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…
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