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Processor power in a notebook is useless if you are tied to a power outlet. Notebooks are meant to be used in situations where power outlets are not available. That's why there are batteries in them. I never carry my charger because my MBP lasts at least 3 days when used solely for high school and/or college classes. But my Windows PC-carrying friends carry at least 2 extra batteries and a charger for just one day of classes.

For desktops, it's a totally different story...

What kind of garbage laptops do your friends have, and how many classes do they take in a day? I went through a CMSC degree with a horrible HP tablet. Its 4-6 hour battery easily lasted the day. If you're getting 3 days out of it, that would mean your friends' battery life was less than 1.5 hours per charge (9 charges over 3 days). Obviously the MBP will fare better than a lot of Winblows machines, but I honestly never saw any of my classmates (Mac or PC) carry extra batteries around.

My ideal MBP update would be as follows:

Feb 2010
New unibody design more in line with iPhone4 and 16:9 1080p screen
Sandy Bridge Quads
AMD GPU
7-8 hour battery
Light peak
OS X with TRIM support for the phat new Intel 600 GB SSDs

Give me the above and I will blow a socket. People keep talking about the 35w TDP because Apple has stuck with that as a max for all MBPs so far, but I wouldn't rule out a 45w if they came up with a new design. What, 8 hours battery now? If they update the battery capacity and change the form factor for 16:9, I could see them doing a 7-8 battery life instead of the 8-9. People are always like "HISTORICALLY APPLE HASN'T DONE IT," but Apple hadn't launched an iPad before this year and they hadn't launched an iPhone before 2007. There's always a first for everything.
 
Give me the above and I will blow a socket. People keep talking about the 35w TDP because Apple has stuck with that as a max for all MBPs so far, but I wouldn't rule out a 45w if they came up with a new design. What, 8 hours battery now? If they update the battery capacity and change the form factor for 16:9, I could see them doing a 7-8 battery life instead of the 8-9. People are always like "HISTORICALLY APPLE HASN'T DONE IT," but Apple hadn't launched an iPad before this year and they hadn't launched an iPhone before 2007. There's always a first for everything.

Don't forget the Sandybridge is thinner. Thinner can mean more space for battery, thus compensating the extra drain.
 
It will simply provide better clock for clock, core for core performance so e.g. 2GHz Sandy Bridge may be as fast as 2.4GHz Nehalem.
Current rumors point to 20% clock-for-clock improvement, but there's much variance among different tasks.
 
The Sandy Bridge is going to have the much faster IGP onboard the CPU die instead of a separate die like the current ones, which also means the onboard memory controller will be integrated on the CPU.

Even at same clock speed, the CPU should be 5-20% faster with lower latency memory and better graphics performance (it is supposed to be twice as fast as the current iGP).

But for current owners of mid 2010 MBPs, it won't be a big change unless Apple decides to introduce USB 3 and FW1600/3200 (I doubt FW will be updated) ports.
 
"Intel's 'Sandy Bridge' to use new specialized silicon"

Intel's upcoming Sandy Bridge processors will include new circuits for handling demanding multimedia tasks, according to sources, more evidence of processor changes in store as the chip giant gets ready to shift over to a new processor architecture.
…
For the first time on any Intel chip, Sandy Bridge will include silicon dedicated to handling the transcoding, or converting, of data from one format to another. The transcoding circuits will be separate from the main processor and the on-chip graphics function, according to sources at system makers.
 
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