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New MacBook Pro series

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276 pointsfrytaz347 comments

Didn't get as much coverage, but there are also new ThinkPads this week: http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/22/lenovo-trots-out-new-thin...

The 14" models look good: 30 hours (claimed) battery on the T420, 0.83" ultrathin T420s with discrete graphics.

Edit: Here's the official announcement, which took a bit of digging around to find: http://news.lenovo.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=1421 . synacksynack has posted a good link now.

Here's the friendly version of the official announcement: http://shop.lenovo.com/us/products/professional-grade/thinkp...

I'm pretty happy about the resolution bump for the T400 series, even if it means going to a less square screen.

30 hours (claimed) battery life?

That sounds ridiculous. How close (or far away) to the truth is that? Anybody know more?

I think it's with an external battery slice.

Is that some briefcase-sized device you strap to your notebook with bungee cords?

It's a thin battery pack that attaches to the bottom of the laptop and works in conjunction with the system battery.

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/MIGR-74450.html

That's for extended battery used together with the regular battery.

Ah, the fine print.

I just feel if this was just the actual battery, we would have heard a bigger announcement!

15 hours (claimed) with the regular 9 cell battery. Not too shabby.

battery life > battery life while actually using computer.

The * often states it;s without wifi on and at 50% screen brightness, so that's pretty much the same thing.

My 2 year old X200 has 1.3 hours battery time, decreasing rapidly. The display plastic is broken, the camera is broken and the mouse tracking nob is broken. It's the worst piece of laptop hardware I've ever had (compared to older IBM Thinkpads, DELLs and iBooks, Macbooks and MacbooksPro).

Strange. I never had any problems with my Thinkpads, but my Macbook has had several. The plastic casing is brittle and just breaks off after a certain amount of time, the battery died and needed replacing, the hard drive died and needed replacing and the power supply died and needed replacing too.

Seriously considering getting one of these new Thinkpads and sticking Ubuntu on it. Maybe the T420 or T520.

Your last sentence... I'm in the same camp.

I was waiting for the MBP announcement to see if the 13" would be so compelling that it would become the perfect laptop for me, but the keyboard still isn't for me, and I really wanted USB3 and was hoping to lose the CD bay in exchange for more battery.

The T420 is slightly larger than I wanted, but Ubuntu on my T61p is such a sweet thing for development and lifestyle use that the smaller T420 looks really good. If Lenovo had a 13" in the T series spec'd like that, they'd have me instantly... as it is they probably have me anyway as the MBP hasn't moved enough to be compelling to me and I can deal with the slice battery on the T420 for a long weekend of use when travelling. The Lenovo keyboards remain without compare, which I guess means I'm now talking myself into it pretty convincingly. T420 + Ubuntu seals the deal.

Edit:

Just checked out the T420 dimensions, and they're: 13.4in x 9.05in x 1.18in.

It's not bad... a little larger than the new 13" MBP (12.78in x 8.94in x 0.95in), but not by enough to dissuade me. The higher resolution on the T420 is a good trade-off for the extra bit of size.

Your Macbook sounds as though it came from the same batch as my wife's Macbook. The Apple store replaced her battery free of charge well out of warranty and also offered a replacement casing. This could be a UK thing as it's pretty clear that there was a period where Macbooks were being manufactured below acceptable standards, the "Sale of goods act" would apply.

I bought a Macbook about a year after my wife and mine has been absolutely fine, no cracking and still with a good original battery.

"The plastic casing is brittle and just breaks off after a certain amount of time"

This is apparently a known issue with certain models of the Macbook. I had mine replaced free of charge as well, even though I'm out of warranty. Apple is aware of the issue and I'm happy that they at least replaced my case without a fuss.

Am I the only one who absolutely loves the eraserhead on the Thinkpad? It's so nice to be able to use the mouse without taking your hands off the keyboard. (Why netbooks have a tiny, useless touchpad rather than an eraserhead is beyond me.)

My 2009 macbook has been a disaster for me ergonomically. The keys are spaced too far apart and I keep trying to "click" the trackpad, which is killing my fingers. And the limited trackpad space when trying to drag or highlight something long drives me crazy.

Agreed. Try going 4 years older. My IBM branded X41 is the finest laptop I've owned and ubuntu works flawless on it. I bought a replacement battery for it and get a good 5 hours and a few days standby. I like it so much, I even consider not telling people so I can buy up more used ones and set aside for future parts. But hey, what's life if you don't share. Considering the cost of these on ebay (as much as some new netbooks) I think the secret is already out.

I always like to say that you could beat somebody with a x41 over the head and then continue working. Sometime ago a friend of mine actually had to use his X41 to defend himself. He did just that and it worked just fine for some more months until it died from an unrelated problem.

arhh yes, the X41 - the last laptop I had before I went Mac.

I called it my Darth Vadar laptop - strong, sleek black frame, powerful, ugly yet strangely beautiful at the same time.

The problem is the X41 always suffered from poor resolution, and certainly that is true by today's standards. I wield a MBP with hi-res matte screen and 1680 x 1050 in a 15" package used at 2 feet from my eyes is basically like a Retina display.

I upgraded the resolution on my X61t to 1400x1050 on a 12" display.

"Retina display"? Hah.

http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/retina-display.html

How did you do that?

It used to be an optional upgrade.

The x41 had a basic performance problem - they switched to the smaller, iPod-like hard drives, as compared to the regular laptop hard drives that the X31 had. This was unfortunate - when I had the X31, I immediately replaced the stock drive with a 7200RPM drive, and the X31 screamed for years. Then, I got the X41, found out that the same surgery is unavailable, and promptly got rid of it.

I had a T41p at a previous job - amazing laptop. I actually traded in a Powerbook G4 for it. No issues with it, ever (except that the battery life declined to nothing after a couple of years, and the battery had to be replaced).

A few years later, I was given a T60p at an internship. Total junk. Not even in the same league.

My 2 year old X200 still gets a good 3-4 hours of battery time with a cycle count of 670, so YMMV :)

I will say, though, there have been some quality issues with my x200 as well. The fan has a tendency to get stuck, the case feels like it's starting to come apart, and the screen surface has some smudges that are impossible to remove (and increasingly annoying). Still, not bad for a laptop that has traveled the world, been treated very roughly, and used almost every day for several hours a day. I'd buy another Thinkpad in a heartbeat.

Any news on the resolution on the 14" models? I'm still looking for a competitor for the display on my three or four year old sony: 13.3" with a 1600x900 display. The new Sony laptops do full 1080p at 13.3", but Sony really doesn't like linux, so I'd love to get a different brand. If only there were somebody else making high-DPI laptops...

UPDATED:

Noticed the Tech Specs PDF. Looks like the 14" does offer a 1600x900 resolution, so that's really cool. I'll have to see what the configurations look like once that part of the page is working (in late march, apparently). Thanks for the link!

I had a Vaio VGN-Z70B. You can somehow run linux on it but its a pure pain. On another note, I strongly suggest against Sony. Some things I experienced:

- Severe quality problems (broken cdrom plastic part on the side, white pixels screen, discoloring and wearout of plastic)

- Broke down completely once in the guarantee time, exchanged it freely but with penalty ( I had to get my data of the disk, but guess what, you can't access the disk easily you have to take apart the whole laptop for that. Putting it together was no problem, but they noticed you did that and thus let you pay penalty.)

- Broke down now again, probably again something with the power supply. No guarantee this time.

Don't buy Sony.

The problem with anecdotal evidence is that it makes you under the impression that you know something. If it were as harmless as it were useless, there would be no problem.

Sure you are right, it's anecdotal and subjective. If you think nothing of it, please go ahead and try Sony.

Getting so many problems in such a short time despite a costly service repair didn't really make my day. Now the machine is a brick and under no guarantee.

Lenovo needs to get its head out of it's ass and release anything so I can upgrade my 4:3 X61s. I hate widescreen.

HP's refreshed Elitebook series is also around the corner it has not received much attention either. The 14 inch model will also offer up to 32 hours with the use of the extended/slate battery. They also will use discrete graphics from AMD switchable to onboard Intel video if less performance is necessary.

Early preview from Anandtech: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4190/hps-business-notebook-hat...

I didn't like the EliteBook 8440p that I got from work (it felt real clunky), but this refreshed version looks nice.

ThinkPad keyboards are still better than any keyboard on any Apple product.

My only complaint with my MBP keyboard is the lack of a ctrl key on the right side. It's my only real complaint about the laptop in general. Everything else is just a quirk.

I agree, but I am disappointed that the keyboard on my IBM Thinkpad T40 is significantly better than the one on my Lenovo T60. The T60's just seems flimsier, somehow.

