The new Macbook Pro announced yesterday has amazing upgrades! a 2.6 GHz i7 processor, 8GB Memory and most excitedly: a Solid State Drive (no moving parts & about 4 times faster)!…oh. wait… My 2010 model was already upgraded to all those things when I bought it 2 years ago… nevermind. It’s cool that the rest of the world can catch up to me now though I guess. #geekballer.
I’ll probably get the new one anyway though. The retina display is kindov worth it for a video producer.
There are other upgrade bumps though that aren’t insignificant:
All of this brings us to the new MacBook Pro. Apple evidently felt that the price and capacity of flash storage had finally reached a point where it could replace hard drives in the company’s pro laptops; indeed, for $500 above the base price, you can get the new machine with a 768-gigabyte flash drive. That’s not quite as much storage as you can get on the existing MacBook Pro in hard drive form (1 terabyte), but it’s not cramped.
With no hard drive or DVD drive, Apple could make the new machine much thinner and lighter than its predecessor, which Apple still sells (for $400 less). The new laptop is only 0.7 inch thick — about the same as the fat end of a MacBook Air — and weighs 4.5 pounds. It’s not the thinnest or lightest 15-incher (the Samsung Series 9 is fractionally thinner and 0.8 pound lighter, for example), but it’s easily one-handable.
Apple calls the new machine the “most beautiful computer we’ve ever made.” The MacBook Air begs to differ. Even so, this new laptop certainly is pretty; it wouldn’t even make it past the lobby of the Ugly Museum Hall of Fame.
The guts are top of the line and sizzling fast: the latest quad-core Intel processor, Bluetooth 4.0, a memory card slot and a cooling fan that has asymmetrical blades. That’s to make the fan quieter, since irregular blades spread the air noise over multiple frequencies. (Wow, Apple — perfectionist much?)
I didn’t sit there with a stopwatch, but I can attest that the “7-hour” battery easily lasts a full day of work, provided you break for lunch and a couple of phone calls. An HDMI jack appears on this Mac for the first time, for one-cable connection to TV sets and projectors (there is no traditional video jack).
This sounds…odd but people are saying the smart money is on a short wait for the purchase:
The longer you wait after a new product introduction, the more money you’ll save. But don’t head to your local Apple Store. Authorized resellers like Amazon, MacMall and MacConnection frequently undercut Apple Store prices, DealNews advised in their April Mac report.
Apple’s MacBook Pros usually see deals quickly compared with other Mac computers, perhaps as early as Wednesday, if history repeats itself. (The previous generation 15-inch model saw a $100 discount on the same day of its release, Ramirez said.) If you can hold off for three months, you could save as much as $300. The new Mac Book Pros start at $1,199 for a 13-inch laptop and $1,799 for the 15-inch model, priced the same as previous models. As expected, the 17-inch unit was discontinued.
For a new MacBook Air, the second-most discounted Apple computer, wait one day and save $50 or wait four months and possibly save $150, he said. Both Best Buy and Amazon offered deep discounts (deep for Apple!) on the smallest MacBook Air released last July, so start there. A new 11-inch MacBook Air starts at $999, while the larger 13-inch model starts at $1,199 — equivalent to the previous units.
