Apple Discontinues The 15-inch MacBook Pro

Apple has silently killed off the 15-inch MacBook Pro and is now strongly pushing towards the future with its more powerful slimmer and lighter Retina-equipped 13-inch and 15-inch MacBooks. People looking to get an affordably priced 15-inch MacBook Pro will have to turn to the refurbished and used market, while Apple has made efforts to lower the price point of the new 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro down to $1,999 from last year's $2,199 entry price. The 13-inch standard MacBook Pro is still being offered for purchase with year-old specs, and is now the only remaining Mac to come with an optical drive. But for an additional $100, you can get an up-to-date Retina model with a super fast PCIe-based 128GB of flash storage which can be a compromise for some.

Drexel University Puts MacBooks Into Vending Machines

The traditional vending machine where you go for a bottle of Coke is no more, at least not at Drexel University in Philadelphia. In place of soda and water, they've created a MacBook vending machine (or the MacVending as we call it) that allow students to rent out a 15-inch MacBook Pro if a student were to forget theirs at home. 

Simply scan your student ID and you can take one of the 12 MacBooks for your own for five hours before paying $5 for each additional hour. Of course, there are security measures employed to make sure nobody runs off with one of their $1500 odd dollar laptops. This provides an excellent resource for students, especially when something urgent comes up and you're short a computer. Drexel plans to bring iPad vending machines as well if this new program is well received. 

Apple Executes Their 17-Inch Quietly

Now that we've all had time to rejoice over the new Retina Display Macbook Pro, let us take a moment and remember the giant of the family, the 17 inch Macbook Pro. Without too much of a mention, Apple silently discountinued their 17 inch Pro model after WWDC. It might not have sold as many units as its smaller brothers and sisters just as we've reported, but for you professionals out there who loved your huge screen estate, we are sorry for your loss. 

OS X Mountain Lion Is Packed With New Features

WWDC 2012 had both its excitements and its disappointments. To the dismay of a lot of us, Apple’s glorious Retina Displays will not be included throughout their entire laptop lineup, but on the bright side, we have an entirely new addition: the new MacBook Pro with Retina Display. With all of its upgraded hardware, Apple just had to make it even better with improved software as well. OS X Mountain Lion will be the next big thing for Apple as it plans to improve the current OS X and include new features as well.

The basic structure and ideas for Mountain Lion seems to mirror a lot of what iOS already has to offer, creating an overall mobile experience, loaded with simple gestures and finger movements. Notifications will now alert you of incoming messages, emails, reminders and much more. An easy swipe to the right on your trackpad will bring it right up. As Apple has always strived for simplicity and ease of use, Mountain Lion is no exception. By incorporating Facebook integration, we can now post updates and statuses on Facebook directly from our Mac, without having to go back to your Facebook page.

iMessage was released to the public months back as a beta, and rightfully so. The numerous bugs and issues it had made it practically useless. With Mountain Lion, iMessage will do what it was created to do: send messages. Exactly like iMessages on your iPhone, this app will send messages to any other Apple product, as long as there is WiFi. This makes communicating with your friends so much easier as you will no longer have to stop what you’re doing on your Mac and reply with your iPhone. To make things even easier, with the help of the Cloud, all of your messages will stay updated throughout all your devices.

An interesting feature that Mountain Lion will have is called Power Nap, which allows your Mac to quietly update itself without leaving sleep mode. This seems rather convenient as it prevents you from missing an important software update or Time Machine back-up. Lastly, Dictation might be a solution to a keyboard-free experience. Similar to Siri, it translates what you say into text.

OS X Mountain Lion will be available to all users through the Mac App Store in July for only $19.99. All of these features and more can be found on Apple’s website. 

Late 2011 MacBook Pros Get Their Specs Bumped

While we were all in bed, Apple surprised us this morning with light spec bumps for all late 2011 MacBook Pros. What hasn't changed are the prices. The updates include slightly faster processors, graphics and larger storage capacities as a standard. Starting off with the lower end 13-inch MacBook Pro - it now has a 2.4Ghz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor bumped up from 2.3Ghz, and a 500GB hard drive bumped up from 320GB. 

The lower end 15-inch MacBook Pro was bumped up from 2.0Ghz to a 2.2Ghz quad-core Intel i7 processor while the 17-inch MacBook Pro has been refreshed with a 2.4Ghz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor from the older 2.2Ghz processor. Both the 15-inch and 17-inch higher end offerings now boast a new AMD Radeon HD 6770M graphics card with 1GB of GDDR5 VRAM. These updates are no reason to sell what you've got now.

Apple Patent Suggest Thinner MacBook Pro

Rumors are now at full swing about Apple's next generation MacBook Pro portables. As we get closer to a potentially imminent refresh announcement of the MacBook Pro line, a new patent that has been recently discovered reveals that Apple has found a way to make its 0.95-inch thick MacBook Pros even thinner. How? The patent suggest that Apple found a way to redesign the optical drive that's slim enough for Apple to shave off a few more millimeters. Reducing moving parts inside the optical drive with specially designed magnets that create an magnetic field that will in turn quietly spin a CD, DVD and if we get lucky - Blu-ray. There's no knowing if Apple can actually pull this off, but at least they want to make things thinner.