books

MacBook Air missing more than an optical drive

The new MacBook Air is svelte-as-can-be, but it's also missing some key, traditional Mac functionality that might leave some users disappointed or in a lurch. First off, the battery is apparently not user-replaceable. This means you can't swap out batteries to extend operating life, and you'll likely need to seek authorized service to get the battery replaced when it inevitably loses capacity or if it fails altogether.

Since the MacBook Air lacks an optical drive, you can't boot from an inserted DVD like the Mac OS X Leopard install disc unless you purchase the optional, $100 … Read more

Apple releases the "MacBook Air," but will it measure up?

Apple has put the "Wow" in computing, today announcing its MacBook Air. What had been rumored to be a MacBook with wireless broadband built in turned out to be nothing so pedestrian. Apple, the Arsenal of computing, surprised many with an insanely thin new MacBook Air

Intel and Apple started collaborating on the project a year ago and the result is nothing short of spectacular. Whether it's something that you'll actually want to buy is an entirely different question, however. At $1,799.00, it's not cheap, but no one buys excellence for pennies.

Here are some of the more incredible/interesting aspects of the design:

Dimensions: 0.16" to 0.76". 13.3" screen. As demonstrated, it fits within an envelope. It is dramatically thinner than anything else on the market. The option of flash-based memory.… Read more

Apple flies in the MacBook Air

With Macworld kicking off today, that tangled web of rumor, innuendo, and outright fabrication known as the Internet has been abuzz with all kinds of supposedly inside top-secret documentation, downloaded directly from Steve Jobs' frontal lobe.

Naturally, we didn't believe a word of any of the oh-so-fake "leaked" Steve Jobs keynote addresses and product spec sheets, but one area where most of the speculators were at least partially right was in Apple's latest laptop, the MacBook Air.

As was heavily predicted, the new laptop is not quite an ultraportable, but still very small. Mimicking the 13-inch … Read more

Eco-alternative to Amazon funds literacy programs

F. Xavier Helgesen had big dreams to build Web sites after graduating from Notre Dame in 2001 with an MIS degree, but then the dot-com industry crashed.

Instead he co-founded a company in 2002 that sells books otherwise destined for the landfill, sends some of the proceeds to literacy groups, and uses carbon-neutral shipping.

Better World Books collects books from university bookstores and libraries and resells them, donating 7.5 percent of the price of the book to nonprofit literacy groups--Books for Africa, Room to Read, World Fund, and National Center for Family Literacy. Some of the books are shipped … Read more

Fujitsu announces LifeBook P8010

Could 2008 be the year of the ultraportable? Just a few days after Lenovo launched the tiny IdeaPad U110, Fujitsu has announced its own featherweight laptop. The LifeBook P8010, which weighs less than 3 pounds, manages to pack a 12.1-inch backlit-LED display and a DVD burner into a footprint the size of a piece of paper.

While Fujitsu's previous P-series ultraportable, the 10.6-inch LifeBook P7230, came stocked with a Core Solo CPU that provided middling performance, the LifeBook P8010 will come equipped with a Core 2 Duo processor. And the company is promising up to 6.5 … Read more

Finally -- MacBook tops Amazon's bestselling computer list

Say what you will, but as I've said numerous times on these pages, the MacBook is easily one of the best notebooks in the world. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it's probably one of the best I've ever used.

And while I still have numerous issues with Windows and my utter distrust for a company that can't even release an operating system that's final knows no bounds, I truly believe the average consumer should go out and find themselves a Mac.

Luckily for us, it seems like most people tend to agree. As of this writing, theresults of Amazon's bestseller list shows Apple's 13.3-inch MacBook leads the pack of any and all PCs and computer hardware.

Sure, the results may not mean much to some and saying it has sold the best may not necessarily indicate that Windows PCs are on the slide and Macs are slowly making a trek to the top, but can you remember a time in recent history when a Windows machine wasn't sitting atop a list of bestselling computers?Regardless of how you feel about it, Macs are coming on strong and 2008 could be the year of the Mac.… Read more

The 10 best downloads of 2007

The editors here at CNET Download.com have bashed our heads together trying to sort through the bloody mess that was the past 12 months in software. The rise of webware sure changed the playing field, but we think we've found 10 Windows applications that are either new to the world or had such a major upgrade that they might as well be. We present these in no particular order, but please feel free to add your favorites in the comments below.

… Read more

'Lightroom Adventure' useful for newbies and beyond

If you want a book to learn or better understand Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, I can recommend Mikkel Aaland's Photoshop Lightroom Adventure (O'Reilly Media) as a good option.

But you'd better move quickly. Lightroom is changing fast--probably a lot faster than the book publishing business can. The software has moved through beta to 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3 in recent months, and at this rate, a major update might not be far off.

I've been a big fan of Lightroom as a way to make shooting "raw" photos--the unprocessed data … Read more

Auctioneers ask for double Kindle's retail price

Auctioneers at eBay were asking for more than double the retail price of Amazon's Kindle e-Reader on Friday.

A check of eBay at 2:45 p.m. PST showed prices for the e-Book reader went as high as $930. TechCrunch reported that a Kindle, which retails for $399, was bid up to $1,500 earlier in the week.

Has Amazon really discovered untapped consumer demand for digital-book readers?

The e-tailer, dabbling in electronics manufacturing for the first time, sold out of Kindles soon after introducing them last month. The device connects to the Web to download books--a feature that … Read more