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Apple Unveils New Macbook
Several readers have written in to mention that Apple has released the new Macbook on their site. Yahoo! has details from the press release: "With prices starting at just $1,099, the MacBook lineup includes three models: a 1.83 GHz and 2.0 GHz MacBook in a newly designed, sleek white enclosure and a 2.0 GHz MacBook in a stunning new black enclosure. The new MacBook offers performance up to five times faster than the iBook and up to four times faster than the 12-inch PowerBook with a completely new system architecture including a 667 MHz front-side bus and 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM memory expandable to 2GB."
and a 2.0 GHz MacBook in a stunning new black enclosure.
;-)
What the article doesn't mention is that the new black enclosure is made from the same patented finish as the ipod nano
Seriously, $1099 for the low end one is making these look pretty tempting, but I'm going to have to wait for the fourth gen (instead of usual second gen) for mactel stuff.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Leave it to Apple to set the trends again. I bet all the other companies are gonna copy them and come out with black laptops now... ; )
This guy's the limit!
...FireWire is present, as it is on all new Intel-based Macs to date, proving that FireWire isn't going anywhere (anytime soon, anyway) on Apple's computer products. It also totally shatters Jason O'Grady's ridiculous predictions that "FireWire is gone completely from the new Intel iBooks", which were widely accepted as fact. Of course, it made zero sense at that time, too, but that didn't stop it from spreading around the net like wildfire.
;-)
Note also that the MacBook features the Core Duo, not Core Solo, and the screen resolution has increased from 1024x768 on the old 12" iBook and PowerBook to 1280x800.
With the array of connectivity (mini DVI also supports VGA, S-Video, and composite), built-in Bluetooth and 802.11a/b/g (yes, a is included and supported by the OS), the ability to boot Windows natively or use Windows (or other x86 OSes) in virtualization, for just over $1000, this looks to be a great deal.
It appears that some of the traditional differences between the "iBook" and "PowerBook" line are shrinking even more; I wouldn't be surprised if there was no 12" MacBook Pro based on the new MacBook's specifications.
One hopes that Apple is applying a reasonable amount of thermal paste on the new MacBooks.
Apple's website saying the family is complete has no bearing at all on whether we can expect any new arrivals- it's not like they'd put "coming soon" and hurt the sales of the current products.
is a brushed metal MacBook Pro that's black. That would be sweet.
The guitars sound good, now give me about 10db more on the cow bell.
anyone notice that now its 2x256 and not 1x512?
DVI, VGA, S-video and composite out all require adapters (sold separately, of course).
Lies about crimes
This new laptop is much closer to the MacBook Pro than I expected. I thought they might only do Core Solo processors, to create more distinction between the two levels.
I had been planning on getting the 15 or 17" Pro, but looking at the specs on these - and the price, I might go for the MacBook.
The biggest difference I see is the display resolution.. 1280x800, like the older PowerBooks.
Just built me a Dell online and matched up the specs as closely as possible. Here's what I made:
Latitude D620:
Intel® Core(TM) Duo T2400 (1.83GHz) 667Mhz Dual Core
Operating Systems:
Genuine Windows® XP Home Edition, SP2, with media
LCDs:
14.1 inch Wide Screen WXGA LCD Panel
Graphics:
Intel® Integrated Graphics Media Accelerator 950
Memory:
512MB, DDR2-533 SDRAM, 1 DIMM
Hard Drives:
60GB Hard Drive, 9.5MM, 5400RPM
Optical Drive - Modular:
24X CD-RW/DVD w/ Cyberlink PowerDVD(TM)
Wireless LAN (802.11):
Dell Wireless(TM) 1390 802.11g Mini Card
Bluetooth:
Dell Wireless® 350 Bluetooth Module
I assume that a "mini card" with regards to wireless is a plug in thing? I'm pretty sure it would say internal if it was built in, but some one who knows more about Dell can correct me.
