Google is planning to unveil a broad new social product on Tuesday that will integrate with at least two existing Google products. Some details emerged earlier today on the Wall Street Journal (“a new feature that makes it easier and faster for users of Gmail to view media and status updates”), but our understanding is that the product goes well beyond a Gmail integration.

As I wrote last night, there is still a lot of room for improvement in online social services. Status updates, photo and video sharing, review and location based content are not only decentralized today, but are becoming overwhelmed with spam and other noise.

The Google event begins at 10 am. Tune in to TechCrunch for live coverage.

Gmail is set to become Google’s next major push into social media. According to The Wall Street Journal, the popular webmail service will soon launch a new feature for sharing content and status updates with friends. [Update: We think Google might announce these features on Tuesday]

As WSJ points out, Gmail users can already update their statuses — sort of — through Gmail’s chat feature. Currently, this feature is more akin to the traditional IM “away message.” However, with this new social push, Gmail will offer a timeline-view of your friends’ status updates, just like on Facebook and Twitter.

Those updates might come from both Gmail and third-party services. According to WSJ, Google-owned YouTube and Picasa will be integrated into the stream. The huge question then is whether or not the new feature will include updates from Twitter and Facebook.

If so, the new features could be thought of more like a TweetDeck or Seesmic, looking to provide an aggregate view of your friends’ social media activities along with the ability to push status updates to the services you use from inside of Gmail. If not, it could be thought of as a major competitor to Twitter and Facebook as Gmail looks to covert its millions of e-mail users into adherents to a whole new breed of social media service.

An issue with the latter, however, is that Gmail has historically added people to your contacts based on e-mail interactions. Hence, this contact list often varies significantly from your friends on social sites where relationships need to be made explicitly.

In other words, your Gmail contacts aren’t necessarily the same people you want to share status updates, photos and videos with. This is an issue that shouldn’t be overlooked in evaluating the new features Google is soon to unveil.

Tags: facebook, gmail, Google, trending, twitter

As hinted by CEO Eric Schmidt, Google debuted a Super Bowl ad Sunday. The ad tells the story of a romance helped along by a series of Google searches conducted by (one is left to imagine) a young man whose simple plan to study abroad in Paris ends with his need to know how to assemble a crib.

John Battelle more or less ran down Google’s intentions Saturday after Schmidt tipped his hand on Twitter. But it was an unexpected move by the search giant which has eschewed advertising even as competitors Microsoft and Yahoo have spent 10’s of millions of dollars in advertising to compete with the company that nevertheless retains a search market share exceeding 70 percent.

Google has reinvented online advertising but has done so with no brand advertising itself — unusual not only because even big companies with world-known brands find it helpful to remind the public about themselves in a positive light, but also because as the behemoth in the search space it might need to proactively ward off backlash. And Google is not exactly immune to controversy, given its bold initiative to scan the world’s books and its threat to stop censoring search results in China — to say nothing of its behavioral targeting strategy.

As Battelle reminds, Schmidt in 2006 called brand advertising “The last bastion of unaccountable spending in corporate America.” At something like $3 million per 30-second spot the decision to start (and perhaps finish) a TV campaign on the Super Bowl is a lot like arranging to fly for the first time on the Space Shuttle. And, since it’s just a series of screengrabs of searches, the suggestions as they take shape, and the results, it must be a contender for the cheapest-ever Super Bowl ad.

In fact, the ad wasn’t even produced for the Super Bowl. Schmidt said in a post on the Google blog that the ad, “Parisian Love,” has been on YouTube for over three months and that the company decided “to share it with a wider audience.” Considering that the estimated worldwide audience for Super Bowl XLIV was about one billion people that is an exponentially wider audience than the 1.2 million hits the video has online at this writing.

“We didn’t set out to do a Super Bowl ad, or even a TV ad for search,” Schmidt said in the post. “Our goal was simply to create a series of short online videos about our products and our users, and how they interact.”

Reaction to the TV ad, which has no narration and a gentle soundtrack, was quick and largely positive. Word of mouth marketing expert David Binkowski said on Twitter that “@Google ad was very good. Value proposition was dead on and they told their story extremely well.”

New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter joked: “I want to try this “Google.” (Seriously, though, that was a lovely ad, and everybody in the room adored it.”

