The updated Macbook range

[rhoenix]

Phongn, thank you for those additional tips - I've noticed that you can get a 7200rpm drive with the 15" MBP, which would be rather useful for VMWare Fusion.

Additionally, any conjecture on what they have planned with the 17" model?

[His Divine Shadow]

Any possibility of upgrading the harddrive later? Is anything upgradable or does it all have to be done at the checkout? Too bad about the lack of firewire, I understand you can really get good speeds there with an external HDD.

[DaveJB]

It's easy enough to upgrade the memory and hard drives on the plastic MacBooks; I don't think Apple would have changed it for the newer ones. Heck, you can even upgrade the drive in the MacBook Air, though it's a complete plain in the butt to do so.

Memory upgrades are going to be more expensive for the time being though, since Apple have moved to DDR3 with the new models. It should be the standard stuff though - Apple haven't used proprietary memory sticks for quite a while, far as I remember.

[General Zod]

So I take it the 2.0 vs. 2.4ghz isn't worth the money then, better to aim for more RAM, regarding that, am I limited to apples RAM when buying, or is it possible to upgrade later?

Funny thing about upgrading the RAM. I did a check on it the other day, and where it's $150 to upgrade to 4gb at your time of order, it will cost you $300 down the road to do it yourself. Apple apparently doesn't like its customers upgrading machines on their own without paying Apple for the privilege of doing it themselves.

[phongn]

Any possibility of upgrading the harddrive later? Is anything upgradable or does it all have to be done at the checkout? Too bad about the lack of firewire, I understand you can really get good speeds there with an external HDD.

Phongn, thank you for those additional tips - I've noticed that you can get a 7200rpm drive with the 15" MBP, which would be rather useful for VMWare Fusion.

You can also upgrade the hard drive yourself and it's pretty easy to do so on the new MacBook and MacBook Pro.

Funny thing about upgrading the RAM. I did a check on it the other day, and where it's $150 to upgrade to 4gb at your time of order, it will cost you $300 down the road to do it yourself. Apple apparently doesn't like its customers upgrading machines on their own without paying Apple for the privilege of doing it themselves.

Er, what?

[His Divine Shadow]

Oh well god damnit Apple! The 1299 version doesn't have the back lit keyboard. I fucking love that feature! Argh

[DaveJB]

I think Zod might have transposed those two numbers. What he probably means is that Apple are pulling the old OEM trick of charging you £100 for a memory upgrade when it only costs you £25 to buy the same-sized memory sticks somewhere and install them yourself.

[General Zod]

Funny thing about upgrading the RAM. I did a check on it the other day, and where it's $150 to upgrade to 4gb at your time of order, it will cost you $300 down the road to do it yourself. Apple apparently doesn't like its customers upgrading machines on their own without paying Apple for the privilege of doing it themselves.

Er, what?

This is the image from the Macbook store when ordering a 2.4ghz Macbook and given the option to select your ram. Here it's only $150



This is the image from the store when just ordering the 4gb of RAM on its own, for twice the price of upgrading at the time of purchase of a new Macbook. Bit of a disparity here you could say.

[DaveJB]

Oh well god damnit Apple! The 1299 version doesn't have the back lit keyboard. I fucking love that feature! Argh

Are we talking about the MacBook Pro? Because Apple's page shows that (and the MacBook Air for that matter) still with the backlit keyboard. The standard MacBook has never had a backlit keyboard AFAIK.

[Bounty]

This is the image from the store when just ordering the 4gb of RAM on its own, for twice the price of upgrading at the time of purchase of a new Macbook. Bit of a disparity here you could say.

$150 for two extra gigs, or $300 for four gigs. What disparity?

[General Zod]

This is the image from the store when just ordering the 4gb of RAM on its own, for twice the price of upgrading at the time of purchase of a new Macbook. Bit of a disparity here you could say.

$150 for two extra gigs, or $300 for four gigs. What disparity?

Bleh, okay, I'm being an idiot again then. For some bizarre reason I thought Apple was replacing 2 1gb chips with 2 2gb chips, instead of just adding an extra chip. I choose to blame the painkillers.

[Stark]

Oh man, that's funny. Jump from 2-4Gb, $150. 4Gb chip individually, $300. Failing to do maths and deciding this is paying twice as much for the same thing - copyright Mastercard marketing.

[His Divine Shadow]

Oh well god damnit Apple! The 1299 version doesn't have the back lit keyboard. I fucking love that feature! Argh

Are we talking about the MacBook Pro? Because Apple's page shows that (and the MacBook Air for that matter) still with the backlit keyboard. The standard MacBook has never had a backlit keyboard AFAIK.