Total Price: $1466.00 or 1216.00 after instant rebate.
If they use Windows, they'll call me about their blue screens of death. What to do?
First you stop installing Windows ME on your friends computers.
I mean, it's really not that great value for the black ones. It's quite an expensive price bump for the black finish and an extra few gigs of hard dr....OH GOD I WANT A BLACK MACBOOK!
"Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
Dual Purpose Get the big picture when you join your MacBook with either a stunning 20- or 23-inch Apple Cinema Display by way of a crystal-clear connection miniDVI port. (Requires miniDVI to DVI adapter, sold separately.)
It looks sweet.
Fight Crime - Shoot Back!
Except, of course, that the UK price includes VAT, making the actual price differential 7% or so.
is the addition of screen spanning, mirroring, and lid closed operation with a external monitor. Integrated graphics are a bummer, but are expected given their appearence in the mac mini. The new screen is long overdue (a 1024x768 screen doesn't cut it in 2006). Now the only thing we still are waiting on is a replacement for the powermac, but seeing as how few of the major pro apps are universal binaries, that release may be a ways down the road.
The use of RAM in pairs is due to the inclusion of an Intel Integrated Graphics.
If you put the RAM in pairs the amount of bandwith is double compared to the use of one single module (dual channel vs single channel)
Nice.
I wonder what does Dell charge for a built in hi-res webcam, slot loading optical, 1.08 inch wide "my 5 year old just stepped on it" resistant case, scrollpad, iLife and OS X.
Now it looks even worse for Dell.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
It's late May, HS graduation is around the corner and here comes Apple with its flagship college laptop. At this price point, and with these specs, I'm pretty sure Apple won't be able to fill demand. A it's an $1100 Apple engineered laptop with built-in webcam, wifi and bluetooth that can also run Windows (and run it VERY well) - AWESOME. Sure, nobody's going to be playing games on it - nobody ever bought an Apple laptop to play games before (generalization) - but 90% of college students aren't CS majors and there are probably more people interested in the iSight web cam then in 3D performance.
Not too big, not so small that you can't see the screen, with a LOT of horsepower under the hood and the incredible iLife package to boot. The only comparable performance/form factor laptops I can find after a cursory search are $1700+ VAIOs, so the price point is pretty great too. If I were a betting man, I'd be putting a buy order on some Apple stock today.
(All this said, the only one I would ever think about getting is the lowest-end model and dropping in some extra RAM.)
Or maybe they think that you should pay the 17.5% VAT your government imposes (Tax is not included in US prices, but traditionally IS included in UK prices). This should have been obvious to you, as the Apple UK store even gives you the prices "ex vat": 637.45, 765.11, 875.74. I did the math at today's rate, and the 875.74 comes out to about $1650usd. Which means that you're paying about $150 in import fees and tarriffs.
Apple isn't screwing you. Your government is taxing the shit out of you. Deal with it, or change it.
The new system is availabe in three specs.
It also looks like Apple put together a spec comparison chart, for those who are interested.
Well, I'm gonna get a white 2.0 dual core, upgrade the harddrive for $60 and buy a $5 can of black spray paint. A net savings of $135!
__
Thou hast besquirted me, O leotarded one.
I beleive with certin types of DDR ram, pairing yeilds better proformance than a single bigger DIM, so I would probably match both slots with new ram anyway if I were upgrading; hell, for ~$200 from a 3rd party, why not upgrade to 2GB
Introducing the superfast, blogging, podcasting, do-everything-out-of-the-box MacBook.
Finally, a laptop that can do blogging and podcasting. This is exactly what I've been waiting for! Go Apple!
So, apparently, for no extra charge, you can now get a glossy screen on the MacBook Pro. Can anyone explain to me why you would want a glossy screen? It just seems like it would make the glare rediculous.
I was really hoping Apple would step up and try to develop one. The Win Tablet market is so inadequate.
Decided I'd browse over to Dell and see how big the "Apple premium" is sitting right now.
