Steve Jobs once again rallied the troops at Apple's Town Hall for the company's yearly onslaught of product announcements. As anticipated, the announcements largely focused on the company's Macbook and Macbook Pro lines.
Jobs started the event off by bringing the company's SVP of of Industrial Design to discuss the company's new casing design process--the much-rumored Macbook Brick. Rather than combining aluminum casing with a magnesium alloy, the new Macbooks carve a 1.5-pound casing out of a 2.5 pound brick of aluminum. The new casing will be implemented on the refresh to the Macbook Pro line.
The Pro will also get a Apple's new "chiclet" keyboard, a flush screen, and a new multi-touch glass trackback, which does away with Apple's longstanding single button. The notebook line also features the NVIDIA 9400M GPU + chipset for discreet graphics. The Pro also offers a solid state option and now measures a thin 0.95 inches. The Pro comes in two price configurations: $1,999 for the 2.4-GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of DDR3 RAM; and $2,499 for 4GB of RAM, a 320GB HDD, and a step up in the processing department.
The standard Macbook, meanwhile, also gets the NVIDIA 9400M graphics, brick casing, and the new glass trackpad. The $1,299 base configuration offers a 2-GHz Core 2 Duo. Stepping the system up to $1,599 adds 4GB of RAM and a 320GB HDD. The company has also added a solid-state option. On the other end of the price spectrum, Apple is dropping the price of the low-end Macbook to $999--not quite the $800 netbook we were hoping to see.
The new Macbooks are shipping today, and expected in retails stores tomorrow.
The Macbook Air is also getting those NVIDIA 9400M graphics, along with a 120GB hard drive or 128GB solid state configuration. The new Air comes in two price configurations: $1,799 and $2,499, which will get you a 1.86-GHz Core 2 Duo processor and that SSD. The latter will arrive early next month.
Also updated are Apple's cinema displays. The monitors will get a 24-inch bump, along with LED backlighting, a MagSafe adapter, and a Mini DisplayPort, all for $899.
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October 14, 2008 3:26 PM
exciting, but i want matte screen back!
October 14, 2008 5:12 PM
Oh snap - all of the screens are glossy now? Hmm. That might not go over too well with a lot of people who were becoming accustomed to having a choice.
October 14, 2008 5:29 PM
I know that it sounds all cool and everything to the Mac heads and I have to admit I'm going to, at some point, buy a Mac just because I want to have a good feel for both platforms, but when I heard there was some big deal going on today I was hoping for something better than what has recently come out of Mac. When you here Mac is going to have an event of any kind; you want your mouth to drop and Mac and Steve knows how to deliver. While I like Macs Aluminum casings I still think Macs are over priced, even with there interesting operating system, notice how I didn't say superior. Mac needs to have better pricing to really prove how good they are. Mac still charges Lamborghini prices for Cadillac computers and this is still proof that they rather be style and boutique instead of good and for the masses