Wired’s own Steven Levy said, tongue perhaps in cheek, “Can’t wait to see the analytics on Google superbowl ad.”

Media critic Jeff Jarvis was non-plussed. “Disappointed Google didn’t make a new commercial appropriate to the Super Bowl. France? Football? Google?”

But one YouTube commenter in particular was undoubtedly what Google had been hoping for. “ahhh was watching the superbowl (coincidentally as an American girl in Paris ) and this made me cry!!” said gabriellepomay. “Best ad of the whole superbowl!”

If you are selling a scarcity — an inventory — of any nonphysical goods today, stop, turn around, and start selling value — outcomes — instead. Or you’re screwed. Apply this rule to many enterprises: advertising, media, content, information, education, consultation, and to some extent, performance.

Start with advertising. I wrote in my report on a local advertising sales roundtable we held at CUNY that sites should shift from selling media — their own inventory of banners and buttons — to selling services for merchants, helping them succeed through networks of local sites and also through Google, Yelp, Twitter, Facebook, email, mobile, and whatever comes next … helping them with their business. The merchant doesn’t give a rat’s ass about your limited supply of space and eyeballs; the merchant cares about sales and return on investment. As Max Kalehoff advised in a comment on that post, “Sell the outcome.”

At a Paley Center breakfast this week, Sirius CEO Mel Karmazin — a titan of ad sales in broadcast — was blunt about the current state of advertising in media: “There’s just too much supply,” he said, “and I don’t think that supply is going to go away. The leverage is on the part of the buyer as opposed to the seller.” When there’s limitless supply, pricing is not based on supply and demand. These are the new economics of media.

Thus the value is in results. That, of course, is what Google realized when it sold clicks instead of pixels, aligning its interests with those of the advertiser and sharing the risk, which motivated Google not to sell scarcity but to create abundance in the form of AdSense. This, for Google, produced a practically limitless supply, which in turn yielded ever-better relevance, effectiveness, and ROI.

Or as Karmazin famously told Google in Ken Auletta’s book: “You’re fucking with the secret sauce.” He recounted his reaction to Google’s strategy at the breakfast: “You want advertisers to know what will work and what doesn’t? That’s bizarre…. Oh, my God, I don’t want to be in that business.” In most media, Karmazin said, the lowest rates were paid by direct response: “The people who knew what worked were the ones who paid the lower rate.” That bubble is irreparably burst.

So what are you to do if you are media? First, you have to align your interest with marketers if you have any hope of still helping them, still adding and then recognizing value. Marketers will, as Bob Garfield so forcefully states in The Chaos Scenario, build their own, direct relationships around media, without advertising. Or as I’ve been obnoxiously stating it, advertising is failure — it’s what you do when you don’t have a valued relationship.

Relationships. That’s what the business of media must become. In our New Business Models for News, we began — just began — to project the value of the relationship a new media service can have in its community: creating events; educating; gathering and selling data; selling goods directly (as the Telegraph does, quite successfully); running networks to help others succeed; saving money by collaborating. This is why the notion of charging your best customers — cutting off your richest relationships with a toll booth — seems so dangerous to me.

Instead, we must also align our interests with those of the community, with the people formerly known as the audience, helping them do what they want to do, adding value and recognizing it that way. We need to make ourselves their platform.

Content is not a scarcity. You can no longer sell it as such. That’s one of the morals of the Demand Media and Wikipedia stories: Like it or not, for many different motives, there’s always someone out there who can create content that serves a similar purpose, that answers the same question, that is just good enough. Selling content as if it were a consumable — indeed, calling the people who use content consumers — is now outmoded.

Information is not a scarcity, or at least it isn’t scarce for long. Yes, when I don’t know something, then the answer is scarce. But now it’s much easier to get that answer; Google will have it in .3 seconds and if it doesn’t and if enough of us ask it, then someone at Demand Media will write it for me and the rest of the world for $20. When news is new, its value is scarce (as Thomson Reuters Tom Glocer says, his information has its highest value in its first 3 milliseconds); but then that value deflates.

The new media economy gets even more complicated because putting our content and information out there is how it gets distributed, how we find new people, how we build new relationships, how we realize new value.

You can no longer afford to make yourself scarce.

In education, we’re fooling ourselves if we think that we can maintain our scarcity-based economy: only so chairs to soak in the wisdom of that teacher. It’s a wildly inefficient system — especially in our industrial-age knowledge factories that try to turn out people who memorize the same answer instead of invent new ones.

