Yesterday Apple announced a raft of new product. There are new all Core-i iMacs with ATI Radeon graphics processor units shipping immediately; new multi-core (up to 12) Mac Pros on the way for next month; a new freestanding Magic Trackpad that brings MacBook-style gestures to the desktop, but which will certainly be usable with notebooks as well as an alternative to a mouse when using your ‘Book in desktop mode. Then there’s a new, $999 27” LED Cinema Display with a built-in iSight video camera, microphone and speakers, a powered USB 2.0 hub, and a universal MagSafe connector that is being specifically pitched as “an ideal companion for the MacBook family” but wil also of course work with Mac desktop Computers. More prosaic is a new $29 Apple Battery Charger — a “green” device that Apple says has one of the lowest standby power usage values — or “vampire draw” — of similar chargers on the market that comes complete with six bundled AA size NiMH cells with a projected service life of up to 10 years.
So what inferences can Mac laptop fans draw from this relative tsunami of mostly not particularly laptop-oriented hardware? Actually quite a bit. An obvious one is that with the entire Mac desktop line from mini to Pro recently or about to be upgraded, notebooks are logically next in line for refreshment.
The switch to all Core-i and all-ATI CPUs and GPUs respectively in the iMacs, which have shared a fair bit of engineering with Apple’s laptops from the get-go in 1998, with the original teardrop G3 iMac and WallStreet PowerBooks, is especially intriguing. Intel’s lower power consumption Core i3 silicon makes its Mac debut with the July 2010 iMac revision, which inclines one to speculate that it probably won’t be long before there are Core i3 MacBooks as well. Less expected but not wholly surprising in light of the current politics in the graphics accelerator orbit is the wholesale shift away from NVIDIA GPUs and back to ATI Radeon 4000 or 5000 Series units with either 256 MB or 512 MB of dedicated video RAM, marking the first time since 2008 that iMac graphics have been all-ATI.
Apple’s notebook lines are currently all-NVIDIA graphics save for the Intel HD integrated GPUs used in Core-i5 and i7 15” and 17” MacBook Pros, which are piggy-backed with NVIDIA GeForce freestanding GPUs. The new MAc Pros coming in August will also ship with ATI graphics silicon, which will leave the Mac mini with its MacBook-esque internal architecture the last of the NVIDIA graphics Mohicans, at least for the present. This all begs the question of whether we will see a similar migration back to ATI with the next generation of MacBooks and MacBook Pros.
Photo Courtesy Apple
The new iMacs come with 3.06 and 3.20 GHz Intel Core i3 and 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5 processors with a 2.93 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 processor a build-to-order option. There has been speculation about quad-core MAcBook Pros being in the works, but we’ll have to wait and see. The Core-i processors feature an integrated memory controller that accesses the system memory directly, allowing full advantage to be taken of of the fast 1333 MHz memory (up from the 1066 MHz RAM in the foregoing models) that we should see in the next MacBook Pros at least.
Another new wrinkle introduced with these new iMacs that will probably make the jump to laptop space is an SD card slot that supports the SDXC format to handle the latest high-capacity storage cards. Notable by its absence, however, is USB 3.0, which is a bit of a disappointment, although the iMacs happily still come with a FireWire 800 port.
Externally, the new machines continue the now three-year-old aluminum iMac form factor unchanged, as is the standars 4 GB RAM configuration with a ceiling of 16 GB using four 4 GB modules.
iMac prices start at $1,199 for the 21.5” 3.06GHz Core i3 model ranging to $1,999 for the 27-inch 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5 iMac, and on up with the i7 chip and other BTO options — arguably representing the most value for the money you can get in a Mac.
Apple’s new $69 wireless Magic Trackpad brings the intuitive Multi-Touch gestures of Mac notebook trackpads to the desktop. It’s very similar (only larger) to the glass Multi-Touch trackpads, with gesture support that enables users to scroll smoothly up and down a page with inertial scrolling, pinch to zoom in and out, rotate an image with their fingertips and swipe three fingers to flip through a collection of web pages or photos. The Magic Trackpad can be configured to support single button or two button commands and supports laptop-style tap-to-click as well as a physical click.
Photo Courtesy Apple
It’s nice to have this as an option, especially as a substitute for Apple’s Magic Mouse, since I find low-profile mice unsuitable for comfortable prolonged-session use I’ve had a freestanding trackpad for years — a superb Cirqué Easy Cat (which is not Multi-Touch), and as a laptop user I appreciate the virtues of the concept, but I’m not sure that even the coolness of Multi-Touch support would ever wean me off conventional mice for desktop duty. That’s of course a subjective evaluation, and I don’t doubt that the Magic Trackpad will be a hot seller, and that some folks will abandon the mouse in its favor. I can certainly see having both. I currently have three point & click input devices of various form factors connected to my MacBook as I type this column (on an external keyboard), and for one of them to be a MAgic Trackpad would make logical sense.
Photo Courtesy Apple
The Magic Trackpad brings the intuitive Multi-Touch gestures of Mac notebook trackpads to the desktop. With its glass surface, the wireless Magic Trackpad enables users to scroll smoothly up and down a page with inertial scrolling, pinch to zoom in and out, rotate an image with their fingertips and swipe three fingers to flip through a collection of web pages or photos. The Magic Trackpad can be configured to support single button or two button commands and supports tap-to-click as well as a physical click. The Magic Trackpad brings the intuitive Multi-Touch gestures of Mac notebook trackpads to the desktop. With its glass surface, the wireless Magic Trackpad enables users to scroll smoothly up and down a page with inertial scrolling, pinch to zoom in and out, rotate an image with their fingertips and swipe three fingers to flip through a collection of web pages or photos. The Magic Trackpad can be configured to support single button or two button commands and supports tap-to-click as well as a physical click.
