Apple announces new 13-inch MacBook - Page 8

I think you are all making a mountain out of a mole hill.

I have a firewire hard drive, it has USB2 as well, no biggie.

I live in Australia, the base level MacBook 2Ghz costs 2099 bux inc. gst which works out roughly the same as the American prices including the sales tax.

Now I compare it to a Dell XPS M1330 with a 2.1ghz core 2 duo with an 8400M GS and 2GB DDR-2, its 1800 AUD sure its heaps cheaper, but its not as well made, its heavier and thicker.

Then I look at a Dell Latitude E4300, this thing is closer to the new macbook than the XPS 1330 is, it has a magnesium alloy case, its 1" thick and weights under 2kg, it has same specs as the macbook bar the gfx which are intel, and it costs 2800 AUD. It had no firewire and only 1 USB port.

Thing you all must realise is that this new macbook is an ultraportable, its not going to have all the bells and whistles.

Does the MacBook have the same easily replaceable hard drive as the MacBook Pro? Could a person stick their own 7200RPM drive in there if they were so inclined, since Apple doesn't offer it?

Absolutely! I have a 12" PowerBook G4. I use it mostly for surfing and word processing, and I don't see any reason to upgrade to a new MacBook. For users who aren't using graphics-intensive applications, I fail to see any point to the upgrade. Give me a faster machine with an LED backlit screen and longer battery life, make it no bigger than my current G4, price it at, say $1099, and I might be interested. Till then, I can wait.

You can't even hook this up to a standard monitor without shelling out another $29 for the DVI or VGA adapter.

Its not a lot of money but...

booo!

This is exactly the same situation as when Apple transitioned from P2 ports to USB and FireWire 10 years ago. They did it before the larger market, eventually everyone else followed. Soon everyone will be offering Display Port.

I work in a pro audio business selling recording equipment (mics, monitors, software, interfaces etc.) and not including a firewire port will have a very serious impact on the type of equipment I sell. We sell a lot of firewire audio interfaces and the Macbook will no longer be a choice for that customer. It's not always super high-end interfaces either (for the inevitable "shrug-off" argument that these will be "high-end customers" who can just simply afford to buy a Pro)- a lot of them are $200-$300 interfaces. The most bizarre part of it is that Apple trumpets it's "close relation" with a company called Apogee for audio interfaces. Apogee only makes firewire interfaces (and pci-e technically). I'm just really shocked by this move. I know this doesn't affect a lot of you guys, but it really affects my side of the world. We often find ourselves selling someone on the idea of buying a Macbook as their first introduction to a Mac (without spending a ton of money) and getting Logic Studio and an Apogee interface. Knowing that I'm going to have to try to convince this type of customer to now spend $2000 just to get firewire is just plain nuts...

Really. I wonder who defined that.

Well, in the current economic conditions, some people will make a *lot* of money. For instance, people high up in the banks that were allowed to make hoodles of money by taking every risks possible until they got nearly bankrupt and *then* got a free check from the tax-payer. They gain a lot for years, and when they should have lost, their loses were paid for by the American and European citizens.
Same for the stock market, in the last week, some people have made a lot of money with the stocks having record amplitude.
And there are some economic segments where a lot of money will be made. For instance, my boss is quite happy about the situation : he will be able to buy other companies for dirt shirt, and he will be able to hire new employees with minimal efforts and wages. This means increases income for him...

So, these people will need proper laptop to show off (not that they would use them for real) how rich they are. This is especially important in a falling economy. You can't bring the Porsche inside buildings and the Bang&Olufsen stays at home. Now, they have the new MPB. Glass display, alumium body, sci-fi sounding manufacturing process, look over function and possibilities, that's a very good nomade proxy for Bang&Olufsen in the laptop world...

I configured a Dell XPS M1330 to $1523
2.4 Ghz 8300 Intel
250GB HDD
128MB Nvidia 8400
LED Backlit Display
3GB of RAM (vs 2 in the Macbook)

So overall a better value with the dell. And the graphics is discrete not shared memory like on the Macbook. Both are generally aluminum, the Macbook has the multitouch where as the dell has features like fingerprint scanner, HDMI, FireWire, ExpressCard.

For $1423 you can get that with Intel X3100 if you don't game... YOU HAVE A CHOICE.

It has FireWire like most laptops and I used FireWire long before I bought my Macbook. I don't think I know a Sony without Firewire So don't spread lies that PC users don't use Firewire, and its not dead like Floppies were (replaced with CD for quite a while before it was killed). What has replaced Firewire, its still a very pro tool.

