New MacBook Pros

Apple released new laptops recently. As nice as these new ones look, even as a big Apple fan, I feel like there wasn’t enough substance in the update. My impression at first was more positive but after letting some time pass and seeing that more impressive specs can be found easily from other manufacturers my opinion has changed.

They’ve got a cool unibody aluminum enclosure, a glass buttonless trackpad, environmentally friendly material adjustments, and a video praising it all.

I absolutely love OSX and do not see myself moving to another OS anytime soon but it does feel as though the “Pro” version of Apple’s laptops need to be competitive at a hardware level with other high end laptops that are out now.

Things I would have liked to see, at least as options. All of these are easy to find in other high end laptops.

• A Quad-Core CPU.
• 8GB of RAM.
• There are two GPUs in the case, why no SLI?
• Raided disks.
• A new 17″ MacBook Pro. Why no refresh of the big fella? I realize I may be in the minority, but like large screens with huge resolution in my laptop.

With these latest MacBooks it would have been great to see some bleeding edge jumps in the hardware. As it stands the hardware spec increases were minimal and they filled the gap with aluminum and glass. As nice as the new trackpads are (did give them a try at the Lenox Apple Store, very nice) I would rather have twice the memory or more cores. Apple charges a premium for their products and usually that premium can be largely justified by the quality of the components in the machines (OSX and style make up the rest depending on your opinion), but with these new laptops the price premium feels a bit more shallow.

There has been some chatter that indicates the new machines have the hardware to support 8GB of RAM and SLI between the GPUs. Hopefully when Snow Leopard comes out or sooner they will make some adjustments on the software end of things to enable both of these features.

Still a big fan of Apple, these new laptops are really nice and look awesome, just would have been nice to see a bigger jump in the specs. There are some really wicked laptops coming out now that make the new MacBook Pros look underpowered in comparison. Those laptops just don’t run OSX.