Filed under: Hardware

It's so thin and barely there. What could be inside Apple's Magic Trackpad? The folks at iFixit took theirs apart, photographing and describing each component in great detail. Here's what they found.

Inside there is, well, not a whole heck of a lot. A large spacer prevents the user from pressing down hard enough to damage the small logic board. That board is connected to the trackpad itself via two "ridiculously thin" ribbon cables, which are glued into place. They used a hot air gun to soften the adhesive. So, tread very lightly if you plan to remove these.

Speaking of the board, the gang found that it holds a Broadcom BCM2042 for Bluetooth connectivity and a Broadcom BCM5974 touch screen controller chip (the same on used in the iPhone, iPod touch and MacBook Air). A SST 25WF020 provides 2 Mbit of serial flash memory. On the back, there's just a whole lot of glue.

Here's a bit of good news: the Magic Trackpad's battery is user-serviceable! Just good luck getting to it. It's also notable that pressure applied to the surface is translated to the feet, which in turn presses on a plate attached to the chassis. That place squeezes an electronic mouse button switch. In essence, as pointed out by Macworld, it clicks with its feet.

Thanks to iFixit for another well-documented tear down, and for sweating the (very tiny) details.

Rounding out the list of hardware updates from Apple this morning is a battery charger. Before you dismiss it (as I initially did) as just a battery charger, consider the following.

First, Apple is pushing its green aspects. For example, the charger is smart enough to pull less power once the batteries are fully charged. In fact, Apple claims that it has the lowest standby power usage than any similar charger on the market (more on that in a minute). Also, Apple notes that the 6 batteries that ship with it are able to hold a long charge over hundreds of charges. Expect to get 10 years of use out of them, Apple says. The idea is that users will pull less power from the grid and use fewer batteries with Apple's charger.

Also consider that this is another step towards Apple's making "the whole widget." For example, you can now buy a computer, mouse, keyboard, Magic Trackpad, batteries and battery charger all from Apple. Who says Steve's a control freak?

Finally, let's compare it to a charger I currently own, the Engergizer Rechargeable 15 Minute Charger. When I say "own," I mean "despise." Yes, it charges batteries in 15 minutes, and they'll hold that charge for almost as long! It's also huge (it uses one socket and covers the other) and heats up like an iron forge. For $32 it ships with 4 batteries, compared to the 6 Apple gives you for $29.

Yes, it's a battery charger. But it's also been infused with Apple magic.

At long last, Apple has updated the Cinema Display line with a new 27-inch LED model that will ship later this year. With its 2560 x 1440 resolution, your pixels will enjoy 60% more elbow room than on the 24-inch LED model.

In addition to the extra real estate, this model offers an iSight camera, mic and speakers, plus a powered USB 2.0 hub (3 ports) and MagSafe connector to charge your laptop. The display includes ambient light sensor, which adjusts the display's brightness in response to the light in a room.

Apple's also keen to describe the display's environmental friendliness, noting that it uses mercury-free LED technology, arsenic-free glass and recyclable materials. Additionally, the display meets Energy Star 5.0 requirements and achieves EPEAT Gold status.

It sure sounds nice, and it will be available in September for US$999. Note that it requires a Mac with a Mini DisplayPort.

Today, Apple released the Magic Trackpad, calling it "...a multi-touch Bluetooth trackpad meant to work with your desktop computer." It certainly resembles an oversized MacBook Pro trackpad (in fact, it's 80% larger) perched atop the same battery case that's on Apple's Bluetooth keyboards. In fact, it sits at the same height and angle as the keyboard, so you can move back and forth easily.

When paired with an Apple desktop, it offers the same multi-touch gestures that laptop owners enjoy. Use it to swipe, pinch and scroll. Inertial scrolling on the Magic Trackpad reacts to the pressure and speed you use.

The surface is made of wear-resistant glass and, get this: the entire thing is also a giant button, so click away as you would with a mouse.

We first saw a trademark filing for the name back in February and FCC approval in July. Back in June, a leaked photo of what we were then calling the "Magic Slate" appeared, and many wondered if it would be revealed at WWDC '10. The Magic Trackpad is available now for US$69.

Update: The drawing has now closed -- congratulations to the winner selected by Drobo, @celatone.

TUAW and Data Robotics have teamed up for some deals that are as hot as the summer weather here in the Northern Hemisphere.

How would you like your choice of a brand-new Drobo S or Drobo FS? The Drobo S (valued at US$799) is a 5-bay storage solution featuring the Data Robotics BeyondRAID technology, with eSATA, FireWire 800, and USB 2.0 ports, The Drobo FS (valued at $699) includes 5 bays and a Gigabit Ethernet port for network sharing. One of these units can be yours if you win the giveaway.