And HDMI is better than DisplayPort if you have a TV and want to transfer video and audio...
I know I'm disappointed, and a friend who was considering switch from PCs decided not 2...

mumbo!!! Jumbo!!! Dumbo!!!

Such a bunch of stupid morornic lies from a stupid PC user.

First of all the processor is not the same. The Dell is only 800Mhz FSB while Mac is 1066Mhz

Secondly the memory on the Mac is 1066Mhz vs the 667Mhz on the Dell.

Thirdly no software along the lines of iLife.

Fourthly - DisplayPort has many advantages over HDMI and is very powerful. It performs with relatively low power-consumption, has a low pin count and can transmit data at 10.8 Gigabits/second, supporting resolutions up to 2560x1600 (WQXGA) and possibly beyond. It can perform properly over a length of cable up to 15 meters in length, which many see as a great advantage over HDMI.

Fifthly - Multitouch vs Fingerprint scanner. Are you mentally retarded??

So get your facts right EL STUPIDO PC MORON!!!

Also, the XPS is not "aluminum." It contains merely some aluminum accents. Some of it is still just plastic.

I like the XPS though. They are decent values, high spec'ed, and are fairly well built for a PC laptop; plus, OS X runs almost perfectly with the current models.

First of all I own a 2.4ghz Macbook which I decided for over the XPS... well cuz it was 1299 and I wanted both Vista and OS X.

Second... your the idiot. I said Multitouch vs HDMI, ExpressCard, FireWire, Fingerprint Scanner.

Benchmarks performed EARLIER IN THIS THREAD showed very little difference between the new 2.4 ghz and the old 2.4ghz. The big deal with me is the drop from 2.4 to 2.0ghz in the $1299 model as well as drop of Firewire. You can get the base XPS 2.0ghz for $999 (ya not led, but 3GB of Ram, 250GB HDD) which beats the crap out of the white macbook at that same price.

Yes I will give you that iLife is nice, but Dell puts software on their and Vista has a DVD Burner, Movie Maker (which is decent) and trying to compete with iPhoto as well. Yes the Apple software is better, but Vista did do alot in create a better multimedia experience. I'm not a blind fanboi, nor a fanboi at all. I see what is good from both companies and quite enjoy my HP Slimline with WMC as my DVR and a 360 as an Extender. Most DVRs lock your content to one TV... not WMC.

If someone asked me what computer to buy, I would suggest something different based on their needs. If they loved music, and wanted to dip their toes in creating it... Macbook for sure (well the white one as some tools want Firewire). If they wanted a HTPC... Vista no doubt. I have easily had over a month uptime on it, it only reboots for updates. I watch TV everyday...

I love the tooling on the new macbook, but spec wise i'm not interested as I have an Xbox 360 and a dedicated gaming desktop that I upgrade as I need. I love the manufacturing, but I hate that it has Firewire. My $600 HP Slimline has it... its a HTPC it makes sense to enable this video device.

It also saddens me that a friend who wanted a macbook is now unsure... the only thing that would excite me is the use of the graphics in Snow Leopard to really speed up video rendering... as we need to continue to push computers to do that faster...

No firewire is just asinine. Backups and data transfers will take forever!!

One of my sisters and my father want to upgrade their aging macbooks, but they both need firewire for their camcorders. The lack of firewire is a major deal breaker, and they cannot afford the cost of Macbook Pros... so what are their options now?

Longtime AI lurker, got an account just to post in this thread.

What is wrong with this community? Apple hit a home run with these models, in particular giving you guys almost everything on your long-running wish lists, and your reaction is to crack up? Absolutely amazing.

It's impossible to reply to every single post, so I'd like instead to address the more popular complaints being made.

Price increases: What? Where? Let's re-examine the announcement. Two aluminum MacBooks have been released. The lower of the two, which is the mid-tier MacBook, costs $1299; this is the same price as the prior mid-tier MacBook. The higher of the two aluminum MacBooks has increased from $1499 to $1599, a $100 increase. However, the white plastic MacBook fell from $1099 to $999, a $100 decrease. Quick, what do you get when you add 100 then subtract 100? Zero, which is how much the line's price has increased. "But I'm still paying $100 more for the top-tier MacBook," one might protest. Fine, but keep in mind that you get what you pay for. One may as well apply the same logic to the MacBook Pro line in general: why not consider it outrageous and unjust that the MacBook Pro and its predecessor PowerBook has always been priced hundreds to thousands of dollars more than the base MacBook and its predecessor iBook? "But the economy is bad right now," one might say. Personally, I dispute that assessment, but let's accept the premise: if the economy is bad, then why were you looking forward to buying a new computer in the first place? If the economy actually is bad, then you can't afford the luxury of a new computer, particularly when your current machine works just fine.

