded upgrade of display quality )

After two months of getting configured and acquainted, I’m pretty much comfortably settled in with my first Intel Mac — a little jewel of a 13″ unibody MacBook — and thus far it’s pretty much all good. It’s been an adjustment going down from the 17″ display on my previous workhorse system, a 1.33 GHz PowerBook, to the MacBook’s 13″ screen, but I’m used to getting along with limited display real estate as I still use an old Pismo PowerBook as a utility and road work computer

Well, those late rumors of updated iMacs and Mac minis coming today proved to be true. The Apple Store went down for a while this morning, and when it came back, refreshed versions of all of Apple’s desktops, including the Mac Pro, had appeared. Even though I just made an iMac purchase last year, and will be buying one of the new Mac minis, the iMac refresh does make the machine very appealing, even if there are very few surprises in the changes to the computer.

Seems nearly everybody believes the rumored Mac mini is fake. At least, that’s what I see in most of the comments to the published rumors.

Apple’s current chipset bedfellow, NVIDIA, has just announced that the first iteration of its upcoming Ion platform will come in desktop form, and should be expected this upcoming Spring. The new architecture integrates Intel Atom processors with the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M integrated graphics card, making it a good candidate for netbooks, as many suspected the chipset’s inaugural device would likely be. Instead, the graphics card maker says the new desktop will be a “very small and affordable,” low-power consumption model