Apple Sneaked in Updates to it's MacBook Pro Line

Posted by Berin Loritsch Wed, 14 Apr 2010 13:05:00 GMT

With all the fanfare surrounding the iPad and iPhone OS 4.0 (there’s multitasking now), the updates to the MacBook Pro line came out with little attention. So what’s new with MacBook? There’s four improvements that I could see:

  • New i5/i7 processors (still dual core, but they throttle up as necessary)
  • New and improved graphics (NVidia GeForce 320 or 330)
  • More pixels on your screen (1980×1200 on 17”, 1680×1050 on 15”)
  • More battery life (10 hours on 13”, 8-9 hours on 15” and 17”)

The advantage of buying a mac laptop isn’t just the Apple operating system. These are very balanced systems. Apple cares about little things like battery life, stability, and things just working. It’s how they’ve re-established their brand. Usually it’s not just about swapping out your processor, updating graphics, and such. They’ve got to do it in a way that keeps the same battery life or better.

I can understand why they didn’t move up to quad core on their laptops just yet. That will probably come with the fanfare surrounding the new update to their operating system—whenever that is. With Snow Leopard they introduced some APIs to make it easier to write multi-core friendly code. They hinted at the release that there is still more work to be done in that area. My guess is that in order for 4 cores of 1.6 GHz processing power to feel faster than 2 cores of 2.66 GHz processing power, they need to finish that work. It’s also my guess that they’ll need to update their motherboard to support new socket types for the quad core i7 line.

So, Apple if you are listening, here’s what I’d like to see on your next MacBook Pro update:

  • A bit more fanfare
  • full 1080p on your 15” laptops (if Dell can do it, you can do it better)
  • quad core i7 processors as an option (the i7-720 is not too expensive)
  • 1333MHz DDR3 RAM
  • blue ray? (dare to dream)

I know there isn’t going to be too much difference between the 1066 and 1333 MHz ram, but every bit helps. Of course, the 1333MHz DDR3 RAM and the 1080p screen will require a different GPU. Perhaps the NVidia GeForce M260? Not sure how battery hungry the M260 is, but it if you want to attract people who do gaming you’ll need something like this. I personally create stuff, so between my programming, photography and occasional game and my daughter’s video and DVD creation we can make use of the power that’s there.