You are getting your money's worth regardless of model.

FireWire: I truly do not understand the outrage of the removal of FireWire. Has anyone paid attention to the FireWire peripheral market? Doubtful, because it barely exists. FireWire is, to put it generously, a near-dead standard. It was never widely adopted in the first place. USB soundly won the war in a manner reminiscent of VHS' triumph over Betamax. But, okay, there are people who own FireWire-based devices, such as external hard drives and video cameras. If FireWire is an absolute necessity, the solution to your problem is obvious:

Buy a dual FireWire/USB hub.

Glossy screen: Again, I don't understand the outrage. Actually, in a sense, I do: who wants half their screen rendered unwatchable by unsightly glare from light fixtures, windows, or natural sunlight? Well, guys, there are plenty of good reasons to have a glossy screen that have already been touched on, primarily by graphics artists, and I'm not going to repeat what they've had to say. If a matte screen is an absolute necessity, the solution to your problem is obvious:

Buy a matte screen filter.

Blu-Ray: This I can understand, being an avid Blu-Ray fan. But, folks, Blu-Ray slot drives simply are not cost-effective enough to warrant inclusion in machines that are already being criticized for price increases. If the aggregate is already of the opinion that the MacBook costs too much, imagine the bottom line of a Blu-Ray-equipped MacBook. Why do the "poor economy" arguments apply only to the $100 price increase/decrease, but not to the potential price of a MacBook with a Blu-Ray drive? If you want to watch movies on the go, the solution to your problem is obvious:

Put movies on your hard drive. Use iTunes.

Meanwhile, in the midst of all this complaining about the display/bezel/form factor, I have not seen the following point raised: what type of display does the MacBook use? Has Apple taken the opportunity to install 8-bit display panels? Who supplies the display panels? Has the color banding issue, which appeared in Q1/Q2 MacBooks manufactured with Samsung display panels, been corrected? I bought and returned three MacBooks that had this same issue and decided to wait for the oft-rumored aluminum MacBook. After deciding to upgrade the MacBook's GPU, did Apple give consideration to what their output will look like? I'll buy the $1299 model and find out.

Get a grip, AI community. You're better than this.

While I generally agree with you, there is one point where Apple really has shot its own foot: Firewire. And no, a dual hub is not a solution; the fuss is partly only about peripherals. It is also about Target Disk mode and Migration Assistant. You kiss bye-bye these two (they don't work through USB), or you use probably the wireless alternative (there must be something like that, no?) armed with much patience and luck so that your wireless router does not crash in the middle of data transfer, since typically this is going to take hours.

This is not like previous transitions, when some old technology was abandoned for something new and better and we had the usual complains about peripheral compatibility. Now Apple just removed a very useful in-house developed connectivity without proposing an alternative (like it did with the DisplayPort). This is just... irrational.

I find the features of the new Macbooks really great and I was ready to buy a new one to replace my black one which is still under warranty. But with no FW and the price increase (50 euros up) I will hold off.

EDIT: I am probably mistaken on the price increase, it may be much more; check out the UK pricing thread.

Agreed, a comparable Dell or Sony to the Macbook costs more by a few bucks to a few hundred bucks.


So you are suggesting that we buy a dual USB FW hub? What good would that do? You do realize that it still requires both the FW and USB ports on the computer to function, right?


Exactly why a BD drive should be an option like it is on VAIOs. I'd gladly pay $500 over sticker for the option to have one.



You realize that movies are only one use for a BD burner, right? A BD-R holds 25GB worth of data, and it would make backing up a whole lot less cumbersome.


They went on about more accurate color, so I assume it is an 8 bit panel, but you'd probably have an easier time finding out about Area 51 than Apple giving you that info.


Wrong again.

Some of you folks need to understand where the complaints are coming from.

While it is true that the new MB is actually cheaper than comparable machines from Sony and Dell, the complaints are that there is no low-end model to compete with the lower-end Dells and Sonys.

The plastic MB at $999 isn't quite as good as the cheapest M1330 that one can buy.

Sure, the MB competes well with the high-end Sonys and Dells, but many consumers aren't looking to buy a higher-end machine; they want something cheaper.