Earlier, I’ve speculated about the idea of an educational ecosystem with star professors whose lectures are widely available (as is the case with MIT and Stanford) and who gain value (books, speaking gigs) through being broadly distributed. Then we have local tutors who give us the specialized instruction and consultation we need.

Thus we have performers and consultants. There is still value in unique performance. We will continue to buy tickets to concerts by stars (but we won’t pay for the Muzak covers of their songs on elevators). We will buy books. We will pay to sit in a movie theater with popcorn. The new competition in the case of media and performance isn’t that someone will make a good-enough version of what we do but that there is more call for the public’s attention.

Quality is a scarcity. But it is a real scarcity. You may think that your newspaper’s version of the Super Bowl is better than the next, but good luck trying to build a business on charging for it. No, you have to be recognized by enough people as being the best — so many that they spread the word for you — if you want to have a blockbuster. It’s still possible. But in an economy of abundance, it’s ever harder and thus riskier and more expensive to get that hit.

This is also why value shifts from creation to curation: in a world of overabundant content, it’s the filters we need.

If you’re not the star performer (or professor), if you’re the consultant (or tutor) who works much more locally, you do indeed have a scarcity: your own time. That scarcity works against you. So it’s in your interest to scale as best you can. That is why people like me blog. The more we share our ideas, the more attention we draw, the more business we can get, the more efficient we are. I’ve even tried to convince big consulting companies and headhunters and international organizations of this; didn’t get far.

The real story in nonphysical goods is one of deflation. Value in once-scarce — well, once-controlled — commodities like news, information, and advertising decline as the internet explodes creation and competition. The internet also destroys the ability of many to control distribution and thus value. But at the same time, the internet drastically increases efficiency thanks to platforms and open distribution and the ability — no, the need — to specialize and collaborate. The bottom line in many of these enterprises — as we tried to show in our New Business Models for News — is that they may be profitable, only smaller. Both sides of the ledger deflate.

This is why the old controllers of scarcity have such trouble rethinking and remaking themselves for the economy of abundance. Their reflex is to control more, when that only decreases value.

So stop selling scarcity. Scarcity has no value. Results and efficiency do.

Then again, people are spending big money — billions — for a virtual market with a virtual scarcity in virtual goods: pixels on a screen. It’s absurd, of course, that anyone can create a scarcity and market value for fictional food for fictional cows, but it’s making money. In this economy, I think we see both the dying gasp and a parody of scarcity.

If you want a Blu-ray player or a new car, you’re pretty much stuck with what big companies like Sony and GM have to offer. It might not be exactly what you want, but it’s available and it’s cheap.

Until recently, the tools of production — from design to manufacturing — were inaccessible to the masses. Just because someone tinkering in their garage could design a better product didn’t mean the inventor could suddenly scale up the operation into production.

Storyboard Podcast: Episode 14

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Wired Editor in Chief Chris Anderson thinks this is about to change. In “Atoms Are the New Bits” from the February issue of Wired, he argues that the proliferation of open-source, DIY design in recent years signals the dawn of a new industrial revolution.

In his previous bestseller The Long Tail, Anderson discussed the long tail of bits — the idea that open source software serving niche markets collectively takes up a larger market share than large, best-selling products. In his latest Wired story, Anderson argues that — thanks to the democratization of the tools of manufacturing — product design is moving toward the long tail of stuff.

But can a legion of small-scale product designers armed with great ideas collectively churn out more wares than Apple and Sony? In this week’s Storyboard podcast, Anderson discusses his new “mind grenade” with Wired Executive Editor Thomas Goetz.

Photograph: Dan Winters

From the New York Times: While Amazon goes on a hiring spree for its Kindle division, hiring color LCD managers and Wi-Fi specialists, where does the company take the Kindle from here?

Continue reading at the New York Times »

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See Also:

• CHART OF THE DAY: Amazon's Stock Wins Day One Of The iPad Onslaught
• Amazon Has Sold 3 Million Kindles, About As Many As Expected
• Hachette Joins Macmillan's Battle Against Amazon

Magazine newsstand sales plummeted 9% in the second half of the year compared to last year. Certain popular titles like Newsweek, Time, and W took it particularly hard, losing more than 30% of newsstand sales.

