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Charles Moore's The Agenda - Leather Sleevecases For MacBook And Air, EZ Upgrade Hard Drive Migration, New OWC External Drives
Friday, May 16 2008 @ 10:17 AM ET | Article Link
iSobre Hand Made Leather Sleevecases For MacBook Air and MacBook

Steve Jobs introduced the MacBook Air back in January, using a standard manila envelope, which the Air can fit inside, as a stage prop. It was an excellent illustration if the Air's sliver-thin form factor.

A Spanish company, iSobre, has adapted the envelope theme for its new line of leather sleeve cases, which not only accommodate the MacBook Air, but also the MacBook, which shares a similar footprint with the Air, but is somewhat thicker in section.

iSobre's 100% hand made leather sleeves have a smooth, practical, sleek, but tastefully minimalist and understated design that makes them as special as your Apple 'Book.



The iSobre sleeve cases are available in two different leather finishes, both exactly the same otherwise in design and dimensions.



Both the "Student" and the "Executive" iSobre sleeves are made of high quality leather, with the Student sleeve in a suede finish made out of pigskin, while the Executive sleeve has a softly tanned finish of cowhide leather.



Personally, I'm partial to the softness and tactile feel of pigskin, but it's nice to have a choice.



Both sleeves are handmade to a similar standard of finish, but, the pigskin Student Sleeve is slightly cheaper, since the tanning process for the cowhide Executive sleeve takes longer, thus increasing the price.



Both sleeves can accommodate either a MacBook or a MacBook Air - dimensions being more or less 345 x 220 x 25 mm

The iSobre is made in Cadiz, (South of Spain in the Andalusian Region).

iSobre Student:
High quality pigskin suede with a velvet effect finish.
Euro 29,99

iSobre Executive:
High quality full-grain cowhide leather with a soft tanning finish.
Euro 49,99

Shipping will be made through FEDEX and calculated automatically within Paypal.
Shipping charges are:
Europe: 15 euro
USA and Canada: 20 euro
Rest of the World: 30 euro

For more information or to order, visit:
http://www.isobre.com/index.html

Apricorn Releases EZ Upgrade Notebook Hard Drive Upgrade Kit with Dual SATA/PATA Interface

Apricorn has released a dual interface version of its popular EZ Upgrade Notebook Hard Drive Upgrade Kit, a solution that facilitates the transfer data from an old PATA/IDE or SATA notebook hard drive to a new hard drive in three easy steps.



Compatible with both PC and Mac notebooks and featuring a high quality metal enclosure, the EZ Upgrade's dual SATA/PATA interface connects with any 9.5mm (the most common size configuration) PATA/IDE or SATA notebook hard drive. Slide the easy-open switch to release the hard drive tray, attach your notebook hard drive to the appropriate SATA or PATA connector, slide the tray closed and connect to your computer's USB port. Once connected the EZ Upgrade enables you to transfer your OS, settings, applications and all of your data to your new drive using Apricorn's Upgrade Suite, which features Apricorn's EZ Gig II cloning and imaging software for Windows and Shirt Pocket's SuperDuper! for Mac.

To use EZ Upgrade, connect the hardware; run the cloning software; and install the new hard drive into the notebook (this latter which involves widely variant degrees of difficulty depending on the computer model, ranging in Macs from dirt-simple with the MacBook, pretty easy with a PowerBook G3 Series machine, considerably more challenging with a MacBook Pro or metal PowerBook 15" or 17", and daunting with the 12" PowerBook). After the upgrade is complete, the pulled older drive can be re-used in the EZ Upgrade enclosure as a portable Hi-Speed USB 2.0 backup hard drive.

The EZ Upgrade Notebook Upgrade Kit includes: Hi-Speed USB 2.0 hard drive enclosure (USB 1.1 compatible), USB cable and Apricorn's Upgrade Suite containing cloning software for PC and Mac.

System Requirements

Mac system requirements:
CD-ROM Drive, Apple G3 or later notebook, 64 MB RAM, available powered USB port

Supported Operating Systems:
Mac OS 9.2 or later & Mac OS X 10.2 or later

The unit is bus Powered from some systems, but an optional AC Adapter sold separately if required (likely with MacBooks and later PowerBooks).

Apricorn's EZ Upgrade sells for $49, and is currently available online at www.apricorn.com or through a network of resellers throughout the US and Canada.

For more information, visit:
http://www.apricorn.com

OWC Announces Lowest-cost Mercury On-the-go FireWire + USB 2.0 Portable Storage Drives

Other World Computing announced yesterday their lowest cost line of OWC Mercury On-The-Go FireWire + USB 2.0 storage drives yet, with 500GB capacity priced at $329. The new line of OWC Mercury On-The-Go high-performance FireWire 400 + USB 2.0 drives are fully bus powered with no additional external power or secondary powering cable required.

