About a week ago, Steve Jobs hosted a special event to announce the new MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops to the market, and offering them as their best notebooks.
After viewing Apple’s keynote on Tuesday, October 14, and interacting with them at the Apple Store at the Mall of Georgia location, I’ve come to terms with the new models and the features they offer in the industry.
Sporting Intel’s latest chips and NVIDIA’s latest graphics, the new MacBook, Apple’s entry level machine, is well rounded out a powerful machine. The professional model, Apple’s MacBook Pro, is even more powerful than its predecessor. Both models are lighter, and feel to be more durable as well. The entry level notebook has dropped the plastic and gained an aluminum casing, the MacBook was the only model that had plastic casing prior to the redesign.
The MacBook Pro has also been redesigned and retooled to better compete with the desktop replacement class of machines. Since its introduction in early 2006, the MacBook Pro has used aluminum for its casing. The new model’s design relocates nearly all of the computer’s ports to the left side of the machine, and moves the optical drive to eject on the right side, much like the MacBook’s design.
However, having owned both previous models, I’ve noticed that the new models don’t support the ports and connections that the previous models were known for having. The MacBook loses the FireWire 400 port on the left side of the machine, leaving 2 USB ports for connecting to devices, such as hard drives and printers. The MacBook Pro also has also dropped the FireWire 400 port, leaving 2 USBs and 1 FireWire 800 (which uses a different connector).
Both models also lose the physical trackpad button, being the first set of notebooks to to button-less with their trackpads. While the physical button is gone, the functionality isn’t, the width of the lower portion of the trackpad is the physical button, so when the lower portion of the track pad is depressed, the button is activated. When Steve first mentioned this feature, I was a bit skeptical of the design and functionality, but after using the new machines in the Apple Store, I find that the transition from button to button-less is quite seamless, and the trackpad is quite functional.
Over all, both the next generation of the MacBook and the MacBook Pro is quite impressive, but being a first revision change, I wouldn’t recommend forking over the cash to pick up one of the new models just yet. If I’ve watched Apple’s changes in the past, I would expect that there will be an update in March or April of 2009, for a second revision. If you’re in the market for a new notebook, and you’re looking at Apple’s offerings, I’d recommend picking up a refurbished model of the previous generation machines. If the dream of a new notebook is in your mind, save your money and pick a new model after February 2009, both machines should be mature enough by that point, and the new version of Mac OS X “Snow Leopard” should be available within those following months.
