Hi everyone, So my hope is the next 13" Macbook Pro (hopefully no ODD), will have a 1440x900 screen. I'm beginning to think this 15" is a little too large, and I'm just wondering, is the Sandy Bridge GPU good enough for most tasks such as video watching, interface interaction, etc. No games, no photoshop, no final cut, etc. Perhaps a little bit of Pixelmator. Thanks
The sandy bridge is more than good enough for what you want to do! To be honest, the current mbp 13" will do you fine. I find the current screen to have more than enough space. Obviously i'm not going to be able to have Photoshop and safari windows side by side, that would be stupid!
Yes, the HD3000 is perfectly capable of those tasks, and can even do some light-moderate gaming. People are making it look like it can't even display a blue screen, but in reality it's about the same in performance as the nvidia 320m. It does sound like you want a MacBook air though. You just described the 13" MBA in what you want from the next pro.
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7) Not unless you're reading from tutorial and doing Photoshop at the same time.
Next iteration of the 3000 IGP "should" match the 320m, just a step below the announced Llano IGP imo. There's no way Intel is outdoing AMD/ATI in the last thing they have going for them. That's assuming Apple upgrades to Ivy. That's a pretty big assumption. Apple's usually a bit late to the party (last gen MBP 13 was still on C2D, 2 years outdated; before the last refresh, MBP 15s was also on C2D, which were a year outdated), except this year, in which case they were early.
Photoshop and final cut don't even use the GPU really. It is all CPU mostly. You will be very fine with those programs.