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The Fake MacBook Nano makes us want an Apple netbook even more!

I know it’s never going to happen, or at least, Steve Jobs will do his damnedest to make sure such a product never sees the light of day,  but I’ll be damned if I don’t really want a Mac netbook like one of these.

Gizmodo posted these pictures of what is likely an MSI Wind modded into a shiny new MacBook Nano.  It’s obviously fake, but probably not very far from what Apple could come up with.  So why don’t they?

Simply because they won’t make enough money off of them.

Of course Steve Jobs says that they don’t know how to make a cheap laptop that isn’t “a piece of junk”,  but what that really means is,  we dont know how to make a cheap laptop that isn’t a piece of junk that we still make a 50% profit on.  If Apple has been consistent on one thing since the return of Steve Jobs well over 10 years ago, it’s that they won’t release a product unless they are absolutely sure that they will be able to make a serious profit margin on it.

Even Apple’s iPhone 3g which retails for $199 makes Apple a serious profit margin,  it’s just that we don’t really pay it.  AT&T does.  It’s rumored that AT&T pays Apple $399-499 for each iPhone 3g and then subsidizes it to the price we see today.

Apple doesn’t want to cannibalize the sales of it’s wildly-successful MacBook line with a line of laptops which at the $500-700 price range, would be of serious interest to average consumers.  Not to mention the fact that the sub-optimal performance of OS X on an Atom based netbook would hurt the user experience, something we know Apple is NEVER interested in doing.

So what WILL show up in that open $500-$700 slot in Apple’s product line?  I have a feeling that we’ll find out the answer to that question in January at MacWorld.

Tags: Apple, Macbook, MacBook nano

MacBook Introduction Video

Introducing the new Macbook Series Design Story from Ronan park on Vimeo

For those who have read my article prognosticating that Jony Ive, Senior VP of Design at Apple may eventually take over for Steve Jobs in the stagecraft of announcing new products when Jobs finally steps down, I just found some of the proof I was looking for.  This is the video that Steve presented towards the end of his keynote today, featuring Ive talking up the design of the new MacBook.  What do you think?  Does he have the chops to step into the turtleneck and jeans?

Tags: Apple, Macbook

…And we’re back! Let the MacBook madness begin!

Well after a round of server problems, I’m back up and running.  Just in time it seems as we are awaiting the beginning of the Stevenote which will announce all new laptops.  What are we expecting?  It seems John Gruber of Daring Fireball has gotten together a pretty comprehensive look of all the rumors and put together the likely scenario for today’s release:

 

Engadget just posted the first real picture and accurate description I’ve seen in public of the new 15-inch MacBook Pro, set to be announced later today. It’s the real deal. Major visible changes from the previous MacBook Pros:

• A new iMac-style black border around the display.
• A single-piece aluminum frame. No more chintzy plastic trim along the edges and seams.
• No more physical latch.
• MacBook Air-style black keyboard.

And good news for those of you who’ve been bitching about Apple’s laptops having a single button: the single-button trackpad is gone. Which is to say there is no button at all. The new trackpad is similar to the Air’s, in that it is bigger and supports additional multi-touch gestures. But unlike the Air’s, the MacBook Pro’s new trackpad is made of glass, and is a button itself. You just press and it clicks. This is not like the current software option where you can enable “Tap to Click” in the trackpad preferences, but instead a glass trackpad that acts as a physical button, with a click you can feel. Sounds odd, but I hear it’s very cool in practice.

The new MacBook Pro is not available with a matte-finish display. If you don’t like glossy, you can suck it. (I bought a matte-finish display for my MacBook Pro back in March, so don’t shoot the messenger.)

Engadget is also correct that there is no new 17-inch MacBook Pro. I don’t know if the 17-inch revision is simply forthcoming, or whether it’s being phased out. My hunch is that it’s being phased out. The current 17-inch model will remain for sale for the time being — albeit with a larger 320 GB hard drive and 4 GB of RAM instead of 2 — but there is no 17-inch model with the features or appearance of the new 15-inch Pro.

I have some educated guesses as to what else will be announced.

The new regular MacBooks look like 13-inch versions of the new MacBook Pro. Another single-piece all-aluminum chassis, the same black border around the display, and the same new no-button multi-touch trackpads. The displays are backlit LEDs, like the 15-inch Pros. (Engadget, which is reporting that the regular MacBooks aren’t being revised, is wrong. They’re not just being announced but should be shipping by the end of the week.)

The updated Airs look the same as the current Airs, but now offer larger hard drives: a 120 GB disk in the low-end model, and a twice-as-large 128 GB solid-state drive in the high-end model.

