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Apple Announced 17" MacBook Pro
artlu writes "According to Reuters news, Apple has announced the launch of the 17" MacBook Pro. The new MacBook will retail for $2,799, come with iLife '06, and begins shipping next week. Details are not yet on Apple's website, but hopefully these notebooks will be triple booting as well!"
Taken from http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jht ml?articleID=186100229
"The graphics processor of Apple Computer Inc.'s MacBook Pro portable has been deliberately slowed down, a Mac user reported recently, probably as part of the overall effort to lower the heat the machine generates.
According to a posting on the French language site MacBidouille, a user identified as "SpacetitoX" uncovered the underclocking of the MacBook's ATI Radeon Mobility X1600 graphics chip after adding Windows XP to the computer, then running a beta version of the "ATITools" overclocking utility.
By replacing the existing ATI drivers added to the MacBook Pro for dual-booting into Windows XP, SpacetitoX was able to boost one benchmark's result from 61 frames per second to 91."
Funnypics
- FireWire 800 (9-pin) is included, in addition to FireWire 400 (6-pin) (so no, FireWire, and particularly FireWire 800, is not dead, as some like to continually predict)
- 3 USB 2.0 ports are included; 2 on the left, 1 on the right
- The left side ports are: power, 2 USB 2.0, analog and digital optical audio in and out, ExpressCard/34; the right side ports are: DVI (supports VGA, S-Video, composite), 10/100/1000 ethernet, FireWire 800, FireWire 400, 1 USB 2.0, security port
- An 8x dual layer SuperDrive is included (unlike the 15" MacBook Pro)[1]
- While this is known by many, it bears repeating that the wireless chipset in all Intel-based Macs supports 802.11a/b/g, though Apple doesn't advertise 'a'
- The 1680 x 1050 resolution of the 17" display is the same as many desktop 20" widescreen LCDs such as the Apple 20" Cinema Display and the 20" Dell 2007WFP
- Retail $2799, Education/government $2599 with 2.16 GHz Core Duo, 1 GB RAM, 120 GB 5400RPM Serial ATA drive, 256MB ATI Radeon x1600, and 8x dual layer SuperDrive
- For detailed specs, see here
I'd also note that for some people who might think that the 15" MacBook Pro looks like a bad deal next to this, the 17" is simply too large for many people, and many of those same people have no need for the faster dual layer SuperDrive, nor for FireWire 800.
And the Apple we site does not have to explicitly say it for us to know that, yes, of course the 17" MacBook Pro will support "Boot Camp" (and triple booting[2]), which is simply an umbrella marketing name for a collection of technologies that support booting Windows on Intel-based Macs:
- A Compatibility Support Module (CSM, BIOS compatibility layer) for EFI: this is already a non-beta, supported component of the recent rounds of firmware updates for Intel-based Macs, which the 17" MacBook Pro will ship with
- The ability to live-resize partitions on a GPT formatted volumes: this is already a non-beta, supported component of "diskutil" as of 10.4.6
- A collection of Windows drivers for the hardware in Intel-based Macs: almost all of these are non-beta, preexisting third party drivers
- A setup assistant that brings everything together: this is the only part of the solution, from a technical standpoint, that is "beta"
[1] Some may note that the new 17" MacBook Pro, at the same thickness of the 15" MacBook Pro (1.0"), includes an 8x dual layer SuperDrive versus the 4x single layer drive in the 15" model. It might be recalled that the reasoning for not including a faster, dual layer SuperDrive in the 15" MacBook Pro was because of the necessary space not being available inside the case; the 15" MacBook Pro could only use a 9mm tall mechanism as opposed to the 12mm mechanism currently required for dual layer capability and the greater speed. How, then, can the 17" MacBook Pro (or even the previous 17" PowerBook), at the exact same thickness, include this drive? Does this mean Apple was holding back? Is the 8x DL drive due in a 15" MacBook Pro imminently? The answer is no: the reason why the drive didn't (and still doesn't) fit in the 15" MacBook Pro is because the wider trackpad mechanism Apple chose to use encroaches internally on the space needed for a 12mm drive by about 1/8" laterally. However, this is not the case on the 17" MacBook Pro.
[2] Who wants to dual boot, much less triple boot? I'd rather have all of my environments running side by side in virtualization. And yes, I know there are some specific reasons people may want to dual boot (such as games for native 3D graphics support), and that's fine...but other than for those specific tasks, who would really prefer dual/triple booting over virtualization, especially given the excellent benefits Intel VT now offers for virtual machines?
What's this about, then?
The hardware was underclocked - you can use the ATI tools to reset the clock speed, then when you reboot in os X the new clock will remain. The setting is stored on the video card.
I wish the 12" MacBook would get here. I am in the market right now for an ultraportable for my wife, and would probably get an Apple if they offered it.
The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
Since my own blurb for this was rejected (no blame on the editors, they were probably flooded with stories on this), I'll state an observation here: The 17" PowerBook G4 is now gone, but the 12" model stll hasn't been updated yet. Is that an indication that the rumors about a 13.3" MacBook to replace the 12" PowerBook and the 14" iBook are true?