Color me disappointed. I was hoping for:

• Ditching the optical media for longer battery life

• 4 cores in the 13"

• Max RAM of 12 GB (this one isn't listed ... maybe?)

• The higher resolution 1440x900 resolution in the 13" that the Macbook Air has

Altogether it's a pretty wussy update. Basically it looks like the diff (on the 13" model, which is what I care about) is:

• Faster CPU (finally!)

• Thunderbolt port (count on buying another $30 display adapter like every generation)

• 3 hours less battery life

I was really hoping the stock models would ditch hard drives entirely (for SSDs) like the MB Air.

The only reason I wasn't hoping for that is because I intend to stuff a 512 GB aftermarket SSD into my next MBP and I'd rather not pay through the nose for Apple's upgrade option.

They are only charging $1100-$1200 for the upgrade. Where are you getting a high-quality aftermarket 512GB SSD for much less than that (forget that you have to install it yourself)?

edit: pricing differs slightly depending on model

Is hard drive replacement in an MBP really difficult enough to warrant any mention when high-end SSDs are in play?

Nope. I got my 13" Macbook Pro in early January of this year and it took me a total of 10 minutes to replace the stock HDD with an SSD.

If you ignore the hours of data copying or fresh install.

that's where lightpeak/thunderbolt steps in.

I actually cloned it with Carbon Copy Cloner before switching it in. It was about another 5 minutes of work, and then letting it sit and run in the background for an hour. Not much to worry or complain about.

Especially if you get a list price discount (negotiated for small business, big employer, association, government, military) the apple upgrade price is below market price, at least for the 512.

As of this morning, $1200 for a 512GB SSD is cheaper than what's available on newegg.com

I don't think the laptop versions of the Core i* have 3 memory channels (neither do the Socket-1155/1156 desktop versions), so 3x4GB of RAM would be a strange/suboptimal configuration. There probably isn't enough physical space in a 13" laptop for more than 2 modules anyway (unless you sacrifice battery or optical drive space). Even soldering them to the motherboard wouldn't save much space - I think all current 4GB modules use 16 DRAM chips.

The move from Core2Duo to Core i* alone should bag you a substantial improvement in processing power, at least; the lack of a quad-core model is presumably a battery life and cooling system trade-off.

Wasn't there a problem with some of the core processors? I don't remember which ones, but I'd check very carefully.

Also worth checking out is what scale they are made at, I remember some of the core i processors were only being made at the higher nanometers scale (e.g. older less heat efficient technology).

It would be ironic if the Core i5 four core model was more battery efficient and produced less heat than the core i5 two core models...

Edit: no, I'm not referring to the recent thing with the sandy bridge architecture, but a previous architecture. Did some more research and it sounds like back in September some of them were produced at 32 nanometers and others were produced at 45 nanometers. Also there may have been some initial problems going to their new 32nm process.

Presumably by now they've got the issues that I remembered sorted out (so that they can have new and different issues like sandy bridge ports and so forth).

All the new MacBook Pros use the latest "Sandy Bridge" generation CPUs. You can tell by the type of integrated GPU. There was a problem with the secondary SATA controller in the first revision of Intel's chipset for these CPUs. This has since been fixed, and also only surfaces in systems with more than 2 SATA ports.

It's the Sandy Bridge series (the affected one), but it was the chipsets that were affected, and that supposedly won't be a problem with these laptops.

Yep, those CPUs only support 8GB max.

See the Intel Core i7 2620M (the 2.7Ghz part in the high-end 13" model) spec sheet for example: http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=52231

Interesting, I didn't realise the mobile versions don't even support multiple memory modules per channel. (which would allow for 4 modules like on many desktop systems, including the iMacs)

unless you sacrifice [...] optical drive space

What they really sacrificed here was the opportunity to make a compelling product. It's 2011, when have you last time used an optical drive?

I have no idea why they're still so popular. I can only assume people don't think about it rationally. I don't know anyone who drags DVDs around with them, so why drag around the drive?

Frankly, I haven't needed an optical drive in a laptop since booting from USB drives became practical a few years ago. (happy MacBook Air user here)

It'll be interesting to see if Apple fleshes out its Cinema display into a combined docking station and screen using the Thunderbolt port's potential. Add a DVD drive, HDD for Time Machine, USB/Firewire controllers, ExpressCard slot, whatever, using the PCIe channel in the Thunderbolt.

It's 2011, when have you last time used an optical drive?

I see where you're standing. But actually I receive two DVDs per week in my mailbox, so last time was today. And I still buy CDs, yes.

I think what you really want is the next iteration of the Air with whatnot is missing from the current model.

So, honest question, would you not trade the internal CD-Rom for better battery life, more ram, lighter weight or some other tangible advantage?

The only situation where I could imagine an external CD-Rom to get in the way would be for watching DVDs on the go. But afaik even for that most people copy the movie to the harddrive beforehand - to prevent the drive from sucking the battery dry while watching.

Instead of the above trade off, I think I'd buy two machines if needed.

I see the MBP as a laptop to use plugged in a socket and with a lan cable at home, work, a client's place or a library, and only need decent portability and battery life. For all other uses I'd prefer the ipad or the Air(wish I get the $$ for it).

Last night, to rip a DVD from Netflix. Before that, I didn't use it often, to be fair, but I've still used it to install Office, to install OS X, and to burn a DVD with the complete audio _Ulysses_ on it.

Do I use it as often as I did, say, 10 years ago? No, but I can imagine why Apple would leave it.

When I updated the system to Snow Leopard.

Given the Air's recovery thumbdrive, I think Apple can start sell the next OS X version in thumbdrive form =).

1st thing I did when I receive my Snow Leopard DVD is to RIP it to my firewire HDD.

I'm curious why they didn't put in a Blu-Ray reader/writer, if they're going to put in an optical drive at all?

Because it costs more.

and a pony? :)

(see: http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/publications/magazine/6/4/... )

still looking for an "official" statement but i believe that the thunderbolt port may be backwards compatible with minidisplay. i would assume apple would change it's form if it were not, as to prevent users from accidentally plugging in incompatible devices.

[updated] it is backwards compatible - source: http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/features.html

>>• 3 hours less battery life

The old battery tests were unrealistic. They advertised 8 hours on the 17'', but who really got even close to that under normal use?

I'm thankful they're taking the hit on pure battery life numbers to report an honest, realistic test.

I'd be surprised if that's what happened. I suspect this is just another unrealistic number that's the same proportion of reality as the previous numbers.

That said, when I'm traveling and going for extended battery life (read: trans-atlantic flights) I get pretty close to the rated number by dimming my backlight and shutting off wifi and bluetooth.

Apple reported that they were changing the way they measured/reported battery life with the last MacBook air launch, and explained that it was less favorable, but more realistic.

During transitions like this it would be nice to give both numbers on the new and old machines. This at least gives people some type of comparison point.

While that would be nice for the techie crowd, it would read to the typical user like "we were lying before, sorry about that". Not very feasible.

Well, I do get very close to 8 hours on my 17" MBP (when the cpu is not too stressed). That number will go down if any serious work is done, but light browsing etc. takes it all the way up to 8h.

The key I find with my mid 2010 17 is to manually force intel graphics. Several web browsers and plugins seem to invoke the NVidia discrete chip which sucks power.

Thank you for this reminder.

http://codykrieger.com/gfxCardStatus is a great tool for this.

Yep. My MBP, which was hte latest verison as of last week, gets about 3-4 hours on battery. Way less than they advertised. In the past they've been pretty reasonable. Not so much any more.

They advertised 10 hours for my (now) last-gen MacBook pro. I can easily do 12 hours. And have. Screen brightness at minimum, using terminal.app. I prefer vim to any graphical editor (haven't tried emacs), and nethack is one of my favorite games ever. That's what I spend my long plane rides doing.

I'm not sure if they're being more realistic.

The previous MBPs had CPUs with a TDP of 35W. The TDP of the CPUs in the 2011 MBPs are 45W. Battery life seems to have dropped inline with the increase in power envelope.

We should see improved battery life next year with Ivy Bridge, or if there's a mid-year refresh with Sandy Bridge processors with new steppings.

Regardless, I plunked down for a 15" today so I could rid myself of the large brick my workplace saddled with me. They didn't believe me when I said I'd buy my own laptop with my own case. Hell, I meant it.

I think the TDP increase is mostly due to the integrated graphics being moved on to the CPU. Overall platform power usage should be lower than the previous generation.

The increase in TDP mostly has to do with the increased GPU power - I think (speculating) that if you were running the 2010 CPU + the nvidia gpu hot for equivalent performance you'd be seeing at least as high a total power draw.

