Friday, April 16, 2010

MacBook Pro - now with i5 and i7

The MacBook Pro, finally with Core i5 and i7.

I always visit Apple's MacBook Pro webpage just so I could see the good news of a new line of MacBook Pro. Thank God that my prayers, including others who wanted to get their crummy hands on this baby. Here's a little basic info of the new MBP.

Graphics
This little beast not only sleek like the previous MacBook Pro, it packs more power. It comes with NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M graphics card with 256MB of GDDR3 memory. The amount of memory differs depending on what processor it's on. It's 256MB for 2.4GHz and 2.53GHz configs while it's 512MB for 2.66GHz configs. Included is also Intel HD Graphics with 256MB of DDR3, which is shared with your RAM. Screen ranges from  720 by 480 to 1440 by 900 and with optional 1680 by 1050 widescreen. You can also choose glossy or antiglare.

Hard Disk
I'm quite disappointed with the amount of HDD they are providing. If you were to customize your Mac, the best hard disk you could find is a 500GB @ 7200 RPM. There is of course a Solid State Drive at 512GB. The catch is, it cost as more as another MacBook. But I guess we could just upgrade it ourselves with Western Digital's 1TB 2.5" hard drive.

Battery Power
According to Apple, it could last up to 8 to 9 hours of battery life, including wireless. It's a 77.5-watt-hour battery, a little more than last year's model which is at 73-watt-hour.

Networking and ports
It's compatible with IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n and comes with Bluetooh 2.1 with Enhanced Data Rate. I was hoping for Bluetooth 3.0 though. There's also a 10/100/1000 Base-T Ethernet port. Their connection ports are the same as the previous model. The number of USB ports remains at 2 and disappointingly, it's still USB 2.0. With USB 3.0 products first out in January 2010, I was just thinking maybe the new MacBook Pro will come with two USB 2.0 and one USB 3.0. Sadly though, my prayers weren't answered. It still has a FireWire 800, that Mini DisplayPort and a SD card slot. It seems the new eSATA is not added in either.

Memory
All MacBook Pro now comes with a minimum 4GB of 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM; and is further upgradable to 8GB. Now that's the amount of memory I'm talking about! It's desktop powerful!

Processor
Now here comes the juicy part; the Processor. There's a choice of three; Intel Core i5 2.4GHz and 2.53GHz and Intel Core i7 2.66GHz. Both Core i5 comes with 3MB shared L3 cache while the Core i7 comes with 4MB shared L3 cache. Talk about power.

Conclusion
Well, from the specs itself anyone could see it wasn't really much of a power-up. It feels like they ripped off the previous MacBook Pro model of the Core 2 Duo processor and soldered in the Core 15/7 processor. It did comes with upgrades like the graphics card but the upgrades were only on the inside. I was hoping for more USB ports or USB 3.0 and a eSATA port. But who knows, maybe Apple might have those in their next MacBook Pro line up!

Via: Apple

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