As predicted by many, Apple today announced upgrades to their Macbook and Macbook Pro line of computers. Both feature the new 45nm Intel Penryn processors, larger hard drives, 802.11n wifi, and for the Macbook Pro, a multi-touch trackpad. Both are “available immediately, shipping immediately.” No word on the iPhone SDK.
New Macbooks, Macbook Pros Unveiled
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Adam Scheinberg
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Because everytime these release ANYTHING, I want it. And the thing is, I can’t figure out why they don’t refresh their hardware – at least the CPUs and hard drives, more regularly. Yet the proof is there – it’s big news when they tweak their line, the same thing Dell does several times a week.
It’s not big news – the web makes it big news!
Apple has totally self-generating hype from the community.
Don’t you think Linux advocates jump for joy at each new Ubunut Alpha?
I think it’s fair, because Dell could only wish for a strong community of excited users, regardless if I, or you like said equipment or not.
Why don’t they do more HW refreshes? I think stories like this would soon get boring if the press reported an update every 2 weeks. Also, maybe Apple are worried about “Osborning” their sales. ATM it seems they do a refresh about every 6 months. That’s long enough for potential customers to put the thought of waiting for something marginally more powerful out of their minds. Why buy V1 when V1.1 is “just round the corner”?
Personally I’d much rather have a single-touch touchscreen than a trackpad of any sorts.
I’ve never got on with trackpads.
Give me a TrackPoint any day. I’d give my left arm for something like the Thinkpad X series, where the trackpad was left off entirely.
All hail the red dot!
I agree with this. I have been a loyal ThinkPad user for years, but I am heavily leaning toward an Apple this time. The main thing I will miss is the TrackPoint, which is a major feature for me.
Alas, it looks like I will have to get used to the touchpad.
The lack of a TrackPoint and overall durability issues are the only things that keep me away from Macs (and addicted to Thinkpads). I’ve been looking longingly at the OSx86 project to merge my two loves.
Until I can get that working satisfactorily, though, it’s Linux on the Thinkpad for me.
I made that jump nearly 2 years ago. It took awhile to get accustomed to the touchpad. But, Apple’s is so well integrated with their software that it was a very easy transition. Further, Apple’s build quality, IMHO, rivals that of the old thinkpads (IBM) and their customer service has been first-rate, like IBM in my experience. The whole experience has been the best computer experience I have ever had. I have been converted and only regret that I do not have more funds for Apple acquisition. Unfortunately, I am quickly becoming a zealot.
Anyone else not ‘excited’ by the release?
I looked at the specs and didn’t find much to be thrilled with. A small bump in the processor speed and type is pretty cool and on the Macbooks, a bigger standard HD.
Unfortunately, I have upgraded my Macbook already – running a Nov 06 with 250 GB HD, 3 GB of RAM.
Just ‘wanted’ to see more, I guess.
Bill
Well, I have a original Macbook with a 250 GB hard drive and 2 GB RAM and those new macs look appealing to me. Why? Faster processor and better video chip. That and the fact that my Macbook is looking slightly worn after nearly 2 years of being used 12+ hours a day and having to run throughout the night.
But I might wait for the next revision before upgrading or I’ll save and get a Macbook Pro.
Well I bought a MacBook (or should I say BlackBook) in the end of january, but it was returned within the week because of serious noise issues…yet, I am planning to buy a new one. I am so glad I returned it now that the new upgrades are out. Just hope that if I buy one now the noise issues are gone.
Ahh nevermind. Looks like these new ones (Penryn) also have the CPU whine problems.
That’s very disappointing. The CPU whine is something that I find rather annoying with my first gen Macbook. I thought they’d have sorted it out by now.
Anyone know if there is anything they can do? Or is it specific to the Intel chips (i.e. other laptops with the Penryn processor whine too)?
Super-fast processor.
Huge hard drive.
Combo drive.
It was ridicoulus in 2004, now I don’t know what to think.
Do they know that a lot of people notice too late that they can’t burn a stupid DVD with their shiny new MacBook? Or those who don’t buy one, just for that?
And if you plan to resell it: when I replaced my iBook with a second hand MacBook, I got the cheaper I found with a superdrive, didn’t even look at those without.
Try: “Apple suck”, they would never be able to do shit like that in a non monopolic market ;/
What monolopic market? You can buy any other laptop you want from any vendor. And people who require Mac OS X, can complain to Apple directly, it’s Apple’s ‘loss’ not IBM’s or Dell’s or anybody else’s.