My 2010 15" MBP (i7, anti-glare upgrade) routinely gets 5-6+ hours on battery -- unless I'm doing something that causes the discrete GPU to kick in. Then, I'm lucky to get two hours.

I can totally vouch for this. My 5,3 MBP only got about 4 hours max when brand new as long as I was running OS X and had the power-saving video mode selected. Running Debian, I usually see around 2 hours if I'm lucky.

>Thunderbolt port (count on buying another $30 display adapter like every generation)

Existing (edit: mini)displayport adapters will work. Per the Apple Thunderbolt site (http://www.apple.com/thunderbolt/):

"And because Thunderbolt is based on DisplayPort technology, the video standard for high-resolution displays, any Mini DisplayPort display plugs right into the Thunderbolt port. To connect a DisplayPort, DVI, HDMI, or VGA display, just use an existing adapter."

Yes, and you can pick up a cheap $7 mini-display port to DVI connector from Monoprice.com. I'm using one now to connect my early 2010 MBP to an el-cheapo Dell 22" LCD.

What happens when you plug a Thunderbolt plug into a DisplayPort port?

Probably nothing. If they're smart, they've made it physically not fit (like SAS into SATA).

It's $100 for the mini-display port to dual-dvi, and it doesn't even work very well.

I was scared away from purchasing a MacBook Pro with a Mini-Display Port just because of all the reviews on Apple.com saying how that converter was horrible. I'm happy I did, because it caused me to wait for a MacBook Air 13", and not only did I get a computer that is better for me (I really don't need all the features and power of the latest and greatest MBP) - They also seemed to have fixed the problems with the converter. I spend 10-12 hours a day with my MBAir 13" 1440x900and my Dell 2560x1600.

The Converter works fine, I _love_ the mini-display port form factor, Happy to hear they are adapting it for thunderbolt, (Interesting to see the similarity in Bus Naming "FIRE WIRE" "THUNDER BOLT") - Only downside is that it requires a USB port to power it, but, on the pro side, the MBAir comes with two!

I believe your monitor has a Displayport-in, which means you only need a $5 cable from monoprice that is mini-DP to DP. I have one and it works quite well. Much cheaper than the $100 adapter.

I have the dell 3007wfp, which does not have display port, the 3008wfp does.

I almost choked on a sip of tea when I noticed that the 13" "Pro" is still stuck with a 1280*800 display. Talk about boneheaded move.

Market segmentation.

Yeah. It segments away people who want more than 113 dpi in a sub-5 lb laptop with a hard drive larger than 256 GB quite effectively.

Why is that a boneheaded move? I think that 1280x800 fits plenty of information on a 13" screen. I usually run an external display for more space.

If anything, 1400x900 on the new MBA seems a little bit small (and Apple doesn't allow you to bump the size of everything up like you can in Windows). It's interesting that 1680x1050 is still an upcharge on the 15".

> Why is that a boneheaded move?

Because people want higher resolutions without using an external display. Or at least a choice.

The fact that a 1920x1080 is only available on a single production laptop, the Sony Vaio Z and a small number of 17" laptops (possibly some 16"ers too) makes me suspect that the market for high resolution screens is very slim.

The best I can tell, the availability of high resolution screens on laptops has actually dropped over the past few years rather than increased. It seems rare now that screen resolution is even an option on laptops.

Personally I'm one of the people who is in the market for high resolution laptop screens. Unfortunately its a choice between high resolution and durability or size. I'm never traveling with a 17" screen again and I don't really want a poorly engineered Vaio Z.

We're talking about the 13". You do realize 1280x800 and 1920x1080 aren't the only choices, right? You don't have to look far, Apple's own Macbook Air comes with a 13" 1440x900. (And to rub it in, a 11" 1366x768.)

And the macbook air has a higher resolution in an 11" form-factor

The number of potential customers for this model that actually know what that means is very small.

If Apple put in a 1900x1080 screen, what you'd hear instead from consumers is that everything is too tiny to read.

Nice false dichotomy.

I think the kind of people who just look at the size of the screen and not the number of pixels, are likely the same people who will just buy the same size Windows PC because it's several hundred dollars less.

In other words, the people willing to pay Apple prices care enough about their computer purchase to actually read the specs. Like if you buy a high performance car, you at least want to do enough research not to look like a total idiot in front of your gear head friends after you've spent that much money.

Or maybe I'm wrong, and Apple customers really only care about how nice it will look on the coffee shop table.

I know at least 2 such Apple customers. It's an Apple, it's good enough, and that's all that matters to them; specs are the last things they care about.

A colleague has a Vaio with that resolution running Win7. It doesn't seem to respect DPI settings system wide, he is continually adjusting font sizes. I don't know why he puts up with it, it seems much more hassle than it is worth.

My work provided me with a 13" MacBook Pro and I hate how the display is only 1280 by 800. When we get our new budget I am hoping I can get an upgrade to a 15" with the hi-res display, but we shall see.

My MacBook Pro 15" from a couple of years ago has a 1440 by 900 display and that is MUCH better than this 1280 by 800. Shame that Apple still thinks that is acceptable.

To add to your list: 3G internet.

Yeah, why not? Among top tier laptop and cellphone manufacturers, the only name that appears on both lists is Apple (well, I guess Samsung makes laptops too...). Adding a SIM/RUIM slot and a 3G chip makes so much sense. I know a lot of laptop manufacturers in Europe have offered this as an option. Why not Apple?

Because it's more profitable for Apple if you get your 3G from a tethered iPhone?

Maybe more profitable for AT&T. It's not like you're not going to buy an iPhone because they add 3G to their laptops.

why would it be tethering be profitable for Apple? AFAIK they do not get a cut of the tethering charge from providers.

Because then you have to buy an iPhone (and proprietary cables, and then you might find some fun apps etc.)

Because most people don't want to pay for two 3G data plans, and the types of people who would want 3G connectivity on their laptops probably have 3G smartphones with tethering already.

You don’t have to pay for a data plan. I use one of those prepaid 3G USB sticks and pay 2.50€ for one day unlimited HSDPA internet access (limited to GPRS speeds after 500MB).

That’s perfect for me since I’m maybe six hours in a train two or three times a month and no flatrate can beat the five or eight Euro I’m paying.

There are dozens of other options available (at least in Germany), suitable for pretty much any conceivable need and some will come with extra SIM cards for your smartphone or tablet.

How about this one: 15€ per month, unlimited HSDPA internet access (limited to GPRS speeds after 1GB), 9ct per minute for all phone calls and SMS (as always in Europe, incoming phone calls and SMS are free), two SIM cards. You could order an unlocked iPhone from Apple right now (I don’t know whether that’s possible in the US but it is now in Germany) and put one SIM card in the phone and use the other one for your laptop or whatever other device.

In the US and Canada you don't get anything like these offers, and Apple's not the kind to redesign their hardware just so that some people in Europe can do something easily accomplished with a smartphone or a $50-100 USB 3G modem.

It seems just so strange. The iPad does have 3G built in, why not their other mobile products? Plugging that 3G modem in is just so unelegant.

Maybe they're not confident that the number of people choosing this option would compensate for the extra training and infrastructure necessary to support it, plus the tie-ins with a carrier. It's one thing to do that for the iPhone where every customer wants it, another for 5% of Macbook buyers.

The main thing that bothers me in your list that I was really hoping for, was the better resolution on the 13inch. boo.

I'm getting the 15" for just that reason. The extra weight is worth having two vim buffers side by side.

Great, it's the standard 1440x900 or the high-res option ? Did you get matte display ?

I don't think it's less battery life - it's just measured more accurately.

Love the quad core.

Hate the CD drive - fill up that space with something useful, not a dead weight. I'd have to install an optibay adapter with SSD but I don't see why I'd want to to hack a brand new laptop.

I am still waiting for a 13" Macbook Air with an Apple ARM processor, 10 hours of battery, RAM upgradeable to 8GB and 512gb SSD drive by default, for less than $1500. Hopefully it'll be out in a year. Maybe two.

Lugging around my Core2Duo MBP weighing at over 2kg does get quite tiring. :( I need its battery life though.

> Ditching the optical media for longer battery life

I doubt the optical drive uses any significant power at all when it's not in use.

That said, I ditched my own in favor of an SSD + HDD setup and haven't looked back.

I think what's meant is using that space for battery and not a useless optical drive.

I think he meant (or this is certainly what I was hoping for) that removing the optical bay would leave space for a much larger battery.

Ah, that makes more sense. Although a battery is a lot denser than an optical drive, so that would kick the system weight up. If you use some of the space gained to instead make the system thinner, you start to get essentially a Macbook Air. And I think it's fairly clear that Apple is moving in the direction of converging the Air and the 13" MBP.

Totally agreed on ditching optical media. I'm also wondering when they'll get around to adding mobile broadband support.

