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Well my replacement MacBook finally turned up and I’m glad I did the swap, the new one is perfect! Can’t believe how light and thin it feels, its not far off the MacBook Air, but with an optical drive. My initial impressions are, it’s light, it’s quick, the trackpad is brilliant, the screen is nice, and the backlit keyboard totally rocks! I’m currently loading it up with my music etc, also I’m going to stick Windows XP on via BootCamp so I can test the graphical prowess a bit better. Lookout for future posts with more detailed impressions aswell as gaming benchmarks etc.

New MacBook 2.4GHz!

Apple announced the latest MacBook at their October 14th media event. As predicted the new MacBook is housed in an Aluminum enclosure and uses the new all in one NVIDIA 9400m Chipset and Graphics. Apple tell us the new GPU offers on average 5x the performance of the current Intel GMA X3100.

As I predicted Apple have kept the current white MacBook as part of their product line and have lowered the price to £719. There are then two new higher end models priced at £949 and £1149. Both these models use the new Aluminum ‘Unibody’ and sport the NVIDIA 9400m. The £1149 model even has a Backlit Keyboard, a first for the MacBook (also another one of my predictions).

New MacBooks are very appealing

One thing many people have noticed since the major leak of images from Macx.cn is the lack of a FireWire port on the MacBook casing. This seems to have gone down badly in the Apple world with many posting complaints on forums questioning Apple’s logic in ditching the interface they begun. iPods have now all moved over to USB 2.0, and there has been an increasing trend for Digital Video Cameras to also use the serial bus interface. USB 2.0 (480Mbit/s) offer speeds equivalent to FireWire 400 (400Mbit/s) at it’s peak, but benchmarks often show FireWire can maintain a slightly higher average transfer rate.

MacBook casing lacks FireWire cut-out

Chinese Website Macx.cn has posted more detailed pictures of the new MacBook and MacBook Pro case redesigns. As I have predicted in my earlier post it looks like the MacBook Pro will feature a much bigger trackpad, black keyboard and a magnetic latch.

MacBook Pro 15

MacBook 13

Website planetamac.es have posted what appears to be a mockup of what they think the new Aluminum MacBooks will look like. While it remains to be seen how genuine these mockups are, you can’t help but feel the new MacBook won’t be too dissimilar to what is depicted here, i.e very much like a meatier MacBook Air.

Picture courtesy of www.planetamac.es

Well, they’ve left it till the last possible minute, but Apple today sent out invites to the media for an event only described as “the spotlight turns to notebooks”. Three guesses to what they’ll be showing then. If you’ve been following recent rumors they all heavily suggest the imminent release of an NVIDIA powered Aluminum MacBook. Hopefully both rumors will come true and we can say goodbye to the Intel GMA’s!

I smell an Aluminum MacBook

The event will take place in San Francisco at 10AM PST, that’s 6PM for us here in the United Kingdom. I expect a full Keynote stream will be posted a few hours after the event here. As ever I will keep you up to date with the latest developments right here on my blog.

With the rumor mill spreading that Apple will release the brand new Aluminum MacBooks on the 14th of October, I’m wondering whether it is too late for them to announce a Special Event in time? Apple have typically held an iPod themed event every year, in either September or October. Well we’ve had the iPod event for this year, so what next? I see the Aluminum MacBooks as far to big an announcement to be just quietly introduced on their website.

Could this be a sign that the 14th of October date circulating is false? Im sure they would love to have these laptops out in time for the holiday season. If indeed Apple does announce an event I suspect the MacBook Air will also receive an overhaul, and should sport the new slim 120GB hard drive found in the latest iPod Classic.

The word on the street is that Apple plan on introducing the new, all aluminum MacBook, on the 14th of this month. Indeed TUAW are running a rumour story that seems to have some plausibility.

Other rumors are also suggesting the new MacBooks will ditch the much maligned Intel ‘onboard’ GPU’s in favour of an NVIDIA MCP7A-U chipset. This is supposedly “the quickest mGPU ever made” and on par with the NVIDIA 9xxx series of graphics cards. Website exPreview provide full details on the spec of this mGPU.

Could Apple finally be seeing the MacBook as a viable gaming platform? Or are they thinking ahead to the release of Snow Leopard? Could be both, but well have to wait and see.

One of the more interesting rumors comes from 9to5Mac who claim the much talked about ‘Brick’ is indeed a term for the manufacturing process of the new MacBooks, and not a code name. It starts with a block (or brick) of aluminum which it then carved to shape using lasers and high pressure water jets. If this is the case it is another sign of Apple taking product design and quality to a whole new level.