Slashdot Mirror
Quad Core, Thunderbolt In New MacBook Pros
Although as I write this the store is still down, the Apple web site has officially published the specs for the revised MacBook Pros, which top out at 2.2GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 for the 17" as well as offering a 512GB solid state drive. Somehow I don't think my boss will let me expense the one I want.
Apple is now using a more realistic battery life testing suite: "Apple is using a new, more rigorous battery test that measures the results you can expect in the real world â" like surfing your favorite sites in a coffee shop or catching up on the latest web videos."
Is Intel's official name for the technology formerly codenamed Light Peak
http://www.intel.com/technology/io/thunderbolt/index.htm
No, it's not an Apple made-up name.
Nowhere does it say anything about screen resolution. Why is it that people seem to think that the physical size (in inches) of the screen is the only thing that matters?
Move sig!
They have the Apple logo, iOS logo, iPhone, and Macbook. Why does apple get so many special Slashdot icons?
Dozens.
Overkill much?
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
well, buy a pc. get more for less. and there's some good chassis too available(and they come with built in 3g, bluray, esata, usb3 etc etc). they'll even work nicely with your old firewire devices ;).
of course though, maybe you really must have the new interconnect to connect.. erm, well, nothing. well, some devices will come with due time and you're going to be paying your mac tax on the thunderbolt cables.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
at 2199. The fact the base resolution isn't much better than Windows budget computers irks me too. If anything their prices are worse than before. The whole push seems to be to get LightPeak out ahead of the iPad2 which many have speculated that the unknown connector on it was LightPeak
The 13 inch laptop is disappointing when compared to even the MBA line. I am can almost justify the 13 price structure but I still trying to get my hands around where they are with the 15 laptops.
I love my Apple iMac but I certainly don't see value in their laptops, I can get by just fine with a $600 dollar range Windows Laptop and have done a trip or two with a netbook just fine. The price difference alone changes how you deal with them on trips, when I traveled with my previous 2.4 MBP I was loathe to leave out of my sight, checking it in at the desk when I had to be out of the room for hours. With the others I just stuffed them under a pillow.
The only thing Pro about these is the price. The name is a pretentious as those with them who camp at Starbucks
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Take it back for a refund.
Or Apple could get really crazy and issue a firmware update that allows the iPhone/iPad to optionally wirelessly sync in the background when at home/on the charger, so that "syncing" could take advantage of wireless networking and network storage capabilities(which things like the time capsule indicate that Apple can certainly handle) rather than being pretty much exactly identical to what Pilot 1000 owners were doing in 1996...
You can get an idea right now, since the HD3000 has been out for a while. Basically, in raw GPU performance, it's pretty lousy. There are places where the memory bus improvements can make up some of the difference, but frankly, I consider this a step back. It's a shame, too--I'd been planning on picking up the 13" MBP after this refresh. Now I'm going to start looking at other notebooks.
I thought the same before using a MacBook Pro every day for work for a year.
You just don't get the stability, performance, battery life and build quality in a cheap Windows notebook (I've bought tons of them after much research when I worked in IT). Runs for months on end, 80 hour weeks, never shutdown, rarely restarted, basically never gets in my way.
Bah! The wireless is only in the 2.4 GHz spectrum. They left out the 802.11a/n 5 GHz bits.
Can you tell me if the wifi is provided by a mini-PCI or mini-PCIe card? If so, I could replace it with something proper that does both 2.4 & 5 GHz.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
2.8Ghz quad core i7 in a Toshiba? Impossible...
The fastest sandy bridge quad core i7 is the Core i7-2920XM which is 2.5Ghz. It's MSRP alone is $1096 because is the top-end extreme edition so even if Toshiba used that, there is no way the laptop would be anywhere close to $1200 let alone even under $2000.
Apple is using the Core i7-2720QM 2.2Ghz which has an MSRP of $378 already.
There is one processor in between these and that's the Core i7-2820QM which is 2.3Ghz and runs $568.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i7_microprocessors#.22Sandy_Bridge.22_.2832_nm.29_2
I walked into an office recently and a coworker saw my MacBook Pro and said, "I wish I had that instead of this Dell POS. Just look at the screen resolution!" Put a four-year old MacBook Pro next to a four-year old Dell laptop and you will be able to see the difference. There will not be any missing cheap plastic pieces on the Mac.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
Not really worth the 500-1000 dollar upcharge IMO. My HP ultraportable never gets in my way either. I turn it off it once every couple days just because I don't need it all the time. For example, when I am sleeping. Also, the build quality is as good as any Macbook I've ever used (My wife likes Macbook and owns a refurb one as I won't allow her to buy a new one because of the ridiculous cost). It has a brushed aluminum chassis with a plastic bottom, however it actually is nice this way as its super lite and has some rubber gripping spots on all four corners that blend seamlessly and keep it from sliding around on smooth surfaces. It also has a chiclet like keyboard that is actually easier to type on than any other laptop Ive used. It has buttons in places that make it extremely functional and ergonomic with the exception of the power button being a weird sliding button on the side. Still, its worth it because it cost me about 650 when it first came out at a special sale at Office Depot which actually was cheaper than HP sold them for on their website. I don't dispute that Apple brought something to the table with build quality a few years ago, but HP has totally caught up in their Envy, Ultraportable and Performance categories. If you need up-time install a Linux distribution. The sub 500-700 dollar notebooks are still crap depending on which manufacturer you get them from. I'm just arguing Apple isn't as good as everyone argues they are hardware and build wise, so people should really be arguing that 500-1000 dollars upcharge is worth the OS, extra aluminum, magsafe plug, trackpad and led backlit keyboard rather than saying they are superior in every way, because that simply is not true.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
Starting at:
13 inch $1199
15 inch $1799
17 inch $2499
The same as the old models and within a few buck of comparable models....if there were any.
