by SandB0x on 2/24/11, 2:36 PM
by wheels on 2/24/11, 2:07 PM
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 $30 display adapter like every generation)
• 3 hours less battery life
by sandGorgon on 2/24/11, 2:57 PM
hmm - you need to go to 1799$ 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 ?
by billybob on 2/24/11, 3:18 PM
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
by CrazedGeek on 2/24/11, 2:01 PM
by joshfinnie on 2/24/11, 2:03 PM
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?
by jonpaul on 2/24/11, 3:32 PM
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.
by wippler on 2/24/11, 2:02 PM
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
by swannodette on 2/24/11, 3:53 PM
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.
by nicksergeant on 2/24/11, 2:13 PM
Does anyone know if Thunderbolt will support multiple displays? If I hear a yes, I'm off to the Apple store.
by code_duck on 2/24/11, 6:46 PM
I dread this because it makes the model I bought last year feel outdated!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.
by xster on 2/24/11, 6:00 PM
unfortunate that almost all the rumours were false
- hybrid ssd
- better battery
- higher resolution
- bigger trackpad
- thinner body
by mrinterweb on 2/24/11, 7:13 PM
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.
by zefhous on 2/24/11, 4:05 PM
Anyone know if you can boot from a Thunderbolt Connected drive?
by NathanKP on 2/24/11, 2:02 PM
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.
by Groxx on 2/24/11, 7:00 PM
>
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.
by tsycho on 2/24/11, 2:05 PM
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)?
by bane on 2/25/11, 2:37 AM
Somehow the shot of the side made me feel very old, I hardly recognized what half of the ports were. :(
by Torn on 2/24/11, 2:02 PM
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...
by raymondh on 2/24/11, 11:20 PM
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.
by emilepetrone on 2/24/11, 2:37 PM
Ask HN: Get an old 13in MBP or new 13in MBP?
The battery is more important to me than Thunderbolt.
by mcantelon on 2/24/11, 4:25 PM
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.
by nagnatron on 2/24/11, 5:12 PM
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.
by tjmaxal on 2/24/11, 3:33 PM
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.
by philthy on 2/24/11, 2:19 PM
sucks i bought a MBP two months ago...
by didip on 2/24/11, 7:10 PM
They took out the AMD Radeon graphic card on the 13" unit?
Make up your mind, Apple.
by cosgroveb on 2/24/11, 2:50 PM
So who's getting ready to sell their old MBP?
by eof on 2/24/11, 3:39 PM
No USB 3.0 is surprising/bad.
by ssn on 2/24/11, 2:01 PM
What's new?
by trezor on 2/24/11, 2:32 PM
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.
by shareme on 2/24/11, 2:02 PM
Its the first MacBook Pro that I have wanted to buy
by xubz on 2/24/11, 2:14 PM
No BluRay combo drive.. I was very much expecting it to be present in the series update.
by PHPAdam on 2/24/11, 1:55 PM
In other news Dell XPS Laptops Add Premium Audio, 3D Video, Sandy Bridge Processors.
by brudgers on 2/24/11, 3:51 PM
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.
by marknutter on 2/24/11, 2:09 PM
I remember when Apple used to have events for their notebook releases. Sigh.