One of the more exciting features of the new MacBook Pro 15″ and 17″ and iMac series is that you can use dual external displays by daisy chaining them via the Thunderbolt port. Unfortunately, this ability is lost on the 2011 MacBook Air, due to the weaker Intel HD 3000 graphics chip and a stripped down Thunderbolt controller.

This was noticed by Anandtech, who points out the lightweight Thunderbolt chip, called Eagle Ridge, only supports a single DisplayPort channel compared to the dual channels in the larger Light Ridge chip:

Eagle Ridge is available in two form factors (normal and SFF) and is effectively half of a Light Ridge chip. That means you only get two Thunderbolt channels and one DP output. Apple used the small form factor version of Eagle Ridge in its new MacBook Air to cut cost and save on motherboard real estate.

While this may affect some purchasing decisions and direct a few users to the MacBook Pro line instead, not all is lost. The 27″ Thunderbolt Display with it’s whopping 2560×1440 resolution is a giant on it’s own and should be more than adequate to meet the needs of most users looking for external displays with their MacBook Air. Plus, Apple is openly advertising the Thunderbolt display as a docking station of sorts for the MacBook Air, since it brings FireWire, three additional USB ports, Ethernet, and a FaceTime HD camera.

And really, when we consider the heaviest MacBook Air is 2.9lbs and the benchmark performance is through the roof, can we really complain much?

One of OS X’s many great new features are all the new high quality multi-lingual voices (here is how to add them yourself). If you went on a voice adding spree like I did, you may quickly realize that all these new voices take up a fair amount of disk space, each weighing in around 400 MB. On a large enough hard drive that isn’t too big of a deal, but I’m on a MacBook Air with 64 GB so 10 voices taking up 4.3 GB of space matters to me.

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Not to pour anymore fuel on the Windows vs Mac fire, but this wifi setup guide from McDonalds is an excellent illustration to show how the same task is handled on each operating system.

On the left, you’ll see two lengthy Windows XP and Windows Vista walkthroughs with a multiple of clicking, configuring, properties, tabs, and a general maze to navigate, just to get wireless connectivity working. Meanwhile on the right side is Mac OS X, with the only instructions being to select the network from the menubar.

This was spotted at a McDonalds in Australia (via TwitPic), and it shows one of just many reasons why I’ll always recommend Macs, over and over again.

Want to toss out the windows in your current application session, preventing them from reopening again via the Resume feature in OS X?

This is pretty easy you just have to remember to do it, to discard windows as you quit an app in Mac OS X just do the following:

Hold down the Option key while going to Quit and you will see the option to “Quit and Discard Windows”.

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If you’ve spent much time using OS X Lion’s new LaunchPad feature you’ve probably noticed that outside of stuffing things into new folders you can’t really hide apps. If you enter the ‘jiggle‘ mode and try to remove an app from LaunchPad, it actually uninstalls the app, which makes it very easy to uninstall things but not so easy to customize your LaunchPad experience.

But now there’s LaunchControl, a free utility that allows you to hide any app from appearing in LaunchPad without uninstalling the app from Lion.

Download LaunchControl from developer ChaosSpace.de

LaunchControl is a tiny download and extremely easy to use, it displays a list of all the apps contained within your LaunchPad and you just uncheck the ones you don’t want to see anymore.
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OS X has a nice new feature to login and lock screens that allow you to display a message underneath the login panel. This is visible to everyone who can see the Mac screen, and it makes for a great place to put either a bit of generic personalization message, or better yet, a lost & found message with some contact and ownership details.

We’ll show you exactly how to set this up on any Mac, it only takes a minute:
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The Mac has an autocorrect feature that can range from excellent to annoying, and it works by attempting to automatically correct typos and misspellings of words as they appear, which are instantly compared to an extensive dictionary and replaced on the fly. It can be a great feature but it’s not perfect, and how you feel about auto-corrections really depends on what you’re trying to type, how often you make typos, and what your individual experience is with the corrections themselves, much of which can depend on typing habits themselves.

If you find yourself on the annoyed end of things with macOS Mojave, MacOS High Sierra, MacOS Sierra, OS X El Capitan, Lion, Mountain Lion, Mavericks, and OS X Yosemite new auto correct feature, you will be pleased to discover all of autocorrect can be disabled quickly.

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In the market for a brand new ultralight Core i5 MacBook Air? Amazon is selling the 2011 base model 11.6″ model at a 5% discount, bringing the price down to $949.99 with free shipping included.

MacBook Air MC968LL/A 11.6-Inch Laptop (NEWEST VERSION) – $949.99 from Amazon

Specs of the base 11.6″ model include: 1.6GHz Dual Core Core i5 Processor, 2GB RAM, 64GB SSD, Intel HD 3000 graphics, backlit keyboard, Mac OS X Lion preinstalled

The 2011 MacBook Air benchmarks show just how fast these ultra portable Macs are, with the 2011 series coming in 2x faster than the 2010 models they replaced.

