Like cars in the winter and guitars on long tours, laptops can face some challenging environments when you take them mobile. My “road” or beater computers for the past several years have been a couple of 2000 vintage Pismo PowerBooks that still do a fine job, but would not represent catastrophic hits to my wallet should ill befall them.

Sometimes you just get it right from the outset, and today’s MacBook computers can trace a direct line of heritage and their general form factor back to those 1991 PowerBook 100, 140, and 170 machines. An apt automotive analogy would be Ford’s Mustang, which was so brilliantly conceived and styled at its introduction in May, 1964, that the current 2011 Mustang could not be mistaken for anything else..

Perhaps one of the best known sounds in the geek universe is the startup gong that we Mac users hear almost every time we start up our machines. While it in and of itself is just one of the many noises our computers make on a daily basis, it has made quite a name for itself, and is surprisingly calming. After the jump, you will find an extremely fascinating interview held with the creator of this sound: Jim Reekes.

Apple user Blair Saldanah has put together quite an amazing collection of Mac memorabilia over the past 25 years, and although it breaks his heart to do it, he’s now in a position to have to sell it off. Normally, Appletell wouldn’t help someone advertise a sale (we’re not Cragi’s List, people), but there really are some excellent Apple fanboy collectibles up for grabs here: an Apple Macintosh Portable Computer, a PowerBook Duo 210, and all manner of buttons, brochures, manuals, T-shirts and more.

This weekend, an event by the name of The Gadget Show Live is being held in Birmingham, UK. Hosted by the presenters of the Channel 5 program, The Gadget Show, featured over 120 companies showing off the latest tech. Although Apple didn’t make an appearance, their products and ideas still came through.

It happens every so often: Apple declares certain older products obsolete or vintage. Vintage machines are those made between five and seven years ago, and obsolete machines are those made more than seven years ago. What’s been interesting of late is the amount of Macs on the list that are still in fairly heavy use, and really don’t seem that old. Think the lampshade iMac, PowerBook G4, iBook, and PowerMac G4s.

Now that the much anticipated Apple Let’s Rock event is only two days off, let’s talk Let’s Rock rumors. There are lots of possible goodies for the event, so let’s hope that Apple is up for the challenge and fulfills everyone’s hopes.

Read on for the full list of possibilities.

I really enjoy the two finger scrolling gesture on the Apple laptop trackpads. It’s smooth, and it works exactly how you would expect, unlike some of those other built in scroll bars. However, this technology is only available from Apple on newer models; so, what about the older ones? Enter iScroll2. This preference pane software more »

Apple may well be one of the top IT companies producing top-selling and cool products here and there, but this success doesn’t render the company immune to various lawsuits. Like any other big IT companies, Apple is hounded by several lawsuits caused by product-related issues which the company needs to settle financially. One of these more »

In what is perhaps the coolest thing I have ever seen, Troika has created a “virus” for Mac, though its status as a virus is debatable. It lives on a USB key, and you have to have physical access to the computer to install it. The virus was created in an attempt to get back to the tme when viruses were just amusing little programs run to make the user chuckle. Nowadays, viruses are used for malicious intent, but back in the advent of the personal computer, “viruses [were] born out of the wit of early computer adopters, viruses whose sole purpose was to surprise and amuse.”

Troika says that they “chose to do it for mac as the platform is still a virgin territory.” If this is what Mac viruses will look like, I will download and install every suspicious looking thing that comes my way. The “virus” causes the menu bar to crack in half and fall, along with all desktop icons, to the bottom of the screen. Then, by turning the computer around, the icons and menu bar halves respond just as they would if they were really in a box.

The only problem? You can’t actually get it. If anyone can figure out how to get this, please comment. I want it really badly. Now, to see it in action, look after the break.