Photo Courtesy Apple
Apple laptop owners have definitely not been forgotten, as Apple yesterday released the Magic Trackpad and Multi-Touch Trackpad Update 1.0 driver that adds support to Mac OS X for the Magic Trackpad and is required for its use, and also enables inertial scrolling and the three-finger drag gesture in recent MacBook and MacBook Pro notebooks. Mac OS X 10.6.4 is required.
The Mac portable models listed below support inertial scrolling and the three-finger drag gesture after you install Magic Trackpad and Multi-Touch Trackpad Update 1.0:
MacBook
MacBook (13-inch, Early 2009)
MacBook (13-inch, Mid 2009)
MacBook (13-inch, Late 2009)
MacBook (13-inch, Aluminum, Late 2008)
MacBook Pro
MacBook Pro (17-inch, Mid 2010)
MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2010)
MacBook Pro (17-inch, Mid 2009)
MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2.53 GHz, Mid 2009)
MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2009)
MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2009)
MacBook Pro (17-inch, Early 2009)
MacBook Pro (17-inch, Late 2008)
The following Mac portables support inertial scrolling after installing Magic Trackpad and Multi-Touch Trackpad Update 1.0:
MacBook Air
MacBook Air
MacBook Air (Mid 2009)
MacBook Pro
MacBook Pro (15-inch, Early 2008)
MacBook Pro (17-inch, Early 2008)
To download the driver, visit:
http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1066
For more information about this update, visit this website:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4254
For additional information about the Magic Trackpad and Multi-Touch Trackpad visit:
http://www.apple.com/magictrackpad
Moving along, the 24” Apple LED Cinema Display was originally introduced. on October 14, 2008 along with the aluminum unibody MAcBook and MacBook Pro, and expressly intended as a perfect companion for users who don’t have a desktop computer and use their laptops as the core module of their desktop work station. Now Apple has announced a larger 27-inch LED Cinema Display whose 16:9 ratio form factor and 2560 x 1440 resolution provides 60 percent more screen real estate than the 24-inch LED Cinema Display (which remains available for $200 less).
Photo Courtesy Apple
As noted above, the 27” LED Cinema Display also incorporates a built-in iSight video camera, microphone and speakers, an integrated MagSafe charger to keep Mac notebooks charged, built-in Mini DisplayPort connectivity for video and audio input, and a powered three-port USB 2.0 hub. It’s an edge-to-edge glass unit on an aluminum stand with an adjustable hinge that makes tilting the display easy.
Photo Courtesy Apple
The new LED Cinema Display also includes a new ambient light sensor that automatically adjusts the display brightness based on external lighting conditions and uses only as much energy as necessary to provide optimum viewing. Made with mercury-free LED technology, arsenic-free glass and recyclable materials, the LED Cinema Display meets Energy Star 5.0 requirements and achieves EPEAT Gold status, contains no brominated flame retardants, and all cables and components are PVC-free. The new LED Cinema Display will be available in September through the Apple Store Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers for a suggested retail price of $999.
The Mac Pro has the least engineering commonality with laptops of any Mac computer, so it’s not likely there will be much crossover with our ‘Books, but briefly, the new Pro desktops will be available with quad-core and 6-core Intel Xeon processors running at speeds up to 3.33 GHz. These multi-core processors use a single die design so each core can share up to 12MB L3 cache to improve efficiency while increasing processing speed, and feature an integrated memory controller for faster memory bandwidth and reduced memory latency; Turbo Boost to dynamically boost processor speeds up to 3.6 GHz; and Hyper-Threading to create up to 24 virtual cores.
Photo Courtesy Apple
The Mac Pro comes with the ATI Radeon HD 5770 graphics processor with 1GB of memory and customers can configure-to-order the faster ATI Radeon HD 5870 with 1GB of memory. Prices start at $2,499 and range to $3,499 for preconfigured models and beyond with a vast array of build-to-order options, and these new ones will be the fastest Macs ever built.
Finally, there’s the Apple Battery Charger, which Apple claims to have the lowest standby power usage values — or “vampire draw” — of similar chargers on the market, thanks to its ability to sense when the batteries are finished charging and automatically reduce the amount of power it consumes to 30 milliwatts. In addition, the reusable AA NiMH batteries that come bundled with each Apple Battery Charger are designed to maintain a high charge capacity for hundreds of charges, so you no longer have to buy new batteries or toss them every few months.
Photo Courtesy Apple
The Apple Battery Charger can recharge one or two batteries at a time, is optimized for Apple-supplied batteries and works with AA NiMH batteries from other vendors as well.
Each Apple Battery Charger comes with six high-performance AA NiMH batteries: two for your keyboard, two for your mouse or trackpad, and two for charging. These batteries are claimed to have an incredibly long service life — up to 10 years — and an extraordinarily low self-discharge rate, retaining 80 percent of their original charge after a year of not being recharged. The Charger’s compact shape should slip neatly in your laptop bag or backpack and is designed with a removable AC plug so you can substitute plugs that work with different outlets around the world.
For more information, visit:
http://www.apple.com/battery-charger/