While these sales aren't make-or-break for magazines, they contribute a fatter profit than subscriptions, since most subscriptions are sold at a discount to the cover price.

This decline in sales explains, in part, why media companies are praying at the altar of the iPad and other tablets. The market for applications is gaining steam at the same time the market for physical magazines is dying. If publishers can get into the biggest online newsstands in the world, the theory goes, they can regain some of the vanishing sales.

Read the rest of this story »

See Also:

• CHART OF THE DAY: Facebook Catching Up To Google And Yahoo As Your Home On The Web
• CHART OF THE DAY: Apple Dominates Smartphone Growth In Q4
• CHART OF THE DAY: Apple's Giant Pile Of Cash In Context

The latest research from Websense Security Labs paints a dreary but familiar picture of the state of online security threats. Echoing the bad news of other such recent reports, it seems the vast majority of the Web consists of malware and spam. Worse yet, even legitimate, well-known sites are being used to pump malware, SEO poisoning, or phishing attacks.

Websense uses a global network of systems to scan and analyze over 40 billion websites every hour, tracking malware and other unwanted content. The results for the latter half of 2009 show a 225 percent increase in malicious websites. Worse, 71 percent of websites found to contain some malicious code were in fact legitimate websites that had been compromised in some way.

A writing habit is cultivated by two things:

1. Writing a lot.
2. Reading even more.

The more you write, the more you get to practice flexing vocabulary and voice as well as how to put your ideas into clear thoughts. The more you read, the more you capture lessons about tone, sentence structure, cadence, and idea flow.  And the more you do both, the more everything you touch, see, hear, and read becomes the seed of something else to write about.

There are some great posts out there about cultivating a writing habit, like these:

• Cultivate a Writing Habit: Chris Brogan
• 10 Steps to Create the Habit of Writing: Write to Done
• Seven Bad Writing Habits You Learned in School: Copyblogger
• Posts on Better Writing: Men with Pens
• Complete Your First Book with These 9 Simple Writing Habits: Dumb Little Man

These practices apply whether you’re blogging or penning a novel. Writing is an active discipline. You have to do it. Often.

But absorbing the written word in lots of different forms makes you a better writer. Period. Read blogs, articles, business books, biographies, fiction, whatever suits your fancy right now.

Not sure what to read? I piled a bunch of recommendations for books in my Twitter favorites. Scroll through them and you’ll find lots that have been tossed to me by my Twitter friends.  And I keep an Evernote file called “Book List” where I capture all the titles I haven’t read, but want to, so I’m always prepared at the bookstore or the library.

Reading more helps you identify good writing AND bad writing, and how to tell the difference between the two. You’ll start learning to spot words that are smooth to read versus overly dense, the pace of delivering ideas and organizing them in a flow, length of sentences that are easy or hard to read, vocabulary that’s too high brow or not nuanced enough.

Julien Smith tells you how to read a book a week in 2010. I probably average that if not more, in addition to all the blogs I read and online articles, news, whitepapers, etc. I read a ton, and I write every day. If you hate to read, that’s going to be harder for you, but it’s important nonetheless.

If delivering content on the web in written form is something you seriously aspire to – for the sake of contribution of ideas or to make money or both – you’ d better learn what it takes to write well, and reading is an important step to doing just that.

There is no shortcut.

Are you a writer? Reader? Both? Do you agree? What are you reading right now?

Wanna Write? Read Voraciously.

As more and more of our friends and favorite organizations start publishing updates online, being able to organize them well is becoming even more important. Niche-popular desktop social media stream-reader Tweetdeck issued a software update this morning and the most striking change is in its handling of user groups. It's beautiful. The new Tweetdeck is faster, more flexible and easier to navigate.

Groups, we have argued, are the secret weapon of the social web. Here are five ways that the new Tweetdeck gets groups right and that Facebook, the world's dominant social media stream reader by a long-shot, could learn from what Tweetdeck is doing. That would drastically improve Facebook's own user experience.

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Internet startup investor John Borthwick of Betaworks has told us that he invested in Tweetdeck specifically because its column metaphor represented a drastic break from the page-based metaphor of the rest of the web and the Instant Messaging metaphor of most other Twitter clients. That's how Tweetdeck works: it lets you put your friends and contacts on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn into grouped columns across your screen. It's a powerful system and the clear leader in the ecosystem of interfaces built around Twitter. Competitor Seesmic has a similar offering and is also based on columns for groups.

