What problems for Apple do I see?
With the start of Windows 7 and the fact that it is hyped
in the media, has very good reviews and a very high overall acceptance,
PC's got a lot of previously lost credibility back.
HP already announced, and others will follow I'm sure, that they'll be able to sell notebooks with integrated grafics cheaper than
before, since the C2D and arrendale CPU's are similar in price, building the motherboard
however will be cheaper, since there are less chips/parts to incorporate onto the board.
Biggest competitor to the 13" MBP is the Macbook, that probably will be faster in some cases than an
arrendale MBP with no dedicated Grafics, since OpenCL (big selling point for SL) is fully
supported by the 9400M. This will most likely be the case with Applications that use a lot of processing power i.e. photoshop
(OpenCL support), for Safari you won't recognize the difference in cpu power anyway.
Skipping the arrendale Chips entirely will cause a loss of credibility among mac users. Even hardcore
apple fans would have quite a difficult time to explain to themselvers why they bought a laptop for twice the money
than that notebook from the discounter, that is faster and has newer components.
I'm in the market for a new 13" Macbook but a simple Arrendale with integrated grafics wouldn't do it for me. Not because
I can't live with the Intel grafics, I'm sure I won't even recognize the difference most of the time, it is merely because the
overall value would be worse than now (and it's not that good in the moment either, since the 250$ Premium to the Macbook). I use
my macbook 95% of the time for internet, music, video etc, so I probably wouldn't need more processing power and I'm fairly certain
I am not the only one here with that kind of use, but that doesn't mean however that I'm willing to settle with low end components
in a machine with the price of a mid to highend one.
I think everybody here is willing to pay a bit more for a Mac, me included, it's just that I have a problem with getting
ripped off by apple. And one thing is for sure, they won't make the MBP cheaper than now, because than the normal macbook would be
obsolete.
Again I will have no problems with the Intel grafics when Apple compensates you're loss of grafics power in other ways. Ok I burried
the dream of Blu-Ray a while back, but I still think replacing the Superdrive (again I am only talking about the 13" version) with a
big HDD (e.g. 640GB) and putting a 64-128GB SSD in the Place of the normal harddrive, will be a good trade-off. Replacing the Display
with an ips type panel (non-glare, pleeeease) would be also something I could agree with.
At the end only time will tell, but at least in my case Apple will have to make it worth it. (I'm sure they will somehow *praying*)