The MacBook Air 2012 is a screamer, and though the CPU-based benchmarks show about a 15-20% improvement over the MacBook Air 2011 models, by far the biggest performance boost comes from the new flash memory (SSD) that Apple is using for storage on the 2012 models. In our tests, the disk used in the newest MacBook Air models is up to 217% faster than the previous model years drives.

MacBook Air 2012 SSD: writes at 364MB/sec, reads at 461MB/sec

MacBook Air 2011 SSD: writes at 152MB/sec, reads at 145MB/sec

MacBook Air 2010 SSD: writes at 157MB/sec, reads at 188MB/sec

It is difficult to convey just how fast the newest MacBook Air is, but it’s safe to say the performance is extremely impressive and I haven’t ever used a laptop that feels faster. You can attribute that to the ultraquick flash storage.

Interestingly, the SSD tested within the MBA 2012 is the TS128E model, a Toshiba drive. The SSD tested with the MBA 2011 and 2010 models are Samsung. You may recall that Apple also ships faster Samsung drives in some MacBook Airs, that appears to still be going on with the 2012 updates which suggests the tested Toshiba flash drive is probably slightly slower than a Samsung model, though the performance difference between the two drives is likely to be completely negligible at this point.

All read and write speeds were benchmarked with DiskSpeedTest, a free disk testing app available from the Mac App Store.

Apple has begun to air a new iPad commercial, focusing on a variety of tasks being accomplished through various apps on the 3rd generation iPad. The narration says:

“Send a note. Stay informed. Catch a show. Make your point. Make a memory. Make a… masterpiece. Read something. Watch something. And learn something. Do it all more beautifully, with the retina display, on iPad.”

This is the second recent TV advertisement released by Apple that focuses on the retina display technology, with last week Apple starting to air a new MacBook Pro with Retina display commercial as well.

An update to OS X Mountain Lion Developer Preview 4 has been released to developers, barely a week after the last version was released at WWDC. The update comes as build 12A248 and is recommended for all devs running DP4 and can be downloaded through the Mac App Store.

The largely unspecified release presumably includes bug fixes and updates to various elements of the next version of Mac OS X as the consumer release nears next month.

OS X Mountain Lion will be available to everyone in July from the Mac App Store for $19.99.

Microsoft released Surface today, their direct competitor to the iPad and Android tablets. As you’d expect, the device is a touchscreen tablet but differs from the iPad in that it comes in two distinct versions; a traditional tablet model based on ARM architecture and runs only Windows RT – that’s Metro for those who don’t follow MS closely – and the other is a pro model based on Intel Ivy Bridge chips that runs full-fledged Windows 8 desktop.

Other than providing a look at Apple’s competition, perhaps most interesting to iPad users is the cover that ships with the tablet. Upon first appearance it looks like a Smart Cover knock-off, but it actually one-ups Apple’s offering by including a completely functional multitouch keyboard built directly into the cover itself. It certainly looks fascinating, and assuming it works well you can bet third party cover manufactures will be cranking out similar cases for the iPad soon.

Onto the Surface specs:

Surface – Standard model

• Windows RT (Metro-only interface)
• ARM CPU
• 32GB and 64GB available
• 1.5lbs
• 9.3mm thick enclosure made out of magnesium, with built-in stand
• 10.6″ ClearType HD Display (retina-ish?), 16×9 aspect ratio
• MicroSD card slot, USB 2.0, MicroHD video, 2×2 MIMO antennae (?)
• Bundled with Office Home & Student 2013 RT
• Multitouch cover with built-in keyboard

Surface – Pro model

• Windows 8 Pro (standard Windows desktop & Metro)
• Intel Ivy Bridge CPU
• 64GB and 128GB storage
• 2lbs
• 13.5mm
• 10.6″ ClearType Full HD Display (not sure how this differs from other model)
• MicroSDXC, USB 3.0, Mini DisplayPort, 2×2 MIMO
• Bundled with Touch Cover, Type Cover, and magnet stylus pen

Noticeably missing from either spec sheet provided by Microsoft is any word on battery life, device pricing, or availability of the Surface.

Here is Microsofts …unusual… promo video for Surface, it is more similar to the Motorola DROID commercials than any Apple advertisement:

What do you think, does the Surface look interesting to you? If you’ve played around with Windows 8 on your Mac, does it seem like the type of OS you’d want to run full time on a tablet? Anyone going to jump from the iPad to the Surface? I’m fascinated by the announcement and I think it looks like an interesting product, I look forward to trying one out.

