Tech blogger Dan Warne notes that MacBooks loaded with serious memory—like MacBook Pros with more than 2 GB—can take a long while to activate these days, since the entirety of that memory is being written to your hard disk in the default "safe sleep." If you're almost always plugged into a wall socket or aren't the type to run your battery down entirely, Warne recommends a one-line Terminal hack that brings back the old swift-moving sleep....

The upgraded Mac Pro pushes apps to the limit with a pair of quad-core chips and up to 32GB of RAM

In front of me, two 30-in. Apple Cinema Displays glow softly at my desk. Beside me sits the fastest stock-configuration Macintosh that Apple has ever shipped: a superfast eight-core Mac Pro. Inside the Mac - and on full display on those screens - is Mac OS X 10.5, better known as Leopard, Apple's latest operating system. All around me is the work I've been putting off that is now getting done.

On January 8, 2008 Apple announced the release of a new Mac Pro model with eight processor cores and a new system architecture that delivers significantly higher performance. The base Apple Mac Pro 2.8 GHz model MA970LL/A is $2,799. For those looking for slightly higher processor speeds, 3.0 GHz ($3,599) and 3.2 GHz ($4,399) models are also available. Apple offers custom configurations at the Apple Store which include a single quad-core Intel Xeon processor (-$500), additional memory, an $800 four-channel internal RAID 5 card, hard drive upgrades, video card upgrades, displays, wireless, fibre channel, modem, software, printers, AppleCare and more. Selecting all of the available options for the Mac Pro at the Apple Store can raise the final price to over $28,000. During this review the Apple Mac Pro 2.8 GHz model was tested to determine how it compares to the original Mac Pro 2.66 GHz model.

If you Google the phrase "Microsoft's worst nightmare," the range of hits you get is entertaining for its breadth. Various pundits have proclaimed that the software giant's very worst nightmare is everything from Linux, Google and Firefox to Software as a Service , Cisco's digital home business and the Sony PlayStation.

They can't all be Microsoft's worst nightmare, so which one earns that distinction? The correct answer is none of the above......

Microsoft's worst nightmare is a conjoined Apple and IBM. No other single change in the dynamics of the IT industry could possibly do as much to emasculate Windows....

Intel is planning to launch its first quad-core CPU for notebooks, the Core 2 Extreme QX9300, in the third quarter this year with pricing set at a new high of US$1,038 in thousand-unit tray quantities, according to sources at motherboard makers.

With the market demand for top-level notebooks still below average, Intel expects the quad-core notebook CPUs will not become standard in the performance/mainstream notebook market until the second half of 2009, and therefore should not impact the desktop PC market, noted the sources.

More than a year ago, I wrote a column in this space called "Why the iPhone will change the (PC) world." In that piece, I described how the user interface of future operating systems - the next-generation Windows, OS X and Linux UIs - will have iPhone-like elements such as multitouch, gestures, physics, 3-D and minimal icons....

You can argue all day long about whether the iPhone is the best phone (it isn't), or if Apple designers invented these five UI elements (they didn't). But over the next decade it will become increasingly clear, as next-generation cell phone, laptop and desktop systems emerge, that the iPhone was breathtakingly ahead of its time....

Within seven years, PCs will change completely....

Of course with such title you can argue that we are Mac centric and/or addicts not able to look around or to consider anything else that does not hold an Apple logo. But if you are a long time reader of Hardmac, you know our policy to support the Mac community, without being devoted to Apple. The reason of this title is quite simple and you will better understand.

Couple of weeks ago, while we were sailing in West Indies, we had to stop in Union Island (piece of land in the middle of the Caribbean sea) for getting some food as well as the last information about weather and wind forecast. While we were looking for the local harbor authority building, we spotted a small internet cafe:

As we could get the required information from the net, we headed to the place. I was entering and getting prepared to see couple of PCs, but I was wrong, deeply wrong: it was a kingdom for Apple computers! The only PCs belong to customers willing to use the wireless network provided by the Airport station....

When Steve Jobs, Apple Inc.'s CEO, announced what Apple calls its, "Thinnovative" notebook, I could not wait to get my hands on the three pound, slim-enough-to-fit-into-an-interoffice-envelope, MacBook Air.

From the minute I saw the sleek and elegant black box that contained the notebook, I knew I should expect what was inside to be of the same or greater esthetic caliber. I was not disappointed when I opened the box. MacBook Air was indeed very polished and very thin, measuring only 0.16-inches at its thinnest point and 0.76-inches at its thickest....

From a more personal standpoint of being an avid-PC user, it took me some time to get used to using a Mac unit and operating system. MacBook Air comes equipped with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and with the new iLife '08 software.

Someday, the batteries that power your iPod or laptop will last for weeks. Until then, your options for keeping the juice flowing range from hacking them to whacking them.

Eventually, users of MP3 players, mobile phones or personal computers all face an ominous flashing light or dull "beep" - the device's warning that it has sucked all but the last spark from its portable power source. Brace yourself, this "low battery" alert says, the end is near.

At the heart of the $55 billion global battery market is the chemical conundrum of power supply. Engineers have shrunk and souped up gadgets so that it's possible to watch whole movies on paperback book-sized devices, but portable power technology has not kept up.

Taking advantage of dropping hardware prices, Intel expects to plug its newest Atom chips into desktops that will be available later this year from under US$200.

Intel expects an Atom chip, code-named Diamondville, to be used in fanless desktop computers designed for basic tasks like surfing the Internet or viewing standard-definition DVDs. The company expects the systems to be priced in the $199 to $250 range.

I've never understood why Apple conceals useful operating system features from its users. I'm talking about such things as changing the default file format for creating a screen shot or turning off the Dashboard app.

Sooner or later (usually sooner) some clever Mac geek figures out how to access and enable these hidden options via the Unix command line in the Terminal or writes a utility to facilitate the task.

Such is the case with Deep Sleep, a Dashboard widget that lets users put their Mac into a standby mode that completely shuts off the power, similar to the "hibernate" function in Windows.

Macworld has spent the past week reviewing what we've learned about Leopard in the four months since its release. And just as Rob Griffiths and Dan Frakes have weighed in with their opinions, here's my take on what I like, what I don't, and what I just don't understand.

The Desktop was the target of an extreme makeover in Leopard, and I've been surprised at how much I like most of its changes.....

A while ago, I wrote about the "Spaces" feature in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), which I would very much like to be able to use as a way to enhance my computing experience. I tend to do a lot of multi-tasking, and I could use a feature that helps me organize things better visually.

As I noted in my earlier post, even if it worked as expected, Spaces would still be a source of frustration, in part because of the fact that it is, like Mac OS X itself, an application-centric tool.

Initially, in my experience at least, Spaces was not just flawed but actually buggy, with windows occasionally disappearing altogether with no easy way to bring them back. So I quickly gave up on it.

Although consumer electronics are getting smaller than ever, they still don't offer the same level of performance as their larger counterparts.

Laptops still have some catching up to do with their desktop counterparts, but Toshiba is helping to narrow the gap, especially for notebooks that are particularly compact.

Toshiba has developed a new series 1.8-inch hard drives that bumps the standard speed from 4200rpm to a more respectable 5400rpm.....

We are all a bit puzzled about the e-mail Apple sent out yesterday regarding this year's World Wide Developer Conference. There has been mass amounts of speculation regarding the graphic included in the message, but we thought we would take a stab at what the dual bridge analogy could really mean. So here are our ten best guesses as to what it all translates to....

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