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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.
It's amazing how AAPL stock drops after an announcement.
Buy on rumor. sell on fact.
You have ExpressCard, use it.
You need to get over the fact that Apple, just like Linux, or Google will get a special treatment on Slashdot. These are products/brands that the typical slashdot reader are interested in. You will see that this "article", even if it is nothing more than a glorified press release, will get a large number of comments, justifying its place on the slashdot frontpage.
Failtastic in so many ways:
Please help metamoderate.
Simple question: do you think Apple is marketing the new Macbooks for Mr. Joe Collegestudent or Mr. Professional Visual Neuroscientist Who Does Some Colorimetric Work?
Apple spends 9/10 of their time marketing. Always hasl. Mr. Professional Visual Neuroscientist Who Does Some Colorimetric Work arguably won't get the laptop marketed for its Word processing and gaming use.
Do you understand that DisplayPort is capable of more than DVI? I believe it surpasses HDMI as well. Furthermore, /.-ers should be overjoyed at a connector that is royalty/license-free.
I'm wondering about the rational behind that decision. After all, isn't the ability to use iMovie to make your own home movies a big selling point for the consumer level Macs?
Without a firewire interface, iMovie (and by extension iDVD) seems like it would be useless.
Furthermore, /.-ers should be overjoyed at a connector that is royalty/license-free.
And yet still costs more than those royalty/license-laden connectors... funny how that works.
It was also JUST ANNOUNCED TODAY. Wait until it shows up on Monoprice.
I wanted one bad too. Now I wish I didn't pay the premium when I discovered just how easily the case of my MacBook Pro is damaged. I have three dents including on that has rendered my optical drive unusable. I paid $2000 for a laptop that is not as durable as advertised. I'm going back to a non-apple laptop with Linux when this one has gone through it's useful life. The only thing that brought me over to Apple was OS X and now the quality is pushing me back. The smugness of the Apple Store and the Apple Authorized repair shops has also driven me away. The asking price of $610 to replace the bottom case was also a deal breaker for me. Apple just isn't worth it and I feel stupid for having taken a drink of the kool-aid.
If that other notebook doesn't run Windows then yes.
the EeeePC, Dell9, and many other netbooks with Linux options made it to the front page.
It is only Windows notebooks that get ignored because they are frankly all the same.
Apple has come up with some interesting things like their power adapter and now this case.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
And yet still costs more than those royalty/license-laden connectors... funny how that works.
Because speech != beer?
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Cause I prefer using a Mac? I like OS X. I'm a perfectly capable *nix user, so I like having it available to me, in addition to a nice simple GUI.
But it can tell which finger applied the pressure, and tell the difference between a left and a right click.
No it can't. It can tell which fingers are touching it. But it cannot tell the difference between pressing with your right finger or your left finger if both fingers are in contact. To perform a right click with the Mighty Mouse you have to lift up with your left finger and click with the right.
This, in a word, sucks.
Hopefully the MacBook trackpads are better. Sounds like they are. But the Mighty Mouse is just utterly horrible.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
... To perform a right click with the Mighty Mouse you have to lift up with your left finger and click with the right.
This, in a word, sucks.
Have you used one for more than a minute or two? You'd be surprised how quickly you adapt to it; it's just another muscle-memory thing. When I'm using a more traditional two-button mouse, I find it quaint that it has actual physical buttons, and that the scroll button/wheel is only two directional.
Hopefully the MacBook trackpads are better. Sounds like they are.
I'll bet the physical feel is pretty damn good. I'm still amazed at how well multi-touch works on an iPhone screen, and I'm guessing the glass mouse will be very similar.
Preferring OS X is relevant because if you want to buy a laptop with OS X, you're now stuck with a glossy screen.
You can't buy and connect any screen you want without serious modifications to the laptop. Adding an external display is not the point; it's a portable computer.
Well there went my hope that they'd finally offer us two-buttons.
*sighs*
There is nothing I hate more than having to use a trackpad as a click-button. You try to move the cursor and open up half a dozen links accidentally.
I nearly sent back my Dell until we found drivers that let me turn that feature off. :(
Steve...YOUR A TWIT!!!
Is anyone else actually looking forward to the day that Steve Jobs retires? Every computer Apple now makes either looks like a hunk of metal and glass or a cheese grater; its brutalist architecture for the PC, and it's just as ugly on computers as it is on buildings.
It's also painfully obvious that he doesn't give a rat-fuck about what end users want; note the number of mouse buttons on the new laptops.
Jobs built, and then re-built, this company into what it is, but I'm tired of all the computer models being his personal art project. You can expect excellence in design from Apple without this depressing, Bauhaus case design that Apple seems addicted to now. We're getting German worker housing in a PC, and paying a premium for it. Apple computers used to be beautiful and original. I love my eMac... it's instantly recognizable as an Apple with its white plastic and round curves. Now all of Apple's computers are dark, gun-metal slabs. I seriously wonder if Jobs and Ive spend all their time shooting heroin and listening to Goth music in the dark now.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
That's YOUR opinion, but I'd argue it's quite one-sided and flawed too.