Oh everything's stolen these days. Why the fax machine is nothing more than a waffle iron with a phone attached!
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
I love my 12" Powerbook. It's SMALL, it's light, it's easy to carry around, it fits in a backpack, it can take a 4' fall onto concrete not even dent (ok, maybe that was just luck). It's perfect. The screen's big enough, and the keyboard is full-sized.
I don't want a giant laptop. I want some features that the bigger ones have, like the illuminated keyboard and maybe a PCCARD slot. I definitely do NOT want the bulk.
Come on, Apple! Gimmie a 12" (or the not-even-rumoured-much 13.1") MacBookPro! And if it can use the same battery as my Powerbook that'd be nice!
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
At $2799 the 17" MacBook Pro with a 2.16Ghz core duo costs the same as the 15.4" model with 2.16 Ghz core duo, one must assume a price drop is imminent on the 15.4" model.
My other sig is extremely clever...
Lots of reports of noise and excessive heat from the first rount of MBPs. Apple's much touted fix resulted in the problem getting worse for many owners (see macintouch.com MBP reader reports). So these issues are still out there, and the heat issue is severe (MBP so hot you can't touch it in places near the keyboard).
Here's hoping that these issues are resolved this time around.
You have to realize that Heat = Wasted Electricity. On a laptop, battery life is bad enough without worrying about the graphics processor killing your battery. I'm sure they could build a laptop with 20 hours battery life. But nobody really seems to be focussing on this. Low power chip + old school graphics card because it doesn't affect office work anyway, and you could probably have a pretty low power computer. Use a slower hard drive, and give it enough ram that it doesn't need to have a swap file, and you'd probably get quite a bit more of life out of the thing.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I got one of the 15" ones just a few days ago. It rocks.
If you have a significant other that isn't interested in computers, get one of these and then demonstrate Frontrow with the remote to go through your photos/music/video. You might find they suddenly take an interest...
Yes, Apple's driver supports the "a" functionality. Also, on page 62 of Apple's MacBook Pro user's guide, it confirms that it is capable of connecting to "any 802.11a-, 802.11b-, or 802.11g-compliant product."
Apple has so far used the Broadcom BCM4311 and Atheros AR5000 Series (AR5006EX) wireless chipsets, both of which support 802.11a/b/g. Don't know what the status with regard to Linux is for any of those chipsets.
Of course, I've used RHEL, Fedora Core, and CentOS happily with networking, in virtualization, on my MacBook Pro, so there's no need to worry about "Linux drivers".
Ugn. please.
every time there is an apple thread, someone comes out and says 'wait PC's are cheaper!! and here is a comparison!!' and then some apple fanatic comes back and refutes it and blah blah blah.
Look, my time is worth money. windows and linux take effort. I want my tools to work, so I can get to the business at hand. when my tools dont work, i have to spend time fixing them simply so i can get back to work. Having used windows previously (which made me even more of a mac fan) I can tell you that my mac 'just works' and windows does not (i mean, it works, kinda, if you know how to set it up right and keep it running, oh, and reboot every so often and.. and.... and...).
So, again, my time is worth money, if the mac were 5 times as expensive as the dell, it would still pay itself off in productivity in about a month in comparison. So, feel free to buy the cheaper machine, more power to yah. I would rather spend my free time with friends and family and my work time being creative. (as opposed to spending my free time fixing my computer, and my work time jumping through hoops to get shit done)
When dell gives those 750$ off coupons they boost the base price so it's not really as good as it seems. So, when buying a dell take a look at the prices when they are not offering any promotions to compare. The deals are still pretty good though, you can get a discount of 25% off or so.
The thing is, Apple's not really competing with Dell as Dell's laptop's are made inexpensiveley. Dell can't be beat on value but Apple's laptops are really nicely made with excellent keyboards and very solid cases. With IBM's laptop division gone to Lenovo, I think Apple laptops are poised to take the high end market, a great place for a company looking for large profit margins.
this is nice, but who would have thought the next Power...MacBook Pro would come out, instead of a 'consumer line' (read, NOT a ~2800$ laptop) MacBook to really get ppl switching.
For me I'm really starting to fall for (or lean hard towards) a Mac Mini Duo -- not only can you triple boot on it, there's now video of it doing 'fast OS switching', much as it does its 'fast user switching'.
Damn, this is getting fun.
fak3r.com
It's exactly the other way around: if you want to be immune from Windows malware, then you should run Windows inside a virtual machine. Then you can restrict it to its own virtual disk (which would just be a big file on your Mac disk), restrict it from accessing the network if you want to, and so on. On the other hand, if you dual-boot into Windows, then a Windows program with sufficient privileges can destroy your Mac partition as easily as it can with the Windows partition: just run fdisk. So there is no fundamental level of extra security in dual-booting.
1. Maintain a tenuous balance on the edge of total collapse for decades 2. ??? 3. Profit
Only in this case, instead of nobody being sure who knows what step 2 is, we all know that Jobs knows, but he won't tell anybody.
