Spent the last week trying to dig out from having been gone for two weeks – I’m glad to not be traveling for work again until March.
I’m not much of a football fan, but we enjoyed watching the Seahawks win the NFC championship yesterday – a Seattle team has never gone to the Superbowl before, so it’s all very exciting (though not exciting enough to skip a Sunday of skiing with my son in two weeks).
We saw the Apple Intel cleanroom TV ad during the game – the folks watching at my house, who are not following the whole technology story of this switch, enjoyed the ad a lot.
I think Ted leung has the sanest take on this that I’ve seen so far:
It looks like Apple did the most expedient thing that it could, which is to take an Intel 945PM chipset and stick it into a PowerBook case, and add a small number bells and whistles (like the built in iSight and remote control). That explains the ExpressCard slot, and the FW400. If I didn’t have to measure the MacBook Pro against something like the Lenovo T60 (see preview), which has 5 hours of battery life with a 2.16GHz Core Duo T2600 in a 4.8lb package, I might be happy. But this is hardly the top to bottom revamp of the pro notebook line that you’d expect for the Intel transition. And let’s not even discuss the name.
That’s what it looks like to me too – that Apple did what they could to get some Intel-based product on the street as quickly as possible. Craig Wood’s got some performance testing data that shows that the new MacBook Pro is quite a bit quicker than the G4 Powerbooks, though nowhere near the four times as fast as Apple is touting.
My primary uses of a laptop don’t include a lot of CPU-intensive tasks – for me it’s a web-browsing, blog-writing, emailing, presentation-making, IMing machine. So I’m not jumping on the upgrade bandwagon just yet (though the built-in ISight camera and Front Row remote software are a nice touch). I’m still hoping for something lighter, cooler, and with longer battery life from Apple.
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