CPU performance remains more or less unchanged across the board: 2.4 / 2.53 GHz for the MacBook Pro; 2.0 / 2.4 GHz for the MacBook; and 1.6 / 1.83 GHz for the MacBook Air. What is new with regard to performance are the video cards: all these new MacBooks — regular, Pro, and Air — ship with the new Nvidia 9400M GPU. It’s apparently a screamer performance-wise, especially compared to the Intel integrated graphic chipsets that shipped with previous MacBooks and MacBook Airs, and it is capable of driving the 30-inch Cinema Display as an external monitor.¹

In addition to the 9400M, the MacBook Pro sports a second GPU, the Nvidia 9600M GT. I have never heard of a notebook with two graphics processors, but that’s the deal for the new MacBook Pros, and presumably there are huge performance advantages to this configuration.UPDATE: Via Twitter, Stuart Maxwell writes, “The Lenovo Thinkpad T500 has two graphics cards. One is used on battery to conserve power.” Apparently some Sony Vaios use dual graphic cards like this, too — a low-power one for battery, a high-power one when plugged-in.

(Recall, too, that taking advantage of GPUs for system-wide performance gains is one of the main focal points for Snow Leopard. Snow Leopard’s OpenCL allows applications to offload general computing tasks to the GPUs. Or, I guess, the GPUs, plural.)

Keep your eyes peeled for jackassery in post-event news coverage, much of which, I predict, will focus on the fact that none of these new machines sell for under $1299. The reality is that these new machines are all steps up, but the rumors that caught the most attention in the past week were the ones regarding $799 and $899 laptops. None of these “$800 new MacBook!” rumors came from anyone with any credibility, but that won’t stop some people from holding it against Apple that they didn’t pan out.

MacBook Pro prices will remain the same, at $1999 and $2499. Same for MacBook Airs: $1799 and $2499. Regular MacBook pricing is interesting, though. In the old (plastic) MacBook lineup, there were three standard configurations:

• $1099: 2.1 GHz, white, 1 GB memory, 120 GB disk
• $1299: 2.4 GHz, white, 2 GB memory, 160 GB disk
• $1499: 2.4 GHz, black, 2 GB memory, 250 GB disk

In the new (aluminum) MacBook lineup, there are only two standard configurations:

• $1299: 2.0 GHz, 2 GB memory, 160 GB disk
• $1499: 2.4 GHz, 2 GB memory, 250 GB disk

Which is notable in that the new $1299 model sports a CPU that is 16 percent slower than the old one. That is not to say the system itself is “slower”, Apple’s argument will apparently be that the new Nvidia GPUs more than make up for the difference. What we’re seeing may be the beginning of the end of CPU hertz as the rule-of-thumb metric for system performance.

Also notable is that the 2.1 GHz white MacBook remains in the new lineup, at a new price of $999 — technically breaking the $1000 barrier, but nowhere near the $800 price point some financial analysts have been whacking off to.

 

I’m disappointed that the rumor I had been hearing of line consolidation was untrue.  Considering that the MacBook and the MacBook Pro will look nearly identical to each other in every detail except screen size and ports, it’s strange to see them continuing with a naming system that doesn’t really fit anymore.

I’m also disappointed to see the removal of the 17″ notebook from the lineup.  As a digital photographer, and retoucher,  having that extra screen real estate was something I was looking forward to as I planned to upgrade from the MacBook to a 17″ MacBook Pro.  Something tells me it isn’t quite gone forever though time will tell.

The biggest problem with the announcement though, is the fact that despite an extreme economic downturn, Apple has not only NOT made their products less expensive,  in the case of the MacBook, they have become MORE expensive,  moving from the opening price of $1099 to $1299.  I’m sure this has to do with the aluminum manufacturing process that we’ve all heard so much about lately,  and that when the economies of scale are met, the prices WILL be reduced.  Needless to say though, it’s a disappointment.

On the plus side, the design of the new MacBooks and MacBook Pro’s are ABSOLUTELY STUNNING.  They are easily the most beautiful computers Apple has yet designed, and I can’t wait to get my hands on one.

Stay tuned at 10am Pacific/ 1pm Eastern time while we meta-liveblog the event!  Who knows what could change between now and then..

Tags: Apple, Macbook, macbook air, Macbook Pro

Apple’s “Brick” is the solution to their last big problem

9 to 5 Mac, this weekend broke the rumor that Apple’s widely rumored “brick” project, is indeed code for a brand new factory featuring an all new manufacturing method for the upcoming all aluminum MacBooks.

According to the article:

 

The MacBook Brick is a block of high-quality, aircraft grade aluminum.  It is the beginning.

The beginning of what? 

It is the beginning of the new Apple manufacturing process to make MacBooks.   It is totally revolutionary, a game changer.  One of the biggest Apple innovations in a decade.

