I walked into the Apple Store in San Francisco tonight fully expecting to walk out with a brand-new MacBook Pro — the 2.53 GHz model, if at all possible. After 30 minutes playing with all of Apple’s latest laptops, I was stunned to find myself instead walking out the door with a 2.4 GHz MacBook and a smile on my face.
The Top Line: The Aluminum MacBook is the perfect heir to the 12″ PowerBook G4. It’s light, rugged, and meant to be used as a true laptop — it actually runs cooler than my 12″ PowerBook from 2003. Apple hit it out of the park with this thing, and I couldn’t be more delighted. To learn why, click through.
A Lust Object With Strength to Spare
If you were wondering just why Steve Jobs was so obsessed with the manufacturing process on the new MacBooks, five seconds with the new line should clear up any confusion. The new MacBooks are beautiful, strong, and lighter than I could have guessed. I would say my new lappy is impossibly thin, but I have played with a MacBook Air, so I won’t pretend that’s the case. In every regard, it’s stronger, less flexible, and more rugged than any consumer laptop in history. Seriously. You could throw this thing against a wall, and you would break the wall, not your MacBook. And it’s so nice to have a magnetic latch on an aluminum Mac the interaction is just phenomenal. This is a road warrior’s dream.
Stunning Screen and Magnificent Keyboard
Switching over from a 12″ PowerBook was a snap. If I didn’t know better, I would say that Apple has positioned the top of the trackpad at the same distance from the keyboard, which has meant I’ve started typing more rapidly on this thing than on any new Mac I have ever picked up. The LED glossy screen is also significantly prettier than I was expecting. Reflections are less than I anticipated, and movies look really pretty here — nice dark blacks and incredibly popping colors.
Setting iPhoto (And Everything Else) to Overdrive
I know this will make me sound like someone who’s moving on from a six-year-old computer, but I can’t believe how much better iPhoto performance is now. I can scroll through thousands of photos in seconds and have all of them render. The graphics performance is so much better than the previous generation that it feels like a completely different kind of machine. HD video performance is absolutely flawless — dramatically better than what I’ve seen on the past White MacBooks. I’m in the process of downloading the Doom 3 demo to test 3-D performance, and I’ll report back once I’ve gotten a chance to mess around with it.
A steal at well, OK, at its own price
As many others have mentioned, this computer is not cheap — it’s a bit more expensive than the previous generation black MacBook, but it also delivers so much more, it’s hard to be bothered by the price difference. In addition to everything previously mentioned, hard drive upgrades are a snap — all you do is flip it over, pop a hatch, and swap. It’s really great. RAM upgrades are trickier, but I’ve got 4GB on the way from Crucial right now, so I’ll let you know how that goes, too. For now, the performance with only 2GB is excellent.
Mini DisplayPort is Still Stupid
Yeah, I’m not going to let this go.
Written by Pete Mortensen on October 17th, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on Apple and Hardware and MacBook and Macintosh and Reviews and review.
Apple promised that it would finally pull its attention off the cash cow iPhone and iPod product lines to spotlight notebooks at an event this morning, and they weren’t kidding. New MacBook, new Air, new Pro, and a new matching Cinema Display for good measure. The design team absolutely hit it out of the park on these machines, which are all glass, shiny black accents, and subtly tapered corners. Like the iMac whose design they refine and make significantly more appealing, these machines look like they were just made to sync with an iPhone or iPod touch (and, if anything, they make the continued use of white plastic docks for those devices look increasingly incongruous). This is Apple’s best design work, and it’s for a Mac — something we haven’t seen since the 12″ PowerBook G4 that I’m typing on was introduced. Read on for the Pros and the Cons…Pros: The new MacBooks are stunningly beautiful, but the designs are also functionally better. For the first time, Apple’s pro line of notebooks can be opened at a finger’s touch. No button release, just a nice, smooth magnetic latch. The models are made from a single block of aluminum, which makes these machines lighter, better for the environmental, and noticeably more sturdy — and free of screws — than their predecessors. Each sports a much larger, low-friction glass trackpad optimized for multitouch.
Just as importantly, the new MacBook family’s external changes were matched by praiseworthy, significant upgrades under the hood that go far beyond just chucking in a new processor and a bigger hard drive. The biggest change is the use of a system-on-a-chip from NVIDIA that sports the GeForce 9400M graphics processor. Compared to the built-in Intel GMA x3100 of the previous MacBooks, this is a brawny graphics performer, capable of handling Apple’s most demanding pro apps, including Aperture and Final Cut Studio. This is the first credible graphics performer in an Apple consumer line in ages. Much lower on the list for immediate impact but incredibly symbolically important is the extension of an SSD option to all models, not just the Air — and the drive is user-accessible and really easy to change. You can buy today and toss in an SSD when it’s affordable.
Cons: Even when Apple nails it, there are inexplicable decisions to second-guess. Most notable among these is the introduction of Mini DisplayPort, an Apple-only version of an emerging video standard. I really don’t get this choice at all. It’s barely smaller than a full-size DisplayPort, but it’s just enough to be incompatible with all existing DisplayPort monitors. Worse, Apple doesn’t offer an adapter to hook it to full-size DisplayPort or the far-more ubiquitous HDMI for watching HD iTunes rentals on your TV without an extra audio cable. The new standard also requires an incredibly expensive adapter ($100!) to hook it up to any monitor requiring DVI Dual Link, such as Apple’s 30″ Cinema Display. Out of the box, you can connect these machines to Apple’s 24″ LED Cinema Display — AND THAT’S IT. In previous generations, Apple always at least made their computers ready to hook up to a standard video source, whether DVI or VGA. This time, they want $30 just to think about using a non-Apple monitor — or even using a slightly older Apple monitor. It will be inexcusable if Apple doesn’t bring out both a Mini DisplayPort-to-HDMI and Mini DisplayPort-to-DisplayPort in the next year. You see how outrageous this is? Apple has made me type “DisplayPort” three times in just eight words!
