Speculation about upgraded macbook pro

vgoklanivgoklani
Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
It seems rather strange that Apple would give us this "free upgrade". Doesn't it require them to open up each box, disassemble the laptops and physically change the CPU? On the G4 models, they would have to change the logic board. Perhaps these new laptops have interchangable CPUs? Or maybe they are just clocking the CPUs at a higher speed? Or did they decide this from the very beginning, as a stunt to kick off the new laptops? Perhaps they found a bug in the design, and used this "upgrade" as a gesture to buy them some more time?



One quick question though, are there any design differences between the 1.83GHZ/2GHZ and the new 2.13 GHZ cpus? Are they part of the same family? Do they all output the same amount of heat? Perhaps they corrected some of the bugs in the Coreduo design?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 3
    aplnubaplnub Posts: 2,605member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by vgoklani

    It seems rather strange that Apple would give us this "free upgrade". Doesn't it require them to open up each box, disassemble the laptops and physically change the CPU? On the G4 models, they would have to change the logic board. Perhaps these new laptops have interchangable CPUs? Or maybe they are just clocking the CPUs at a higher speed? Or did they decide this from the very beginning, as a stunt to kick off the new laptops? Perhaps they found a bug in the design, and used this "upgrade" as a gesture to buy them some more time?



    One quick question though, are there any design differences between the 1.83GHZ/2GHZ and the new 2.13 GHZ cpus? Are they part of the same family? Do they all output the same amount of heat? Perhaps they corrected some of the bugs in the Coreduo design?



    I would guess they made this decesion a few weeks ago and the units went into product this past weekend. But I havne't the slightest idea so there is some speculation for ya.
  • Reply 2 of 3
    icfireballicfireball Posts: 2,594member
    An idea that I had was that the battery life which was (and is to my knowlege still) missing, might have had to do with the chip. If they figured they could still get a good batery life with a higher performance chip, why not upgrade the chip?
  • Reply 3 of 3
    ciparisciparis Posts: 87member
    When you're finally using the same parts as PC vendors, and they all announce they're taking orders for 2.16 GHz models, it places Apple in the position of being more or less compelled to match that speed or risk losing sales.





    Being directly comparable is a new scenario for Apple, and it will in some cases dictate their marketing choices. I'm surprised they didn't announce them this way to begin with, although it may just be a matter of them getting used to Intel's availability estimates: when Intel says they'll have a "small number" of parts available at the highest bin speed, anyone in hardware at Apple would most likely think of what Motorola and IBM meant when they said that (which would mean "we can get you a few chips to demo on-stage"). With Intel, instead it means "just don't expect to sell *all* of your computers at that speed -- we'll keep up". It's probably a nice surprise for the Apple folks, and something the PC vendors expected to represent the top end all along, since it was in the slides since fall.
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