Aulia Masna

Apple’s MacBooks Go Pro

Apple does not usually announce new products at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference, so it was surprising to see it unveil its latest line of notebooks at the show in June.

Several days before the event, Apple quietly updated its white MacBook, making it faster and giving it more storage space. The white MacBook houses an Intel Core 2 Duo processor that now runs at 2.13GHz, faster than the next model up, the aluminum MacBook, which has a speed of 2.0 GHz. The front-side bus and the hard drive are matched at 1066MHz and 160GB, respectively. But the downside of the white MacBook is its plastic shell, which is susceptible to cracking.

Nevertheless, the new white MacBook has surpassed its aluminum sibling. It inherited the Nvidia GeForce 9400M motherboard from the previous model and also a FireWire port, which allows quick transfers of large amounts of data from one computer to another. The aluminum MacBook does not have this.

But the aluminum line is getting a makeover, too. After the backlash Apple received for removing the FireWire port from the aluminum line in 2008, it has wisely put it back in and renamed the 13-inch notebook the MacBook Pro.

The Macbook Pro was unveiled at the conference and the audience cheered when Apple’s senior vice president, Phil Schiller, announced that the FireWire 800 was back in the aluminum line.

The FireWire port is considered essential for some because it allows a Mac to be turned into an external hard drive when plugged into another Mac. Professional photographers and musicians use the port to plug in equipment because USB connections can only manage one-third of the power a FireWire port can.

Many have long called on Apple for a smaller pro-level notebook. From 2003 to 2006, the 12-inch PowerBook G4 was on the market. The svelte, compact notebook, weighing just 2.1kgs, was very popular among executives and professionals. When Apple took it off the market in 2006 and offered no replacement, customers voiced their disapproval and Apple introduced the very thin and light MacBook Air in 2008.

The new 13-inch MacBook Pro comes in two models, each carrying an Intel Core 2 Duo processor at either 2.26GHz or 2.53GHz. The slower Mac also comes with 2GB RAM and a 160GB hard drive, while the other model has 4GB RAM and a 250GB hard drive.

The 15-inch MacBook Pro of the previous generation has similar specifications, so rest assured, these smaller machines are up to the task. Better yet, at just 2kg, the 13-inch MacBook Pro models are lighter than the old 12-inch PowerBook G4. They also have backlit keyboards for working in the dark or spaces with minimal lighting.

There are, however, debates about the quality of the display. While editorial photographer Rob Galbraith says that the MacBook Pro offers “the best displays for photographers we’ve ever seen from Apple,” user interface designer Louie Mantia claims that the screen does not live up to its promise.

Apple is unwilling to disclose the full specifications of the displays, which means it is really up to the buyer to decide whether the screen on the 13-inch MacBook Pro is up to snuff.

Fans of the old 12-inch PowerBook G4 will be very happy to know that these two new models are cheaper than the aluminum MacBooks that preceded them. The MacBook Pro retails for $1,200 to $2,500, depending on screen size, while white MacBooks start at $1,000. The previous upper model of the MacBook Air is now $1,000 less, at $1,500, and the price for the new upper model has dropped by around $700.

They also have SD card slots so you can plug in those memory cards from your pocket cameras straight into the notebook. It’s possible to install Mac OS X on an SD card to make it a tiny emergency boot disk; just make sure you use one that holds 8GB or greater.

The other members of the MacBook Pro family, the 15-inch and the 17-inch, are still basically the same as in the previous generation, except with faster processors and more storage space, which are expected with any update.

On the 15-inch model, the ExpressCard slot has been replaced by the same SD card slot as in the 13-inch models. Apple claims that only “a single digit percentage” of their customers use ExpressCards, and most of those customers use it to connect to an SD card adapter.

There is now a 15-inch MacBook Pro model without a dedicated graphics card, which means it is basically the same as the 13-inch model except with a much larger screen, perfect for those who like the room but do not work with heavy graphic files.

In a move to extend battery life, Apple has decided to adopt the built-in battery design that is used on the MacBook Air and the 17-inch MacBook Pro. All of Apple’s aluminum notebooks now sport nonremovable batteries.

While this may be considered a downside because a replacement is no longer possible without a trip to an authorized service provider, the upside is that they can last up to 7 hours, depending on usage patterns. A typical use, which previously would have exhausted the battery in under 4 hours, would now take up to 6 or 7 hours. You can now watch movies for 4 hours, or about 90 minutes longer than on the previous models.

With these changes, the new aluminum model is being referred to simply as the Pro, while the name MacBook will be used exclusively for the white line.

Don’t be surprised if the MacBook is replaced altogether by early next year with something that we’ve never seen or considered before, which may serve as Apple’s answer to the netbook market. It may not be a netbook as we know it but Apple rarely releases anything as we know it. It’s something to look forward to.


Aulia Masna is a writer and podcaster on technology. You can access his blog at aulia.posterous.com.

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