So you got a job, moved into your own place, picked up an IKEA Poang and then felt pretty good about life. Things were working out alright! Then you saw the Frederic Sofia Relaxation Chair…
The Gadget: MacPadd, the anodised aluminium mousepad meant to match the finish on newer MacBook and MacBook Pros. It’s about the size of a standard mousepad, if slightly shorter than usual (but just as wide).
The MacPadd mousepad is a little matchy-matchy, but we can certainly appreciate the intent. Engineered entirely from anodized aluminium, the $US25 MacPadd promises industrial durability, bacterial resistance, increased laser mouse precision and, of course, a complimentary style to your aluminium MacBook of choice. But for those who aren’t excited over a mere metal mousepad, then consider this post the first official scoop of an ultra-thin MacBook with no screen, inputs or power source. Oooh! [MacPadd via TidBITS]
In light of the news about the updated construction process for the new MacBooks, it is high time you got a brief edumication on the history of unibody construction. It may seem revolutionary, but the method Apple is using derives from the early 20th century monocoque (“single shell”) technique of using an object’s external skin to support structural loads. It has its roots in the airline industry where a price drop in aluminium in the 1920′s made it affordable to meet the demand for stiff, strong, smooth skins that could handle the stress of high altitudes and increasingly powerful aircraft. By the end of WWII, almost all high-performance aircraft were built using monocoque or semi-monocoque technique.
The new MacBook Pro 2008 is, at last, the worthy successor to the mythical PowerBook Titanium. From its new design–with an iMac-style glass screen, smooth Air-style surfaces, and no-button trackpad–to its guts–with new processors and the Nvidia GeForce 9400m and 9600m GT working in tandem–there’s little not to like about the new MacBook Pro 2008. In fact, this thing is absolutely amazing. Full specs and details after the jump.
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digg_skin = 'compact'; digg_bgcolor = '#f1f8fa'; digg_url = 'http://digg.com/design/Carving_the_New_MacBooks_with_Lasers';Apple has confirmed their new way to make laptops in the new MacBook 2008 line-up. Previously, manufacturers–including Apple–would add layers to form a body, welding each of them to give the laptop rigidity. Now, they have changed the whole game: instead of adding pieces, they will eliminate matter from solid pieces of aluminium using lasers and other machinery to create the new MacBook bodies.
The whole thing starts with a solid block of aluminium. This goes through an extrusion machine, in which the block is flattened on a thick, continuous metal sheet, like giant aluminium tagliatelle, which then get cut into the blocks that make the base of the MacBooks.
These blocks go through a whopping 16 different milling operations, using all kinds of machinery including lasers, until the part is completely finished and ready to be sent to the assembly line.
Given the recent rumours about a “revolutionary” new manufacturing process from Apple involving water jet-cut aluminium for new MacBooks, it seemed appropriate to discuss a new product coming out of the 2008 Fabtech International & AWS Welding show. The FLOW is a 6-axis system that perform full 3D water cutting without a bulky gantry holding it back. Instead, the entire system runs off a flexible robotic arm for more precision work (although its accuracy has been described as “mid range”). Either way, it looks like the FLOW 6 will be used to fabricate some awesome stuff down the line. [AVING via Slashgear]
9to5 Mac has gone on record as saying that the rumoured Apple Brick isn’t a product, but a manufacturing process that can make high quality aluminium shells. The “brick” part comes in because the supposed technique carves these MacBook casings with lasers and high pressure water jets out of bricks of aluminium, making for a seamless and screwless design. Whether or not it’s true is still left to be seen, but one benefit would mean that there would be no need to bend metal (which creates weak spots). Again, no idea if this is legit, but 9 to 5 Mac has a fairly decent track record, which they conveniently point out at the end of their post. [9 to 5 Mac]
NZXT’s been making slightly expensive gaming cases for a while, but their latest full tower Khaos case looks very nice. It’s got dual power supply support, 2-3mm aluminium build, a total of 7 fan slots and a price of US$399. Did we mention that it looks nice? This case alone costs more than some fully-built computers, but if you’re the type of gamer that likes to haul your rig to LAN parties in order to compare your aluminium wang to your buddies’, you could do a lot worse. [NZXT]
While we generally love to see gadgets receive new alloy skins, this mod that added carbon fibre to the back of a Macbook Air is—sensitively put—fugly. The trade-off is that carbon fibre is lighter than aluminium, though at the installed thickness, it’s a bit flimsier too.
