Pros+everyone else+24-bit hardware in Apple laptops...
Since when? There's 1, possibly 2, laptops released to the public which have had an 8-bit display. One. Think about how many laptops have been released over the last decade. Why do you think Apple have fallen behind, particularly the 17" MBP? Besides, implementation is just as important as ability.
Personally, I'd much rather have an 8-bit display like we normally see on external LCD Monitors, but since people can't even tell the difference between 6-bit and 8-bit displays (notice how not even the pros haven't complained about this for absolutely ages.......they just calibrate their MBP display and say it's good), perhaps the interpolated colours are fine for everyone except those who are most demanding of colour accuracy. What percentage of "professionals" does that make up? A very small proportion, I'd bet. Having said that, why would these people be using their laptop screen for colour work anyway?
I agree. An 8-bit hardware display should be the norm, NOT the exception, even in MacBooks. There's more color accuracy built into a G4 iBook from 2005 than there is in a new MacBook. I actually proved that last week, when two students in my Digital Imaging and Photography class both wanted to print from their laptops to the wireless color Epson 9800 in one of the labs at Smith College. The screens were over 4 years apart in age, but, with 19 years of professional experience to my name, the G4 iBook's seemingly 'low-fi' matte screen calibrated with the big Gretag-MacBeth color calibration unit BETTER than the beautiful, vibrant MacBook display; dithering a 6-bit up to an apparent 8-bit/channel LCD was definitely a huge factor, IMO, if not THE determining factor in that comparison. The MBP 17" unibody, or ANY 17" MBP has NEVER been a mainstream, consumer-grade portable... their laptops, and I've made many thousands with them all; NO windows laptop I've ever owned, and there have been far too many, are as color-accurate as the past, or present, 17" MBPs.
That said, you don't understand why anyone would want accurate color in a $3k+ laptop? Actually, I'm selling over $900,000 of 17" MBPs this year to various clients in video and film post-production, educational and corporate digital imaging, advertising agencies, medical imaging (you think publish's color-critical? Try convincing Mass General that your computer will faithfully depict a patient's CAT Scan using the HOSPITAL'S CMS), publishing, fine-art photo imaging and archival/gallery printing companies, . The laptops that are sold with dithered 24-bit screens are mostly sold, you're right, I'll bet, to those for whom 'color' and 'profession' will always be two different worlds, let alone words.
'Why would these people be using their laptops for colour work?' Because if you're a pro who NEEDS color accuracy in a laptop, it's to check proofs in the field, do draft video editing, photo-editing, pre-press image-editing and graphics, and many other mission-critical color work on a plane, or in the middle of a press-check on a 2.5 Million dollar Heidelberg press that's running YOUR Editor's final digital files, just burned to plate and hanging on that big press, and you... *don't have* a Barco Reference Calibrator with you, just your laptop, an ICC output and display profile to match the waiting printer's CMS, and about 24 minutes to find out why the Magenta Plate's bunging up the colors on the two-page spread in your magazine that cost the client who bought the ad space around $75K... times like THAT, and MANY other occasions, are where, and why, I pay LOTS of money to make a LOT more, using an addition to my desktop color work, not a substitute... Thank goodness, there's still NO blessed substitute to a carefully calibrated 30" Cinema Display. But- the closer you can get, as a pro, or even as a non-pro trying to build your eye and skills, and just save valuable ink and paper and TIME, to what you can expect to see on your desktop monitor, and KNOW why and where those displays will diverge, is why the 17" MBP exists, not for Johnny's web-surfing in the dorm, or editing out the red-eye on the sRGB P&S JPEG file that's coming out of a $99.00 life-support system for selling ink cartridges in the Den. But a display that can display 24-bit color accurately used to be Apple's game for the losing. And lose it they have, on all but the 17" unibody MBP. And that, as they say, is too bad. Too bad for anyone who wants to be unfettered from the growing limitations of hardware that only displays a 'rough' approximation of the print, even though the consumer's/student's photographer's/enthusiast's/Graphic Designer's skills at P-shop, and ICC profiling, and CMS, and paper output profiles has grown faster than his/her wallet, and knows *how* to use accurate equipment, but doesn't have the spar bucks lying around for a 17" MBP, or a full-on Mac Pro/24" iMac system AND a good Tabloid printer, just ONE or the OTHER. Apple used to have THAT market LOCKED. No more. When I made $56.00 an hour in the late 1990's doing GD work on spec to supplement my consulting and teaching in backwoods Vermont, I couldn't afford a consumer-grade, then a pro-grade laptop, so I went with a Lombard. Years later, my son Declan made over $22,000 one summer working nights in the Living Room, HBO on, sitting in the easy chair under a full-spectrum bulb in the floor lamp, a good micro-fiber cloth and an American Recorder CO2 cartridge compressed air blower scanning, cropping, color-correcting and burning to DVD-R thousands of 35mm slides for a local College. He used my older-than-dirt 14.1" G3 iBook with 640MB of RAM, a hardware-calibrated screen, and a 40GB hard drive, an RF USB wireless mouse, a FireWire Nikon slide-scanner and a 250GB FireWire Hard Drive... the iBook's screen? Hardware 24-bit. He got a great reference from the College's (Middlebury College in Vermont, to be specific), rave reviews on the P-shop editing he did to bring out the true colors of the slides he was digitizing. To do that same thing with a current shipping MB would be impossible, because of the 18-bit MB screen. My son? No pro. But he had a great and profitable experience as a NON-pro, because Apple built a screen into its lowly iBook that could depict color accurately.
Apple exists to *exceed* those MacBook buyers' needs, so the next step up in their skills and needs is met, a atste of quality that begets another purchase from the company smart enough to see that consumers are PEOPLE who evolve and grow, not just earn more, over time. And it wouldn't kill 'em to do what they've done so often, and to such good effect, in the past... give the consumer, the artist, the neophyte, the same excellent technology, in this case TRUE 24-bit hardware color capability, that those who part with thousands more have because they absolutely REQUIRE it for their livelihoods.
OK, rant over... =^P
Best,
Charlie