That they kept the optical drives wasn't a surprise. For most of us (power-users) — who download software and/or use disk images — it's not a necessity, but a lot of regular Joe's still burn CD's/DVD's.

I've had a lot of people look at a MacBook Air and then ask me "where's the DVD drive?".

Apple could easily leverage this to their advantage by selling an optional external drive and marketing it appropriately.

Or they could design the bay to accommodate an optional battery that would be factory installed.

The battery life score is based on Apple's new battery tests. 50% screen brightness whilst browsing 30 websites (including flash) in a normal fashion until the battery dies.

hmm - you need to go to 1799$ before you end up with a half decent graphics card and 2199$ for a decent card.

Compare it with a Dell XPS 15 Sandy Bridge - $1049 for i7 2620M, 1920X1080 display, nVidia GT525 Optimus card, HD Camera.

For a first time possible mac buyer (me) - is it well justified ?

Yes.

I was a first timer on the first unibody. I still LOVE it. I've never loved a PC, Dell, Sony, HP, ACER, Lenovo or otherwise. Part of that is OSX. I find it so much better than Windows, even after having using Windows most of my life.

I am pretty much the same way. I got a 13" mb a bit before the unibody was announced and the got the 15" in late 2009. Great machine and still very fast. I LOVE it and am amazed at how useful it is to have a computer that you trust to come out of sleep so quickly and that has good battery life. I only wish I have the 15" with the higher resolution screen.

Have you used OS X before?

I pay the Mac premium for two reasons: (1) my laptop is supported by tons of Apple Stores across the country, and (2) OS X is awesome (and since it's Unix-based, I can work in the terminal without a problem). There's also a great reselling market for Macs.

If (1) and (2) don't really matter to you, go with the Dell. I'll pay the extra price to get exactly what I want in my computer.

This... the cost of my computer hardware is basically inconsequential given that these days I'll often get 3-4 years out of it. If I'm using it for work, that's like $2 a day total cost over its lifetime. I'll happily pay an incremental $1 a day for a system that saves me 10 minutes of dicking around and forgo starbucks if that's what it takes.

Justifying choice of your primary work system on the basis of even a $1,000 price difference is generally penny wise - pound foolish. I don't think that's a Mac/Win/Linux issue, just common sense when it comes to work tools.

Well said. Though a cynical contractor could counter that having less productive tools means you get to bill more hours for a given task. Sort of a flip side of the old job creation parable:

"Why are those men digging that ditch with shovels? Wouldn't it be more efficient to use a backhoe?"

"Yes, but this way we create more jobs."

"OK, but if that's the case, why not give them spoons instead?"

Ha. There is always paralells and win xp if you want to be slow. But for the rest of the time i am so fast on os x. I had to do some automation programming and that was the only way to do it.

That assumes you save any time at all. I use a ThinkPad with Win7 and I think honestly say that I lose no additional time vs using a MBP. In fact I'd argue it saves me time as I generally like the keyboard more and I can't stand trackpads (I turn mine off and use the stickpoint -- which I actually even prefer over a mouse).

My point... the $1000 savings for many comes with no penalty at all. With that said, I don't have a Unix environnemnt requirements, which would change the equation in a big way.

I think if you find the Thinkpad / W7 more powerful, you should go that route.

All I'm saying is that if you're planning to make on the order of $250-$300K off using a piece of equipment, $1,000 (or even $10,000, arguably) probably shouldn't be material to which one you choose.

But any dollar not spent on one part of a work setup can be spent on some other part of the work setup, so that kind of thinking can easily come out in the wash.

Day to day tasks, I'm pretty equally efficient in any OS, but OSX's significant "lifetime of ownership" time savings for me has been system maintenance. I've never needed to reformat and reinstall a Mac, and when I've voluntarily done it (hackintoshing), restoring a complete system from Time Machine backups has been absolutely painless.

Major OSX updates have never been a problem either (although I've read accounts of errors happening), I've carried one Macbook from 10.4 to 10.6 without ever reinstalling. I've been burned a couple times trying to do distribution upgrades with Ubuntu, I've never had a Windows install that didn't need an occasional refresh for some reason, and I wouldn't dare upgrade from XP->Vista->7. I've not owned Win 7 long enough yet to determine if that will still be the case, but Windows' history has me skeptical.

Just my experience. The Mac price difference has paid for itself many times over for systems I depend on and family I support.

Depends what kind of developer you are. If you're a developer that requires a posix environment, you're definitely better off in the mac world. Thinkpad with Linux is sometimes an option if you're confident that everything is supported, but very often you'll be wasting time dicking around in the xorg.conf file to get the external display to work properly with certain monitors/configurations.

I'm also a bit surprised that you hate the trackpad -- that's the one thing I love about the mac. It supports many kinds of gestures that just wouldn't be possible on a single stickpoint. For example, I use the 3-finger swipe for navigation in chrome every day, and a 4 finger swipe for jumping to specific apps.

I'm a recent OS X convert and I absolutely loathe using trackpads. So I use a mouse. Big whoop.

(1)That support, in the form of AppleCare costs money, something like $350 at time of purchase. (2)OSX will run on most PCs, it's not specific to hardware anymore. The additional price paid to Apple is ostensibly for attention to detail in hardware and software design.

And the assurance that it will actually work as advertised. I don't want to spend the time and effort to get OSX working on non-Apple hardware. Maybe it will take little time and effort. Maybe it won't. I'm willing to pay to not find out.

(1) That support, for the first year of my laptop's life, is complimentary. The $350 is worth it when it extends the life of my 2006 MacBook to 5 years.

(2) Are you seriously suggesting I buy a Windows laptop, screw around with it for hours/days, and install a buggy version of OS X so I can save $300? No thanks.

this is not a rhetorical question - would you say that a similarly priced Dell warranty cover (what we call CompleteCover in Asia: it includes accidental damage protection) is worse than a walk-in Apple Genius support ?

Dell's coverage is usually next day onsite.

Personally, I've found Dell's next day onsite service very impressive. BUT the laptop in question needed such service so often that I would never buy another Dell without evidence of a major change in their operations.

(Not to mention that at one point their online service guys told me our harddrive was not salvageable and recommended reformatting it. I ignored them and less than 12 hours later had backed up the entire drive using a Linux Live CD.)

Never owned a Dell, but support for my Compaq (I know, I know) was absolutely terrible. Others could probably answer this question better.

As a Linux user I find it funny when OSX is compared to a Unix OS since it has a terminal. That's like saying Nextstep (what OSX is based on) is an acceptable OSX

OS X is a fully POSIX compliant operating system (as opposed to Linux, which is not fully compliant). It is officially branded as Unix. I don't understand what you mean?

Aside from OSX -- I wonder how many people on HN actually have much dealings with a real UNIX (a Solaris or AIX etc).

I would hazard a guess that *nix means Linux to a large % of the population.

POSIX is irrelevant, Linux is POSIX compliant, no-ones bothered to pay the money for the piece of paper the important thing is the tools.

The main thing lacking from OSX is a package manager, in Linux its build in. On OSX you have to use 3rd party ones. Just look at mark pilgrims 'how to install mysql on ubuntu' for an example of how It Just Works on Linux and on OSX you have to tweak lots of config files.

Then your complaint is not "It's not Unix." It's really "It's not Linux."

There is no package manager built into Linux.

There are a variety package managers to choose from on Linux (apt, yum, portage) just as on Mac OS X (which has MacPorts, Homebrew, and Fink).

Perhaps you are thinking of apt, a popular, slick, "best of breed" package manager that is native on exactly one of the many Linux distributions: Debian. It is technically "third party," though "built in," on other Linux distributions like Ubuntu, which is based on Debian but not the same thing as Debian.

Anyway, packaging is a mess on both Linux and OS X. Even on Ubuntu and Debian you have to go outside the built in packager for a truly good experience in certain cases, e.g. Ruby via rvm; Rails and other ruby packages via gem; Perl modules via CPAN, etc.

Yes, OS X would be better with a package manager other than the one built into the App Store, but a lack of one does not make it Not Unix.

Balls to semantics! :) If you install Linux on your machine, you get a distro and you get a package manager. It's not third party to your OS it comes with you OS, your OS is installed with it, you OS is upgraded with the package manager. You only need to use the package manager that comes with your OS (i have never had to use yum while on a debian os). None is true on OSX.

The OSX package managers are not as good as apt (the one package manager I have a lot of experience), in the same way Nextstep is not as good as OSX. The fact that you need to have more than one installed and use for different software (my experience working with fink afnd macports in OSX tiger days) shows that its not as good as apt

Fink is apt, and it is by far the worst of the three package managers available for OS X.