I don't know of any laptop LCDs that are genuinely 8-bit. Most are dithered + 6-bit TN.

Sigh. With Apple screwing the pooch with no FireWire on the 'luminum models, looks like my new machine, if I bother to get one, is going to be the old white plastic model.

Well, at least it has FireWire. \

...

The good news is that for those who need FW and want an inexpensive Mac, refurbished units have dropped substantially in price.

Well, I was quite right after all. The 2.4 MHz MacBook is charged € 1,250 tax excluded (1,500 € with sales tax). That means a 1.28 exchange rate, which is pretty close the 1.35 actual rate. Besides, I can get the educational discount, so it's gonna be an extra € 100 off for me.

This machine is perfect for developement and editing. I don't care about Firewire. I don't care about BlueRay. I do care about video output and CPU speed, obviously. From 2 to 2.4 GHz, that's a 20 % increase, and if I can reduce the compiling time by that amount, it's great. No to speak about intensive CPU applications like simulation, 3D design or GIS stuff.

The only drawback I see is the nasty 5400 rpm drive. I think I'll change it for a 7200. That should improve both compiling time and database performance.

Well, it is also a matter of not giving any penny to Bill and its fellows…

Apple did not invent Firewire. Sony did. Apple were an early adopter, but they still have to pay Sony royalties to use it.


Yes, about 1% of existing MacBook users have ever plugged anything into their Firewire port. However, 50% of Mac buyers come from the PC world. That percentage is higher for MacBook buyers. So, probably under 0.5% of new MacBook buyers have ever used Firewire and only a (probably large) fraction of that <0.5% own Firewire peripherals.


Apple probably have to pay about that to Sony just for licensing. Add to that the cost of components, manufacturing, development, testing, weight, battery life, etc. and the benefits just don't justify the costs.

I realize that's inconvenient for owners of Firewire peripherals. Firewire lost against USB in the market. It was clear about ten years ago when Intel dropped their plans to include Firewire as a standard chipset feature when the licensing negotiations with Sony broke down. Anyone who bought Firewire devices after that should have known that, eventually, they would be obsolete. Life goes on.

You sure? From Wikipedia:

FireWire is Apple Inc.'s name for the IEEE 1394 High Speed Serial Bus. It was initiated by Apple and developed by the IEEE P1394 Working Group, largely driven by contributions from Apple, although major contributions were also made by engineers from Texas Instruments, Sony, Digital Equipment Corporation, IBM, and INMOS/SGS Thomson (now STMicroelectronics).


I also seem to recall reading somewhere a couple of years back that Apple was collecting royalties, albeit small, from other companies that used FW in their products.

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I believe the old white MacBook is still being offered only because Apple have a lot of components in the pipeline. I expect it to be discontinued by MWSF. We should then see a version of the new MacBook at $999 or $1099. I'm not sure how Apple could reconfigure the new MacBook to cut costs by $200 or $300. Dropping the internal optical drive would be the obvious first step. Cutting back to 1GB of RAM would not save enough money to be worthwhile. Anyone know when Intel's next CPU price cut is due?

Prices will go down but not so fast. Give it one revision (at least six months from now) and after that we will see.

Unfortunately it's not quite that simple. Firewire beats USB hands down on the Mac, because USB is incredibly slow and inefficient on the Mac compared to the PC. If they are truly going to ditch Firewire in Macs altogether, they're going to have to sort out the Mac USB problem... Otherwise all PC switchers are going to do is moan about how much better their old PC handled USB peripherals.

This article explains Apple's target demographics for the Macbook: home and education users (aka students). FW likely plays a small part for most students given they have later versions of iPods, and take a lot of thier photos and movies with their phones or webcams for youtube.

For the fledgling movie maker the bar is now set by the $2699 MSRP Canon 5D Mark II. 1080p @ 30fps although you are limited to 12 minute scenes. From a digital SLR.

http://blog.vincentlaforet.com/2008/...-our-industry/

Data interface? USB2.

The damn thing compares with the Z1E and XLH1 favorably. And the ISO numbers are freaking impressive. The primary downsides are no 24p mode and a 4GB clip limit.

There are HD camcorders and regular camcorders with USB2 output. Yes, it's annoying if you already have a lot of FW devices but if you're a student heading off to college with a current iPod, DS or PSP and phone it FEAKING DOESN'T MATTER.

And there is your target demographic that has not yet been affected by the economic downturn. Not being able to play WoW has likely affected more MB purchases than the availability (or lack thereof) of a FW port.