If you went ahead and installed iOS 6 beta and determined the buggy nature of the first developer release isn’t for you, it’s time to downgrade. Most developers should know how to do this already, but if not this process is easy and you’ll be back to running iOS 5.1.1 in no time at all.

Downgrading is identical on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

1. Turn the device off, connect it to the computer via USB, and launch iTunes
2. Place the iOS device into DFU mode: with the device off, hold down the Power and Home buttons together for 10 seconds then release the power button, continue holding Home button until iTunes notifies you of a device in recovery mode being detected. The devices screen should stay black as if turned off.
3. Restore within iTunes through either method a or b:
• a: Restore from the iOS 5.1.1 backup you made prior to installing iOS 6 beta
• b: Restore to iOS 5.1.1 IPSW by Option-Clicking the “Restore” button, and then restore from iCloud backup when finished
4. Let iTunes restore back to iOS 5.1.1, the device will reboot when finished

Typically you can’t downgrade iOS versions so easily, but because Apple is still signing iOS 5.1.1 this allows downgrading to commence with minimal effort.

Troubleshooting the Downgrade:
If you get any strange errors (3194, 1013, etc) when trying to restore, you probably have Apple’s servers blocked in your hosts file. This is relatively common for people who jailbroke a device at some point in their iOS usage. Remove any blocks to Apple’s servers from /etc/hosts and try again.

TotalTerminal is an excellent tweak for those of us who frequently use the command line, it provides instant access to the Terminal from anywhere in Mac OS X with just a keyboard shortcut. Modeled after the classic Quake console, an official Terminal.app prompt drops down from the top of the screen where you can quickly enter a command or two and then hide it to get back to work within the OS X GUI.

• Get TotalTerminal free from BinaryAge

Installing TotalTerminal is much easier these days than it’s early incarnation as Visor, and once installed the default hotkey for summoning the drop-down terminal is Control+~ (that’s Control tilde, the squigly line next to the 1 key). An accompanying menubar item allows you to access the command line as well, and of course you can customize the keyboard shortcut yourself. TotalTerminal gives you a lot of other options for customization, letting you change the positioning on screen of where the terminal appears, if it shows up on all Spaces, the delay for showing and hiding, whether or not it should animate itself, and a handy unix-friendly copy/paste setting.

It’s important to note that TotalTerminal will uninstall SIMBL due to conflicts between the two system-level tweaks. If you’re using SIMBL for colorizing Finder icons or some other system mods you may not want to use TotalTerminal at all. If you want to just try it out however, uninstalling TotalTerminal is as easy as installing it, by a simple choice of “uninstall” through the apps drop down menu.

Fully compatible with virtually every version of Mac OS X including Snow Leopard, Lion, and even OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, TotalTerminal is a worthy addition to Mac powerusers toolkits.

The Retina MacBook Pro 15″ screen resolution is 2880×1800, but because of how a retina display works the effective resolution is 1440×900 and the onscreen elements are just running in HIDPI mode. Apple provides an option to run at 1920×1200 through System Preferences, but as of now there is no built-in approach to running the retina display at the screens true 1×1 native resolution of 2880×1800. Instead, you must activate the 2880×1800 option through a variety of third party approaches, the result of which is a gigantic amount of screen real estate, albeit with tiny onscreen elements. If that sounds good to you, here are three four different ways to enable the true 1-to-1 native res:
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If you’ve used FaceTime in an area without the best internet connections you’ve probably experienced the choppy video, breaking audio, and other call difficulties that can arrise as a result of poor internet service. Rather than giving up on the communication completely, you can turn the video call into a voice-only call and dramatically increase the calls audio quality. This allows you to basically use FaceTime as a voice over IP (VOIP) service, with very clear voice chat working even when the bandwidth is restricted enough for an otherwise awful connection.

To force FaceTime into voice-only mode:

1. Start a FaceTime video call as usual
2. After the connection has been made, hit the Home button on the iPhone, IPad, or iPod touch

This freezes transmission of video but allows the audio to continue streaming. You’ll end up at the homescreen with the iOS status bar showing an active FaceTime connection, saying “touch to resume”, but you’ll notice audio chat works perfectly and the quality of the audio is suddenly dramatically improved.

Presumably the reason this works so well is by reallocating the available bandwidth away from the video channel and all into audio, resulting in surprisingly high quality voice calls. The obvious downside of course is you’ll miss the video chat portion, but if you’re making an important call and either yourself or the recipient is using subpar internet service, a voice call is certainly better than nothing.