Do you need Apple specific software? If not, go with the gear at a good price that lasts long. I had a Dell business grade laptop, Compaq, and a 13" macbook pro. Dell died twice and was repaired on their dime, Compaq lasted 8 years and still works except the sound card burning out, and my 3 year old macbook, is a-ok as well. Compaq was $1150, Dell was $1500, and the MBP was $1350.

For my software dev, all of them worked well. For gaming, they all sucked.

I do my software Dev on Mac OS X. I am a backend systems software engineer working on daemons that run in the background on top of FreeBSD. Mac OS X helps since it is so similar to FreeBSD it makes it easy for me to test on my own laptop, and I have access to all of the tools I need to do my job in Terminal, such as mercurial, python, easy to install open source software using MacPorts and whatnot. On Windows I would have to dick around with msys, and cygwin, also I would be vastly less efficient because of having to deal with various inconsistencies and possible issues because the code I just wrote might not compile correctly on a POSIX system.

Your configuration is about $1600, not $1049. Did you actually try to configure it?

http://d.pr/jSut+

You did the 2720QM instead of the 2620M he specified, and added a few extras (windows ultimate, 750gb hdd, etc). What he claimed is almost true, except he missed that the $1050 model's display is not 1920x1080, you have to pay an extra $150 for that.

very true - my mistake. I could, however, be very much on the mark - if we account for the frequent coupons that Dell puts out.

I'm also interested in becoming a 'first time mac buyer'. As such, I have some questions:

- Do these offer a significant enough improvement over the last generation to justify not buying a refurbed older model? - What's the real conceptual difference between the three models? I know it's not just screen size - how do they differ in intended use case? - I want a laptop I can lug around everywhere and curl up on the sofa with as well as sit at a desk. Is the 17" too big for that?

- Do these offer a significant enough improvement over the last generation to justify not buying a refurbed older model?

Depends on what you do: if you do anything that's heavily CPU-bound, the answer is "yes." If you don't, the answer is "no."

If you want to see all three, go to an Apple store. If it were me, I'd probably want a 13" with an aftermarket SSD and an external monitor at home.

No, just get an older model off ebay.

Or Apple refurb. That's what I did, and it saved me nearly 20% off retail.

I got a refurb 13" 2 weeks ago, probably as they were clearing out stock. It's a really nice machine, solid in all the ways it should be. And it was only $1k.

My US$.02:

- Unless you need the higher processor speed or the Thunderbolt port, previous gen refurbished should be quite a deal.

- The 15" high res (1920x1080) is the sweet spot for portability and desktop use. I have a 17" now, and it's really just too big. When I bought mine though (late 2007), the 15" didn't have a high res display. If I were buying one now, it would be the 15" 1080p or the 13" Air (ultraportable).

Where are you seeing 1080p on the 15"? I have the last-gen 15" with the anti-glare upgrade, but was disappointed only to be able to get 1680x1050, so I was pretty excited at the prospect of that much higher a resolution. Looking at the site, though, the upgrade is still just 1680x1050.

I think I'll just continue to hold out hope that the rumored refresh of the Air line, offering Sandy Bridge chips, comes in June.

That said, I agree; if you don't specifically need quad-core or Thunderbolt (which does look pretty cool), the previous generation is very solid, and I'm quite happy with mine.

Really interested in your feedback of the 1440 vs the 1680 on the 15" screen. I spend lots of time in iTerm/TextMate doing web dev. My current MBP 1440 is ok for me, but thinking I should go higher this time.

Will the fonts be too small? (hey, I'm not that old but concerned I'll be 'leaning in' to a screen where everything is too tiny).

Personally, I don't think they're too small. I moved to this machine from a ThinkPad x61 tablet (12.1", 1400x1050 -- just shy of 150 ppi, as opposed to 128-and-change on the MBP), so it's actually a step down in pixel pitch for me. FWIW, I tend to live in the terminal, too.

(That said, part of the reason for the upgrade was that I was starting to notice some "leaning in", myself...)

No direct experience with the 1440x900 screen, so I can't offer any sort of meaningful comparison, but you'd have to make a very compelling case (say, sub three pounds) for me to consider a screen with anything under a vertical kilopixel. (And even then, I'm holding onto a sliver of hope that the Air refresh will bring a higher-res display along with whatever other goodies...)

EDIT: sloppy proofreading.

Good catch, I swore I saw that they offered 1080p on the 15" but Apples site says otherwise. That said, I have the 17" with 1680x1050, and it's plenty of pixels on a laptop.

Here are where I see the use cases for the different sizes of MB Pros:

13": you do work on the laptop, but you also do a fair amount of travelling. In this particular case, the MB Air is also quite good.

15": you do quite a bit of work on the laptop, including connecting it to an external monitor, but would still like the laptop screen as a second monitor. This is definitely the best all around option, especially if you do some travelling/commuting but not all the time.

17": you need the extra screen real estate for something like video editing/graphics editing while on the move. Other than that, it's a bit bigger and heavier than most people find comfortable.

I think many times a big chunk of the price difference comes from the display on Apple laptops. Someone with more knowledge on this could probably explain it better, but I usually notice a better viewing angle and brighter, more vivid colors.

In addition to that you've got the battery life, the thinness and the great touch pad

I think they use s-ips screens in the 15" and up. Not sure about the newer 13" but the older one was tn which is junk. A lot of manufacturers use tn which has probably the lowest quality of the different types of screens.

Nope. They have all been TN so far. Just better quality TNs. I've been wishing for an IPS on a Macbook for years. Looks like this update didn't bring any change to that matter.

I believe the last commercially available IPS laptop was the think pad t43p. The actual plant making 15" IPS panels shut down. (EDIT: wow, thank you! (I forgot about the T60p, but that's also discontinued; the HP EliteBook having a 17" is amazing though...I may have to get one of those!)

The T60p also had one, and the Thinkpad tablets at least through X200t had an IPS (Flexview) option. It doesn't appear to be an option on the more recent tablets.

"I believe the last commercially available IPS laptop was the think pad t43p."

There are one or two commercially available -- see here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4049/hp-elitebook-8740w-ips-on...

The x61 tablet had one, too. One of the many reasons I stuck with that machine as long as I did.

The Dell XPS is a desktop-replacement laptop. Fast, but bulky. I doubt it has wonderful battery life. It's probably got a cheap case. Resale value will be low.

Comparing Apples to Apples, you might look at high-end Sony laptops. The MBP 13" close to the S series, both in price and quality. The F series (big, bulky powerhouse) is much cheaper, and has much better specs - but it's a desktop replacement (like the Dell XPS 15).

Apple doesn't make desktop-replacement laptops. It doesn't even make desktops! I wish it did - I'd love a $1500 Apple mini-tower, and a $1000 MacBook (not Pro) 17", but it's just not going to happen.

It doesn't even make desktops!

Huh? What about the Mac Mini, the iMac and the Mac Pro?

Only the Mac Pro is a true screenless tower.

It's pointless to discount the Mac Mini because of its form factor. Put it in a cardboard box if you want it to look like a tower.

It's valid to discount the Mini because when you buy a Mini you are paying for several very significant features that are lacking from a typical desktop. If you want to make a fair comparison to the Mini, look at home-theater PCs that will be similarly small and quiet.

I don't follow how being a better desktop disqualifies the mini from being a desktop?

Does it have a discrete GPU, or one that shares the system's memory?

Can you upgrade the GPU?

Can you add extra hard drives?

Obviously not everyone needs those features, but some people do. And not everyone wants to pay for workstation parts (like the Pro).

The mini, by virtue of using low-power laptop chips and other techniques to reduce its size and power consumption, will always have a higher cost than a budget tower with equivalent clock speeds but a 250W power supply built by the lowest bidder, loud fans, and other commodity parts.

If all you are looking for is a cheap tower machine built from commodity parts, any of Apple's offerings will require you to pay a significant amount for features that you don't want, because the Apple machine isn't meant to be a generic box or to compete with generic boxes. The Mac mini, iMac, and Mac Pro all target niches that are different from the low-budget, ultra-low-margin desktop market.

It's really no different from saying that the MacBook Pro is an overpriced desktop - of course it is, because it is more than just a desktop. Apple doesn't make ordinary desktops, much to the consternation of almost every hacker who wants an ordinary desktop (but not a workstation) with a good unix-like OS. If Apple did make a generic ATX form-factor box, nobody would take exception to the idea that the Mini, iMac, and Mac Pro are in different categories.

OK, you're right. It seems that small form factors (Mini) and all-in-ones (iMac) are generally classified as "desktops". Though workstations (Pros) are not.

By "desktop", I meant "towers, mini-towers, and those horizontal towers that used to prop up CRT monitors". Computers that you could stuff high-end (but not workstation) video cards, and quad core processors into.