What do you need to do to enter? Just follow this link to the Drobo giveaway page and fill out the form, and a winner will be announced on Thursday afternoon, July 29th Tuesday 7/27 via Drobo's Twitter account. [Apologies; Drobo miscommunicated the end date for the drawing.]

So far, so good. But how about doubling your chances to win a Drobo? If you're a Twitter user and tweet the following phrase:


you'll be entered in a second drawing for a 2nd generation Drobo. This sleek storage device, valued at $399, has 4 drive bays and features FireWire 800 and USB 2.0 connectivity.

But wait, there's more! As a bonus to everyone who enters, Data Robotics has put together some instant rebate coupons that will be sent to entrants on Thursday, July 29th and good through midnight on July 31st, 2010. You can save $75 on a Drobo S or FS, or $155 on a Drobo S or FS bundled with drives in the US and Canada, or €58 on a Drobo S or FS (£48.57) in the EU 27 member states plus Norway and Switzerland, just by entering the contest.

Good luck! And while you're dreaming of your new Drobo, be sure to visit the Data Robotics site to check out the complete line of BeyondRAID storage products from the company.

Disclaimer: Data Robotics, Inc. is the sole administrator of the Drobo giveaway and discount program and will determine all the conditions and requirements of participation. TUAW is not responsible for the giveaway and cannot answer questions or provide support for any hardware or applications on the Drobo device. No advertising contract or financial relationship exists between TUAW and Data Robotics, Inc.

I bought a one terabyte Time Capsule shortly after it hit the market, along with an external 1.5TB drive. I use the Time Capsule's internal drive to back up two smaller capacity Macs, while the external disk backs up my two larger capacity Macs.

Working with Time Machine in Leopard or Snow Leopard, the Time Capsule updates its backups every hour. This makes perfect sense if you're just dealing with one Mac wired into the Time Capsule, since it really doesn't slow anything down. But if you are using it to wirelessly back up multiple Macs, hourly backups slow everything down to a crawl.

TimeMachineEditor (a free utility that I highly recommend), allows you to set Time Machine to back up as frequently or infrequently as you like. I created a setup where, with staggered backups starting between 2am and 4am, each Mac gets backed up once a day. Outside of some errant sparse image problems that required a reformat, all was well. I had long beaten the 18 month Time Capsule funerals that were recently reported... but then things turned ugly.

Two weeks back at WWDC, Square told us that the company was "catching up with demand" of its little plastic credit card reader for the iPhone, and that it would "be there really soon." But it looks like things won't quite "be there" as soon as they thought.

They've decided to delay the mass roll-out of the devices, with Jack Dorsey telling users that the company "released parts of Square before they were fully baked." That coincides with what our readers were saying in the comments on the original interview -- that the reader devices were taking a long time to be shipped out to users. Dorsey also agreed with the other issue our commenters brought up (that the service's transaction limits, which Square originally put in place to counteract fraud, are too low), and said that those limits would be addressed soon.

Dorsey doesn't say how "soon" that may be -- there's still no ETA on when the readers will go out, and Square is still working on how exactly it will change or update those transaction limits. Basically, there is no fix in sight for those frustrated by the company so far.

So it looks like Square isn't quite where it wants to be yet. But then again, think about the problems it's having: it can't keep up with demand for free readers, and people want to transfer even more money through the service. Those are pretty good problems to have. Square is definitely taking its time while working out the kinks, but the fact that it just can't keep up with demand is far from a condemnation of their business model.

A strange realization dawned on me today: I have already made mental plans to eventually replace two Mac devices I already own with two totally different devices that I don't yet own. Namely, I am planning to replace my MacBook Pro with an iPad and my iMac with a Mac mini.

Replacing the MacBook Pro will happen first, probably sometime later this summer depending on when the "CFO of Household Expenses" (aka my wife) gives me the green light. The MBP has some "issues" like constantly running fans (yes I've tried smcFanControl and resetting the System Management Controller), the DVD drive doesn't work even after having been replaced, and a corner of the frame is bent from a laptop bag "strap incident" that I would rather not go into here. Once the iPad arrives, the MacBook Pro will live out the rest of its life as my home "desktop" computer, happily hooked to an external monitor and keyboard. For portable computing, the iPad will definitely fit the bill for 99% of what I ever need to do while mobile. (My wife has a black MacBook for those times when I need a portable Mac.)

On Tuesday, Eye-Fi announced a new Apple-exclusive product as well as expansion of its hotspot service plan.

