iBook legacy comes to an end with white MacBook cancellation. Today's Apple releases weren't all about new products: Apple has discontinued its spartan, entry-level plastic MacBook. With the MacBook Air selling so well, and starting at the same $999 price, Apple has apparently decided to scrap the MacBook entirely in favor of the tiny 11" laptop. The white MacBook began life as the iBook, Apple's consumer-grade laptop introduced in 1999 that was the first Apple machine to come with WiFi wireless networking. The colorful laptop was revised in 2003 with an all-white polycarbonate shell, and Apple changed its name to MacBook in 2006 when it switched from PowerPC to Intel processors. The most recent MacBook design, last updated in 2009, featured a white unibody shell. Apple bumped the specs slightly over the last two years, but its ho-hum performance barely justified its $999 price tag. Rest in peace, plastic MacBook. (Update: Apparently the MacBook still exists, technically, but it's strictly limited to educational institutions.)
The MacBook Is Dead. Long Live The (New) MacBook Air. “At this point, I’m thinking Apple should just replace the standard MacBook with the Air.” Yes, I just quoted myself. But I have a good reason. I wrote that on October 21 of last year, after one day of playing with the just-released new MacBook Air. Today, 9 months later, Apple is listening. The MacBook is dead. Long live the MacBook Air. The fact of the matter is that this was inevitable. Apple is revamping the MacBook Air lineup, upgrading the device with the new Thunderbolt port, new Intel Core i5 chips, and yes, even a backlit keyboard — finally. I’ve had the chance to use one of the new systems for the past few days, and it screams. The model I’ve been testing out is a 13.3-inch 1.7GHz dual-core Intel Core i5. Everything I loved about the last iteration of the Air holds true here as well.
I have not been able to test the Thunderbolt port yet because there simply aren’t enough devices out there on the market yet. But I recognize that some people do need more power. In Apple Upgrade, Steps Forward, Stumbles Backward - State of the Art. Apple's OS X Lion Brings PCs Into Tablet Era - Walt Mossberg - Personal Technology. With its iPhones and iPads, Apple has led people toward a new way of operating digital devices that relies on direct manipulation of items with finger gestures, not a mouse and scroll bars. App icons are arrayed front and center, not buried deep in a file system or limited to a strip at the bottom of the screen.
Now, Apple is bringing those concepts and others to the personal computer via its most radical new Macintosh operating system version in years. It’s called Lion and it goes on sale Wednesday for $29.99—a price that allows installation on as many personal Macs as you own. Lion is a giant step in the merger of the personal computer and post-PC devices like tablets and smartphones.
The new system doesn’t turn a Mac into a tablet. But it’s a big change. I’ve been testing Lion on four Macs, and I like it. I only suffered one crash in Lion. An Adjustment Process There are, however, downsides to anything this new and major. One of the biggest changes is in scrolling. Upgrading Migrating. Mac OS X 10.7 Lion: the Ars Technica review. Mac OS X 10.7 was first shown to the public in October 2010. The presentation was understated, especially compared to the bold rhetoric that accompanied the launches of the iPhone ("Apple reinvents the phone") and the iPad ("a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price"). Instead, Steve Jobs simply called the new operating system "a sneak peek at where we're going with Mac OS X. " Behind Jobs, the screen listed the seven previous major releases of Mac OS X: Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard, and Snow Leopard. Such brief retrospectives are de rigueur at major Mac OS X announcements, but long-time Apple watchers might have felt a slight tingle this time.
The public "big cat" branding for Mac OS X only began with Jaguar; code names for the two earlier versions were not well known outside the developer community and were certainly not part of Apple's official marketing message for those releases. Why bring the cat theme back to the forefront now? Table of Contents. Apple kills white MacBook, 11.6-inch Air is the new entry level Mac | This is my next... With OS X Lion, Apple Touches Upon The Next Decade Of The OS. Ten years ago, I was not a Mac user. I had never owned a Mac. I thought I probably would never own a Mac. I was a Windows guy all the way. Sure, Windows Me sucked, but Windows 95 and 98 were solid. And we were on the verge of Windows XP. The Mac was something I was forced to use at school. Then, on March 24, 2001, OS X hit. I was a freshman in college at the time. But I wasn’t entirely sold. I bought Windows XP the day it came out — exactly one month after Puma — October 25, 2001.
Even ten years ago, it was a different time. I basically didn’t think about Apple, OS X, or even the iPod until almost three years later when I broke down and bought a 40 GB iPod so I would have all my music with me on a drive out to California. A few months later, I was working in California, in Hollywood. Fast forward to today. A Touch Of Lion When Apple first unveiled OS X Lion last fall, it was billed as “OS X meets iOS“. With Lion, OS X does catch up. The Lion’s Features The Lion Feel The Lion’s Approach. Lion Is Smooth, But Tries Too Hard to Be iOS | Product Reviews. Mac OS X Lion is rich with visual enhancements, such as the new Launchpad feature for launching apps. My head started hurting after the first hour of using Mac OS X Lion.
Two words: inverted scrolling. That’s correct — Lion’s default scrolling behavior is to scroll down when you swipe up on your multitouch mouse, and to scroll up when you swipe down, just like you would on an iPad. This modification in scrolling clearly illustrates Apple’s ambition with Mac OS X Lion, which was to make the Mac operating system more like the mega-popular iOS software powering not just the iPad, but also the iPhone and the iPod Touch. Apple CEO Steve Jobs previously said the company was learning lessons from the iPad and rolling them into its desktop operating system.
The company envisions a future where PCs become more and more like mobile products, as they continue to get thinner, lighter, more battery-efficient and more dependent on online storage. First, let me finish my rant about inverted scrolling.