Apple makes October 14th MacBook event official - Page 3

I think the missing thing you can't see is the 3G data connection. There will be evolutionary changes to bring the products into line but Apple will sell a $800 MacBook and make the money up through a choice of AT&T/O2 etc data packages (which won't be obligatory but will be pushed hard).

I would imagine there will be a choice of three or four data packages, none will be unlimited (too much of a liability for the service providers) but will usher a new era in the way we pay for our Macs.

No-one buys a dirt cheap laptop in the UK really anymore - you can get a free one with a 2 year home (or 3G) broadband connection.

Its the 'old' black macbook im pretty sure! They wouldnt put the new product on the invite!

Yes - whatever he was referring to should be in this update.
In fact, the new technology was supposed to reduce the margins LAST quarter... (not reduce the price of the Macs, reduce the margin made on the Macs - big difference).

I hope the new technology isn't the brick manufacturing process... which (as I understand it) would result in a better more seamless casing for the MacBooks and novel new possibilities. That's good, but I thought it was something affecting what the Mac could do.... like touch screens or hardware h264 encoding etc. I'll have to reread the old rumours to see whether the Brick process fits....

Speaking of, will Apple finally offer built-in 3G cards? Would they go with specific carriers; would they offer a proprietary card slot, like they did with their WiFi, so you can choose CDMA2000 or HSUPA; or would they just carry two different builds?


If I recall correctly, Montevina offers built-in H.264 encoding and decoding. There are rumors that NVIDIA will provide the new chipset, but I think that is unlikely.

I would think they'll stick with AT&T to and use the same tech as in the iPhone. The guaranteed income from a single provider will allow them to push the cost of the laptop right down.

Then the apple logo almost doubled in size. Measure it, cross compare with the photo...

Does anyone have a (intelligent) theory of when the new MBP's will be available for purchase? And is there going to be a rediculous waiting list for the new notebooks?
I've been biting my nails for over a year waiting for these babies to come out... ever since my POS Dell Latitude died. I am dying of anticipation for Tuesday.

Does anyone make a Blu-ray reader + DVD writer?

Well that and the iMac are NOT gonna sit on older CPU platforms and let the portables run a muck... I think with laptop sales increasing year over year you spotlight the hot selling product. Nehalem is also available from intel for the Mac pro.

The man who kills off the mini is the man I will return the favor to.

It needs an update and a repackaging job. Add a Mini Keyboard and mini mouse (aluminum and white plastic) sold ONLY with it, priced at $599 take home. Throw it at the wolves (walmart, target, bestbuy, circuit city) maybe, What's a Mini? The perfect Home Theater component. The perfect office computer. The perfect entry level Macintosh. Now make it so.

Same day. Apparently they were shipped almost a month ago to the states.

Waiting list? Maybe. Order first=less wait.

Wanna see if we can bring down the Apple Store server? Everyone set their browser to refresh every 2 seconds on that page, day of.

There are plenty of those out there, just none (as readers or burners) that fit the current 9.5mm form factor of most Macs.

A standard SIM card slot that works with any GSM carrier's SIM card would provide more choice for customers. It would also be more cost effective for Apple since they would not have to design their own cards.

LETS DO IT!!! lol.

It's great to know that the new notebooks will likely be offered immediately. Does anybody know how quickly they usually make it onto the Best Buy shelves. I've got a $500 gift card and would love to put it towards a new Mac. The iPods showed up at Best Buy the next day so I was just wondering if it would likely be the same for the new Macs.

That'd be fine, as long as they actually made a decision so I can make my decision. For so long they've just ignored it.

Maybe they will announce the death of the mini at this event and replace it with a wider selection of notebooks.

(Actually that would not be fine.)

Why do you keep on with this nonsense? Stop misinforming people, please. So what you mean is that there exists some for some Macs?
In that case your use of NONE is an utter fallacy.
Go to the link please:
http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/...g_vinb_gglsrch

ive waited so long to see what they would put in the new macbook pros.. i cant wait for Tuesday to come!

Hope there is a smaller tablet without the damned keyboard - I have gotten so used to the iphone keyboard and believe it or not, I quite like it. I really wish a $600 - $700 price point 10" tablet with a dvd drive debuts. Then again, that will eat into the mbp's segment and margins. So they wouldn't do it.

I blame the sun, moon and all the damn planets, including pluto. Curse them all. When will they ever line up for me ?

A $600 system that is under powered next to other pc desktops at the same price does not make a good office computer. A harder open case dose not make a office computer. A laptop hard drive in a desktop dose not make a office computer.