...So the Apple premium now stands at -$340, close as I can figure.
Dell Inspiron E1405:
14.1" screen (1280x800)
Core Duo 1.83
1 GB RAM (can't get 512)
80 GB HD
Total cost: $1540
MacBook:
13.3" screen (1280x800)
Core Duo 1.83
512 MB RAM
80 GB HD
built-in Webcam
Total cost: $1100
Integrated graphics?
It's the low-end consumer machine. Having integrated graphics is common, just look at other machines in the same price range.
Shipping with 2xSODIMMS? (meaning your tossing out both)
The intel chipset used needs paired RAM chips for reasonable performance.
Black is essentially a premium color? It cost more that the system below it with a $50 upgrade to the HDD.
You were expecting it to cost less than the model below it? Yup it's a $50 hard drive upgrade and tax on the fashion conscious. If you don't like it, don't pay it.
Not good enough.
...then don't buy it. What is the point of complaining here that a machine doesn't have the specs you want?
The only reason I said "anytime soon" was because I knew someone would say "well, FireWire isn't going to around *forever*". Of course it's not. All standards change, and some are supplanted by others.
But when the iPods dropped FireWire, everyone took that as some kind of "hint" that Apple was "backing away" from FireWire, shunning the standard, and quietly putting it to sleep/death. No. That is not the case. It wasn't then, and it isn't now.
The iPods dropped FireWire likely because of a technical/marketing/cost decision. Most iPod purchasers were (and are) Windows PC owners, almost all of whom don't have FireWire, but DO have USB, and most USB 2.0. All of Apple's machines for the last few years also had USB 2.0 (and at least have USB, since 1998). If one interface had to go for standardize chipset and sizing/cost concerns, it seems pretty clear which one it was to be.
Of course, many people took that as a sign that Apple was getting rid of FireWire completely. There was no basis, however, to make that assumption.
As I've said before:
While specific features of future Macintosh computers cannot be predicted, FireWire is an critical protocol that has come to be relied upon. Some important factors to note:
- FireWire usage across the industry is increasing, not decreasing
- FireWire is featured on all currently shipping Intel-based Macs
- FireWire is required for Target Disk Mode, a critical feature that many administrators and the Migration Assistant depend on; USB is not supported for these tasks
- FireWire is increasingly used as the interface of choice on modern digital video and audio equipment
- Since July 2005, all HD cable set top boxes are mandated by the FCC to come with a "functional IEEE-1394 [FireWire] port"
- FireWire is the primary (and often only) transport mechanism used by all digital video (DV) and high definition digitial video (HDV) cameras and decks
- Application software and features on every Mac, like iMovie, iDVD, and the SuperDrive (DVD±RW/CD-RW), depend on FireWire to import video into the computer via DV
For these reasons, it makes no sense that FireWire would have been abandoned now, nor will it be in the near future. *Someday* will machines ship without FireWire? Yeah, and someday they'll ship without USB, too. These standards will die just like everything else does, eventually. Did USB "win" in the mainstream desktop peripheral connectivity war? Yes, of course it did. Long ago. Unfortunately, just because USB and FireWire appeared to compete in some common areas (like desktop storage), the perception was that they were completely competitive standards, and that's not true. Technically, FireWire and USB are a lot different. Could USB be expanded to subsume at least some of the functionality of FireWire? Could a future iteration of USB provide some of the hostless or multi-host peer capabilities of FireWire? Could a universal DV-over-USB standard be adopted? Sure, to all of them. But FireWire is here now, and is used for all of these tasks.
Apple didn't go out of its way to keep FireWire just so the Intel transition was "less disruptive". It keep FireWire because customers need and want it, and its products and product features depend upon it. Apple isn't the only one keeping FireWire alive. It's used all over the industry. All of Apple's computing products will have it for quite some time, and there's no logical or technical reason to believe otherwise.
