MacBook Pro Refresh Soon?

[iMacmatician]

Its only been 3 months... Plus the 17" wasnt even shipping until late March early April.

3 months (technically 4) from November 2007 was February 2008, the Penryn update.

Plus it may be that the next updates will not be in June but sometime later.

 

[Shake 'n' Bake]

This would lead to a slight timing problem, as there are some paradigm shifts in technology on the horizon. USB 3.0 ports will start appearing on computers in Q4 2009; Intel will have a Centrino 2 platform ready to be rolled out around the same time, along with new processors.

In other words Apple has two choices: Wait until early 2010 before updating the MBP (and this will be a major update), or do an interim update sometime during 2010 to keep sales of the current MBP going. If they were to hold off this interim update until the fall of 2009, that version would be the most short lived Mac ever. So the best timing would be to release a slightly updated MBP line in June... July at the very latest.

So, my guess...

MBP 1.0 > Nov 2008
MBP 1.1 > Jun-Jul 2009
MBP 2.0 > Feb-Mar 2010

Don't we already have Centrino 2?

 

[macquarius]

I hope they update the GPU to the nVidia GTS 150M/160M for the 15" UMBP's and for the 17" UMBP's to the nVidia GTX260M/280M and maybe some speedbumps.

 

[Anuba]

People, they just "refreshed" them in March when the 17" was released. They are not going to refresh them again just 3 months later.

Not March. It was the beginning of January, 5 months ago. Besides, the 17" doesn't make the 15" and 13" models any younger. It's been 235 days with no updates, the average is 197.

Right now we have a ridiculous situation where the entry-level WhiteBook has a larger hard drive (500 GB) than the Pro models (320 GB), and there's no matte option on the 15" model. They're idiots if they don't address these issues soon. I would expect a refresh much earlier than September, due to the simple fact that if they wait that long they will have to do another refresh very shortly thereafter to add USB 3.0 and Intel's new mobile quads. Unless their new plan is to pass on the opportunity to get first dibs on anything new from Intel and let the PC manufacturers have the edge.

 

[iMacmatician]

I would expect a refresh much earlier than September, due to the simple fact that if they wait that long they will have to do another refresh very shortly thereafter to add USB 3.0 and Intel's new mobile quads. Unless their new plan is to pass on the opportunity to get first dibs on anything new from Intel and let the PC manufacturers have the edge.

I don't expect quad-core to show up in the MacBook Pro. I'd say the update after next will be in H1 2010.

 

[RolandVet]

I think they might put a quadcore in the new MBP. I'm hoping for a price drop on SSD disks.

 

[Sneakz]

I hope they update the GPU to the nVidia GTS 150M/160M for the 15" UMBP's and for the 17" UMBP's to the nVidia GTX260M/280M and maybe some speedbumps.

You should be dreaming instead. The wattage on those cards is higher than the MacBook Pro's entire power consumption.

 

[Anuba]

I don't expect quad-core to show up in the MacBook Pro. I'd say the update after next will be in H1 2010.

Oh I dunno... Apple has been at the forefront of multicore mania from day one. They barely had quads out the door when they started talking about octads. They've also demonstrated that they're so crazy about core numbers they don't really care about clock frequency (or else they wouldn't have the 2.26 GHz octad out there). Finally -- and this is the most important point -- there's Grand Central in Snow Leopard: "More cores, not faster clock speeds, drive performance increases in today’s processors. Grand Central takes full advantage by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors. Grand Central also makes it much easier for developers to create programs that squeeze every last drop of power from multicore systems."
If Grand Central works as advertised they will definitely want to show it off by putting quads in the MBP line, even if it's those slow 1.6 GHz ones that Intel will be rolling out this year.

Personally I'm not really interested, but I hope they do roll out the low-frequency quads anyway, as this will probably give me a better price on a 2.66 or 2.93 dual.