Immediately available and priced starting at $95.99, the Mercury On-The-Go portable drive is a palm-sized performer with a huge capacity up to 500GB that fits in a shirt pocket. The latest drive units are interfaced with OWC's custom bridge solution featuring the acclaimed Oxford chipset.

Pricing for OWC Mercury On-the-Go FireWire + USB 2.0 models:

40GB 5400RPM $ 95.99
80GB 5400RPM $109.99
120GB 5400RPM $119.99
160GB 5400RPM $129.99
250GB 5400RPM $157.99
320GB 5400RPM $179.99 **NEW**
500GB 5400RPM $329.99 **NEW**
100GB 7200RPM $139.99 **NEW**
200GB 7200RPM $189.99 **NEW**

OWC Mercury On-The-Go portable drives are compatible with virtually all computers with an available FireWire or USB port, including all Macs and PCs. They also work with all FireWire and USB gadgets, including digital cameras, camcorders, and other gear, for an instant on-the-go portable storage solution to quickly and safely store all your digital photos and video while on the road.

With the Mercury On-The-Go, you can back-up your entire workstation computer and bring it with you everywhere you go. For easy backup, the drive also includes the full retail software versions of the latest Prosoft DataBackup III for OS X (and NovaStor NovaBackup for Windows). Mercury On-The-Go is "Time Machine" ready for backing up files with Leopard's new automated backup feature.

Mercury On-The-Go portable drives ship with a carrying case; cables for all interfaces supported by Mercury On-the-Go models; Prosoft DataRescue III for OS X; and NovaStor NovaBackup for Windows. All portable drives are covered by a one-year warranty and are compatible with Apple OS Versions 8.5 through 9.2.x; Apple OS X 10.0.3 and higher (including the latest OS 10.5.x); and Microsoft Windows 98SE, ME, 2000, XP, and Vista.

Special OWC Exclusive Hitachi Rebate is available now and through May 23rd on all OWC Mercury On-The-Go 200GB 7200RPM Models. Save an additional $30 per unit on up to 5 drives on qualifying purchases. Qualifying models and more information online:
http://eshop.macsales.com/search/Hitachi+200GB+Rebate

For more information, see:
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/on-the-go

bookmystique@pbcentral.com


Week's Best MacBook Deals
Friday, May 16 2008 @ 8:59 AM ET | Article Link
We've posted the Week's Best Deals on MacBooks, MacBook Airs, and MacBook Pros for Friday, the 16th of May. Find the lowest price or the best set of bundles from Apple's Authorized Resellers with these deals: Week's Best MacBook Pro Deals | Week's Best MacBook Deals | Week's Best MacBook Air Deals

And, as always, keep an eye on our price trackers at MacPrices for the latest prices and bundles from Apple's resellers. We update our price trackers every morning.

Free all-in-one printer with purchase of new Mac from Apple
Friday, May 16 2008 @ 8:04 AM ET | Article Link
Purchase a new Mac from The Apple Store through July 21, 2008, and receive $100 back on a qualifying printer. The HP Photosmart C4280 All-in-One Printer, Scanner, Copier and the Canon PIXMA MP470 all-in-one Printer are both available for $99.95. Use this rebate to reduce that price to $0 when you purchase your Mac. Apple is now using a new online form for this rebate, replacing the older PDF mail-in rebate forms.

Exclusive MacPrices coupon: Up to $227 off MacBook Airs through 5/31
Friday, May 16 2008 @ 7:58 AM ET | Article Link
 Use coupon code PCPRICESMWB12918, good through May 31, 2008, to take 3% off the price of any MacBook Air at MacMall. This discount is in addition to their $100-$125 MacBook Air mail-in rebates plus instant discounts. Combine the coupon code with their rebate, and you won't find lower MacBook Air prices from any other source.

- 13" MacBook Air 1.8GHz/64GB SSD: $2871.33 sku 7373089; $227 off MSRP
- 13" MacBook Air 1.6GHz/64GB SSD: $2605.33 sku 7373419; $193 off MSRP

- 13" MacBook Air 1.8GHz/80GB HD: $1931.18 sku 7373094; $168 off MSRP
- 13" MacBook Air 1.6GHz/80GB HD: $1640.18 sku 7373085; $159 off MSRP

Optional bundles include a copy of Parallels Desktop, an HP or Epson printer, and a carrying case..