The MacBook manufacturing process up to this point has been outsourced to Chinese or Taiwanese manufacturers like Foxconn.  Now Apple is in charge.  The company has spent the last few years building an entirely new manufacturing process that uses lasers and jets of water to carve the MacBooks out of a brick of aluminum. 

 

I like the sound of this.  These new MacBooks would be built out of a single machined piece or “brick” of aluminum, reducing the need for screws and seams.  That’s cool, but not that important to the general consumer.   What really interests me is that the production facility is Apple’s alone.  Meaning they have much better control over the quality of the final product.

Don’t get me wrong, the idea of a perfectly laser drilled, beautifully machined notebook is nice.  And I’m sure it will positively affect the look of the hardware, but that isn’t the point.  The real positive aspect to these possible new laptops is the solution to a problem that has been bugging Apple for the past couple of years in almost all of it’s products.  Inconsistent quality control.

Even my MacBook, a device which I’ve kept as clean and gently handled as possible, has been subject to cracking problems near the magnetic latch.  It’s just simply a case of bad quality control.  As much as Steve Jobs would love to have control over the Chinese manufacturers who put together their products currently, he simply does not, and I don’t think quality is as high as he would like it to be.  To me, this looks like a move to bring as much of the production in house as possible, to ensure that the QUALITY of the finished product matches the design of the products in terms of high end appeal.

Though, with the recent downturns in Apple stock due to the collapsing market, it’s hard to tell if this was a wise position to take.  Likely the Chinese manufacturing would be less expensive, and the overhead of running a production facility with staffing will cost Apple a pretty penny.  Thankfully Apple seems to have quite a bit of cash on hand, and hopefully should be able to weather the storm well.    

Regardless, it looks more and more like October 14th will be the day we see this brand new revelation in notebook design and manufacturing.  Hopefully it will be enough to rebound the stock a bit.

Tags: Apple, Brick, Macbook

And the new MacBook fake machine starts right up

Well that was fast.   Here’s the first of what looks to be many new MacBook mockups coming.   Is it real?  Don’t know for sure but I doubt it.  Not sure how functional having the dock down on a touch screen trackpad would actually be.  But hey I’m open to new ideas.  Oh and people taking pictures of secret products?  Bring better cameras to work, PLEASE!  At least 4 megapixels.  They’re cheap now, and thin!  Maybe only $100 bucks.  Oh, and make your watermark actually readable so I can give you your credit.

Tags: Apple, Fake, Macbook

New Rumors about Apple’s MacBook refresh!

I Just found a very interesting article over at AppleInsider about the upcoming refresh of the Mac line.

Production ready versions of Apple’s next-generation MacBook and MacBook Pro notebooks have surfaced stateside in matching attire, according to people who’ve been privy to early glimpses of some of the company’s other hardware offerings.

In its attempt to provide the most accurate picture of Apple’s future product plans, AppleInsider notes that these people lack a lengthy track record. Therefore, the following information is being conveyed as rumor to supplement earlier reports of higher conviction (outlined below). That said, the limited information provided by these people thus far has proven to be extremely accurate.

According to the latest reports, both the new 13-inch MacBooks and 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pros will share similarities not only in their employment of aluminum enclosures, but in their overall aesthetic as well, with the new 13-inch MacBooks for the first time matching their higher-priced cousins as if they were members of the same product family.

Again, the new designs were described as a cross between the 13-inch MacBook Air introduced this January and the aluminum iMacs that made their debut during the summer of 2007. In its April report, AppleInsider noted this would include a trimming — or tapering — around the edges and instances of black material to contrast the largely aluminum motif of the new notebooks.

New, however, are reports that Apple has done away with some traditional I/O ports and altered others as it strives to marginally reduce the overall footprint of its next-gen notebooks. In particular, those people who claim to have seen the new designs say the FireWire 400 port appears to have been removed from the new MacBook Pro, leaving a backwards compatible FireWire 800 port.

Hm, thats funny.  I believed I called this one back a couple of weeks ago  (see “Is Apple planning to ditch the MacBook Pro?“).   As I’ve said previously,  Apple’s movement in the notebook space makes it seem more and more likely that they will drop the “Pro” moniker from it’s larger screened laptop line, and bring all three screen sizes under the MacBook name.   Even MacRumors caught onto this, though I don’t think they quite “got” it either.  They Said: (emphasis added by me)

The new 13″ MacBooks, 15″ MacBook Pros and 17″ MacBook Pros are said to share similar Aluminum-based look “as if they were members of the same product family“. The current MacBooks and MacBook Pro are very distinct from one another with the MacBook housed in a white or black plastic enclosure.

I would be surprised if they indeed did NOT drop the Pro moniker from the notebook line and lower the prices a bit.  The market has previously reacted extremely well to Apple’s notebook offerings, and making the larger screen sizes more accessible to the general public could only help them further.  More to come as we hear it.

Tags: Apple, Macbook