Over the weekend, I spent several hours using a MacBook Pro, and it was a revelation.

Living in the world of low-end Macs (my newest Mac is a 2004 1.25 GHz eMac, and the two Power Macs I use daily are a dual 1 GHz Mirror Drive Door from 2002 and a dual 1.6 GHz upgraded Digital Audio from 2001), I'm used to a certain level of performance. I constantly reiterate that these Macs are sufficient for the work I do.

....They're also reliable and paid for. Even if I had the money to buy an Intel-based Mac, I don't need to - but I definitely want to someday.

A niece contacted me several weeks ago... ready to throw her Windows laptop into the trash. She wanted a Mac, and.... decided that she really wanted the bigger 1440 x 900 display on the Pro model....

I've played with modern Macs at the Apple Store and tinkered with other people's MacBook Pros now and then, but I hadn't spent any extended amount of time with them until now.....

Honestly, I didn't expect to be blown away by the power of dual-core Intel processing. After all, the bottleneck is the speed of your Internet connection. How much difference could more processing power really make?

A lot!...

I've been happy with my G4 Macs for a long time, but now I'm lusting after Intel power....

When it comes to phone-based technical support, Apple customers reported themselves to be more satisfied than those of Dell or HP. Compared with 2008 results, however, HP has made enormous strides, pleasing more customers on multiple fronts, which is a boost to overall customer satisfaction, loyalty and the likelihood of their recommending the brand to others.

Apple customers are once again the most satisfied customers, when it comes to phone-based technical support, according to a new survey from Vocalabs.....

Adobe Photoshop is so intrinsic to our daily digital lives these days, you might find it hard to believe that the program is just two decades old. In the 20 years since its introduction, Photoshop has changed the way we see the world, altered our sense of reality, and transformed the way we express ourselves.....

Apple's $499 starting iPad price tag is already lower than many people - and a few competitors - expected, but apparently Steve and company have left themselves a little wiggle room: Credit Suisse analyst Bill Shope says that Apple told him it'll remain "nimble" when it comes to iPad pricing, suggesting that the price could drop if sales don't meet targets.....

If the market does not respond well to the iPad and its price range of $499 to $829, Apple executives have reportedly said they could be "nimble" on its cost....

Despite a highly publicized public debut, potential customers lost a great deal of interest in Apple's new touchscreen iPad after it was unveiled, a new study has found....

A follow-up Retrevo Pulse study looking at consumer interest in buying the new Apple iPad indicates a failure to convince any new buyers to consider the iPad. Not only did Apple fail to convince new buyers, it may have lost many potential buyers who now say they don't think they need an Apple tablet computer.

On the other hand, Retrevo notes that there's a positive side to the survey results in that the number of respondents indicating interest in buying an iPad tripled from 3% to 9%, and that having 30% of respondents as potential iPad buyers is not a bad thing for Apple, but that the iPad may have to prove itself before becoming as popular a product as the iPhone.

The iPad is not a notebook replacement - although many will use it that way - but the high-end of Apple's iPhone OS (iP/OS) product line. The iPad's form factor is less important than the 140,000 cheap iP/OS apps and the 75 million people already using iP/OS....

It wasn't long ago that observers debated the iPod's halo effect. If people liked the iPod would that lead them to buy Macs?

No one is debating the halo today...

But wait, there's more
That is just the beginning.....

A benchmark report for an unreleased Apple MacBook Pro sporting Intel's upcoming dual-core 2.66GHz Core i7 mobile processor was published online this week, suggesting a refresh to the professional notebook line may be imminent.....

Ever since the MacBook Air, a machine made for 3G wireless access, was released without built-in ability to connect to mobile wireless, I've been waiting for Apple to put 3G access in their laptops.

Will my wait be over soon?

A couple of things have happened in the last month that give me a bit of hope.

If you bought your first Mac at some point during the last few years, what was it that drove you to make the switch?

The other day I added my thoughts to a piece written by Chris Seibold over on Apple Matters. Seibold suggested that Apple's success with the Mac platform is down to the company's shift to Intel CPUs, and he has data that shows strong correlation. I suggested that CPU brand wasn't a strong enough driving force and suggested that Boot Camp, an easy way to run Windows on Macs (technology made possible by the fact that Macs ran Intel processors), was the driving force.

But it seems that many of you don't agree with this at all.....

Like the existing iPhone and iPod touch, the iPad can output video via the same composite or component video cables to present standard definition, analog video with roughly 480 lines of resolution.

The iPad's new VGA-connector option delivers PC style video at the device's native 1024x768 resolution. Existing iPhone and iPod models won't work with the new VGA cable, as they aren't designed to support higher resolution outputs than they can display....

You can bet the critics were howling when Apple's press event and product information on the iPad failed to mention multitasking. How, then, do you run more than a single app at the same time? What if you need to integrate the content you create in, say, Pages with Numbers? Isn't this all a throwback to the original Mac in 1984? Does Steve Jobs have an innate hatred of multitasking, just as he seems to abhor Adobe Flash?

Through the years, Apple and desktop publishing were regarded as almost one and the same. From the very first PostScript-enabled LaserWriter and the original Aldus PageMaker, an entire industry was established and an older one, traditional typography, was largely supplanted. Indeed, I suffered tremendously in those years until I mastered the Mac and was able to continue to earn a decent living.

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