MacBook posts

The only company that can make Apple's products look comparatively ugly is Apple. Take for example the new MacBook Air. Grab one of those babies, put it next to a current MacBook or MacBook Pro, and the bigger notebooks look like monstrosities. Now, I'm sure Apple will start to port many of the improvements of the latest Air -- like the SSD chips and improved screens -- over to the MacBook and MacBook Pro, but I'm hoping that Apple takes the biggest step that it can regarding the MacBook line and tears out the optical drives.

I've owned my 15" MacBook Pro (the last one to have a removable battery) since June 2009. Not once in my seventeen months of ownership have I ever used the optical drive. I've never used it to import music, play a DVD, or burn a CD or DVD. I'm not alone in my realization of having a completely irrelevant piece of hardware on my top of the line laptop either. MG Siegler at our recently acquired sister site, TechCrunch, pretty much noticed the same thing a few weeks ago.

If the MacBook Air really is the sign of the future of Apple's laptops, then the optical drive just has to go. People own laptops because they take them places. Portability is their main attraction. As Apple has shown us, no optical drive equals more portability. I mean, it's not like most users need them, is it? When was the last time you actually were out and about and needed to use your optical drive? Were you in a coffee shop, and the guy next to you needed to give you a Word file, so he burned it to a CD? I didn't think so. There are so many faster, lighter, and more portable ways to transfer data -- like USB drives or DropBox -- that the optical disc is all but pointless for file transfers. Installing software is also a moot point, since most of us download our software or will buy it through the upcoming Mac App Store. As for watching DVDs? A movie plays better and drains less power on your laptop if it resides on your hard drive.

After distracting us with new goodies, Apple updated the MacBook Pro with a build-to-order CPU bump, bringing the full speed processor choice up to a 2.8GHz i7.

The upgrade will cost you US$400 and is limited to the 17-inch and 15-inch models. Consider this the polar opposite of the new Core 2 duo-powered MacBook Air -- huge, heavy and full of power and storage. If you need a maxed-out Apple portable, this is it.

If you've ever wanted more control over Apple's "safe sleep" mode, the free SafeSleep.app from Side Tree Software is for you.

If you've never heard of it before, you might be wondering what "safe sleep" is (but if you have heard of it, you can skip the next couple paragraphs). When the battery on one of Apple's notebook computers (including the MacBook, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and some late-model PowerBooks) is very low, OS X will put the machine into what Apple calls "safe sleep" mode. This is similar to standard sleep, except the contents of the RAM are completely written to the hard drive and all power shuts down. You can even remove the battery while the machine is in safe sleep. To wake the computer from safe sleep, press the power button on the computer. A progress bar will display (startup will be noticeably slower than a normal wake from sleep), then your computer will be restored to how it was before safe sleep was invoked.

This feature is called "hibernation" in the Windows world, and it's one of the very few features I missed when I switched from Windows to Mac. (The other big one was how Windows deals with moving files, which can be replicated on the Mac side using moveAddict.) One of the nice things that Windows computers have is the ability to choose to hibernate when you are shutting down the machine. For years, I never turned my Windows laptop off; I only hibernated. Unfortunately, Apple has not made that feature available to Mac users.

That's where SafeSleep.app comes in. When you launch the app, it displays several options. The one I'm most excited about is "Safe Sleep Now," which lets me choose safe sleep without having to change the way the Mac usually works. I can still just close the lid for normal sleep (or choose it from the window above), but if I want to make sure to trigger safe sleep, it's now much easier to do.

"Always use Safe Sleep" will tell the computer to never use the normal, faster sleep mode. If you choose that and want to change it back later, select "Only Safe Sleep in Emergencies." You can also totally disable safe sleep; this isn't recommended for obvious reasons, but if you're willing to take the risk, disabling it can make the process of putting your Mac into "normal sleep" faster.

Although safe sleep was designed for portable Macs, you can also use it on desktop Macs. At night, I use safe sleep on my iMac because, otherwise, it seems to wake from "normal sleep" on its own. A word of caution, however: be sure to unmount any external drives that are connected to your Mac before entering safe sleep. Even if they remain physically attached to the Mac, OS X thinks that the disk was ejected without being unmounted, which is something you want to avoid. Physically connected drives will automatically be remounted when the machine wakes from safe sleep.

SafeSleep is free and can be downloaded from MacUpdate.

An anonymous tipster has sent an image to our friends across the hall at the Engadget HQ and what a treat it is. The image appears to be of the upcoming MacBook Air that is likely to be announced at Wednesdays "Back to the Mac" event.

Features include a re-designed case, more internal room for battery packs, and a 0GB hard drive. Wait, what? In this particular example, there doesn't appear to be a hard drive. This leaves us to speculate that there must be multiple models of the Air and this particular SKU is probably making use of some sort of flash-based storage device.

The MacBook Air hasn't received a substantial hardware upgrade in quite some time and the newer Unibody MacBooks have many features not found in the MacBook Air. Whether this is the new MacBook Air or not, this Wednesday cannot arrive quickly enough.

If you believe in the kindness of strangers, this tip might be for you. Most laptop users fear that their computer will be lost or stolen. Assuming that the right sort of person finds your laptop, however, they might be willing to return it to its rightful owner, if they knew how to contact you.

It is possible to add a short message to the login screen of your Mac. The easiest way to do that is by using Onyx; click on the Parameters tab, and then type your message into the area shown above. I suggest including your name, phone number, and whatever else you think increases your chances of getting it back.

This won't help if a thief has ripped off your MacBook while you weren't looking, but it just might help if you accidentally leave it in a cab and someone trustworthy gets in next. Hey, it could happen!

Note that "certain special characters" includes ( ), so if you want to include a phone number, I suggest using a format such as xxx-xxx-xxxx.

Last weekend provided not one, but two opportunities for me to do some upgrades to some "old" MacBooks to bring 'em up to workable condition. To start with, one client of mine wanted to get rid of an unused MacBook, so I decided to purchase it from her as a machine for training. The other client had one of the original 15" Intel Core Duo MacBook Pros and doesn't want to spend the money on a new machine. In both cases, the machines were running older versions of Mac OS X, had insufficient RAM, and had hard drives that were both slow and small. The following post is a textbook example of how you can bring new life to slightly old Macs by just spending enough money to upgrade the memory, OS, and hard disk drive.

For the MacBook, I decided that I wanted to max out its RAM, add more hard drive space, and speed up the hard drive while I was at it. I wanted to set up the machine with Mac OS X 10.6 and a Boot Camp partition running Windows 7, with an alternative external boot drive containing Mac OS X Server 10.6. The machine's initial setup: 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (Penryn) CPU, 2 GB of RAM, and a 160GB 5400 RPM SATA hard disk. I chose to max out the RAM to a total of 6GB, purchase a 500GB 7200 RPM drive for the internal drive, and procure a USB 2.0 bus-powered external shell for the existing drive. This MacBook was also running Mac OS X 10.5.8, and I wanted to update it to the latest version of Snow Leopard. Click "Read More" to find out how the upgrades went.