I appreciated the specs review. The one thing I thought the reviewer was unclear on is the keyboard on the MBP. You can actually activate Application Expose and Remove Windows Expose by pressing F3 and Control (for App Expose) and pressing F3 and Command clears all the windows.
It isn't as elegant as F8, F9, & F10, and for that reason I switch the keyboard default to pressing FN activates the special keys, which allows me to use F8, F9, and F10 for Expose, but still easily control iTunes with the FN key.
Also the reviewer said that these notebooks are largely a product of Intel's innovation, and I had a couple of reactions to that. First, isn't this largely the case in Apple's resurgence and the industry as a whole? I think of Apple's greatness taking two forms. One is software. The second is its ability to take commodity parts and arrange them in a well designed way, with minimal hardware innovation, and spending most of the time letting the hardware product showcase their software.
The iPod, the iPhone, and Mac lineup is mostly made up of commodity parts readily available to other manufacturers.
Indeed the MacBook Pro offers much the same internals as a Dell. Apple's arrangement of those parts evokes its design aesthetics, and Apple has done a good job of sprinkling a few hardware innovations: backlight keyboard, large trackpad, multitouch - which as an aside is one of the greatest innovations on any notebook.
Two finger scrolling is simply brilliant; and the ability to second click with two fingers down is genius. With the latter I get a really large single button target whether I am doing main click or second click and can distinguish between the two with one or two fingers which is very simple to memorize. The system puts to shame all notebooks with tiny trackpads and buttons split equally into two (despite the fact that no one, and I mean NO ONE uses secondary click as much as they primary click, so why make the primary button the same size as the secondary button? Ridiculous.)
The IBM X40s answer to backlight keyboard - a yellow bulb at the top of the display that shined down onto the keyboard. How can it be said that Apple doesn't innovate in hardware? They do. But their focus is innovating in software. And I think the arrangement of the commodity parts into such an awesome design is also an innovation.
So I see a lot of hardware innovation in these laptops, but I also don't expect to see evolution, or even revolutions in each iteration. Intel is to chips as Apple is to software. So I expect Apple to keep innovating software at the same level that Intel innovates with their chips, and the synergy between the two to be awesome.
Which I think it is.
