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Seagate To End Production of 7,200 RPM Laptop Hard Drives At End Of 2013
Fear Of A Webkit Planet Misplaced
Apple's 13-inch Non-Retina MacBook Pro On the Bubble?
Why You Shouldn't Replace A Broken Internal SuperDrive
Apple Releases Java for OS X 2013-002
Seagate To End Production of 7,200 RPM Laptop Hard Drives At End Of 2013
ZNet's Sean Portnoy reports more evidence that solid state drives are becoming the new mainstream storage medium for higher-end laptops, with Seagate having disclosed that it plans to end production of high-performance 7,200rpm notebook hard drives sometime later this year.
Portnoy cites a marketing director for the drive manufacturer telling X-bit Labs that Seagate will cease production of the drives "at the end of 2013." Seagate will continue to produce 5,400rpm 2.5" drives, which are used in most mainstream laptops.
It will be interesting to see if Seagate's archrival Western Digital follwos suite and dumps 7,200 RPM laptop drives, but if you want a speedy conventional HDD for your laptop, it's probably time to make your move.
For the full report visit here:
http://goo.gl/bNQTd
Fear Of A Webkit Planet Misplaced
Hypercritical blogger and longtime IT pundit John Siracusa, famous for his Tolstoyesque-length product reviews on Ars Technica, says was neither surprised nor disturbed by last months announcement that the Opera web browser was switching to Apple's Open Source WebKit rendering engine.
However, he notes that widespread anxiety about the possibility of a WebKit monoculture is based on past events that many of us remember all too well.
However,as much as he despised Internet Explorer for Windows, and what its simultaneous stagnation and dominance did to the web, Siricusa thinks its a faulty historical analog to apply in this case, noting that WebKit is not a web browser or even a product, and much more analogous to Linux, an open-source project that any company or individual is free to build on and enhance.
Siracusa observes that thanks to WebKit, anyone needing a world-class web rendering engine can get one for free, and products built with WebKit are as varied as those built with Linux - eg: Chrome and Safari. He says he hasn't forgotten the past, and a single, crappy web browser coming to dominate the market would be just as terrible today as it was in the dark days of IE6, but WebKit is not a browser, but rather, like Linux, is an enabling technology - free, open-source, and therefore beyond the control of any single entity.
For the full commentary visit here:
http://hypercritical.co/2013/03/04/fear-of-a-webkit-planet
Apple's 13-inch Non-Retina MacBook Pro On the Bubble?
SeekingAlpha's Ashraf Eassa says that with Apple having announced a mild refresh and price cuts on some of its Retina display and Air MacBook models, reducing the price of the 13" Retina MacBook Pro from $1699 to $1499, and dropping the price of the 13" MacBook Air from $1499 to $1399. Notably, the non-Retina 13" MacBook Pro was passed over for any changes, causing Eassa to wonder if this represented the death knell for the 13" MacBook Pro.
He notes that the MacBook Pros are targeted as higher end, fully-featured general purpose notebook, the MacBook Air as a state of the art, ultra-thin notebook that is also a fully-featured general purpose notebook. The Pro comes in 13" and 15" versions while the Air comes in 11" and 13" sizes, meaning there's overlap between the 13" Air and the two 13" Pro models.
And while the 11" Air fills the niche for solid performance in an extremely portable form factor, and the 15" MacBooks can be configured with a lot of storage, come with a quad core Intel Core i7, Nvidia discrete graphics, up to 16GB of RAM, and up to 768GB of flash storage, but the 13" MacBook Air and 13" MacBook Pro overlap is probably too much redundancy.
[Editor's note: I expect that both the 13-inch and 15-inch non-Retina MacBook Pros will be discontinued when the rest of Apple's notebook lineup gets Intel Haswell processors later this year. Ed.]
For the full commentary visit here:
http://goo.gl/LnYe4
Why You Shouldn't Replace A Broken Internal SuperDrive
FairerPlatform contends that if the SuperDrive optical drive in your Mac croaks, it's smarter strategy not to replace it with another internal unit, but to get an external USB optical drive.
Why replace the internal SuperDrive when it's highly unlikely your next Mac will ship with one? An external SuperDrive can serve over the long haul with several Macs.
FairerPlatform suggests tha Patuoxun USB External Slot in DVD RW Drive Burner Superdrive For Apple MacBook Pro Air ($41.99, Amazon), or one of a nice range of external DVD drives from Other World Computing, starting at $49.
A favorite of your editor is the Aegis NetDock Mac Edition
3 in 1 Notebook Docking Station for MacBook or MacBook Air. For details see:
http://goo.gl/zFS4w
Full product review:
http://goo.gl/uMVq6
For the full commentary visit here:
http://goo.gl/5aAqy
Apple Manufacturing 2TB SSDs Bound For Upcoming Mac Pro - Rumor
AppleInsider Staff report:
A fresh rumor holds that Apple may be producing self-branded large capacity solid state drives for use in the next Mac Pro, the company's professional level tower that is said to be getting a refresh later this year.
For the full report visit here:
http://goo.gl/MNOc2
Apple Releases Java for OS X 2013-002
Java for OS X 2013-002 delivers improved security, reliability, and compatibility by updating Java SE 6 to 1.6.0_43.
On systems that have not already installed Java for OS X 2012-006, this update disables the Java SE 6 applet plug-in. To use applets on a web page, click on the region labeled "Missing plug-in" to download the latest version of the Java applet plug-in from Oracle.
See http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5675 for more details about this update.
See http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222 for information about the security content of this update.
Java for OS X 2013-002 delivers improved security, reliability, and compatibility by updating Java SE 6 to 1.6.0_43.
System Requirements
• OS X Snow Leopard v10.6 or later
• OS X Lion v10.7 or later
• OS X Mountain Lion v10.8 or later
For more information, visit:
http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1572
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