According to the comparison chart http://store.apple.com/Catalog/US/Images/compariso n_chart.html , both the MacBook and the MacBook Pro have a built in omnidirectional microphone. Why it's not listed on the technical specs, I don't know.
Donald Roeber
Generating 2048 Bits of Randomness...
Apple's web site indicates this new model has a stunning glossy screen. Am I the only one that hates these new glossy screens. They reflect glare and just look bad. The screen on the MacBook Pro isn't glossy. Why does the MacBook need a glossy screen?
"1 GB RAM (can't get 512)"
Then why not just upgrade the iBook to 1GB? It then costs $1,249.
Thus the price difference is $1540 - $1249 = $291.
Your price difference is wrong, and you have not included the cost of the 80GB HD upgrade.
I still think that is an amazing deal, even though you get a slightly smaller screen.
The only comparable performance/form factor laptops I can find after a cursory search are $1700+ VAIOs, so the price point is pretty great too.
You can get a similarly equipped Dell E1405 for about $800. The only thing missing is a webcam, but an USB webcam would cost you $25.
But then, when I was in college... I bought Levi Jeans. Some students can afford to spend twice as much for designer labels.
The MacBook is out. and by all rights it looked to be the thing to have. Right up untill I read that it has 64mb of Shared Vedio Memory. I'm not saying that there is anything overly wrong with this if all you want to do is watch DVDs or surf the net. But you can forget about doing anything that requires GPU power such as the lastest games. PC laptops have been using this system for years. and it was my hope that Apple didn't start using it. I have owned a few PC laptops with this and I've been sorry that i did. I would rather buy a 2nd hand Ibook 12" G3-500 with the 8mb ATI GPU. I'm sorry to say that this one point will stop me buying it. Sigh, and it even came in Black. I have always wanted a back laptop.
The black and white iPods don't have a price difference, why would they charge a premium for something like that on the MacBook.
So your laptop can match your turtleneck?
Good comparison, but there's one important thing to consider: Win 2000/XP is going to perform a hell of a lot better on the same hardware than OSX does. This machine is a monster of a PC unless you have some kind of special needs. This is the lowest-end OSX machine.
That's not true, I run the latest version of OS X for PPC on my G4/400 w/1 GB RAM and for normal operations it runs just as fast as my MacBook Pro runs the Intel version of 10.4.6 using 512 MB RAM.
My stepdaughter runs 10.3.9 on a G3/400 with 800 MB RAM with equal alacrity.
You must remember that unlike Windows, OS X isn't bloatware. Those iBooks (er... MacBooks) will run OS X like a dream.
Vacation in Wilmington. Ah yes, "A Place To Be Somebody" where "It's Good to be First."
Yes, I often find myself thinking "Oooh, St. Moritz or Wilmington? I just can't decide."
Hell, I remember when I was born, my parents thought the family was complete. 3 years and a broken condom later, my little brother would have to disagree with you.
You must never fly coach.
I've got a 12" iBook, and on a typical Boeing aircraft, if the person in front of me puts their seat back, I can *just barely* have the iBook open, sitting on the front lip of the tray table.
If my laptop screen was one inch taller, it would be pretty much impossible to use in most of the cheap seats of a plane. I would have to always arrive early and request an exit-row seat.
That's one reason why I think the wide-screen laptops are an awesome idea. More screen real estate, less height when it's open.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
G4 PowerBooks were dog slow until the day they announced the MacTels. And please don't accuse me of trolling when Apple themselves is now claiming a 5x increase in speed!
Yes, because as chips get faster in the future, we realize that we were total chumps for buying such slow, expensive chips in the past. You had an Apple II? What a chump you were for paying so much money for a slow old 6502 processor. You had a 80486 PC? You should have just waited for the Core Duo!
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
I was there.
There was no broken condom.
The opposite of progress is congress
Most of the U2 iPods were sold, not to U2 fans, but to black-colored electronics fans.
That's funny. None of the black people I know have one.