Couldn't find this mentioned anywhere else on the forum, but does anyone think the white version of this new mini desktop from Asus seems to be filling the same hole as the unloved Mac Mini (sans optical drive but with optional vertical stand!)?

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/10..._asus_eee_box/

I can't believe The Register fails to see or mention the similarity :).

jMc

div style="FLOAT: right"img title="Toshiba Portege R600 ultralight laptop with 9 hours of battery life" alt="Toshiba Portege R600 ultralight laptop with 9 hours of battery life" hspace="5" src="http://www.ubergizmo.com/photos/2008/10/toshiba-portege-r600.jpg" vspace="5" border="0" //div pToshiba has launched its a href="http://www.toshiba.ca/web/product.grp?lg=enamp;section=1amp;group=1amp;product=8790amp;part=8671#spectop"Portege R600/a, 2.4lbs uber-light laptop. It is physically similar to the R500, which shares the same weight and 283 x 215.8 x 19.5-25.5mm dimensions. What's new then?/p ul listrongFaster CPU/strong: 1.4Ghz Core Duo (vs 1.2Ghz mono-core)/li listrongTwice the memory/strong: 2GB vs 1GB/li listrongUpper memory ceiling/strong: 5GB max vs 1.5GB max/li listrongBetter graphics/strong: Intel X4500 vs Intel 945GMS/li/ul pAt least, you can be assured that the R600 will be a bit faster than its predecessor (that would be lame if it wasn't, huh?). I think that the higher memory capacity is the most important point here. 1.5GB on the a href="http://www.toshiba.ca/web/product.grp?lg=enamp;section=1amp;group=1amp;product=7170amp;category="R500/a was just idiotic. At this price, the advantages that it has over the Macbook Air are the optical drive and the number of available ports (3xUSB, VGA) - that is, if you planned to use Windows to start with./p pa href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/10/toshiba_portege_r600_ultralight_laptop_with_9_hours_of_battery_life.html#comments"Add a comment/a | From: a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/10/toshiba_portege_r600_ultralight_laptop_with_9_hours_of_battery_life.html"Toshiba Portege R600 ultralight laptop with 9 hours of battery life/a | Visit a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com"Ubergizmo/a | a href="http://www.uberbargain.com/"Good deals/a/p pmap name="google_ad_map_081009153533" area shape="rect" href="http://imageads.googleadservices.com/pagead/imgclick/081009153533?pos=0" coords="1,2,367,28"/ area shape="rect" href="http://services.google.com/feedback/abg" coords="384,10,453,23"//map img usemap="#google_ad_map_081009153533" border="0" src="http://imageads.googleadservices.com/pagead/ads?format=468x30_aff_imgamp;client=ca-pub-7335032025195922amp;channel=9684588219amp;output=pngamp;cuid=081009153533amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ubergizmo.com%2F15%2Farchives%2F2008%2F10%2Ftoshiba_portege_r600_ultralight_laptop_with_9_hours_of_battery_life.html"//p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/vhikbQlMPN9qmkPs_gcNx5xX9g0/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/vhikbQlMPN9qmkPs_gcNx5xX9g0/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=15tDLwyM"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=ONUvvJ3u"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?i=ONUvvJ3u" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=PjQXMdeA"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=FGWXlGUk"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?i=FGWXlGUk" border="0"/img/a /div

With speculation that Apple could be putting out an $800 laptop in the near future, we all need to step back and look at the big picture.

In the majority of the discussions, the MBA is the least referred to product when talking about MacBook. Most likely it is being ignored because the pictures are of a Macbook (It has an optical drive!). One of the MBAs biggest critics is the perfomance you get at the price you pay. Since the Macbook is about to go aluminum and has better specs, why not let it be the midrange product?

It would be a perfect compromise to wanting a bit more size/power than an MBA, while having near MBP specs (which the current Macbook does now, save for graphics card.

Once could easily feel that this new 13" Macbook be worth the $1300 Apple would sell it for. It would have near feature parity with the MBP; backlit keyboard, dedicated graphics, maybe even FW800.