I'm talking about the new aluminum macbooks, the 13" models, the $1299 and $1599 ones. The latter has a backlit keyboard, the cheaper one does not. According to Arstechnica.

[Vendetta]

That's if you buy the memory from Apple. When I got my Powerbook they sourced the RAM elsewhere, as Apple were charging about double or triple the market price.

$150 for two extra gigs, or $300 for four gigs. What disparity?

2GB at time of purchase is 2x1GB. to upgrade to 4GB you'd need to chuck that and get 2x2GB.

[Bounty]

The new Macbooks come with 1x2gb as a base memory option, not 2x1gb. I didn't take that into account before jumping the gun.

Actually, you may have been right the first time - the page still says 2x1GB when I checked it. Should've read the fine print...

[DaveJB]

I'm talking about the new aluminum macbooks, the 13" models, the $1299 and $1599 ones. The latter has a backlit keyboard, the cheaper one does not. According to Arstechnica.

That must be a new addition to the updated range of MacBooks then, because I don't know of any 2005-2008 normal MacBook model that ever had a backlit keyboard (unless the black plastic ones did, but I don't remember that being the case). My early-2007 vintage MacBook only has a normal keyboard, that's for sure.

[General Zod]

I'm talking about the new aluminum macbooks, the 13" models, the $1299 and $1599 ones. The latter has a backlit keyboard, the cheaper one does not. According to Arstechnica.

That must be a new addition to the updated range of MacBooks then, because I don't know of any 2005-2008 normal MacBook model that ever had a backlit keyboard (unless the black plastic ones did, but I don't remember that being the case). My early-2007 vintage MacBook only has a normal keyboard, that's for sure.

There is no option for backlit keyboards in the $1,299 models in the Apple Store, but there is for the $1,599 one.

[Vendetta]

Backlit keyboards used to be a Powerbook/Macbook Pro only thing.

[DaveJB]

Oh, sure, I'm just saying that until this release, no MacBook has had a backlit keyboard (to my knowledge anyway), so it isn't a case of Apple cutting something out of the cheaper model - as they did with the FireWire - it was just that they only introduced it to the slightly less cheap model.

[His Divine Shadow]

I'm talking about the new aluminum macbooks, the 13" models, the $1299 and $1599 ones. The latter has a backlit keyboard, the cheaper one does not. According to Arstechnica.

That must be a new addition to the updated range of MacBooks then, because I don't know of any 2005-2008 normal MacBook model that ever had a backlit keyboard (unless the black plastic ones did, but I don't remember that being the case). My early-2007 vintage MacBook only has a normal keyboard, that's for sure.

I wouldn't know about the old macbooks, I've never owned a mac before. I'm thinking this should be my first and I really like the backlit keyboard feature. I've had several times when it would've been a useful feature, so it looks like I am gonna get the $1599 version if I get one. It's annoying though because you'd easily get the impression that both the $1299 and the $1599 versions had the backlit keyboard, given how little else differs between the models and the impression apple video on the website gave...

[Durandal]

Oh, so they're NOT just using vectors for everything? I don't have a good understanding of how the whole raster/vector thing works, but if it's 'resolution independent' on a display with a physical resolution and they're not either interpolating or calculating it from raw vectors, how ARE they doing it?

Not everything, but some things. In Leopard, the CoreUI framework is responsible for rendering the UI elements, and those elements consist of "recipes" for generating them. In some parts of the recipe, vectors are involved. In others, high-resolution images are involved. See here for more.

And yes, LCDs have a physical resolution, but you can get a sharp image at non-native resolutions provided they are multiples of powers of two of the native resolution (2x, 4x, 8x, ...). The same is true for inverse multiples of 2 (1/2, 1/4, 1/8, ...). In any case, "resolution independence" is a fancier way of saying "pretend like you're this resolution instead".

You're still drawing the UI at the same physical resolution; you're just scaling everything up by a constant factor to make it seem like the display has a lower pixel density than it really does. Thus, you draw your UI on a grid that is independent of the physical display resolution. So if you have a 30-inch monitor with 160 ppi resolution, the OS doesn't pretend like it's 72 ppi and make everything insanely tiny.

It's a bit like how virtual memory gives you a memory address space whose size is independent of the amount of physical memory you have on the system. Call it a "virtualized display space" if you want.

And I'm aware of this 'modern' font technology being around since the 90s, I'm just behind the times on the whole 'fonts aren't just little pictures of letters' thing. The Mac version of cleartype (or whatever MS calls it's LCD text-display thing) seems to be much better.

Most fonts are just vectors these days.