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MacBook Pros Upgraded and Shipped
Moby Cock writes "Apple Insider is reporting that Apple has started shipping the new MacBook Pro with an upgrade to the CPU clock speed. The two models now sport 1.83 GHz and 2.0 GHz Core Duos (up from 1.67 GHz and 1.83 GHz). A 2.16 GHz upgrade is also available. The price point remains the same." Dear Apple: Slashdot needs to review 5 of these indefinitely. Thank you XOXO ;) Seriously, i'm waiting for someone to give good benchmarks on these- especially testing for Warcraft. Now that it has a new Universal Binary I can't wait to see how it holds up against a modern windows machine.
It is still rev 0. Ill personally wait for Apple and Intel to get the major kinks out of their perspective products. Mabey next year. But still I am glad the CPU speed it is shipping is a little higher then advertised becaues other laptops were shipping now with the faster chip.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Why unbundle Safari? Are you saying they shouldn't ship it with their machines and the OS? Uhhhhhh, why? It's not tied into the OS in any way like IE on Windows, and you're free to use Firefox, Camino, Opera or any other browser.
Slashdot: 24 hours behind every other site or your money back!
More hardware, more options. Especially if you talk price-matching, we know MacBooks aren't exactly cheap.
Yeah, because I have so many options for video when spec'ing out my Dell laptop.
Oh, wait, you wanted to compare a laptop to your gaming machine with it's $500 video card?
Sure. That makes sense.
Not if they're pro laptops vs consumer desktops
Move to Europe, the local sites have (at time of writing) not upgraded the MacBook....
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
Does anyone have any idea what the battery life of these things are? It was previously unannounced because they were still testing pre-shipping versions. Well, now they're shipping. And the only thing on the technical specs page is a footnote that says
Yeah, that helps.
*blinking cursor*
Just because the browser comes pre-installed doesn't mean that it's bundled quite the way IE is. You can still remove it, and install any other browser you want. Most Linux distros by default will install a browser too. Try installing KDE without Konquerer. I'm pretty sure it isn't possible.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
If it was a PowerPC-based Mac with internals done by PowerPC-partner then I'd wait. Seeming this is designed by Intel with way way more in debt experience making personal computers I wouldnt worry as much. The external casing is still basically a tried & tested Apple Albook so I wouldnt worry too much.
If you're a pro user with a need for native Adobe & Macromedia apps then I'd wait for the universal binaries that are expected late this year or 2008. By that time OS X 10.5 Leopard is expected to be out.
Well Windows Vista setup boots, but there is no graphics driver for the UGA BIOS so you don't see anything - but remember the keypresses to exit Vista setup and Robert is your mothers brother the computer reboots.
So it seems the like "Running Windows natively" problem has become one of getting Windows drivers for the Mac hardware which given most of it is now Intel standard stuff means we are really waiting for Apple or Microsoft (or perhaps ATI) to release that driver or for someone to hack the Windows driver to work with the Mac BIOSed X1600s.
$2B OR NOT $2B = $FF
Wait for VPC or VMWare. Letting Windows boot your hardware is just begging for a world of pain.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
So far Classic is a dead issue (pun intended, but unfortunate for us and Apple) and I'm sure there will be more.
To me it's just another cycle of waiting (hoping) vendors update thier products (as well as making the upgrades affordable) or manufacturers bother to re-code thier device drivers to work on yet anothewr new Apple platform.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Yes we know that macbooks aren't exactly cheap ... and nor are gaming capable PC laptops -- they come out quite comparable pricewise. You certainly can't buy a PC laptop with all of the features of the MacBook for much less than the MacBook costs.
James P. Barrett
So my question is, why should I switch?
My question is, why should we care?
If you're actually happy with your Windows box, good for you. Why even post in this thread?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
What's great about the MacBook again? It it not compatible with PC Cards, and there are zero available peripherals for its ExpressCard/34 slot. It has no way to read a CompactFlash card except for a USB reader. It has no modem, except for a USB modem. It has no GPRS/EDGE/EVDO/1xRTT wireless WAN card, and no slot for adding one. It has no SmartCard reader. The battery life, although unannounced, is expected to be average.
As far as I can tell, the MacBook lacks any kind of feature that sets it apart, other than running MacOS X. The Acer TravelMate, Ferrari series and the Thinkpad X series seem to be much better computers if you don't need MacOS X.
I'm planning to stay with my 6-year-old PowerBook G3 until Apple releases a computer that's somewhere near as useful.
But my point still stands. How many parts of KDE become unusable once you remove Konquerer? The browser/ HTML rendering engine is an important part of any modern Desktop. The real question is, how deep does the browser tie into the actual OS/Kernel? If the browser is just a component that lets you render HTML/CSS/JS, then it's probably doing just what a browser is supposed to do. Certain linux packages require certain desktop libraries (KDE,Gnome) to be installed in order to function. IE is a different beast altogether because it goes much deeper than the application level, right into the OS level causing lots of security problems.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
A modern Windows machine will always outperform a MacBook in games. More hardware, more options.
Hrm... But aren't they all using the same hard ware? I mean these are all laptops right? They are using Intel and then maybe ATI or nVidia? Hardware is not different.
Unless you count AMD.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
So you are spending close to $2000 so you can have slightly better graphics in WarCraft?
So you are spending close to $2000 so you can have the same graphics in your internet/email clients?
Most people I know could be using a computer made 10 years ago with no problems at all, at least this guy needs the power for something. You should be picking on the people buying $2000 computers to play solitaire. I believe you can get a high quality deck of cards for something like $3.
Probably trying to clean out inventory.