It's only recently that the iMac used "desktop" parts, and not "laptop" ones, isn't it?

"horizontal towers" = pizza boxes?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_box_form_factor

I bought a mac for the first time about 3 months ago (a 13" macbook air). This is after being an IBM guy for years. I gotta say I'm very satisfied with my purchase. The hardware build quality is great and the support is top notch. I had an issue with my logic board, brought it in to an apple store, paid nothing and walked out with a fixed computer two days later. The lack of a 2-4 week turnaround time is wonderful for repairs, and the unix OS is really nice. I dont think I'll switch over to a mac desktop, but for laptops I'm sold.

I've got a 15" dell xps with a core-i7, total piece of shit. Build quality is crap, broken hinges and keys. The battery holds 2/3 of original charge after 6 months. Overheats due to acpi bugs not reporting the temp correctly. Bulky.

Really miss my thinkpad. Never again.

Thunderbolt is the coolest thing here to me. The way I read this, Intel at least partly owns the IP on it, so it should be available on PCs in the future, too? (I hope so, because that will create a bigger peripheral market.)

UPDATE: Answer appears to be "yes."

"...the fastest way to get information in and out of your PC and peripheral devices..."

http://www.intel.com/technology/io/thunderbolt/index.htm

when the 11" Macbook Air gets Thunderbolt and a newer generation of processors, I will be first in line to pick one up.

Compact size, internal SSD, and only two cords to plug in each time I sit down - power and data - and data happens to also carry video to a large external monitor setup.

Thunderbolt is the coolest thing here to me.

Same here. For years, my biggest compliant about laptops has been the speed bottleneck between my laptop and large external storage devices.

I was about to post something to the effect of "I'm disappointed that the 13-inch model replaced the Nvidia GPU with an Intel one", but it seems to be decently better: http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-320M.28701.0.htm...

I'm a bit disappointed because I wanted to fool with GPU programming and I think Nvidia is still the standard there:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4638324/nvidia-vs-amd-gpg...

Does anyone have any experience with OpenCL versus Cuda?

you can't program cuda in os x anyway, apple only uses OpenCL. As far as I know, os x doesn't support OpenCL on the intel graphics chips either

Of course they don't.

I didn't encounter any problems using nVidia's CUDA toolkit on OS X. If you mean that it is not provided out of the box, true.

The people in this forum would be very surprised you can't program Cuda on Mac OS X :)

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showforum=75

Oh wow, I was pretty sure I read somewhere that Apple was only allowing OpenCL. Good find

I never understood why the 13" version is such a second class citizen? Is it that different of a footprint that Apple can't fit the same technology in it... or is this Apple's plan?

The main driving factor here is not making the technology smaller, it's running those chips on a smaller battery. All of the MBPs achieve a claimed 7 hours battery life.

plan. remember that 13" didn't even have Pro in it's name at first - it was called Aluminum Unibody MacBook when first introduced.

The footprint is that different.

The volume is smaller, but the HDD, optical drive, keyboard, trackpad, and several other parts stay the same size. Of course the smaller laptop is going to be less stocked with features.

And people expect to pay less for a 13" version...

Probably because of overlap between it and the MacBook and the MacBook Air?

Frankly, I'm amazed they still offer a 13 inch MBP (which is not to say that it isn't a good little machine, but that Apple likes to segment their market clearly)

I can't see the prices and options at the moment, but it may be that the MBP is just a couple of hundred bucks more than the top end MacBook, which means that some people might stretch that little bit extra.... but the Apple lineup is becoming very cluttered around that small portable computer strange attractor.

> Frankly, I'm amazed they still offer a 13 inch MBP (which is not to say that it isn't a good little machine, but that Apple likes to segment their market clearly)

While true, it is their best selling laptop, I can imagine it happening in a few years once the air gets a few spec bumps and lowers in price.

There is indeed this overlap and clutter on the 13". I think this is because much within the Air is still pretty new stuff for most people: SSD, ditching optical drives. So if people want to pay for performance as they now know it, they'll go for the Pro version. But I doubt there will be a next generation of 13 inch Pros.

More like, so much within the Air is still bloody expensive.

I'd rather have space than SSD speed for the associated price. I want to be able to watch DVDs or burn off a quick disk. I don't want to have to step up to a bulky 15" machine just to retain these features.

The Air is not, in my opinion, a really useful machine.

Totally depends on what you use your computer for. I use my optical drive about once every 12 months and all of my important files fit easily into 128GB. With the proliferation of media services in the cloud, that number continues to drop...I now listen to Pandora 10x as much as my iTunes collection.

So you are one of the reasons there is still a 13 inch Pro. In a couple of years, with a new Air with bigger SSD and more of your data in the cloud, it might make more sense to you.

How is having a bigger SSD going to help him burn stuff to disk or watch a DVD? His point was that he still uses the optical drive.

So you say, well, your DVD will be 'in the cloud'. Never mind that pushing that much data up most connections will take all month, how will he even get it onto his computer with no optical drive in the first place?

Well, you might say, all your new stuff will be on the cloud, so don't worry about it. But consider if he has a massive DVD collection. Heck, not even a massive one, just assume a hundred or s DVDs.... are you Seriously proposing that he repurchase all that media in 'cloud' format? At $30 a pop, that would easily justify the cost of going for a more expensive MBP rather than a crippled Air.

Oh you say, well if it is just a matter of money, you can just buy the external optical drive. But now whenever you take the laptop anywhere, you have peripherals to drag along with you, and that involves logistics. Again, he's better off with the one that is just built in.

Disclaimer: personally I think the Air is pretty neat. I just don't agree with parent's assertion that optical drives are unnecessary.

Streaming Netflix is $8 a month. Its library now is okay. In the next few years, it may approach total coverage of the movies most people want to watch. (There already is plenty of overlap with my collection and what's available through streaming.)

The parent did not assert optical drives were unnecessary. He only suggested they may not be necessary for that person.

In the year I've had my current MacBook, I've used the optical drive maybe 10 times: -I've started burning CDs again because I just bought a car from 2003, too new for a tape adapter and too old for aux input. -Occasional DVDs, but most video comes over the web. -Occasional software installation, but I get most software via the web these days.

Burning CDs full of data is already an idea long gone with the advent of various flash devices. Practically no one burns CDs of music anymore since CD players are pretty much gone. Even DVDs are fading; Apple has a vested interest in this happening faster since they sell media online in any case.

With high-speed I/O, an external drive would work just fine for folks who need to read or burn disks only occasionally. These days, that's most people.

It's the entry level MBP, it's also by far the most popular model; Apple just wants to make sure that you have something to upgrade _to_ from the the 13" model.

I never plan to upgrade from 13" to 15"/17". For me the main feature of a laptop is the small form factor and the 13" is just really neat in that respect. I have my desktop for when I need more power.

Why not get the Air then?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2258395

So basically, you still use your optical drive. I've had my current work Macbook for about 6 months and I've yet to use the optical drive.

Space might be an issue but it's also strategic. I need the higher-resolution screens and have bought (and will continue to buy) the 15" versions even though I don't really need the better CPU or GPU. I'm sure there are many others like me who grudgingly or not will fork over the extra cash.

Bummed that you can't get more than 8 GB of memory on even the i7. Why are the i7 mobiles only limited to 8 GB? That seems silly for today's standards and memory costs.

its not the new i7 mobiles that are not supporting it... You can get a sager with 16GB http://www.sagernotebook.com/index.php?page=product_customed...

may be they should've relabeled the 13" MBP as Macbook and retired the white Macbook, frankly the specs are quite low except for the CPU.. display at 1280x800 :(

But the 15" and 17" inchers look awesome with quads

I agree. I'm especially bummed out that the screen resolution is the same as before. I was hoping that it would be 1440x900! Given that the Macbook Air 13" is 1440x900, it's plausible.

I think that was the original goal - hence why my original 13" unibody just says "Macbook" and not "Macbook Pro." I think they originally planned on retiring the white plastic model, and either calling all of them Macbooks, or just calling the 15" and 17" models Pros. I can only assume they changed because there was still demand for the slightly cheaper plastic model.

Consumer laptops where the OS sees 8 processors. Now is a really good time to pick up Clojure, Erlang, Haskell, Scala and see what the fuss is all about.

Does anyone know if Thunderbolt will support multiple displays? If I hear a yes, I'm off to the Apple store.

You'd think so, it did say something like up to 6 devices.

That's what I'm thinking. As stated here: "...including your display. And with support for video and eight-channel audio, it’s easy to connect HDMI-compatible devices — like your TV and home stereo — using the HDMI adapter you already have. Current VGA, DVI, and DisplayPort adapters are also supported." -- So, one DP monitor, another with HDMI, another with DVI.

