New MacBook Pro from Apple
The new MacBook Pro
So, after much hype and rumour, the new MacBooks are finally out, and many of the ‘wishlist’ items are there in reality. You can see the whole announcement at Apple, including the usual Steve Jobs bit, and a quirky missive from Jonathan Ive, who is clearly enjoying being able to make new components. In particular, the following new things are included:
- Unibody construction, i.e. machined from block aluminium. This is supposed to confer increased rigidity and reduce the weight.
- Large, glass trackpad with additional gestures, including a 4-finger gesture for Expose and application selection. There is no button any more, and left- and right-button clicking is available through software.
- LED backlighting, which is becoming an industry standard to replace previous cold-cathode backlights. It’s supposed to increase battery life, but the quoted life on the MacBook Pro is 5 hours with the slower Nvidia graphics running.
- SSD option. This is expensive, but is now available at 128 Gb.
- Nvidia graphics. The Pros come with two chips, where you can choose which graphics chip you wish to run with - not sure how that is done yet.
- Mini DisplayPort is to be the standard across the product line.
- No more Firewire 400 sockets. I don’t like this myself. Firewire 800 is there instead, with 400 via a cable.
The main ‘missing’ item is the much hoped-for touchscreen, which I guess will come at some time in the future. Another thing, which won’t be missed, is the lack of Blu-Ray on the drives. Don’t all Mac owners pirate their HD video anyway? In terms of product line-up, Apple isn’t offering a Netbook yet; they seem to be sticking to premium-priced products, which enables them to maintain innovation I suppose.
There are two interesting things about the new products are the unibody construction and the graphics chip. The unibody construction seems to be the same thing as the secret ‘Brick’ project, and is where Apple are machining the main frame and lower case in a single piece from aluminium block to save assembly costs. They say it’s more environmentally friendly because they recycle the swarf, but the quoted wastage is 90% - a 2.5 pound block becomes a 0.25 pound frame according to Steve. I’m sure the wastage on stamping is less than this. It now looks like the MacBook Air was a 1st-generation niche product to see how a unibody construction could be used. It’s now entering the main Apple product line.
The second interesting thing - for scientists at least - is the use of the Nvidia 9400M and 9600M GT parts in the same laptop, which contain 16 and 32 cores respectively. If you’re interested in stream processing, then this could be an interesting product.
Of course, there are other products in the announcement. The 13-inch MacBook is now just a mini MacBook Pro rather than a differentiated line. There is also a 24-inch LED-lit display (available in November), and I think they’ve missed a trick here by having a rather clunky 3-plug connector cable rather than a dock or single plug design.
All in all, not a bad upgrade to the line. It would be nice to have a full touchscreen, but I shudder at what that would cost…
Partical Physics
Phew. It’s been a long couple of weeks, but I’m pretty much moved in now.
So, I’m apparently a lecturer in physics at Manchester University, and no longer employed by HM Govt. It’s been a busy couple of weeks to say the least, as I’ve been out of the university arena for some years. I’ve joined the Particle Physics Group (also confusingly called HEP - High Energy Physics), and am a couple of doors down from fellow group member Brian Cox (whose site is much better looking than mine). It’s been a steep learning curve getting ready for the teaching load, but being given the nuclear physics lab is kind of nice, as I think I understand it. I’ll let you know after tomorrow’s first day! Universities are a lot more lively than when I was an undergraduate, and there is a real buzz about the place. It’s a bit like being in a hospital - everyone else seems to know what they’re doing and where they’re supposed to go, but there are few signs about. The ones that are there can be confusing (see picture!). Bit by bit I’m picking up what I’m supposed to be doing, which is teaching and research basically…
Fortunately, my office in Schuster is with the other physicists, and not in the old Rutherford Building, which is part of the older quad of buildings on Oxford Road, and I think now occupied by psychologists. People have commented on a possible link between the deaths of five people who all worked in the building, but given the very low levels of radiation so far measured (it’s been a hundred years guys) I’m betting it will turn out to be another leukemia cluster. In other words, it will be a random clustering of events that people call attention to because they are looking for a specific, well-identified cause. There is a lot of psychology in that activity - maybe the building occupants will look into that!
Hopefully unconnected with my arrival is the rather amusing decision by the Student Union to re-classify the toilets from men/women to with/without urinals (in the words of Al Murray, ‘I was never confused’). Transgender students have perhaps correctly pointed out that there is an uncomfortable choice to be made about whether to have abuse thrown at them by either women or men, depending on which door they go through. In typical student fashion, there is a backlash from more conservative student groups who wish to maintain a clear gender divide for their own comfort. The union representative on that there TV (who had surprisingly green hair which made me forget her name) seemed a bit non-plussed at the media attention, but gamely held her own on the rights of all to choose. Good on her. For me, the amusing part of the story is that anyone would want to use any of the toilets in that building. They are after all rather dingy.