Thanksgiving Roundup: Apple Buys Land, New MacBooks in April, App Store Sales, Black Friday Prices

Mercury News reports that Apple has purchased 98 acres of land in Cupertino which was owned by HP:
Apple's latest acquisition is the longtime Cupertino campus of rival tech giant Hewlett-Packard, the Mercury News learned Wednesday. HP announced over the summer that it planned to move out of that site, which it had occupied for decades, as it consolidates operations at its Palo Alto headquarters over the next two years.
The extra land will be used by Apple to expand their existing Cupertino campus.Three Guys and a Podcast are claiming that Apple will be holding two special events next year:
- January 2011 - New iPad
- April 2011 - All New Mac Book Pros + Final Cut Pro Update
They don't list their source for the information, so we're not sure how much is speculative, but they claim the MacBook Pro will follow the MacBook Airs move to Solid State Storage and removal of an optical drive.
The Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S. has triggered massive sales in the App Store. TouchArcade has consolidated a massive list of notable gaming sales. Meanwhile, AppShopper offers a running list of every App Store sale as they happen. The Universal App let's you find sales on your iOS device.
Apple Australia has already begun their Black Friday sales with the following discounts:
-A$51 on iPad (8%)
-A$121 on MBP (8%)
-A$15 or 25 on Nano (respective sizes) (up to 12%)
-A$25, 45 or 51 on iPod Touch (respective sizes) (up to 18%)
-A$121 on MBA (only 13") (7.5%)
-A$121 on iMac (8%)
We'll cover Apple's U.S. Black Friday sales tomorrow, which should offer similar savings.
Top Rated Comments
(View all)Then the 13'' MBP will be discontinued! :rolleyes:
I wonder what they will add though. Probably not worth the time not being spent without a Mac. :D
Absolute value doesn't tell us anything about what we may expect in the US.
Keeping my fingers crossed for Solid State + no optical drive + better GPU!
Quad Core option would be nice too...
An announcement maybe for release in the spring.
JohnG
No optical drive?? Are you kidding me? How am I supposed to install something if it isn't possible to download it? We aren't ready for totally getting rid of optical drives yet. It's like when Rumsfeld thought he could take over Iraq with just Special Forces.
1) buy an external optical drive
2) use remote disk like the MacBook air
What if they had SSD + second internal storage? Some people need to carry around hundreds of gigs of stuff. And no external HD :D
Yes, yes, yes, please, please, please.
Plenty of folk have swapped out their optical drive to have an HDD+SDD combo. Unfortunately, between sleep/hibernation issues, power management issues, and the need to move files around from one drive to another, I haven't been willing to go this route.
If Apple took care of all the nitty gritty, though, it'd be sweet.
Several manufacturers now make 7 mm harddrives. Use that, along with an MBA style blade SSD card, lose the optical drive, and have the OS manage which files go to which drive, and we'd have a moderately priced, very thin, VERY fast machine.
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