Apples and Oranges: Meet the New MacBooks

Well, folks, it looks like Apple’s really taken their “Tuesday Newsday” philosophy to heart here; yet another major announcement hit the feeds this morning as the new generation of MacBooks was released, along with their beefy brothers the MacBook Pros. This latest iteration of the lean machines is as impressive as ever  displaying a variety of new features on the surface as well as brand new Intel Penryn chips under the lid (as it were).

You may have noticed, incidentally, that this article has a nifty new subtitle. This isn’t because we’re hinting that the new Macs are fruity; rather, the subtitle comes from the fact that MacApper is expanding its content to include editorial material  the first example of which is this very column, Apples and Oranges. News commentary, software experience reviews, and healthy doses of sarcasm will likely find their way into the column, which yours truly will henceforth inhabit.

But I digress. Back to the Mac:

New Books, Not-So-New Looks

It seems that Apple’s design team was busy watching the Oscars or something when they were supposed to be meeting to discuss possible design improvements. Either that, or they’re under the impression that they’ve reached a pinnacle of laptop design standards that has no flaws worth noticing. The impressive thing is that they may actually be right.

In any case, don’t expect any major design revisions with the new MacBooks; they look more or less identical to their freshly-outdated siblings of the previous generation. Sleek is still the power word here, and the MacBook Pro especially looks like something an aesthetically-conscious chef would use to mince vegetables with.

Or maybe I’m thinking of the MacBook Air. The mainstream MacBooks and their Pro counterparts are still about an inch thick, so while you might not be able to use them as competent cooking utensils (or envelope stuffers), you may be able to rest a bit more easily because you won’t have to worry about having them snap in half if you should sneeze too hard in their general direction. The weight has also remained about the same, with the heaviest of the bunch still weighing in at an admirably anorexic 5.4 pounds.

It would be unfair to talk about the MacBooks’ design without mentioning their nifty back-lit LED screens: the brightest, most energy-efficient, and environmentally friendly displays around. How can a laptop display be environmentally friendly, you ask? Well because the new LED variety found on the MacBook and MacBook Pro are now fully Mercury-free. Think of it like a “Low Cholesterol!” marking on that carton of eggs you just bought  it doesn’t actually mean anything, but it’s good advertising. Score one for the Apple Marketing Division.

The keyboards are as comfortable and soft as ever, with the MacBook’s keys sitting flush against the body for a nice low profile and typing that doesn’t make your $1200 laptop sound like an antique typewriter with arthritis. The unbelievably useful back-lighting is also back in force, with an intuitive sensor that can tell when you need the feature most: it lights up the keys whenever you pass your hand over the laptop, or lean forward; but keeps them resolutely off if you should, say, be in a dark place.

It seems as though, for better or for worse, the design team decided to take the old adage to heart: “Don’t fix what ain’t broke.”

That’s Touching, Really

Though some of the components look the same, Apple has managed to sneak in some brand new functionality. The track-pad is the example I’ve got in mind, and it’s truly one of those innovations that has a lot of potential.

Just like the recently-released MacBook Air, the new generations of MacBooks and MacBook Pros have advanced track-pads which feature more sophisticated recognition algorithms, meaning that you can now perform more complex gestures such as pinches and rotation to trigger various corresponding effects.

To be specific, you can pinch and expand to zoom in and out on photos, scroll by holding two fingers and sliding up or down, “swipe” by using three or more fingers and sliding across the track-pad, rotating images by placing two fingers on the track-pad and performing various uncomfortable motions with your wrist, hitting the “Control” button, placing two fingers on the track-pad and sliding them up or down to zoom the entire screen in and out…you get my drift. Clearly, this is a machine for the hands-on learners of the world.

Besides the obvious benefits to your productivity, this intelligent track-pad opens up a whole new world of interactivity for the Mac gaming world. Stop laughing, I mean it. “Marius, you naive idiot,” I hear you cry out; but I am quite serious. Just imagine the kinds of fun game developers could have if they started designing games to take advantage of this added level of interactivity: it’s like having a Nintendo DS built straight into your laptop!