Monopolistic? They have less than 10% of the market. How can you possibly call that a monopoly?
Some people are not bothered about burning dvd’s with a macbook anyway, so much wasted battery life for one dvd, it’s overrated. I’d rather wirelessly transfer stuff than, dvd burning is so yesterday
I find it interesting that according to the technical specs, the projected battery life for the 17″ 1920×1200 screen (with LED backlight) is half an hour longer than the 17″ 1650×1080 screen (without LED backlight).
I guess LEDs must be a real power-saver.
802.11 n was already there and they should have had 256MB vram from the begining but Apple suck.
I know it’s only a small thing but has anyone noticed that the apple remote is now an optional extra on the Macbook (unless i read it wrong).
I know a lot of people probably don’t even use the remote but i think it’s a bit cheap of apple to now have it as an optional extra.
Nothing really new for Macbooks.
Instead i was interested in the iMacs
Still no update for the Mac mini… What are they waiting for? Or maybe they just want to kill it…
agreed, all I would like it a new mini, bigger hard drive, new processor, but most importantly, and HDMI output
A merge of the Apple TV + mini with 1080p output.
That would be nice.
I am surprised the MacBook was updated so soon, but I guess the processor has become a commodity part like the SuperDrive and the MacBook Pro will have to rely on other features to make it “professional”.
Since the format war is over I wonder if the iMac will get a BluRay drive with its next refresh, which is why it was not updated with the MacBook Pro.
This leaves the Mac mini. I figured with its next refresh we would see it get Santa Rosa while keeping the Merom processor, but now I think it will get both Santa Rosa and Penryn. Not only will this help keep costs down, but the entire Mac line will have processors that can take advantage of SSE4.
Blu-ray/shmu-ray – Apple has made it clear that their chips are resting on no more physical media.
There WILL be Blu-ray on high end Macs soon, I’d wager, but Blu-ray is not they way they want to go for delivering consumer media.
Edit: Here’s proof that Apple is pushing a “zero media” initiative -> http://www.macrumors.com/2008/02/26/itunes-is-number-2-music-retail…
Edited 2008-02-26 18:29 UTC
Yeah, because everybody like to download/stream content on their PC.
I still prefer to own a physical media, with everything on it, full 1080p, TrueHD sound and all the extra.
I wonder where the real MacBook Pro update is?
It just seems odd that every Mac now has the chiclet type keyboard, even desktops, except this one.
I’m typing this on an older MacBook Pro and the keyboard is nowhere near as nice as the MacBook IMO.
Edited 2008-02-26 19:41 UTC
And OS news is once again Mac news.
Why do every new product by Apple have to be a news item ?
We don’t hear when Dell, HP, Microsoft, Creative or any other releases some new hardware/software.
But we get every little tiny bit from Apple, that is VERY annoying.
And really disrespects the name of this site, OS NEWS, not Apple news, and also not hardware news.
Please admins, do something about all the apple hype news.
Without all of you folks policing what I am able to read on OSNews, I don’t know what I would do – especially since they force me to read every article. I think they use mind-control, or some variant of the VNC protocol. Again, thanks for the service.
Hmm, let’s see…
“Another GNOME-Mono Discussion”..No, not OS news. Fail.
“New Macbooks, Macbooks Revealed”..Not this one either. Fail.
“IE8 Beta 1 Coming to Testers Soon, to Public Afterwards”.. Nope. Fail again.
“Preload: the Linux Superfetch/PreBinding Equivalent”.. No, fail.
And so on..Wouldn’t really be much to read here. If it’s only Mac-related stuff you’re complaining about..Hmm, they seem to be rather popular, atleast looking at the number of comments. And there are lots of news about Microsoft related stuff and Linux related stuff so why not about Apple related ones too? Should they just boycott Apple related news just because you think OSNews is Apple Hype News?
As you can see, atleast I clearly disagree with you.
All of those except Apple hardware news are about important pieces of operating systems – major desktop environment for *nix systems, default Windows web browser and inner workings of Linux.
I am sick of news about minor upgrades to some hardware company computers. Why don’t we get to read about Dell, HP, Fujitsu-Siemens etc?
Maybe you should get a Mac, and see what all the fuzz is about. Seriously though, Apple have a very small product line, that are extremely popular. Any update in these is welcome, and very interesting to Mac people.