These applications may be more overwhelming than many mainstream users are looking for, but the principles could be adapted to Facebook's own interface in some very interesting ways.

Groups of users, which Facebook calls Lists, are extremely helpful in prioritizing messages by their source. They enable users to subscribe to more sources of information in total without fear they will miss high-priority content. Groups help contextualize messages in a stream and with good search support they can help you target queries and unearth the information you're looking for within a limited space of trusted, topical sources of information. Last month, Facebook suggested its users subscribe to news organizations on the social network and put those updates in a special list called News, for example.

Unfortunately, Facebook has never treated Groups with the respect that they deserve. The newest redesign pushes friends Lists a click removed from the front page of the site, even. (It took me three clicks from the home page to see the view pictured on the right, for example.) The company is instead focused on serving up content from favored sources using the new News Feed (vs Live Feed) algorithm. This algorithm says that the more you've interacted with a source of information in the past, the more likely you are to want to read that person's updates in the future. News Feed is a self-reenforcing paradigm that simplifies and narrows a user's universe by taking editorial control out of their hands and putting it in the hands of a black-box formula.

How could Facebook better handle groups? Let's take a look at how Tweetdeck does it.

• Buttons to navigate directly

  The new Tweetdeck update today added a series of buttons at the bottom of the application for your group columns. Hover over them and you'll see the column name. Click on that button and you'll be brought immediately to that column, a much nicer experience than the awkward old scrolling. The hover display does show some information that's probably not useful to anyone (API calls remaining) but putting rapid group navigation in a good place in the app makes a big difference. It would also be nice if those buttons were configurable in some way - like the red one or #3 is for my @ replies column. But Tweetdeck now makes it much, much easier to navigate between groups than Facebook does. Facebook almost seems to be discouraging use of groups by burying them several clicks below top level options.

  
  
  
• Different Notification Priorities

  Tweetdeck makes it easy to set up different levels of notification for different groups. For example, my "high-priority" Twitter group sends full messages as a pop-up in the corner of my screen when it updates, but my column for people I actually know in real life on Facebook (like my family members) throws a pop-up and an audio notification in Tweetdeck when there's something new. That's awesome.

  Facebook is all about the notifications, why not let me get a special notification when someone in a particular group has posted an update?

  
  

• Shareable Groups, Suggestions etc.

  For years Twitter has been fundamentally public and Facebook private, but for better or for worse that's changing on Facebook. Isn't it time for Facebook to offer bundles of pages or people that you can follow all at once? Twitter and Tweetdeck make this easy with lists, sharable lists and the Tweetdeck directory of recommended lists to follow. Facebook users would love something like that! My college newspaper staff as one big list of Facebook users to follow? My football team? Suzy Bright's curated list of top sex writers to follow on Facebook? People would eat that kind of stuff up.
  

• Keyword Filters

  Last week I was working when the season premier of Lost came on TV. I'm likely to watch it later on DVD. Tweetdeck let me add a filter to all of my groups to hide any posts that included the word Lost! Sick of hearing about the iPad? No problem! Tweetdeck does a great job of building value on top of these groups of contacts: filter for, filter out keywords, analyze a group for its most-used words. There are lots of possibilities. Facebook users would probably like these same options.
  

• A Group for New Friends

  Tweetdeck has a great feature that lets you create a column to display the bios of people who have just started following you. From there you can click once to follow them back. Facebook could easily do something like that, bring new friends and/or recommended friends up higher into a very visible place in the interface. Facebook wants users to go beyond connecting with people they already know in real life (sorry, users, that's what Facebook has decided) so why not create a "group" that's made up of people who are fans of the same pages you are or are otherwise recommended for connecting with?

There are all kinds of ways that Facebook could offer meaningful support for user groups and turn the News Feed into a more powerful tool, with more control for users and more value in the long run. Tweetdeck is doing a pretty darned good job of exactly that.

Fans of classic science fiction will be saddened to hear that one of its most imaginative writers has passed. In the 1950s and 1960s, William Tenn stood with pioneers like Theodore Sturgeon in creating vivid scenarios of mind-blowing alien worlds in novels and stories that illuminated emotional, political and ethical issues of good old humanity. Tenn was a pseudonym for Philip Klass. His particular contribution to the Golden Age was a willingness to put humor at center stage. (My favorite story of his: “On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi.”)