This works wonderfully on iPad and iPhone, and it should even work in the Mac OS X FaceTime client if you just minimize the app into the Dock.

Of course, you can always make true VOIP calls with Skype and Google Voice, but since not everyone has those installed on their iPads, iPods, Macs, and iPhones, this FaceTime solution works for just about anyone.

Want more FaceTime tips?

If you travel internationally with a Mac or you split life between different parts of the world you can make your computing life easier by adjusting regional settings based on your current location.

Mac OS X makes this very easy to do and you can switch from US to metric, change currency, and set the date formats all in one place.

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Though we certainly wouldn’t recommend this, it turns out you can install iOS 6 beta onto an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, without using a developer account and without having to deal with UDID activation. It’s actually a lot easier to do than you’d think, and as long as the iOS device meets the compatibility requirements and you don’t mind the potentially iffy nature of the process, CultOfMac says you’re good to go.

We haven’t confirmed this specific method of installing iOS 6 but we’ll relay their instructions for the adventurous, before that understand a few caveats though: iOS 6 is in the earliest stages of its beta life, this means its generally unstable, some features don’t work, many apps don’t work. It’s absolutely not intended for a wide audience beyond developers who are building their apps for the platform. Attempting this could be harmful to your iPhone, iPad, or iPod, and nobody is responsible for that but yourself. Proceed at your own risk.

1. Install iTunes 10.6.3 and launch it
2. Download iOS 6 beta IPSW for your device either through the Dev Center, get it from a friend, or get creative with Google as CultofMac suggests
3. Connect the iOS device to the computer and perform a backup by right-clicking and choosing “Back Up”, let this finish before continuing
4. Hold down the Option key in OS X (Windows use Shift key) and click on “Update” to use IPSW updating
5. Select the iOS 6 IPSW file you downloaded, updating the device to iOS 6 beta

When finished, the device should reboot into iOS 6 beta.

Remember, this is beta software, meaning it’s not intended for widespread consumption and many things will not behave as intended. If you try this out don’t be surprised if you experience a buggy OS.

This weeks awesome Mac setup comes to us from Sergey N., a doctor and medical researcher in Russia who needs plenty of screen space to get work done quickly and efficiently. Maximized for productivity, the Macs are set up with a Magic Mouse, Magic Trackpad, and a Griffin Powermate, each configured for different tasks and gestures. Hardware shown is as follows:

• iMac 27″ (mid-2011) with 16GB RAM, 1TB HD & 240GB Intel SSD running OS X 10.7.3
• Dual Dell U2711 displays connected to iMac
• Apple keyboard
• Magic Mouse configured with custom gestures tied to keyboard shortcuts using MagicPrefs
• Magic Trackpad also configured with custom gestures
• MacBook Air 11″ (2010) 2GB RAM, 64GB SSD, used for travel
• MacBook Air 13″ (2011) 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD, used for additional screen space
• Griffin PowerMate USB controller, custom configured for app-specific shortcuts
• 2 iPod Shuffles attached to the left display for music
• iPod touch 4th gen, 32GB model for the kids
• iPhone 4S 64GB
• iPad 1 16GB that gets occasional use as an additional screen
• PowerCom Imperial UPS for power management

The iMac is configured with 9 virtual desktops per screen, for a whopping total of 27 workspaces not counting fullscreen apps, and the MacBook Air 13″ brings an additional 8 workspaces into the mix. How’s that for maximizing productivity?

Want your sweet Apple setup featured here? Send us a good picture along with brief description of hardware and what you use it for to osxdailycom@gmail.com, we receive a ton of submissions so it may take a while to get around to them all!

If you use Instagram and you’ve ever wanted to download all the pictures you’ve taken you’ve probably noticed there is no built-in option to do so. Thankfully there are several free options that let you back up all photos from Instagram and export them all directly to your computer.

We’ve narrowed it down to the two best solutions, a native OS X app and a web app. Both serve the same function and will download all of your Instagram pictures for local storage. The biggest caveat with both solutions though is they download the photos at a paltry 612×612 pixel resolution, though that is likely an Instagram limitation and not the applications fault (if anyone knows a workaround for that, let us know!).

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There has long been a debate as to whether background apps can drain battery life of iOS devices. Many people argue they don’t (or at least shouldn’t) have any impact on battery, and others are certain that background apps do. Carat is an iOS app brought to us by a team at UC Berkeley that aims to resolve that age old question by monitoring what apps are doing on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch and then reporting back to you what apps are eating away at battery life. This is followed up with some recommendations on which apps should be quit, killed, relaunched, and some other helpful tips to improve and conserve battery life.