English is easier said than done.
I went to the apple site to look at the new powerbook... (excuse me, macbookpro) what did I see? Gray text on a black background! I'm not an old codger by any means, but I can't read that.
Maybe you should adjust the brightness and/or contrast of your monitor. Very light grey text on a black background is the ideal color scheme for monitors. Since the screen is emitting light, even for "black" colored items, it has a tendency to cause eyestrain. Staring at a light for extended periods is just not what our eyes were designed for. The highest contrast of colors is black and white. We're accustomed to black on white due to historical printing technologies, but while it provides the best contrast it also emits the most light and causes the most eyestrain. Reversing the color scheme to be white text on a black background keeps the contrast as high as possible but minimizes the light emission, and hence, minimizes the eyestrain. Darkening the white text to a very light grey helps to soften it a little and further reduce brightness, while only minimally affecting the contrast.
So Apple is using the color scheme that is exactly the ideal, as recommended by numerous independent studies and researchers and as recommended by every design and usability manual I have ever read. This leads me to two conclusions. One, if you're having a problem you probably have your monitor messed up. Two, some people will complain no matter what you do.
Was the Apple user interface group out back having a smoke when this page was being designed?
I doubt it. You'll note the interface tends to a medium to light grey. This provides the ideal contrast compromise with both grey text on black backgrounds (ideal for viewing on monitors and variations of which are the standard for terminal windows and other text interfaces for those of us who have to use them all day) and with black text on a white background, which is the standard printed text view, used by common text editors, word processors, and when viewing anything destined for print.
I can't find anywhere on the site where I can send them a quick email to point out their faux pas, so I have to satisfy myself with ranting here.
Hopefully they won't follow your recommendations, but there is a "contact us" link at the bottom of the page (and all their Web pages), which provides feedback links for the Web site and all the products. The one you want is This one.
Funny--I'm hearing people I wouldn't expect, long-time Wintel users, talking about buying one of the new Macs. It seems there is a lot of pent-up demand for Macs, which has been held back mainly by fear.
What if I get a new Mac and after a few months decide that I actually like Windows better?
What if Apple goes out of business and I can't get software?
What if my employer requires me to use a particular Windows application?
What if a program or game that I want is only available for Windows?
Suddenly, all of these worries have vanished.
That's the IR receiver for the Front Row remote...
Unfortunately, just using an older video chip would not give longer battery life. Mainly because newer chips are manufactured with smaller transistors. So the newer chips can do more work with more transistors taking up about the same amount of space and power. Newer chips also have better power management features, to shut down parts of the chip when they are not in use.
Now, if you took some of the new features of the new chips and removed them, you'd have a smaller/cheaper chip that would take less power. I think this would be a great idea. The main problem is that the manufacturers think they wouldn't make enough money on them.
Intel makes ultra-low-power (ULV) CPUs, but they're not used all that much in mainstream laptops. I suppose people still want fast computers, even when they don't have that much need for the speed.
And don't forget the wireless and LCD backlight. Those are other major contributors of power utilization. Hopefully OLED will help resolve the latter. I'm not sure if there's any hope in reducing power used by radio transceivers.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Sounds neat; just out of curiosity, what are you using for the virtualization?
Parallels Workstation. Takes full advantage of Intel VT, too.
And perhaps I'm revealing my ignorance here, but how does the guest OS on a virtualized system handle networking? There must be some sort of psuedo-device driver that you install so that it can talk to the virtualized 'hardware,' or else the virtualization software must emulate some kind of commonly-supported networking hardware. I guess I'm just curious what you have to do to the guest OS, if anything, to get it to work inside the sandbox.
It can either be NATed behind the host OS, or it can have its very own IP on the same network as the host machine. The virtual machine has an emulated network interface with its own MAC address. You don't have to "do" anything in the guest OS. It's a very generic network card that has had drivers available (and in my case, always included) in every OS I've installed so far.
Right now all my equipment (Mac stuff, anyway) is PPC based; however I find the whole virtualization concept really intriguing and I'm hoping that by my next round of upgrades, it'll be sufficiently mature to make dual-booting (or having a separate PC for Linux connected with a KVM switch, my current solution) unnecessary.
Well, you'll likely be very happy then, because, even at this early stage, that's exactly what I'm using it for right now. All on one machine that I can carry around with me.
but every ounce of space counts
In space, an ounce is weightless.
Turn up the volume!!
=)
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
The trackpad interferes with the 12mm drive but not with the 9mm drive. I bet the edge of the trackpad, by his description, rests slightly over the 9mm drive, but the 12mm drive has no such leeway. On a 17" MBP there is no need for overlapping the devices because the 17" MBP is that much bigger than a 15" MBP
Again, read the post. The trackpad lies on top of the space the 12mm DL DVD-RW drive would sit, so they used the 8mm DVD-RW drive instead in the 15" MBP.
GPL Deconstructed
yes, in fact, it is, but the 20" display is intended to be viewed from further away so it's lower dpi is more excusable. A 1920x1200 17" display is a glorious thing. Hopefully Apple will invent it soon.