His death on Sunday, a few months short of his 90th birthday, is a blow to sci-fi. Condolences to his wife Fruma (herself an award-winning writer) and daughter Adina. But the loss also extends to those who never did manage to crack his novel about an extraterrestrial race with seven sexes.

After living a scuffling life of a freelance sci-fi writer in Greenwich Village for many years, Klass joined the faculty of Penn State in the mid-’60s. He was instrumental in encouraging the careers of fiction writers and journalists like David Morrell, who dedicated his debut novel, First Blood, to his mentor — that’s right — the book that unleashed Rambo.

Those who took his creative writing classes and waited outside his office or his home for a personal critique of their work — Klass was always booked for more meetings than a 24-hour day could handle — got tough-love assessments, and a dare to do better. Coming from a pro, that meant a lot.

I was one of those students, an English lit major in the grad program slowly grasping that I was not destined for academia. In his lengthy comment on the first story I handed in for his class, Klass began, “Well, at least you can write,” and proceeded to eviscerate almost every line of my work.

No matter — I could write! Klass helped get me an internship at the local newspaper — something not usually done for grad students. During my semester at the Centre Daily Times I covered a science fiction conclave held at the university and saw first-hand the massive esteem with which giants in the field like Frederick Pohl regarded Klass/Tenn. With his encouragement, I left State College with hopes of making a living with my typewriter. (Computers were a few years away.)

Fortunately, William Tenn’s work, all of which breaks out of the genre with his unique generosity of spirit, survives. His fiction is collected in two volumes, both in print: Immodest Proposals and Here Comes Civilization. But I’ll always remember Phil Klass for a sentence he wrote about a callow short story from a student with deeply buried potential: At least you can write.

God knows where I would have wound up without hearing that.

Home page photo courtesy The Official Home Page of Science Fiction Writer William Tenn

See Also:

• Steven Levy on the Burden of Twitter
• Steven Levy on How Gadgets Lose Their Magic
• Googlephone No Match for Kafkaesque Carriers, Steven Levy Finds
• Steven Levy on the Promise and Perils of Divorcing Your Cable Company
• Steven Levy Revisits Akihabara’s Sublime, Kooky Gadgets
• Stephen Wolfram Reveals Radical New Formula for Web Search
• Steven Levy on Why Apps Will Secure the Smartphone Champion
• Steven Levy on the Answer Engine, a Radical New Formula for Web Search
• Steven Levy: Why the iPhone Is Almost Perfect
• Secret of Googlenomics: Data-Fueled Recipe Brews Profitability

Google could launch a Twitter-killer as soon as this week, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Read the rest of this story »

Computer geeks over the weekend had a dorkgasm at the sight of a report hinting at an upcoming MacBook Pro equipped with Intel’s latest mobile processor.

Readers of MacRumors.com spotted Geekbench benchmark results for what appears to be a MacBook Pro featuring a 2.66GHz Core i7 M620, a high-end dual core processor featuring Intel’s Hyperthreading and Turbo Boost technologies.

The benchmark results appear plausible, as they suggest the alleged Core i7 MacBook Pro outperforms 2.66GHz MacBook Pros with the current Core 2 Duo chip. However, take this with a grain of salt. You have to wonder why an Apple employee would run this test and post the results in public.

Geekbench creator John Poole told Wired.com that Geekbench results can be faked, but he believes the Core i7 MacBook Pro benchmark is real.

“If the system information for this system has been faked, it’s a convincing fake; there aren’t any inconsistencies in the system information, the Mac OS X build number matches Apple’s numbering scheme for new hardware builds, and the processor matches people’s expectations for what will appear in the refreshed MacBook Pro,” Poole said. “In other words, I believe this result is authentic.”

Intel announced its latest mobile chips at CES 2010, and many notebooks are beginning to ship with the new processors. Observers believe Apple will upgrade its MacBook Pro family to include the new Intel chips.

MacBook Pros received an upgrade in June 2009, and Apple typically refreshes its notebooks every six or seven months. So if the Geekbench results are to believed, we should expect to see a Core i7 MacBook Pro soon.

See Also:

• MacBook Pros With New Intel Chips Could Arrive Soon
• Toshiba Launches Satellite Notebooks With Latest Intel Chips …

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com