On Intel Macs
As many people expected, Apple announced their first Intel Macs today. The models they announced were not quite what was expected, though.
To my delight, the 15″ Pro notebook (now called the MacBook Pro instead of Powerbook - vomit) was announced in dual-core 1.67 & 1.83ghz configurations, as well as 1.83 & 2.0ghz dual-core iMacs. I somewhat expected the high-end laptops to go Intel first, since it would make no sense to release Intel iBooks first and cannibalize their high-end offerings. The iMac was a surprise, though, coming a slight few months after the last revision. I don’t know what their strategy here is. I was really expecting a media center-positioned Intel Mac Mini.
Other things to note:
- 1.83ghz MacBook Pro ships with 1gb RAM and 256mb video RAM. The 2.0ghz iMac still ships with 512mb and 128mb, respectively. Weird.
- The MacBook Pro uses Serial ATA (SATA), a departure from the PATA used on PowerBooks. This is most welcome. I heard that the last PB revision put the DVD±RW drive on the same cable as the HDD, which would cause issues when accessing both at the same time (i.e. burning or ripping a DVD or CD, or playing a DVD while doing heavy disk I/O.
- Front Row is cool and all, but I still wish the remote was Bluetooth instead of IR.
- No more modem. Good riddance.
- Display loses 60 pixels of horizontal height. A necessary sacrifice to get the 67% brighter screen?
- A perturbing absence of battery life information. I hope this does not bode ill for the mobility of the system.
- No bump in the DVD±RW drive speed. 4x is pretty slow for DVDs, particularly when you’re used to 16x burning (as am I). Hopefully this can be upgraded later.
In any case, my order for one is going in shortly.