As was expected new Macbooks were announced at the Apple event yesterday. Apple has kept the white Macbook for their lowend laptop and slashed the price from $1099 to $999. They introduced to new models up from the white that now have an aluminum enclosure like the Pro and the air. They also feature a new nvidia chipset and the onboard video is now a lot faster than the old intel on board that was used before. One of the things I do not like about the new Macbook is the loss of the firewire port. I know that probably the majority of owners of the Macbook probably never use firewire, but at the same time Apple is always talking about how creative you can be with their machines. By removing firewire they have taken away the ability to capture footage from a video camera and most of them use firewire. However, Apple is always thinking ahead and most cameras are now moving to flash memory or hard drive storage, so in the near future this won’t be a problem.
The Macbook Pro also saw a redesign of the case and have removed the option of having a matte screen. All the ports have now been moved to one side like the Macbook and the optical drive is now on the other side rather than the front. Also, they have now removed the latching mechanism when you close the lid to the magnetic latch system of the Macbook. They have removed the firewire 400 port and now there is just an 800 port. This isn’t as big of a deal since you can pick up a cable that goes for 800-400 for a few dollars. The other cool thing about the pro is it has 2 graphics cards. One is the built in like the regular Macbook and give you about 5 hours of batter life. Then when you need extra speed like with gaming or video editing then you can kick on the separate video card with dedicated 256 or 512 mb of memory depending on which model you get.
Both models also include a new glass trackpad and the button has been removed so the trackpad now is the button. It sounds like that could be clunky, but I need to try it first. Knowing Apple they have implemented it in a way that works great. Anyway here are pictures of the new Macbook and Macbook Pro. LIke I said previously I just recently got a new laptop, so it will be a few years before I upgrade, but by then they will have some other neat new features.
