Stories by Dan Frakes

Along with a new iPhone and a new iPod touch, September's Apple event brought with it a new iPod nano, the first in two years. This one is mostly an improvement over its predecessor.

Editor's note: This article is the first in a series of upcoming articles on installing Mountain Lion. We'll publish a complete guide to the new version of OS X once the update becomes available.

Believe it or not, it's been nearly four and a half years since Apple released the original --MacBook Air. At the time, it was revolutionary in terms of its size and weight, but it also was slow, had little storage, had only a single USB port for expansion, and was very expensive--it started at $1799, and if you wanted solid-state storage, the price increased dramatically (by $999!). As Jason Snell wrote at the time, "laptop design has always been about compromise," and the original Air required some painful compromises.

The first time I saw the new display, I was floored, and after my first session using the new iPad, I was a convert.

I'm a heavy user of iTunes's smart playlists, which are dynamic listings of tracks based on criteria you define; as your iTunes library changes, smart playlists automatically update their contents to reflect those changes. For example, instead of creating a standard playlist called Recent Jazz, and then manually adding new jazz tracks to it and removing older tracks from it, you can create a smart playlist with the criteria Genre Is Jazz and Date Added in the last 3 months. Whenever you add new jazz tracks to iTunes, that playlist is automatically updated to include them; tracks you added prior to three months ago are pruned automatically.

Wish your iPad or iPod could hold more media? That your hotel room's Internet connection was wireless? That you had a portable Time Machine drive when traveling? Hitachi's upcoming G-Connect Wireless Storage with Internet Access for iPad, announced Wednesday, offers a solution to all these challenges and more in one compact package.