Slashdot Mirror
MacBook Pro Gets Santa Rosa Chipset, LED Screen
frdmfghtr writes "TechNewsWorld is reporting that Apple has updated the MacBook Pro line with the Santa Rosa chipset from Intel. In addition, Apple is also introducing mercury-free displays with some models. 'When Apple presented new editions of its MacBook line last month, the company excluded the latest Intel Centrino chips, dubbed "Santa Rosa," which had been released just days prior. The chips have found their way into Apple's new high-end MacBook Pro notebooks, which the company revealed Tuesday. Certain models use mercury-free displays, falling in line with the company's recent ecological promises.'"
...a link to the actual MacBook Pro web page and specifications, since that's what people here probably care about, as opposed to a "TechNewsWorld" article being the only thing linked in the summary?
Also, while Apple folks and other tech-savvy folks may know the Intel-based Macs run Windows, why does the news article not even mention that? For many people even considering buying a Mac, the fact that a laptop like this can easily run Windows natively or seamlessly alongside Mac OS X with packages like Parallels Desktop at least bears repeating.
Yeah, have fun taking your MacBook Pro to Boston :-)
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Apple didn't "surrender" to Greenpeace.
Apple simply issued a statement about its product environmental plans, among other things.
Numerous other vendors were "greener" by Greenpeace standards because they had a public "environmental plan", or even a "plan to have a plan", whereas Apple was silent on futures as it relates to future products, as it always is.
Perhaps Jobs thought it pragmatic to offer its plan publicly so that it would stop getting hammered by Greenpeace as having one of the worst environmental commitments in the industry, when in reality it has one of the best (sure, sure, cue the "but so-and-so is better/first/whatever than Apple is such-and-such category" comments). And besides, I thought it was actions, not lip service about possible future directions, that actually mattered?
But the bottom line is Apple didn't "surrender"; it just published what its already-existing environmental plans were. If you call that a "surrender", then, hey, wave the white flag, Apple.
The biggest news IMO is that the 17" MacBook Pro now comes with a 1920x1200 screen option. I've got that on my 15.4" Sager now, and it's wonderful. I'd rather have another 15.4", but I'd rather not step down to 1440x900.
The LEDs do just provide the backlight.
The color spectrum that a given LED provides will necessarily be different than the spectrum that CCF backlights generate, and different from the spectra that the various CRT monitor phosphors generate.
If a given portion of the spectrum is not present in the "white light" (using that term very loosely here) backlight, no amount of filtering by the LCD screen overlay can put it back. If this is not intuitive, imagine trying to create blue using only a pure-red LED backlight. (You can't do it - the backlight must have at least some blue).
So if, for example, the LED backlight has more green and red light available in its "white light" spectrum than a CCF backlight has, the LCD overlay so-illuminated can produce yellow tones (since red and green are the constituent primaries that make yellow) that a LCD illuminated with a CCF cannot. That gives the LED-illuminated LCD a wider gamut.
However, if both the LED-illuminated and the CCF-illuminated LCD overlays only filter light at a resolution of 8 bits per channel, they will both be able to display the same amount of information about color, but because the gamut of one is different from the gamut of the other, in many cases they will not be able to display the same colors.
The "6-bit" comment in my earlier post refers to the fact that Apple has been shipping 6-bit displays on its Powerbooks and MacBook pros for a while. I believe there has been a /. post on this situation.
If a manufacturer provides more bit depth (more than 8 bits per channel, f.e.) the LCD overlay will be able to filter the available light more finely than 8- or 6-bit displays can do. In general, an 8-bit display should in fact have a larger (but not necessarily wider) gamut than a 6-bit. A 10-, 12-, or (allow me to dream here) 16-bit-per-channel display would have still larger (but again, not necessarily wider).
In an LCD display the spectrum of the backlight will determine how wide the gamut can be at its absolute maximum - if a color is not present in that spectrum, it cannot be filtered into existance by the LCD overlay. By the same token, the bit-depth-per-channel of the LCD overlay will determine how many individual color tones are in that gamut.
In reality, it's a lot more complicated than this, but this is the gist of it.
I'm a former Apple Engineer, and I'm really getting a kick out of these replies.
From talking with my former co-workers, Apple had been working with engineering sample LED backlight systems for almost a year when Greenpeace made their attention whoring report. Apple didn't choose LED systems only because they were mercury-free, they were also looking at lower power, brighter, longer lasting, and far cheaper to mass produce than cold cathode.
Clearly Greenpeace had learned Apple was working on migrating their whole lineup to "greener", so they beat them to the punch with a completely bogus report. At that point, anything Apple did would seem as if it was a reaction to Greenpeace. Engineering lead times are far too long for these new backlights to have been brought in after the Greenpeace slander job.