There are other puzzlements. The MacBook Air now looks practically retro, since it only got an under-the-hood upgrade instead of the black glass bezel. The MacBook no longer has FireWire of any kind, so wave goodbye to directly hooking up a camcorder for iMovie at the consumer level. The mandatorily glossy screen reduces choice dramatically and makes the line even more inappropriate for professional color graphic design work than the previous generation.
Verdict: Other than the bizarre choice of Mini DisplayPort and the likely controversial choice of glossy screens only, these machines absolutely hit it out of the park. I have held out for five and a half years with my PowerBook G4 12″, and I’m finally ready to take the plunge. Well-done, Apple, and get them in stores as soon as you can!
Written by Pete Mortensen on October 15th, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on Apple and Hardware and Macintosh.
Erroneous MacBook Pro Mock-Up Courtesy Ars Technica
This has been a gangbuster summer for Apple. First came the iPhone 3G announcement in June, alongside OS X iPhone 2.0 with the AppStore, Mobile Me, and HD video in iTunes, then came a new round of incremental but strong new iPods, and amazing news about a major uptick in Mac sales during a down economy. In spite of some software issues, Apple is coming out with huge new gains in multiple markets and is healthier than just about any other tech company.
And yet, unless Apple rolls out rumored new Macs next Tuesday, all of that will start to look suspect. To find out why, click through!The latest scuttlebutt holds that, going on three months after every other computer company on the planet has introduced laptops based on the Montevina platform from Intel, Apple will finally bring out updated MacBooks regular and Pro on Tuesday, Sept. 23. These are faster, lower-power, and mature chips. And they’re really late.
There are plenty of good reasons why Apple didn’t bring out new MacBooks this summer. The iPhone is Apple’s most important single initiative right now. Then bringing out new iPods as Back to School ended was the top priority, which Apple tackled last week. Get a nice two-week buffer, and you have Tuesday. The company’s biggest annual updates are wrapped up, and now it’s high time for Apple to maintain its core business. If, for some reason, Apple can’t deliver, I’m really concerned.
That’s because waiting until two weeks after new iPods makes sense. It’s planned marketing to maximize impact of each launch. Being later than that suggests a resource challenge that Apple isn’t prepared to meet, which raises major questions about the sustainability of the company’s long boom of late. We’ve seen this before. The original iPhone’s software needed so much work that lots of developers were pulled off of Mac OS X Leopard in order to make the device ship on time. And when Leopard emerged, it was noticeably lacking in the polish Apple typically delivers.
But that was just software — Apple’s hardware outside of handhelds was still shipping on time and on the cutting edge. If hardware is getting slowed down, too, it starts to look like Apple is growing to quickly to maintain its core business as it ought to. And that couldn’t happen at a worse time. Mac sales are through the roof right now. Apple is a bigger and bigger force in computers. And Apple’s not keeping pace, even though they’re working off of the same chips as the rest of the market. Over the long term, that could prove poisonous to the brand.
Written by Pete Mortensen on September 19th, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on Apple and Macintosh and Rumors.
Apple released the OS X 10.5.5 update in the US on Monday afternoon to immediate acclaim as an all-out assault on bugs. Despite initial skepticism, even TUAW, which was first to the tape, acknowledged the release notes are “quite detailed.”
Gizmodo provided a laundry list of items addresed in the update, with MacWorld shortly touting 30 bugs fixed in the new software. Not six hours later, ComputerWorld upped the ante to 70 bugs fixed.
Security experts are finally satisfied the “Dan Kaminski exploit,” referring to the researcher who disclosed a critical flaw in DNS that made it much easier than originally thought to “poison” the cache of DNS servers, or insert bogus information into the Internet’s routing infrastructure, has been fixed.
Apple also updated Mac OS X’s implementation of BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain), the open-source DNS software maintained by the Internet Software Consortium (ISC), to keep it current with an early-August version that ISC released to solve performance issues that had shipped in the original fix for Kaminsky’s vulnerability.
The update also fixes a number of non-security flaws, according to the release notes. iCal and Mail both received more than half a dozen fixes, Time Machine got slapped around a bit, and MobileMe even came in for some love.
See the complete list of adjustments after the jump. (more…)
Written by Lonnie Lazar on September 16th, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on Apple and Macintosh and Software.
A film that looks at the evolution and culture surrounding the Macintosh has been selected to the shortlist of the 2008 Naperville Independent Film Festival which takes place next week.
This is the first time the film, a documentary called, ‘Welcome to Machintosh’, has been screened in the US since new interview footage with original Apple co-founder Ron Wayne was added to the movie. Click here to watch the trailer on YouTube.
That exclusive interview was added just before the movie’s European premiere at the Globians Documentary Film Festival in August. The documentary mixes history, criticism and Apple idolatory into an exploration of the early years of Apple as seen through the eyes of Apple employees, engineers, resellers and supporters.
(more…)
Written by Jonny Evans on September 15th, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on Apple and Macintosh.