Hopefully, just like the iPhone, Apple charged a high price for a new product for R/D and to see the initial market reaction. Then come out with an improved product that could be sold at a more mass market acceptable price to ignite sales.

Taiwanese blog Apple.Pro has put out a couple more pictures that could be related to the upcoming Macbook Pro. We're not sure if they're real or not, but there are enough photos out there to at least mostly rule out Photoshop. While the new pictures resemble case images we saw earlier, it looks to be designed for a smaller laptop and lacks their speaker grills.
The keyboard seems to be identical to the MacBook Air, but with a larger trackpad. The left side houses all the ports (much like the earlier photo), while the right side has a slot for the optical drive. Apple.Pro is responsible for previous case images as well, but only time will tell how accurate their tips are. [Apple Pro via Mac Rumors]


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pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/10/appleprorumorpics.jpg" width="600" height="144" style="display:block;float:none;" / Taiwanese blog Apple.Pro has put out a couple more pictures that icould/i be related to the upcoming Macbook Pro. We're not sure if they're real or not, but there are enough photos out there to at least mostly rule out Photoshop. While the new pictures resemble a href="http://gizmodo.com/5060751/new-macbook-pro-rumor-control"case images/a we saw earlier, it looks to be designed for a smaller laptop and lacks their speaker grills./p pThe keyboard seems to be identical to the MacBook Air, but with a larger trackpad. The left side houses all the ports (much like the earlier photo), while the right side has a slot for the optical drive. Apple.Pro is responsible for img src="http://gizmodo.com/5032929/possible-pictures-of-upcoming-macbook-leaked"previous case images as well, but only time will tell how accurate their tips are. [a href="http://tw.apple.pro/?uid-1-action-viewspace-itemid-1138"Apple Pro/a via a href="http://www.macrumors.com/"Mac Rumors/a]/p br style="clear: both;"/ a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:116c28fda1754760d55a9bf820f0811a:MK4x6ylKqjUQtcgztNQNNRnWFY9dVRX1zli0I0QFZrgauWcr26id82zTjafOpDjf3kLdJPVJqyLKQg%3D%3D'img border='0' title='Poll' alt='Poll' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/poll_securityslow.png'//a br style="clear: both;"/ img alt="" style="border: 0; height:1px; width:1px;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?i=a90e9985520dabb43e51fdf040aef318" height="1" width="1"/ img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=a90e9985520dabb43e51fdf040aef318" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/ pa href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~a/gizmodo/full?a=jwx7Um"img src="http://feeds.gawker.com/~a/gizmodo/full?i=jwx7Um" border="0"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=NantM"img src="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=NantM" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=rPJkM"img src="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=rPJkM" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=sE2lm"img src="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=sE2lm" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=5onAm"img src="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=5onAm" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~4/415582537" height="1" width="1"/

I see all these posts about people's bad experiences with Apple repairs and how their laptop came back worse than it was before and everything, i think thats gonna lead people to misjudge Apples amazing customer service so im gonna post my wonderful story with the genius bar.


So my black macbook was acting up, the optical drive would not burn dvds and it wouldnt even recognize blank cds. Also i had a crack on my top case so that needed to be replaced also.

So i went to my nearest apple store (Rockaway, NJ) and explained the problem and they agreed with me that the optical drive and top case needed to be replaced. So they told me it would be 4 to 5 days to repair the machine. Okay great.

So ive been using a windows machine for the past 4 days :(

Well yesterday i got an email from Apple that my repair was complete and i was amazed that they ordered the two parts and got them there and installed them in 3 days. I picked up my precious macbook today and wow.


They replaced only the top case but the whole casing feels like its brand new! It feels like it just took it out of the box brand new! And i booted it up popped in a blank cd it recognized it and i burned a cd perfectly! It feels like i just got the laptop all over again. I am so impressed with apples service i didn't expect it to be this great after reading all these posts about how bad of an experience people have had with apple!


Great job Apple, keep it up!