Flash is not multi threaded so it will only slow down one core...
In cyberspace nobody knows you're a cat!
You assume wrong. The prices are the essentially the same.
Which does not mean that Apple is not guilty of buzz word compliance. It just tends to make it's own, such as back lit keyboard. But I prefer a engineered and efficient machine. For instance, I do carry my machine around and use it without a power source. The rated 7 hours instead of 3.77 is a benefit. Even my old Powerbook gets almost 4. Low mass and thickness is also a benefit for a portable machine. Obviously a machine such as this is a compromise between mass and features, and that compromise is a personal choice. For me I have been carrying my 13" machine much more than my 17" because the 13" screen size is good enough. Carrying around 10+ pounds would not be what I want to do.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
You realize that the shutting down every 49 days thing is no longer true in Vista/Win 7, right? The only reason I have to shut down now is to save electricity or to install security updates (but Apple has those too). I also haven't seen a blue screen since Windows XP SP2. I'm a coder and even when I make a typo with some pointers or do something else that crashes the machine, I have never gotten it to the point where I have to reboot. Windows 7 is a resource hog, but it's rock solid.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
From this photo here you can see that the logo for thunderbolt is a commonly-used symbol for electricity.
In fairness, you mean the commonly used symbol for high voltage electricity. So, it's OK if you plug the 3kV feed directly in. I wonder it if takes 3-pahse. One way to find out, I suppose...
SJW n. One who posts facts.
my bad its a 2.8ghz dual core i7 I was looking at
The 13 inch never had a discrete GPU. It just used an NVIDIA provided integrated GPU. In other words - they significantly improved the processor and memory speed capabilities of the system, at the cost of a very slight reduction on GPU"performance - on a system that does not have adequate GPU resources for anything to begin with. Games should still see an overall improvement in performance; especially as most games that actually show up on Mac OS are CPU limited.
I hope Apple hasn't let their fascination with reducing port count get in the way of what might otherwise have been an interesting technology...
Well, first the mini-DisplayPort compatible connector has been adopted by Intel as well - so this is the official Thunderbolt connector, not some Apple proprietary thing.
Secondly, according to the Apple website, you can still plug a monitor directly into the thunderbolt port, using your existing Mini-DP cables and adaptors. So nothing has been lost.
Interestingly, if you look on the tech brief at the intel site, it says:
Thunderbolt cables may be electrical or optical; both use the same Thunderbolt connector. An active electrical-only cable provides for connections of up to 3 meters in length, and provides for up to 10W of power deliverable to a bus-powered device. And an active optical cable provides for much greater lengths; tens of meters.
So - is there actually an optical link hiding inside the socket on the new Macs? (Not unfeasible: there's already one hiding inside the audio jacks, but the rumors had said that Lightpeak was going to be optical only).
Unless they have a clever plan in mind to make it useful for niche cases that could actually use the 10gb/s, without blocking external monitor capabilities
If you read TFA you'll see that the port contains 2 independent, duplex, 10Gbps channels.
As of 2011, there are(to the best of my knowledge), zero displayport peripherals, announced or in production, that either support display daisy chaining or use the AUX channel to integrate USB ports, webcams, audio, or other peripheral functions into displayport devices without the use of additional cabling, despite 720mb/s being ample for quite a few applications. Zip, zero, nada.
Yeah - that's annoying. Even the Apple Cinema Display, which is DisplayPort only, doesn't have a daisychain and uses a separate USB link for the camera, audio and USB hub (which kinda suggests that there is some hitch with doing that over DisplayPort - I can't see Apple getting any advantage from denying people the opportunity to buu two cinema displays...!)
Maybe the fact that the first Thunderbolt machines out of the gate only have single ports will ensure that device manufacturers include daisychain ports...
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
I'm pretty sure Adobe is working on an update that will allow all four cores to run at 100%.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Troll.
1) The first i7 chips were released in Nov 2008. 2 years, 3 months ago.
2) These processors are the Sandy Bridge core, 32nm, with lower TDP. Released January 2011. One month ago.
3) $2500 will get you a 13" or 15" with a SSD and an HD LED screen in the 15". In addition to decent NEW dedicated graphics chips.
Note: I do not own a Mac
Dual Core vs. Quad Core.
As someone who has benchmarked the living crap out of all of Apple's 2010 hardware, I can tell you with certainty that the Mac Pro will still leave these in the dust on any real work. The 2010 Mac Pro is 3 to 4 times faster than the 2010 MacBook Pro i7 in any reasonable benchmark you want to talk about. Maybe it's only 2 to 3 times faster now.
Until Intel releases Xeons based on this same stuff, then it will probably be 4 to 5 times faster.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
The versions of the i7 they are using were first available at the end of January 2011
Intel® Core i7-740QM processor (quad core 3.6 GHz)
Not sure where you got that from. The i7-740QM is a quad-core 1.73GHz part. In the highest Turbo Boost mode, it is a single-core 2.93GHz part. It doesn't have a 3.6GHz mode. It's also the last generation (Clarksfield, 45nm) part, while the MBPs use the newer (Sandybridge, 32nm) ones. The slowest that the 17" MBPs come with is the Core i7-2720QM, which is 2.2GHz in quad-core mode, up to 3.3GHz in single-core mode.
Given the other features of that machine, the CPU looks pretty anaemic.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News