Japan Apple Store is Down

It's 10;16 PM, Tuesday night, and the Japanese Apple online store is down for updating with the new MacBook and MacBook Pro models. It will be interesting to see if Apple uses the current exchange rate of 102.68 yen to the dollar, or if the Japanese MacBooks and MacBook Pros will be pricier than the U.S. models. John Gruber has a rundown, complete with prices, over at Daring Fireball. The new MacBook Pros will have two GPUs. Sounds killer.

New MacBooks to Have NVIDIA Inside

Apple Insider reports that new MacBooks will ship with Nvidia chipsets and integrated graphics and will "significantly outperform Intel's current GMA series architecture."

New MacBooks at Last

Enough about the iPhone. It's nice to know that Apple hasn't forgotten about its computer business. Apple has finally confirmed the October 14th notebook event. While speculation has centered around new aluminum cases for both the Macbook and Macbook Pro, it's more interesting to consider what might be inside. Which CPUs will Apple use and how much will they boost video performance? There have also been rumors of an $800 notebook from Apple. Will this be powered by a dual-core Atom processor? And what about the Mac mini--is it too much to hope for an upgrade?

Change that Gamma and White Point

OK, I'm aware that Macs and PCs have different gamma and white point settings. That's why I mess with images and photos in Fireworks or Photoshop on my Windows PC. It took this post from Don MacAskill's Smugblog to get me off my ass and into the system settings of my Mac computers. To summarize: If there's even a remote possibility that people will view your images on monitors attached to Windows machines, change your gamma to 2.2 and your white point to D65 before you do any editing. From a subjective viewpoint, and my vision is questionable, the MacBook looks a bit better with the gamma at 2.2. It looked a tad washed-out with the gamma set at the Mac standard 1.8. Now I can do web pages and edit photos on the Mac with the comforting knowledge that they should look approximately the same on a PC.