Articles tagged MacBook.

Holy covered banners Batman! We had thought Apple raised all their banners this past Friday, but have been proven wrong. It appears Werner Reschke (Guy #3), was correct in his guess that Apple may put up covered banners Sunday night. Nice call Werner. You can see more original T-GAAP WWDC banner photos here.

We are not sure what this banner holds under it's black veil, but here are three of our best guesses:

 The Powerbook 100 series were the first laptops that Apple produced and they had 9-inch screens. For the next 10 years, the computer industry kept developing larger and larger screens for laptop computers. In 2003, 12 years after the first PowerBook, Apple introduced the 17-inch PowerBook. While the 17-inch may have been popular in the graphics and desktop replacement sections of the market, the majority of the users found them to be too big. Users soon found that the 13-15-inch displays worked the best for most users.

Last year, Apple released a major update to the MacBook Air line. They have become a huge success by taking 25 percent of the total Macs sold the the following quarter. The MacBook Air is neither the fastest MacBook, the cheapest MacBook, nor the biggest. So why has the MacBook Air become a major success?

Apple comes to the table on April 20, at 2 PM Pacific, to reveal what will likely be year another record fiscal 2Q11. Financial numbers are one thing, but how Apple achieves them is another.

There's been a lot of speculation revolving around Apple's supply chain for iPad 2 and MacBook batteries since the Japan quake and Tsunami. But a few hints from Apple may be revealing another story. The truth. On April 20th we'll learn a lot based on the little information Apple delivers.

Apple refreshed their Macbook Pro line-up at the end of January 2011.  The big news out of this update was an announcement of a new data port called Thunderbolt and the move to Intel's Sandy Bridge micro-architecture.  Apple also switched from Nvidia's integrated graphics processors (IGP) and discreet graphics processors to Intel's IGP and AMD's (formally ATI) discreet graphics processors.  With this move, Apple changed the Macbook Pro 13" graphics chip to the Intel HD Graphics 3000.  Intel's Sandy Bridge main processor is a big upgrade from the previous version, a Core 2 Duo, but is the graphics processor an upgrade or a downgrade?

Intel has been known in the past for producing very poor graphics processors.  This lack of a good graphics processor from Intel is the main reason why most decent desktop and laptop computers come with a discreet processor.  Nvidia built a graphics processor into the supporting chipset for the Intel x86 main processors, which was used in the previous MacBook Pros.  Nvidia's IGP performance was substantially better than anything Intel came out with and provided a huge upgrade in performance.

Apple's Discussion Forum has been down the last two times we checked. Once a few moments ago (16:45 Pacific Time) and once last night (22:00 Pacific Time)..

We have to wonder if this has anything to do with the forthcoming rumored launch of the MacBook Pros or any forthcoming launch. It could be just a maintenance update, or worse — if Apple isn't using Xserves to host this site we can see all sorts of potential problems.