First off, you're upset that they dropped the price of a big selling notebook (older style white Macbook) by $100? Yeah, it's not "new tech", but it's a proven design people bought millions of already. And today, it's $100 cheaper than yesterday. If you follow typical Apple product life-cycles, it's likely it's going away within the next 6-9 months anyway. They like to do this with popular products, rather than immediately dropping them. (Remember the eMac, or the PowerMac G4 towers when they became the last system still capable of running MacOS 9.x natively?)
As for that Gateway laptop you're talking about? Does it have a mag-safe adapter on it? How about a backlit keyboard? When you lock one with a Kensington security cable, does it also lock the battery and hard drive compartments? How's the support from old Gateway these days? (I can still visit one of a couple local Apple stores in town, but "Gateway Country" stores didn't fare so well.....) And obviously, it lacks OS X too.
Buy what you like, but personally, I'm more inclined to say the real "ripoff" are these sub-standard quality laptops Toshiba, Gateway, Dell, HP and others keep cranking out. I have no problem paying more for quality, and I think with Apple, it's generally there. (Claiming OS X is simply "cutesy graphics and a slick UI" sells it pretty short too, but I'm not even going to get started on that.)
Gee its funny that they keep changing the "mini" display adapter for every laptop.
mini-vga - ibook
mini-dvi - macbook (previous generations)
micro-dvi - macbook air
mini-displayport - current generation macbook and macbook pro
Now the adapters that I bought for previous laptops are incompatible with the new one. To get basic connectivity you have to buy both the vga and dvi adapters (since the dvi is missing a pin it cannot work with additional DVI-to-VGA adapters). Why do I need to spend $60 extra for every laptop, merely cause Apple cannot even standarize on its own adapters?
If you're computing from a fixed seating position you're probably sitting at a desk.
If you're sitting at a desk, it might be your desk, at which you could do all of those things, but it might not. It might be at the office you're visiting.
It might not be a desk. It might be a seat on a plane or train, sunlight coming in from a nearby window you don't control (and boy, if there's any setting in which you have almost no room to maneuver, it's on a plane in coach. And yet the Mac Book Air? Glossy only from day one.)
It might be the one of a small set of seats available to you at a conference room, or a lecture hall.
It might be a park bench, it might be on the couch in the living room facing the TV where you're sitting to be with your SO or family while they're watching it, and you're trying to work, but the sunset through the window behind the couch is causing a problem.
If you bought a laptop, the whole point is that you'd like to be able to move it around and use it anywhere. The constraints arbitrarily added by the glare off a glossy screen make it more difficult.
Tweet, tweet.
Consider it your warning that you need to change your surroundings before continuing your work ... not a reason to get a different display.
and here I was thinking people bought laptops so they could work anywhere they wanted
TIAEAE!
* I've got MBP 17" now. I like it. They are dropping that size.
No they're not.
* I don't like having to carry yet another kind of custom one-use rat tail to put my laptop on someone else's cheap VGA-style projector.
This hasn't changed.
* I do wish my MBP had heat sensors on the graphics system; the processor sensors are sometimes midrange while the graphics head is starting to exhibit heat-induced artifacts.
It does.
* I do wish they'd fix the runaway-syslogd problem in Leopard. I have read all the howtos and forum lists, nothing but a 15min cronjob to kill it is helping.
* I do wish they'd fix the too-many-hd-resets problem in Leopard, if I leave the machine on overnight with little disk activity, my drive will reset itself to a state it won't spin up again. Everything RAM-resident runs, but more and more processes go zombie when the disk doesn't spin up.
Never experienced or seen either of these myself.
* I don't like the new "partial tapered" (their term) or "puffy" (my term) lid.
* I don't like the black bezel inside the lid. Match the whole case.
* I hate the fugly new keyboards that feel and look like IBM PCjr chicklet.
* I don't care if it's magnetic or a button to pop the lid.
* I don't care if there's a slot visible on the front.
Then screw you, jack. Go buy a Dell. Or better yet: Don't replace what you have, and donate a couple thousand bucks to a charity instead.
You know what I don't like? Sugarless gum. And those new-fangled behind-the-head earphones. I also don't like tiny toy dogs. And open-toed shoes. And I hate vinyl records. And I hate it when the cat drinks from the toilet. Furthermore, I hate other people's personal preferences, and the way they spew them onto public forums like they have any qualitative value whatsoever.
Something tells me that folks in the market to buy BOTH a Macbook Pro AND a 30" display are not going to bitch, moan, and stomp their feet when forced to buy a $100 adapter.