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Apple Announces New MacBook, Pro, Air
Steve Jobs just got through announcing new MacBook lines in Cupertino. The MacBook, the Pro, and the Air all got revved. The old line of plastic-body MacBooks drops in price by $100, to $999. The new MacBooks have a metal body and multi-touch trackpad, just like the new Pros. The Pro features two NVidia graphics chips. Quoting Jobs: "With the 9400M, you get 5 hours of battery life, with the 9600M GT you get four hours of battery life. You choose." In summary: "We're building both [MacBook and Pro] in a whole new way. From a slab of aluminum to a notebook. New graphics. New trackpad, the best we've ever built. And LED-backlit displays that are far brighter, instant on, far more environmentally responsible." They are shipping today and should be in stores tomorrow. Oh, and one more thing: Steve's blood pressure is 110/70.
The Mini DisplayPort is downsized from the full sized DVI connector. The Mini DisplayPort can drive everything the big DVI can (30-inch displays).
Unless you need Firewire, in which case you're up a creek sans paddle. Typical Apple, a couple steps forward, one step back, one step to the side. Never end up exactly where you want to be.
It's called short selling. Check wikipedia
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The Mini DisplayPort is downsized from the full sized DVI connector. The Mini DisplayPort can drive everything the big DVI can (30-inch displays).
...if you buy the $30 adapter for it.
The glass trackpad *is* the buttons, and not like tapping to do a click.
It works in a similar way to the ipod wheel, the corners move down when you press it. Watch the video on the macbook page. I was afraid of that too, but it really is quite nice.
Dented and flexed cases in the AL Powerbooks and Macbook Pros are a pretty well known problem. Drop it just right onto concrete or tile, even from a pretty short height, and you might find yourself with a big dent or an unusable optical drive. This is an unfortunate side effect of using such thin, stamped AL for the case.
This is a big reason they redesigned the case. The 3-D milling allows very precise placement of material, which should produce a stiffer case for the same weight. But also take a look at how they designed the case. The bottom half used to be a single "tub" of aluminum, with a separate piece for the "deck." Now the sides are attached to the deck, with a separate piece for the very bottom surface. This creates stronger corners, and an easily-replacable bottom surface if a dent does occur.
Also, take a look at where they put the optical bay. This is one of the weakest parts of the structure because it's a big hole in the sidewall. Again, the milling should allow them to thicken the border of the disc port a bit, to stiffen it up. And it's placed directly over the battery, which is one of the strongest and most solid parts of the computer.
I think the new design should be a lot more resistant to stupid dings and expensive fixes.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Where I work we have 45 Macs. Of those 35 people have now switched to plain jane Logitech LX optical mice because the Apple mouse is so spectacularly bad. People get wrist cramps having permanently hold the left finger away when right clicking, the shape of the mouse is painful for many of them over time, and to top it all, the little scroll ball invariably gunks up with finger sweat and dirt after a while and you can only clean it so many times before the ball wears away and no longer maintains contact to the little slide wheels inside the mouse.
The Apple mouse is a terrible product, and its bluetooth pendant is even worse. the battery life is so bad that most people who have ehm and use them every day have to replace the batteries about once a month. I switched long ago to a Logitech LX-7 wireless which has used the same set of batteries for about 8 months.
I like Apple's products, and even own a Mac Pro tower myself, but I get really tired of people praising every thing Apple does simply because it's Apple.
I work with several professional photographers as a consultant. I can assure you that glossy displays DO NOT work as well subjectively for most photographers and other artists using LCD displays. Some photographers still insist on using CRTs because of those subjective preferences.
You can bake the numbers all you want, but if the palette and contrast don't feel right for photographers - many of which started using Photoshop to work with Tango-scanned film images - they will not touch it. Consistency, not gimmicks, are key for these folks.
These are not gear queers running out to compare the specs on the newest whoosy-whatsit, but artists who are extremely picky about their equipment. Here's what they tell me they HATE about glossy displays:
-Extreme brightness on glossy displays = extreme contrast. It's harder to believe you're looking at a calibrated 2.2 gamma when your "superbrite" glossy LCD display has such a massive contrast ratio.
-Working in neutrally-painted, darkened rooms is optimal. When you turn these superbright LCDs down to achieve a reasonable brightness for a darkened room, the glare and reflections from the glossy panel are distracting. Turn it back up, and it takes you several seconds to a minute to see where you're going.
-The higher brightness leads to colors looking more saturated, which sells with consumers. Most pros I talk to HATE it. Photographers who rely on a muted palette and who work in color managed workflows can't tell what's going to roll out of their printer with displays like the iMac's glossy LED display - the colors seem too contrasty and saturated, so everything gets dialled down too far.
That's my experience. Pros hate these damned displays.
Glossy screens are just not acceptable for the calibration and perception standards
Oh, come on. You seriously maintain that you cannot calibrate the color output of a glossy display? Do you even know what the only physical difference between the two is?
Let me inform you, since you probably do not. There is literally no difference in any of the elements which significantly affect the spectrum of the emitted light. In a LCD display, those would be the backlight, the LCD subpixel intensity filters, and the color filter. All these components are 100% identical between a glossy and non glossy display. The one and only different component is that a matte display has a surface roughening treatment (or coating) on the outermost glass layer to provide some scattering.
Scattering does two things, one desirable and one undesirable. The desirable part is that it greatly reduces the intensity of reflections of other things in a room (especially light sources). It's hard to see a reflected image when the light is reflected in a ton of different directions by the rough surface.
The undesirable part is that it does the same thing to the image being displayed. And that's why people like glossy displays: the colors can be much more saturated (matte displays have a bit of a whiteout effect) and the display is brighter given identical backlights (scattering sends a lot of the light output off in random directions).