The first shipments of Apple's next-generation 13-inch MacBooks have left mainland China ahead of a large-scale manufacturing ramp scheduled for later this month, according to investment bank Citigroup.

In a "Company Flash" bulletin issued to clients on Monday, analyst Rich Gardner said he expects the Cupertino-based Mac maker to introduce its fall line of notebooks "within weeks."

Is Apple going to ditch the 'Pro' from MacBook Pro and streamline its laptop range, leaving just a 'standard' MacBook (with different screen sizes and minor tinkering possibilities under the hood), and the Air for people who happily set fire to $50 dollar bills?....

Obviously, this is idle speculation, but such streamlining would make sense......

The dust from the new iPods has settled, but it appears that Apple is already gearing up for a next round of introductions. Apparently, the company is planning an October 14 event, during which a refreshed notebook family and a mysterious new product code-named "Brick" are expected to be introduced.....

If you believe rumor site 9 to 5 Mac, there will be a "one more thing" moment with a new, mysterious product code-named "Brick." There is some chatter that this "Brick" is actually a Mac tablet, but we here at TG Daily believe that if that is in fact the case, Macworld in January may be a more appropriate event to unveil a tablet. Another rumor has it that Apple may introduce a brand-new sub-notebook to compete with Asustek's EeePC....

Sales of Macintosh computers continue to grow year-to-year, but their rate of growth is slowing, Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster reported Monday in a note issued to clients.

Based on data released at midday by the NPD Group, Munster estimates that Apple will sell 2.8 to 2.9 million Macs and 11 million iPods in its fourth fiscal quarter, which ends Sept. 30.

The Mac numbers represent year-to-year unit growth of 29% to 34%, somewhat higher than the Street's estimate of 25%, but down considerably from the 43% year-to-year growth the Mac racked up in July.

Seagate and Western Digital both detailed changes in their external hard-drive lineups Monday. Customers can choose capacities from 250GB to 1TB, with software add-ons and color options. Smaller, faster and cheaper are the buzzwords.....

Seagate revamped its 2.5-inch FreeAgent portable and external drives for PCs and Macs. The drives are preformatted for the Macintosh or PC, come in an array of colors, and include utilities to make external storage easier to use.

Western Digital's announcement focused on a new 500GB drive in two flavors - the Passport Elite and the Passport Essential. According to Western Digital, the Essential drives come in 11 colors and weighs in at seven ounces. The Elite drives come in four soft-touch finishes and include software to facilitate secure file sharing and transport on MioNet-enabled PCs.

Ubuntu is putting serious investment into improving the interface of its Linux.

Mark Shuttleworth wants Linux to become comparable to the Apple Macintosh, quoting the watchwords of Web 2.0:
Make your site visually appealing,
Do something different and do it very, very well,
Call users to action and give them an immediate, rewarding experience.

Good idea. But the Ubuntu Developer Summit is taking the wrong approach.

It is past time for open source to become truly innovative. The Macintosh interface is a nice point-and-click interface, but that's all it is.

We need something completely different......

Two Apple customer service representatives told reader Mark to blame his MacBook's four hard drive crashes on GarageBand, professional-grade software that his puny consumer-grade laptop 'can't handle.' Every MacBook comes with GarageBand pre-loaded as part of Apple's iLife suite.

Fast cellular modems for laptops are flying out the door as business users hit the road and tire of looking for Wi-Fi hotspots, an ABI Research analyst said Friday.
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Unit sales of the modems grew about 300 percent from 2006 to 2007, and annual revenue should surpass $22 billion by 2013, according to analyst Dan Shey, who wrote a report on the trend released Friday. That's up from $3 billion in 2007.

"Growth has been phenomenal," Shey said in an interview. Falling prices for devices and services is one factor, he noted. The hottest type of laptop modem for 3G (third-generation) and 3.5G connectivity is the USB (Universal Serial Bus) dongle, Shey said. Internal Mini-PCI modems as well as cards that slide into PC Card slots are also available.

Simple, fresh, back to basics and back to work. No overly excessive GUI distractions, just the pureness and quickness of OS 9 on the black shark.