If this allows for daisy chaining monitors I might just get the newest one.

I agree with you. It'd be great to be able to run 3 monitors from a closed mbp as a tower replacement. We'll have to see what kind of display adapters they come up with. I use a Diamond NV usb-2 video adapter and it works well for excel or mail, but if you are trying to actively use spaces it gets very laggy due to bandwidth constraints on usb2.0

Yeah, I've got the Diamond BVU195, too. Slows everything down, especially spaces and other things that use Core animation.

Supposedly DisplayPort is theoretically capable of at least one extra display, but Apple's tech specs page still says "an" external display, so I don't think they've implemented that yet.

Still, I'm thinking there might be Thunderbolt-compatible external video cards. Since the wire protocol is PCI Express, it seems possible, and performance should be better than external USB video cards.

I dread this because it makes the model I bought last year feel outdated! I can't see upgrading something like an MBP more than once every two years, though. That's reassuring since I know whatever that model is, it will be fantastic by current standards.

The only time my MBP breaks a sweat as it is, though, is on games: Half Life 2 and the PlayStation 2 emulator make the fans come on like it's trying to dry my hair.

I'm not 100% sold on my next laptop being an Apple, though. While my MBP is very impressive, it is also a quite expensive piece of hardware... and I'm not impressed by Apple's policies regarding iOS and the App Store. But what is the alternative? It doesn't seem like there is any other manufacturer successfully designs elegant, high performance luxury notebooks.

I have been pretty satisfied with my HP Envy 15 purchased last March, for roughly the same price that a MBP would have cost me. Differences between it and a MBP:

Slightly lighter.

No cool magnetic charger thing; instead, power brick.

Battery life is comparatively awful -- I usually get about an hour and a half. (I don't personally care about battery life.)

Envy has better resolution at 15" -- 1920x1080. Envy has what appears to be slightly better graphics card. (That is, a slightly better graphics card a year ago as opposed to what the new MBPs have today. It kicked the crap out of the last-generation ones.)

Envy has SSD+HDD instead of having SSD + built-in optical drive.

I'm personally much happier with it, since resolution and being able to play games on it are a big deal for me. Not sure what HP's offerings look like today.

Other laptops that don't appear to suck, but which I have no personal experience with, include IBM ThinkPads and some of Sony's Vaio series.

Don't feel out of date. I've had the same macbook pro I bought 4 years ago. It's gone on trips with me, it's been knocked off the couch by my kid, and it runs my unit tests just as fast as my friend's newer model.

I paid $1900 for my core2duo macbook pro and got four years and counting out of it. Before that I was buying new Windows machines every two years. They were half the price, but didn't last as long.

My next machine, when this one dies, will definitely be a mac. :)

unfortunate that almost all the rumours were false - hybrid ssd - better battery - higher resolution - bigger trackpad - thinner body

I find the benchmark graphs on http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/performance.html frustrating. What is the baseline Apple is comparing to? I have a MacBook Pro with a core 2 duo 2.53GHz processor. I am sure that the 2.2 GHz quad-core processor on the new MBPs is faster, but by how much. How do the processors stack up when running single treaded applications? I suppose I'll need to wait for the third party reviews.

Apple always say what the stats are of the machines in the footnotes: http://grab.by/98Pq

Anyone know if you can boot from a Thunderbolt Connected drive?

Apple has always supported booting OS X from external drives, be it USB or Firewire. So I'm sure the answer is 'Yes.'

The drive would have to either be a device that's already supported by Apple's EFI or it would have to include an EFI option ROM.

It seems as if for the last couple years every time Apple releases a new device it gets less expensive than the predecessor. I wonder if this is just an economy of scale effect, if as Apple grows they can afford to make less expensive computers, or if the lower prices are driven by falling hardware costs, or if they are deliberately driving the price down to grab a larger market share.

Either way the Apple product line up is just getting better and better in my eyes.

Aren’t prices exactly the same as before?

Right, but now you are getting more hardware for your dollars.

that's how it is supposed to work

Uhm, like everywhere else? Have you been alive those last thirty years? Hardware gets better, prices come down. This years MacBook is obviously and unsurprisingly going to better than last years.

like clockwork!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moores_law

>Thanks to the new microarchitecture, the graphics processor is on the same chip as the central processor and has direct access to L3 cache.

I've been waiting for this kind of thing for years. Up until the iPad, I never would've guessed it'd be Apple that beat everyone out the door. That kind of proximity has the potential to change how we use GPUs, because moving data back and forth can be so much faster.

Innovations in Sandy Bridge are due to Intel, not Apple. All PC vendors use the same Intel processors. CPU/GPU "fusion" sounds like a great idea until you realize that it necessarily involves a weak GPU, which negates any benefit of the close coupling.

Interesting that they are now offering a SSD drive......does this mean they have now added the SSD TRIM command (or planning to add it in Lion)?

they've always offered SSD

Indeed, they've done so for some time now. I hoped it would be the default in the new MBP's... :-(

There is already an SSD option for current Macbooks. No TRIM.

newer SSDs (Vertex 3 Pro) actually perform worse after a TRIM

_worse_? I'd expect worst-case no-change, if it would hurt, the vendor would make TRIM a NOP. However, I'm always open for a source. (AnandTech for instance writes, TRIM just doesn't help, at http://www.anandtech.com/show/4159/ocz-vertex-3-pro-preview-...)

[edit] Well, if you look at the numbers, one column actually got worse. Wow.

Not sure why you were voted down - I really want to see Apple support TRIM, too.

Does anyone know whether there's a next-gen interface standard that's being worked on that might supersede SATA, with more elegant support for flash memory (beyond SATA's hacky NCQ+TRIM)?

High-end SSDs may migrate to PCIe with NVMHCI.

Built in garbage collection in newer SSD's makes it unnecessary.

So I (blindly) thought that an Apple-integrated SSD might somehow be better than an aftermarket add in I drop in, RE TRIM. Is this not the case?

IANAHDS (I am not a hard drive specialist)

According to a benchmark, OS X doesn't really require TRIM to keep the performance up.

Please see this link: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/apple/2010/07/01/mac-ssd-pe...

I have been using two Intel X25-M SSDs as RAID 0 in a Macbook Pro almost a year now and I've yet to see any loss in performance. Apple has been offering SSDs as BTO for quite some time now. If you can use a screwdriver I suggest you buy a Sandforce-based SSD and install it yourself as those are immensely faster than the Apple-provided ones.

That article is misleading for a number of reasons, foremost that they performed a full format before getting started, effectively trashing the SSD's performance. See here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1486847

However, TRIM support is mostly a moot point if you go with the Apple offered SSD upgrade, since the Toshiba drives they ship features very aggressive background GC (making TRIM rather redundant). There is still a question mark as to how severly this constant background GC will affect the durability of the drives though:http://www.anandtech.com/show/4010/kingston-ssdnow-v-plus-10...

Somehow the shot of the side made me feel very old, I hardly recognized what half of the ports were. :(

Interesting they've included an integrated graphics controller (Intel) but also a discrete ATI card with 1GB of its own memory.

I wonder if real-world gaming benchmarks will really have near the promised 3x improvements over the last gen MBP's...

hasn't Apple always done this?

The combo of built in and also discrete graphics is a relatively new phenomenon for them.

I remember back when they introduced the first MBPs with the two different built in graphics chips they were hyping it up, but the audience reaction was stony to say the least, because the previous MBPs had had a moderately good (for the time) graphics card, and built in graphics were perceived as being of a much lower capability, so that was a step backwards in power.

It might have given them great battery life (I seem to remember that as their big selling point), but it meant you couldn't play graphics intensive games on them.

This is the same configuration as the last gen MBP. They just traded nvidia for ati.

The new SDXC slot is limited to 64GB. That's an odd limitation given that Lexar has already released a 128GB SDXC card. The spec tops out at 2TB, so this slot could have provided a great way to load huge filesystems.

Ask HN: Get an old 13in MBP or new 13in MBP?

The battery is more important to me than Thunderbolt.

Also consider that the new i5 in the 13" will be much better than the old Core2Duo.

The battery life will be similar, they are just using a realistic test on the 13" now. Go for the new one! :)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2258162

Consider the Air. At least the full-spec one ($1800) is fine for web dev (some Eclipse/XCode as well) and the form factor is unbeatable.

The Mac I'm working on is the last Apple product I plan on buying. Not interested in further subsidizing their attempts to normalize restrictive computing models on their iOS platforms.

Ugh, that's the biggest reason i decided to be a first time Mac user.

