Macbook refresh gets official with 10-hour battery | Hacker News Reader

Macbook refresh gets official with 10-hour battery

engadget.com

34 pointsdjcapelis26 comments

I'm just still sore about having to wait another 8 or 9 months to get a MacBook WITH A 13" SCREEN that has a CPU from this century.

2.4GHz Core 2 Duo in their latest offerings.... while all the competition is flashing around i3s and i5s.

Steve Jobs reply: We figured people care more about game performance and battery life.

Well, since when is "gaming" what people get Macs for!? I'd rather you sped-up my Photoshopping and my Compiling than my playing of ports of games from the early 90s.

Personally I'm actually happy about their decision (got one of the new 13"ers), battery life is more valuable to me than CPU performance.

Ideally they'd offer choice (as unlikely as that is for apple) between 10h batter time and i5 CPU.

I was really hoping to upgrade my now 3-generations ago Unibody 13"er because it's just too damn slow. Back then, I opted to pay the extra bucks and get the 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo for the "premium" model - it's so sad that that same CPU is still in the new models (albiet as the "base" and a 2.6GHz as the "premium").

I understand their conundrum though, it's not their fault.

The 13" design simply doesn't have room for a standalone graphics card, so they need to use an integrated video card. Due to licensing battles between nVidia and Intel (you'd think they'd give it a break in the face of the joint AMD-ATI competition), there are no Core iX motherboards manufactured with an nVidia chipset at the moment. So it's either dump the iX or dump nVidia, and they (sensibly) picked to remain with the nVidia platform.

Makes you really hate the stupid politics power plays done that prevent users from paying for and getting the best.

Well, to be fair, that CPU is still way fast enough for everything 99% of people are doing. I'm admittedly not pushing mine very hard, but it copes well even with windows in vmware and is outright zippy for everything else (light photoshop/lightroom use and such).

To those people the 2h (or something) extra battery life is a much bigger benefit than a faster CPU. In fact, for my usage pattern this is the fastest I need. As far as I am concerned they should just keep this CPU forever and only keep pushing battery life and display resolution. ;-)

Also, if your photoshop use is more demanding than the 13" can handle then wouldn't a larger screen come in handy anyways for that kind of work?

If I was looking for raw power then I wouldn't look at apple anyways. Much better bang-for-buck can be had from Dell and such.

My problem isn't with Photoshop. It's with running a million apps at once.

Word + TextWrangler + Chrome + Fusion + Speed Download + Adium + Transmit + Better Zip + Preview + iTunes + Mail + Finder is more than it can handle, even with 4GB of quality RAM.

I'll be honest: I'm not looking for bang for buck. I'm willing to spend a bit extra for the quality experience and superior "whole package" experience. And a MacBook is a device I can throw in my BackPack and take it with me everywhere, every day and never worry about it simply "wearing out" (though they do break, they don't simply "wear out" and start experiencing odd hardware issues such as loose parts, bad circulation, etc.).

I want a quality machine that's 13". Not 10, not 14, and certainly not 17 or 19". And MacBook gave me that, 2 years ago. But now, even though they added "Pro" to the name of my Aluminum 13" beast, they haven't upped the specs (at least as far as I'm concerned).

Are you sure running so many things at once, the bottleneck is the CPU and not RAM or hard disk access?

Odd. I have an original unibody 13" with 4 GB of RAM and I've never felt this computer is slow. I typically have Chrome, iTunes, Fluid (running an instance of Gmail in Safari), Adium, Terminal, Preview and Finder open.

I second what eru said (sibling post). Your bottleneck is most likely not the CPU but the RAM.

Get some activity monitor (e.g. iStat menu) to see what's really going on, I bet you're running low on RAM and the OS is swapping - which is the surefire way to bring everything to a crawl.

If you have the spare change then upgrade to 8G Ram (only possible in latest macbook generation I think) and a fast SSD (intel).

I'm pretty sure you will have nothing to complain about with a 13" stuffed like that.

Honestly, what it sounds like you need is more RAM and/or an SSD. I recently upgraded to an i7 MBP just so I could get the 8GB of RAM. My last C2D MBP could only use 4GB. If it could have gone to 8GB I would have stuck with it and just added more RAM since that would have been the most cost/benefit way to improve performance with my usage (VMs for Windev, XCode for Apple dev, everything in between).

Now that I have an i7, my next big performance changing upgrade will be an SSD. I'm just waiting for the next gen or maybe the next gen after that.