I'm not so sure about that. At our office, there's a bulky Windows tower stuffed under or on every desk and I for one would rather reclaim some space. They are never, ever opened. In fact, many office workers use laptops, which again are never opened for obvious reasons. Office workers really don't need much power. Their entire use comprises the Office suite and a browser. Graphic designers, video editors and the like obviously would need more power for Photoshop or Final Cut, but the vast majority of office users don't. In fact, I know somebody with a Mini that does 50x more work on it than we ever use our office PCs for.

The small mini should be at $500 with a bigger mid-tower at $700 and up when apple does not have but they do have a $600 mini with weak hardware and joke a $800 system with 1gb of ram and GMA video then it looks real bad.

dude... you're buying a mac.

Let me add to the damned planet and planetlets
1) I don't think a tablet will happen next week. Perhaps MacWorld.
2) I don't think any tablet will have a built in DVD drive. They'll be going LIGHT.
3) I think it's possible a tablet will run iPhone OSX, not Mac OSX.... but that will make it smaller, lighter, and cheaper of course.

edit: I don't buy into it eating into mbp's segment.
It's like saying a bakery isn't going to sell bread rolls because it'll eat into their bread loaf segment.

Here is what I see: a general reference to notebooks (presumably MB and MBP) and a notebook corner highlighted. Note that this one has the aluminum (or gun metal? ) color. So the invite probably confirms the rumor circulating some time now that the new Macbook will indeed be metal. Or (rather unlikely) that Apple will unite the existing MB and MBP lines to a larger one.

I can't stand the anticipation until tuesday. Anyone got any leads where I can get cryogenically frozen till then???



</southpark reference>

Everything is Aluminium (95% chance)
Everything is Brick-made by Apple in its own factory (50% chance)

MB Air: Same sexy thinness, faster CPU
MacBook: Now metal, recyclable, etc. etc. like MB Air but with optical drive, etc.
MacBook Pro: Redesigned to be tapered, sexy like MB Air and MB.

MacBook uses Nvidia chipset
MacBook Pro: ???

And thus are my predictions laid out...

Any reasonable speculation as to what that might mean for the GPU?

One last thing: *** CONFIRMED ***
Someone has to keep the tradition.

LOLs.

As for the GPU, the MacBook probably would have a low-8-series nVidia GPU integrated with the motherboard chipset.

For the MacBook Pro, it honestly might be the 8600 M GT still (which is a nice laptop GPU anyways), hopefully they'll bump it to an 8700.

Despite some hardware problems of failed 8-series nVidia cards, the 8-series for the most part is a good workhorse in the nVidia PC and Mac stable.

Apple could go with 9-series nVidia, it would be a really aggressive (hence the warning on "reduced margins") play with nVidia chipsets as well, but it could be what they need to do high performance with real thin and light stuff. We'll have to see.

Apple is probably very serious about Open CL if all laptops go nVidia GPUs and chipsets. That's pretty big.

I'd say Apple will still have a mix of Intel and ATI somewhere in there. The change of chipset is not so big a deal, because the "secret" is the Brick, which, remember, is the manufacturing process, not about chipset/ PA Semi/ going "back" to RISC/ etc. etc.


(Rambling)
Then again, with Apple, who knows. Hell, I just use Mac + iPhone3G. Sometimes, that's all I need to know. I'm trying to "reflow" my income stream to something that is a bit less hardcore technical, or something less geeky-but-poor.

Any hint on how these compare against the current X3100 in the Macbook?

And you wonder why I think you have need the doctors you fix your meds. To your credit, youa ctually linked to a site in an attampt to back up your claim. For that I give you credit. But nowhere on that site is there proof of a 9.5mm drive used, and visual proof that the drive is tray-loading, not the slot-loading drives that Apple has used for every MacBook, G3 and G4 PowerBooks, and perhaps G3/G4 iBooks.

These Sony drives might be 12.7mm tray-loading drives because that are only costing and additional $500 on top of the normal drive cost, but there is no proof of that. But they do also REQUIRE you to use Vista and add 4GB RAM before being able to select this expensive tray-loading drive.

PS: If you think that the word 'some' validates your argument because a Mac Pro, a 17" MBP and 24" iMac can take the latest slot-loading Blu-ray drives then you are even far gone that I had thought. I have been repeatingly stating that the 12.7mm drives are the smallest available, butyou have been claiming that 9.5mm drives are somehow magically possible and for the same $150 pricepoint as the large, cheap tray;-loading drives.