Although Carat is a genuinely useful app that is worth the free download, you should heed the warning of many App Store reviewers who note that, ironically, Carat itself hogs battery by constantly using Location Services. In other words, you may want to check it’s recommendations and then kill Carat itself. That’ll probably be fixed an update, but it is kind of an amusing bug in an app designed to improve battery life.

• Download Carat free from the App Store

If you don’t want to download the app, you can follow these basic tips to get a vague idea of what Carat will suggest: update iOS to the latest version, quit unused apps, upgrade apps to the newest versions, restart apps that handle background tasks. Fair advice all around.

iOS 6 includes an impressive Apple-baked version of the Maps application, but the new Maps icon shows some less than impressive directions. Anyone familiar with Cupertino, California and 1 Infinite Loop should immediately identify the problem here: the Maps icon is directing traffic to fly right off the De Anza blvd overpass and into the median of I-280. Oops.

This is obviously a joke as there are legitimate ways to take a left turn onto 280 from northbound De Anza, but that wouldn’t be as amusing to show.

This picture has been making the rounds and has been sent to us 60000 times so figured we’d post it. If anyone knows the original source of the image let us know and we’ll link it up.

We have covered a handful of different ways to disable the internal screen on a MacBook Pro/Air while keeping the laptops lid open and the computer turned on, ranging from a command line approach, dimming brightness or using sleep, and even a silly magnet trick, but for whatever reason there have always been a few users who can’t seem to get any of the methods to work, or they find them cumbersome to bother with. If you fall into that camp, here is yet another approach to disabling the internal screen of a Mac laptop while the lid is open, this method is easy enough and has been verified to work on a variety of MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air machines running OS X Lion or later.

As with the other methods, the MagSafe power cable must be connected to the MacBook in order for this to work.

1. Open System Preferences and click “Mission Control”, then click on “Hot Corners”
2. Select a hot corner and pull down the menu to select “Put Display to Sleep”
3. Now connect the external display to the Mac and move the cursor to the newly created sleep corner to turn off the internal display
4. Close the MacBook lid and wait a few seconds before opening the lid again, the internal display should stay off while the external display will be powered on

This approach lets you continue to use the MacBooks built-in keyboard and trackpad too.

For those wondering why you’d want to do this at all, keeping the lid open with the screen off serves these purposes; it allows for maximum cooling of the MacBook because heat dissipates through the keyboard, and it allows the GPU to devote all of it’s power to the external screen. These two perks make this a popular trick for anyone doing intensive graphics work and for gamers.

Thanks to Jared L. for the tip

Ever wished you could easily start over from scratch when laying out your app icons on an iPhone or iPad without resetting the entire device to factory defaults? You can thanks to a handy feature that resets the app icon layout to it’s factory default settings.

Not only will this restore the iOS home screen to its default icon arrangement, but it also has the added benefit of removing every app that is contained within a folder and placing them back onto the Home Screen of the device, effectively removing those folders in the process.

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For many of us, our contacts list are the most important part of our iPhones and what we care most about backing up. It’s easy to re-download apps and adjust settings, but it can be very difficult to rebuild a large contact list of names, email addresses, and phone numbers if you lose it. For that reason you may want to be sure the address book is being backed up so that all of your contacts are preserved in case you need to restore them, here is how to do this.

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The first beta of iOS 6 has only been in the wild a few days but has already been jailbroken. The DevTeam released a dev build of Redsn0w 0.9.13 to handle the jailbreak which works on iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, and iPod touch 4G, though each device is tethered for the time being and there are a handful of major issues with the jailbreak that should prevent most users from attempting to use it on their devices.

As the versioning implies, Redsn0w 0.9.13dev1 is intended for developers only. There are many components that do not work, including Apple’s default apps, many 3rd party apps, Cydia apps, and more. Furthermore, this version of the tethered jailbreak does not install Cydia. Because of all the caveats this is really a proof of concept and should not be widely adopted beyond those developing jailbreak tweaks or apps, but it does suggest that when iOS 6 is released to the public a jailbreak will accompany it rather quickly.

Download Redsn0w 0.9.13dev

For the brave devs that wish to try this, these are direct links:

• Mac
• Windows

If you’re a developer and you wish to try this out, point Redsn0w at the iOS 6 IPSW file to jailbreak, and then boot tethered. As the Dev Team mentions, anyone attempting to use this version of redsn0w will need a registered UDID to activate their device.

iOS 6 is scheduled for a public release this fall.