And for every music pro that believes Apple threw them under the bus there's probably another pro out there going "Cool...I can drive a 30" ACD for photoshop without buying a freaking MBP now".

As noted above, Seagate claims that Apple improved their USB2 transfer rates in Leopard which is why their Maxtor HDD with FW400/USB2 was even up in the speed tests. Now the drive itself isn't a speedster but many of the portable drives are not.

And GigE is faster than FW400.

Yes and I think there is a critical point here. That Apple's products require longer R&D than most and were not designed to go live in an economic crash. They cannot drop their prices as it would set a bad precedent for years to come. These were designed to be premium products against a background of cheap PCs.

So they have dropped the price of a SuperDrive macbook and have kept open a manufacturing line that they probably intended to close. The white macbook is reducing their margin and is only there so that people can buy a macbook in these bad times.

That's good to know. I guess I am just clinging on to Firewire. It is a bit of a shame though... Firewire did the job of both USB and Ethernet in a nice, fast, hot-swappable interface. Not only that but most Firewire devices are self-powered, unlike USB.

It's not I'm sad to say goodbye to Firewire as much as I dislike the alternative. I just wish USB wasn't so sh*t!

I'm quite puzzled by hearing the Mac OS X USB drivers are inefficient. After all, there are a lot of OpenSource drivers for USB out here, and I am pretty confident that Linux or FreeBSD drivers feature more than reasonable performances. I don't think porting this code to Darwin/MacOS is beyond the abilities of Apple software engineers. I am perfectly satisfied with NetBSD USB drivers, which recently added the isochronous transfer mode, and I am pretty confident that those can be imported almost directly on MacOS. That's the beauty of the BSD licence.

I am still confused over all this. I do not play games on the computer, basically just word processing and Internet.

Is the new 2.0 MacBook noticeably faster than the previous white?

Is it 1/2 pound lighter?

Besides the trackpad, is there any other major gain?

Thanks !

I don't really know what to say. I have tried USB keys on MBs and on PC laptops. Guess what... under Windows they transfer data like 2-3 times faster than under Leopard. Because of that I thought that the MB had USB1 ports but no, it is USB2.

I have not tried USB hard disks though.

You are the market Apple seems to be missing. The lowest end MacBook (white) is all you will need, and even then it will be more powerful than you need.


The speed of the white MacBook they are still selling sits between the new two in terms of speed. However what with the improvements to chipset, extra memory et al the new MacBook probably outperforms the older white model.


According to the specs in The Store, yes.


much faster graphics, but you will probably not notice this unless you are playing games or running photo manipulation software (iPhoto, Photoshop). One "minor" omission is Firewire. But that's probably not a worry for you?

My main gripe is the USB handshaking vs Firewire. Firewire feels ten times more responsive and you see file transfers updating much much faster (like SCSI devices used to be). USB feels like sending information via WiFi. It was never designed for fast, sustained transfer rates, unlike Firewire.

The speed difference (CPU-wise) must be small. But other than that, the new machines are quite nice: better overall construction and screen (on paper at least), lighter, new trackpad, illuminated keyboard in the high end, much faster graphics subsystem (claims about 5x faster).

Errr... There are two problems here. The first is the raw output on the USB bus. The second is the way the OS handles the file system used on the USB key.

Eg: I have a USB key divided in two partitions. One is MSDOS, the other is FFS, the native format of *BSD. Well, I can write the same file 5 to 10x faster on a FFS-formated key than on a DOS32-formated one. The clue here is not the raw transfer rate, which is basically the same, but the software operations to write down the associated metadata (repertory information, data location, etc.). Obviously the code handling MSDOS and NTFS has never been optimized under NetBSD, because it is not meant to serve as an everyday basis but just for occasional transfers, and there is no use to lose time and energy on that. On Windows, the situation is totally different.

Yet, I do agree there are some problems on MacOS X USB drivers.

Last Thursday I was attending a conference featuring the (at least in France and Canada) widely known astrophysician Hubert Reeves. He owns a Mac Book Air. I wanted to get a copy of his slideshow on my USB key. Impossible. The transfer started, but never ended (it hanged on a "5 sec remaining" message and never went on). We had to use a foreign ftp server to do this. Bummer.

I will install NetBSD together with MacOS on the MacBook I ordered this morning (btw: 8 days delay here in France) and try to do comparative benchmarks.

Interesting. You can probably start a new thread with this if you can add USB performance results under Windows too.

How are you going to install and use NetBSD? Through VMware maybe?