Ah, back to when things were still somewhat simple, the OS 8 and 9 days. It was 1998, and the PowerBook Wallstreet was a radical departure from the previous PowerBooks that preceded it.....With two hot swapable drive bays, the Wallstreet could house two batteries for double the power on the road. With an optional PCMCIA DVD decoder card, along with the DVD-ROM drive, DVD playback became possible under OS 9. However, since OS X's DVD player did not support the DVD decoder card, DVD playback is restricted to OS 9 and earlier. Add a beautiful keyboard, two PC card slots, which can house USB, Firewire, wireless cards, and the like, with legacy ports, the Wallstreet bridges the old with the new.....

So, what is under the hood of my upgraded, refreshed Wallstreet?

Well, after some messing around, I finally managed to get a SanDisk Ultra II 4 GB CF card into my PowerBook 5300ce with the requisite CF-IDE adapter. Fast and total silence Read on if you want to do likewise.

After reading Dan Knight's "Silence is Golden" (LEM), I decided to follow suit and install a Compact Flash card (CF card) in place of the old, 1.1 GB, noisy, spinny hard drive that was in my PowerBook 5300ce.

As Dan refers to in his article, the Addonics Dual IDE-CF card adapter is a small adapter chip that houses up to 2 CF cards. It actually looks like a RAM chip holder, where there is one slot for a CF card on the top, and another on the bottom. "Simply" slide the CF Card into the desired slot, and plug the Addonics adapter into the 44 PIN Hard Drive connector on the main board of the computer, and you are off to the races.

ChangeWave is probably best known as a purveyor of e-mail get-rich-quick investment tips. But it also runs a monthly survey of its 15,000 subscribers that has proven to be a pretty good barometer of tech buying trends. Its latest report, issued Sunday, offers bad news and good - bad for the industry, good for Apple.....

....The number who picked Apple hit an all-time high for both laptops (34%; up 2 points) and desktops (30%; up 3 points).

That's a marked increase from the roughly 18% who said they planned to buy a Mac two years ago and the 28% who said they planned to buy an Apple laptop (or 23% who planned to buy a desktop Mac) in August 2007.

Apple needs to refresh the Mac line.

That's a key takeaway from today's data from market research firm NPD on August Mac and iPod sales. In a note this afternoon, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster reports that the NPD data showed Mac sales growth in August was up 23% year-over-year in units, down from 43% growth in July. On a revenue basis, Macs were up 21% year-over-year. Earlier in the day, in a preview of the report, Munster had forecast that the NPD data would show 35%-40% year-over-year unit growth for the month.....

The bottom line, Munster writes, is that "the directional trend" in the Mac data is weaker than expected "likely due to Mac family in need of refresh."....

Apparently we're (and I'm including YOU since you're reading this) in an elite group. Apple's customers are like no others -"a rich blend of the most sociologically elite with those seeking elegant, simple computing," says Research and Markets. And the future only looks brighter.

A new study by the research group says Apple's panache has enabled them to maintain some of the highest margins in the industry, while also sustaining a brand loyalty level which is the envy of many. Now Apple is making surprising and measurable progress against Windows' dominance with a multi-pronged strategy involving broadened retail, mobile computing, and non-computer products and services, according to ABI Research.....

Mozilla's security chief has called on Apple to disclose more information about the steps it takes to protect customers from malware and other computer-born threats.

At a security conference on Monday, Window Snyder said open communication about recently reported vulnerabilities and ongoing processes for locking down products is a core responsibility of security departments at every software organization. The head of security for Mozilla's Firefox browser then singled out Apple as a vendor with room for improvement.

"I'm big Apple fan - I've got a Mac right here," Snyder said as she gripped her MacBook while speaking at the MIS Training Institute's IT Security World conference in San Francisco. "But one of my big problems with Apple is we don't get to hear what they're doing with security. I'd have a lot more confidence if they would communicate that stuff."

Over the past couple of weeks, white hat netizens have scored two important victories in their tireless quest to clean up some of the internet's darkest recesses. While the events are encouraging, forgive us if we don't jump for joy....

Yes, the wins may make it harder for bad guys to spread malware, spam and illegal scams, but at what cost to a robust and unfettered internet? The inability of traditional law enforcement to crack down on online scammers - or for private individuals to target them with civil lawsuits - has unleashed a new breed of enforcement that turns registrars and webhosts into de facto gatekeepers. By and large, these groups are honest and well intentioned. But their lack of due process has implications for free speech, net neutrality and other concerns that ought not be trumped by our zeal to stamp out cybercrime....

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