Testing suggests that the New MacBook Pro hardware can handle 8GB of RAM; however, there are OS-level limitations that cause instability.

Luke from iFixIt.com tested the new MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM and posted the following on MacRumors

We did some more testing and found some interesting things. We have not succeeded to go beyond the 4GB limit with any OS X GUI app. With a C app (eatmem) that does not use Apple’s APIs, we were able to allocate 8 GB and have it reported in Activity Monitor (and top).

The C app was able to allocate up to 8 GB without paging to disk. However, OS X is not happy running at or above the 4 GB limit. Performance is very erratic, and we crashed OS X and Parallels multiple times. 8 GB allocated, the system crashed shortly thereafter.

Interestingly, when we booted Ubuntu on the machine it only reported 3 GB memory total. We don’t have an explanation for that.

Overall, our testing showed that the system is unstable at 8 GB of RAM. Parallels takes forever to load, even when using
We then yanked a chip to do a comparison with 4 GB. With a single 4 GB chip, everything seems happy.

We then added a 1 GB chip for 5 GB total. We were able to get GUI apps to use all 5 GB and the system hasn’t crashed on us yet. It will take more testing to determine how stable this configuration is.

We suspect that this testing implies a two things:
1) The hardware can handle a 4 GB chip without any problem
2) There are OS-level limitations with 8 GB RAM on these systems.

Luke Soules
iFixit Labs

Edward Lee has released a version of Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 which includes support for Multi-Touch gestures.

Below you can read his introduction to the build…

Earlier I took the Firefox patch and tweaked it slightly to conform better to sdwilsh style standards and added various refactoring. And now I?ve tossed those pair of patches up on the try-server so people can touch Firefox with a new set of gestures.

A quick detour for those not familiar with the multi-touch gestures.. The most basic multi-touch gesture is the 2-finger scroll which has been around for over 3 years (my iBook had it), and it lets you scroll through pages up/down/left/right/diagonally. Recently added is the 3-finger ?swipe? where you place 3 fingers on the trackpad and move them in any direction like the 2-finger scroll. A couple other iPhone-inspired gestures are the ?pinch? (2 fingers moving towards/away from each other) and the ?twist? (2 fingers rotating).

Note! The following gestures are totally tentative and subject to change, and I?m not sure if they?ll even make it into Firefox 3.1. (From what I quickly gathered, the gestures interface was reverse engineered from some private Apple API, so things might change at any time!) You have been warned!

* Swipe Left: Go back in history [bonus! hold Cmd to open it in a tab]
* Swipe Right: Go forwards in history
* Swipe Up: Return to top of page
* Swipe Down: End of page
* Pinch Together: Zoom out
* Pinch Apart: Zoom in
* Twist Right: Next tab
* Twist Left: Previous tab

Personally, the biggest benefit is the ease of going to the very next tab with just the touchpad. No need to use keyboard shortcuts like cmd-alt-right or fn-ctrl-down or cmd-tab#. Rotating to the right doesn?t just go to the next tab because if you keep twisting right, you?ll go to the next one and the next one. You could think of it as turning a dial to pick the tab you want. And of course, turning the dial back in the same motion switches back to the previous tab.

So if all that sounds interesting and you want to try, make sure you have one of these machines before downloading:
- MacBook Pro from this year (either early-2008 model or the new late-2008 ones)
- MacBook Air (both models from 2008)
- MacBook from late 2008 (the new aluminum ones)

Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 ?pre? with Multi-Touch Gestures – OS X only [build.mozilla.org]

The Mac mini may be pronounced dead as soon as today’s Apple earnings conference call, according to Gizmodo.

Two major retailers in Europe have confirmed to Gizmodo that they can’t order any more of the little computers.

While this could signal an updated model coming in, they have been told by Apple to expect no more of it.

Their impression is that?once again?the Mac Mini may be dead dead DEAD for real, even while you can still order it at the Apple Store.