Apple Launches MacBook Pros with Thunderbolt, Quad Core CPUs, AMD GPUs

[ArthurWellsley]

To anyone in the UK.

The 17" is £2,099.

Book easyjet flight to Geneva on the morning of 24th March 2011 (fly to Switzerland a non - EU country, flight costs £22.99 (leave UK 8.30am). Pick up tax free 17" at Luton Airport duty free shop for £1,679. At Geneva airport get rid of all packaging , load laptop with software and a few bits of work, slide into previously empty bag, fly back to Luton at 4.15 pm from Switzerland on Easyjet for £15.99. Costs of flights, flight taxes, Sandwich drinks etc. approx £50. You lose a day messing around and save £370.

 

[gtiintrepid]

already on. and $5 cheaper,wow, great saving!!!

but pre-order, is apple.com pre-order as well?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.ht..._t=301&pf_rd_p=1289360802&pf_rd_i=macbook pro

How long does it usually take for new models to become available on sites like Amazon? I'm looking to cash in on all of the Amazon gift cards I got for Christmas (and avoid sales tax)

 

[gnasher729]

I am buying the 17'' MBP online now... What is the advantage of the 2.3ghz vs the 2.2ghz? Who would the upgrade be good for?

There are people who are unhappy if they don't have the fastest processor available. If you are one of those then you can spend £200 on 100 more MHz. If not, there are better things to spend the money on. Like external hard drive for Time Machine, a large monitor, RAM. These would actually be useful.

 

[Roessnakhan]

One the worst upgrades in a history of apple.

A bit hyperbolic, no?

 

[ghsDUDE]

They just updated the 15 and 17inch to 8 hours of battery.
They did that BS for sales...well I already saw 7...you can't trick me!

 

[melis.cuga]

Question

Maybe a stupid question coming from me, but since I have no experience with this, does it always happen that apple needs copies of my ID and recent Bank Account when I'm buying it off their apple store? Or is it only the case now when I am using Education Discount?

 

[carsncars]

I think the true reason for more rigorous testing, however, is that Apple doesn't want the MBP to have better battery life than an ultraportable, like the Air. Would be bad PR for their beloved Air. By the same token, Apple has no qualms that BOTH Air models are equipped with better resolution screens than the smallest "Pro" model. Any question which computer Apple favors?

IMO the MBP 13" has its days numbered. As the price of large SSDs comes down, I can see the MBA 11" and 13" easily filling the void left by the elimination of the MBP 13"--it's my guess (/hope?) that this is Apple's plan. MBA 13" with a 256 GB SSD next year for $1299 and I'd switch in a heartbeat.

 

[nickarmadillo]

Then look up the specs of the processor and the new amd gpu.

Compare the specs to that of the previous generation and you will see just how wrong you are.

Do you, in all honesty, believe that these updates represent an 800-1000% speed increase from the previous models? If so, you might need to be committed to the nearest mental institution.

 

[Tears Apart]

I am buying the 17'' MBP online now... What is the advantage of the 2.3ghz vs the 2.2ghz? Who would the upgrade be good for?

advantage is that you can brag about it.

and why the large font btw? is your question more important than those of others?

 

[CompilerGuy]

Cannot agree more here..

Same here -- I would be happy to pay a bit more for the MacBook Air panel.

I don't want to sound like a complainer here (in general, I'm pretty jazzed about the new machines), but it doesn't seem like Apple wants to offer a high-power notebook that is also small. I know a lot of people who do serious computing on their notebooks, but need them to be small for travel purposes. Clearly, there are space constraints inside a 13" enclosure, but the company seems to equate "small" with "less powerful", and I don't see why.

 

[Tears Apart]

i'm going to get a macbook soon but i'm not sure whether i should go with the MBP 13 or MBA 13 (or even MBA 11). any help?

considering the amount of information you offer us, I would say go for the fourth option.

 

[xStep]

Once again, though, the pro cameras will always be limited by the speed of the recording media when dishing up RAW files, even over LightPeak/Thunderbolt. Currently that limit is 90 MB/s on the most expensive CF cards.

It will be faster than having USB2 (tops out at 60 MB/s) on the cameras but we'll still be limited by the media it is stored on. So you'd get the same speed as if you just bought a LightPeak enabled card reader.

You are limiting your argument to memory cards. Consider other possibilities with such a camera; direct link to a computer, external memory device with much higher specs. There are other possibilities.

 

[AnalyzeThis]

A bit hyperbolic, no?

Sorry, I did not know there is a bunch of even worse than that.

 

[zigzagable]

Wrong comparison: Compare MBP 13 vs. MBA 11 and MBP 15 vs. MBA 13.

MBP: Much faster processor, bigger but slower hard drive, more RAM, upgradeable.
MBA: Much less weight, much less size, smaller pixels are bad if you are >40 years.

why are smaller pixels bad for people >40?

 

[thetechnologist]

Apple Store Battery Length Differences (7 hrs Vs 8 hrs)

Has anyone noticed that, on the Apple Store site, the 15" & 17" MacBook Pro battery lengths show 7 hours, however, when you visit it on the Education Store with the discounts showing, the battery lengths show 8 hours? Which is right?

