Apple’s new laptops, Biggest upgrade in years
Wow, Apple released a major update to their laptops today. If you’ve been shopping for a new machine be glad you waited. There are a few negatives compared to their last version, but also some important new features that make expansion of your laptop much easier and faster then before. Great news if you do a lot of image or video editing. I thought this upgrade deserved a post.
Probably the most important new feature is what Apple is calling Thunderbolt. From what I understand Apple and Intel have been working on developing this for a couple years. You may also see it called Lightspeak which is Intel’s name for it. What it is it? It’s a new really really fast way to connect devices and monitors to your computer. It basically works as both a PCI express slot and display port in one. It’s throughput is rated at 10Gbits compared to 120Mbs of USB 2.0. You could hook up a large raid array, multiple monitors and probably still have speed to spare. Disk access would be just as fast as if they were installed in your machine. Gigabit ethernet adapters or even fiber channel devices. I think a few devices are on the market now, but I expect we’ll see more soon as it appears in Windows machines. Intel just annouced it themselves a couple days ago. You can see a Intel demo here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kidmWiqKzqY&feature=player_embedded
What else is new? Big processor upgrades. The Core 2 Duo is finally gone and the 13” laptop runs dual core i5 processors now. The 15” and 17” laptops have gone quad core. The high end 13” runs at 2.3 or 2.7Ghz and the 15” and 17” have 2.0, 2.2 and 2.3Ghz options. A lot of apps still don’t support multiple processors all that well and the 13” 2.7Ghz looks like a great solution for people wanting a smaller machine. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s pretty competitive with quad core machines, especially the 2.0 and 2.2 Ghz machines.
The screens on the 15” and 17” have been upgraded to the higher resolution screens by default. That used to be an option on the previous models. The 15” and 17” models still have an option for a matte screen. The SD card slots have been upgraded to SDXC which is good if your camera supports it.
If there is a downside to all this new power, it’s lower battery life. All machines are rated at 7 hours compared to 8-10 hours on previous models. I think it’s probably a good tradeoff. This is the biggest upgrade Apple’s laptops have seen in several years.
After seeing Thunderbolt I’d probably avoid buying a Macbook Air until it sees the next upgrade. The faster interface means a lot more for that machine than is does for these, especially for an ethernet connection. I expect we’ll see new iMacs with Thunderbolt support too.