Updated MacBook Price Trackers
Friday, May 16 2008 @ 7:56 AM ET | Article Link
We've updated our Laptop Price Trackers with the latest information on prices, bundles, and availability from Apple's authorized internet/catalog resellers. Laptops include the MacBook Air plus MacBook Pros, MacBooks, PowerBooks, and iBooks. The following charts are available:

17" MacBook Pro | 15" MacBook Pro | 13" MacBook | MacBook Air
Apple Refurbs | Clearance Laptops

Charles Moore's The Agenda - A Terabyte Of Storage Inside Your 'Book!
Thursday, May 15 2008 @ 11:00 AM ET | Article Link
Up To 1TB Now Available Inside Your MacBook Pro, MacBook, or PowerBook G4

A terabyte is an awful lot of data space. It blows me away that the 500 GB Maxtor 7200 RPM hard drive in my SimpleTech Pininfarina SimpleDrive external hard drive has 1000 times the storage capacity of the 500 MB drive that I thought was pretty roomy in my first Apple laptop - a 1996 PowerBook 5300. I've been using the SimpleDrive for data backups for more than a year now -- since last November for Time Machine backups, and it still has more than 300 GB free space. Amazing!

And yet, there are users for whom even 500 GB is not adequate - people who work with video or just like to collect movies, for example, and the relatively limited capacity ceiling has been an inhibitor to them working with notebook computers rather than desktop machines, but now long-established Apple laptop storage media specialists MCE have addressed that limitation with their new MCE OptiBay Hard Drive, which was created for users who want as much hard drive space as possible inside their MacBook Pro, MacBook, or PowerBook G4... period.



The MCE OptiBay Hard Drive replaces your 'Book's internal SuperDrive optical drive with a high performance hard drive. Two bootable hard drives inside your notebook provides tremendous flexibility. For example, you can have one disk a scratch disk and use the other as your system/applications disk, set up RAID configurations, make one disk your Mac OS disk and the other Windows, have extra music storage to satisfy a digital DJs, do high end HD and DV editing with Final Cut Pro, and so forth. You can still have an external SuperDrive or other optical drive in an enclosure for your removed SuperDrive or Combo drive so you'll still have CD/DVD read/write functionality anytime you want for loading system software or applications, as well as burning, playing, or ripping CDs and DVDs - which is the same motif that MacBook Air users have available, and no serious hardship for most of us.

MCE has lots of experience in engineering innovative enhancements to Apple laptop storage technology. Since the mid-'90s they've been designing and marketing hard drive and optical upgrades exclusively for PowerBooks, which from the PowerBook 5300 and 190 through the PowerBook G3 Series 2000 "Pismo" came with a removable-device expansion bay slot that provided users a luxurious amount of flexibility in how they use their machines. MCE created expansion bay hard drives for those machines, (still available today), that allow users to easily replace their expansion bay optical drives with a removable hard drive (or other type of drive; I have SuperDrive, Zip, and SuperDisk modules for my Pismos). Unhappily, Apple's introduction of the PowerBook G4 in 2001 launching their quest for the thinnest notebook in the world eliminated the possibility for an expansion bay slot and users have been limited to a permanent, built-in optical drive ever since. Until now.

For those users who want more hard drive space inside their MacBook Pro or PowerBook G4 for their music, video, and photo libraries the MCE OptiBay Hard Drive is your solution. Take your SuperDrive out, put an OptiBay Hard Drive in, and you have up to up to an extra 500GB of high performance hard drive space to use however you'd like. Combine it with up to a 500GB internal hard drive and find out what a dream it is to have up to 1TB of hard drive space inside your laptop.

OptiBay Hard Drive Features
• Up to 500GB additional internal hard disk storage
• Up to 1TB total internal hard disk storage.
• Can be used as an individual volume, as part of a RAID array, or combined with internal hard drive as one very large volume
• Bootable
• Easy setup using Apple's Disk Utility program
• Negligible impact on battery life
• S.M.A.R.T. drive status compliant
• Optional FireWire SuperDrive or optical drive enclosure
• 3 Year Warranty



The MCE OptiBay Hard Drive is a high performance laptop hard drive mounted inside a lightweight housing that's been engineered to the match exact same dimensions as your laptop's SuperDrive or Combo drive. An extra bonus from this mod is that replacing your optical drive with an MCE OptiBay Hard Drive will shave up to a quarter pound off the weight of your MacBook Pro, MacBook or PowerBook G4. To accommodate the different data connector protocols, a no efficiency loss adapter was developed allowing the hard drive to communicate through the optical drive connector on the notebook's motherboard.

The laptop recognizes it as just another volume connected to its ATA bus and communicates with it just as it would any other hard drive, and it can be easily set up and partition in conjunction with your main internal hard drive as part of a RAID 0 (Striped) or RAID 1 (Mirrored) array, or concatenated (combined) with your internal hard drive so they appear as one large hard drive - just a few of a number of possibilities.