Their new device, the Eye-Fi Geo X2, will only be sold at Apple Stores starting in May. It brings faster uploads of photos and video (via a new 802.11n transmitter) directly to iPhoto and MobileMe (Picasa, Facebook, and 20+ others). Its capacity is 4GB.

One cool new feature is what they're calling Endless Memory, which allows users to have Eye-Fi automatically make space available on the card after photos and videos have been safely uploaded. Neat! It also does automatic geotagging so your shots will show up in iPhoto's "Places" feature with no problem.

Eye-Fi also announced the expansion of its hotspot service plan through a partnership with Devicescape, allowing X2 users to upload photos internationally and on thousands more networks.

If the US$49.99 Connect X2 doesn't float your boat and the $99.99 Explore X2 is a bit too pricey, consider the $69.99 Geo X2. A few TUAW bloggers have used Eye-Fi cards with rave reviews. Look for one next month.

Google's purchase of a firm staffed with former Apple employees is surrounded by mystery, according to AppleInsider. Agnilux is a small San Jose startup founded by a few former Apple employees, most of whom left the mothership right around the time of the P.A. Semi acquisition.

Other than that, nothing is known about the company. And I mean nothing -- the NYT's Bits blog even tried to do a drive-by of what they were up to, and came up with bupkis. It's probably something processor-related, but whatever it is, Agnilux is guarding it so closely that they won't even talk abstractly about what they're working on, for fear that someone will "take our intellectual property before we're ready." The closest NYT gets is "some kind of server."

Google has purchased the company, for a (surprise) undisclosed sum. What do they want with it? We have no idea -- Google already knows their way around server architecture, and it certainly seems like they're a little late to start installing new processors everywhere. Conspiracy money says that they really just wanted a nice chunk of Apple -- if that's the case, then with Agnilux on the payroll, they probably got what they wanted.

When people ask if they should add RAM to their computers to improve performance, fellow blogger Erica Sadun says she typically replies, "YES! Just don't buy it from Apple!" Apple's RAM upgrades have typically run about double what I actually ended up paying for them elsewhere. However, as noted by astute observers over at MacRumors, Apple has covertly changed their pricing on build-to-order RAM configurations for 27-inch iMacs, bringing the price of an 8GB upgrade down to only about $25US more than competitors like Other World Computing.

Here are the old specs, courtesy of MacRumors:

And the new specs:

A price drop of $200 for the 8GB upgrade is surprising, but certainly welcome. I've always thought that Apple was running a scam targeted at the technically inept, charging them an extra 100% for not knowing better. Is this part of a trend toward more affordable, Apple-approved upgrades?

Just in time for the weekend, here's a technology that's arrived before its time, I think. Winscape is a set of two plasma televisions set up behind window panes, and hooked up to a Mac Pro. The Pro is running the custom Winscape software, which controls the "view" out of the windows according to a sensor (they show it in the video above attached to a baby, and it actually looks really large and pretty unwieldy). So as the sensor moves around the room, the view changes, as if you were moving angles while looking out of the windows to get a different view.

Oh, and the whole thing is controlled with an iPhone app -- there are a few different views, as you can see in the video above. You can buy the Winscape software for $10 over on the website, and the remote app is $2 in the store, but of course you've got to buy the plasma televisions and Mac Pro yourself (and cut a window into your wall and/or install them all the way you want them). So no, it's not a very practical solution -- at least until houses come standard with video windows.

But it would be great to wake up every morning and be able to look out the window and see whatever you want to see. Maybe someday we'll see a setup like this as a more accessible investment.

Data Robotics has just announced a new member of the Drobo family -- the Drobo FS.

The new device is designed to serve as Network Attached Storage with all of the advantages of the Data Robotics BeyondRAID technology, with the added bonus of drop-dead simple setup. In a pre-release interview with Mark Fuccio of Data Robotics last week, he noted that setup on the device is as easy as installing the Drobo Dashboard software on a computer on the network, and then letting it handle all of the setup decisions for you.

The device features a dual core processor, with one core running the embedded proprietary OS and the other core running Linux. The processor brings a lot of speed to the Drobo FS -- in testing, the device had about four times the speed of the former Drobo NAS solution, which was a Drobo plus the DroboShare device. Data Robotics noted that using Jumbo Frames, read speeds of up to 50-55MB/sec are possible.

The Drobo FS has five storage bays, each of which can hold one standard 3.5" SATA hard drive. At the present time, the largest capacity of these drives is 2 TB, for a total of 9.1 TB of capacity or 5.44 TB with dual-disk redundancy (two drives can fail and the array can still operate flawlessly). As drive capacities grow in the future, the 2 TB drives can be replaced with larger drives, increasing the capacity of the array even more. The FS has a single Gigabit Ethernet port on the back for its connection to the world.