MacBook Pro's best new feature: Battery life

Apple has devoted a fair amount of screen real estate on its website bragging about the new battery technology in its new MacBook Pros. It turns out it's not just marketing speak to hide the fact the battery is no longer user replaceable.

According to AnandTech, the advertised 7 hour battery life (or 8 hours for the 17" model) is real. The 15" MacBook Pro is advertised to get 7 hours of battery life, yet with light usage Anand was able to get over "Eight, freakin, hours" out of the thing, and 6.5 hours with moderate usage. Even with relatively heavy usage he was able to get nearly 5 hours.

The MacBook Pro has just raised the bar enormously for battery life on full-fledged laptops.

It will be interesting to see if this battery life increase is limited to Mac OS X, or if it will be seen under Windows as well.

13" MacBook gets Firewire (again)

Firewire, welcome back!

Many of us old timers complained about the loss of Firewire on the aluminum 13" MacBooks, expecting that it was gone forever. Well, good news, it's back. However, that 13" machine is no longer called the MacBook. The new 13" update has pushed it into the MacBook Pro category, and it gets a new Secure Digital slot as well. Also, even the low end model now gets the illuminated keyboard. Interestingly, it also has a non-removable battery now, like the MacBook Air.

Further good news is the pricing has actually decreased. That's a nice shift in Apple's marketing. Maybe it's time for me to jump into the market for a new laptop again.

Baby Shaker iPhone app sparks outrage

Apple released a new third-party application in its iTunes store for the iPhone recently, called Baby Shaker. It has since been taken down, but it is shocking that it was allowed to get through in the first place, especially since Apple continues to refuse a lot of potentially very useful (and inoffensive) applications.

New iPod shuffle? No thanks.

The new iPod shuffle has come out, with possibly the weirdest interface ever designed for Apple. No scratch that. The shuffle itself doesn't even have an interface. The shuffle's front is now absolutely naked, with the interface now on the headphone cord. That might actually be a good thing, except now there is absolutely no way to control the shuffle when using third party headphones. The really strange part is the fact that no control dongle exists for those third party headphones, either from Apple itself or from third parties. That will come of course, but who knows after how long? Given that Apple's included earbuds have always been absolutely terrible (as would be expected for included earbuds), this is a dealbreaker for many people until the dongle comes out. Even when it does come out, it will still be a problem, in terms of price. I wouldn't be surprised if they want upwards of US$29 for the dongle. Twenty-nine bucks isn't a lot in the greater scheme of things, but it is compared to the cost of a shuffle, especially when previous shuffles could be had for less than $50. And finally, even with such a dongle (or the included headphones), controlling the shuffle now seems a little complicated. I'm sure one can learn, but one might have expected something more intuitive from Apple.

Let me backtrack a bit though. The design is actually interesting in some ways. One thing I've always missed on the shuffle is the ability to know exactly what song was playing. I thought the way around it would be to have a small one-line LED or LCD screen or perhaps text-to-audio, but also thought Apple would implement neither. They've now added VoiceOver, which is essentially the latter idea, with multi-language support to boot. The other thing I've missed on the shuffle is proper playlist support, but Apple has now implemented that too. Despite all these advancements however, the lack of a controller dongle for third party headphones leaves me scratching my head for this announcement.

Somehow, this almost seems like a grand Onion parody.

I guess the best news is that VoiceOver may appear in non-naked non-shuffle iPods (and iPhones) too in 2009.

New iMac - No quad for you

Apple disappointed many today by releasing an update to the iMac... without quad cores. This was not overly surprising however, as only high-power and mid-power quad-core Intel CPUs exist at the moment. The low power mainstream version that Apple will likely use in the iMac (and MacBook Pro) will not be out until about 2009 Q3 or 2010 Q1.

I want a new iMac, but I'll simply wait. My dual-core iMac will have to do until then. Hopefully by that time 8 GB of RAM for the iMac will actually be affordable, instead of the CAD$1200 it is now.

By the way, Apple finally added another USB port. Too bad they didn't make it five, like on the new Mac mini. However, they removed one Firewire port to make room for it.

New Mac mini gets dual video outputs

As the rumours predicted, the newly released Mac mini gets two video outputs and five USB ports. Nice.