“As I look at a newly arrived MacBook Air laptop,” writes Dean Takahashi (mercurynews.com), “it occurs to me there has never been a better time to switch to a Mac.” And he points to the new MacBook Air as “a great example of the faster innovation” that Apple offers customers. “The design is attractive and nobody can boast having a thinner notebook computer. It has an innovation dubbed Remote Disc. You install a disk on a desktop’s DVD drive. Then you can use your MacBook Air’s Remote Disc function to take over the DVD drive and install software into the MacBook Air. It’s an innovation that may signal the beginning of the end of disk media.”,MacBook Air shows: “never been a better time to switch to a Mac”, http://www.mercurynews.com/columns/ci_8294034, http://images.apple.com/main/rss/hotnews/hotnews.rss, Apple Hot News,

“For a lot of people,” says Ken Mingis (computerworld.com), “smaller and lighter is better when it comes to their laptops.” He considers MacBook Air “one of the coolest-looking laptops to appear in years — both in terms of size and hipness.” It has “a gorgeous display that looks sharper and brighter on the Air than it does on the regular MacBook.” And, he says, “waking it up from sleep mode took about 2 seconds, and the LED backlighting means the screen hit full brightness as soon as it was awake.” As for performance: “The Air feels just about as snappy as my MacBook Pro in day-to-day use doing the kinds of things most users will be doing: surfing the Web, firing off e-mails, text editing and light graphics work.”,MacBook Air just what the road warrior has been waiting for, http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9062959&pageNumber=1, http://images.apple.com/main/rss/hotnews/hotnews.rss, Apple Hot News,

For the first time, music fans can enjoy all of the contestant performances from Season Seven of American Idol, television’s most popular show, exclusively on iTunes. This week, performances of the “American Idol” Top 24 semifinalists will be the first to appear on iTunes. You also can purchase music performances for 99 cents per song. Starting March 11, you’ll also be able to purchase the full video of Top 12 finalist performances for $1.99. And, beginning today, you can pre-order performances of your favorite contestants from the iTunes Store, which will automatically download the day after the show airs. The exclusive availability comes to you thanks to a partnership of Fox Broadcasting Company, Fox Interactive Media, 19 Entertainment, FremantleMedia and Apple.,Catch “American Idol” Performances Exclusively on iTunes, http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewCustomPage?name=pageAmericanIdol2008, http://images.apple.com/main/rss/hotnews/hotnews.rss, Apple Hot News,

Reviewing MacBook Air for the Daily Telegraph, Claudine Beaumont notes that most of the staff there “have found this lightweight laptop very impressive.” MacBook Air, she indicates “is a delightfully designed gadget, hewn from aluminum and glass, and draws amazed gasps from almost all who see it. It’s hard to appreciate just how slim it is until you hold it for yourself.” While “there’s no doubt the Air is beautifully designed,” Beaumont points out that it also “ packs all of the powerhouse computing we expect from Apple.”,MacBook Air “instantly attractive to mobile workers”, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2008/02/14/dlmac114.xml, http://images.apple.com/main/rss/hotnews/hotnews.rss, Apple Hot News,

“Apple has done well with Aperture 2.0, based on my test of ingesting and editing a batch of my own photos on a dual-core iMac,” remarks Stephen Shankland in a recent article on CNET. And, he points out, he’s not the only one to notice the dramatic performance gains: “I feel like someone snuck a new CPU into my machine,” gushed photographer Josh Anon in a Wednesday blog posting.” “On top of a general performance boost,” Shankland continues, Aperture 2 delivers “a new preview mode that specifically emphasizes speed,” an entirely “new raw-processing engine” that delivers significant advantages, and a variety of other new features, as well.,Aperture 2 impresses CNET Editor, http://www.news.com/8301-13580_3-9872913-39.html?tag=nefd.lede, http://images.apple.com/main/rss/hotnews/hotnews.rss, Apple Hot News,

The cellphone industry went to Barcelona to “show off the latest and greatest phones” and, once again, hardware took center stage. But, Victoria Shannon (New York Times) points out, “software is growing in importance as smartphones, capable of accessing the Web, become more popular.” So, Shannon continues, “it was no surprise that many of the phones were iPhone clones — with touch screens, sleek flat shapes and spare software interfaces. Apple was able to make a phone that paid equal attention to the software and the hardware. And the rest of the industry was following suit here.”,iPhone sets the tone at Mobile World Congress, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/technology/personaltech/14basics.html?pagewanted=1&ref=personaltech, http://images.apple.com/main/rss/hotnews/hotnews.rss, Apple Hot News,

Macworld’s Jonny Evans reports that “Google has confirmed it has seen 50 times more searches from the iPhone than from any other mobile handset. ‘We thought it was a mistake and made our engineers check the logs again,’ Vic Gundotra, head of Google’s mobile operations told the Financial Times at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.” Evans also indicates that O2 “recently confirmed the iPhone to be driving ‘unheard of data traffic’ on the mobile network.”,iPhone customers lead mobile search stats, http://www.macworld.co.uk/ipod-itunes/news/index.cfm?RSS&NewsID=20446, http://images.apple.com/main/rss/hotnews/hotnews.rss, Apple Hot News,

“The best recent advance in the mobile telecommunications user space came not from a mobile telecom company but from Apple Inc. — the iPhone.” That, according to David Benjamin (EE Times) was the conclusion reached by a “blue-ribbon panel of human behavior and technology experts at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.” And, Benjamin points out, “Anup Murarka, director of technical marketing for Adobe, cited a study showing that 77 percent of iPhone purchasers described themselves as “very satisfied” with their user experience.”,Customers continue their “love affair with iPhone”, http://www.eetimes.com/rss/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206504012&cid=RSSfeed_eetimes_newsRSS, http://images.apple.com/main/rss/hotnews/hotnews.rss, Apple Hot News,

You’ve probably downloaded scores of PDFs from the Web and no doubt created many of your own in Mac OS X. But did you know that Leopard gives you more control of PDFs than ever, even letting you reorder or delete pages, insert or extract pages, or add Spotlight search terms? We show you how to use Preview to manipulate PDFs in the latest Quick Tip of the Week.,Quick Tip of the Week: Manipulating PDFs in Preview, http://www.apple.com/business/videotips/?sr=hotnews?sr=hotnews.rss, http://images.apple.com/main/rss/hotnews/hotnews.rss, Apple Hot News,

“Much of the attention for iPhoto ’08 has focused on the new Events pane,” report Jim Heid and Kelly Turner (macworld.com), but the newest version of iPhoto “has many more tricks up its sleeve.” For example, Heid and Turner explain how iPhoto lets you customize print options, adjust fonts, create and assign keywords more easily, perform more effective searches, and still other tricks.,The hidden power in iPhoto ‘08, http://www.macworld.com/article/132013/2008/02/digitalphoto2503.html, http://images.apple.com/main/rss/hotnews/hotnews.rss, Apple Hot News,