I guess the takeaway is that Apple gives us one hour longer battery time when we're using the new MacBook Pros for educational purposes

 

[ZenithP]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

Um... I'm sorry for my ignorance... But Uh... Is the second 13" MacBook pro good enough to run Photoshop? I have the early 2008 white basic MacBook, with no upgrades (1 gb about 2.15 ghz. I'm sure I'll upgrade to a new MacBook pro in about two years anyway, and I need a new MacBook soon, so will the 13" MacBook pro be good enough for at least 2 years? Again, sorry for my ignorance...

 

[TheHoff]

That's true except for tethered shooting, which doesn't write to the CF card.

Good point! That would be nice for tethering. And please give the camera's side some sort of locking interface that is not like FireWire.

 

[conch575]

Love it!! Going to order one at a reasonable time today
My favorite bit is how the prices are almost as great as the American ones!! $2,499 for the laptop I was previously going to buy for $2,699! But this makes me wonder (with the new specs) if I should just get the entry level... Ohh staff discount either way!

 

[Tears Apart]

Has anyone noticed that, on the Apple Store site, the 15" & 17" MacBook Pro battery lengths show 7 hours, however, when you visit it on the Education Store with the discounts showing, the battery lengths show 8 hours? Which is right?

I guess the takeaway is that Apple gives us one hour longer battery time when we're using the new MacBook Pros for educational purposes

Or they were still testing the MBPs batteries when they updated the store - they got 7 hours by then, but now a hour passed and they realised that they can squeeze 8 in fact Cross fingers for 9 now.

 

[chrmjenkins]

Sorry, I did not know there is a bunch of even worse than that.

Ok, qualify why this is a horrible update.

 

[gnasher729]

2006 HP laptop owner looking to purchase my first Macbook. Will not use it for gaming. Will use it for work (which entails lots of word processing, spreadsheets, powerpoints, etc.), for the web and for video editing (but nothing too heavy, although HD, the videos are just family home movies). Wondering whether, base on my intended uses, there is any need at all to get the better resolution/graphics card available in the MBP "15. Also wondering whether I should just get the MBA "13 (originally passed on it and waited for this refresh because I was told that storage capacity was lacking on the MBA and even light video editing would be annoying). Would love to hear thoughts from any of you experts as to what I should get.

For video editing SSD is very expensive. Also, video editing is where SSD gives you the least advantage compared to a hard disk. The graphics card makes little difference for video editing, that is all done in the CPU.

You might consider the MBP 13" plus a large monitor.

 

[TheHoff]

You are limiting your argument to memory cards. Consider other possibilities with such a camera; direct link to a computer, external memory device with much higher specs. There are other possibilities.

Yup tethering would be a good application for it but hell if I'm carrying some sort of external memory device with me while shooting in the field. So a direct camera < TB > computer link would only be useful in the studio. We'll still mostly be waiting around for cards to download at 90 MB/s.

 

[elmateo487]

Ok... So I just counted the positive and negative votes since the first iBook and Powerbook up to this MBP.

Positive: 5,633
Negative: 5,202

I can't believe nearly HALF of people that vote in those are unsatisfied! Are the Macbook Pros no good or something? You people are crazy! lol. Quit whining and enjoy incremental updates. Or go follow another companies lineup refreshes and see that they do the SAME small update releases.

Sheesh

and if you tell me that it is just a statistical anomaly, then ok... why do we even have the voting system.

 

[edubya]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

I noticed that the battery life went down to 7 hours in all models. For those of you who have the 2010 13" model, did it really get up to 10 hours of battery?

I could get 7 or 8 pretty easily on wireless with light surfing and using MS Word. I just had to knock down the brightness a notch or two if I was really concerned with the battery lasting that long.

 

[cChris]

according to Apple

<<<I'm a newbie that joined almost 10 years ago. =)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but according to Apple the dual i7 2.7 that is in the 13" is faster than the quad i5 2.0 in the 15".

The 13-inch MacBook Pro now features a 2.3GHz Intel Core i5 processor or the fastest dual-core processor available — the 2.7GHz Intel Core i7. With Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.4GHz, these processors allow the 13-inch MacBook Pro to perform up to twice as fast as the previous generation.1


But we couldn’t leave fast enough alone. The new 15- and 17-inch models bring quad-core power to almost everything you do. The available 2.3GHz(typo?edit:BTO option) quad-core Intel Core i7 processor — with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.4GHz and up to 8MB of shared L3 cache — enables these MacBook Pro models to run applications up to twice as fast as their top-of-the-line predecessors.2

So the dual i7 2.7 has speeds up to 3.4 and the quad 2.2(2.3) has speeds up to 3.4? What about the quad 2.0? I guess the sustained speed of these is more important though. I'll wait for bench testing.

Edit: I didn't notice that the 2.3 quad core i7 is a BTO option. So that means the 13" with the 2.7 dual-core i7 is the fastest Macbook Pro, with the exception of the 2.3 BTO option.