If you don’t understand that this is different from other vendors like Dell that have a big jungle of models then I don’t know what to say. Apple updates their product line maybe once every six months or so, and a lot of people want to read about it.
“major desktop environment for *nix systems”. Are you kidding me? A quick search on “KDE” in the search field reveals “KDE 3.5.9 Released”. That’s right, an incremental update in a desktop environment I think totally blows, completely uninteresting to anybody else. Yet I don’t complain about it, because I have the choice not to read it. But I do understand it might be interesting to others.
If you have nothing better to do than bitch about articles you don’t find interesting, you should seriously consider getting out more.
Again, this is OSnews. And I have used Macs and OSX. Nice and good looking computers but so are Sony Vaios, for example.
Hmm, they seem to be rather popular, atleast looking at the number of comments.
Yes by the number of comments, but if you look at the market share world wide, it is rather tiny.
Thats why i called it hyped, actually over hyped.
Of the about 10 people i know who has a Apple computer, only 1, yes only 1 is using it for OSX, the rest of them use it only for Windows XP or Windows Vista. Why, simply because OSX is to weird for them, the lack of needed software. So why buy a Mac ? they think it looks nice.
To them it is only a piece of expensive hardware that looks nice, the OS the simply throw away, but they still need to pay for it.
Heh, anecdotal evidence ftw.
No one I know who has a Mac has anything other than Mac OS X installed. And that’s upwards of 20 people.
I wish that I could buy Mac OS X to run legally on my PC because the Apple Mac hardware line-up is so limited. I know the standard lines about how I can run other software on hardware from other vendors but I could care less about Apple’s hardware I just want OS X.
Why are there still such gaping holes in Apple’s line-up? It’s frustrating that the DVD-burner is not standard across their entire line. I mean even $600 laptops at Wal-Mart have DVD-burners this seems like an odd move by Apple. There are still no 15″ or 17″ screen options for their consumer laptop line. They never released a real successor to the 12″ Powerbook and no the MacBook Air does not count because it is an ultra-portable not a small stature MacBook Pro. Also why is their least expensive laptop $1099? Can they really not release a laptop for $999 or less?
Also whatever happened to the Mac Mini? And there is still no xMac which is seems like a product with a market. Are they afraid an xMac would cannibalize sells of their Mac Pros. Also why do they have such a weird strategy with the Apple TV? They could either add its functionality to the Mac Mini and other Macs or open it up for third-party development.
Also why doesn’t Apple develop some kind of framework for adding TV functionality to their hardware and software. Even if they didn’t release the product themselves and you had to buy some kind of add-on there is obviously a market for it.
Also why do they not update their LCD line more often? It also seems to me like if Apple would keep up with things better they could have a wider selection of LCD screen sizes and release televisions since they are basically a consumer electronics company now anyway?
Sorry for the rant but if we’re going to talk about this subject I think it’s useful to wonder about what seems like such obvious flaws in otherwise nice products.
http://www.elgato.com/elgato/na/mainmenu/home/what-is-eyetv.en.html
Also, TV is a hot potato. The TV standards vary from region to region and the cost of supporting all standards is high. Even something as universal as PAL varies a lot over regions across Europe.
I’d love to have a choice of the keyboards. I dig the new fullsize keyboards for my workstations.
I sure as hell would like to have that in a laptop and the small screen size for the Macbook doesn’t do a damn thing for me.
After installing leopard on both of my Macs(intel iMac”24 and intel MacMini, and friends powerbookG4)
DVD-R can’t be mounted. It insist rejecting the DVD out after few mins of trying to mount. DVD+R can be mounted but nor DVD-R and DVD+R can be burned. This issue occured on 3 of the Macs. And I’ve seen user having the very same issue as mine. We had a issue like that with the ‘eject’ button on keyboard for 2-3month on Tiger last year. Apple didn’t make announcement to inform user before, and not informing now.
I wonder how would it be if Windows user had the same problem with DVD burning.. i guess it would have been called a scandal. But Mac’s world, its silence.
Apple seem to cancel my and other people’s user accounts on discussion to keep that silent.. way you go apple
I love Mac’s and OSX, its a price I had to pay as it seems
What would i do with faster CPU or ram if I can’t simply burn/read DVD’s..
I’ve never had a problem burning DVDs with my Macbook. Perhaps there is something else that’s an issue here? Posting on a Mac users’ forum like macosx.com/forums would get you a lot better results than posting at the end of a new item on OSNews.