Commentary

MacBooks and FireWire: Steve Jobs’ Response

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A few days ago, I had a long-winded rant about Apple dropping FireWire from the new MacBooks. A lot of other people have been ranting about it as well, going by Discussions.Apple.com and various other blogs and Mac-oriented forums. Steve Jobs has responded to one … Read more

Apple MacBook Redesigned

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Apple Redesigned MacBook 2008 Now that we’ve seen the new 13.3″ Apple MacBook and are reassured of Steve Jobs’ health, let’s take a look at what your $1,299 or $1,599 is going to get you. Be warned, I have a long-winded rant about the removal of the FireWire port at the end.

It’s going to get you a very nicely designed notebook (that appears to be sturdy). It’s environmentally-friendly to boot (which matters to some). It’s got a decent graphics chipset that even supports Apple’s new 30″ Cinema displays (which just so happen to have cables to charge your MacBook without you having to take your A/C MagSafe adapter out of your bag). It’s got LED-backlighting, and you even get the option of adding a 128GB Solid State Drive (SSD).

It also gets you an incredibly cool multi-touch touchpad that’s glass, yes glass, that actually acts like a button (it is the button – there are no separate buttons). You can even use four-finger gestures for certain actions. This was the most interesting thing to me (even more so than the design). I’m looking forward to getting my hands on one in my local Apple Store.

It’s a great looking notebook brought up to date, but for every two steps forward, there’s one or two steps back, and some of these are real head-scratchers.

Here comes the long-winded rant about FireWire – you’ve been warned!

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Apple Notebook Event 2008 – Notes

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Apple Redesigned MacBook 2008 Some notes and thoughts about the notebook event that Apple held today. I like the new MacBook design, and keeping the price low enough was very important (redesigned MacBooks start at $1299, older-style at $999). Steve Jobs also left the door open for netbooks in the future.

The new designs:
– They are moving the MacBooks and MacBook Pros to the same design / construction as the 13.3″ MacBook Air
– MacBook Pros are getting a hybrid graphics system, similar to certain Sony models (although the Sony VAIOs using Intel and NVIDIA side-by-side – Apple’s solution is NVIDIA for both). Uses an NVIDIA 9400M and 9600M GT.
– The new MacBooks are getting an LED-lit display, along with the new NVIDIA graphics, a faster bus speed, and faster memory (DDR3).
– For the time being, you can still buy the older style 13.3″ MacBook
– Firewire was dropped from the redesigned MacBooks

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Lenovo S10 and Communities

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Over at Lenovo Connections (a collection of Lenovo-oriented blogs, with some oriented towards Lenovo ThinkPads), Mark Hopkins is discussing everything going on around the Lenovo S10 netbook with user communities and modifications, and how it reminds him of the early days of personal computers. They … Read more

Apple and Netbooks

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Apple MacBook Air Kevin Tofel over at jkOnTheRun wrote a good summary of why we’ll probably see an Apple netbook sometime this year. He listed three very good reasons why Apple will produce a netbook, and I agree for the most part – I differ on the issue of timing, but I’m not so sure that Apple has a choice on timing at this point. With one of the last holdouts, Sony, even saying “we have to participate“, Apple will be the only major player without a netbook.

Kevin’s reason:
1) Apple is way overdue on MacBook Pro refreshes and designs (important when taken in context with the other reasons). His reasoning – a lot of new technology has come out since the MacBook Pros were first released, and a major refresh would take advantage of those newer technologies.

2) The 13.3” MacBooks could possibly be absorbed into the MacBook Pro line, based on what HP just did (HP has released the 13.3″ Pavilion dv3500t which has an NVIDIA GeForce 9300M GS graphcis chipset while the MacBook is relying on Intel’s integrated graphics chipsets, and the dv3500t is in the MacBook price range). If Apple adds better graphics to the MacBook, then it would be very close to the MacBook Pro (as Kevin points out, one of the key differences between the consumer and pro Apple lineups is the graphics chipsets).

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