Thursday, February 24, 2011

Apple refreshes the MacBook Pro line


As highly rumored, Thunderbolt (earlier called Light Peak) makes its way into Apple's MacBook Pro family.  A quick look at what is new:
  • Intel Sandy Bridge - quad core i5 and i7 on the 15inch and 17inch models (13inch gets dual core i5 and i7 options)
  • AMD Graphics (Radeon HD6490M on the 15inch and AMD Radeon 6750M on the 17inch models) Intel HD 3000 integrated graphics on the 13inch one. Goodbye NVidia!
  • HD Camera (for better Facetime)
  • Thunderbolt I/O
  • Multi-Touch Trackpad
There is no Display Port (not even mini-HDMI/DVI) - and that's what's interesting about Thunderbolt (apart from "speeds up to 10 Gbps"). You can now connect devices with HDMI, DVI, and VGA over DisplayPort interfaces to the Thunderbolt port. Of course, this means a whole lot of HDMI/DVI/DisplayPort adapters to buy! Nothing surprising here - given Apple's penchant for getting you to always buy some kind of adapter.

All other things are pretty much the same - aluminum unibody, glass display and trackpad, although an intriguing thing is that Apple has not gotten rid of the Firewire port. With Thunderbolt coming in - I would have pretty much assumed that Firewire would die out...

Overall, the 15inch model looks highly tempting! I wish the 13inch one got these specs - I would have arranged for the small crack on my existing 13inch white Macbook to take its toll faster, thereby "forcing" me to upgrade ;-).

On a side note the 13inch White Macbook doesn't seem to have got any serious upgrades.

Which one will you be buying?

Links:
http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/features.html
http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/24/apple-refreshes-macbook-pro-family-with-sandy-bridge-processors/


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