Apple had their so long awaited WWDC Keynote on June 8, 2009 where they released new notebooks, a phone, and some software updates. There is so much to be excited but the one thing that makes me go crazy is the new line of notebooks, essentially, Apple transform their lower line of notebooks into professional tools at affordable prices.
I have to talk about this because there is no better time to own an Apple notebook, these new notebooks outperform anything I have seen in the market today and will give you years of joy, but there is more if you buy one of these notebooks today (June 23, 2009) you are eligible to get Snow Leopard, the next update to Mac OS X, for only $9.95 USD via their uptodate program. Everything looks like good news at Cupertino, CA as WWDC ends and leaves everyone with a great taste in their mouth of how the future is shaping to be a great one for Mac users.
Onto the new notebooks, the new MacBook Pro line starts at only $1,199 USD and sports the latest and greatest of updates for small hardware inside a notebook. The processors (CPU) starts at 2.26 GHz which is a nice bump from 2.0 in the previous model, frontside bus is 1,066MHz and you can install up to 8GB of DDR3 Ram on it. Who can’t get excited with these specifications, when on earth you have heard of any other notebook that you can use for professional applications at $1,199 USD.
While all these sound great, it doesn’t end there, you get a beautiful LED display, NVIDIA graphics with 256MB of Shared DDR3 SDRAM, a FireWire 800 port, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, and up to 7 hours of battery life. If you think these are minor specs for a notebook, you are clueless, first off the NVIDIA graphics have been tested and proved to be a real screamer, leaving the need for discreet graphics out of question. The FireWire 800 port is a much needed addition as the FireWire was removed in the previous model, and this FireWire port is backward compatible with FireWire 400 with a special adapter, this is a win-win situation for every fan of the FireWire port.
The computer comes stock with a 160GB hard drive, which is enough for anyone with basic space needs on a notebook. Now the feature that really grabs me is the addition of a SD card reader in the machine, a slot that allegedly you can use to boot your machine. Imagine the possibilities, you could have to OS X loading from an SD card to boot your computer in seconds or you could install Windows on an SD card to dual booth without compromising your primary hard drive. This is the killer feature that has me most excited of all this announcement.
The notebook is not perfect, it has some minor flaws that in no way are a turn off for me, the first one is that the battery is sealed inside the notebook, leaving you the the only option of buying a replacement battery only from Apple or if you choose an approved third party provider you would need to ship your computer to have the battery replaced. The only other flaw I find on this little machines is the adding or changing memory or a new hard drive is harder than before due to the new unibody enclosure.
What makes this 13-inch notebook a pro, you may ask, well you have a FireWire 800 port, a backlit keyboard, and up to 8GB of DDR3 SDRAM. For me these are the right specs for a super machine, especially one that you can travel with it and it only weight 4.5 pounds. I will be selling my Early 2008 MacBook to get this new MacBook Pro and I can’t believe I’m even saying this. What do you think of the these new lineup from Apple? Excited?