Mac OS X Lion brought a few changes to the Dashboard, one being that it’s contained within it’s own Space by default, and the other noticeable UI difference is the new Lego lookalike background wallpaper that looks a little, well, Lego-like. That background image is easy to change, so pick an image you’d rather see and let’s get started.

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Outside of watching the little progress bar on the downloading apps icon in LaunchPad or the Dock, there isn’t much of an outward display of how downloads are progressing from the App Store in OS X. Instead, more specific information about download progress and download speed is contained within the Mac App Store app itself, though it may not be completely obvious upon first glance. Here’s how you can check the transfer details in the Mac App Store:
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If you have used Mail for a long time, you have probably noticed the new Mail animations for replying and sending, where the message seems to slide off the screen. Like all the other new animations, this is a polarizing addition and some people hate it. Turning off the general new window animations in OS X doesn’t change Mails animations though, because they are separately controlled by another defaults write command.
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For the die-hard jailbreakers out there, you can jailbreak the newly released iOS 4.3.5 using the same redsn0w 0.9.8b3 version that worked for 4.3.4.

As before, the big caveat here is that it’s a tethered jailbreak, meaning it must be reconnected to a computer anytime you want to reboot the iOS device or if it runs out of battery.

This is what you’ll need:

• Download Redsnow (Mac)
• Download Redsnow (Windows)
• iOS 4.3.4 IPSW files
• iOS 4.3.5 IPSW files

You need to download both versions of the iOS firmware for your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch (iPad 2 is not supported), and you’ll want to point redsn0w at the older 4.3.4 firmware. The rest of the procedure is the same as always, just follow the onscreen instructions to put the iOS device into DFU mode, then boot tethered, and you’ll be jailbroken as expected.

Personally, I don’t like tethered jailbreaks, but for many users they don’t mind the tethered boot process since it is fairly rare that an iPhone ever turns off, and this is for you.

If you don’t want to deal with manually hiding and showing the desktop icons, showing hidden files, accessing the user library directory, and forcibly emptying the Trash, grab DesktopUtility for your menu bar. It’s a free and simple app that offers those four useful features directly in the menu bar, preventing you from using any command line tweaks or key combos to get these functions.

Download the app .dmg directly or check out the developer SweetPProductions page

The app runs in 10.6 too but it’s far more useful in 10.7 because of the new standard of hiding the ~/Library folder. I’m also getting a surprising amount of use out of quickly seeing hidden files, something that I don’t want enabled all the time.
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Do you miss the way Mail used to look, when you used to be able to see many more email messages all at once from the primary screen without scrolling around? As you probably know, Mail.app received a pretty significant makeover in Mac OS X Lion and that new default layout has stuck around in all versions of OS X ever since Mavericks and Yosemite included.

If you’re not a fan of the revised layout of Mail app, you can easily revert back to the classic Mail appearances original UI by doing the following.

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Apparently, you can do just about anything in an Apple Store and the employees don’t seem to mind.

To prove this point, a comedian set about pushing the limits of the Apple Stores unspoken “anything goes” policy, and goes about performing a variety of goofy endeavors within an Apple Store. Everything from hosting a date, ordering a pizza, dressing as Darth Vader, and finally, bringing a goat into the store.

Yes, you can bring a goat into the Apple store. Well, at least this guy did, and got away with it. Or it was allowed. Or nobody seemed to care.

Seriously, watch the video below. It’s quite amusing:

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Mac users can easily install and use the Lynx web browser in the Terminal. Lynx is a text based command line web browser, it’s relatively popular within unix communities but it also has a variety of general uses too; it’s great if you want to discretely browse the web and read articles at work or school, and developers use lynx frequently to test accessibility and to roughly estimate how spiders or crawlers view a website. Because it only loads text and avoids javascript and images, it’s also lightning fast.

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For those of you who aren’t running Mac OS X Lion yet, Apple has released a supplemental update to OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard that includes a variety of bug fixes for the OS and for moving to 10.7 Lion. Here are the brief release notes:

The Mac OS X 10.6.8 Supplemental Update is recommended for all users running Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.8 and resolves issues with:

* Transferring personal data, settings, and compatible applications from a Mac running Mac OS X Snow Leopard to a new Mac running Mac OS X Lion

* Certain network printers that pause print jobs immediately and fail to complete

* System audio that stops working when using HDMI or optical audio out

You can get download the newest version through Software Update or from Apple’s website

iOS 4.3.5 has been released by Apple, the update includes a fix for a security vulnerability pertaining to certificate validations and is recommended for all iOS users – unless of course you rely on a jailbreak. iOS 4.3.5 is build 8L1 and supports iPhone 4 GSM, iPhone 3GS, iPad, iPad 2, iPod touch 3rd and 4th gen, a separate 4.2.10 release is available for iPhone 4 CDMA users.

You can get the latest iOS 4.3.5 update directly from software update within iTunes, or by downloading the firmware directly from Apple at the links below.
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