Plug ‘n Play

One thing you’re familiar with, if you happen to be a happy MacBook user like myself (MacBook Pro, to be precise), is the fact that the laptop features a surprisingly complete palette of connectivity options considering its sleek and smooth design principles. 3 USB 2.0 ports (on the 17-inch model), 1 FireWire 400 and 1 FireWire 800 port, a Gigabit Ethernet Port, an ExpressCard slot, DVI-out, Audio in, Audio out…clearly, we’re dealing with one friendly machine here.

And the best part is that the new versions feature much-improved wireless network connection capabilities which conform to 802.11n standards  that’s 5x faster and supports twice the range of previous generations. This makes things like chatting and emailing a breeze, even when participating in crowded video conferencing sessions. Sending files to a wireless printer is effortless, and backing up your data wirelessly with Time Machine no longer requires you to go off and read a Dostoyevsky novel while you wait for it to finish.

And what would a discussion on MacBook connectivity be without a mention of their ingenious, ditz-safe power cord? It plugs in magnetically so you don’t have to worry about tripping over it and pulling your whole laptop down off its perch. The idea is actually brilliant and I have to confess that I spent a little too much time playing with it in idle fascination when I first unpacked my MacBook Pro.

My one biggest complaint with it is that it doesn’t actually make that satisfying popping noise that it does in the videos. I studied them and scrutinized, but no matter how I tried, I could not reproduce the satisfying sound when disconnecting the cord. It felt kind of like being a kid and waiting eagerly to play with a roll of bubble-wrap, only to discover that the bubbles just hiss feebly when punctured. I don’t know if maybe it’s just my specific machine that came pre-set with a pop-silencing feature, but I would have already written to Apple to complain if only I could keep a straight face while drafting the letter.

Penryn Performance

Let’s take a brief look under the hood and see the brand new guts that power Apple’s new generation MacBooks and MacBook Pros. The first thing that’s special is the new processors: Intel’s blazingly fast “Penryn” Core 2 Duo chip which, to quote the Apple site:

…runs on 45-nm process technology at speeds up to 2.6GHz with up to 6MB of L2 cache. Its SSE4 vector engine handles 128-bit computations in a single clock cycle, accelerating data manipulation by simultaneously applying a single instruction to multiple data.

In English, that means that it does the whole processing thing really really fast. Which is a good thing, because it means you can do all your complex video rendering, audio reverb calculations, and photo filter applications more than 50% faster than you could before. And let’s not forget the RAM, which can be upgraded to up to 4GB of DDR2, running at 667MHz (on the Macbook Pro. The Macbook can have up to 2GB).

The video card that powers the entire visual affair is NVIDIA’s GeForce 8600M GT (again, on the Macbook Pro) which can include up to 512MB of GDDR3 dedicated memory. With the ability to operate in a colossal 1680×1050 screen resolution, full-quality HD video viewing is no longer a worry  say goodbye to window re-sizing.

The hard drives have also been beefed up, so that you now have a variety of options for drive size and speed available to you for each of the various models of MacBook and MacBook Pro. Sadly, the highest speed is still just 7200-rpm, which is a bit on the stunted side when it comes to working with high-quality audio samples or reading/writing massive amounts of HD-video data to the disk.

Contrary to what you might expect with such serious hardware powering the system, the MacBook still claims to have a lengthy 4.5-hour battery life, while the 15-inch MacBook Pro can apparently last for 5 hours, including active wireless productivity.

Hello, World!

Thus, with open arms, I welcome the new generation of Mac notebooks as we look forward to seeing peoples’ responses to the updates that Apple has provided. In the meantime, more details about the new MacBook and MacBook Pro can be found on their respective product pages, which include detailed technical specs and far more professional custom graphics than my own.

Until next time,

- Marius “Macbook” Masalar

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