PPS: I'm still waiting for a rationale, intelligent rebuttal as to why Apple would switch to a tray-loading drives just to support Blu-ray, as well as your argument of why they will increase the thickness of their machines to support this niche market.

MacBook:-

2.4GHz Intel Penryn Core 2 Duo Up to 2.8GHz
2GB to 4GB
250GB Serial ATA Drive @ 5400 rpm
SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW) no BulRay
Utilize the newer 16:9 ratio screens also to come in two sizes 11.1″ and 13.3″

MacBook Pro

Nehalem-based Core i7 processors would be nice, But 2.8GHz Penryn Core 2 Duo to 3.6GHz more likely
4GB to 16GB
400GB Serial ATA @ 5400 rpm
SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW) with BluRay
Utilize the newer 16:9 ratio screens also to come in two sizes 18.4″ 16.4″

This is my perdiction for what its worth. I also think the Pro will have a recessed keypad like MacBook Air. But I think the keys will be metal with backlight in the Chicklet style on Pros.

The chip-over-chip change for the MBA keeps the 1.6 and 1.8GHz at 1.6 and 1.83GHz. The TDP get lowered, which is definitely needed.

I really hope they don't go with NIVIDIA. I think it would introduce too many issues. If that is the case I will not be buying a new Mac next week.

Nehalem - definitely not. Not even the desktop versions are ready yet.

Those processor clock speeds are way out of whack. 3.6 GHz? Do you have any idea how hot that would be or how high the power consumption would be?

Don't expect anything higher than 2.8 GHz at the top end or you'll be disappointed.

Unless this prediction is at least 12 months in advance, then prepared to be disappointed.

1) Nehalem isn't out for servers/workstations yet, much less for notebooks
2) Your speeds don't match what is available for Montevina/Penryn.
3) I can only find 4GB SODIMMS in 667MHz RAM, none for DDR3 and certainly not 8GB sticks
4) No known 9.5mm slot-loading BRDs are on the market.

Indeed, what a jerk.

LOL!



Very funny indeed.

Not exactly. It's underpowered in it's current form, yes you are right there. But last year comparing spec/spec a Dell system - SFF (if you can call it Slim when the powerbrick is the size of 2 HP 2133's) ran just over $760 with the same equipment.

The laptop drive is no big deal in an office. Your accessing data over a server based Client/Server network so regardless the speed of the drive it's stuck to network speeds anyways. With average power consumption of 48watts/hour over a workday they use 1/4 the power of a regular desktop, fit well mounted behind a monitor and we can deploy them in a matter of mins to a customers site. The best option we've been using lately has been to consolodate the applications that run on windows to a XP Machine with Elusiva Terminal server and put the mac's into place. This means we only need to repair the terminal server once a month and not every workstation. Trust me, the Mini is BETTER hands down but like you said could use a bump in specs or a really nice $200 drop in price to be competitive.

Hard to open? We lock up the cases at customers site to keep employee's from opening them. There was one customer we had to keep going back to for 3 months (Dell GX240 here) that complained the two computers in one department were slow. We uped the ram to 1gb. Came back the next week on the same call, there's 256mb in the case, back to 1gb. For three months we were doing this and charging the customer (different locations in the office). Long story short, the custodian was fired and brought up on charges of theft totally over $1000 in computer hardware. He was selling the parts on ebay. So hard to open is GOOD for business.

No penryn, Montevina and 2.0ghz to 3.06ghz speeds running on a 1066 Bus with DDR3 Ram, Max of 8gb!

I'm not sure THIS update is the one I want. Nehalem will run circles around Montevina. It offers QuickPath and a reduction in instruction sets requiring ancillary chips. Plus it's power management is supposed to control everything from Core's with variable speeds even turned off to variable bus speeds. But Montevina is the path to HD and from what I've read offers as much as 20% power savings over Penryn.

Nehalem cores are only available in small supply for OEM's at the moment. But YES Quad Core mobile's will be around same time next year on that platform. Apple might announce the MacPro's cpu upgrade tuesday to get us all giddy about that since Nehalem will be in full production in about a month or so.

Please, do yourself a favour and learn what the apostrophe is for.

Those phrases should read:

its power management … Cores with … for OEMs at the moment … its current form … You're accessing data … put the Macs into place … at customers' sites to keep employees from opening them … its power management … Cores with variable speeds … Quad Core mobiles



Hmmm, the things I read months ago seemed to suggest that Nehalem was actually going to increase power consumption. The (allegedly) massive increase in processing power would still mean better computing power/watt though.