FutureFive New Zealand - Consumer technology news & reviews from the future
Story image
News: new MacBook line, MacBook Air design patent, Melo for Last.fm scrobbling, and more!
Sun, 10th Jun 2012
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Perhaps one of the biggest rumours to appear before WWDC this year is the one about the all-new MacBook line. According to AppleInsider and other sources, the new MacBook line will sit between the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro lines as a sort of middle ground between the two ends of the spectrum. The new MacBook line is speculated to have the portability of the MacBook Air, with the same optical drive-less design, but with all the power of the MacBook Pro line. It's also rumoured that the MacBook line will feature retina displays, and come in both 13- and 15-inch models. Apple has been granted what The Verge are calling a broad patent on the wedge design of the MacBook Air, putting every Ultrabook machine in jeopardy of infringing a patent. The patent has been termed broad because it covers a wide variety of aspects, but because the patent doesn't claim various aspects of the wedge design, it means that a company could tweak everything from the feet of the laptop to the hinge design and still infringe on Apple's patent.

Melo is a new Mac App which makes Last.fm scrobbling from your Mac easy. If you play your music through iTunes, Melo can be set up with rules so you don't scrobble podcasts, or anything else that isn't strictly "music", and MacStories has a review.

The command line is one of those things that many unexperienced users shy away from, and for good reason: it's just not as simple as the rest of the Mac. A new shell, Fish, aims to change that by asking the question: can a command line shell be Mac-like?