I honestly wish. But I'm using 160GB of my MacBook's 250GB (I got the plus model). The only option is therefore the 256GB Corsair for 700 bucks. I don't mind shelling out 700 for such a great upgrade, but I'm not convinced that this generation of SSDs is completely up to snuff, either. I'm probably going to want the next generation to come out, I feel the current tech isn't yet ready for prime-time. Makes it less feasible >.<

Instead of upgrading the notebook, you may want to consider switching to a solid-state drive. In terms of real-world performance boost, an SSD simply can't be beat. It's like upgrading to 60 or 120GB of RAM for <$300.

I am not convinced that most MacBook users are CPU constrained. SSD FTW!

Uninstalling any on-access antivirus protection will help too.

I am not convinced that most MacBook users are CPU constrained.

Any Core Duo above 2 Ghz is just an embarrassment of riches, CPU wise. You're walking around with the equivalent of a super-computer under your arm, and you're complaining?

http://www.tikaro.com/2009/03/youre-sitting-in-a-chair-in-th...

Only game I know of where you're CPU-constrained is Dwarf Fortress.

He's not the typical MacBook user; he's worried about speeding up compiling.

I recently switched out to a fast SSD and I can say this with certainty - compiling was and continues to be CPU constrained, at least for the code I spend the most time compiling.

Thanks - that's exactly my issue. I have compiling which takes up most of the CPU, but the amalgamation of all the other software each taking up to 10% in the background is what kills.

The current 13in Macbook Pro has an i3 chipset. Did you mean you're waiting for them to get the i5? Arstechnica had a pretty solid article detailing why the current MacBook Pro 13in can't have an i5 without sacrificing the DVD drive. That article can be viewed here: http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/04/why-the-13-macbook...

"The current 13in Macbook Pro has an i3 chipset."

Read that link again: it has a Core 2 Duo, not an i3:

"The update to Nehalem-based cores, as well as a die shrink to 32nm, gives these Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7 mobile processors clear performance advantages over the Core 2 Duo that Apple retained for the 13" MacBook Pro. "

A MacBook for a fast Photoshop and Compilation experience? Isnt this simply the wrong hardware for the job?

I think for a lot of people it's more about getting the best value for money than actually needing the better CPU. Yes there are people that actually need a mobile machine with that extra power but for most uses cases it's perfectly fine.

I just brought one of the new 13inch mbp's, for development I can't really say it's any less responsive than the i7 machines I use at uni.

You're doing it wrong. My i7 is not even in the same league as my old Core 2 Duo. Some things, like running test suites, are almost 10x faster. 10x! The i7 is an amazing piece of hardware.

I agree. I replaced a SR MBP (2.4 C2D) with a new i7 and normal tasks really are that much faster. I had expected better performance, but was pleasantly surprised by how much the upgrade provided.

I'd rather you sped-up my Photoshopping and my Compiling than my playing of ports of games from the early 90s.

Then buy Windows or Linux laptop. The only reason to use OS X is if you have some legacy app that only runs on Macs, which is pretty rare these days.

It looks like they have room in the MB for an i3/5 and a separate Nvidia GPU since they have a 320M in the new one. The reasoning for the C2D in the 13" MBP though was that they didn't have room for both the i3/i5 and the Nvidia GPU so you'd be stuck with only the Intel IGP /shudder. Part of the blame I think needs to fall on Intel for making it so complicated to support other GPUs now.

The battery life sales point is an interesting differentiator. By my quick survey it looks like most laptops get about 4-5 hours of battery life now a days.

The non-user-replaceable battery seems to be a gamble that hasn't hurt them in the market.

Some ultra low voltage processor models get around 10hrs of battery life as well. The Asus UL series get really good battery life, at least under Windows.

I have a UL80vt running Ubuntu 9.10 and get around 5hrs on that with the screen at full brightness (b/c brightness control only works with reboot). It also uses the nvidia dedicated graphics afaik (it has hot-switchable dual graphics under windows).

I just started using a 2.4ghz 13-inch mbp for work. My personal machine is a mid-2007 white macbook (2.16ghz, 4GB RAM). I do like the Aluminum case, but the machine really isn't noticeably faster than the old one. Not that the old one is slow by any means. I think I've decided to hold off one more generation (bought myself a magic mouse and wireless keyboard to get rid of some of the gadget craving).

For the guy who said he needs something faster to run lots of apps, none of those apps need to run in the background, so you shouldn't be CPU limited. Maybe you just need more than 4GB of RAM. I think your machine can fit 6GB...

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