Reviewed: The Thinnest, Loveliest MacBook You’ll Never Buy

It’s so easy to blast Apple for sacrificing utility in the name of beautiful design. Everybody does it every time a new Apple product comes out.

The iPhone, 2007: “No keys! No memory card! No removable battery! Doomed!”

The MacBook Air, 2008: “No DVD drive! No hard drive! Doomed!”

The iPad, 2010: “No USB ports! No expansion! Doomed!”

But time passes. The tumult dies down, the product becomes a huge hit, and rival companies soon embrace exactly the same design.

This Friday, you’ll be able to buy the company’s latest product, the MacBook. Not the MacBook Air, not the MacBook Pro (both of which will remain for sale). Just MacBook.

Yes, the cycle of “Doomed!” is about to begin again. I know this cycle too well. I’ve lived through it over and over. And even so, this time, when I behold this new 12-inch MacBook, I want to shout: “This time, you’ve really gone too far!”

I mean, no jacks at all!?

That’s correct. No standard USB jacks, no video output jacks, no memory card slot, no Thunderbolt port, no Ethernet.

On top of all that, Apple has the gall to introduce another MacBook power connector. With this model, Apple has abandoned the MagSafe connector (both versions of it), the magnetic charging plug that doesn’t drag your laptop to the floor when someone trips on it. 

When Apple unveiled MagSafe, Steve Jobs hailed it as a triumph of clever engineering and common sense. And now suddenly MagSafe is dropped like chopped liver.

Meet the MacBook

OK, well, that’s the bad news.

The good news is that this laptop looks amazing. It is crazy thin, light, and small. It’s available in three aluminum hues (a first for Apple) — standard silver, gold, and gray. The gray looks wicked great.

New aluminum battery for smartphones can be charged in a minute

Reuters

April 7, 2015

LONDON (Reuters) - U.S. scientists said they have invented a cheap, long-lasting and flexible battery made of aluminum for use in smartphones that can be charged in as little as one minute.

The researchers, who detailed their discovery in the journal Nature, said the new aluminum-ion battery has the potential to replace lithium-ion batteries, used in millions of laptops and mobile phones.

Besides recharging much faster, the new aluminum battery is safer than existing lithium-ion batteries, which occasionally burst into flames, they added.

Researchers have long tried but failed to develop a battery made of aluminum, a lightweight and relatively inexpensive metal that has high charging capacity.

A team lead by chemistry professor Hongjie Dai at Stanford University in California made a breakthrough by accidentally discovering that graphite made a good partner to aluminum, Stanford said in a statement.

In a prototype, aluminum was used to make the negatively-charged anode while graphite provided material for the positively charged cathode.

A prototype aluminum battery recharged in one minute, the scientists said.

"Lithium-ion batteries can be a fire hazard," said Dai. "Our new battery won't catch fire, even if you drill through it."

The new battery is also very durable and flexible, the scientists said.

While lithium-ion batteries last about 1,000 cycles, the new aluminum battery was able to continue after more than 7,500 cycles without loss of capacity. It also can be bent or folded.

Larger aluminum batteries could also be used to store renewable energy on the electrical grid, Dai said.

(Reporting by Eric Onstad, editing by David Evans)

How to Do a Word Search on Webpages with iPhone and iPad

Yoni Heisler, BGRApril 2, 2015

If you’re an iPhone or iPad user, odds are that you use mobile Safari to do all of your web browsing. But buried underneath all all of the more overt browsing options is a hidden way to search an individual webpage for a specific word or phrase.

Here’s how you can find it and use it to your heart’s content.

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Let’s say I hop on over to NBA.com and want to quickly scan the page for any stories involving, say, Kevin Durant. Instead of tediously scrolling through the entire webpage and hoping to spot a story of interest, iOS provides a clever way to do all of the heavy lifting for you.

To get started, simply apply a single tap to the URL bar, highlighted below.

Once the URL bar becomes highlighted, you can begin typing in your search phrase which, in this case, is “Durant.”

Next, you’re presented with what appears to be a standard Safari search results page. Clearly these are of no help.

But here’s where things get cool.

Simply scroll further down on the page and you’re soon presented with a previously hidden category which lists out all of the instances in which “Durant” is found on the webpage in question.

Boom. There it is.

Following that, simply tap on “durant” and you’re whisked back to the NBA.com homepage and all of the instances of “Durant” on the open page will be highlighted in yellow. What’s more, iOS makes it easy to navigate between each instance of the word simply by tapping the arrow keys on the lower left hand side of the display.

For a feature that’s as useful and widely used as in-page search, one would think that Apple would advertise this functionality just a little bit more. Either way, this handy tip should help save some time you might otherwise spend searching and slogging through a massive webpage with tiny text.