I'm disappointed that the 13" still has no high DPI screen. I think Apple will start pushing higher DPI screens into their laptops when their OS becomes more resolution-independent.

I just bought a MacBook Pro last month. Why can't they announce these kinds of updates so us poor fools don't get caught with old tech.

http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#MacBook_Pro

Because they want you poor fools to buy up their remaining stock.

Did you buy from an Apple store? Even if you are a little over the 30 days, they might let you upgrade for the difference.

sucks i bought a MBP two months ago...

Yea, I just ordered 4 Henge Docks for the current (last?) generation MacBook Pro lineup. Crap! I have a support question out to Henge to see if the ports line up or not.

BTW: I'm not affiliated with Henge in any way, just a satisfied customer. If you need a dock for your MBP, the Henge is it!

I'm excited about "Thunderbolt" because someone will finally be able to build a real Mac laptop dock/port replicator.

Henge looks nice, but having a bunch of plugs sticking out from a piece of plastic seems like such a kludge.

It actually works quite well. I have it set up behind my huge cinema display and it looks kinda like a tiny tower back there. :)

They took out the AMD Radeon graphic card on the 13" unit?

Make up your mind, Apple.

So who's getting ready to sell their old MBP?

Not me, my dual-core i7 already runs quite hot enough!

And has the feature of when running connected to a monitor (lid closed) to becoming a warm cat bed/magnet :)

No USB 3.0 is surprising/bad.

Seems to me like they skipped it for Lightpeak, which is also surprising/good.

Is there any technical reason they'd stick with USB2?

Politically, I think they want to skip it and push "Thunderbolt" as the better standard, since USB3 adoption is still pretty low. Just look at their comparison chart:

http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/performance.html

It might be Intel trying to impose their Light Peak format. They already decided to postpone USB3 in their motherboards in favor of Light Peak.

Maybe the sweetheart deal with Apple over being the first ones to implement this tech included a "let's not do USB3 too fast, shall we?" clause.

Probably because Intel's chipsets won't support USB 3 until next year. Current PC motherboards are supporting it with third-party controllers, which presumably Apple didn't want to bother with.

What's new?

Quad core i7 instead of dual core i7 in 15" and 17"

i5 processor in 13"

Thunderbolt 10Gbps integrated into DisplayPort connection

AMD/ATI Radeon graphics chips

Actually the older generation of core i7 were quad core too but had less cache than this generation.

  L2 Cache (per core):	256 KB
  L3 Cache:	4 MB

My i7 says 2 cores in Device Profiler but says 4 in Activity Monitor, fwiw.

Hyperthreading. 2 physical core, 4 logical.

http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/specs-compare.html

Will you be able to get a MBP with a builtin 3G-adapter yet? No? Ok, I'll just go back to Dell then.

Edit: While my comment may come off trollish, this is a requirement for me when buying any mobile gear. That Apple still doesn't provide this for their top of the line laptops still baffles me.

3G? What about 4G?

I'm a little irked that there's no system bus [1] slot, into which I could install a 3G/4G combo card.

However, in the past, I've turned out to be unwilling to spend the extra money on the dedicated hardware and extra subscription. I'd rather have a (nowadays quite tolerably small) USB dongle that I can use on any laptop or even a battery-powered wireless access point [2] than the sleek convenience of something built-in that only supports what was available when I bought it.

[1] e.g. ExpressCard, though, since the 802.11 on the pre-unibody generations appeared to be mini-PCIe, I do wonder if there's hope for a combo wifi/wwan card, even aftermarket.

[2] I'm a huge fan of the Cradlepoint PHS-300

I second [2]

There is an ExpressCard/34 slot on the 17" MBPs, and there isn't really room for one on the 15" and smaller sizes.

I'm aware, but the 17" is just too huge. The 15" is just right, and I wouldn't mind it being larger, as in previous generations, if only from squarer corners.

I'm not convinced there's an issue of space per se, since the SD card slot is only slightly smaller, and, even there, a card is not completely contained within the chassis when plugged in. Doing this with ExpressCard would be better than having none at all, IMO.

Apple has never attempted to be everything to everyone. Why would you expect anything different?

And why not just use a USB dongle?

Why not have everything as external dongles? How about an external soundcard? Or external wifi-module? External card-reader? External auxiliary videocard for hooking up external monitirs?

There's a value in having stuff built in. Where do you draw the line?

I've never understood the demand for builtin 3G for laptops. I don't want to pay for a 3G data plan for my laptop + 3G data plan for my iPad + 3G data plan for my phone. I want a data plan for my phone, and I want all of my devices to be able to access it via tethering.

I can get a twin-card for my phone so it's tied to the same subscription and I don't have an iPad. In that case, it makes very much sense to me to be able to use that twin SIM-card somewhere useful.

It may not fit your needs, but in the parts of the world where 3G is way more ubiquitous than wifi, it's very neat having. And it's extra neat to have without the need to bring up the phone and setting up tethering.

Dell offers it as an option, just like everything else. I fail to see why Apple can't do the same.

Its the first MacBook Pro that I have wanted to buy

What has made it such an improvement over the previous models?

He likes the shorter battery life.

No BluRay combo drive.. I was very much expecting it to be present in the series update.

porn industry killed the bluray

Apple will never include a Bluray drive. Period.

Why?

Apple won't add a new technology to a product for no reason. I can't think of a reason why the mainstream users of MBP would be interested in BluRay.

Moving forward, I hope Apple will get rid of the optical drive or offer an option to replace it with a 2nd HDD.

I can't think of a reason why the mainstream users of MBP would be interested in BluRay.

For those of us without excellent internet connections, it's the only feasible way to get HD movies.

Oh, well. Maybe because I live in Singapore here where internet connection is damn fast I took it for granted.

I suggest that you're therefore not a mainstream user.

Obviously circular reasoning aside, the other feasible way is to spend more time on a slower internet connection. Under 24 hours on a 2Mb/s connection for 20GB isn't prohibitive, unless you're looking to stock your hard-disk for a trans-Pacific flight.

They're betting big on downloadable content.

Steve wants you get your movies from iTunes.

Two reasons. Apple is deeply invested in physical media being a thing of the past, and they aren't going to sacrifice any of their profit margin to add hardware that is seen as unnecessary. I'll be very surprised if next year's MBP has an internal DVD drive at all.

I honestly wish this were not the case. Nearly everything on iTunes seems more expensive than the Blu-ray version on day / week 1 release. To make it worse, the Blu-ray version will often come with the iTunes digital copy on a separate disk or with a code on the inside.

I love movies, but I don't buy many DVD disks nor did I ever, at 480x720 it just seemed not worth it. Blu-ray though I find that I'm more willing to purchase with the greatly improved quality.

They want to push everyone towards iTunes so they will continue to ignore bluray.

In other news Dell XPS Laptops Add Premium Audio, 3D Video, Sandy Bridge Processors.

TL;DR A year and a half after quad core i7 mobile processors become available (and two and half years after the first quad core mobile processors were released), the MBP gets them.

The first ones ran hotter/used more power than the case was designed for.

The reason was Apple wanted to sell older processors at a high markup. It was not as if Intel kept their roadmap a mystery or that Apple was not capable of designing a new case and by the time unibody 17" MBP came on the market Penryn had been out for more than a quarter.

I remember when Apple used to have events for their notebook releases. Sigh.

They never had events for speed bumps.

Thunderbolt and FaceTime HD aren't exactly a speed bump.

Holding an event for that kind of minor change would be pretty pathetic and boring. It’s also not exactly great demo material.

I agree with you but...

It wasn't that long ago that we had a "day you'll never forget". Though, I wouldn't blame if you if ..ahh..forgot about that.

I've never seen a more beautiful laptop. What can they really do besides include faster components and add features to software?

Ditch the two spinning drives and build in a SSD by default? That would allow for a redesign as well as a larger battery and would certainly warrant an event.

After the MacBook Air, it’s only a matter of time until they do just that, maybe next year. (I can only hope. I’m actually seriously considering schlepping my 2007 MacBook Pro around another year.)

I'm with you. On the other hand, considering that I had just bought a top-of-the-line 17'' MBP 3 months ago, the frugal part of me was actually dreading the prospect of an MBA-like MBP sans optical drive, because that's pretty much my dream machine right now. Would have been pretty hard to resist doing the foolish thing and upgrade again after just 3 months. As it is, I look forward to upgrade next year, pretty sure that's gonna be the date then. Personally speaking, makes that much more financial sense now. ;-) Now I just need to decide whether to spring for an optibay in the meantime...

I understand that there are pretty HUGE technical differences between SSDs and traditional HDDs. But from a user perspective it's just a faster component that uses less power...

It’s not the SSD per se, it’s the saved space. A speed bump is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for an Apple event ;-)

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