For those in situations where being as fail-safe as possible is more important than the extra capacity, you can opt to clone your entire internal hard drive to the MCE OptiBay Hard Drive and, with the included BounceBack Express backup software, schedule backups to the OptiBay Hard Drive at regular, perhaps even daily, intervals (or of course use the second hard drive as your destination drive for self-contained Time Machine automated backups). That way if your PowerBook or MacBook Pro's internal hard drive ever goes down you won't miss a beat since you can immediately switch over and work seamlessly from the OptiBay Drive. If maximum speed performance is of the essence, the MCE OptiBay Hard Drive can also be used as a scratch disk for your swapfile or virtual memory data, doing all the heavy work and not bogged down having to run system routines simultaneously.

The MCE OptiBay Hard Drive runs within the heat and power dissipation specification for the optical drive it is replacing and also has built-in power management routines which allow it to use even less power. Depending on the spindle speed of the drive, battery life between charges with an OptiBay Hard Drive installed is affected by approximately 10 to 15%. The Mac OS can spin the OptiBay Hard Drive down when not in use if instructed to do so in the Energy Saver preference panel in the System Preferences.

In order to maintain the CD/DVD read/write functionality of the original internal optical drive replaced by the OptiBay Hard Drive with the MacBook Pro 17-inch and PowerBook G4, you can use a MCE Portable FireWire/USB 2.0 Optical Drive Enclosure Kit into which you may install the SuperDrive or Combo drive removed from the MacBook Pro. This slim external FireWire/USB 2.0 enclosure transforms your optical drive into a bootable, bus-powered SuperDrive or Combo retaining full compatibility that can be plugged into a FireWire or USB 2.0 port when needed in order to play, burn, or rip CDs or DVDs or to load new system software or applications. You can also choose the MCE External 18x DVD-/+R/RW + Dual/Double Layer FireWire/USB 2.0 SuperDrive to instead have the functionality of a higher-speed CD/DVD reader/writer at your disposal in a more stationary desktop form factor.

The MacBook and MacBook Pro 15-inch use a non-standard 9.5mm internal SuperDrive. Since there are no external enclosures available for this type of SuperDrive, MCE gives you the option of a complete portable 8X DVD±R/RW + Dual/Double Layer bus-powered FireWire/USB 2.0 SuperDrive, or the desktop 18X DVD±R/RW + Dual/Double Layer FireWire/USB 2.0 SuperDrive.

If you're handy with tools, you can install the MCE OptiBay yourself, although for 12-inch PowerBook G4 Owners: MCE strongly recommends that you leave that job to a professional tech since installation of the MCE OptiBay Hard drive in the 12-incher involves the removal of some 40 plus screws and parts and is not for the faint of heart. If you prefer, these upgrades can be installed by MCE Technologies or one of their worldwide Authorized Upgrade Centers, for a fee of course.

The MCE OptiBay Hard Drive is compatible with the 17" and 15" MacBook Pro, the 13.3" MacBook and also the 17", 15", and 12" Apple PowerBook G4.

System Requirements:
MacBook Pro (15" or 17") or MacBook (13.3") running Mac OS 10.4.x or later. PowerBook G4 (12" Aluminum, 15" Aluminum or Titanium, or 17" Aluminum) running Mac OS 9, Mac OS 10.2, Mac OS 10.3, Mac OS 10.4 (or later) Full Disc Burning compatibility with FireWire or USB 2.0 enclosure requires Mac OS 10.4 or later. PowerBook G4 15" Titanium DVD-ROM only drive not compatible with FireWire Enclosure.

For more information, visit:
http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/

You can also order direct from MCE 24-hours a day, or call 1-800-5000-MAC.

bookmystique@pbcentral.com


Roundup of Apple Refurbished MacBooks and MacBook Pros
Thursday, May 15 2008 @ 9:24 AM ET | Article Link
 The Apple Store has Apple Certified Refurbished MacBooks and MacBook Pros available today for up to $850 off original MSRP. Each model comes with an Apple one-year warranty, and ground shipping is free. The following configurations are available:

Refurbished 2008 models:
- 15" 2.5GHz MacBook Black: $2149 $350 off MSRP
- 15" 2.4GHz MacBook Black: $1699 $300 off MSRP

- 13" 2.4GHz MacBook Black: $1299 $200 off MSRP
- 13" 2.4GHz MacBook White: $1099 $200 off MSRP
- 13" 2.1GHz MacBook White: $949 $150 off MSRP

Refurbished 2007 models:
- 17" 2.6GHz MacBook Pro HD: $2499 original MSRP $3299
- 17" 2.4GHz MacBook Pro HD: $2299 original MSRP $3049
- 17" 2.4GHz MacBook Pro: $2099 original MSRP $2799

- 15" 2.4GHz MacBook Pro: $1649 original MSRP $2499
- 15" 2.2GHz MacBook Pro: $1449 original MSRP $1999

- 13" 2.2GHz White Core 2 Duo MacBook: $999 original MSRP $1299

Click here to purchase any of these models, and note that some models may sell out quickly today.



Visit our price trackers on the web at MacPrices for detailed info.

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