Hey now be careful, some Macs play the sound of breaking glass when the machine doesn't POST properly. Though I liked the sound of the car crash on the first generation PowerMacs when the machine would not POST. IIRC all of the Blue and White G3 Macs and newer Macs have boring, but actually useful beeps when the machine can't POST.
Impersonating Tycho from Penny Arcade since before there was a PA.
No, you're not alone. There are plenty of idiots who see hipocricy in the fact that a diverse community of thousands of people can contain many different viewpoints.
Also, I've only noticed a small minority of comments in this discussion talking about XP. It's hardly characteristic of the entire discussion.
I know it is a bit much to expect from a slashdot posting, but those of us who can read English learned long ago that there is a difference between "has started shipping", which is what the slashdot posting says, versus "will begin shipping", which is what the article actually says.
Yes, the article said "this week", which is pretty soon. But I still maintain that there is a difference between the future an dthe past. Conventional of me, I know.
1.) Of course it deserves an article. Apple is shipping upgraded computer specs at no extra charge. Tell me the last time Dell did that.
2.) If you don't like it, you didn't have to click "Read More," click "Reply," and actually type out a post.
3.) The Apple-bashing price argument has been disproved time and time again.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Bravo -- you hit the nail on the head exactly.
I think this pretty much sums up Apple's retail strategy completely.
The closest they ever get to a "sale" (usually a bit before the holidays, another one over the summer) is that they'll up-spec the whole lineup by a certain amount. The beauty of this is that people generally don't see the price on the laptop they bought decreasing -- they usually don't bump the specs by so much at once that the middle-of-the-road system instantly becomes the $999 one, it happens gradually. Even though the different systems (Fast, Faster, Fastest) become more powerful over time, it avoids the feeling of being ripped off that's common to computer purchasers when they go online six months later and find out the system they purchased for $1k is now $600. You'll never see that on Apple's site: all you'll ever see are three systems for each model, and always at (about) the same three price points. They just become progressively better, not the same model becoming "cheaper." It's kind of a subtle psychological thing, but it works.
It's also great because most people (most 'average consumers,' and definitely most parents who are buying a computer for a kid) pick out the price they're willing to pay FIRST, then choose specs. So they decide, "okay, I'll spend a grand on a laptop." And that's it -- aside from maybe a little upselling, that's what they're willing to pay. Very few people actually go out with an idea of the specifications of the computer they want to purchase (e.g. "I want a 1.2GHz system with 512MB RAM and a 80GB hard drive with WiFi."). Geeks may do that, but the majority of the people lined up at the Apple Store probably don't.
I have a feeling that the strategy was one that they developed as a company after it became clear that they weren't going to win the megahertz war; you don't want people emphasizing specifications, you want them to associate the price directly with the product, and that product with the user experience. The hardware specs are details. They're nerdy. Ignore them. And people do -- happily.
If you look at how Apple advertises its higher-end products (the Power Macs) you'll notice there's slightly more emphasis on specifications and customization, and less on price. But at the entry level, there are usually three price points, and three products: 'you pays your money and yous gets your computer.'
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Does anyone else here get the irony of /.-ers spending virtual lifetimes bashing 'Doze, hating every byte of M$ kruftware, and yearning for an environmental catastrophe in Redmond, then getting all excited about the potential of running XP on a new MacBook?
Am I alone here when I utter a collossal WTF?
Believe it or not, there are different kinds of people on Slashdot! Whoa!
Some people don't like Microsoft. They probably still don't.
Some people do like Microsoft, and take exception to the fact that they've decided to come to a place where a lot of people don't. They'll post all about how persecuted they are and engage in passive-agressive discussion of the moderation system like "You are going to mod me down for this, I know it! Go ahead and prove me wrong unless you really are a bunch of elitist jerks." They will probably like to boot whatever they like on the Mac(Power)Book.
Some people don't care. They just want to run what they want to run on their hardware of choice. They'd like to know that Windows will run so that they can run whatever they want to run. After all, if Windows will run on it then most likely anything else will.
I know you all are going to mod me down for this, go ahead and prove me wrong unless you really are a bunch of moderators who think that this post doesn't merit a high score based on the quality of its content! Ha! So there.
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
Wow, being upgraded from 1.83 GHz to 2.0 GHz for free constitutes being "screwed" now. That's some way to twist it!
Lalala
Oh my you are right. It is an easy choice. Thanks for the info!!!
Now if i can just find out why my WoW game wont load on the PS2.... Might have to call in support. You think its a driver issue?
Is the glass half full or half empty? People have already paid (including me) for their Macbooks, not to mention the Macbooks are majorly backordered (if you didn't order early, there is close to a month waiting period). At least from my POV, Apple doesn't gain much from bumping up the speeds (at least sales-wise short term) except making their customers happy. Which, could very well increase their sales long term.
What is the price of something other than what someone is willing to pay for it? I was willing to pay the set price for the 1.8GHz, so I'm counting it as a free upgrade.
With the Intel-based Macs, I wonder if Apple will feel the pressure to keep up the GHz race with other PCs. If so, does that mean an updated CPU every few months?
Apple could dodge the GHz number when they're on the PowerPC. That's harder to do now.
I ordered a MacBook Pro on January 10th. I ordered the top of the line (at that point) standard configuration. My first ship date was Feb. 15. My next ship date was Feb. 28. Today, I received confirmation that my NEW order date would be March 3.
Needless to say, I'm livid with Apple. I cancelled my order. I then called my local Apple Store (Newark, DE). They said they would be receiving MBPros next week.
In other words, Apple's priority is to ship MacBook Pros to people who have not even purchased them yet, rather than those who have been waiting for what will be nearly two months.
As a twenty-year Apple customer, I am ticked to say the least.
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!